‘Daubing’ the bottom house and using the fireside
Bissondai Lile (Carl Croker photos)
Bissondai Lile (Carl Croker photos)

– Riverstown ‘auntie’ explains how to do both

EVEN as Bissondai Lile has a gas stove upstairs, it is her bottom house fireside that she’d prefer to use every day. Perhaps she agrees with the popular saying that fireside food tastes different; better! Or maybe it’s simply because she has grown accustomed to using it decades over, ever since she was a child and looking at her mother cook for the entire family with it.

Lile is just not sure. All she knows is that the fireside is her comfort place. She doesn’t mind the work that comes with using it. For one thing, she explained how she’d have to go to the nearby sawmill and ask for pieces of wood that they were not using. Even on those occasions where she’d have to buy the wood, she would choose to have it no other way.

A resident of Back Street, Riverstown, Essequibo Coast, Lile, a mother of six, is originally from Leonora, on the West Coast Demerara. Her husband died about seven years ago, leaving her with their grown children and five grandchildren.

Lile prefers using her fireside over her gas stove

“I have a gas stove upstairs, but I don’t use it. You finish cooking faster on the fireside. They said when you cook on fireside, it does eat more sweet. My mother never had a gas stove; she always use fireside,” Lile shared in an interview with Pepperpot Magazine.

“We go to the sawmill and ask them, or sometimes we buy,” she continued, adding, “You put the wood in and rub your mud or soap power on the pot to make sure it don’t get black.”
She wakes up around 4 am to cook for one of her sons, who must get to work early. She’d then “hustle” to get her housework done before making her way to a fellow villager to help with some cleaning.

By 11:00hrs, though, she’s already finished helping out at the little shop and is back home to have the lunch that she would have already finished cooking. Continuing to explain what her day is like, Lile related how she would next take a bath and then relax in her hammock until it’s time to cook dinner.

‘Daubing’ using a mop instead of her hands

Once a week, she would ‘daub’ her bottom house. This is another traditional practice that Lile has kept over the years. She goes to the canal at the end of her street, digs the mud she needs and places it in a bucket.
According to her, she has been daubing ever since she got married as a young girl. Most times, one bucket of mud would do the trick, or sometimes two. This is something that she said she has grown up seeing her family doing.

In times past, she explained that she would go down on her knees and use her hands to smooth the mud over. At times, the mud would be mixed with cow dung, which she said somehow didn’t smell bad.
But things have changed for the better. Today, she said she’d simply use a mop to do the job. She said she would mix the mud with some water and then use the mop the same way she would use it to wipe her house.

“It make the place look nice and clean,” she said. This is, of course, only when the sun is shining through. “When the sun come out, then yuh ah daub; yuh nah daub when rain ah fall,” she explained.
Lile has had to deal with instances when the rain started falling as soon as she was finished daubing. In such a case, she’d simply have to wait until the bottom house was dry to do it all over again.

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