I thought owning a fleet of buckets
would increase the seating capacity of our hut. These 5-gallon
buckets manufactured in Dakar resemble any 5-gallon paint/utility
bucket in the states but they lack the earnest rigidity of the
buckets I grew up with. Sitting on these things with their soft
rubber tops is unnerving, like sitting on a wicker chair with only a
few wicker strands left spanning the seat. And because buckets are
expensive (relative to our incomes of $10/day) and are not sold in
our town combined with the fact that our hauling and storing of water
depends on them, sitting on 'em is just not the done thing at the
home of Ibrahima Cissokho Jr. and Sadjoe Tigana Jr.
When we bought these buckets
in Kedougou-meme (the city of Kedougou), I envisaged the previously
mentioned purposes of multi-bucket ownership. But it was only
tonight, more than a month since we arrived in town and a few days
after we cooked chili for our host family—more than 20 people ate
that meal with beans aplenty leftover to share with my counterpart,
Moussa—that I glimpsed a bit of how our household spending is
different from our host family's. The Cissokhos own some sheep,
goats, guinea hens, some nice huts, a TV and a freezer. They have
invested for the long term and our money has gone toward
smaller-ticket purchases. But, we have shiny new green buckets and
theirs are older and in another life contained palm oil and a few may
have carried gasoline from time to time.
The story goes, we cooked
the meat and onions for the chili at our place but hauled a full
bucket of already soaked beans to our host family's compound some
distance away because the fam cooks over a wood fire, which is
cheaper than gas which we cook with, and the beans had to simmer for
six hours. Well, the meal was great and went by quickly; some people
were puzzled at the absence of a thick layer of oil on the sauce but
they dug in anyway, and our host brother Soba went kind of crazy over
the Sriracha we brought.
When we went home that night
we forgot our bucket and it wasn't until this afternoon that we
realized the bucket cluster was diminished by one. At first, I
thought my count was off. So I recounted our four remaining buckets,
several times. Perhaps the bucket was just out of place, perched
somewhere out of sight in our one door, two window round hut with no
cabinets, counters or surfaces generally other than roof, wall and
floor? I glanced around once, twice...and still no bucket. Then it
dawned on me. One of the rowdy party of kids who helped us weed
yesterday must have run off with the water bucket we set out for
them. I am sure I did see two kindergarten-agers take with them the
hoe-head they unearthed—is a lone bucket so different? Yes, it is,
and my suspicions were soon proved ridiculous. Anne remembered that
we'd moved those beans with it and it must still be at Cissokho
kunda, our host family's compound. When Anne was over there she asked
about it and was told, “yes, it was here but our sister Djionkounda
took it to town with her” (town is really just the cluster of five
or ten buildings at the cross-roads of the Bamako and Bembou roads).
Turns out, the bucket was there all along, sitting washed and ready
in Djionkounda's bedroom.
We live at a funny
intersection (not just the Bamako-Bembo roads crossing) in society.
Our community is developed enough to have pavement running through
it, almost two hundred meters of sidewalk, electricity (for two
chunks of time each day) and two public water faucets of running
water (running in the morning) and a hardware store but it is so
underdeveloped in other ways. Trash is either thrown to the wind or
thrown in the fire, farmers plow their fields with a short-handled
hoe, the school doesn't have working sanitation for the students (but
it does for the teachers) and utility goods like lidded five-gallon
buckets are not for sale. So, people sporting new buckets must have
recently been to the city and in their leisure had nothing better to
buy and lug back in a car with ten other people in it than buckets.
Don't let me exaggerate,
good buckets with tops are not exactly rare or expensive, but they do
cost about four dollars each—though unskilled labor here is only
worth about five dollars for a long day's work. So, in purchasing
power parity terms, a bucket is almost as valuable as the labor of a
well-digger or fence builder, even if you can't really sit on it when
you eat breakfast or type a blog entry.
