Happenings in Farakala

I lost my portable alarm clock in the shuffling around I did before moving in so when my phone runs out of battery at site I tell the time by the type of bird I find in my concession. If it’s before noon, it’s the chickens that are hanging around, picking at the drying peanuts on the ground. If it’s somewhere between 2 and 6, it’s the guinea fowl are all in a line perched up on the crumbling mud wall that marks my territory. They shuffle their fat speckled bodies along the wall while they plan their attack on my dirty dishes or food scraps. I learned from my Malian neighbors that the best way to keep these annoyingly awkward-looking creatures out of your concession is to throw little pebbles at them. My only problem is that my aim is terrible and getting worse and the guinea fowl have learned this by now so they don’t even flinch when I wind up for a shot at them.

Below are some pictures of thing going on in Farakala. The first picture is of my host cousin (?) cooking to which is what the villagers eat for almost every meal. This to is made from corn and it has a wonderful texture (kind of like jello-y cornbread, if there is such a thing) but it only tastes good to me with certain kinds of sauces. The villagers of farakala usually eat it with this gumbo sauce that smells like dead fish and looks like slimy guts so I usually pass on that.

Below you can see just how big my host family (the Sanogos) is. Whoever is cooking to that day usually has to feed over 30 people per meal! The Sanogos concession stretches back the entire length of the market (about 1km) which is the largest concession in the village. I meet someone almost everyday that I later discover is a part of my host family.

This is a pic of me in my house with Noum and Sheata, two of my neighbors that hang around my house. They started getting a little too comfortable helping themselves to whatever they please in my house so I told them that they could only continue coming back everyday if they either A) fetched my water for me once a week or B) got rid of the chickens in my concession. It's kind of funny now whenever Noum enters my concession I know that he's there even before he comes to the door because the chicken are clucking away as he chases them out of my yard.

This is a picture of me working in the rice fields one day with my host dad. We fed the machine stalks of rice until we had 12 whole bags of rice (took about 6 hours). I felt really awesome when my host dad made me wear not only a face mask but also a motto helmet while the other malians worked with almost no protection.