Les hors doêuvres

1 Septembre 2006

More potent potables:

People always ask me what time it is, though absolutely no on has a
watch or a clock, nor does anything in this village happen at a
specific time. (Why do you care what time it is?) My kids are always
trying to read the time from my watch, but they literally couldn't be
more wrong if they had rolled their guesses on dice.

When children are sleeping and you want them to move, you pick them up
by one arm and one leg, and plop them down in another place. They
never wake up.

All the boutiques sell the same ten things: Sugar, tea, rice,
cigarettes, camel biscuits (like animal crackers), oil, candy,
peanuts, sandals and batteries.

People here listen to awful music. Crappy tape mixes of rave-style
club grooves, dated American ballads or terrible Senagalese drivel.

Almost no one knows how old they are, and the ones that say they do
are either estimating or just lying. Very few people were born in
hospitals, and there is no other record of their birth. Even taking
into account the age distorting effects of malnutrition, their guesses
about this are also laughably wrong.

Our courtyard is made of dirt, (it's literally the ground)
and yet they sweep it off every day with a little broom. They sweep
the dirt off of the dirt.

You knew this already, but women, and sometimes men, carry incredibly
huge things on their heads, and they never fall off. I have a picture
I'd like to post sometime, and the caption will be, "Excuse me,
there's a tree on your head."

I can't use anything in public without being asked for it. I have
currently been asked for such things as: a band-aid, some duct tape, a
bandanna, my sunglasses, paper, some Kool-Aide, a pen and a Q tip.

You can burp (modestly) in public, afterward saying simply, "Sahe" (health).

Many of the young boys get their heads shaved periodically, and I'm
not sure why. I think it has something to do with a weird head
ailment, either from bugs or malnutrition, and related to this - my
nephews usually have gross, scabbed over sores on their heads. It's
fucked.

Another sign of malnutrition is reddish tinged hair, which at least 2
out of 4 children in my village have.

No one likes dogs, and the people who keep them only do so for
protection and such, and they never go near them. This might be
because all the dogs are either recently descended from jackals, or are
actually jackals.

Speaking of such, the place occupied by wolves in all of our
fairy-tales, is occupied by hyenas in all of theirs. Hyenas haven't
lived in this area for decades, and that's lucky, because those things
are assholes.

It's not cultural, but I hate goats. Simple as that.

You can get children here to do any sort of manual chore for you, and
they love it. Now, I will never go to the boutique myself, if there is
a child around. I don't even have to know them. They're like robots.

Have I talked about the greetings yet? Suffice it to say that the
greetings are ubiquitous, long, manifold and repetitive. It's the
equivalent of a giant "How are you?"
in which the answer is always "Not bad (lebess), thank-god"

The hours between 12 and 4 pm are dead time. It's too hot to do
anything, and no one does.

Humor translates. Sarcasm is widely understood, and people are
delighted when I tell little jokes poking fun at one's physical and/or
mental characteristics, and/or comparing someone to one or more forms
of comical animal life. I am hilarious here.

You can pick your nose in public. And we do.