All Safe in the Hut - Journal Selections From a Rainy Ramadan

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2 August

The best kind of day in village – chores, cleaning, organizing, fixing, a million little things that keep me busy for hours. Cut my first crop of moringa leaves and laid them out to dry on my cot. It’s so nice to feel productive after several days of feeling down. IST was fun and in some ways inspiring, but it left me feeling sort of listless and eager to get back to SPB.

Yesterday spent the morning running around Kolda by myself – something I should do more often. Took a mini-bus back to Mampatim. It was cramped and hot and slow and when I got to Chelsea’s I had trouble pumping up my tire and even more trouble locking her hut. But by the time I was on the road to SPB, with a full tire and Tanko on my back I was so happy I almost cried. It was a beautiful sunset, everything on the ground was lush and green and springing to life. Met Ansou Kanté on the road and had a bit of a race on the last stretch as it grew darker. It was getting hard to see the road in front of me, but the tiniest sliver of moon was lowering itself on the horizon… Ramadan! Sunkaro = fasting month. Today is the first day of the fast.

3 August

All safe in the hut! There’s something so wonderful about the feeling I get when I’m safe and dry inside my hut watching violent downpours turn my compound into a lake. I think I like these storms more during the day than at night. But today it is particularly delicious because it is so well timed. Another morning of chores and now there’s nothing to do but wait for the storm to pass so I can return my damp laundry to the line. It’s these quite moments that make life here so sweet and worth coming home to, an anecdote to that worst kind of homesickness that I felt after IST. Its not going to be hard to leave Senegal, it’s going to be hard to leave Saré Pathé.

The problem with IST (and congregations of volunteers in general): talking about development = talking about problems. It becomes so negative.

Storm is passing, slowly. Outside is getting clean. Everything is cool and fresh, but a little bit in shambles.

Sounds: long rolls of thunder, rain hitting the enormous puddles made by the rain that came before it, the low clucking of a chicken (sounds like she is considering something), trees soughing.

Watching the eucalyptus sway in the distance reminds me of home in the same sweet way as the smell of it – it doesn’t make me homesick, just nostalgic, knowing I will go back there someday, that I have my whole life to live in California. What a glorious future, what a wonderful present.

A cool breath of wind and a warm puppy in my lap.

9 August

Woke up early on Saturday and rode my bike to Kolda with Tanko in a bucket on the back. 75 km, over 4 hours, 2 attempted escapes. Painted the house - taking ownership, making improvements.

13 August

FAR too much down time during Ramadan. Its not so much not having work to do that gets to me, because I’m perfectly content reading for hours on end; it's the restlessness of being cooped up in my hut. Where would I go? It’s too hot to venture out and what would I do anyway? Yesterday went to Mampatim as much to interrupt the tedium as to try and get a look at the health records. The doctor wasn’t in so Chelsea and I spent the whole day lounging around her hut talking.

I can’t get over the drama of these storms

Over my shoulder the full moon shining clear and bright

Washing the compound in a dim silver glow

In front of me huge clouds rolling over us

Billowy and white up front

Black and thick with rain in the middle

21 August

Yesterday spent all day in the fields with the women, pulling weeds in the rice paddy, bent or crouched the better part of the day. These women work so hard and on no food or water right now. I sunburned a stripe across my lower back.

22 August

Woke up sometime around 2 a.m. aware that it had been pouring heavily for a while. I had been hearing it through half sleep and thinking I’d never heard it rain so hard for so long in my life. A bump in the night. I reach for my headlamp and peer through my mosquito net. There is a muddy river flowing through my room – pouring over the back doorjamb like a miniature Niagara and emptying into the ocean that was once my family’s compound. This is not a mefloquin dream. Tanko and I are floating in adjacent islands, safe from the muck and protected from the leaks through the thatch by a tarp I had tented above my bed in drier times.

I keep thinking I’ve seen the rainy season and then Africa ups the ante.

I felt like all the rain that falls on Santa Rosa in a year was falling on Saré Pathé all at once (my 30 liter beignoir set out in the open yard filled and overflowed who knows how many times over). How can that much water come out of the sky in one night? What is a monsoon? I misheard something that was said and the phrase “black rain” came to me. A perfect way to describe it. Water falling from the blackest possible sky in an endless violent downpour, flooding the village and wreaking havoc. Black rain – rain so thick you can’t see through it. African rain. Must we always come back to the Heart of Darkness?

I hear voices outside. The black rain has subsided to a normal downpour (still heavier than what we’re used to in sweet gentle America). I open the door to see Moustapha trudging through the flood, carrying something from the boys’ room to Mamadou’s. “Nafi! Big rain is happening!” I hear Maimouna, from Mamadou’s hut as well, tell me that the women’s hut is a goner. She actually uses the phrase for when you’re so full you can’t eat any more.

I went back to bed wondering what things would look like in the morning. When I got up the boys were chasing an injured bird around the compound (one of those pretty little bright yellow ones). I thought it was a game and left them to it while Filijee showed me the damage to the big room. The wall was cracked in 2 places where the flood had washed out the ground beneath it. Crack isn’t even the right word since it’s several inches wide. As we’re walking out we hear a commotion outside and the kids are yelling and huddled around Tanko who appears to be eating the wounded bird. Part of me feels bad for the poor thing, but part of me is proud of his hunter instinct since one of the reasons I got him in the first place was to keep mice and spiders out of my room. Filijee, in a rush to see the action, slips in the mud, cracking herself up and startling Bakary, who she is carrying, into tears. They manage to get the bird away from Tanko and the chase continues.

I soon find out that their panic at seeing Tanko go for the bird has nothing to do with warm fuzzy feelings for it – they don’t plan to adopt this bird, nurse it back to health and set it free or keep it as a pet like American children would want to do (like I would have wanted to do). No. They plan on eating it for breakfast. It’s such a small bird – hardly any meat on it at all. They’d get more out of one of the bull frogs I heard croaking all night. But the bird is here and has become a pretty little sacrifice to protein deficiency. Yum.

Did my laundry in clean cold rainwater.

24 August

Woke up to howling. Dogs? No, wailing. Someone in the village has died. As I wake up and get out of bed I start to think maybe I was wrong and it is just animals being noisy. The sound seems to have morphed into rooster crows as I hear it from my backyard. But when I open my front door to greet the family Maimouna tells me there has been a death after all – a two year old child who had been sick for the last couple days.

I went to sit in the women’s hut at the Sané compound across the way. The wailing had subsided into sniffles. I glanced at Filijee across from me who seemed to be lost in thought. As she stared deep into the space in front of her I wondered if she was thinking about her own child who died a few years ago. I thought about the time, already a couple months ago, when she came to me and asked if I could do anything for Bakary’s diarrhea. She seemed so panicked and then was so grateful when he got better (gosh, all I did was give him sugar and salt in water). Its just too common for children to die here of things they would never even get in America. Could I have done something if I knew this child was sick?

The first storms came from the southeast. This one came from the northwest. There’s not much of a pattern anymore.

Found a baby bat clinging to the bamboo pile under the mango tree. Its wings were so fragile and translucent, tiny pink spidery digits spread across them. The fur on its back like the softest gray velvet and little alert ears like cups of tissue paper. I moved it on a stick into the tree in an attempt to keep it form the kids. Its not there anymore.

Big rain again. I stepped out for mere seconds to put my buckets out to catch it and the back of my shirt was completely soaked. Just hoping my room doesn’t flood again. The water flows into the compound from at least five places. We seem to be at one of the lowest spots in the village. Lake Mané!

25 August

The rain started in the late afternoon and continued on through the evening. I sat in my doorway through a lot of it, watching the compound fill with water, drawing, sitting on a bucket with Tanko in my lap. Had a fun conversation with Fili about how there are men in America who carry babies on their backs and cook and clean, how men and women share work and that’s why I don’t want an African husband. I think she thought the idea of a man with a baby on his back was the funniest thing she’d heard all day. When it got dark, and after candlelit cuuro (rice porridge), sat in the new “big room,” formerly Mamadou’s room, looking at the pictures in a reader by firelight, Khady pointing out the different animals and people. Warm and cozy and exactly what I wanted to be doing.

Yesterday a baby goat hung around the compound all day. Tanko had a great time chasing it down all morning. Then it hung around until night crying and just being lost in the rain.

26 August

I think Tanko just ate the baby bat.

28 August

Yesterday was Kirimoo or Kidimoo or something like that, a holiday whose only significance that I could gather was its proximity to the end of Ramadan. They celebrate with a chicken dinner and singing into the night. Mamadou asked me for more money to get rice for dinner. We ended up killing two of the young chickens in the compound because Mamadou didn’t budget the money I advanced him the other day and couldn’t afford to buy a nice fat chicken for dinner. Why would you spend 12,000 CFA on a bag of corn if you know two days later you’re going to need rice and chicken? I don’t get it.

Filijee and Maimouna tell me that Sana ran off in the middle of the night with 10,000 CFA of Mamadou’s money and that when he found out he cried. As if he isn’t having a hard enough time scraping by. I want to do something for the family for Korité before he asks me for any favors.