Diabaly 3 - April 5

There is no pleasure in life like strolling through a village street with a paper handful of beignets. The beignets today I think might have been made with wheat flour – interesting, because most of the beignets I’ve had in Mali were made with millet or rice. I cannot love the millet – it is often fermented and sour – but there are exquisite little rice beignets (the batter looks kind of like very soupy rice porridge) made in an oily griddle with round depressions where they cook until crispy at the edges and soft and airy on the inside. They then are sprinkled with sugar. A woman near my apartment makes them and I think might be unnerved at the assiduity of my patronage.

Today we did indeed go out into a village to test the questionnaires. We drove for about 30 minutes through dry, dry scrub and eventually arrived at this little Peulh village. We all pulled up in our SUVs with our clipboards and shook hands with a couple of elders and unnerved but intrigued children. (God, I love kids here.) Then we sat down on some mats and waited for a while, and a few more people trickled in. The chief or mayor offered us some milk, I was secretly relieved that accepting it with thanks did not involve immediately consuming it – I hate whole milk. Then we sat around some more. Eventually we (and by ‘we’ I definitely do not mean me – I do not speak any Bambara or Peulh, have in this context no useful skills at all, and was along strictly as an observer – and not too close an observer either, because the presence of someone so obviously strange and foreign could make people feel uncomfortable about answering questions) decided that the survey teams should split up and go track people down, rather than waiting for them to come back from wherever they were. So I ended up back in the camp with the health expert just hanging out. It was actually really nice to have a space when I couldn’t do any work and had to just chill. The health expert is very cool and a great traveling companion. The only problem is that I have read everything there is to read and now I am in the terrible, terrible position of having NO READING MATERIAL. It is going to be a long night.

Tomorrow we head back to Bamako – it will be a long haul, 7 hours in the car (although thank heavens paved after Niono) – when we arrive I am going to find out if pizza delivery from Da Guido actually works and maybe open the bottle of Nederburg that has been waiting in my fridge for a good occasion.