Bakadaji!

For a few days during the between-terms break in April I visited Effo in Bakadaji (and you can read about her adventures in Fatoto here)! Bakadaji is a Mandinka and Fula village, but her host family is Mandinka so I didn’t have much to say to them. I’m jealous because Effo’s neighbors have a monkey named Mabintu with Frida Kahlo eyes—and I’m not just saying that because she had a unibrow. Her face was itty-bitty and freakishly human-like and also very wrinkly. Not that Frida Kahlo was freakishly human or wrinkly, that's why I specified eyes. It’s unfortunate the only pictures I have of Mabintu are ones where she’s got dried mango stuck all over her face. There was a day when she was clean and eating banana bread and looking Adorable, but my camera was nowhere to be found.


Yes, you read that correctly! Banana bread! We succeeded in baking banana bread. Sure, it didn’t taste exactly like banana bread, but that was probably due to us using under-ripe bananas instead of over-ripe ones. The important thing, to me at least, is that it had the texture of banana bread and as a bonus, the loaves were shaped like giant muffins because we'd used large aluminium cups instead of baking pans. Effo lives near the baker, who speaks better Pulaar than Mandinka but speaks both languages with a stutter. When we first asked him if he could bake bread for us, he told us to come in the evening, but when we came around six he told us to return at nine. So we did. When we showed up he pulled the burning logs out of the oven so only the hot charred pieces remained. He put our future loaves of banana bread inside and closed the door. Then, for an hour and fifteen minutes, we sat in the dark and made awkward conversation with the baker. Whatever Effo said she needed to translate for me and whatever I said I needed to translate for her. The baker’s surname was Bah, so I mostly talked about his fat stomach because my last name is Jallow and I never miss an opportunity to tease Bahs about their inability to stop eating. I love these joking relationships with the surnames!

Here's what we learned during our conversation with the baker:

• He bakes bread for the whole village and has been doing so for the past twenty years, or maybe he said the oven has been around for twenty years, because he also told us he’s twenty nine years old. But who knows, maybe he has been baking bread since he was nine years old.
• The name of the singer whose song he hummed along to on the radio (since forgotten)
• He would like an English wife.
• He would like to learn how to make this bread, but he told us this before it’d even finished baking so I said wait and taste it first. We tried to bring a piece of it to him the next morning, but only met his father, so I never did learn his thoughts.

Returning from Bakadaji we wandered some fabric shops in Basse. We did not buy the fabric patterned with: lobsters, Mary and Jesus, the Taj Mahal, irons, high-heel shoes, corn-less unicorns.

After I’d visited Bakadaji, Effo came to Fatoto. We were unfortunate to ride there in the same gelle that once took three hours to get there from Basse (it should take one hour, tops) and the same one (I think) that I also lost my water bottle in. I’ve now taken note of how to recognize this unlucky gelle: blue vinyl seats, two neon red triangles leaning against the windshield, and a driver with a permanent grimace and a Frankenstein’s monster forehead. However, the only thing recognizing this gelle will allow me to do is mentally prepare myself for a long and uncomfortable trip because with only one gelle leaving for Fatoto at a time and with hours in between gelles, there’s not much choice for the next time I show up at the car park and find the blue-vinyl gelle waiting for me. This time, the problems were:

•  the car wouldn’t start and needed to be pushed
• the car kept needing to make stops and men would jump out and open the hood and fix stuff or maybe just peer intently inside
• the driver needed to stop so he could spend several minutes haggling with roadside mango vendors and then return with an armload of mangoes
•  the woman sitting behind Effo kept resting her arms and head on the back of Effo’s seat so that she couldn’t sit comfortably.

I’d never had a real-live guest before (or a dead one, for that matter) and I liked that I could wander the village photographing trees and cows and nothing in particular without feeling strange, because I was just showing my guest around town, obviously. So if I ever get an internet connection that will allow me to upload photos, you’ll get to see photos of stuff other than children or puppies. Not that children or puppies are unworthy subject matters, but variety is nice.