rain torrenting down familiarly, i am sleepy with a belly full of rice and ready to return to my sweet Matakosi tomorrow, where the beans are ready for harvest and sunflowers grow tall in my garden and a little kitten meows for Rokia at the rain-washed round door of my hut... it is august, the corn is high - tassles grazing rooftops and making the pathways between compounds into surreal green tunnels... children run back and forth playing with dolls made of early cornsilk, the girls carefully braid every three strands... i am beginning to sink into the timelessness of village life, feel the days roll by, in thinking of what to say here it is a wash of visions of voices of moments... so i will give it to you this way?
i have been to see griots, (across the river in a tree-dug canoe, to a hilltop round of huts where goat-skins hang to dry in the sun --soon to be stretched over the tops of drums -- and Dugu Tigi lays on a platform of woven bamboo humming to himself and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes of tobacco, kinkilebaa and hot pepper and his hands are blackened and calloused like cast-iron pans and he smiles eyes-wild shakes a rattle to announce my arrival to the birds) .....i have been caught in a storm with nothing but corn for shelter..... the Chokhoy river has almost stolen me away in its rain-fed current now twice.... I have walked in on a birth ( strong Hoyca whose belly had been a dark round melon standing strong and calm, bloody pagna to her knees, small blue creature deposited onto the rain-puddled mud floor of a hut, there wrinkled and still attached to the afterbirth, i arrive to be greeted as though nothing were strange, ask stupidly 'is that yOUR baby?' becuz it is! what comes first and i know not what to say i have never been so close, standing there in broken water//// and she laughs, the grandmothers come in, dirt still on their hands from the field, cut the cord, tie a crude belly button; take the new body out into the burn of mid-day africa sun and scrub him hard, a sponge of tree bark, i am emotional cant help it the villagers just giggle and tell me 'ROkia hebbi tokora' which means i have a namesake, i hold back tears, the rain arrives and cries for me)/// birth is unremarkable, death too...me i just breathe..... and then one week later the child is to be named, the elders gather, women take turns pounding rice into a soft white powder to be mixed with honey gathered from that-morning trees i as the namesake am formally escorted to the Denabo by the father, handed a pounding mortar to help in the making of the sweet stic! ky ceremonial cabbal... but when the moment comes and El -Hadj! ii is ch anting, bamboo pole to the sky, and he is about to divine the child's name he turns to me and asks for my fathers name b/c after all the baby is a boy and not expecting this i spit out 'michael' and he turns back to the sky and says slowly and carefully may-ka-laa... and the gathered villagers all repeat the name in agreement maykala maykala maykala and i am holding back laughter but it is beautiful really, it is an honor, i gift the mother a cloth wrap that symbolically says i will carry him on my back whenever she is tired; and kola nuts to split among the elders...now there is a baby with my fathers name, and strangely , bizarrely, this baby; birthed by an ebony-skinned mother and a father the color of watermelon seeds, is now over two weeks old and has still not 'bawli'-ed ,or darkened, his skin is light, i asked when he would turn and Hoyca said, no two weeks have passed, this is his color, he truly is your namesake///
and some of you have asked what exactly my work is and this is difficult to explain becuse i do have an agenda and specific tasks and i could lay those out and feel very peace corps officiall but the real work i believe is in the slow long process of becoming a part of this place and letting the people i live among understand me and trust me enough to share with me their problems; and about me understanding the rhythms of this village , what is truly lacking, what ways and wisdom are in want of preservation , who speaks truth, which opinions are collectively-motivated, which are antiquated , what form of 'sustainability' can realistically be both desired and reached for... it is this that i am engaged in truly, though officially i am an 'agricultural extension agent' and i AM definitively this as well : out there weeding and singing at the kiles - collective weeding parties that farmers hold in their fields, sometimes they re-pay the villag! e helpers with a feast, or they will pay griots to play djembes all morning while we work, or sometimes it is a share of kola nuts, or tea and sugar, or rarely CFA coins.... and i have fields to monitor where flood-resistant corn is grown next to the local variety, and i have headed a bean field with the womens group to experiment, add some protein to the diet and introduce a little crop diversity , and the field is ripe now and flowering for the third time and the women dance to know of the beans they will be eating soon in the all-too-substance-less maafe... and i have to count yields and ears of corn and weigh seeds and collect rice grains and store them but all of that is official and calculable and , yes, fun, becuz EVERYone is out in the fields these days and it is a social flirty singy playful culture and when it is hot we run to the river and when it rains a soccer ball appears from nowhere and we are slipping laughing in the mud and when it is time to res! t we reallllly rest... and all is done together
& there is also a lot of interest in fruit tree work in my village and we just had an amazing village-wide cooperative training of how to outplant pepinierred trees, and we made a windbreak line of acacia which will grow quick and spread their leaves strong and stop the rain-bringing whips of wind from snapping corn stalks and destroying gourd vines, and we split up armloads of fruit trees ripe to exit their plastic sacks and entre real earth, and each compound received some combination of mangoes and lemons and cashews and guava seedlings, and i and another volunteer demonstrated how to plant them how to make a rice-bundle protective fence around them; IPM techiques etc it was fantastic, all these elders in a line planting trees and listening so carefully, and after one of them chucked the black plastic bag into the brush and i yelled at him saying it would not disappear just like the shards of old flip-flops we come upon when weeding the corn field and thoug! h i thought i had stepped over the line, other villagers backed me saying 'o halli goonga' - she speaks the truth - and soon i had a small but dedicated contingent of garbage collectors-hee hee..... and we've formed a committee to pressure the communitie rurale to push for a hand-pumped forage ( a more technologically-advanced well, drilled down to the artesian layer) b/c it seems that my village is one of those whose wells turn into empty caves in the dry season...
and there are oh so many other beginnings of projects....it has merely just begun
but daily life revolves turns itself over and over again; and i feel so lucky to be in this peaceful corner where men still herd the cattle with the song of their hand-carved bamboo flutes, i have come to recognize the calls of different pipers, and when the moon is clear the girls gather to sing and dance and play games in the cornrows, and if i walk in any direction i am offered bowls of food, rounds of tea, girls braid and unbraid my hair i gossip kneeling beneath the smoke of cooking huts, the endless greeting of everyone, so many families to know, the blind grandmother they claim is one hundred years old and eats little else besides kola nuts, the healer who practices bloodletting, suctioning out 'bad blood' into ram's horns taut against the patient's skin, my tokora who brings fresh-from-the-cow milk every morning to my kitten....
and since i dont eat meat, and since there are banana trees in my garden, and since one day when the jowro - cheif - was sick sick sick with malaria shuddering and shivering next to the fire in the cooking hut in the middle of a hot day and he handed me coins and sent me on my bike to the next village over to get him medicine, and i rode like the wind cuz i saw dark purple clouds and i didnt make it i got drenched and when i arrived the path had become a river and the Chokhoy villagers were all yelling at me that i could not cross the rain-flash stream on the path but i thought truly he would die without this medicine so I grabbed my friend Sorry and told him to come with me and we rode through the knee-high water and when we got to the stream the current was strong so i left my bike and swam across and ran in the darkening night to bring this medicine and i arrived and my family was astonished, and exhausted i ate and fell immediately to a 12-hour sleep, when i awoke t! hey were all saying i was some word i didnt understand which i later found out means something like a sorceress or witch or magician, the above are the three reasons they site, it is partially a joke and partially a curiousity, they really think i have some sort of power, a young boy came to get me to go and sit with his sick grandfather i told him i had no medicine but he said that just my coming would be medicine enough... his conviction was so strong that even i believed him i went and i sat and listened to him breathe..... so i wonder what 'work' is the most important in the end... for me in all of life it is the connecting which is the most beautiful, yields the thickest reward.... it is what brings me and keeps me here...
now i really must go i am tired my eyes are heavy with the day
as usual this has been a mess-swirl of thought/// it is hard to go this long between tellings/// i heard a rumor however that email is returning to kedougou which means i may be slightly more regular to this screen
and thank you for your letters.... they make me smile and bring daydreams on rainy days when my hut is mine and i am cozy inside with my cat and a cup of hot tea... please have patience with those coming from this end, i am discovering that they are oh so very slow.... and that many which have been sent, good-journey smooch-on-the-envelope and all, have not arrived....
i am well and still bright-eyed,
keep watching the stars
there are secrets there
linz