Why I'm Glad I Got A Shovel

About heavy rains and my backyard… I am so glad I bought the shovel. Last night’s storm started out fast and furious. I had trenched around my douche to prevent repetition of the mudslide from last week but hadn’t yet dug a drainage ditch for my yard (future garden). The trench around the douche performed fairly well, although it needs some reworking. I know those of you in San Antonio are familiar with flash flooding. Well, it exists here too. This is the story of how I found out about it:

It was a cloudy afternoon with thunderheads looming on the eastern and western horizons. We left the baptism (slash dance party) early to rearrange our rooms so that when the wind picked up, the vulnerable parts of our roofs wouldn’t leak onto important belongings. The clouds hovered and breeze swirled, but little movement was made as the rain bided its time, planning its attack strategy. Knowing there’d be at least an hour before the water came and needing some alone time, I took a walk up into the woods behind the village and circled around to the fields to see the freshly sown manioc and peanut sprouts. As I walked, I prayed for a big, loud storm to come and offer me an excuse to make some American tea and hole-up in my room. A well-timed phone call saw me all the way back to my compound (thanks B, it was so great to talk to you), where the family was gathered eyeing the sky and beginning dinner preparations. To the delight of all the children, Awa and I played a game of hopscotch in the quickly darkening twilight. Meanwhile, the stormclouds brewed directly overhead, gathering their ranks into a mass ready to drop with mighty force.

Then the rain fell, softly at first, giving us enough time to collect our chairs and mats and take shelter in our huts. Next the wind started in. It swept wildly through the back door, so I closed it, my window, and the front door. I sat in the dark and began searching for leaking drips as the rain pounded out its angry beat on my thatch roof. I was moving my belongings out of water’s way (not much, just enough to merit some temporary redecoration) when I noticed a friendly frog hopping near the back door, looking for an escape. “Hello, little frog! I bet you want out. I’ll just open the door and let you go be in the rain,” I thought. MISTAKE!

I opened the door just enough to let the frog out and WHOOSH! My backyard flooded into my room. I quickly closed the door and started moving buckets out of the way. It was too late. The seal on the door was broken (or perhaps it wasn’t really sealed in the first place and I just didn’t notice the trickling water in the dark while I was busy aiming my flashlight at the ceiling). Once I had consolidated all of my belongings into the one dry corner of my room and shimmied my bed into shallower water, I sat down and waited. Every few minutes I’d check my window to see if the rain had let up. When I was sure that it was safe to open the front door, I went out into the now very light rain and walked around my hut to peer over the fence into my backyard to check on the water level. Opening the door again was out of the question, but I had to know if the flood had subsided. It had. I thought about how I would have to wait until morning, with half of my room sitting in a couple inches of water and began to wonder about dinner. Tijaani came to the cooking hut (directly next to mine) to check on the pot, which was happily boiling away, unbothered by the rain. She looked in my room to see if I had any leaks and found my mini-pond. “Wait a minute, I’ll be right back,” she says. She came back a few minutes later with some of the moms in my compound. They grabbed my broom and one left to return with a cup to bail out my room. Once most of the water was gone (amazingly, a broom and a determined Senegalese woman are pretty effective with standing water), we went to another building in my compound to eat dinner. The rain continued all through the night and well into the morning today, although the initial deluge was the worst of it by far. The moral of the story, according to Kay, is keep your frogs. I think for me, it’s don’t wait to landscape your backyard. Do it immediately. I’ll do it tomorrow (or tonight if there’s time when I get home).

In other news, the best part of my week was when I wandered out to the rice fields to see where my mother plants our rice. They were so excited about my going out to the fields. I went in the morning and watched. I helped hoe for about a minute and a half, and that was enough for the people on the complete opposite side of town to be asking me about my farming experience in the afternoon. What’s more, the rice faros are away from the village in the most beautiful setting I’ve seen here. This is the Africa I’ve been waiting to see. I forgot to bring the cord to connect my camera to my computer, but I will put up pictures eventually. Even better, it is utterly peaceful out there. The birdsong was amazing and everything is so green. I found a broken down building, which my mother told me belonged to a Canadian several years ago. Apparently he came down from Tamba and helped log the area. Who knew that by asking one simple question, “I saw a building. It’s broken. What is it?” I would have a twenty-minute history lesson on the environmental past of our village. Great! That is exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to find out about for the environmental assessment I’ll need to present at IST.

It was a good week.

I am looking forward to next week. There is a 4th of July celebration in Kedougou and I’m gonna bookend my trip with visits to Mary’s and Kay’s villages. That means, of course, that I probably won’t be online, and it’s also why I’m in town today. I want to be in my village Monday because I’m headed to Mary’s on Tuesday. There’s a wedding tomorrow on the other side of town, so that should be fun too. Good food and lots of dancing. Although about the food… there was meat for the baptism yesterday and I had some for dinner, but I have no idea what kind of animal or even what organ it was that I ate. All I know is that it was definitely meat, kind of shrively, and not that bad. It looked like an oversized mitochondria… maybe a liver or a stomach? I don’t think it was intestines because I’ve seen chitlins, and this wasn’t it. It definitely wasn’t sheep brain, because we dissected one of those in high school bio. Really no idea. I might have asked, but I was tired and the rain was loud on the tin roof. Besides, I’m not sure I really want to know. That being said, I hope you all have a very happy 4th with fireworks and food that you recognize. Until next time!