BBQ party

Yesterday, we sat around all day in my AC watching movies. Hala and I watched Wall-E in the morning, then after lunch Adam joined us for The Big Lebowski, as did Dan and Dave partway through the movie. After that was done, no one wanted to move, so we just stayed in and watched Mean Girls. At that point, it was 8PM, and we needed to report to Nicolas’s house for said barbecue.

Nicolas and I did most of the work preparing the kebabs, and Dave kept his eye on those that were cooking. They were pretty good—meat (probably beef), onions, and tomatoes, grilled over hot coals. Nicolas made fries and had beer and soda there, so altogether it was quite the feast. We just hung out, Dave and Dan, me, Hala and Adam, Nicolas and his friend David (Malian), and Oumar showed up at the end, speaking in a mix of languages, Nicolas doing his best in English, Dave attempting to speak French. It was a lot of fun.

We went home around 11:30 and I had the best night’s sleep ever. I did not want to get up this morning. But M. Guindo was going to come over at 10, so I needed to haul myself out of bed and make sure Hala and Adam were doing okay.

Adam and I went to the market to get breakfast makings. Since Hala came, we’ve been cutting up fresh fruit (papaya, mango, banana) and mixing it with fresh yogurt. Delicious. We also picked up some green peppers and tomatoes to try and make stuffed peppers for lunch. The ladies selling them spoke Tommo-So, which is always a lot of fun at the market. The other day a Tommo-speaking woman from my commune gave me free onions since I could speak Dogon. The numbers always mess me up, though, since the base unit of currency is the equivalent of 5 francs. So I asked how much some bananas were, and she told me ‘40’, and I’m thinking, “Forty francs? No way.” Then I remembered that really it’s 40 x 5, so 200.

We’re also going to try and make banana ice cream today. They were selling vials of banana flavoring at the store this morning, and I picked up some fresh bananas, so we’ll see how that goes.

On the Phil’s health front, apparently he has typhoid and a bone infection of the ribs and shoulder. Poor guy. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do just yet, but hopefully he’ll be fine.

I guess Jeremy is coming through Douentza tonight on his way up to Timbuktu, so we’ll have quite a full house here.