pocket full of peanuts

My pockets are full of peanuts - or rather, the little sack I bring around with me each evening as I make my neighborhood rounds - along with my soap for washing my hands, my sacred flashlight (the solar rechargeable batteries quickly fading), my notebook and a real ink pen which I splurged on at the Tubab store in Bamako. After my cold bucket bath beneath a fading orange sun - which blazed with fury 30 minutes ago - I lock my tin doors and walk down the short dirt path to Founeba's house, making sure to avoid the goat shit and broken Baobab fruit with its white chalky center scraped out by the grubby hands of some bare bellied toddler. I pass the piles of peanut shells, the last ground remains of the waning peanut harvest season, and stacks of irregular mud bricks freshly molded from the cool earth. Foune'ba is probably sitting on the low wood stool in front of a black iron pot licked by low flames, which is propped on a pile of dried mud, creating a stovetop of sorts. With a wood stick she is stirring the sauce bubbling in the pot - tiga dega na (peanut butter sauce) or saga saga na (a slimy leaf sauce) - which she'll taste and add more Maggi or peanut butter like precious bit of gold ore. I read to her as she tends to the sauce and her two month-old baby Omou who is swathed in bright patterned cloth with her brown little face quietly looking out. When the sauce is done she gives Omou her breast and I hand her the health manual from which I've been reading, and help her stumble through the Bambara translation which I can read fluently since I've grown up sounding out letters but she has only learned to read since her training to become a midwife. I envy her understanding even if she still confuses every n and m and I've learned that for both of us it will come, dooni dooni (small small). We read about AIDS in Mali as she gasps at the statistics, or about weaning children off breast milk without creating protein deficiencies, or the importance of vaccinations. And while yesterday she was angry at me for leaving to visit Kristen on the slow Saturday, and even more for my carelessness in leaving my chair and soap outside which to her feels like an ostentatious show of my money, we're over it. We both know were differed - I resent the mother like role she tries to take which is really just communal coexistence regardless of our professional relationship, and she doesn't always grasp my American independence. We're both learning.

After the darkness begins to filter in I say my night blessings and take off for my host families house as one of Founeba's daughters (or one of her husband's other daughters, she's wife number 4) follows with a bowl of sauce and rice sitting on her head without the slightest threat of its downfall. The women carry themselves with model like stability despite the threat of their dangling earrings. I eat dinner with my host father and his two younger sons; his older sons are off at the nearest high school, 2 hours away in Kita. I wash my hands with the soap which I have been offering them for months but they finally accept, which could have something to do with the big hand washing mural I've just finished on the wall of the health center. We all squat around the bowl on the floor as he grunts and holds the flashlight. Tonight Sani is making dublini, hibiscus tea. It is heavy and sweet with its fragrant magenta juice and equal parts sugar. A group of her classmates show up. Their presence is at a first glance imposing; their tall thin figures draped in bright panyes which don't match their skirts, which don't match their shirts or their headwraps anyway. Their swirling palate of color is lit by the bonfire which we sit around, and in fact all I can see are the distant family bonfires where the women squat on low stools around their endless children snacking on their after dinner roasted peanuts. The complete night scene is only broken by an occasional anonymous passerby with their flashlight whispering good evening with equally whispered responses from attentive ears. As the girls sit down the intimidation fades as I recognize each face - 13 and 14 year olds, strong and emboldened by their impending roles as wives and mothers only a year or two away. Even some classmates their age carry their notebooks atop their round stomachs.

As my host mother Hagie shells the peanuts in a weaved bowl the group alternates between pensive silence, complete and comfortable as they stare into the fire, and lively gossip about the village. I am slowly beginning to carve out the Malinke words and phrases from the dark cloud of sounds, which I can connect to the Bambara words I've learned and sew together with context, the quilt of Malian languages. Their chatter sounds like drum and base; their tongues heavy with h and j sounds, interrupted sporadically by the quick high pitched l's and k's.

After long stretches of silence I feel I've put in some decent "family time" and move on to the next concession over, Soliba's house. Here I sit down amidst a warm chorus of greetings and bubbling children who run up to me and smile. I sit down on the wood bench, relieved that they don't scurry to get me a better chair - the respectful motion always embarrasses me, and anyway I'd much rather sit next to my friends with their children at my knees. Some of the toddlers lay on my lap and try to play with my hair, which they still can't believe is connected to my head, and mutter questions that I have no chance of understanding with their lispy Malinke tongues. I am teaching Soliba English, and we've gotten a few phrases down that she's asked to learn. These are of the utmost importance here: "Come eat!" "Lets go to Behon," and "How is your family?" These frequent Malian phrases sound random and quite useless in the American English. But of course language is so much more than just a string of sounds; it is entwined with all the peculiar way each culture lives, what they value, what is respectful or even trivial in this little Malian culture that is, well, the whole world. At least to them, and for this moment me too.