Visit to another village

Written Tuesday, 23 October 2007

 

 

The local health volunteers association (whose members are villagers, but I participate too) was supposed to have a "health day" on Sunday in a village about 45 km away.   For the health days, which is an activity they've just started recently, all the association members go to the chosen village and hold health education classes and demonstrations.   Since the village is far away, it was decided that the members would all meet on Saturday in Dialacoto, take a hired car to the village, and spend the night there.  There is a Peace Corps volunteer in a neighboring village, so instead of taking the car with everyone else, I decided to bike down and stay with my friend.

 

I arrived in the village about noon on Saturday.   The village is much farther off the road than mine is, and right on the edge of the Niokolo-Koba national park.  It felt very isolated and quiet and was very pretty.   I spent the day Saturday just talking with my friend and his villagers.  His village speaks Tandonke, which is a dialect or language related to Mandinka, and which I find easier to understand than Jaxanke.   So it was nice to feel as if my language skills had magically improved overnight.

 

On Sunday my volunteer friend, the health association member from his village, and I biked over to the neighboring village where the health day was supposed to happen.   Only to find out that the health day had been cancelled and none of the other association members were coming.  Such is life in the land of no cell phone reception.

 

The village was Pulaar, and keeping with their traditions, these Pulaars had a lot of cows.   So they gave us a bowl of "nono" ("keedam" in Pulaar, which I am trying to learn), which is curdled milk (basically yoghurt).  It was the best I've had, and I decided the whole trip was worth it just for that.   I wish I could get it in the US.  Right now I am fantasizing about getting them to teach me how to make it, and then buying a milk cow when I go back to the US.  (And where would I keep the cow?  On my apartment balcony?  That's why this is just a fantasy.)

 

After our nono snack, we went around the village to greet the chief and other villagers.   We couldn't talk to them much since we don't speak Pulaar, but everyone was really nice and friendly.  One nice old woman took a liking to me for some reason and asked my volunteer friend if the village could keep me.   I wanted to say sure, if they would teach me Pulaar and feed me nono every day, but my volunteer friend told her that my own villagers won't agree to give me up.   Poo.  The villagers did end up asking to make a formal request to get their own Peace Corps volunteer, though, so my friend is going to do the paperwork and see if they can get one.

 

They fed us lunch – rice with squash.   It was the first time I've had squash here – it was delicious.  And then when it got a little cooler we biked back to my friend's village, with a live chicken they gave us as a present hanging upside-down from the handlebars.

 

Yesterday (Monday) morning I biked back to my village, and along the way got to see a troop of monkeys crossing the road, and then just a little farther on a family of warthogs.   Unfortunately they all ran away too fast when they heard me coming for me to get a picture of them.

 

So it turned out to be a great trip, even though the health day, which was the reason I'd gone down there in the first place, didn't happen.