Tea

One of my favorite West African rituals is drinking tea. It’s become part of my daily routine, like brushing my teeth or getting dressed. Every night, after I’ve finished eating dinner, I head over to Moussa’s. Moussa brings out the teapots, the sugar, and of course the tea. Chinese green tea with funny names like Arawane and Bonmama. While Moussa is preparing the tea, we chat about our day. They boil it for way longer than is necessary and add a LOT of sugar, like ½ cup per 8 ounces of tea. People have different preferences. I like mine foamy and super hot with mint.

One of the most entertaining parts of making tea is exchanging the tea from one teapot to the next to mix in the sugar and make it foamy. This part is really elaborate, with the tea chief holding one teapot more than a foot above the other to create a tea waterfall.

The whole process, each  box makes about 3 pots of tea, can take around an hour. This means lots of time to “causer” (chat) or just sit in silence and enjoy eachother’s company and the night sky. When a pot is ready, Moussa will pour out the tea into shot glasses, one per person per round. There’s a bit of a hierarchy concerning who gets the first shots, but since I’m the toubabmuso I almost always get first dibs (unless there’s a lot of men around).

I’ve learned that it’s not really about the tea, but about bringing people together. It’s nice having an hour each night to reflect under the starry night sky and what Moussa calls village electricity- the moon.

A mango a day... or ten

It’s mango season! And lucky me, my village is overflowing with them. In my courtyard, surrounding my courtyard, in the market, everywhere there are mango trees. The mangoes have been on the trees for about 3 months now but they only just started getting ripe a couple of weeks ago. The kids in my village spend most of their waking hours not in school on a mango mission, namely to get those mangoes off of those trees.

All kids have different techniques and much depends on skill level. Very small children can’t do much but wait for a big wind to come blow some down to the ground or beg their older brothers and sisters for one. My smallest neighbor, two-year-old Sharif, insulted his mom the other day because she wouldn’t give him a mango. The athletic ones can run and jump onto a branch and climb to the ripest ones at the very top. The stupid, unathletic kids throw rocks. But it’s the clever kids who interest me most. They devise new contraptions, mango technology if you will.  The bigger and riper and juicier the mangoes get, the more elaborate the contraptions that the smart kids make to get them down.

Here, you don’t give your teacher an apple. You give her a mango. I get at least 10 a day offered to me from my students and small children in my neighborhood. And living in a mango area you learn that not all mangoes are created equal. There are at least five different mangoes that I know of, and probably a lot more. My favorite is timi timi, the juiciest type of mango which I’ve learned to spot by its curved tip. The three mango trees in my courtyard are called “mangues en retard,” or late mangoes. Apparently, they get nice and ripe once all of the other mangoes are carted off to the rest of the mango-less world. Bon appétit!