Guests galore

Phil remained (and possibly remains?) sick. I ate dinner on my own Tuesday night, then made three trips between my house and his, bringing him meds or food. Good thing I have my motorcycle. Yesterday evening, he left for Sevare to go to the doctor there, so hopefully he’ll get a real diagnosis and get better.

But to backtrack, I worked with M. Guindo on Wednesday morning, looking at the semantics of various adjectives. For instance, /ɛ̀lɛ̀lú/ can mean both ‘sweet’ and ‘sharp’, and then is used in all sorts of expressions like /kùù ɛ́lɛ́lú/ ‘good luck’ (literally ‘sweet head’), /àŋà ɛ́lɛ́lú/ ‘a liar, someone who says whatever he wants’ (literally ‘sweet mouth’), or /nììndɛ̀ ɛ́lɛ́lú/ ‘a woman who gets fat and happy after marriage’ (literally ‘sweet tongue’).

I was just about to head over to Phil’s after that, when I got a call from Hala and Adam, the two tourists I’d met in Bamako and again on the bus to Douentza. They had gotten into town after a trip to Timbuktu and were waiting at the freeway. I hopped on my motorcycle and went to meet Phil, then together we went down to meet them and had lunch.

Afterwards, we took their stuff back to my house, then hung out for a while. That evening, Dave and Dan came back into town too with some guy they’d met at the softball tournament, Jason. Jason is on his way to Timbuktu today. After dinner in the market, Hala and Adam went back to my house to sleep and the rest of us went out to the Tango for beers. Unfortunately, they ran out of beers, so we went back to the Peace Corps house and hung out on the roof until I decided it was time for bed.

Yesterday, we decided we would make a delicious pasta lunch. It’s still the heart of tomato season and Dave’s garden has a lot of basil in it, so we set to work. We made a fresh, chunky tomato sauce with green pepper in it, along with some pasta, then sprinkled fresh basil and parmesan cheese Dave’s parents had sent to him. It tasted like America. Or Italy. In any case, it didn’t taste like Mali, so that was a nice change of pace.

We spent the rest of the day hanging out at the Peace Corps house, playing ladder ball, etc. I finished paying for my motorcycle registration around 3, then we decided to bring beers back to the house at night and drink them there. We probably looked like pretty big bums, buying a lot of little beers, since they had run out of the big ones, but there were a lot of us. We hung out long into the night and all just crashed on the roof, where a nice cool breeze made for good sleeping.

Tonight we’re going over to Nicolas’s house for a barbecue. There’s been a lot of fun hanging out lately, so the days are flying by. Just a little over 2 months until I leave Douentza.