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!
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