Happy holidays, everybody! I miss you guys so much, although I am having fun here in Kolda and it is fairly festive. I hope you’re all well and have traveled safely to wherever you are today. I’m typing this on my new laptop, which just got here a week ago, yay! Hopefully this means I will be better about keeping in touch. It’s been a while since I wrote, I know. I’m trying to remember what I haven’t written about…
The rice and peanut harvests are about finished, finally. My Nene really can work - she’s spent most of the day every day the past month out in the rice ‘farrow’ cutting each individual stalk with a little knife and making them into bundles. I helped for the first week or two, but then got fairly sick with diarrhea and then a cold and some other stomach illness. Also, Sadio (one of Wurra’s wives) had her mother come help for a week or so, and Jeneba, an adoptive daughter of my Nene’s who lives in Sare Gagna (with David Shames) also came and helped.
The men are getting the peanuts all packed up for wholesale, in this manner: they let them dry, then beat them with sticks until the peanuts come off the plant, then wait for the wind to blow and pour the leaves and nuts into the wind to separate them. Then they bring the leaves to the house for the livestock and put the nuts in huge sacks. They don’t fetch a very good price, for the amount of work that goes into them. The rice isn’t sold at all, just saved and eaten. They pound the bundles to separate the rice from the stalks, then steam the grains to loosen the hulls, dry them in the sun and then pound them as they need rice, to remove the hulls.
I’m getting started on a demonstration garden with my host brother Daouda these days. Everyone around here wants to garden, because it’s a source of income, mostly for women. However, fencing is expensive and requires male labour (in their opinion) so gardens are usually only established, beyond tiny house gardens, by aid organizations. They also try to hold training sessions for the leaders of women’s groups. But obviously aid organizations don’t provide enough gardens for every village to have one, so I’m going to try out some live fencing species that could be used as a cheaper and more permanent means of fencing gardens.
The kids are out of school for three weeks around Christmas and the New Year, which is a bit odd, because that’s much longer than they got for the biggest Muslim holiday, and most of them are Muslim. But they do celebrate Christmas on the 24th, sort of, with food and wearing nice clothes, and they do fireworks on Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Last night we had meat and potatoes and salad - and also rice, as always. Today the guys at the Peace Corps house are roasting a pig in a pit, as well as cooking chicken and beef! There are some volunteers from my training stage out visiting, and it’s nice to see them again. I’m heading up to St. Louis, a historically Catholic city to meet up with a lot of other people from our training stage for a few days for the New Year. Should be fun!
