In every village where I have been, doing transect walks and interviews, they have offered me zumkum during the lunch break under the tree in the middle of the village. It is a drink traditionally given to guests, and it is made of small millet flour, sugar, water and sometimes spiced with some wild herb or other. I’ve always taken a sip of it, out of politeness, but because of my potentially hyper-sensitive Swedish stomach, I haven’t dared to properly drink it. It doesn’t taste much, just sweet from the sugar and slightly sour from the small millet.
I have also been given bags of unpeeled groundnuts of varying sizes. It is one of their cash crops, and being in the middle of harvest season, they have plenty of it lying around. I think it’s lovely, the way they all want to give us gifts. We were told, before we came here, that this is a gift-giving culture, and that is really true, but I’d like to think that them giving us groundnuts also shows that they’ve appreciated us visiting them. That they’ve liked having me, and that I must have made a good impression on them.
Every visit has always ended in a long exchange of blessings and good luck wishes. They’ve also said that they will pray for the success of my work. It is touching, really, how much effort they put into showing that they care. It’s a cultural thing, of course, but they are genuine in it too. It’s something you can feel.
Somehow, I feel like receiving that kind of sincerity from strangers would rarely happen in a place like Sweden. And in a sense, I feel like I don’t really deserve it. I’m only a student, after all. What can I really achieve? But now, with all these blessings and prayers for the success of my project, I would have to screw up really really badly for it to fail. If prayers are what makes a master thesis pass, my project can’t get anything less than an A.
Now we have bags and bags of unpeeled groundnuts. Me and Elli spend the evenings watching Community and peeling them, but the amount of nuts in the unpeeled bags never seem to decrease. The peeling makes our fingers hurt. I’m not sure if we’ll ever be able to peel them all.
Katja Malmborg 