Yummy in the tummy!

It is official: the garden is up and running!

A couple weeks ago, my host family and I ate our first meal from the garden: salad with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions. There is something so wonderful about eating food straight from the garden that you grew. All the kids were so excited about it - they only get vegetables once in a blue moon, so it is a real treat for them. They all fought over the last bits of lettuce in the communal bowl. I couldn't help but compare them to American kids, who I highly doubt would ever fight over who got the most tomatoes or cucumber slices. But these vegetables are better to them than candy! The watermelons are ready to harvest now too, so last night for dinner I had salad and a huge slice of watermelon for dessert! It honestly amazes me that the soil in our garden - very sandy - can produce gigantic juicy watermelons! Score one for food security!

In addition, a couple weeks ago we had a very important group of visitors: a NGO by a French couple that is building a garden for an association of Malians out in Bankass - Dogon Country. Before they began work on their new community garden, they were showing the Malians around to other gardens and allowing Malians to teach Malians good gardening techniques. They heard of our garden, and chose it as one of the teaching sites. Moussa came out with his entourage to show them around. He led a mini-session on tree planting, and each person in the group planted a mango tree! Then, completely unplanned, Coumbare took some of the group aside and told them about her work in the vegetable nursery. She basically taught them everything she had learned through my lessons and her experience! I was so proud of her! For a woman to speak in public in front of strangers, especially strange men, is a huge deal here. When I first came, she would not even ask questions if a man was leading a meeting. That day, she spoke confidently in public! Again, so proud.

Last week was the Muslim holiday of Tabaski, and we celebrated by killing a sheep and snacking on it all day long (woohoo!). The Tabaski sheep is like the Thanksgiving turkey - every family who can afford to kills a sheep. If you cannot afford a sheep, you get a cheaper animal, like goat, chicken, or even pigeon. Tabaski celebrates when Abraham was told to sacrifice his son Ishmael by Allah. At the last minute, Allah saved Ishmael and replaced him with a sheep (hence the eating of the sheep). Sound like the Christian story of Abraham and Isaac? Yup. It is the biggest holiday of the year - everyone is dressed in their fanciest outfits and goes around greeting all day and eating meat with their family and neighbors. I unfortunately had to eat bits of stomach, kidney, and liver (very gross, but it would be very rude to refuse). All in all, a good holiday!

History Time!

I recently finished a book on the history of Timbuktu, and in it was an interesting description of the Fulani people - the majority ethnic group in my village. This pertains to them before the Islamic conquest and their conversion to Islam, so says little about their culture today, but it is still fascinating history. The excerpt below is from Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle (Walker Publishing Co: New York, 2007), p. 47-49.

"The Fulani, or Fulbe, or Peul, are an interesting people who have spread throughout the African savanna, and late in Timbuktu's life had a more or less disastrous effect on its politics. Their origins are in Senegal-Gambia, the product of admixture between native Wolof and incoming Berbers, yielding a modern people who are dark of skin with Arab or European features; indeed, newborn Fulani are often white, though they quickly turn dark. Throughout history the prickly Fulani were notorious for their fanatical views on their own racial purity and their insistence on their own beauty, even to the extent that an ordinary-looking Fulani man would encourage his wife to give birth to sons of better-looking men so as to improve the race. This fanaticism was later transferred to religion, and when the Fulani adopted Islam in later centuries their zeal gave rise to waves of jihadist warfare that roiled Timbuktu and its region for generations. About seven million Fulani are now spread out across a dozen countries.

"On the Niger, they settled somewhere around 1400 in Masina, west of Timbuktu; the Tarikh of al-Sa'adi often referred to the Masinakoi, or sultans of Masina. For reasons unknown they drew the unyielding hatred of the Songhai tyrant Sonni Ali and later, in 1498, became the unwilling subjects of the Songhai, when Askia Mohamed defeated them in battle, but they resisted to the last and maintained their own unrelenting hostility to their conquerors until after the Moroccan invasions of 1590.

"The pre-Islamic Fulani had a complicated cosmology. Most African societies, though animist, believed in some sort of supreme being, but the Fulani were more explicit than most; making them fairly easy converts when Muslim proselytizers came through in the centuries after Muhammad. They also had a creation myth that speaks eloquently, if rather cynically, of resurrection and redemption.

At the beginning there was a huge drop of milk,
Then Doondari came and created stone.
Then stone created iron;
And iron created fire;
And fire created water;
And water created air.
Then Doondari descended a second time.
And he took the five elements
And he shaped them into man.
But man was proud.
Then Doondari created blindness and blindness defeated man.
But when blindness became too proud,
Doondari created sleep and sleep defeated blindness;
But when sleep became too proud,
Doondari created worry and worry defeated sleep;
But when worry became too proud,
Doondari created death, and death defeated worry;
But when death became too proud,
Doondari descended for the third time
And he came as Gueno the eternal one,
And Gueno defeated death."