Visiting a Mandinka Village

written Saturday, March 27, 2007


I just came back on Thursday from spending several days in a Mandinka village near the town of Tambacounda. A Peace Corps driver took us to Tambacounda, where I spent the night with some other volunteers, and the next morning I went with a Peace Corps volunteer who has already been here a year, along with another trainee, to the volunteer's village.

We took a "mini-car" (a van with lots of benches) from Tambacounda. Most of the Peace Corps volunteers call the mini-cars "Alhams" because so many of them have "Alhamdulillahi" written on them, which means praise be to God - or in the case of the Alhams, according to the joke, praise be to God this thing is still running. At our fullest moment, I counted 26 people crammed into our mini-car, which could probably have held about twelve comfortably. This count doesn't include the babies on their mothers' laps or the people who were on top of the bus, but it does include the people who were hanging off the back of the bus.

I found it pretty amusing the way they manage to cram people in. A man who spoke some English noticed our incredulous faces as they kept cramming people in, and he said, "hey, this is Africa". Indeed. I love it. And despite the lack of American style standards for safety for the minicar, such as having seatbelts or even actual seats for everyone (some people were sitting on portable benches which they shoved in between the benches that were permanently installed), I felt safe in the mini-car because we were going pretty slow and there wasn't much traffic. Other than the occasional goat or donkey in the road, that is.

Anyway, after about two hours we got off the mini-car and hiked two kilometers down a dirt path to the Volunteer's village. Along the way we had to greet everyone we passed - which, if you read my earlier post about greetings, takes forever. In 104 degree heat and with a twenty pound pack on my back (next time I am definitely packing lighter!). We also collected a little group of children who followed us for a while, grabbing our hands as if they were our kids. I felt like the Pied Piper. A very hot Pied Piper.

But eventually we made it to the Volunteer's hut, which was very cozy - round with a low-hanging thatch roof which several times I walked into and cut my head on - and we collapsed and took a nap, cause it is just too hot to do anything in the middle of the day. At least for us toubabs. But most of the locals seemed to be hiding out in the shade too.

After our naps a pack of kids wandered into the hut, and we spent several hours playing with them. Then we had dinner - millet with maffe, which is a peanut sauce. Millet tastes pretty much like eating sand, but the maffe is good. Which is a good thing, because almost every meal we had in the village had maffe - either with millet, rice, or corn. We did once get fed some sort of sauce made with green onions, which tasted sort of like chicken noodle soup. I forget now if it was with millet or rice, but it was good. But other than that meal, vegetables seem to be pretty non-existent in the village diet. The volunteer we were staying with said it's because vegetables are expensive, and they don't go very far in large families. It's more economical to eat millet or rice. So I'm thinking maybe I'll try to have a little garden when I get to my village, both to supplement my diet and as a health project to share ideas about good nutrition.

The rest of the time at the village passed quickly. We pulled water from the well for drinking and bathing, carrying it back to the hut on our heads (I wasn't very good at it, but I made it), we tried to pound millet (it's hard, and the villagers laughed at our wussiness), we played with the kids, and we spent what seemed like a ridiculous amount of time just greeting people as we walked by.

The volunteer we were staying with had the kids at the village school put on a skit about how diarrhea is passed around and how to avoid it, which was fun to watch.

The best part of the visit was hanging out with the volunteer's family, who were hilarious. Just imagine tiny, half toothless old women singing, with bad pronunciation and without understanding what it means, "That's the way...uh huh uh huh...I like it". I tried to convince the volunteer who lives with them that she needs to teach them the Vanilla Ice song "Ice Ice Baby" or whatever it's called - I think they would love the rhythm. Plus it would be hilarious. But she said she doesn't know the song well enough to teach it to them.

The women taught us a traditional song which is sung while pounding millet, which was very pretty. I'm sure we butchered the pronunciation. They also tried to teach us some Mandinka words, including bento, which is bench, and bosso, which means mat. Every few minutes they would say Bento! Bosso! and make us point to the right thing and repeat it, to make sure we remembered. After a while it became a huge joke, to the point where they were saying hello and goodbye to us by saying "Bench mat!" in Mandinka.

So the village was a blast, and I can't wait to get my own village. And for those who are wondering, the volunteer had a concrete circle with a hole in the ground to use for a shower and toilet, but it actually seemed much cleaner than the other toilets I've used in Senegal, and I preferred it. Plus it feels really nice to take a shower outside in the fresh air. Toilet paper, however... let's just say, remember to bring your own.