Chicken vomit

I had a really good day yesterday. In the morning, Nicolas came over, and we went to the market together to pick up some lunch fixings. We went back to his house and cooked up pasta with fresh tomato sauce, an easy but delicious classic. For dessert, we had mangoes, which are beginning to come back into season. We hung out for a while and talked about life and work and being in Mali, then I went back to get some work done.

I had been in my room for maybe a half an hour when Oumar came to tell me that Fatimata had sent somebody to see me in the morning after I’d gone out. We puzzled over what that could be about, but figured we’d just go see her the next day. Not five minutes later, I get a knock on my door, and it’s Fatimata herself. I greeted her and we went to sit down together in the shade of my hanger. I called over Oumar to act as translator. (My Fulfulde is definitely not yet conversational, unless the conversation only consists of me saying ‘I only came to greet you’ [jowtude ma tan waddi am] or ‘If I am here, I will come’ [so mi wonii gaa, mi wartan].)

She pulled out a small cloth bundle and handed it to Oumar. He unwrapped it to reveal a crude horseman statue in weathered iron. The horseman is seated on a Tuareg style saddle with a turban, but the horse has no legs and the features are otherwise obscured either by simple work or age. She said that her brother’s motorcycle had broken down between Bandiagara and Bankass, and while he was looking around for a stone to pry his tire off with, he found it in the dirt. She had no idea what it was, but if I wanted to buy it, she would sell it. I held it in my hands and it *felt* old. I don’t know how, but it just did. I figured, sure, why not, either it is something legitimately old (I think I’ll get it appraised in the US) that maybe a collector wants, or it’s just a curiosity, but either way, I have no problem giving my friend $15. She’s always giving me things, after all. In fact, just the day before, Oumar gave me a little paper package containing a ring Fatimata’s brother had made for me. It’s beautiful: copper with a silver vine-like inlay.

Anyhow, after I agreed to buy it and she took a necklace of mine to fix, she told me that her mother was in the area, in a village called Petaka, about twenty minutes the highway. She really wanted to introduce me to her mother. I agreed whole-heartedly, and twenty minutes later, she and I and her baby son were on my motorcycle, on our way east up the freeway.

As with any village you go to, it is the children first who are fascinated with you. They looked at me in awe and a couple little girls held my hand for a while. We went back into the village and sat down on mats until Fatimata’s mom came over, a woman of about 65, I would guess. We took some photos while the children squealed in delight, then Fatimata ushered me back to a little mud house.

When I stepped into the doorway, I saw a large woman with huge bare breasts giving an enema to a newborn baby girl. The umbilical cord was still tied off and everything. I must have been visibly shocked at the whole thing, since Fatimata was laughing at me, saying something along the lines of how amazed I was. She took the baby into her arms and I took a picture. Then she handed it back and told me to take a picture with the mother. Only in Mali can a total stranger take a picture of a bare-breasted woman and her child and have it not be awkward.

I sat for a little while longer on the mats, then Fatimata came back to show me the road. She brought with her a live chicken, hanging dazed and upside down from a cord around its legs. She held it out to me as a gift. I didn’t know quite what I would do with a live chicken, but I graciously accepted it, and she slung it over my motorcycle handlebars. With lots of waving and goodbyes, I hit the road on my own, enjoying the freedom of not having a passenger with a young child on the back of my motorcycle.

The whole way back the chicken vomited or slobbered on my bare calf. It was gross and I wanted to be mad, but hey, if I were slung upside down off of a motorcycle I would probably be vomiting too.

Since I was already up on the highway and I didn’t want to weave through the market with a chicken on my motorcycle, I stopped at Nicolas’s house. I showed him the chicken and suggested that we just eat it. We both hesitated for a little while, not knowing entirely how to go about that, but then Nicolas said he would just slaughter it. How hard could it be, right? He took the condemned around the house and slit its throat, like we’d seen done numerous times here before. It’s harder when you’re the one doing it though.

I told him I’d go to the market and get some condiments while he plucked it. I decided to try and make a peanut sauce with plantains fried in ginger and chili on the side. With Oumar’s help, I found everything I needed. I’d also recently ordered a small mortar and pestle to be made, which had arrived the day before, so I brought that over to pound my ginger and garlic into a paste. Really, I just wanted an excuse to use it.

I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing, but everything worked out. Oumar came over and ate with us a while later, and everything I made was a hit. The chicken was good (couldn’t be fresher), the sauce had just the right amount of spice, and the plantains were delicious, as plantains are wont to be. Truly, I was quite pleased with myself. We sat around chatting until almost 10 before I went home.

I got bit by a spider while putting my mosquito net down last night, but I beat it to death with an empty soda bottle, and my hand never swelled or hurt. Then the kittens woke me up at 5:45 in the morning, crying at my door before jumping up and crawling in through a hole in my screen. Stupid kittens.

Tomorrow I will indeed go to Sevare, probably in the morning. I’m envisioning three nights. I figure that’ll be good, and I can get back here before Steve does.