“The sky too is folding over you” I listen to this now as I write, not thinking that I would write for a while just because everything seems either dull or repetitive. Last week was spent at Tendeba a tourist camp/hostel on the river with millions of mosquitoes. In fact the t-shirts say “one million mosquitoes can’t be wrong. Tendeba is awesome”. Well, Tendeba is something. It was better than GPI in the way that we believed the kitchen better prepped and cleaned, the dishes and food. There was electricity almost all the time and there was even a bar and a four/five foot deep swimming pool. All of that was great except we (our whole group (24) got back together again) had class every minute of everyday, so it wasn’t the easiest to find time to do everything we wanted. We spent time in the garden, a forest really, about 1km from camp. We learned to make sunken beds and mud stoves and beehives and had other tech stuff classes, lots of classes, not much applied learning yet. All in all, Tendeba was ok, but we ended up longing for our sleepy little villages. At least I did. I enjoyed my company, “J” and I mated rooms again. I hung out a lot with “A” and “M” and “B” and I jammed on our guitars and harmonicas. That was a lot of fun. We had our first language test, the goal was Novice Mid but I scored Novice High. I don’t know how I did that cause I feel like an idiot speaking this language and I can’t understand anything anyone says but whatever. I’ll take it. But coming back to village feels normal. We know the people better and more interesting things happen. On Sunday I went over on my bike (used, but the best of the bunch, mine changes gears! and has brakes!) to the next Fula training village. I went by my lonesome and guitar and met up with “B” and sat neath a mango tree playing our folk jam songs to little Africans who couldn’t possibly understand how ironic it was for us to sit in front of them with their eyes wide open listening to two Toubabs named Momodou Bah, Jam Tan Jam Band, singing wide-eyed ourselves about them lost and certainly this is not our home and yet we are the ones who feel comfortable. They are the ones without a clue to why we are blowing metal reeds between our metal head gear, strumming against foolish wooden expensive guitars like a bunch of idiots.
Yesterday I was feeling overwhelmed with all the work I needed to do and the language work and the immersion into the community, that’s the most daunting., talking with the locals. I’m just not there yet, I don’t feel right stumbling over my vocab as they smile blindly at me. But finally I needed to start my garden in my back yard, so I gathered up my tools and my brothers and a couple other “small boys” jumped at the opportunity to help. That’s the best part of having a village like ours. The kids can be annoying and loud but the village really does raise them, not just one mother one child. If you see a kid doing something wrong, you say something. If you need help, you tell them to do something, and they do it. They love to help. It must kill the boredom. So I had three or four small boys digging up my back yard. I did my best to tell them how to do it correctly in my best, always my best Pulaar. It worked for the most part. One kid, Ousman (another of the many) saw that I had a wasp’s nest beginning on my fence. I said that when I get a chance I’ll spray it or something. He didn’t want me to wait I guess cause he convinced me that he would grab it with a rag and throw it over my fence and into the coos field. Okay I said. I gave him a rag and sure enough he grabbed the softball sized wasp’s nest with his hand (wasps included) and held onto it for a few minutes, then chucked it away.
Today’s African moment of the day was cleaning my three bidongs with my host brothers. A bidong is a five gallon drum of cooking oil from China. It’s plastic with a small opening and a handle. It comes used and dirty and still has oil inside. Our job is to wash them out so we can water our gardens with them, or store water. They’re a bitch to clean though. You have to fill them with dirt and sand to soak up the oil and then wash all the dirt out, and then if you want to store drinking water in ‘em, you have to sterilize them after that. I’m not storing drinking water anywhere near them, I’m just using them to water and mix compost and manure tea.
So my brothers took the bidongs to the well and with a small wasp-hive-grabbing rag and a few slivers of soap we cleaned the hell out of those bidongs. One quick African method, as I saw it with my own eyes this morning, is to grab a discarded ear of corn, kernels removed and preferably eaten, roasted and delicious. And take that ear of corn and use it as a scrub brush. And that’s exactly what I did. I collected the best chewed up corn cobs I could find and my brother grabbed a corn husk laying in the dirt and we got scrubbing. They didn’t use sand or dirt to absorb the oil inside but instead some dried, little crusty looking things from the coos fields, they worked great. These kids really knew what they were doing. I, as the oldest one, hadn’t a clue. But I loved getting there at the water pump, scrubbing away at a plastic oil container with a broken down ear of corn in the 21st century thinking, wow, sure don’t do this in the states. Later that evening I taught (they already kind of knew) UNO, only I was trying to do everything in Pulaar, so it was Goto. Goto, didi, tatti, nigh, jowi, jago, jadidi, jatatti, and janigh. The colors, which I learned in class today are Bodajo (red) Bulajo (Blue) Bajekaci (green) and Natejo (yellow). I don’t think I have that right still every after saying it three hundred times. They played in a sudden death kind of way. Whoever had the most cards at the end sat out the next game until there were only two left myself and Amadou, the middle of the tree boys who was in charge of the bidong cleaning today and who has taken the most to making sure I don’t get myself into trouble by politely handing smaller kids my things as I often innocently do. Amadou definitely has my back, even when he had malaria which he just had when I was at Tendeba. He’s feeling better now, thank God. I gave him some 400mg of Ibuprophin for his fever the other day. I’m glad it didn’t kill him. He’s the kind of kid that’s just well behaved and uses common sense, is very intelligent and receptive, hard working. He’s the kind of kid I want to send to Toubab Country Continent University. I’m sure there’s about a million kids like him, all deserving of a chance, but they’ll never get it. They’ll be here in 20 years, farming coos, having a big family, happy, not knowing anything different than the few Peace Corps volunteers who show up every year to relearn how to tie their shoes and take a shit. Amadou won, of course. I don’t think I’ve ever won at Uno or Gofo. We finished up and laid down looking up at the night sky, the moon was almost full and it’s so bright you don’t even need a flashlight half the time. Dark clouds moved above us and a cold wind blew over our skin. The three boys and I laid there anticipating rain that never came. I felt content and happy, watching clouds pass over the moon, dreaming about home, wondering who’s dreaming about Africa?
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