Tomorrow is the last day of cbt. Normally the peace corps would have a party for all the cbt families, but that isn’t happening since we already spent all our money. So instead we’re all going to throw in and do it ourselves. Apparently party here means meat, and we just so happen to have a goat, so we’re going to eat it.
And who is going to cook for 50 people you ask? Why that’s no problem at all (apparently). We’ll just tell the women to do it. Isn’t that a relief?
Without these ladies this village would fall apart.
Anyway, Huley and Haroun have model school tomorrow, so they’ll buy all the goods and I will sit on my butt and do nothing. Fifteen kilos of potatoes!
cooking for a village
Fast forward one day-
It’s party day and it turns out that 30 baguettes of bread can’t be had en brousse, no matter how sure the locals are that it can. So our facilitator had to take a taxi into town to get 30 loaves of bread. About an hour later I saw him struggling to drag something back to town from the road (200 M or so).
How much bread did he get?
I walked out to give him a hand and the thing he was dragging through the sand wasn’t bread. It was a goat, laying in a pile on the ground. It wasn’t dead, or hurt or anything, but it knew the score and it wasn’t about to move one muscle to help us. It was a little confusing that our facilitator had just gotten out of a taxi with a goat, because we already had a goat, and we had given it to a guy in town to butcher for us.
why did god have to make me so delicious? It turns out that:
A)the new goat was not a goat, it was a ram.
and
B)the butcher had forgotten that we had given him our goat, and he had let him out with the rest this morning.
So our goat was out wandering around the bush somewhere, and our party got a little more expensive. Our facilitator was kind of pissed, because we’d had an agreement that the butcher guy broke and it cost us some money. But I guess that’s life.


The four toubabs threw in a little for a pool for when dinner was going to start. There was a four hour span and it really could have been anywhere in there. Huley won.
Ram bonafa! There is no way this meal could have been better.
We had bonafa (sp?), which is kind of like a stew with potatoes and potatoes and onions and garlic and pepper (which we never get here). It’s all served on one big plate for five or six people, and everyone uses bread to dig food out. Aaand dinner was amazing. Not just good for africa; there was no way to improve on that meal.
We also had a bucket of bissap, which easily rivals sprite-in-a-bag. Will the wonders never cease.
This girl is freaking adorable. Also, bucket of bissap.
After dinner the girls got some crazy puudi (henna), and all the kids had an insane dance party. At first the music was just the noise from the radio, but no one was really paying attention to the beat. Everyone was just sort of clapping and “dancing” meant flailing all of your limbs as fast as you could. After about 5 minutes they gave up on the radio and the music came from a metal bowl that someone was banging on with their hands. One girl, the 15 year old (married, but we never saw her husband. They assured us he exists), was ruling the dance party with an iron fist. Everyone really wanted to dance but if anyone was dancing that she didn’t want to dance, or if someone wasn’t dancing that she did want to dance, she had a slipper that she would hit them with. Most of the time she just hit everyone until they all sat down and watched her dance. Sometimes if the whole party seemed to be getting too uppity she would just go around and beat everyone as fast as she could. When something caught her attention outside of the hangar and everyone seized the opportunity to flail freely, she would come flying back in and start hitting everyone within reach. And that was the dance party. It was probably the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s kind of sad leaving now. I have to be sure and come back whenever I’m in rosso.