Chapter 8: Malian Inventions We Love!

This post is dedicated to all of the Malian inventions that made our lives easier, starting with this amazing clay pot, called a fine (in our village's dialect of Ganakan), or a jidaga in Bambara. You fill it with water, and bury it in sand or set it on top of sand, and keep the sand wet. Inside, the pot gets to about 70 degrees F, which gives you a little bush fridge, no electricity required! Genius! I know 70 doesn't sound very cold, but when it's 110 out, it makes such a difference to have 'cold' water.

Next we have the daba, which is a locally-made hoe. The blacksmiths in our village would pound the iron and attach the hoes to the handles. You use dabas for everything in the field--weeding, tilling, even making indents (with the knobby side) to plant your seeds! Pretty amazing stuff.

Also good for intimidating children, as Cass can demonstrate:

We also love these little stools. They are super low to the ground, but they are perfect for when you are sitting outside and doing household tasks, stuff like washing dishes in your bucket, washing clothes, or cooking on a locally made charcoal stove. They're also nice to sit on when you are dirty and dusty and don't want to get your 'good' chairs gross! Also perfect for tying your shoes.

Ah, the salidaga. Our best friend (or worst enemy). This is what Malians use to wipe in the negen.

Before you head into the negen, you fill this cute plastic tea-kettle-thing with water, and then when you do your business, you use your right hand to pour the water into your left hand, and then wipe with the left. Hence why it is SO RUDE to do anything with your left hand, including give someone money, eat, shake someone's hand, etc. It's your poop hand. Even the word for left hand (bolo numan) means "nose hand," as in picking your nose, and the word for right hand (bolo kini) means "rice hand," as in your eating hand. However, for you doubters out there, studies have shown that wiping in this way is actually more effective at getting you clean than wiping with toilet paper! (Provided you wash your hands with soap afterwards, which many Malians do not do...hence the diarrheal disease.) But also, the salidaga is awesome because you can basically insta-wash your hands anywhere, at anyone's house, because they are always full of water. You can also use it to wash your shoes, wipe down dust, water plants or animals, etc. It's really so handy, we can't imagine life without it now! 


We also love these charcoal stoves. Women here cook on charcoal for every meal, but we use gas in our house and charcoal only when we are grilling or simulating a crock pot for slow cooking stuff like barbecue. As you can see, you just put the charcoal in the top (like what's in the blue bag) and light it using paper/plastic/grass/etc., and then fan it like mad to get the coals heated up quickly. Another popular method is taking a shovel, minus the handle, and going over to a neighbor's house to get some coals to start your fire. The neighbor method is much faster! (Sadly we didn't have a broken shovel to use.)

This is a smaller version of the charcoal stove, usually used for boiling a pot of tea. We will probably do an entire blog post just on tea, or link to one of our friends', since it's that important of a social institution and process. 

We also love our back-breaking broom! You know though, squatting and walking all the time, your body adjusts to bending a lot, and sweeping with these magnificent brooms gets much easier. I love these brooms. They are a bit slower, but they get the place way cleaner than a push broom, and if our house weren't so giant, we'd use this for the whole house. They are also great outside--you can sweep away rocks in your compound, or chicken poop, or vegetable peelings if you are cooking outside. You can also use them wet or dry. Another amazing invention we love! 

We've shown you our gwa before, but seriously: we love it. Mango tree shade is always our preference, but having a gwa in our compound made such a huge difference. We would read out there in the afternoons, as well as hang out in our hammock and even sleep out there once it started getting really hot.

We would also set out mats for company under the gwa, or set out mats and nap in the afternoon, so another invention we love: debes! They are these plastic mats that are easy to clean and roll out. We used them all the time, for exercise, napping, extra seating, whatever. It was pretty awesome. We miss having a gwa and debes.  

Here is another invention we love to hate, like the salidaga: butt-floss chairs! These chairs are made from iron and plastic string, which they just wrap around the iron frame. They are exceedingly uncomfortable, and the low-to-the-ground ones (not pictured) have the strings running vertically on the seat, so it really is like butt floss. They are horrible but we still love them, if only because everyone else seems to.

Yes, you see that right. It's tie-dye plastic. Why is every plastic item made in Mali tie-dye print? Who decided that everything should be two-tone tie-dye? Who is this plastic monopolist with such genius? We may never know, but what we do know is that we love our tie-dyed plastics! From drinking cups to buckets and wash tubs, plates to funnels, and everything in-between, the answer is yes: it is tie-dye.

Another amazing kitchen appliance: the susu kolon (well) and pounder. This thing even has its own verb: ka susulike: to susu. I know there is a name for the stick but I can't remember what it is...but yeah. This is a kitchen essential in Mali. Making a sauce? Want to cut veggies but can't because the knives are comically dull? Just susu it! Want some millet flour or cornmeal to make to out of? Just susu it! I think I could successfully write an infomercial for this thing. I love it! We mostly used it to grind cinnamon and 'cut' vegetables. Most of us female PCVs were able to susu our way into our villages' hearts--Malians LOVED seeing me susu stuff. They would get so incredulous when I said that I could do it, and then ask me to prove it...and then laugh hysterically when I actually could. I got pretty good at pounding millet. They also do stuff like crush shea nuts though, which is incredibly difficult, hard work. I'm much better at crushing tomatoes and onions than I am shea nuts!

(By the way, they were also amazed that I wanted to learn how to to fasa, or how to stir (make) to, the delightfully awful paste made from boiled, pounded millet. They loved it when I would cook to with them! It was a key strategy in doing my baseline household health survey.) 

Finally, mangorow! Or mangoes! We love these suckers since they a) are delicious, b) are plentiful, and c) help keep the heat at bay. But the really awesome invention is how they get them out of the trees: enter a giant bamboo pole with a hook on the end!

When we got to site and saw all of the green mangoes ripening, we were wondering how they get them down. Do they shake the tree? Climb it? Make kids do it? Throw rocks? Well, technically they do all of the above. But the most innovative and clever way--way cleverer than anything we thought of, I should mention--is this awesome pole that goes all the way to the tippy-top to get some delicious fruit. I won't say Malians are smarter than Guyanese, but I will say I see an awful lot of mangoes at the tops of the trees here in Guyana...