Tobaski Time

Last Monday I went to the college one last time before the break to meet with my counterparts and discuss this term and the coming term at the college. We decided on what we will be teaching next term. I will be holding the class on Teaching Strategies, (yeah fun!). I have already planned a lot for the term and hope it goes well.
On the following Tuesday, everyone was getting ready to travel to their families upcountry. So when I went down to the market, surprise, surprise, it was mass chaos. I've never seen it so busy before, people everywhere along the streets, cars lined up bumper to bumper (gelley gelley vans mostly), people selling via yelling through megaphones, and just tons of people winding their way around the market trying to buy silifando (souvenirs) to take for their families. Along with all those goods, there was a major influx of rams in the country. They are loaded where ever they can fit, on top of the vans, in the back seats of cars, trailing behind bicycles, etc. The good think about all this madness is that hardly anyone paid attention to me (lowest toubab tally yet!) because they were so busy trying to get out of town. I was thinking as I pushed my way through the market, " Man! People at home think shopping during Christmas time is bad!, At least in America we have some semblance or order in things we do, (like, we know how to get in a line, take turns, etc!) But here, the lack of order is the normal order of business.
The following day, (Wednesday) Andy and I braved the market again because we wanted to get our host family some things to cook with the family's ram (the ram was tied to the tree by the cooking area since about Monday)
We bought: 5 Liters of vegetable oil (very important here, it is the second food group besides rice!)
2 large eggplants
5 carrots
2 piles of potatoes (about 8-10)
2 piles of onions (about 8-10, and the 3rd food group)
1 jar of Senegal dijon mustard (used for sauces)
2 small plastic bags of pounded black pepper
then we went to what I call "the black light district" which is an area of the market where you can buy ready-made clothes, that is covered so that it is dark from the canvas roofs and lit with black lights (not so good because last time we went there to buy Andy's kaftan we didn't realize it was purple because of the blacklights, we thought it was blue!). We got Andy another outfit this time we made sure we figured out the color before buying it (a nice brown)!
When Thursday rolled around it was Tobaski. I woke up a little late (for here 8 ish) and felt kinda out of the loop because Andy had already woken up early and helped wash the rams to prepare them for the slaughtering that day. Everyone in the compound was very busy preparing things, and I felt like I had nothing to do. Like last holiday, it is slightly unnerving when you are involved in a holiday that is new to you, and you aren't quite sure what is going to happen that day. But eventually things got going and they prepared to kill the rams. Our family had a large ram, and a small family that just moved in at the end had a ram, and our next door neighbors had a goat. It was very eventful for me, because I witnessed the slaughtering of these animals. I documented the whole thing with our camera, which for me was easier to do,than just stand by and watch. It was easier to have something to do, if there was a particularly gruesome part, I would zoom in on what was happening, but looking through the lens helped me feel a little detached from it. After the animals had died, the men cut the meat up, after skinning and de-gutting the animals. While they were doing this the small children poked around watching them, touching the dead animals foot and at one point poking at the filled, detached belly of one of the rams laying on the ground. I got a lot of intense pictures of Molado and the other small children in the compound. One in particular of Moldao in her cream frilly party dress standing next to a pool of blood and a slaughtered goat in the background. I couldn't help taking so many pictures of her in the situation because of the contrast between her apparent cleanliness and innocence, prancing happily around what became a slaughtering ground that day.
Well, after the meat was mostly cut up the owners of the meat gave Andy and I some, and suddenly I was thrown into a panic, because I hadn't planned on cooking and I'd never cooked goat or ram before! I got stressed and in an effort to gain control of the situation, took off to the market to get something to cook the meat in. I got to the market and discovered that it was a mere skeleton of it's normal self because of the holiday and everyone had left town. But I found a few things and made my way home only to find out that Fatou Mata had brought over meat to roast in our oven and offered to keep the stuff we had in their fridge till Saturday. So that's what we did. We gorged ourselves on meat and food on Thursday and when bedtime came around Andy realized he had become sick. He moved to the other bed in the main room in the middle of the night, and vomited. We were up all night and he spend all of Friday and Saturday recovering. On Saturday afternoon we had to cook the meat that was being kept for us, so we marinated it in a mixture of: tomato paste, garlic, mustard, black pepper, maggi cubes, water, oil, and onions, and then put it in the solar cooker (after draining the marinate away) with some chunks of potatoes and onions. After about 3 hours in the sun it was a delicious roast. The solar cooker is magic! But it was a little tainted by the fact that we are a little sick right now of so much meat, because it is not a normal thing in our diet and honestly we've had it for every meal except one since Thursday. I think I'll be good for a while after this if I don't have meat!