Breathe.

The Garden

The beginning of the garden is in the hazy but bright oral history of a place where people don't move. Where each day has been the same since when it started and rumors circle and recircle like the wheels of a bicycle.

I see: the same women, younger, in carnival-colored skirts and head wraps that are now the village rags; tying millet stalk fence posts to crooked wind-smoothed logs propping up grass rooves. They're in the garden, the sun is so bright it bleaches the sky to a painful white, but the newly planted cashew trees waxy thick leaves are illuminated to brighter green than the pine tree inhabitors can imagine can exist on the same planet, in the same reality. 

The mist put in place by the distance of time makes it so you can open your eyes completely, something that one can not do in this moment in time reality. But the reality of the scene is no less clear for it not being present, oral history erases time. I have heard, in Senegal, time is circular. And so you can see, through mist transflecting light from blinding white to warm yellow, all the colors in this planet. All the man made ones and the god made ones.

Some of these women have died by now. Abdoulaye, my brother's mom, for one, a woman with no morom, the wolof word for peer/equal; there has been no one to come after her who has had her kindness, her ability to lead people with her words. What people said about her bounced off her like water on a waxy cashew leaf, she always smiled, always positive and optomistic. When I saw Abdoulaye after Laity, my counterpart, told me this story, his unique bristly mustache curling up with his genuine wholehearted smile, in the traditional storytale fashion, I understood something deeper about him, why his eyes are so kind, why I connected to him immediately. Could he tell this change in my inflection when he looked at me? 

When Naomi was there, Abdoulaye was about her age. He's forty now, was twenty then. She remembers him as being quiet. He must have just married Lira, Salane was small, her feet dangling and clicking over the cement laal as she sat next to Nilan. She's seventeen now, with large quiet eyes, like her mother, like Abdoulaye. She's guarding my room while I type on this Apple computer at my mom's plastic-coated kitchen table. Sterile. I would do anything to make her my friend.

Nilan is Naomi, perhaps the biggest legend Nguekokh has to offer. She was the first Peace Corps volunteer back in the 1990's, back before there were cell phones and internet and you used to have to wait at the telecenter with a mean lady who would let you get up to the front of the line and then tell you you couldn't call home. She was an anamatrice, a program that has been phased out. Senegal was a different world those days ago. Women weren't in school. Nguekokh had only 350 people. I feel so overwhelmed at the beauty of this village, the enormity of its history, yet its only 750 people in the whole world, and who will sit to know their stories?

 I wanted to tell you all, my dear and treasured friends and family, but will there ever be time? Time is so saturated with experience that the only yoon is that its lost, what I tell you and what you see is but a thread. So now I will tell you of the garden, and hope you will post and we can come up with a solution for how to go ahead. 

In this hazy mist, this bright utopia, this idealistic painting, women lift giant plastic basins, of every color, overflowing with ripe tomatoes over their heads. They pass them down the line, sharing and laughing, their thick white teeth like ivory radiating points of sunlight. This is the time of plenty, when basins of tomatoes flowed from the Nguekokh garden like water from a freshly dug well, how many people have told me, their eyes present in the distant past, they sold them all the way to Foundiougne, at the hotels, for the toubabs. 

But they'res more than just the women. If you give a Senegalese a paintbrush, chances are s/he is going to break into the traditional form of Senegalese painting. They will recall with the rigidity of marching in the army the drills of "learning art" that they practiced for a specified session a day. Instead of reciting drills as they do for science or matamatics, they will quadrant the paper into a space for a neatly stenciled grass hut, the women in a circle pounding millet, perhaps the men sitting drinking tea or playing cards, or pushing a machine with donkey or horse, the children chasing cast iron circles with sticks. Everyone has their role. So in the garden the men march in stage left, they are fixing the fence and tending the well, offering benevolent advice, and clearing the grass. In this time of plenty, the young men of the village had their own association. They built the school, 6 classrooms in 6 years, unheard of in Senegal, tells Laity. 

Now all these men are in their forties and have left the village to go to Dakar or Spain, France, America. Brain drain. All the youth of this generation have left as well. "It's a different time, Fatou." Abdoulaye tells me the day he is the only one to come to the reunion I called. When these men come back to the village now they stand up at meetings and pronounce deep, passionate philosophies, strengthened by experience in the outside world, exposural education. It paints for me, sadly, what must have been, when all these men were young and full of energy, their bodies, taught like a drum, bursting forth like a slingshot. The youth now slouch in their baggy clothes, watching their peers on a black and white tv, clad with sparkling jewlery and clothes, women they can never afford because in Senegal, you have to be able to afford a bed to get married. Many of them wear angry faces because they realize in the spectrum of the world, they got screwed. Sitting in villages with nothing to do, no job, no education, no money. The time is different now, with tv.

Its a different time. Mam Nene has died, the women are tired. Is it because the forest is depleted and there is no meat? Mam Diene, my father, 89, told me that when he was a boy they used to go out every day to the forest and hunt big game, bringing back meat to the village for all to eat. Now we may go for many days, the fish cart doesn't come, the women eat sheepishly what they've served, a bowl full of rice with some tomato and onion sauce drizzled on top. 

I am not Nilan. Nilan's legend is topped by the fact that she married a Senegalese, and practically the whole village loaded up in cars and drove off down the sand road to her husbands village where they drank sodas and ate until they were full. A villagers dream reality. From what I have seen and heard of Nilan's ghost floating around the village, she was dynamic and untiring, going from compound to compound, never locking her door, hanging out late into the night in her hut with the village teenage boys. I am not an anamatrice. I am a shy, inward, private person, who would much prefer to invisibly observe, participate at will, and retreat, to writing, and reading, having time to let thoughts flow free before they are smothered in stimuli. My brain is to sensitive for this hyper-stimulus world. Thats why the village, at times, the fields, my back yard stars, the peacefulness of a small family, the simple and unchanging daily life, the parable-nature of Wolof when I get it, it smoothes my ruffled brain like pomade on cracked and calloused hands. I really am like a naked turtle, it must be annoying to most if I was honest, well, at least I know now what I need.

And the youth, the world, in Senegal, has changed. The land of plenty, the things we have, are no longer a secret. Other people are finding out and getting mad, craving with all they have, imitating what they see, and not what they know. I feel a lot of anger, a loss of connection with those smiles of Senegalese spirit. Please don't loose it, world, those of you who still hold it are all that are left, lets not all chase the shiny things. Think of the raccoon, set to die with his hand stuck in a hole, tightly gripping the sparkling button. If only he would let it go, his clenched fist released would once again be able to slip through.

Ok, I am getting tired, and ranting.

The garden. Lets fast-foward to my reality, with only a little left to dip into the recent past. What's left of my ancienne is a couple happy pictures of pretty smiling white girl and key figures in my village and in Senegal: director of Peace Corps Senegal, Ambasador of United States to Senegal, Peace Corps counterpart Laity Badjane, and of course, the smooth white-grey well funded by the Peace Corps. A good thing to leave behind. Along with a request for a new volunteer interested in gardening and a paragraph in the Close of Service Report about organizing the women to work in the garden. I don't know the history of this garden, and this is going to hurt. And take time.

I get to my village in May and hold countless meetings until the present, December. For three things: 1. get started, 2. build a fence, the goats are getting in, 3. organize a governing committee.  In the beginning, my Wolof sucks, and this matters only to the point where I nervously and akwardly try to command the meeting, telling them that I want to know when we will start the garden. "Is that all you want to say, Fatou?" The most mouthy of the young women, Fatou Mbodj, says brightly. No, but it is all I can say. The women then burst into groups of twos, fours, fifteens, arguing, talking over each other, talking all at the same time. My head is spinning, literally, as I move from woman to woman trying to pick up anything, voice inflections, eye movements, volume levels. Of course, all these American assessments mean nothing because the Sereer way of speaking is different, voices may be loud as screaming, but they're talking about the quality of peanuts. Women, the men say, can't control their tounges. The men on the other hand, met before the meeting, and came to me with three points, our discussion over in minutes. They wanted electricity, and new kitchens. Laity graciously sums up what may be 2 hours of arguing: we'll start tomorrow.  

But tomorrow, we don't start. And gradually, as the months go on, the amount of women who come to the meetings wanes. Are they loosing faith in me, or each other? I, feeling helpless and useless, wander around the village like a degraded crazed person, my hair dreading into knots, my skirts constantly upshevled. What is my purpose to wake up each day, highly salaried, as each person has their role? My job as a Peace Corps volunteer, come all the way from the brightly colored couches of my bright-talking friends: talking. My other counterpart, Fary, a teacher, once told me I was comparable to the village crazy person. There are no social services in the village, the crazy people free to roam and shooed as sheep, they can sit and stare just as long as they don't start doing inappropriate things in public. I too sit in corners of family compounds, or right in the middle, and stare at people. Occasionally I start a successful conversation. And if I do something inappropriate, they forgive me. Or at least, they float somewhere in a buffer zone of fear and awe. I'm from a different world, untouchable through blankets of language, computers, cars, shiny gratte-ciels and functional highways. What's scary was meeting Senegalese people in little Senegal today in New York City. They speak English and so through the blanket of language comes people loud and clear: they are no different from us. What we chalk up to be "cultural differences" I think most of the time we are mistaking for language inefficiencies on our parts. The differences aren't that vast and weird between my city-walking feet and my henna-clad village dirty ones. We're all the same.

Of course, in a parallel universe world, anything I say can be just as easily retracted. Except the facts. So lets stick to the non abstract reality things. Though they end up recounting my day and are a lot less interesting. But I am trying to work here. Philosophy is left for free time. 

I gather, from this different, slower, more personal path, over the time period of about half a year, what's lying behind this failure to launch. Politics. See, back in the time of milk-and honey, certain people worked harder than others, certain people contributed more than others financially, certain people took their sack of ceeb (rice) at the end of the year and didn't pay for it, and so the garden was squandered. AND THEN GOD SAID: the well dried up. And so the time of plenty was over and people were discouraged. The word for lazy and discouraged, parasseus and decoragee, in Wolof, is the same: tayal.

This is a typical Senegalese developmental problem. You spend a whole year preparing your young trees, by the hundreds. First, you find and buy the seeds. Then you go to Eaus et Forets and get the little black plastic tree sacks. You dig the trench, you mix the manure and the sand, you fill the sacks, you press a hole into the soft moist dirt with your finger and put in the seed, (hang up the telephone), you line the sacks up in the trench. You water, day in, day out, morning and evening, at the right times (water=pulling, hauling, and then watering), from March until the first rains (May-July), you go to your field, you measure the right spacing for the grown up trees, you dig a proper hole, you gently peel off the plastic bag, don't harm the roots, you place the tree in the hole, don't bend them, you fill up the hole. And then God takes over. He brings rain.

You watch your trees grow up big and strong. To your knees, to your waist, your chest. Your neighbors cows break into your field, eating some, so the ones that survive are even more the apple of your eye. And then the locusts come. One day you walk out to your field, and all you see, thin, almost invisible against the grey horizon, the thin, gnarled sticks, the would-have been trunks of your baby mango trees. The locusts have eaten them all.

I watched Laity chase a locust that day. A year later, this one came all on its own. His gait and spring gleeful, his mustache once again curling over his smile, bright against the horizon, his skin blends in, "Xaral bimay ray this one." He says, he likes to mix English and Wolof, so I never know how much he's getting. He's going to kill this one. 

Things like this happen to the Senegalese all of the time. They spend 3 weeks seeding their fields from dawn to dusk in the blistering sun, dragging themselves onto their mats in the cool evenings to pass out sometimes without dinner. The second rain comes and everything sprouts, rows and endless rows into the horizon of tiny bright green shoots, and then, it doesn't rain for another 3 weeks. Everything dies. You seed your field again.

How can I spite these people? A space in my heart so tender for a soul so unable to die. You see it so many times. There souls are so vibrant, so strong and defined, unwarbling. You can see it in their bodies. Their taught shiny skin. Their deep ebony blackness, refusing to be muted out by the unyeilding sun. It radiates with a reddish glow. Their firm muscles, not a quiver of flesh. Their bones, holding firm, though their skin may weigh down on them. Their bodies are what their souls would look like if we could see them. Blunt. Defined. Strong. Is that the same for us?

Yet what people do to them is perhaps more tiring than what God does. Yallah baax naa. Inshallah. Bu sobe Yallah...God is good they say. God willing. If it pleases God. We cannot know what God intends. But oral history does not let us forget the will of people. And so, the biggest block to this garden, people unwilling, perhaps unable to work together.

Is the time of community working over for Nguekokh? (insert: world) Think of the elements of working together. Now it is possible for individuals in Nguekokh to get out, to go to Dakar, to make a live for themselves. Back before this was possible, people in the community needed to pool their resources so they could have more together than they could have on their own. Maybe this sort of community work is obsolete.

Should I settle to take some time, perhaps my whole service, to wander around, talking to individuals, to find other ideas for projects? Or should I buckle down, and commit to this project that I first started, that has taken every ounce of my energy since I moved to Nguekokh? I have learned so much about it. In the words of Shannon Leitner, it is a fine line, a difficult choice between holding peoples hands and letting them go, or enabling them to become dependent. How do we know? We can't. So vote on this particular situation. I can look back at the end of my service and be glad that I was the villages *itch, managing fights, allowing people to take advantage of me for free seeds, or hard earned pepinieres under feigned ignorance (there have been instances of people coming to my backyard and asking for my baby tomato plants, or seeds that I have, because they don't know how to grow them, when they do, but I find out later, came to ask because the village decreed that each person needs to buy seeds for their plots, so while most people buy seeds, others find ways to finagle out of it, some of them by using me). And so now I am in the village politics, and maybe am happy for this, I am in it...

but oh, I am tired, and I don't know if I've put everything in, but due to the rapid changing of my situation, from now until whenever, and the fact that the time I have and the things that will fill it is like a mouse through a pencil hole, I must publish...

thank you friends for a wonderful vacation, you fill my heart with what it needs to propel me through the ride, what keeps a plane in the sky?