Earning My Gold Stars

The way to eat most soups and stews here is to dip a ball of dough into it. Depending on the kind of dough (and the local language where you are), this is called akple, banku, fufu, kenke, or any of a dozen other things I am useless at keeping straight. It is always served with a little basin of water, and the idea is that you wash your hands in the basin, pull off a piece of dough, dredge it through your food, and eat it.

One of my first times eating akple (at least, I think it was akple), I pulled off a hotter-than-expected piece of fresh dough and burned my fingers. Fred, who I was eating with, saw this happening and said 'Oooh, quick, put your fingers in the water.'

This was a sensible solution, and I feel kind of silly for not having come up with it myself. At home, if I ate a piece of food that was too hot, I would reach for my drink without thinking about it. But I remember this happening when I was a little kid, and having to have my mother tell me 'Oooh, quick take a drink take a drink take a drink.'

This is what fieldwork feels like a lot of the time. It's a reversion to childhood, where you have to be explicitly taught the things that any reasonably competent adult knows instinctively. Blunders are patiently corrected. Small triumphs, like doing my laundry or knowing the proper way to shake hands, feel like major accomplishments, and are basically treated as such by others. 'Very good, Yavu!' they seem to almost be saying. 'You did that all by yourself?' And then I squeal with delight and trip over my shoelace.

I should say that this is to the enormous credit of my host communities, both here and in Bolivia. If I hadn't had the good fortune both times to stumble upon people willing to adopt a fully-grown special needs child, by now I probably would have accidentally set myself on fire or shot my eye out or something.