Mostly Me

Meditations on Dengue Fever

It sucks.

CamParfait

10-18

Last week I helped with Dan and Willie's environmental leadership camp. It was tremendous. Suspiciously perfect.
The first known camp of its kind here, it was big news. In fact, a reporter followed everyone around with a tape recorder in their faces the whole time. This was quite awkward during the (cross-dressing!) skits and campfire solos, but worth the nightly readio spot and hour-long summary that airs tonight. Kids were chosen from across the region of Kédougou based on school performance and who was thought to be able to most benefit.
The kids were AMAZING. You know all the problems in US camps? Fights, gossip, homesickness, bullying, not following the rules, hooking up, phone-calls from parents? None of that here! Not even a single complaint about food (which was heavily composed of the cow). Not a single tear-- until they left on the bus. This was so unexpectedly moving. This culture doesn't exactly encourage open greif-- except at funerals-- so to see almost every girls and boy wipe embarassingly at their eyes and turn away-- produces a reaction I don't even have the strength to name.
Hopefully some from this group will return to next year's camp as CITs, since we want to make it annual. Though a bunch of volunteers came to help, the real counselors were amazing Senegalese leaders-- mostly teachers. They did a superb job. Camp activities included fun trust-building and team-bonding games as well as constructing tree nurseries and making/marketing/selling neem lotion. They decorated the bottles and frames for themselves in arts and crafts. One of the frames says "I like Obama." We hiked to the waterfall and source, including the kid with crutches and the girls who insisted carrying their water bottles on their heads the whole climb. We had super cross-cultural dance parties and limbo. As fun as it all was, I'm almost more sad to believe it really was THE Time of Their Lives.
Regardless, it was fun and I think they all took a lot from it.They were so serious about learning, we caught one kid taking ferocious notes as we explained how to roast marshmallows! But I can testify that each of them became more confident and made friends across the region they would enver have otherwise met. I would not have guessed the amount of difference this little thing could make.

On the Death of a Cow

All men slaughter cows,
he said; I chortled
You will watch too?
bemused; now I had to,
A five to ten minute
Process
of sucking, smacking, gasping
coughing, wheezing, moaning,
writhing, wrashing, sounds
of fluids seperating
Furrowed faces cried sweat into
the pools as red as paint
They undid ropes and the corpse
heaved again, a cinematic
bad guy that won't stay dead
They wiped the bright knife on its cheek
as it spluttered a cow's last words;
the final insult
And it fell, finally, like a sigh
its skin immediately snipped
torn, already a beautiful
blanket or rug or
Dissection had begun and I
channeled my high-school biologist
self, labeling livers, impressed
with the heart
The flies gave a festive funeral
the sun grieved loudly so no
one could ignore her
The former cow had five robot men
empty its shit, squeezing
intestines, slicing stomachs
reuniting new grass with old
We would eat around it.
Captivated children ran to help,
brought leaf fans to
plate organs, like jungle china
Hours of this
and she's gone.

Corny Story

10/2
The corn is down and rivers rage where there used to be paths. I could almost scoop a cup into the well for a drink and I'm afraid of my douche overflowing. That would be shitty.
My fingers smart from working with corn: picking it and kicking down the empty stalks (helugol), shucking it (sekugol), and seperating the kernals (hogugol). Is there not a word in english for "sqeperating the kernals"? Thus another opportunity to ponder how my elusive language fluency here doesn't translate-- so to speak-- for potential useful fluency in the future. I know "to carry water on head" (rondugol), "to help someone take water off her head" (rotiragol), "cloth between head and what is carried" (tikawol), "to carry a baby on back" (bambugol), "to cross a river" (lumbagol), and "to tie skirt up" (hadagol). Somehow I can't hear these words frequenting the conference rooms of the UN. I think of all the words on my french vocab lists: to shop, top go to the movies, to order food... Learning the life is more difficult than learning the language.
I'm a little sad the corn is down. I liked the kids' scarecrow calls from their seperate stick table posts for the babboons across the land. I liked corn closing in on every foot, making me think both, AHH, Children of the Corn! and WOO, Hide and Seek! I enjoyed laughing crazily to myself every time I made jokes in my head about the corn "stalking" me or a maze of maise... On second introspection, it seems the corn was not aiding my sanity any. A change could probably do me good. But I do hope the wonder that is fire-roasted corn stays with us a bit longer.
I was complimented, bemusedly and appreciatively, for my shucking skills. Even though two shopping bags of corn had been my previous high in the States; shucking hundreds wasn't bad. I found the work soothing, even when interrupted by biting ants and pincer bugs. Eight of us unwrapped the cobs of gold under a mango tree with a blue mountain backdrop and a soundtrack of laughter. When walls of corn and husk grew around us and I felt like we'd buried ourselves in our sustainance, I grew a bit weary of the children who kept reviving the pile in the center.
But roasted corn and ataaya kept me going. I had the most of these things by far. While everyone else shrunk their stomachs during the Ramadan fast, I made 8 mille for prevailing in a bet that I couldn't eat 24 consecutive vache qui rit cheeses after a full dinner. I never want a Senegalese person to learn of this feat. I can't keep pride over gluttony before a nation both starving and poor. You Americans, however, I fully expect to be fully impressed. I mean, I almost vomitted after #5. Proceed to shudder with disgusted admiration.
The final step to harvesting corn besides hobugoling, unugoling, and actually cooking it: storing it. "Yougol" means to take cobs from the ground of a hut and bail buckets of it into the attic-ish space above. Ousman and I climbed up to this space from a giant pîle of corn and took bucket after bucket of literally thousands of ears of corn. There was some sort of magic feeling about it all. Firstly, the dark crawl-space pressed the childhood magic-attic button. We could peel through the bamboo that made it to see sunny lines of the room below. They filled buckets from a slowly diminishing pile of corn so bright it made me think of bars of gold. It was perfectly safe, but as a testament to my age, I suppose, I fielded thoughts that started with things like "from this height" and ran through barely-possible scenarios of random bouts of fainting or sudden explosive diarhea. In both cases I decided I'd perish.
But I did not. This may or may not relate to my refusal to attempt to be as acrobatic as Ousman in my descent. Instead, I made girly scared noises and everyone laughed. Baaba comforted me that O would bring something to aid my efforts. Relieved, I pictured somthing truly useful like a chair or ladder. Instead, a giant stick came to my rescue. Of course! I laughed in bewilderment and they laughed at my confusion and there were as many laughs as corn in the room, but still I was not on solid ground. "It's to help you get down!" They propped it at a 45 degree angle. Apparently I was to scramble down with my monkey feet. No matter, I'm at least not too old to make do, albeit ungracefully and with a few elbow bumps.

Jolies