March. Been squished in public-transportation in, around and between Thies, Dakar, and several fishing villages for almost three weeks now, trainings and meetings and errands to run, official and unofficial, i am now heading back home, here in Tambacounda, in the interior, here again in Pulaar country -- alhoumdililah.... the road is long and flat, i sit an apparition, headphones beneath pink desert-nomad scarf, if anyone was looking they would see just my eyes... the world has turned dry and dusty, the harmattan wind not a wind at all but sheets of flying desert, torrents of visible tangible stinging wind, a wind that carries red soil and Saharan sand on its breath, and leaves us all appearing to have been dyed the same dull henna color as the earth...
But enlightening, well-rounding perhaps, to live in that other half of Senegal for a bit, a part not my home, a busier wealthier more difficult more in-your-face area, i hop on the back of a streamer-hung rainbow-painted minivan whose windows have long been popped out and replaced with plastic photographs of marabouts or soccer players, the speakers blare scratchy mbalax, a precariously rusted exhaust-pipe burping up black puffs of earth poison that linger over our heads... ...and nobody knows me, i might as well be painted flourescent pink and wearing a jester hat with bells for how well i blend in with the crowd... i am reminded with every glance or not-glance of the pale-ness of my body which for some reason gives vendors extra privelege to stick things in my face (bananas,! coat hangers, alarm clocks, gris-gris, live chickens) and talibe beggars with their tomato-cans held out for alms singing beautiful arabic prayers in harmony, and bayefalls (senegalese sadhus, outcasts, ascetics, drummers, mellow men of prayer-beads and patchwork robes and marijuana in their eyes), waving their rattles and dread-lochs, calling out "la belle fille! Reggae sistah! Help a friend..." shaking their gourds toward me, all for the luck of one toubab coin i never give, i give to noone out of principle, think constantly of my grandfather who gave to everyone...
But it is important to be hit again with that reality, not nearly as omnipresent in Kedougou and my end-of-the-world pulaar hills, of what it means to carry light arms and colored eyes into this world of dark cocoa-butter bodies, i watch everyone and they are so individually beautiful, i am watched as well, a forever-curiosity, but even with pulaar spilling out naturally from my lips, or my newly-learned wolof phrases, i can not darken this white face, i am attached to the history of "my people", here French, Belgian, American, Japanese are all one and the same, i represent the heavy hand of colonialism that to this day still controls what is grown here, what is sold here, what language is spoken in government offices.... i represent the ships that stole reluctant bodies and pushed them across the ocean in ropes and chains, i represent the immense wealth of the West, flaunted ! and un-shared, and to this day driven around the country in the white SUVs of ambassadors, ex-pats and development workers...
And invited randomly to spend a couple of days in the white high-fenced high-security mansion of the director of the World Bank for Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Cap Vert (staying with the enemy?) I got to actually walk through that door..., there is an entire peculiar community of ex-pats living in a mini-Europe, complete with chauffeurs and nicely-paved suburban housing complexes, right there in downtown Dakar... i blinked my eyes thrice to walk in through the door to an espresso machine and baskets of canteloupe and magnets on the refrigerator... familiar... and so so odd-feeling... this particular scenario was down a long sloping driveway above the sea, servants trimming the bushes, soaping the front gate, bar by iron bar, there is a pool and fountains and beautiful furniture and two cooks/maids and an eleven-year-old girl practicing painfully-amateur violin for her recital at the International School, and the whole scene very bizarre, soooo luxuriously comfortable but so quiet, protected, me padding around silently on cold white tiles, flipping through coffee-table books and nibbling on coconut cakes that Desda the maid brings me, i was a princess for 48 hours, their family has no idea of my reality, nonetheless that of the majority of rural Senegal... but they are sweet and the World Bank exec's wife is Ethiopian, as is one of the cooks, and they gossip around the house in loopy Amharic, and we eat tef pancakes dipped in spicy Berber sauce at cool 4'o'clocks, and they are such amaz ing hosts I can't do anything but tell them stories and encourage them to send their daughter for a few startling village days with me in Matakosi, and thank them over and over for their hospitality...
So, back to the village... Gej naa leen gis.... (its been a while...) the hot season is arriving and i am nervous for it, lately i have been a work-bunny in my village, running and biking all over the place, my plans are to continue in this fashion, but i am all too aware at the way the heat invades, immobilizes the afternoon, drains energy and leathers the world with a heavy sauna-like haze... thankfully the thickness of the Hot has not hit here yet, and i am still very refreshed from seaside wind... (thank you taryn who has been living above the surf in a beach bungalow and who has coaxed me to visit her weekend after weekend)
And here i have neglected this screen for all of the cool season, perhaps because i naturally feel more alive when i need to cuddle in blankets at night and heat tea to temper the pink morning hill-breeze, and have been busy busy busy.... also i have had a steady stream of visitors (!!), really december through til now has been a dream in the village, i have so much more of myself to give when I am able to breathe in non-thick air, when the sun is a friend rather than a curse, and when I can show my world to the people i love...
like my parents arriving to a horde of villagers and drums and gourd-shakers and men wrapped for traditional dancing in leaf-tutus and corn-husk crowns and ram's horn rattles tied around their calves, and everyone staring and wanting to touch them, long lines of greetings that do not acknowledge the heat of the afternoon nor the overwhelm of a village-whole dancing and feasting, and that just the first day.... and i knew how important it was for me that my parents see where i live, and how important it was for them to feel the weight of a night in my hut, to walk to the river, to look into the wide eyes of my now-community, to teach them and be taught (my little sister now comes to my door every few days and points to her nose saying 'noysh' -- thanks, dad)....but i could not have known --although it makes ! sense to me now-- how important it would be to my village: in a land where everything stops for family, where sons remain in the compounds of their mothers and daughters never go far, in a land that can't comprehend the motivation of my gypsy soul - this solo unmarried woman traveler -, it was my parents that validated my presence in the village perhaps more than anything i have yet done... my villagers saw that i was not a lost straggler estranged from my family but that i have parents who love me just as they love their own children; and also that my parents want me to be here, they support my experience and care so much as to make the impossible-to-imagine-for-a-villager journey over here, not to see me, the villagers say, but to see them...
so every day women were carrying over beignoirs of water so my parents could have water to bathe, and bowls and bowls of food from compounds where children are going hungry, one afternoon we were gifted five lunches, and the teddungal -ritual of respect- was overwhelming, when the day came to leave people were arriving to fandoto my parents, send them off with gifts, and people who have nothing to give piled upon my parents already-full suitcases an assortment of calabash spoons and woven maafe-bowl mats and even a kilo of matakosi-grown rice.... one woman even gave to my parents 100 CFA....( 20 cents to us, but a day's work to any villager)... and the chief who never ever walks the six km to luumo put on his best robes and made his slow way through the afternoon heat, just to see them off:::: it was truly amazing, how many times in! five days can one be moved to tears??? ... if i doubted it before, i now know clearly this village, this extended family, has become a home...
and then, on the heels of their departure, beautiful wide-eyed taryn (khadijatu?) arrived, she eventually made it down to kedougou to walk my village trails, splash in the river, attend a kile of women spreading mud-and-cow-shit 'sealant' on the walls of a newly-built mud hut, and even got to dance her djembe-feet to some setting-sun tabaski drums...
i am so ...lucky? blessed? i dont know what to say except that it means everything to me to have you walking through my world, to have these trails i know so well tiring your feet, to be breathing it, feeling the changes of temperature and light, hearing the sing-song chaos of cows, chickens, children, the sunrise pounding of corn... to experience the constant unceasing trail of greetings and exits and entries and bowls of food ...to HaVE YOU HeRE..and to be able to share it, to have you dream within the round walls of my hut, see joy in the eyes of my village family, laugh at the silliness of their chatter, drink their tea....is the best gift i could possibly receive or ask for
so come.... it is not an easy place to be, but i think it is worth it:
as for work: my days have been little treats ever since I sat down with a group of women and we decided to plant a garden... my female counterpart and I dug into the soil and found it thick with humus and crawling with worms, and still damp, and trees to shade, and we built a fence and made steps down the riverbank and planted for the first time beds of tomatoes, onions, jaxatu, cabbage, african lettuce and carrots... Matakosi has never done a garden before, many don't even know that carrots are orange, and they were all hesitant to put so much work into a project they know nothing about, but when our plot (my strong-headed wonder-worker of a village counterpart and I share a garden plot) had a 100% germination rate and strange stems of little seedlings were sprouting up and blooming exponentially fast, little by little ! other women started building their fences and asking me to teach them how these tiny seeds in plastic bags turn into plants, and now there is a healthy collection of us that spend our early mornings and late afternoons feet-in-the-river pulling water beignoir by slow beignoir and watering our gardens...
it is the river that has been saving me....even in the midst of dry and dust, the river is lush with life and the water cool and children and their mothers gather there all day to wash clothes, pounding them against soapy river-rocks and hanging them to dry in the trees (the best-dressed patch of forest i've seen), and when I get sweaty and dive in the water and swim around they all scream at me and shout and whoop in shock and delight cuz for the most part they don't know how to swim -- i've offered lessons, they are afraid, think spirits beneath the surface will pull them down under and send them off to resurface in someone else's river somewhere far away -- and really it is an entirely different ecosystem down there, vines and monkeys and trees flowering, and coconuts and Jaxanke women that emerge from the trees to dip makeshift nets into the river, catch 10cm-l! ong silver-bellied fishies... it is my daily Ithacan gorge, it soothes... the healing power of running water, my soul is calm in this routine...
now upon my return i just hope that Laaye, the sweet boy i left in charge, has been watering diligently, and i hope my mulch has deterred any tomato-weevils, and i hope the soil hasn't yet heated up to detrimental degrees, and if all is well, ideally i will be setting out heads of lettuce on a pagne beneath a straw-shade roof of a luumo-stall soon, selling them for 100cfa and promoting dry-season gardens at the same time...
i have much more to say, about the sing-song intricacies of days, the mooniness of nights, the green glow of baby mangoes hanging from their mother trees, changes of mood, rites of passage, births and deaths... but my eyes are done with this screen for the moment, and less my tongue get tired of telling its own story, i will leave off here and hope to return in the evening.
Thank you all for your various energy, letters openable, tapes & CDs listenable, visitors huggable, thoughts that arrive in shafts of light, shadows that come clear in dreams...
You are all in my heart.
Stay shining, in certain wheres it is spring :-)
Here, this gypsy is losing track of time...
Much love,
Linz
p.s. - weary travelers: anyone ever been to ghana or togo?? I am heading out on vacation in late april... any tips or treats would be deliciously welcome.... hee hee!