Palm Wine

We went to visit Thiako’s uncle in Tcherôt, an old village at the end of a long winding track into the bush to the south and east of where we were staying. Before, many families lived in Tcherôt, but they had all moved away to the city and to Senegal; only his uncle and his small family remained as permanent residents. Despite the paucity of inhabitants, the village is well known as a place of palm wine collection, and any decently learned child from the sub-prefecture could point out the appropriate turnoff from the main road.

We were guided to the place where his uncle was working by his young son Talan, a small boy with eyes and head equally round. We found his uncle and others at their camp, a low place, where a stream would flow during the rainy season. They were collecting palm wine.

Palm wine, as collected by the Coñagui people of northern Guinea, refers to a family of drinks made from the sap of a variety of palm tree. Thiako’s uncle explained the process to me while his nephew August kept working, and Thiako translated and elaborated as necessary.

“Palm wine is collected during the dry season, while the palm trees are flowering and fruiting. During the dry season, honey wine replaces palm wine as the tipple of choice, as the honey harvest is performed at during the last month of the dry season. Female palms (or the female parts, recognizable via their more prominent fruiting bodies) are sought as they produce more sap than the males. These fruiting bodies are located at the crown of the tree, requiring an often significant ascent for all but the youngest of palms.

For this purpose, a sort of harness/sling is fashioned from a few long pieces of palm frond. Two rigid bands are formed (presumably with hot water) into U-shaped sections. The long flexible tips of the two fronds are braided together into a thick rope, and then joined with the other ends in a sort of square knot, easy to tie and easy to untie. The result is an oval-shaped  hoop, fitting the diameter of the trunk of the palm and the back of the climber. Additional flaxen rope is wrapped around one side of the oval for abrasion resistance where the contraption slides along the tree.

After ascending, the trunk, barefoot for increased traction, all of his kit swinging from its strings, the climber removes one of two sharp bamboo-handled chisel from their bamboo sheaths (the two chisels are identical, maybe the extra is a backup?) and cuts a small hole at the base of the fruiting body. A small piece of young frond is wound into a cone and pressed into the hole to serve as a funnel. The climber then takes an empty plastic bottle (repurposed soda or water) and suspends it beneath the funnel, attaching it with string to the fronds above. The sap starts to ooze within minutes.

The process (cut spout capture)  is repeated four or five more times around the crown of the tree, one bottle per fruiting body. Then the climbing process is reversed, and the climber seeks out a new tree.

An average palm will fill an average water bottle in about 12 hours. So, twice a day (in the morning and in the evening), the bottles must be emptied. The hole can also be plugged with a wadded up frond, so as not to waste nor attract more insects and sugar-loving animals. On the ground, the contents of each bottle are filtered (a plastic bottle cut in half with a bit of fabric inside) into large bidons (20-liter vegetable oil containers). As the bidon becomes full, a thin white foam—the head, really—puffs out. This indicates the freshness of the wine. Checking the filter afterwards shows bits of palm, windblown detritus, and some insects that died happy.

The sap is not naturally alcoholic. Freshly tapped, it is very sweet, and only a little bit tangy. However, yeasts naturally present (in the air, in the containers, everywhere) metabolize the sugar and , within a few hours of being tapped, create a wine that is distinctly acrid, slightly sweet, and perhaps three to seven percent alcohol by volume. The more it sits, the stronger it gets, until all the sugar is metabolized, and then it turns vinegary. It is drunk at all of these stages.

Traditionally palm wine is offered to strangers on arrival. The vessel, whether a plastic goblet or a traditional clay jar, must always be filled to the brim. Palm wine is also to be shared at partings. All ages and sexes drink palm wine, and all times of day are acceptable. 

La Première Mangue

Entry: March 2. Time: approx. 15h45. I am sitting on the crest of the road traversing the bowal between K____ and D_____. Light to moderate easterly gusting. Sun diffused but not completely blocked by clouds. Ambient noise: birdsong, rustling fire-dried leaves. Temp.: perhaps 28°C. Of the eight mangos in my pack, chose the one appearing least likely to survive the especially bumpy remainder of the ride home. This mango is green, with yellow, ochre, orange, and red, especially towards where the stem connected, where the most sunlight fell each day, until today. It is not small, though certainly not a large mango. Perhaps 10 cm in its largest dimension. It is dense, but not consistently solid. The skin is thick and leathery, but pliable; as if the fruit had, for some reason, desiccated slightly on the tree.

Rinsed it briefly with water. Fairly certain my hands are dirtier that it is, washing thus futile. Using the blade of my pocket knife, made an angular cut, a chord, through the bottom tip of the fruit (while holding it upside down). No juice or sap drips out, or even wells up. The skin does not yield easily to the blade, dull as it is. Fibrous flesh beneath lacks enough structure for the knife to make a clean cut, but it is readily pulled apart by hand. The majority of the pulpy, stringy, and cheddar-cheese orange flesh remains attached to the central seed, a large oblong pit. Ate the morsel so removed.

O delightful flavor! Perfumed, complex, like a papaya, but with none of the wateriness that characterizes the latter. Something of carrot, citrus, and flowers, but smoother, a gestalt, creation of that master crasftsman, le mangier. The taste needs no guile, demands nor even suggests alteration or augmentation (again papaya comes to mind, viz. lime). The flesh clings to the fibers that extend from the pit in all directions. They are hard to cut and harder to remove from between one’s teeth. Find that it’s best to approach the seed as one might an artichoke leaf, scraping with the incisors to remove the maximum of flesh. Cut the rest of the skin away and chewed it like a cheese rind. Chewed it until it was gone. The pit, now scraped clean via the aforementioned technique, suggests some sort of melonheaded barbiedoll in the midst of a makeover. Pale yellow and white, flat and hairy.

Tossed the pit to the ground, licked my knife clean. Smelled the breeze, took in the hills.

More to come. 

Mefliam

School wasn’t cancelled but no one seemed to be in the classrooms. On the walls, in the outdoor corridors, white, angular letters spelled out messages. It didn’t seem to be hate speech, or threats, or political; no one was enraged, nor bemused. The language looked maybe like Finnish, lots of i’s and f’s and doubled letters. They were already starting to sandblast or rub it off. Why only the fresh white graffiti? The old greasy slogans and profanity plus the oil of a thousand hands running every day along its now smooth surface gave the wall a venerable patina. Where the fresh white words had been removed, something else had gone too; now there existed transparent blotches, revealing the crumbled brick backfill of the wall as though preserved in resin, or like a clever display in the mining and geology section of a children’s museum.

Students had gathered on the sort of second-story courtyard, and they were talking, yelling, excited by the distraction. Their black polyester robes flowed about, and their contrasting faces looked grimacey and masklike in the light of the cloudy sky.

But then we were at the party. Rachel or Jessica or Meghan was having a birthday party. An old roommate? We were sitting in some sort of bizarre anteroom, the party could be heard, bounces of colored light too, via the hallway at the left. Again the walls were dirty, greasy, well used. Some of graffiti fluoresced. The light was putrid and turbid, suggesting metal staircases and loading docks and broken fire-extinguisher boxes, and boxes of ammunition towards the corner like in a N64 shooter. People passed by, ones and twos, cups in hand, hand in hand, cups in mouth, mouth in mouth. My companion greeted them when it seemed to suit his fancy, or the haze of his stupor temporarily diminished. He too was slumped in a second dark green (or was it grey) vinyl-covered fauteuil pushed up against the wall. The birthday girl stumbled past, disappearing past a corner, and then was back. The shuttle will be here soooon, she reassured the room, partly for the benefit of the two of us in it. She called out a friend’s name, waved a hand/sloshed a solo cup, and was again gone. Another girl sauntered in and noticed us, maybe.  Her dress was one of those colors which probably looked better on her computer screen than it did now, vraiment. She seemed to recognize my neighbor but then fixed on me. Did she speak? Did it matter? Was my neighbor telling me of her tendency, warning me with a lifted eyebrow and an “if you like…” shrug, or was that just my own souvenir? She approached me, straddled my jutting knees. Her solo cup was partners with a cigarette, each listing dangerously. The hem of her garment, her shoulders, my knees, the edge of the fauteuil were all in the same plane. Her eyes gleamed dangerously and then fogged, the sequins scintillated. “Shuttle’s here!” someone whooped.

We got out of the shuttle onto what looked like a vertical hillside. Tufts of grass green and yellow and drying dirt under our feet evoked an old outfield. I've been here before. In my mind flashed a ski-area-style map; liftlines here, blues and greens, cartoon trees and peaks and permanently closed areas and access roads. You are here. 

The activity was straightforward: you just slide down the hill. Can’t be sure if you need some sort rice-sack-cum-toboggan, or if just spreading your feet apart and balancing is sufficient. Look, down there is the end of the slope, it seems to flatten out. Are those people picnicking? Slide don’t fall. The lift can take you back to the top for a repetition, like at those tubing places. The attendant was checking passes or something, as people came to the entrance before sliding down. How many runs did the birthday party get? I’d already done several, I think. He looked at my pass. A problem: an ID number appeared to be missing. No worry, he can look it up in a ledger, or call someone, and get me my proper number. He is looking for his cell phone. I am getting embarrassed; won’t the people behind me be getting perturbed at the delay? Isn't there a better way to do this? There must be a better way to do this. I’m holding up the whole line. The attendant cares none; he continues searching with a bureaucrat’s disposition. I wait.

American

-So you’re American?

-Yeah.

-From which part? Latin America or Central America?

No title

A different big truck came today and dumped no didn’t dump the young men shoveled all the sand out of it. Its cab was painted the same color as the body and sand leaked through the seams. So I went to Konah to drop of those letters for the AIDS workshop but I forgot the banana bread so I came back and went back again. Took a different route home cause it wasn’t too hot and watched the vultures and little birds and a hawk circling over the freshburned fields where no mouse can hide. I thought I heard a snake but it was a man sitting at the base of the tree wondering why I hadn’t noticed him earlier; but my attention was focused on the creek crossing only dabbed one foot the other totally dry just like the next creek crossing. Bump to the top of the hill where three old oranges where consumed, mostly by me but also by a medium sized grub. Flicked him/her out! Suddenly cellphone credit but too early to call you so back down the hill to the empty center no one at market day because today is marriage day. So out for a walk to clandestinely cut banana leaves with my keys the only tool I had. Sort of wrapped rice and banans with the wide fragile leaves but couldn’t tie with string (see above; re: market day) so just folded and stuffed into the recipient. Started the stove with cancer and cardboard then piled the charcoal on high then the pot on top then half-filled with water then the loose rice packages then the lid then fingers crossed. Left for two hours to allow children to play soccer. I gave them the ball. Marriage sound check DJ check screech check perfume check sneakers check thieboudienne check. Back at home no major catastrophe just a slight tilt to the pot so righted it and cut up the unlucky onions that won’t grow big like their neighbors. Add bacon bits and bacon bits and garlic and fry. Tastes like chinese bao with the pork and sugar and also a tepid crunchy potato salad sesame oil no mayo. Quick colorful clouds make digestion easy. Now light is tiny and the breeze is cooooler. After dark I’ll call.  

Dian

Mamadou Dian Diallo is from Diamiou, a village about ten kilometers from where I live. His father was a businessman (probably a merchant) who did a lot of work in Guinea and in Freetown, Sierra Leone. When he was ten years old, his father moved him to Freetown, where he enrolled in private school and started learning English. While in high school, almost ten years later, he began spending time around the welding school, watching the masters and picking up the basic notions. When the rebels came in 1997, the year before he would have finished high school, he picked up and went back to Guinea. He joined a group of Senegalese welders, and worked as an apprentice for four years. They didn’t pay him, but after four years his master told him there was nothing more for him to learn, and provided him with an attestation of his learning and ability as a welder. They also fed him very well.

His first job after leaving the Senegalese was working on the US embassy in Conakry. He spent almost four years working at the site, moving from operating a jackhammer to welding all of the interior plumbing (a US embassy has quite a bit of complicated plumbing). While working on the building, which is, to date, the most expensive structure that has been built in the country, he was not paid well. At the end of the contract, he and several other Guinean laborers waited patiently, peacefully, and unobstructively outside the gates of the embassy for four days in protest of their non-payment. They were finally told to go home and wait there; payments needed to be authorized by Washington and then converted to local currency, and were in the works, they would be informed via the radio when they would be able to pick up their final wages. He is still waiting for such an announcement.

Since working on the embassy, he has mostly worked out of Conakry, but jobs send him around the country. He has been working in our village for over five months now, first on the home of a wealthy businessman reinforcing the window bars and then making windows and doors for the new school. He says he is doing his best work here; the work is from the heart and not for the money. His young wife is from the village, and he has reminded me twice now that his (future) children will likely go to school in this new school building. He wants his son to inspire awe and reverence when he explains to his classmates that his father made the windows, not laughter or derision because of the shoddy workmanship.

He smiles a lot, smokes some, and always seems to be having an okay day. Two weeks ago he moved back to Conakry.

Desks

They unloaded the truck in the morning, stacking pieces next to the pavilion in the center of the village where meetings are sometimes held. When I passed by on my way to school at a quarter to eight they had almost finished, and the piles of sides and tops and backs and bracing were approaching head height. I arrived at school and remarked to the principal what I had seen. He jumped up to go remind the carpenters that they were allowed to store the completed desks in the pavilion but not to actually work in its shelter. Repairing damage to the tile floor from a stray hammer blow or errant varnish drip could be costly.

After school I stopped again to watch. The truck was gone. It had deposited a load of sand outside the window of the 10^th grade classroom where I was teaching, distracting everyone. Now a large portion of the village center on the north side of the road was filled with freshly glued and nailed desks, perhaps sixty-five or seventy of them. The four carpenters had found an efficient way to share the two hammers, two buckets of glue, and two saws they had brought, and a newly-assembled desk was placed among the others about every two or three minutes. The first carpenter took two opposite endpieces, each with a skid at floor level, a box to support the seat, a beam to support the desk surface, and a riser with a notch cut out at the top to hold the backrest. He then glued the backrest and the seat in place, and added a handful of nails. The next carpenter verified that everything was square and nothing damaged, and fitted the notebook tray at knee level. The third added the desktop, with glue and nails, positioning the groove for pens and pencils at the front of the desk (I only saw two that were backwards). The final carpenter added a brace at foot level, and moved it to the ‘finished’ area.

The fresh desks arranged in rows in the middle of the village attracted passersby other than myself. Many old men stopped to comment on the rapidity of the work, the fact that the wood had so obviously been cut with an electric saw in the city and not by hand, the uniformity of the desks, or just the impressive sight of so many new pieces of scholastic furniture. Children played in the rows, or sat and watched. Small sheep enjoyed the new shade.

I came and stopped again about an hour later, and watched the last desk get nailed together. Eighty new “table-bancs” as they are called in French were more or less arranged in the middle of the village. I think the carpenters where told to work there because it was next to the place where they would be stored, not so that they would attract the attention of everyone who passed by that day. But the effect was important, and valuable. Several people told me directly that it was so inspiring to see all the new desks, ready and waiting for students to fill them. I overheard more than one conversation in which someone lamented no longer being in school (too old, dropped out, etc.) and now wanted to go back, if they could only sit in one of those new desks.

The desks that are currently in use at the school are uneven. Their surfaces are scarred by careless chainsawing at the beginning of their lives and many years (over forty for some of them) of bored students scratching their nicknames and lovers’ names into them with their pens or worse. Most have one or two or three nails that stand proud from the surface, either at the desktop or the bench. Some are wide, some are narrow, some are high, some are short. They have no backrests. Unfortunately, the approximately 300 students currently enrolled this year will need almost half as many desks to be comfortably seated, so many of the current, ugly desks will have to be used alongside the new ones in the new classrooms. I imagine fights between students who come early and get seats at the new desks, and those who come late and won’t accept sitting at an old desk.

Before I went home they had started varnishing. First four gallons of Guinean-made varnish were mixed with half as much lamp oil. I guess lamp oil is cheaper than varnish. When the head carpenter was satisfied with the color and consistency of the mix, brushes were distributed and rinsed in lamp oil, and the varnishing commenced. Gradually the students, children, and even old men sitting and looking on where displaced so their seats could be brushed with varnish, bringing out the lovely light red tones in the wood. I’m not sure if they finished before nightfall.