Woah!

Posting a post two days in a row?! Ridiculous. I'm now at the Stodge (aka the transit house in Kombo). I thought the transit house in Basse was fantastic? This transit house is fantastically fantastic. But I'm not going to bother describing it because you're presumably reading this blog to learn something about The Gambia, and a description of the Stodge would read like a description of some random house in America. I think this will be another list post, because:

• I like writing lists
• Writing lists does not require much thought, and as I slept poorly last night for unknown reasons (I didn't even drink ataya!) I do not have much thinking to spare
• I'm not sure when I'll be kicked off, and it's much less noticeable if a list is left unfinished than if a paragraph is. Sometimes. Therefore, I will not tell you ahead of time how many bullet points these lists were intended to have

Stuff I've recently eaten: 

• Milk 'n' Malt biscuits that I bought from the bitik down the street. They taste kind of like those cookies you always find at functions where cookies are handed out for free because you can buy them in packs of a million. My milk 'n' malt biscuits were not sold in a pack of a million, but the wrapper is bright green and yellow and one side is written in Arabic. 
• A chicken sandwich (I ate this a few hours ago) 
• Chips (French fries)
• Cucumbers, tomatoes, pickles and flatbread dipped in DELICIOUS humus from a restaurant whose name I forgot. It was the same place where I later ate the aforementioned  chicken sandwich. Brains were also on the menu, but I thought, "been there, done that..." Also, the species of brain was unspecified, but I would guess the brains were not from the following:
• Pig
• Human

Unfortunately,  I can't eliminate any other species with certainty...so... maybe I'll have to try them after all. 

Uncomfortably hot places I've recently been:

• Under a mosquito net on a bed in a room of the Basse transit house
• Squeezed into the backseat of a car for 6 hour drive from Basse to the ferry terminal to Banjul
• This couch. The couch is not uncomfortably hot, but the laptop balanced on my lap is. 

Comfortably hot places I've recently been:

• The shower. I have not taken a hot shower since our pre-departure staging in Philadelphia. You would think I would not even want a hot shower, what with the many uncomfortable hot places I've recently and unrecently been. You would be wrong. This shower was amazing. But you all know what showers feel like, so...I should probably start writing about something more Gambian.

I know! I'm going to flip through my language notebook and share some of the interesting tidbits scrawled within. Unfortunately, you will not receive the full effect of the awesomeness that is the Manuscript Book of Binta Bah (now Binta Jallow). This would require viewing the actual pages, where you would find such things as: 

• the outline Sarjo traced of my bird-shaped Silly Band bracelet
• the picture I drew of squash 
• the picture I drew of a butterfly
• the picture I drew of a mouse that was mistaken for a cow, if I remember correctly
• the picture Sarjo drew of a car stuffed with people
• the picture Ousman drew of the Peace Corps logo
• the picture Sarjo and Ousman drew of my house, pit latrine included
• the house Sarjo drew with the words "Sano BAH Momodou OBAMA USA"
• the sketch I copied from the blackboard of the layout of the car park 
• the two pages covered in orange spots from when a baby regurgitated what was presumably mashed up carrots 

I am also a fan of the fact that the notebook is now completely disengaged from the cover. 

Anyway, so, the interesting tidbits:

• Items that cannot be bargained for in a bitik (a bitik is a store, I think I mentioned that at some point. it is not the word for store, it is a type of store that I would define in more detail, but Google could probably give you the answer faster and more clearly): 
• cup of sugar (sukar)
• ataya
• bread (full loaf either 4D or 5D)
• matches, candles, kerosene, tomato paste*

*I have written these bullet points as they appear in my notebook. I cannot explain why tomato paste was grouped with matches and kerosene

• gertogal na dogga = chicken is running
• dendirabe are your cousins (but specifically the children of your mother's brothers and your father's sisters. Your dendirabe are your joke-mates. You can say absolutely ANYTHING to them. And go into their house and borrow ANYTHING. And there's nothing they can do about it. Except joke back. The dendirabe are also the ones who reconcile marriages. 
• the article always rhymes with the end of the word for which it is the article. unless the word was borrowed from another language, in which case the article is "o"
• the article "dam" goes with anything that is liquid, e.g. ndiyam (water), kosam (sour milk), and kedam (fresh milk)
• leki = tree/medicine
• nayi = four/cows. nayi nayi = four cows
• juma = mosque. aljuma = Friday. Because on Friday you go to the mosque!
• supa kanja is a sauce made with red oil and okra. it is very slippery, and goes w/ rice
• maafe/domoda is a peanut sauce that goes with rice, cous, chicken, fish
• no tip, unless the food is really good
• always keep a spare spoon in your bag
• a resema? = are you married?
• ala, mi resaka sabu ko mi suka = no, I am not married because I am a child/young
• during the rainy season, ocean-going vessels (back when The Gambia was a British colony) could go all the way up the river. no part of The Gambia is more than 35 miles from the river because the British thought that's all they'd need for people to come and trade with them
• if someone asks where someone is and you don't know, don't say "I don't know" because this is rude and implies that you don't want to know. Instead, say, "I haven't seen him/her"
• the granddaughter is the "wife" of the grandfather, which also makes her the co-wife of the grandmother. So the granddaughter can joke that she'll eat her grandmother's food because it's her husband's food, etc. 
• boni = spoiled (used for people and food)
• yaaki = spoiled, broken (used for everything except people)
• fusi - broken (used for jars, bottles, tumblers, bowls, eyes)
• heli = broken (used for chairs, beds, benches, trees, doors, handles, body parts except for eyes, a pen if it snaps)
• the traditional occupations have superpowers associated with them:
• blacksmith = if someone stole something from you, they can make a bad spirit follow that person until they bring back the item
• fishermen = can remove fish bones from someone's neck
• leatherworkers = not exactly a superpower, but they're the ones in charge of slaughtering the sheep and skinning it for a naming ceremony
• I do not understand why, but in the corner of one page I wrote: 

                          tomato --> best

                          picture --> worst

                          (pink rectangle)

• wota baaro pila o tidani = don't lean against the pillar, it is not strong
• luuwas = rent (house, car, wheelbarrow)
• tanderma = date *in my notebook, this tidbit is accompanied by my drawing of a date. I was trying to explain to my language teacher what I had eaten the night before to break the fast. I told her I thought they were dates, but I could not be sure, because I had only eaten dates once before, three years ago on the Friday or Saturday before Easter--the same day I tried chocolate-covered matzo for the first time. Except I didn't tell her that run-on sentence of a story I just told you. What I actually said was, "I think they were figs or dates." 
• during the big ceremony when the wife is brought to her husband, she will be covered in a veil and given dozens of pots, lots of bowls, and bookshelves of clothes
• if you REALLY can't afford to buy a sheep to slaughter for your child's naming ceremony, a chicken is acceptable
• "bii fattu!" means "son of a b----!" but "bii Fatou" means "Fatou's son." The former is absolutely an insult and the latter is absolutely not, but the two phrases sound remarkably similar. Therefore, I'm hoping I'll never need to insult anyone, or reference Fatou's son.