Chapter 6: Market Day

Now that you've seen Niena, especially the aerial view, you can tell it's pretty big for a village. We had roughly 10,000 people (we think), and one of the best markets around! I wish we had gotten a picture of the market empty, because it's so big and deserted it's creepy. But alas, I can only bring you pictures from a Sunday market day. Welcome to Niena's market (entrance below)!

Here you can see the wide array of vegetables that we were able to get at market, which was mostly because we were lucky to be in Sikasso region! The variety of food we had available was definitely not typical for other areas of the country. A cabbage, bell pepper, big onion, or head of garlic was roughly mougon, the Bambara word for 100 CFA ($0.20). Tomatoes were cheaper, like a pile for mougon, and some vegetables were more expensive, like green beans (keme or 500 CFA or $1 for a bag), eggplant (binanni or 200 CFA or $0.40 per eggplant), beets (sometimes as much as binanni for one!), and carrots (mougon for 3 small carrots).

You can kind of tell how chaotic market day is with these photos. Literally thousands of people are coming to do all of their shopping for the week, in one confined space, from villages all over. It's craziness!

Here is where the butchers are. They get their own fancy building at the market, presumably because they have to have tables and stuff to chop the meat on. I will say, the market meat was never as good as the meat I would get on weekdays from my butcher, Alu, who set up shop right outside of the CSCOM.

So this particular day, these animist dudes were at our market singing and rattling and drumming and stuff. We never really found out why or what their purpose was, but it was super cool to see and hear. Animists in Mali drink alcohol (scandalous!) and worship the land. They rarely make public appearances because it's kind of a clandestine and taboo thing in this predominantly Muslim country. However, like many countries with a dominant religion, there are lots of "Muslims" that are actually animists.

Below, you can see the disadvantage of the rice sacks hanging at market. On the one hand, they do provide shade. But you also have to hold them up to stand upright! Also, I am wearing what I call my circus outfit. I loved this fabric but my tailor misunderstood me and thought I wanted red (bileman) trim instead of blue (bulaman) trim. So there is this horrible red and gold sequined trim all over it, which I thought looked ridiculous. Luckily for me, in Mali ridiculous = fashionable, so women would compliment me all the time on this outfit!

Here are our site buddies, Marlow (standing up) and Tabitha (leaning over). Tabitha was the seasoned veteran of our bunch, as she was only about 2 months away from finishing Peace Corps (referred to as "COS"ing, or Close of Service -ing). Marlow had been in country about a year and was knee deep in projects when we got evacuated. They were both amazing resources for us to have nearby! Tabitha was an environment volunteer and Marlow was a small business volunteer, and they were doing radio shows, soak pits, and microcredit in their villages, so they knew how to do lots of cool stuff. We lucked out having them as site buddies and coming to Niena every single week for market day!

Here is one of our fabric sellers. There were about 5 good ones, who would bring the vast array of fabrics that you see here. To obtain clothes in Mali, you either buy fabric and take it to the tailor, or you sort through what we call "dead Toubab" (dead white people), which is basically a pile of Goodwill-ish clothing from Western countries. Obviously we had enough Western clothes, so we got all of our Malian clothes via the fabric and tailor route! Fabric is sold by the number of tafes (wrap-around-skirt length), and a complait or full outfit requires about 3 tafes worth of fabric. That amount of fabric is roughly $10 (5,000 CFA), and then taking it to the tailor is at least $2 (1,000 CFA), so it adds up quickly! 

Here are some shoes for sale, roughly $1-$5 per pair, depending on how nice they are. Our favorite Malian shoes were what we called keme flops, or the flip flops you can get for a keme, or 500 CFA ($1).