Village news

written Friday, 15 June 2007

If my village had a newspaper, this is what would be in it:

 

Khadija the Toubab is brought into the village by gendarmes and visited by them again a week later

My "security incident" is still the most exciting thing to have happened here for a long time, it seems. Nearly every day someone asks me if I have seen the guy again or assures me that he will be caught, or that he has left the village for good (the person everyone in the village suspects hasn't come back to the village since just after the incident).

I was brought into the village by gendarmes at the request of Peace Corps, who thought after I reported the incident to them that it would scare off any potential future bad guys if the villagers saw me with the gendarmes. So on my way back from Tamba last time, instead of biking straight to my village, I went to the gendarme station in Dialacoto and they gave me a ride the rest of the way to my village. Then they came back a week later to show me a picture of a suspect, but it wasn't the guy.

 

Horse cart runs out of control on mountain, one passenger injured

 

Horse cart accidents make me think of the 1800s and early 1900s (maybe I am thinking of Black Beauty?), but I guess they are still a danger here. Apparently the cart just got going too fast down the "mountain" (it's really just a medium-sized hill, but in such a flat country everyone calls it a mountain) and partially tipped over, throwing a man off. A pregnant woman, the only other passenger, managed to stay on. The horse ran out of control into the village until some men managed to catch it. Then they went back and found the man who had been thrown off and took him to the hospital. He has some broken bones but he's going to be okay.

 

Leprosy scare!

 

My counterpart gave a health education class for the village women, and besides talking about how to prevent malaria, he talked about warning symptoms of leprosy: discolored spots and acne-like rashes that don't hurt or itch. Now we have a flood of people worried that their pimples or heat rashes are really leprosy. I feel bad for people to be spending their scarce money on going to the doctor when it turns out to be nothing, but I'm certainly not qualified to diagnose, and I guess it's better to be safe than sorry.

 

First heavy rain causes awful flying bugs to pop out of ground

We got the first really heavy rain two nights ago, and the next day thouosands of little flying bugs were popping out of the ground everywhere. They are attracted to light, so we had to eat in the dark last night so they wouldn't all get in our food. (Although with no light to see by, I think there's a good chance we ate a few). My counterpart says that in the time of his grandparents, people used to use lights to attract the bugs to bowls of water, where they'd drown, and then they would cook and eat them. But they don't do it anymore, and he says he himself has never eaten them (at least not on purpose). He promises me that they will disappear in a day or two. Right now there are so many landing on the roof of my hut that it sounds like it is raining.