Chicken and Eggs
I climbed into a minibus taxi this weekend. There were two of us sharing the front bench seat, alongside the driver. The other passenger, an elderly man, began punching me on the arm and muttering words in Jola. I thought that this perhaps was a different kind of local greeting, one that I had not encountered before. But he persisted with thumping me and became increasingly urgent in waving and gesturing, until I noticed that he was also pointing into the footwell. I looked down and my crime became clear as I realised that I was treading on his chicken.
Minibus taxis are cramped, and it is a squeeze to get in and out through the sliding door at the side. Passengers typically help each other by passing baggage in and out. This might be a bag or a box, a tub of vegetables to be sold at the market, sometimes a musical instrument like a drum or a kora, or most entertainingly a baby. Grimacing babies are handled roughly, swung by one arm from person to person. The rules of this game of pass-the-parcel seem to be that whoever is holding the baby when the vehicle begins to move has to hold the baby until the mother remembers to ask for it back, or until it is sick. Twice now a mother has sat in front or behind me and started to chat to other passengers, and I have managed to retain the baby for the whole journey. Mothers seem quite pleased to be rid of the responsibility for a short while, and baby is often intrigued to stare up at a white face, possibly for the first time. I am a little anxious about what happens if the mother gets out and I forget to return her baby.
The other day I accidentally bought some eggs. It was on my journey home from Jarreng a couple of weekends ago. The geli-geli stopped in Soma so we could find breakfast. There are no service stations here, but towns are well served by street vendors with drinks and food. You can have an omelette cooked at the roadside, or a cow sandwich, or any of a variety of local foods. Louise and I bought ñeebi (bean paste in bread) and sat at the wooden stall of a man serving tea. In fact better than that it was tea with Ovaltine in it, made with thick condensed milk – yummy! Three ladies sat across from us and were served first, bread with mayonnaise, and a mug of tea each. Using Wolof I asked for tea, pointing to the cups that the ladies were drinking from. This man was a Mandinka speaker so my Wolof was useless, and he thought I was pointing to the stack of cooked eggs he had in the centre of the table, so he took an egg and began peeling off the shell. No, I said, tea, and pointed again towards the woman. Ah, said the man as he took back the bread from this lady and chopped up the egg into the centre of the sandwich. Her eyes lit up; Abaraka Baki, she said, thank you very much! No, tea, please, I said, and foolishly pointed towards the next woman who was drinking at the time. So she also was given an egg for her sandwich. By this stage it seemed churlish not to buy another egg for the third lady. And after having accidentally bought three eggs and made three women very happy, Louise and I eventually received our sweet Ovaltine tea. But no egg.
