Page 16 - WTP VOl.VII#5

Mbuna Dunes (continued from preceding page)
The chief sat first, then we plopped down again. A woman brought out a bowl of millet and green sauce, placed the bowl before the chief, and disappeared. I’d eaten a similar sauce before. It had the aroma of wet hay and its tasted like old Brussel sprouts. Made with crushed leaves of the Baobab tree and boiled okra: green, thick, and slimy.
In my journal, I began, “Dear Arnold: This afternoon, my host served me snot sauce...”
I was grateful to those little boys who saw us, and to the men who saved our lives and our truck. I was thankful for the gourd of milky water and the wom- an who swept away the children. I was indebted for the shade of the tree and the ground I would sleep on that night. I knew I should be excited about rice and sauce. But when the chief pushed the bowl toward us, and we formed a circle, and everyone dug the fingers of their right hands into the center well with the sauce, I strayed toward the edge, picking
up a small wad of the sticky doughy pounded millet, complete with sandy grit, and pretended a very full and happy mouth.
“Your wife is a fine cook,” said Yaya. “Yes,” we all agreed.
The chief said, “One of them is.” Yaya translated. We laughed.
The chief smiled a bit too widely and his false uppers shot forward half an inch, held back from full libera- tion by his top lip.
There is a collective quality to living in a place so dif- ferent from one’s own. The larger sum of what accumulates, hopefully, is deeper self-knowledge, perpetual wonder, learned wisdom and more. The rest, usually the lesser sum, is the aggravation of working in a second or third or fourth language, difficult tastes and smells, music and traditions, social encounters, bathing, eating, sleeping, even shitting—everything so different from what I have, or do, or like, or hate at home. I had—for weeks at a time—no opportunity either literally or figuratively to touch home. Whether to Bamako or to Los An- geles, in 1988 no cell phones, no computers, and in villages no electricity existed.
I was the foreigner, the perpetually stupid one. Every- thing was alien and would always be so. With a day like the one reaching Mbuna, it all crashed down. I was reminded that I didn’t know as much about get- ting by in this different world as I had thought.
I worked on my smile and watched the conversation but didn’t try to understand the content. Priority as a woman, and its opposite—lack thereof where men’s matters were concerned—suited me fine.
The chief led us through his small village of no more than five hundred people. The mud-brick compounds were high sand content with a crumbly, poor resil- ience to wind or, though unlikely, moisture. The roofs of thatch looked worn, dry, brittle; nothing like fresh millet grew locally to replace the thatch-like stalks. Some of the structures bore corrugated aluminum on top. We were shown a vacant compound to use dur- ing our stay.
A half-dozen adolescent boys carried in, on their backs, the trunks and equipment we’d abandoned to the dunes. Girls appeared out of nowhere with millet stalk brooms to sweep our three small rooms. We were given a clay pot of water for drinking and a bucket of water for washing, and, later, more millet for dinner.
The village chief stopped by. Moussa lit charcoal still in our small stove from the previous night, then pulled tea from his bag and half-filled the ever-pres- ent blue enameled teapot with China green gunpow- der pearls. He poured in an equal amount of white granulated sugar, then walked to the clay pot against our inside courtyard wall, lifted the aluminum lid, and ladled cloudy water from it into the teapot.
Every household had a clay water pot. The clay was fired to a temperature just hot enough to change the chemistry of the clay so the pot wouldn’t melt back into mud, but the surface was left unglazed; water evaporated slowly through the walls, and, as a result of the evaporation, the water inside stayed relatively cool. There was no wood to be found locally to stoke flames hot enough for firing clay, so these water pots (like charcoal or canned goods or fresh onions) must have come from a market rotating among close-by villages.
Moussa took the three shot glasses used for tea and upended them to warm at the perimeter of the charcoal. He dusted off the aluminum plate on which the glasses sat for serving, and waited for the tea and sugar to boil into caffeinated syrup.
Moussa righted the hot glasses onto the aluminum plate and poured—Firsts—and offered the glasses to the chief, then Yaya, then Chieck who had been circling, three cameras hanging from his neck, focus- ing and snapping photos from all angles. Each took a glass with his fingertips, quickly and loudly slurped
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