My Garden Grows

Over the summer I finally put up some crintin woven fencing and turned the little space between my hut and my host mom Mariama's cooking hut into a little garden. My host family helped me get the crintin and I cleared out the trash and bricks, dug out some plots, and picked out some seeds to plant. 

With the help of Mankaba (above) and his older brother Mamadou (below with the moringa) I planted moringa, squash, cherry tomatoes, wax beans, radishes, okra and cucumbers. I tried to plant hot peppers and bitter eggplant but they didn't sprout. Luckily, Mariama, Mamadou and Mankaba's mother, has a nice garden of her own and transplanted a few seedlings over. My little garden's right next to her sleeping hut and her cooking hut it makes for a convenient kitchen garden - if all goes well the tomatoes will go in maafe tiga (the peanut sauce we eat with rice for lunch), the spinach-ish moringa leaves will go in maafe hakko (the leaf sauce we have with corn couscous for dinner) and the other things will be mixed into cucumber salads, added to sauces, or eaten afternoon snacks.

When I cleared out the garden space I realized that the moringa that Lindsay, the PCV I replaced, had planted a couple years ago had survived the long dry seasons and months and months of neglect. In Senegal people call moringa nebba die, from the English "never die" because it's such a tenacious plant. It was nice, feeling like there was some continuity between my little garden and the one she and Mamadou had planted during her service.

My first harvest of radishes and wax beans was somewhat accidental. I'd gone in only planning to thin  the radishes, which were growing in dense and tightly spaced, but most of them were already big enough to call it 'picking' rather than 'thinning.' I also snapped off a handful of beautiful purple beans (which turned green when steamed) and had a delicious mid-morning snack. Like many other Volunteers who haven't gardened in ages and who are lucky enough to live in southern Senegal (where the dirt seems to be made of Miracle-Grow) watching plants spring up in garden beds and produce recognizable, edible things seems slightly magical.

One day Mamadou planted a little banana tree. It's great, but I'm a little worried about its long-term survival outlook, since rainy season is drawing to a close and bananas need a lot of water. For the time being, though, it's a fun addition. Mariama's bitter eggplant and not peppers are coming along well, and the tomatoes are growing like they're trying to take over the world. I keep having to prop them up and trim them back so they don't cover the plants nearest them.

The squash has started fruit and also to climb up my hut; the tomatoes and okra are sprouting little tomatoes and okras, and the cucumber is blossoming nicely. I'm about to be out of village for almost a month because of work - project-related meetings and trainings followed by a Health summit in Thiès -  and I'm a little sad that I won't be able to keep an eye on my garden. While I'm away I'll check in with Mamadou and Mariama, though, and hopefully they'll be able to start harvesting some useful fruits and veggies pretty soon. 

Falling Down huts

There are a lot of huts in various states of disrepair around. In other parts of the country you'll see mostly apartment buildings, or square brick-and-mortar huts, or round mud huts covered in a protective layer of cement. Most of the huts around me are mud, though, just mud, or maybe mud spackled with a village cement made of sand and cow dung. My little hut is just whitewashed mud, with a thin cement floor added on later in order to comply with basic Peace Corps housing requirements. It works, I enjoy it, I feel very at home in my little mud house. But the mud huts aren't permanent, and when they're no longer tenable they crumble in all sorts of interesting ways. 

This hut on the left isn't really falling apart all that much, but it has a lovely squash vine on it and I like it very much. Some of the huts, especially the bigger ones with ample surface area, have stunningly large squash vines. They remind me of frilly old-timey bathing caps or something. The one on the right has slid down quite a bit over the last few weeks, the roof just sinking lower and lower after each rainstorm.

This is my favorite falling-down hut. It was at its best last month, when the tufts of grass around the wall were still short and neon-bright and the inside space was filled with corn stalks. Now the grass on top is grown long and looks slightly dry as it starts to go to seed. The broken-down huts are ruins, but ruins from a very recent past. They're made of dirt, so watching them slowly tumble back down to the ground while the grass and trees rise up around them seems symmetrical. Back from whence they came and all that. A solid hut can last for many years, a decade or mere. It's interesting, living in a structure that isn't intended or expected to last for ages. 

All the over-lush grass spilling out of the ruins of the hut on the left reminds me of a river, crashing through floodgates, and the one on the right makes me think of a game of pick-up-sticks. They're interesting, the falling-down huts, they're quiet and weathered and caught in the midst of a drastic transition; they're a little like clouds or inkblots. They look like sandcastles, or haunted shacks, or Andy Goldsworthy installation pieces. They're neat. 

I obtained guests.

A couple weeks ago my neighbor Katie had a birthday and since she'd been traveling a lot recently decided to have a party out in village instead of slogging in to the Regional House. It rained quite a bit during her ride over to my place, so she wound up do a fair big of slogging anyway, but she made it safe and sound. 

Ramadan was in full swing so we had a discreet little mac & cheese lunch in my hut, and then PCVs Jackie and Jubal came in to celebrate with fancy hors d'œuvres (Laughing Cow "cheese" and salami gifted to us from a friend), hot chocolate, and cake. 

Katie blew out the candles on her Nutella-frosted loaf-cake (imported specially from Kédougou), opened her presents (cards, seed packets, candy, and her supply refills from the med office) and we watched a few episodes of Summer Heights High on my netbook. 

My host family likes it when I have visitors, especially Jubal because he's funny, plays music, and bring seeds, and kept popping in to say hello, exclaim that I'd obtained some guests ("Adama! A hebbi hohbé!") and ask good-naturedly which of us were fasting for Ramadan. (Jubal actually is fasting, but he's still drinking water during the day.) I like having visitors, too; all in all it was a lovely little evening.

Hey, look at this thing I made.

Rainy season has begun in earnest, and that means long, damp afternoons spent in my hut, making tea, listening to podcasts, writing letters, and, most recently, sewing things. I've mended some tattered t-shirts, stitched up my mosquito net, hemmed some pants, and made a replacement pouch for my Diva Cup. (Most female PCVs here use menstrual cups because tampons and pads are not readily available. And also because they're pretty great.) It's been a long time since I sewed anything by hand, but I fussed around and pinned things together this way and that way and it came together eventually.

Tah-dahh

It was a challenge to make the stitching even, but I did remember to how to sew it inside out, line everything up, and measure it correctly. (Thanks Mom!) I was/am particularly proud of myself for making a functional drawstring to close it. Proud enough to show it to pretty much everyone who was hanging out at the Regional House, whether or not they had any interest in either arts & crafts or Diva Cups.



I also showed it to my host family; they were impressed, assumed it was a coin purse, and I didn't correct them. They also thought it was novel, a woman knowing how to sew. In Senegal tailors are almost exclusively male, and sewing is definitely considered a male activity. Not that anyone was offended, just a little amused, and now sometimes when someone on the compound needs help mending clothes or something they send a little kid to fetch me so I can come help, since I'm "very competent with the sewing."