- Cute little old ladies who bow when they meet you
- The dramatic way in which people say Uh-Huh!
- Not having internet
- Oatmeal as my daily sugar source
- Saturday markets, and the bread and bananas they entail
- Hanging out at Jesper's "office" (which is really just the little shop that his young, attractive friend owns)
- Yam french fries
- Local rice with sésame sauce (which is similar to chili)
- Calabash beer
- Afternoon naps
- Flying pidgeons as an alternative form of air conditioning
- The constant presence of chicks and baby goats (PS: I held a chick yesterday.)
- Cold, refreshing bucket showers
- The 24-hour system (and thus the excuse to say things like 18 o'clock)
- Pagne shopping
- Pagne staring (staring at pagnes is like staring at lava lamps; the more you look at one, the more fascinating its pattern becomes)
- Marriage proposals
- The fact that girls are not obsessed with being skinny
- The fact that all guys are in good shape as a result of the cultivating they do
- The indistinction between indoors and outdoors (there are no sealed-off spaces; all space is connected at least by an open, screenless window)
- Sleeping with my head at the foot of the bed and my feet on the pillows (somehow this arrangement diminishes the heat)
- Never, ever having to rush
- The phrase "Le repas est prêt" ("The meal is ready"), which I delightedly hear 2 times a day
- Going to bed at 8 PM and getting up at 7 AM
- Finding frogs in the latrine
- Seeing chameleons strolling nonchalantly across the path in front of me
Voilà, some of the many things I will miss!
One thing I won't miss too much is the public transit system. To go to Kara, we first take a bus from Farendé to Ketao and then a taxi from Ketao to Kara. When I think about the Farendé-Ketao buses, the phrase "crack-bus" unfailingly comes to mind. The buses are designed to seat 6 or 7 people, but they don't depart until they contain about twice that number. Sometimes there's a goat or 2 squished in the trunk as well. If we compare the vehicle to a cow, we can say that the driver milks it to every last drop. If the windshield is broken, you think nothing of it. (In fact, it's a bit of luxury to find a bus or taxi with a windshield that's not broken.) About one bus we took, John (fellow student) hypothesized that it had the engine of a lawn mower. Slowwww slow slow. On top of that, the driver only used the engine when we were going uphill. The smell of exhaust was overwhelming, and all of the windows (not just the windshield) were broken and sewn up like footballs. Pretty different from public transit in the USA.
Since the last entry, I've talked with some more local medicine men. One was with the White Cross Church, and another was an animist. Both of them, and most healers in general, see their practice as almost completely dependent on the spiritual realm. Sicknesses can be caused by the physical world (such as if we eat a contaminated food) or by the spiritual world (somebody who is jealous of you uses sorcery to bewitch you with an ailment). Prayer (either to a Christian god or an ancestral spirit) is a vital component to discovering what should accompany the standard herbal ingredient (which is fixed and does not require any supernatural inquiry) in a medicinal cocktail. The healers have been very open to giving us information about what the standard ingredients are, and we've been studying to what extent the medicines of different healers match (this would indicate that the medicines are effective).
Also, John, Jesper, and I went on a hike to see some road-work that's being done and to see how villagers can be mobilized to work on community projects. Every 5 years, there's a male initiation ceremony called Waa which occurs on this particular mountain. We, the students of this year, are lucky to have come during the year of this ceremony, which we will see in July. The mountain roads are being fixed up so that cars can drive to the site of the ceremony.
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