"Oh Manungima! Now you are beautiful!" Adima tells me as she hands me a small mirror so I can survey my freshly braided hair.
I look like a Dr. Suess character. the braids begin at the back of my neck and work their way up to my forehead, where they meet in a fountain of long tightly plaited strands. Look at myself and knowing that I'll leave the braid in for several days to be polite makes me realize that Manungima Batiloo is not always the same person as Kenley Jones. Manungima Batiloo (which means "have mercy on her, the people's child") has a beautiful singing voice and should join the church choir. In real life, I'm basically tone deaf. Manungima has just learned to cook because in America the only foods they have are ketchup and mayonnaise. Manungima is happy to eat bush meat, because obviously squirrel and porcupine are delicious. And of course, she love to have her hair braided in tight scalp-yanking plaits.
On the topic of eating bush meat though, it is not nearly as bad as I might have imagined. Once, when I was sharing a plate of rice with my friend Fatmata, she gave me a small unidentifiable substance to eat. I found I was more concerned wit how to consume the substance, which seemed like solid bone at first glance, than with what I was eating. Am I supposed to eat the bone? I wondered as I tried to break it apart with my spoon. I watched as Fatmata took a piece of the meat in her hand and bit through the bone to get at the meat and marrow. "Ah, so that's how you eat 'beef' in Africa," I thought, and tried to mimic Fatmata. It was only after I had bitten through what I'm assuming was a squirrel skull, that I allowed myself to think about the fact that the creature's brain was in my mouth. Disgusting in theory, but not honestly somewhat tasty in real life.
Besides, eating bush meat is not terrible when you are doing so in a dirt compound in a village, surrounded by children, dipping your spoon into the same bowl as one of your new friends. When I first arrived to my village, everyone insisted on giving me, the stranger, my own dish as a sign of honor and respect. I was thrilled that when Fatmata invited me to eat with her family, she let me share a dish with her. In a strange way, eating there seemed to mark a sort of turning point for me, not because I learned to bite through bone, but because as I did so, I realized I was beginning to make friends in my village. Everyone is quick to claim me as a friend here, but integrating on more than a superficial level is a slow process.
Nevertheless, I have plenty of time to devote to making friends, since a teaching strike as postponed the opening of school indefinitely. It might open on Monday, or the next Monday, or the next next Monday .... so people tell me ambiguously. In the meantime, I'm trying to hold study sessions for a few highly motivated students and looking for other small projects to work on. Hopefully the teaching strike ends soon. Oh, and for that matter, hopefully the postal workers strike ends too because the post offices have all closed. Other than strikes, all is well!
