Ngouma

I have made it to Ngouma and back and have lived to tell about it. So tell about it I shall.

I packed up my motorcycle with my gear and left the house after noon on Friday. I decided it would be prudent to stop at the internet and write down my Medevac numbers before I left, just in case of an emergency, so I did. Nicolas and I got on the road shortly after one o’ clock, reveling in the open freeway.

We did about 60 kilometers on the paved road before turning off on the road to Ngouma, a gravel road with quite a few dips and holes. The most annoying aspect of the gravel road, however, is the washboard effect. I don’t know how, but heavy trucks repeatedly going over it create stretches where the road becomes like a washboard, rattling your bike and your spine and being generally unpleasant/impossible to drive on. Between those stretches and the occasional pothole, the road kept us on our toes.

Luckily, we had no problems and arrived in Ngouma a little before 4PM. We asked the first person we saw to take us to Ousmane Diallo “the white guy” (Phil’s Malian name), and someone did. He has quite a big house with 4 rooms on a nice courtyard. The only problem is that he shares a main gate with another house’s courtyard, and his neighbors (especially the kids and the ten-year-old brides who aren’t allowed out) are always peering over the wall calling his name, like some sick version of Home Improvement. Kids here can be extremely annoying.

We dropped our stuff off, then Phil took us out on a greeting tour of Ngouma. It is quite a big town, with a central market and everything. Yes, I would say it has definitely achieved town status instead of village status. Nicolas and I waded our way through Fulfulde greetings (Ngouma is a Fulani town) and saw what sights there were to see, including a big beautiful mosque. We didn’t get any pictures, though, since the imam was demanding 1000CFA for a picture. Ridiculous.

We hung out in his courtyard with our goat captive (more about him later) until his host family called him over for dinner. It was rice and fish sauce—not my favorite, but tolerable. By the nightfall, we were exhausted and went to bed. Phil gave me his mattress on the roof, Nicolas spent an uncomfortable night in the hammock, and Phil himself slept on a mat on the roof as well. It was very windy and downright cold by the middle of the night, but luckily I’d brought a fleece blanket. I tucked myself into that and slept relatively comfortably.

Saturday was spent lazing around. It felt good to just be out of Douentza with no obligations. If I wanted to sit there and stare at the dirt all day, gosh darnit, no one could stop me. Nicolas made an effort to speak English with us all weekend and did relatively well, just asking for translation help every now and again. He, Phil and I turned out to be a good trio.

After a breakfast of rice fritters and leftover fish sauce (which I did not partake in), the butcher came over to send our goat on its way to goat paradise. Or so I hope. If you don’t want to know about the goat slaughter, skip the next paragraph.

Phil and the butcher held the goat down, facing Mecca, as is custom. The butcher uttered a blessing then slit its throat. Blood is so red. The initial throat-slitting is the worst part of the slaughter, since you have to hear the breath rasping through the throat and watch as the legs struggle and kick long after the animal has probably lost consciousness. Eventually, the goat was properly dead, and the butcher got right down to skinning it. Eventually, the slung it up by its back legs to get the rest of the skin off, and that’s when the grossest thing happened. It was as if the stomach couldn’t retain its contents anymore and the goat vomited through the whole in its neck. Mega mega gross. The butcher cleaned and removed all the organs and quartered the carcass, then carried it off to grill it. He’d gone and washed all the organs in the bucket Phil uses to bathe, so we had to go to the market and get some bleach for that. Rather unsanitary.

Anyhow, we sat around the rest of the morning, waiting for Meat Round 1 (lunch) to be prepared. We went over to his host family’s again for that, where his host woman had made a meat sauce with one of the quartered sections and a lot of the innards. Neither Nicolas or I could stomach (haha) the insides, but we ate some of the “normal” meat, which was delicious. After eating, his host man sat around forever making tea and talking in Fulfulde. I was tired and bored; eventually Phil picked up on that and took me back to his house so I could take a nap.

The rest of the meat came in a tub around 6 o’ clock. His host came over and we feasted. It was tender and delicious, and we all ate until we could barely move. Even then, there were two whole legs left. One his host packed up in a box and told us to bring to Douentza (slightly unsanitary?), and the other he saved and we had it in the sauce for breakfast. Phil disappeared for a while after dinner, delivering meat to various friends, so Nicolas and I hung out in the dark chatting. When he got back, it was off to bed. Again, it was windy and cold, but a nice change from the heat of the day.

Nicolas and I got going after breakfast this morning. We did about 3 hours on the road again, an exhilarating but exhausting drive. Luckily, no one got hurt. I’m just happy about that. It was a good trip all in all, and now if Phil talks about Ngouma, I’ll know what he is talking about.