I've gotten into a routine of eating, something I've been wanting to do for a long time but hadn't figured out. With my nearest good market, in San, being an hour and half away by bike, I can only get there realistically once a week. It's the only place I can reliably get fruit and vegetables, but it's hard to carry back a week's worth of produce on a bike, and since there's no refrigeration (and, it being hot season, the inside temperature of my house climbing over 100 degrees every day), it all goes bad pretty quickly.
My host family has been gracious enough to continue feeding me, but their supplies are dwindling. All the beans, chickpeas and fonio they harvested has been eaten, leaving only millet and sorghum, which are basically the same grain. I've been eating millet or sorghum to (dough with leaf sauce) every day for lunch since moving here, but dinner variety has dwindled from 5 to 2 options, one of which, millet seri, a porridge, I have somehow formed a mental block against and can't eat. I think it's the sweetness at night. My other option is kininke kini, a couscous made from sorghum, with delicious sauce. I guess I shouldn't be complaining-my host mom is a good cook and tries to innovate and make variety when there is none. Also, some of our neighbors' graineries have recently become completely empty, leaving them with no choice but to make a trip to San or another big market to buy a 50 kg sack of grain.
There is no other way to get food in small villages like mine but to make it yourself. There is one woman who cooks rice with peanut sauce to sell, but most families in my village can not afford the 200 francs a plate, especially when they have 10+ mouths to feed.
These days I eat breakfast at home, oatmeal or granola from Bamako, "toubab food." I eat lunch at noon with my host family, and then dinner isn't served until 8 or later, leaving a big afternoon gap where the aforementioned produce comes into the picture. For a few days after visiting San I have great afternoon snacks at site-fruit salad, tomato and cucumbers. For the remaining days I have a stock of American food thanks to yall gracious enough to send me stuff. I really appreciate it, or rather, my really fast metabolism appreciates it. I usually end up chowing down on this afternoon food because in a normal world, lunch would have filled me and I would be eating dinner at a decent time. But oh well, guess this is my normal world now.
I've noticed a snack the kids in my host family have started eating. They call them "kuntan kolo," kuntan being a type of tree that produces fruit, kolo being "nut," the nut that's inside the fruit. Apparently, though, this nut can only be eaten after goats have eaten the fruit and pooped out the hard shell that the nut is inside of. Kids, and adults alike, spend afternoons collecting nuts from among the goat poop and sitting down to crack them open with a rock. The nut itself is pretty similar to a walnut. Pretty delicious, although I'm kind of wary because it's obviously been mingling with, well, poop. No word on whether the goat actually needs to actually eat the fruit-that's just the story I got.
On a related note, I drank some wine made from the kuntan fruit yesterday. Not very delicious. My family seems to think that wine is good for health, though, and encouraged their kids, including the 3 year old, to take liberal sips from the bowl.
I've been helping my host family out on dinner, bringing them a few kilos of beans a week, which they can cook, with oil and onions on top, for everyone. My host mom makes the best beans in Mali, so we all appreciate it.
I was talking to my host dad recently about the grain storage building in town and how it works, and he told me each of 65 families gets to take 1 sack when they need it, and repays a sack when their own grain is harvested. I don't know if this means one a month or one period, but when I asked him if that was enough he said no, not at all.
We talked about the food price crisis, which he'd heard about on the radio. Luckily it's not affecting our part of Mali, but at over $20 a sack, millet is not cheap for families scraping by on nothing, especially when it takes 1 and half sacks a month to feed a normal family. "Normal family" size also fluctuates, increasing in the rainy season when young men move home to help work the fields. This means more mouths to feed at the time when grain is in shortest supply-it has been harvested almost a year ago. I had heard the term "hungry season" before, and it was brought up again during our conversation. "In rainy season," he told me, "people are hungry." An amazing thing about Malians, or maybe all Africans, is the way they help each other even when they have almost nothing. No one's babies are gonna go hungry because one family is short this month. Their neighbors will be there to help them out.
