Guinea Hen Just Isn't the Same as Turkey

With Christmas just around the corner, it couldn’t feel less like the holiday season to me. No carols on the radio, and there’s certainly no snow on the ground, although the temperature does drop during the night to as low as 70 degrees these days. I walk outside in the morning to find my neighbors bundled up in secondhand ski jackets, hats, and even gloves. Banta, the old woman who shares my compound, won’t come out of her house until the sun is already high in the sky. When I caught the cold that is spreading like wildfire through my village, my counterpart, Aissa, blamed my t-shirts. Despite the 80-degree weather, she was sure I would not have gotten sick if I had only dressed like her, wearing 3 layers with a shawl clutched tightly around her.

So maybe the Christmas spirits not really in the air, but we have been celebrating. Everyone had been talking about Tabaski for months. Once Ramadan was over, it was the holiday everyone was waiting for. The trucks passed through my village more and more frequently, piled high with sheep heading to Bamako to be sold to wealthy families. All the tailors were busy, adding finishing touches to new outfits so everyone could be in their finest for the fete. Women walked around with plastic bags on their feet, waiting for the henna designs on their feet to soak in. Girls sat around for hours braiding their hair, weaving in bangs and buns and updos. The men talked about how much meat they would eat and who had bought the largest sheep. Family members returned to their villages from jobs in Mali’s cities, from Burkina Faso, from Guinea-Bissau, where many men find work during Mali’s long dry season.

When Tabaski finally arrived, we ate and ate and ate. So many sheep to kill, and so much meat to prepare and eat before it went bad. With no refrigerators, everything had to be consumed immediately. My host family cannot afford meat during the year, and all of a sudden, there was so much meat that I received, in addition to huge bowls of rice and sauce and heaping piles of meat, a plastic sack filled with meat. When your stomach was full enough to burst, you left your compound to greet all your family and friends, to wish them a happy holiday, another good year, health, children, money, or, in my case, luck in finding a husband. “May your blessing come true,” I would respond out of politeness, only leading to quick offers to point me in the direction of the most eligible men.

After three days of feasting and greeting, the holiday was finally over and it was back to business as usual. As dry season starts to really set in, business as usual is starting, more and more, to mean sitting around or spending the day in whatever nearby village has its weekly market. Mondays in San, Tuesdays in Bankma, Wednesdays in Fangasso. Peanuts have been shelled and sold, all the millet is harvested – only those who garden vegetables are still in the fields. Women’s daily work continues of course, but men who do not seek out work in cities or neighboring countries and are not lucky enough to have a post at the health clinic or the mayor’s office are left to sit by the roadside, chewing kola nuts, watching the buses go by.

For me, though, my work is starting to pick up. Suddenly I find myself with meetings to attend, expectations and demands from my village for an expansion for our library and a budget for our radio, and, most occupying of all, a burgeoning malnutrition program that I find myself charged with. And of course to add a flair of drama, there are the constant complications of village politics. I feel as if I was born yesterday and am constantly two steps behind in trying to figure out who gets along with whom, and why Moustapha and Adama have entered into their latest feud. At the health clinic, it’s men against women, with me as a somewhat androgynous position. Not so low as a Malian woman, but still not credited with the capabilities and benefits of being a man. At the library, the director embarked on a spontaneous month long strike. However, he did not inform anyone of the strike, hoping instead that the village authorities would notice he was on strike and recognize the importance of the radio. I was the only person who noticed. And at the radio, the director is refusing to use the new accounts book bought by the treasurer, believing the proposition of a new system of keeping track of accounts to be an insult to his ability to manage the radio.

I wish I had someone in my village whose opinion I completely trusted too. But as of yet, I haven’t found that person who will give me a straightforward, unbiased account of the situation. Everyone is invested, and more and more, it seems that it’s family first. I thought I had found that person a couple weeks ago. Adama is a hardworking guy – he moved to Tene five years ago, and quickly became indispensable to Tene’s development projects. He is married with one wife and four kids, and supports himself primarily by selling gas to the motorists in our village. He is also the director of the radio, a position that is currently unpaid, although the radio personnel do receive occasional motivational payments. Adama had often told me how hard it is for him to support his wife and family, and condemned other men who took multiple wives without the financial means to support several wives and countless children. He’s a passionate advocate of education, blaming the lack of education, girls marrying too young, and teenage pregnancies for many societal problems. And so I was shocked to learn that Adama is in fact engaged to be married to his second wife. How could he support her? My shock turned to dismay when I found out that his fiancé was a girl no older than 16, still in school, who gave birth to his child last month.

Most of the men in my village tell me that if they didn’t take additional wives, there would be all kinds of old-maids running around Mali, with no man to support them. I argue back that if that was the case, why would 40 year old men need to look to 15, 16, 17 year old girls as their second or third wives? So far, I have yet to win this argument. My friends are sure that there must be either far less women in America, or else an awful lot of women are real lonely without a man.

When faced with so much blatant sexism – one friend informed me that everywhere, men always work harder than women; another told me it’s natural for men to dominant woman – it often seems odd to me that most of my friends are men. But it’s usually the men who are more educated, speak some French, who have a better idea of where I come from, whose lifestyle is more similar to mine (most women my age are terribly busy with laundry, cooking, pounding millet, pulling water, selling street food to try to find the money to buy their kids a pair of shoes or supplement their diets with some protein, and taking care of at least 4 or 5 kids). And so on Tabaski, I ate surrounded by men, sharing my bowl with men who made jokes about why I wasn’t outside eating with the women. I worry that my ambiguous status negatively impacts my relationships with the women in my village, with the wives of the men with whom I spend my time. It’s a precarious position, and like a politician, I want the support of all Tene’s constituents.