Visiting Mali

As some of you, my readers, might have deduced, I was keen to visit Mali at some point.  I wanted to visit Mali and Bilal's family and generally experience the environment that has made him the man he is today.  This is the reason why I have not posted for quite a while now.

Our journey commenced at Marseille-St. Charles station.  Marseille has very good connections to Charles de Gaulle Airport via the high-speed lines, with the trains leaving the main route shortly before Paris and entering the LGV Interconnection Est.  Given François Hollande's very high taxes, I feel the need to pursue cheap train fares where this option is available (hey, some sacrifices are sometimes needed if one wants two penthouses and eat only the highest quality food!) and I was delighted that Bilal and I managed to find cheap idTGV fares between Marseille-St. Charles and Charles de Gaulle-TGV stations.  Vive la France! From there, we took a flight to Bamako, the capital of Mali.  We could have flown onwards to Mopti, but Bilal wanted to show me Bamako first and we figured that car rental choices would be better there.  I rarely seem to travel by car, but in Mali, it turned out to be necessary: - we didn't have enough time for travel by camel to be practical.  Even though I, as an impossibly dainty Frenchwoman, love to walk everywhere, the distances were too great to be practical.  Tee hee!

Another reason for hiring a car was that some members of Bilal's family met us at the airport.  Even though I am able and willing to walk long distances, the relatives who met us were not!  We needed the car in order to have the flexibility of visiting relatives of his in different parts of the country.  I said Bilal comes from the Timbuktu area, which is true, but the definition of the word "near" is somewhat flexible here!  The word "near" could mean several hundred kilometres in a vast and empty nation like Mali!  MDR.  Being a Touareg, the question of where he comes from is somewhat nebulous.  However, the specific town he is most associated with is Douentza.  Douentza has an airport, but we had no success in finding information out about flights there anyway.  Douentza is quite small, with a population of only about 20,000, but they seemed very hospitable, even if they are under the yoke of Islam.  Douentza sits in the middle of nowhere in between two beautiful mountainous areas.

I always viewed Bilal as being very athletic and rugged, but I was in for a shock when we went into these mountainous areas!  Training as a herdsman began for Bilal at the age of approximately three to four years, in line with tuareg custom.  Various people in La Savine are pseudo-tough, as are some people in the dodgy Paris suburbs.  So too are the wiggers in various middle class areas of French cities!  If one wants to see tough, one should see what people who have been surrounded by gangland culture in La Savine and grown up as a herdsman in the harsh, unforgiving environment that Bilal grew up in!

As I have often said, Bilal is very much a hip-hop person, having grown up in La Savine.  When he speaks, his French is somewhere between a Marseille 'hood accent and a Malian accent.  When he is in France, it sounds more like the former, whereas during the trip to Mali, it sounded more like the latter.  Given that we were in Mali, he toned down his hip-hop vocabulary, knowing that people there would not understand words like "pineco", "darblé", "renoi", "rebeu", "racba" etc!  He was also easier to understand for me as well, as the gulf between Malian French and French French is much smaller than the gulf between La Savine hip-hop slang and French French!

Being the Impossibly Dainty French Woman, the thing that was most notable during the whole of the visit was the attention given to my weight.  In France, I am rightly admired for having a dainty figure, but various stupid people in Mali looked upon me with pity!  People were constantly asking me if my father did not feed me properly, to which I had to reply that I was earning my own income and that my impossibly dainty figure is something I consciously chose!  In Mali (and indeed many African nations), obesity is regarded as a sign of prosperity.  In France, we regard it as a sign of stupidity.  Luckily, Bilal was willing to be a dissenter and tell people around him that he simply did not find it attractive for a woman to be overweight.  Also, I found that there were a few relatively Westernised people in the larger cities (e.g. Bamako, the capital) who follow Western fashions and therefore know that being thin is attractive and a sign of sophistication.

Shopping for local attire was difficult, as the (relatively) high-quality clothing tended to be made for disgustingly obese women, whereas the clothing suitable for impossibly dainty women such as myself tended to be lower quality on the expectation of such people having lower incomes.  In the end, I just visited a local seamstress who made something for me, having taken my measurements.  I don't like dressing in a way that exposes large amounts of flesh, as I feel it is not befitting of a Christian woman and does not look attractive anyway.  However, on this trip, I felt it would be practical to cover even more of my flesh, given that the sun is very intense at this time of year in Mali.

Obviously, given that we weren't in France, the food was not of such good quality as I am accustomed to in France.  However, it wasn't as bad as in the Anglo-Saxon world!  MDR!  Taguella is a ubiquitous part of Touareg cuisine and tends to be made out of millet: - as I understand things, it can be made out of wheat, but fortunately for Bilal's bowels, this is relatively uncommon common in Douentza!  Millet porridge is very common as well: - it is relatively easy to grow millet in hot and dry climates.  People tend to eat sheep, goat and camel meat as and when their finances allow.  I got the right 'ump (said in a Cockney accent) when I found myself having to eat the latter, MDR.

As a result of the lower quality, it was inevitable that I would find myself eating more.  However, that wasn't a bad thing under the circumstances, as I was even more active than normal.  The reason for this is that I tended to accompany Bilal on his journeys to look after his family's livestock.  Just following him was exhausting enough!  However, being a quintessential Frenchwoman, I was well prepared.  As I have often mentioned, a Frenchwoman does not like to use lifts or escalators and prefers to use the stairs where possible.  I live in a penthouse in a tall and luxurious building near the Vieux Port in Marseille (which has a lift as a grudging concession to the wealthy and overweight foreigners who have bought flats there), so I am naturally used to such exercise!  My physical fitness attracted stares from puzzled locals, but who cares?  Anyway, I found that my dainty Frenchwoman portions were not enough for the physical exercise I was doing, so I found myself eating more, but I quickly burned the calories off, given the increased exercise.

As mentioned, although Douentza is the town Bilal is most associated with, he does not have an overwhelming association with one town, given that he is a Touareg and the Touareg people often live a nomadic lifestyle.  Douentza is at the edge of the zone inhabited by the Touareg peoples.  Douentza is on the edge of the Pays Dogon (Dogon Country), which is primarily inhabited by, yes you guessed it, the Dogon people.  The Pays Dogon is an absolutely beautiful mountainous and historic area.  There are lots of historic Tellem granary buildings everywhere and I am told the environment is a lush and green one (Bilal and I were there towards the end of the dry season).

Timbuktu was also another region we visited.  The mosques there were the main architectural attraction in terms of their historic value.  They are completely devoid of spiritual beauty, being mosques, but they abounded in architectural and historical beauty, particular the Djinguereber Masjid.  Bilal took me to see some relatives there and again, they asked me if my father was starving me and again, I had to explain that being slim is a sign of sophistication and being fat is a sign of stupidity.

One thing that was noticeably different was Bilal's temperament.  He often has a facial expression (often obscured by a hooded top or a chèche) that looks rather wistful, as if he is homesick.  I have never visited his home in La Savine, so I don't know if it is absent there, but it was noticeably absent in Mali.  Granted, believers should not feel entirely at home anywhere on earth, as they are looking towards the future in their celestial abode and Bilal is delighted to be in church on Sundays, but he still seems to feel as though he is out-of-place when he is in middle-class areas of Marseille.  He is normally painfully shy, but during the trip, he was noticeably different.  He was unusually inclined to start conversations with others and he was not avoiding conversations with monosyllabic answers as he normally does.  Whatever is most normal for him, I adore him, I was glad to see part of the other country that has gone into making him the man he is today and I can't wait till he makes a proposal of marriage.

Coeliac disease is no longer a yuppie illness

Over Christmas, Bilal had some very strange times.  Being my new boyfriend, he was invited to spend Christmas with my family, given that his gormless family members don't celebrate this occasion.  I remember when my mother invited him over.  He seemed very unenthusiastic, but my mother persisted and he agreed to spend Christmas with us reluctantly.  I stayed in my own flat while he stayed with my parents.  I was enthusiastically looking forward to having Les Treize Desserts, that great Provençal equivalent of a smörgåsbord.

One of the things that has been regarded as extremely odd about Bilal is his refusal to eat any local French cuisine.  There are a few specialist shops in or near La Savine selling traditional Malian products and Bilal always refused to eat anything other than traditional Malian cuisine and nobody had the faintest idea why.  Our church is one where people tend to stay the whole day.  Given Bilal's responsibilities at church, it was not really practical for him to go back to La Savine and come back again for his next task, so he would bring in a packed lunch, perhaps eating it in a room out of sight.  Even on House Party, he would insist on bringing his own food and he would cook it himself if need be, setting up a fire to cook taguella, a traditional Malian bread, which tends to be cooked in sand and ashes.

During the various meals at Christmas, Bilal was constantly trying to make excuses not to participate in mealtimes, saying that he didn't have much of an appetite.  In France, this is quite normal for women with dainty figures such as myself, MDR.  However, it is not normal for a man to have no interest in food: - as I have explained in a previous posting, if a Frenchman is overweight, it is regarded as a sign that he is living the good live.  Anyway, Bilal found that there was no way to avoid eating food at my parents' home without seriously offending those who had cooked it, so he reluctantly ate the food available.  I did not witness the events of the early hours of Christmas Day, as I was sleeping in my own flat after the midnight celebrations of Christmas Eve.  However, when I arrived on Christmas Day, I saw Bilal walking towards the door of my parents' home in order to leave and looking very upset and humilliated.  There was quite a commotion of people trying to persuade him to stay.  What apparently happened is that in the early hours of the morning, he had some extremely violent bowel problems and unfortunately, because the bathroom is not soundproofed, he was not able to hide the sounds resulting from these violent bowel problems and he made very loud moans of pain.  Toilet humour is not exactly to a French woman's taste, so I will bypass some of the details.

After a lot of persuading from me and my parents, Bilal eventually agreed to stay.  This he did for a few further weeks and he ate whatever food was in front of him (and continued having the same bowel problems).  One of my relatives who is known for being a hypochondriac happened to be staying with us this Christmas.  She spoke with Bilal and persuaded him to see a doctor.  Bilal is quietly a macho man, as he is used to surviving in harsh conditions in the Sahara Desert facing down threats to his family's livestock, be they wild animals, armed raiders, lack of water etc, so he wasn't all that enthused by a visit to the doctor.  However, after a very large amount of persuasion, he agreed to visit the doctor.  The doctor took a blood sample from him and told him to visit for a follow-up appointment to discuss the results after the sample had been tested.

When Bilal returned for his follow-up appointment, the doctor asked his permission to refer him to the local hospital for a biopsy, as the blood sample confirmed suspicions that there were antibodies present.  Bilal was a bit apprehensive, but he agreed, as he felt that if there was something wrong with him, he may as well stick the course and find out.  I remember accompanying him to hospital for the biopsy and seeing how nervous he was, even though a biopsy is a reasonably routine surgical procedure.  In this case, it involved pushing a tube all the way through his digestive system and scraping out a sample of his lower intestine.  The sample was later analysed to see if the villi had been blunted on account of inflammation, as in the picture below.

When Bilal visited the doctor again, the doctor informed him that he has coeliac disease (spelled "celiac" by silly Americans who like to murder the English language).  Coeliac disease is an autoimmune condition in which ingestion of gluten causes the villi in the lower intestines to become inflamed.  It is lifelong and there is no way of treating it; one can only prevent the negative effects thereof by not eating gluten, which is found in wheat, barley, rye and spelt.  All this perfectly explains why Bilal never liked deviating from normal Malian cuisine.  Malian cuisine, particularly in the north, is not completely free of wheat, though Bilal comes from the area around Timbuktoo, which is further south.  The foods he tends to eat include taguella (a bread made out of millet flour), rice, beef, mutton, goat, chicken, baobab leaves, spinach, jollof rice, fufu (no, this has nothing to do with men being camp, in spite of how its name sounds), maafe etc.  These foods are not sophisticated in the opinion of a stylish Frenchwoman like myself (at least in the way they are prepared in Malian cuisine), but unknowingly, it appears that they allowed Bilal to live with coeliac disease for so long.  He abstained from French cuisine (in which gluten features so heavily), as he found it inflamed his bowels.

I don't personally know what I would do if I had coeliac disease myself.  I would struggle to abstain from all those foods with gluten in them that make French cuisine so sophisticated.  Granted, not all French recipes have gluten in them: - tartiflette and cassoulet are two examples I have discussed in previous blog posts that don't normally contain gluten.  However, I would struggle to do without my morning baguette: - a micro baguette of course.  One can buy large French sticks like the ones in the photo above.  However, as Mireille Guiliano agrees, the optimum size of a portion of bread for a sophisticated Frenchwoman such as myself is about the size of an old cassette tape.  Gosh, I feel so old, given that I can remember these!  Still, as Zoë Williams correctly points out (grudingly and somewhat sarcastically), we Frenchwomen excel in all of life's seasons, whether it be the young filly season or the old bag season, tee hee.

Anyway, enough about that silly woman!  Bilal has introduced me to various aspects of Malian cuisine and some of it, though nowhere near as sophisticated as French cuisine, at least appears to be vaguely edible.  I am particularly curious about the way tea is drunk.  Normally, what happens is they pour the tea from a great height into the pot several times over.  Supposedly, this enhances the flavour, but even my sophisticated French palate can't tell the difference, so I have no doubt that this is made up.  It isn't as sophisticated as Mariage Frères tea, but it is just about bearable.  Still, if I get married to Bilal, I will have to make some adjustments: - it won't do for him to be in bed alongside me and having bowel problems!  MDR!

So there you have it: - coeliac disease is definitely not a yuppie disease (along the lines of man flu), as I indicated in a previous blog posting about gluten intolerances, tee hee!  Bilal is about as un-yuppieish (yes, I acknowledge there is no such word) as you can imagine.  Granted, some Anglo-Saxon yuppies like to spend ages reading medical textbooks and therefore induce symptoms psychosomatically, but occasionally, there are genuine cases of food issues and Bilal is one such example.  All you yuppies out there, stop pretending you have diseases you don't really have!  It makes a mockery of the people who really do have them!