Invitation

One of the most beautiful things about Guinean culture is the way people share food. 95% of meals consist of people sharing a common (giant) bowl of rice. It is polite (and necessary, really) to invite anyone in the near vicinity to come and share the rice with you. And when I say “near,” I use that term loosely, because you could be walking at one end of a soccer field and someone eating rice at their house at the other end might yell at you, Invitation!! Usually I say Ali Baraka, meaning something like “thanks to God I already ate.” However, sometimes I take people up on the offer and share a few bites of rice with them. This of course works the other way around too. I am obliged to invite everyone to share whatever I’m eating. At school I usually buy, for a cost of 1000 Guinean Francs  (15c), a bean sandwich (a piece of a baguette with beans and spicy oil) and eat it on my way home. I have to invite everyone to share my sandwich with me – this includes people riding by on bikes, in cars, ladies selling things on the side of the road, students, etc…One time I was eating rice at my house with my brothers and a neighbor came up behind me and said, “you’re not going to invite me to eat with you?” and accused me of being rude.  I tried to explain that it was hard to invite people that you didn’t see. Some people are hard-core about their invitations!

I always eat dinner with my family – usually they make a separate bowl of rice just for me, but I actually prefer eating with my little brothers and sisters (with my hands). However, whenever we eat separately I always invite them to come eat my rice and they invite me to eat theirs and then we argue whose rice is better. My little brothers and I love to argue (not real arguing, but joking) and sometimes instead of the invitation we say evitation (eviter means to avoid).

My family has a pretty tough economic situation and they more or less live day-to-day. Earlier this week there wasn’t enough money at the end of the day to buy things to make rice and sauce  so no one was going to eat dinner. I gave my family money to buy bread for everyone but there wasn’t very much bread left at the bakery, so everyone got a tiny piece of baguette for dinner. Despite, in my opinion, this being a depressing and difficult time, Issiaga, Abou, and Mohamed Aliou still joked and we all invited each other to share our pieces bread – each taking a bite out of the other person’s baguette and laughing hysterically at how silly it was. It’s amazing how they can take such hardship in stride and how they learn to be happy with what they have. The following day I mentioned something to Abou  about no one eating dinner the night before and he corrected me and said of course they ate, I had bought them bread (did I forget?)! And I said eating a tiny piece of bread is not dinner, and Abou, in his wisdom well beyond his 18  years, informed that eating a small piece of bread is a great thing, because some people don’t even have that. Perspective