7. Day in the Life, Pt. 1

I usually wake up around 5 am. Unless I remember to put in my earplugs, or I happen to sleep through the Morning Prayer. It is amplified on the only electronic device I know of in the village other than flashlights, and the mosque is not far from my house, my host dad being the Imam and the village being very small.

Then I fall back to sleep immediately, and wake up again at about 6:15, at which point I either a) Go on a run, or b) roll back over for another hour. If I choose option (a) I get to see the beauty of the forest and fields at dawn, when the sun is but a gentle and tender golden orb, and the mist rises serenely in the morning silence. But this is rare, for I normally choose option (b) and fall back asleep.

Activity in my compound begins around 6:30 or so when one or more host moms rises to start pounding corn. After this point, babies start to cry, kids get up and start yelling, and animals (Cows, donkeys, goats, sheep, chickens, dogs etc.), who never really stop making noise during the night start making even more noise. By around 7:15 the compound is crazy, and I am roused one last time from my slumber. The space of the compound is shared with something like 35 people, and by 7:30 the chaos has usually reached the plateau that it stays at for most of the day.

A typical compound scene

Sometimes, after getting up I will try to make coffee, on wood flame^[1], or eat a Kola nut, but usually I drink a bunch of water, and a shot of delicious Kedougou honey, bought at the market for $4 a liter.

Breakfast is invariably ‘koojio’, viscous corn porridge of sorts with a good bit of sugar. It is quite good. I would not, however, object to a bit of variation. This meal is eaten in the front room of my host dad's hut, unlike lunch and dinner, which we eat in the shaded courtyard of the mosque. Along with my host dad, we eat meals with one of his sons, and a shifting mix of Talibé students and young men who are Koranic teachers in training.

I do not yet understand how it is determined who eats with us. It is an ongoing game of musical chairs-- except without chairs, since we eat in a squatting position on the ground/floor. We use deep spoons to slurp up Koojio, the only utensil of any kind employed throughout the day’s meals.

Women and men never eat together. When female volunteers visit for lunch they stay back and eat with the women and kids in my compound, while I go with the men to the Mosque. That's just how it is. 

The women's/children's bowl

Women make food magically appear wherever we are about to eat it. I almost never notice the bowl(s) arriving at the mosque or host dad’s, and my host mom is gone before I knew she had arrived.

After breakfast I pack my daypack, brush my teeth, take my malaria pill, and go find a garden to work in. 

During my first couple months in site, I have had two main work sites. Things are quickly diversifying as I get more established in the community, but thus far work has been straightforward.

One is a little garden next to the 'forage' (water pump, installed by the government) that I have been re-establishing after a season of unruly fallow. Now that it is established, all that I do most mornings is water. Village kids often wander to the garden, and seeing me working, want to help. They find me to be hilarious and interesting.

When this began, I was happy to have the kids participate. But was still protective of my work.

Clearing out the space with Douwa, who is terrific, and whose name means 'prayer'

This led to frustration. The kids would overwater-- which is extremely hard to do here-- step in beds and transform the garden into a loud, chaotic space of increasing, rather than decreasing entropy. I struggled to get the kids to be more careful with their work, but this would end one of two ways. Either the children would not understand, care, or know how to be more careful (these kids are young, 5-9 range), or a nearby adult would see my attempt to communicate and try to help me out, by yelling harshly at the kids, which is the usual way of handling kids here.

I found both of these scenarios to be less than ideal, but I did not know what to do until one day on a bike ride I had the idea to give the garden to the kids. This way I could reduce my own concern with the situation, and hopefully inspire a little bit of responsibility through ownership.

A brilliant idea, I thought.

So, I announced that very evening that the garden was now the ‘kid’s garden’ (Dindingolu laa sardingé, in Jaxanké) and tried to make sure the kids understood. I appointed my host brother, Bassiru, who is nine, cool, and helpful, to head up the project. I told the kids that I would keep doing things there, but that I wanted them to initiate the daily watering. 

The idea garnered with almost zero enthusiasm from the kids. I had imagined that they would be thrilled and enthusiastically claim the space as their own, but instead this garnered nothing more than apathetic sighs of acceptance. 

I pressed the idea anyway, and would remind the kids in the morning and the evening that they should go water their garden. I also tried discussing with them things that they wanted to do, asking, “Is there anything in specific you would like to grow?”

Nada.

They cared very little for the role of proprietor. They continued to water for a while, but enthusiasm waned quickly until one day Bassiru actually just said 'No, we aren't going to water,' with a smile and waggle of the head as if he were declining a second helping of mashed potatoes. Totally inoffensive. Just an honest declination. They simply didn't want to do it.

Young Bassirou unenthusiastically waters a young Banana

This didn't bother me—I never pressed the kids to do anything in anything other than a casual way— but I was perplexed. Why were these kids unwilling to water?

They had been so enthusiastic about helping at first!

I didn’t leave when they were watering. I was still there, tending to other tasks, so we were still working together. They were still helping the toubab!

But, that wasn't it. I was missing something.

Then one day I began rereading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. When I got to the second chapter, Strong Temptations, about the white picket fence, I had to laugh at myself.

Mark Twain, reflecting on a situation not unlike my own, recognizes and extracts a universal lesson of human nature in this archetypical story of human behavior.

In Strong Temptations, Tom wants to play outside. It is a nice day and he has fun plans, but his aunt tells him that he’s got to paint the fence first. To deal with this situation he cleverly manipulates his playmates’ perception of work and play by charismatically portraying the task as fun. His peers then come to covet the chore, and actually trade him apples and other trinkets in exchange for the privilege to paint the fence.

A skilled Marketer

The job remains the same. All that changes is the framing, which then alters how the job is perceived.

I realized that what I was experiencing here was the inverse of this story. The children here enjoyed playing with me while I worked. As long was it was my project, they were carelessly tagging along and what they were doing was not work, even if they were helping me work. However, when I made them responsible, it became work, and suddenly not fun.

Good literature, I suspect, is a teacher for all times and places.

At this point my task is to find a way to reframe helping me as epic fun. 

Needless to say, the 'children's' garden is not my top priority. It is fun, and a social work environment, but the main project is the Master Farm.

Generally, Mamadou, my master farmer, has long since watered everything and is busy with some kind of task when I get out to the farm. The diligence, strength, effectiveness, and knowledgeability of his work as a farmer is truly impressive. He is an deeply religious man[2]. He rises with the first prayer calls of the morning at 5 am and begins preparing himself for the day. In the evenings he often lays out a canvas sack or whatever he has on hand and performs the 4:00 and 7:00 prayers in the Master Farm. 

He is also, for me, one of the most comprehensible people in the village. This is in large part because of his extremely cool, unhurried manner, and slow, clear speech, as well as our common ground as gardeners/farmers. When going in to the Peace Corps, I knew that I would learn more than I would or could ever teach. However I never expected how drastically true that would be. Until this point, between Mamadou and I, the flow of information has been virtually all in one direction.

But it is much more than farming techniques/facts that I have been learning from this man-- the greatest and most profound thing that I am learning from Mamadou is about the spirit of an African subsistence farmer. His outlook, and attitude towards things is, I want to say, fundamentally different than anyone I have ever gotten to know. He seems to have a total affinity with the land, and is calm and thoughtful in his actions and affairs. He carries out his tasks as a farmer with an inspired harmony with the space and things around him. In his presence I feel a calmness and peace that I cannot honestly equate to anything I've known before. 

Mamadou, who has never heard, or heard of 2Pac

I have obviously known many inspired, peaceful farmers and agriculturalists in other parts of the world, but none of them could honestly have been called subsistence farmers, and they were all quite modern in their subjectivity.

Mamadou is a man with only limited formal education of any kind-- Koranic school. Thus his spirit and mind have been cultivated in a way that is not possible through any institution.

If I can find the words I would like to elaborate on this.

Ours is a relationship of relatively few words, but mutually understood silences.

The work on the MF is, so far, my primary effort with regards to the first goal of the Peace Corps.^[3] I enjoy most every aspect of the MF work; my agency in the planning and execution of projects, the collaboration with Mamadou, other Darou Salaamians, and the Peace Corps, and the work itself, which is quite interesting, challenging, and strenuous.

Most of all I think I like it because every bit of work I do-- every shovel full of dirt I lift, every time I swing a pick and every bucket of water I pull out of the well-- is a contribution to a tangible end, much of which I am able to admire with time. There is a very real telos with the work, as the space improves, I get to enjoy it. I will someday literally enjoy the fruits of my labor.

These days, there are two main tasks that occupy a good chunk of my time on the farm. Watering, and digging beds.

Watering:

Southern Kedougou gets slightly more rain in an average year than Portland, Oregon; almost 7 feet a year. 

Skewed

That is a lot of water. The issue is that it all falls within 5.5 months, and 3/4ths of it within 3 months. So it comes hard and fast. Thus it is extremely hard to manage and inevitably leads to flooding and erosion. This is not ideal for agriculture.

And when the rain stops it is followed by 7 months of heat and total dryness. Most of the verdure does not last more than a month after the rains stop, so Kedougou quickly transforms from a land of lush verdure to an extremely dry landscape of parched, cracked, white earth.

So water becomes this divine life-giving force that is miraculous and fleeting. If you want anything to survive through the dry season you have to just dump it on, day in and day out. Thus, as the garden expands, pulling water from the well has come to occupy a large chunk of time every morning and evening.   

Digging beds:
The land that is now the Master Farm has been used to grow peanuts for many years. When these are harvested in the ‘traditional’[4] way, the entire plant is pulled out of the ground, and fed to animals, or just left in a pile to dry out/rot. This means that the nutrients of the plant, which is in fact a nitrogen fixing legume, are not recycled back into the earth at all. Over many years this practice can leach the soil of nutrients, and reduce the land to hard, pale earth. Because of this, it takes a lot of work to get the land into vegetable-growing shape.  

We start this process by watering sections of the farm we want to dig. This loosens the land up a little. Then it becomes a matter of elbow grease. First you hit the whole area with a pick, then double dig it to add amendments, and shape it into a bed. It is a long process, but I will not bore you with more details. 

Mamadou placing tree sacks in our nursery

I do this a lot. It is very important. I believe that there is a good deal of art in the creation of a well-amended bed. Mamadou and I spend many mornings heaving picks in parallel beds, sweating in some kind of meditation of hard work. He works much faster than I. Slowly we are taking the blank canvas of this Master Farm, and creating a beautiful work of art.

There are a great number of other agricultural tasks that Mamadou and I attend to on the MF. We mix sand and manure together and plant tree seeds in this mix in plastic sacks. We add mulch to beds, transplant things from nurseries, clear brush, seed new nurseries, etc. I will never want for lack of tasks on the MF.

Of course my ultimate job is not to simply grow eggplants and mangos on a Master Farm. It is to inspire other people to do so, and show them how to do so 'better'. This is the real challenge of PC work; moving from straightforward Agricultural work, which I know and love, to larger scale work of education, and technique/seed extension. The MF is very important, either way, as a demonstration space for the techniques and varieties that are intended to help improve agricultural practices in my village.  I am focusing on creating a thriving gardening space so that I can gain credibility in the eyes of my fellow villagers, and inspire them to consider new practices.

If it is not intensely hot, (a relative term) Mamadou and I may well work straight through the morning and into the early afternoon. I drink the water straight out of the well on the farm. It is sweet, cool, and hasn't gotten me sick once. This also allows me to stay out there for extended periods of time.

Where I read

If this should be the case, one of Mamadou's wives or children will bring lunch out to the farm and we will eat right there under a tree. I love doing this, because when I go back to my compound my family is usually eating lunch there as well, and I get to enjoy a second lunch, often a different dish-- a very wonderful thing considering the monotony of the food in village.

My Crew

Back in the compound I do a lot of my hanging out with the kids and babies. This is really fun and entertaining because I am the coolest thing that has every happened in their entire lives. I don’t say this lightly. I am the first toubab these kids have ever known. I own stuff they didn't know existed, and act in a way that is very different from anyone they know. I play with them and mess around and they find this endlessly entertaining. It is also fantastic language practice.

So any time I come and kick back in my compound I am generally swarmed by children who I adore. But I can only do so much of this, so I will very often retire into my hut for a time while waiting for lunch and drink chia seeds and read.

Where I sleep

That gets me to lunch on a typical day. Obviously though there is no such thing as a typical day, and my life changes with time and with the seasons. The onset of hot season will be sure to change things. During this period of time a large part of my job will just be staying alive. It has already gotten to 110 in Tamba, just north of Kedougou. The hot season is worst between April and early June. It is approaching fast. I plan on swimming in whatever is left of the Gambia River as much as possible, and doing anything that needs to be done very early in the day.

Anyway, I will leave it there for now.

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^[1] As with the whole village; to my knowledge there are no gas stoves in Darou Salaam. I went to buy a little one to facilitate personal cooking but the dispensary had gas canisters available for exchange only. Compressed natural gas seems to be in short supply in Kedougou.

[2] Indeed the Jaxankés are known and renown throughout west Africa as especially devoted Muslims.

^[3] Which reads: “To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.”

[4] I use scare quotes here because the peanut was introduced to (read ‘forced onto’) the Senegalese by the French. It is native to what is now Paraguay. So any ‘tradition’ is a relatively new one.

6. Scenes of Dar Salaam

Boubacar and Omar, host brothers. Behind them, the rice harvest underway.

Boubacar and Omar

Chaffing rice

Chaffing rice. Harvest labor is mostly gendered. 

Hitting rice, 

to separate the grain from the stalk,

in unison. 

My hut from the back.

The route back to Kedougou

Duwa, clearing land for a garden space.

Dar Salam Women’s Garden. Guess my job here is done.

Future women in the Women's Garden

With no money for watering cans they have another way to evenly water beds here.
Flick o’ the wrist.

Women’s Garden. They are on it.

Compound at the edge of the village at sunset.

Dar Salaam women's group breaks ground on a newly fenced addition to their garden space. 

Kelsey, another PCV, and Mamadou Minté plant bananas in the Master Farm

Minté in his Master Farm.

Chameleon on a mango tree.

Gambia River, 10 minutes away.

Gambia river, kids forge to play soccer in a village on the other side.

Omar, Boubacar and Mamadou. Host Brothers.
Each has a different mother, but all the same father. 

Host moms; Amiñata, back left, Fatoumata, with son Omar, back right, Binta, front right. Woman in the center is Fatoumata, who is Fatoumata’s daughter, and her son Ousmane is on her right. Here they render Shea butter/oil.

With host moms, sister and brothers

My backyard

5. Dar Salaam

As Chad and I bike into Dar Salaam, the thatched roofs of circle huts gradually come into view above the fields of corn. Next to the houses unruly garden plots full of okra, bissap, eggplant and tomato compete with thick weeds. Mango, shea, fig and other trees I do not yet know sprinkle the landscape beyond the houses in every direction.

Houses here are organized into groupings around a courtyard or common area; compounds. Each of these is home to approximately one family, in a loose sense of the word.  I count about 10-12 compounds in Dar Salaam, although sometimes the units are not clearly defined. There are said to be between 180 and 200 people living here, depending on the time of year.

Rice Fields

Chad helped prepare the village to be a Peace Corps site. Thus he knows the people, and took me around to make my preliminary introductions. Greetings are very important in Senegalese culture. First we found my master farmer, Mamadou Minté, and after a beaming introduction, he took us straight out to the Master Farm[1], which is less than one year old[2]. This farm will surely be the focus of much of my work, and much trial and error during my service.

Biking out to the farm I began my orientation to the peripheral farmlands of Dar Salaam. Beyond a band of cornfields the land dips slightly, and in this wide basin I beheld a great, bright green field of rice.


This is a big deal in Senegal, where rice is the preferred grain, but almost impossible to grow in much of the country. The fields were proudly pointed out to me by each person I met in the village. The Master Farm is just beyond the rice, on a gentle slope.

As of yet, there is not much going on in the farm, but it is a good piece of land. A handful of Mango, banana, citrus, and papaya trees, though very young, are in the ground, and a half dozen beds have been dug and have vegetables growing. Much of the rest of the space is home to corn and peanut fields, per the traditional practice, and much is fallow.

A young mango tree

Beds of pepper and Jaxatu in the Master Farm

Then we went to the chief of the village, who is the cousin of my master farmer and has the same name, and then to compound of my host family.

The compound is a lively place. My host dad has 3 wives (which means 3 host moms!), and more than a dozen kids. I am impressed every day by the generosity, energy and compassion of these three women, Fatumata, Bintu and Aminata. In addition to their own kids and husband, they also cook for me, and an additional 20-25 other mouths for every single meal, over open woodfire, pounding all of their own corn and rice for every meal by mortar and pestal. Yet they still find time to cultivate numerous beautiful gardens, make shea butter, walk all the way to Kedougou to sell vegetables a couple times a week, and perform a wide variety of other tasks, and they still have the patience to hang out and talk with me and answer my dozens of frustratingly basic questions about the Jaxanké language. I have no words to describe my respect for these women.

When I met him my new host dad introduced himself as Ousmane Minté, and donned me his Toxoma (Namesake).

Henceforth, I am Ousmane Minté.

Ousmane is an Imam— an Islamic religious leader/teacher—in addition to farming corn, rice and peanuts. He runs the Koranic school in Darou Salaam, and hosts about 20 Koranic students known as Talibés in a dormitory style building in our compound, opposite my hut. That makes perhaps 35-40 residents in my compound alone.  Suddenly this village of 200 did not feel so small.

The Talibé Koranic school system has been the subject of considerable controversy in Senegal in recent years. I will attempt to treat it with prudence.

Talibé is Arabic for ‘student who has travelled to learn.’ They are all male. The Talibé system is a long, complex story.  It is not unique to Senegal. Talibé systems of various kinds exist in a number of other Muslim countries.

The gist is this: families (sometimes, but not necessarily generally poor) hear of an imam in a city or village somewhere that will host children, feed them and school them on the Koran in exchange for work. Perhaps there is a familial connection. Perhaps it is only a vague notion of a generous and wise religious leader. Often the connection is related to whichever brotherhood the family adheres to. (This—the system of Sufi brotherhoods in Senegal— is another, complex and interesting topic.)

The students then go to live with the Imam, or at least in his village, and divide their time between learning a trade, generally farming, and the Koran. This is the traditional notion of the Talibé system. Today however, in many parts of the country, particularly urban centers, the system is unrecognizable to what it once was, having been twisted by corruption and abuse into a system of parasitical patronage.

This is where things get complicated. I highly suggest this short essay as an introduction to/example of the urban Talibé system, and its fall from grace. http://www.talibes.org/2013/10/26/history-of-the-talibe-system-in-saint-louis/
Talibés face a frightening reality in the cities, where they are essentially forced to abuse the ubiquitous Muslim generosity of alms, while the Imam lives comfortably off of the appropriated profits.

Talibé boys in M'bour. The ubiquitous yellow bowls are virtually their only possession

Obviously this is a somewhat simplified, and generalized story. It is not easy to render such a complex situation to in any way. It is also important to emphasize that the Talibé as a system of blatantly corrupt patronage and (arguably) quasi child slavery is almost uniquely an urban phenomenon. The Talibé school of Dar Salaam, my village, is of a different breed. In my opinion, urban and rural Talibés deserve different appellations.

 In Darou Salaam the children, learn, unambiguously, about farming. They are in the fields every day, and learn first hand from accomplished farmers. Much of this is mundane manual labor, but it is a concrete and productive skill nonetheless. The world needs farmers. I have no doubt that working with these kids to enrich the depth and diversity of their knowledge and understanding of agriculture will factor heavily into my service. They are also great kids to hang out with, eat peanuts and practice language.

Pulling peanuts in the Master Farm

I cannot, on the other hand, speak to the quality of their Koranic education, but Ousmane, my host father and their imam is a good man, and I know he is doing what he can.
However, for what I can tell, the Koranic learning is mostly cursory memorization of Arabic phrases. It does not seem as though the students really know what they are saying much less how to read or write the prayers, verses, and stories of Islam.

Studyin the Koran by the light of a bonfire. Every night.

This also means, since there is no French school in the village, that none of the kids are gaining any literacy in French or the Latin script.  As far as I can tell there is one person in my village who can read or speak French, including the adults. I hesitate, I really do, to renounce full cultural relativism and implicate that the knowledge of French is more important, or useful than Arabic. My approach is to try to think about (1) how the languages are taught and (2) what their knowledge allows the student to do/accomplish.

Unfortunately the teaching of French here does involve a good amount of rote memorization as well, but it is undeniably less. Also, there are many more opportunities to practice the French language, since it is the most common written language, used for news, advertisements, etc. Thus learning it in school is a great deal more likely to lead to real literacy. As far as the advantages to learning a language, knowing French opens the door to far more influences and perspectives than Arabic in Senegal. This is just a simple fact of the available literature, education, and business opportunities in this country—it is French, and not Arabic that opens the door to a diversity of knowledge.

The obvious and irrefutable retort here is that the word of God is not written in French, and apparently cannot be, and knowing this is of far greater consequence than any literature or worldly information. I can only suggest here that Islamic scholars may well have developed the scientific method, and contributed formidably to other realms of thought such as logic and mathematics while France was ruled by barbarians. Scientific inquiry is arguably a fundamental and necessary part of Islam, as the Koran instructs the reader to come to know, through study, the world of God’s creation.[3] It can also be said that Arabic is a great language of learning, and there is no shortage of books about all topics published in this language.

The simple fact, however, responding to both of these, is that in Senegal knowledge about the wider world is much more available in French than Arabic.
It is also true that these are both languages of invasive cultural and political hegemonic powers, past and present. So I guess you just have to pick your poison.

Nonetheless, compared to other examples of the Talibé school system in Senegal, the Islamic pedagogy of Dar Salaam seems to do a better job than most.  The boys do not beg, and they are learning how to farm. Sometimes, that may be all you can hope for.

---

[1]“The Master Farmer program is a joint effort between Peace Corps Senegal and the U.S. Agency for International Development in Senegal that seeks to improve local communities’ food security by developing a plot of land for demonstration and training.” (http://www.peacecorps.gov/media/forpress/press/2253/) Basically the Peace Corps pays to build a solid fence around a hectacre of land, and a well, as well as some fruit trees to get things started. Then they support the master farmer in developing the area to be an example of (whatever they decide to be) good agricultural practices for the community. They do this through trainings and seed extension, but mostly though grass roots community involvement and participation. (AKA my job)

[2] The story of the development of the Darou Salaam as a Master Farm/Peace Corps site is rather amusing. As is stated above, the Master Farm program is funded by US AID funds. These are contingent funds, meaning that the money is available to be spend for a period of time, and if it is not used, or at least contracted within that time frame, the opportunity is lost. The Senegal MF national coordinator called a volunteer in Kedougou in February or March of 2013 and said, ‘you have one week to find a new Master Farm site in the Central Kedougou work zone.’ So the volunteers in the area scrambled to make that happen, and Darou Salaam was selected, hastily, and perhaps out of necessity, but not without good reason; it is a wonderful village.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_science