More Village

As promised, this article will be about how I spent my time in the village. I went out there primarily to learn about village life. If I am going to be living in this country and working for these people, I want to know how they live and hopefully start to see the world through their eyes. I also had a secondary goal of studying and documenting the local agricultural practices. Essentially this meant that I got to spend a lot of time working in the fields, which was a very nice break from sitting in an office all day long 5 days of the week.

The village has no power and I don't think anyone even owns a car except for one guy who uses it as an unofficial taxi between the two nearest sizable towns.  Rather than tractors everyone owns a donkey or two, or a horse if they can afford it. I have to say that the donkey seems to be faster than the gas-powered tiller that we have at home but he might be more expensive to "operate" and you can only really use him for half the day. He certainly is cuter!

See that brown spot above the horse? We did that by hand using a tool that is kind of a mix between a shovel and a hoe. The weeds were too high and dense for the donkey and plow. Once we had cleaned the weeds out from between the corn (yes, it's a corn field) we planted watermelon in between the rows.

When I arrived in the village the crops were seriously behind schedule. We had a late spring this year and very little rain. During the two weeks that I was there it rained and rained and rained. The crops jumped out of the ground and by the time I left the corn behind my room looked like this- some of it was approaching chest height.

The general schedule was to get up at 7, go around to greet everyone in the neighborhood, eat breakfast, and then head out to the field at about 7:45. At 11ish you come back in to chat with the neighbors and wait for the women to finish lunch, which gets served at 1:00. The women eat together and the men eat together. In our neighborhood all the men and boys from several families ate together. I think I counted 14 of us around the bowl one day. You can see two thirds of us ready to eat in this picture. Each person uses a spoon or his hand to eat out of the communal bowl. When that is eaten up it is replaced with a second bowl, and then a third. The noon meal was always rice, usually with fish. Each bowl would have a slightly different sauce to give the meal some variety.
After everyone was done eating they would pass around a cup of water so everyone could have a drink. I think I drank five times more water than anyone else in the village. I often had a water bottle with me, but I got used to eating without drinking anything. Thank you to uncle K for the filter, I put it through it's paces!

 

After lunch we would sit around for another couple of hours, chatting with friends and generally trying to stay as cool as possible. We would wander back out to the fields at about 4:30, once the sun wasn't so hot, and work for another hour and a half before returning home. Once there we would chat until dark, waiting for our turn to take a shower. Millet was served by flashlight at about 8:30. The first bowl was generally served with peanut sauce and the second with fish sauce. One evening they made spaghetti, probably in my honor! Some of the women came over to eat it with us, something that very rarely happened. After supper we would sit out under the stars and talk until about 11.

I bet you are thinking, "That sounds like a lot of sitting around and talking." Yes, it was. What made it particularly difficult was that I rarely understood what they were saying. For hours on end I was largely left to observe the others and get lost in my thoughts. Then all of the sudden they would all call my name and tap me on the shoulder.
"huh? what?"
"He just greeted you!" they would say, pointing to a man who was ambling by.
"Oh... désolé." [sorry] And then I would scramble to think of the appropriate greeting and blurt it out to the expectant well-wisher.
I did find some ways to pass the time, though. I introduced some of the guys to checkers and found out that they had a similar game called "Dame." They gave up playing me when I kept losing. We also played a variation on tic-tac toe where you only get to place three pieces and then have to move them.
I wanted to teach them chess but it would have been kind of complicated finding objects to represent the six different figures in two different colors. We did some other games too using the stones that were lying around and squares or circles drawn in the sand. 
Some of the younger boys kept themselves busy during these extended social periods with hand weaving (see picture). They used a pen to weave a plastic line, kind of like fishing line, into a sort of scrunchy that is widely used here in place of washcloths for personal hygiene.  They let me try weaving for a while and were gracious enough to undo several knots for me until I got it right.

And of course there were always kids to watch. Here are M and J (a different J). I didn't need to speak their language to communicate with the kiddos. They were always a lot of fun to have around.
I enjoyed the time after supper the most. I generally hung out with a group that included more French speakers, so I was able to get in on the conversation once in a while. We also had music on several evenings, as I mentioned in the former blog. La nuit en afrique- ça bouge!  I even did a little dancing. The goal of most of the dance seems to be to get various parts of your body to keep as many different rythms at once as possible, kind of like a human drumset. I'm not talented enough for that. The goal near the end of most songs is just to move your feet as quickly as possible. I can do that. It reminds me of track practice.
Once in a while, mainly in the evenings, we would randomly start singing worship songs. Most of these were translated into both the trade language and French, and most of them had originally been written in English. That was great because I already knew the tunes so it wasn't too hard to pick up the words for at least the chorus and sing along. Often they wanted to hear the English version also, so I would sing that for them. One evening we were singing worship songs until 1 AM.

I think I'll wrap up this blog there. The next one will be about my adventures with the local transportation system. Hang on tight, there aren't any seatbelts!!!