On water storers

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.