Well, my nearly three weeks in Douentza are up. Tomorrow, I’m heading back out to the village to spend another week before my impending trip to Bamako. Barring the lack of communication, I’m looking forward to going back out—it’s nice and calm out there and gives you a chance to think (on the flip side, all of that calm gets really boring really fast). Also, I haven’t seen some very nice people I met there for a while, so it will be good to catch up with my improved Tommo-So skills. Finally, what with the rainy season, planting will have started so I will have lots of cultural information to film/photograph/elicit the words for.
If I thought we had a full house last week, I was wrong. Last night, we had nine people sleeping here: Jeff, me, Abbie, Salif, Seydou, Minkailou, two boys from Bunu that Abbie’s working with, and the village chief from Walo who was passing through. People were doubled up on mattresses left and right. Then this morning, Salif decided that 5:30 AM was the perfect time to wash dishes noisily by the foot of my tent. Needless to say, that ended my sleep and made me quite irritable indeed. I reprimanded him for it later and he said he wouldn’t do it anymore.
During the morning break today, I made omelettes for everyone and splattered my hands with hot oil. Of course, now everyone is saying “No, no, from now on the Princess can’t cook, we can’t have the Princess burn her hands.” I told them that I like cooking very much and the issue is that we don’t have the proper utensils—if we just had a spoon with a long handle instead of a normal fork, I could keep my hands away from the oil. We’ll see if this culinary wrong is righted.
Anyhow, I will be away from internet for the next 8 or 9 days, when we take travel into account. I will be back with more village updates after that, so stay tuned.
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I think if someone wakes you up at 5:30 am by washing dishes at the foot of your tent, it qualifies him as a "sac de douche". Anyway, have a great time in the fieldier field (bushier bush??).
I may have to do more of what you're doing the next time I'm back in Kenya. I did literally all of my fieldwork from my house in Busia, which I gather is somewhat similar to your place in Douentza, in that there's some (fragile) electricity, but it's a town with a mix of different Luyia sub-tribes. I just had each of the speakers from each of the different dialects come to my house in a daily procession. I did spend some time out in the "village", but it was mainly for social visits. I didn't do any elicitation there, except informally. That setting would certainly be more suitable for eliciting more exotic vocabulary, since you can say, pointing, "what is THIS?"
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