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.