Gums!

I was sitting with my neighbor Sini one afternoon; she breaks the silence by talking about her gums. Previous to the silence I’d been teaching her random English words. “Mbewa?” “Goat.” “Goat….E nage?” “Cow.” “E sukabe?” “Children.” But we’d quickly pointed to everything within sight and lapsed into the silence. So I get to hear about Sini’s gums. I assume there is a problem with her gums because:
    1) the conversation about her gums starts completely out of the blue
    2) she says, “It is black” and points for me to look
    3) she said, “It hurts!”
     4) she describes brushing vigorously and using a thread until there is blood (I thought, “Awesome! Gambians know about flossing!”). I assume she is discussing dental hygiene.
I ask, “Didn’t you go to the doctor?” and she looks at me kind of funny and says, “No, I wanted it like this.”
That’s when I realized Sini wasn’t talking about cavities or gum disease, she just wanted to tell me about the day she got her gums tattooed. She had been describing how it is done—burned millet was somehow involved—but I’d been too busy trying to figure out why she was telling me this story to devote any concentration to understanding what she was saying. I’ll have to ask her about it again sometime. And I can tell her in America, we also do this, but with machines.