While just another day in Mali...

...I recall that today is the day that every American family comes together, cooks Turkey, and eats as a family--Thanksgiving. I've briefly talked about Malian food and eating habits briefly, but I'll speak a little more specifically on what exactly I eat day to day.

My community, like nearly all of Mali, is composed of farmers; everyone grows corn, millet, beans, and peanuts. The rice fields are slightly further out, so fewer people grow rice. People also have gardens and grow tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, okra, and watermelon. At the end of rainy season, the larger crops are harvested, and everyone goes out to the fields for a few hours to pull up peanuts or cut millet stalks. Once these major crops are harvested, Malian women dry and pound, (in Bambara, susulike) them: millet must be pounded out of it's outside casing and washed, beans dried and washed, and corn dried. Next, you can take your dried beans, corn, or millet to the masine in the center of town and the machine will grind them into a powder. I myself bought some rice, and had it ground into rice powder or malomugu.

Now, finally, you can actually cook what you grow. Mali, and only Mali, eats something called to: you heat water, little by little add millet powder to the heated water, and a thick porridge-like substance results after much stirring. You then ladle it out in large spoonfulls, allow it to cool so it develops a consistency like jello, then you put sauce on it. Most often, Malians serve it with tomato-okra sauce, baobob leaf sauce, or another type of sauce that's mostly just tomatoes.

When peanuts are harvested, women susu peanuts into tigadiga or peanut butter, and then most often make peanut butter sauce--tigadigana-with peanut butter, okra and tomatoes, and serve it over rice. Really good tigadigana is simply...amazing. It makes my day to have rice and tigadigana.

Following a meal, Malians drink tea. When first asked if I drink tea, I had only my American frame of reference: tea as an infusion of a dried plant in hot water, which you drink slowly only while reading philosophy on a rainy morning.

Tea in Mali is not tea in America (or at least not my kind of American tea). Sure, the box says "green tea" like in America, but Malians make their green tea with sugar and through a different process:

1. Take two little ceramic tea pots, put water and tea in one teapot and heat it until it's boiling.
2. Pour the mixture into the second teapot only to pour it back into the first. Heat some more.
3. Pour again into the second teapot and add sugar until it tastes right, pouring the mixture back and forth to dissolve the sugar.

Tea is then served in small glasses that resemble shot glasses: there are always two teapots, and always two tea glasses. Often to get the taste right, the person pours the tea back and forth between the two glasses to get the sugar dissolved and to cool the drink. Finally, the person who makes the tea fills a glass, and hands it to you, at which point you quickly drink and give back, so that he can refill the glass and pass it to the next person. Finally, this process happens no fewer than three times: if you are at a meal, you sit and wait until you get three glasses of tea.

Today I will not be eating turkey, nor will I be drinking tea. But I will don my Malian shirt and skirt made out of a blue fabric with orange autumn-like leaves while eating my cheeseburger.