Buy - Fruit de Baobab

Sticking with Ewan’s obsession with food, there are many additional foods that are worth writing about! I’ll stick with my current obsession: baobab, the magical fruit.

My first week here I was introduced to the variety of sweet, satisfying, delicious tropical fruit juices widely available. My favorite immediately became bouye, made from the fruit of baobab trees. It’s so thick and creamy, it’s more like a milkshake than juice. It has a wonderful, refreshing taste. Nothing leaves me more satisfied when I’m hot, dehydrated, and fatigued after dancing.
All over Dakar, independent vendors sell goodies on the street. Most of these goodies are local products, such as peanuts in all sorts of varieties. I always noticed little plastic bags with small white rock-like objects. Having no idea what it was and too timid with my limited vocabulary to ask, I went on buying peanuts and other familiar snacks. Recently I found out that these little white rocks were the fruit from baobabs, those monumental trees. And that they are delicious. It’s a dry fruit with a texture unlike any other I’ve ever had, which you suck on and then spit out the seeds. It has a tart, unique flavor. When I started eating these I couldn’t stop, but figured it had to be healthy. It’s fruit after all.
As it turns out, healthy was an under-exaggeration. After doing a little research I found out that this fruit has:

-Six times the vitamin C as an orange
-Twice as much calcium as a glass of milk
-Loads of antioxidants
-Iron and potassium
-It’s good for your stomach when sick (when I went to buy a large quantity of it, the vendor asked if I was feeling okay)
-The seeds you spit out can be roasted, ground, and boiled into a coffee-like drink (I’ve been saving my seeds and plan on trying this if I can figure out a way to grind them here)
-You can make ice cream out of it (one lady selling the stuff had a recipe for this; one ingredient was a bunch of kids in the neighborhood to run back and forth to bring enough ice)

Needless to say, I’ve eaten a ton of it since figuring out what it is. My bones, immune system, and stomach have felt great every since! Did I mention that it’s ridiculously cheap?



While on the topic of fruit, I should add that the long-awaited mango season is approaching. I love mangoes. I’ve been excited about mango season since I arrived. The other day I bought ripe mangoes for 10 cents each. This is a sure sign that mango season is coming. It shouldn’t be long before mangoes are falling from the sky (or at least from the giant mango tree in our neighbor’s yard, much of which is hanging over our back courtyard). :)

Jën yu bari - Lots of fish

Continuing my current food obsession...

This morning I woke up with a taste in my mouth like a hangover. A hangover that comes from grilled fish, skin crisp in its own oil, with raw onions.

This is probably the fourth day I've suffered from such a hangover. Each time I swear I've had enough. I'll never eat that much fish again.

But I haven't learned my lesson yet.

Naka lañuy lekk dugup - How to eat sorghum

Back in Dakar for the past week, I've been thinking more and more about food. In fact, I think about food constantly now. Finishing lunch, I start scheming about the next coffee break or street food. I make mental checklists of all the stalls, tables, stands, and restaurants open at each mealtime (and between) in the neighborhood. I go to bed happily anticipating porridge, or bread and jam with kenkiliba tea, powdered milk and dark honey.

Partly I'm responding to stress - food is something I can plan out and control. It's also a handy distraction from figuring out my next difficult research question. But food is also cheap and universally available - in Dakar, you're never more than 50 m from a Nescafé coffee cart or a lady selling peanuts.

Maafe tiga, a village meal of rice and thin peanut sauce. I didn't always look forward to the same meal each day, but I eat better than anyone else in the village. The jaxanke custom is to leave guests (especially white-skinned ones) to eat on their own, and serve them ridiculous portions (in the bottom picture I set two thirds of the rice aside so I won't mix it with the sauce as I eat).

And there are so many variations. I thought I pretty much knew Senegalese food the first time I came. It turns out I was totally wrong. This year, I learned that ceebu jën can have whole fish in the middle of the rice plate and also hand-rolled balls of rice, fish, and spices scattered around the edges. I learned that half the coffee sellers have fresh lime to squeeze into your street espresso. I learned there are at least three types of batter used to make beignet doughnuts (wheat, sorghum, condensed milk with vanilla essence). Just tonight we ate at a small table up the street where Jeanne, a sweet Mankañ woman, chats with her sisters and grills fresh fish on demand. She explained the names of fish I'd never heard, and laid out our morsel on huge plate of salad, dolloping on sharp-tasting, green sauce I'd never tasted. The sauce was her 'secret.' Was it mustard, jalepeños, parsley?

But there is one African food I fantasize about hopelessly, and it's something almost never seen in the States: sorghum. Every culture creates hosts of foods from its staple grains. It's disquieting to realize about  how much we make out of wheat. But even though the end results might not be quite as diverse, sorghum is impressive to me. Maybe it's because for the most part it remains outside the processed food chain. You don't buy sorghum shrink-wrapped in supermarkets. Instead, women carry it into your neighborhood in calabashes wrapped in cloth, or sell small bags on rickety tables along the roadside.

Different varieties of sorghum are grown all over Senegal and West Africa; there are slower- and faster-maturing types depending on how long the rainy season lasts in the region. Sorghum and millet were the 'original' staple grains in the Sahelian and Sudanian zones of West Africa. And although imported rice dominates urban food in Senegal, farmers across the country still grow these dryland grains mostly to feed their families, but also to sell to urban markets (eventually reaching the women who carry it in calabashes).

People here tend to associate sorghum with 'traditional' rural culture. When I tell strangers that I ate sorghum porridge for breakfast, they turn  to each other, laughing and back-slapping: How 'African' this toubab has become! In today's Wolof slang, "I swear by sorghum and yoghurt!" (War na cere ak sow!) mean's you're really serious about what you're saying. (Maybe it's like swearing to the foods of your ancestors, which demand respect?) Eating sorghum also tends to be associated with the more 'peripheral' ethnic groups - especially the Serer from west Senegal and the Fulbe (Fulani) from the center and north of the country. Maybe because these groups are considered more rural and traditional?

The sorghum family, from right to left: sorghum flour (sunguf, dugup bu soq), cere, caakary, suusël. Behind, a bag of ngalax, sweet ground peanut sauce.

I admit I am extremely ignorant about how raw sorghum grain becomes food. I used to think cere porridge was the whole grain. Now I'm pretty sure it first has to pass through the flour stage. You need to remove the chaff, either by pounding the whole grains in a mortar (and then tossing the mixture in a basket to remove the lighter particles?) or by grinding them in a machine. Next you sprinkle water over the flour and toss it so the droplets form into evenly covered balls (I've seen this done with corn). This is the stage where sorghum divides into different kinds of food - large balls will become one kind of porridge; small ones another. Next you cook the balls by steaming them, then dry them completely so they can be stored.

So, on to the foods:

1) Cere [pronounced "cheré"] is a famous bland porridge made of small balls. Cere comes with and without laalo. Laalo is both the name of a slightly bitter sap mixed with the cere and the tree the sap comes from. Cere with laalo is especially good with meat and tomato sauces. Cere without laao is good with milk, hot or cold. The Serer neighbors who sell small bags of sorghum products in their living room remind us every time we visit that "Cere must be drank with milk, not yoghurt!" Right now, I'm hooked on hot cere in the mornings with fried apples or bananas.

2) Caakary [spelled thiakry in French, and pronounced "chakry"] is made of slightly larger balls, and often perfumed with some sort of essence.

3) Lax [the 'x' is pronounced with a throaty "kh" sound, like a French 'r'].
CORRECTION: I initially reported that caakary  took on different names depending on which milk product you eat it with. When eaten with a thin, sweetened and perfumed yoghurt, I said it was called lax. Luckily enough, our neighbor Maggate stopped by this morning to offer some lax brought by a neighbor who just hosted a baptism. I told him: "This doesn't look like caakary!" It wasn't. So I learn that there is yet another kind of sorghum balls - lax sticks together as a soft mush. I still suspect that these same sorghum balls might be called fonde (porridge) when in a sweet watery soup, but Maggate insisted they were just lax.

4) Fonde. In Dakar, people especially like fonde as an evening meal during Ramadan, to break the day-long fast. Sharing a communal bowl, you slurp steaming hot fonde from small dipping ladles.

5) Ngalax. During the Muslim holidays Korite and Tabaski, sorghum (I'm guessing the same kind used in lax) is mixed with incredibly sweet yoghurt, ground peanuts, and vanilla to make the drink ngalax. One cup of this stuff and you're so full you have to skip a meal.

Ngalax made the thick sow  we like best.

6) Beignets. More like doughnut holes than the delicate French beignets Amy taught me how to make, these are often made out of wheat. But the darker, denser, heartier version is made from sorghum flour, and I buy this type whenever I have the choice.

7) Pain riche. I could write another post about the variations on French bread here (boulangerie baguettes, dense village-oven loaves, "diabetic" bread with whole wheat flour). When we want to feel a little healthier (we eat a lot of bread here), we buy sandwich-sized baguettes of pain riche at the nearest boutique. The fluffy inside is speckled dark with sorghum flour.

8) Suusël. My newest discovery. Crumbly little cakes made from sorghum flour, ground peanuts, and sugar. Perfect with a rich, milky café au lait on the street.

Addition: I just thought of another famous type of sorghum food: to ["toe"], a national dish in Mali. I have never had the pleasure of tasting it myself, but one Peace Corps volunteer said to alone was responsible for him losing 50 pounds over the course of his assignment. No matter how hungry he became, he could not bring himself to eat more than a handful of this dense, sticky substance.

These two images of to are courtesy of the extremely well-done illustrated Bambara-English-French dictionary.

Mi yahay haa ara – I’ll go and come back

I got back to Dakar last Thursday afternoon. I spent almost one week in the village of Medina, a few hours south of Tambacounda, and night stopped in the city of Kaolack on the way home. I’ve been mulling over a blog post since the hours spent squeezed in a hot sept-place coming home. But I put off writing because I haven’t felt ready to capture the experience of my first trip outside Dakar. I felt the same way when I had just arrived in Senegal in early January. It’s not going to get any clearer if I put it off, so I’ll just jot down a couple things that happened now.

The amazing thing about the traveling is that it went off without a hitch. The sept-places didn’t break down. The bus didn’t happen to be carrying Tambacounda’s weekly supply of fish. I never even waited more than thirty minutes for my next ride. But I was reminded that traveling is uncomfortable in the best of circumstances – thin cushions produce to aching sit bones, packed legroom lead to bruised knees. There is always at least one baby in a nearby seat. Fortunately there are also three experienced mothers, each with her trick for getting a hysterical baby to slip back into slip. Fortunately the discomforts of travel are quickly forgotten, at least while you’re young.

To get to Medina, I passed from tour bus to village-hopping minibus, then jumped on the back of an all-terrain Guinean motorbike driven by my friend Bara Sané. And all of a sudden I was standing in the dusty courtyard of the same compound I’d lived in for six weeks, almost five years ago. And towards me came a second Bara (Bara Touré) grinning and shouting my Muslim name: “Assane has come! Assane has come!”

I was shocked by how little had changed. In my first stay, I saw how much labor went into literally keeping a rural household together. The biggest difference between modern materials (concrete and tin sheeting) and traditional ones (hard banco clay, thick branches, and thatch) is durability. But I found the same five red huts I’d last seen (although a sliver of wall and caved in inside my former hut, so it was left for the chickens). There was the same roofed shelter covering the raised bench/bed built of twisted poles.

I want to say the reunion with old friends was dramatic, that the odors and sounds renewed an old connection, that I suddenly grasped the significance of having stayed, left, and come back to this small, remote place. But honestly, after about half an hour, it felt mostly normal. Sort of like continuing where I had left off. In part that’s how people treat one another in Senegal (or at least how they treat me). Guests are incredibly important, and welcomed back with long greetings, asking after every family member back at home. You are fed incredibly well. But once you get past that, people seem to treat you in the same low key way as those they see everyday. They don’t expect much. And that’s comforting.

(Although it is important for a guest to bring gifts, this process is also laid back. It literally does not matter whatsoever what types of gift you give, so long as they are of some monetary value. You don’t have to careful calibrate your offering to the recipient’s personality and your interpersonal history like you might when birthday shopping in the West.)

During my week in Medina, I mentally noted thousands of details. Tried to memorize snapshots of dozens of interesting scenes. Somehow none of that is coming back to me now. It’s bad writing to summarize, but probably better than not to write at all.

So over six days in Medina, I conducted ten interviews, recorded fourteen-some hours of talk, and wrote eighty-some pages of notes. I tried to be a lot more detailed and inclusive than before, and write in full sentences. (My first visit resulted in 49 pages of notes over seven weeks) I tried to have more of a sense of what I wanted to learn, and just where the actual collection of data fit into the bigger picture of the research I want to construct, and the education I’m trying to get. And though my mood swung high and low each day – that part was very consistent with my first visit too – overall I started to think that I am extremely lucky. Lucky to have found such a place as Medina to work, and lucky to know the incredibly generous people I do.

I listed the ways I am lucky: I have one of the finest huts in the village: a concrete floor, sturdy bed and table, wooden doors (with keyed locks!), and a well-drained, private bathroom. The women in the village chief’s household cook and delivery to me three heaping meals a day. There may be a heavy presence of rice and thin peanut sauce, but there are also beans or spinach stew some nights, and there’s no way I could cook for myself on an open, wood-fire hearth. As soon as I showed up, I had willing understanding research partners, who know exactly what researchers want and were happy to help me. I realized the first day that I could ask Bara Touré, the main resident of the compound where I stay, to be a research assistant. He was born blind and, perhaps because he is the son of the village chief, spent several years studying and job training in Dakar.

Bara T. is exceptional. Fluent in Wolof, and damn good at French, he has an urban familiarity that allows me to communicate and relate with him closely. And, because he’s blind, he doesn’t undertake dry-season work that takes up most men’s days – watering fields in the banana plantation, gathering timber, traveling to meetings and weddings and funerals. He runs a business based on a solar panel acquired from an old German development project. Together with a used car battery, a series of voltage converters, and power strips, he recharges the village cell phones for about 20 cents a pop. But most of the time, he was happy to help me plan and carry out interviews, translating my clumsy Wolof to one of three languages – even creating a daily schedule of whom to visit at what times!

So although my feelings about returning to Medina (and about my research in general) still swing from morning to evening, when I’m able to step back I feel lucky I can come and go to such a place. Now I’m trying to figure out how best to sort through the details and decide what I need to do next. I’m going to a conference in April, and I want to get the most from the next month in Senegal. When I left Medina, people joked that I was in a hurry to get back to ‘my wife’ in Dakar (mostly true). I told everyone “I’ll go and come back soon.”

Merci de lire!

I wanted to write a quick note to thank everyone for reading, and for all the comments which people have left, either here or via email. It's good to know that people are reading this blog! It's also nice to hear from family and friends while I'm so far away.

Also, a quick note on how much I stand out here! I knew before coming of course that I would stand out, but I was actually surprised when I arrived at how many toubabs (white folks) I saw. However, I stand out in so many ways! In some ways, it's annoying. I have never had anything stolen from me in the US, but within 2 weeks here my cell phone was stolen while on a bus, and I've heard much worse stories of crimes happening to white people here. (Don't worry concerned family members reading this, I've learned how to be very careful since then...) We are targets for criminals. And then there are the taxis who honk at me if they're searching for a client. Taxi after taxi will honk at me while I'm walking or waiting for a bus. Do they think that toubabs never walk or take public transportation? Or more likely that they'll make more money off of me than a Senegalese person? And then of course there are the men who see me as a ticket to the US, women who see me as someone in search of a maid, and who knows what else people want from me (half the time I don't really understand what one is saying).

In some ways standing out is amusing and sort of endearing. A few nights ago I went to a café touba vendor who I had been to once before during my first week here. He remembered that I wanted a little bit of sugar in my coffee. How many cups of coffee does he serve each day to how many different people, and yet he remembered what I'd had the one time I'd gone there over a month ago? Similarly, I ate breakfast at a little stand yesterday which I'd only been to once before, weeks ago, and the woman running it knew what I wanted based on what I'd had before. If I go to one of these breakfast stands, coffee vendors, a patisserie, etc, people never forget. One woman stopped me on the street and knew my name, and it was half-way through the greeting process before I realized she works at a boulangérie I'd been to once. Occurrences like these happen all the time, and if I was with Ewan the last time I'd met the person, they always ask how he is and where he is. Ewan has said that he'll go to a gas station he'd last been to 4 years ago and the staff will remember his name and ask where he's been. People here never forget a toubab.