Oudjilla

I went up the Mandara mountains to Oudjilla which is an animist/Christian village where the chief has 50 wives, except he is 97 now and only has 12 left! One of his 100s of children gave us a guided tour. The wives live in these mud cylinders inside high rock walls hugging the mountainside. Each wife has 4 cylinders – a bedroom, kitchen and 2 grain stores. Imagine a single bed that curves round a wall and you about get the size. They also keep sacred cows that are kept in the dark from birth then let out for 2 months before they are slaughtered. Real interesting stuff. The downside is that I think my vertebrae have got totally f**ked from riding around bumpy roads as I am suffering a lot of middle back spine pain.

 

This week was the festival des moutons or tabaski. The crux of this is everyone slaughters a sheep. I have never seen so many fattened up sheep riding around on motos, either head facing forward in front of the driver or sideways across the moto complete with the usual placid sheep look. It’s surreal, funny and quite moving all at once.

Hamadou’s (guardian de nuit) mum, who I think is about my age, threw a wobbly on fete day and stormed off to the fields and didn’t do any cooking. I don’t blame her personally. From what I can gather she and Hamadou are the only ones who do any work and all the men should get themselves wives and stop expecting her to do everything. Hamadou was distraught about it however. There’s some weird dynamic going on there where I think she reduces him to a gibbering wreck. Anyway, he turns up with a raw sheep leg for me. Dear God! It’s enough to make you vegetarian. At least I hadn’t seen its Yod like face so I did try and chop the meat off with a not very sharp knife and a pair of scissors and bung it in the freezer. Yuk! It was all sinewy and muscular. Give me meat cut and wrapped in plastic any day.

I am flying home 1^st February and flying up to Edinburgh on the Friday to see J1 who goes to Afghanistan on 28^th February. After that I hope to catch up with as many friends and family who want to meet.