Written on Monday, Sept. 22nd

Andy and I had a pretty relaxing weekend spent around the compound. On Saturday I had a really trying day of fasting, because I was incredibly hungry. The reason I was hungry was because of something somewhat out of my control. During Ramadan a lot of people here break fast with French bread. At the local batiks around 6:30/7 o’clock there is a rush of people buying bread for their families to break fast a little after 7pm. Andy and I usually don’t eat bread then, we just eat what our family cooks. But we do buy bread at that time because it is when it is available during Ramadan, for our breakfast in the early morning. So on Friday, Andy went to the bitik to buy bread for Saturday morning, but after going several places, he found out from other people that there is some kind of “baker strike”. Apparently instead of 4 Dalasis a loaf, “they” (not sure who, I’m assuming government of some kind) wanted the bakers to sell their bread even lower than the already low price. Buying flour here is expensive and the price of the bread has remained the same for many years, going lower would mean for them to loose money, or at the very least, not make any profit.
So for early am breakfast Saturday morning, Andy and I had gathered up 3 smallish potatoes, and had that with our usual eggs. Apparently that was not nearly as fulfilling as the normal loaf of bread with eggs on it. Because by late morning I already felt very hungry. Since it was Saturday, there was not much to do, I wandered around trying to busy myself so that I wouldn’t think about how hungry I was. But I think my brain was refusing to engage, or was in some sort of deep fog, because I literally was pacing through the house, then would decide to see what was going on outside, stand on the porch, would get tired, then would go inside again.
When I did manage to settle down to do something like read, I found myself giving the task about thirty percent of my attention, while the other part was thinking about food, and how my stomach was telling my brain it was “dying”. So I would get frustrated and antsy and get up to try to find something else to do that would hopefully keep my attention. This of course led to more aimless wandering until I landed on something else to do.
This sort of schedule went on for most of the afternoon. The amount of activities I tried for small amounts of time did not eat away at much of the day. Each time I would move on to something else, I would check the clock, only to find very little time would have past, “what!? Its only 1 o’clock? But I’ve done this, this and this!?”
Of course eventually the time came to break fast for the day, but it was one of the weakest days I have ever had. Most of the time with our regular breakfast of bread and eggs, I don’t feel too hungry, especially with work and keeping busy.
On Sunday, because of this bakers strike, I decided to take it into my own hands and break out the solar cooker. Rain has still been coming sporadically, but I thought I would wake up in the morning, judge how the sun would be then, and if sunny, go to the market to get flower to make bread. And that is just what I did. The only thing is…..
I’m not a meteorologist. And the day had good blocks of time with sun, but also had large slow moving clouds that would cover it. Because of this situation, the bread was out there all day, and when we finally had to bring it inside, it was still a bit doughy. This, of course, did not matter to Andy and I, and we were eager to dig in as soon as the call to break fast came.
Because we like to share whatever we make in the solar cooker with the family, I gave them some large chunks of bread. I had pre-warned them that it might not be cooked all the way because of the weather.
Later that night, MoLamin came over, and of course as usual, he had some kind of food in his hands. At first glance we thought it was a pankako (a sort of doughnut) but then we noticed it looked a little different and MoLamin said it was mburro (bread). When Alhagie came in with a fistful of bread too we finally devised upon closer inspection that the bread they were eating was the bread we gave them from the solar cooker…but it definitely looked different…. Apparently they had fried it!
This was just hilarious because we always joke about how they fry everything here in oil. We eat fried everything (fish, onion, eggplant, etc.) on top of rice every single day. But also the fact that the shear principle of the solar cooker, to not use firewood to cook, was totally defeated. Oh, well.
We have had three new takers on the compound library in the past two weeks, three of which are adults, and one is a mid-teenage boy Muhammed, he lives in our compound with our family for the year to go to school here. Andy saw him looking at everyone else's book when they came out of the house and through encouragment got him to come check one out. Yah! And the other two adults are both women, one of which was a former teacher. Lately the women in the compound have been bugging me more to teach them English, but I am reluctant to say yes, because right now I don't know when I would have the time. But I would like to, so we shall see.