Monday, June 19, 2006

Life in the bush...

To the African, me and Reaiah must seem the most fragile things on Earth. So far we almost have to sneak around to be able to do anything for ourselves… If we try to draw our own water (or even carry our water back to our hut) one of the women or girls will come and take it from us before we finish. They will ask us to try to pound the grain only long enough to prove that we aren’t good at it and then take it away again (and the one time they let us go very long, my callous-free hands formed instant blisters and almost bled—which they thought was hilarious and proceeded to tell everyone about for the next several days). We wanted to go to the peanut fields with them (even if they won’t let us work) but just before we were to leave they made the excuse that it was just TOO far for us to walk (5 km) and besides it was going to rain that day (which it didn’t…) and they made us wander around town instead.
As they sit around chatting at night, some of the women brought their peanuts to crack. and they even let us do that for a while. Ok, cracking peanuts, no problem… I may have been at it for 20 minutes before the woman next to me started asking about my fingers and insisting that I stop or my fingers would bleed… I told her I was fine and assured her my fingers were not going to bleed from cracking peanuts, but she eventually took what was left in my hands away from me and wouldn’t let me get anymore. And so it goes…

In our compound there is the chief’s family with all his wives and their children/grandchildren and almost in our same compound is his brother and all of his family. One of the nephews is a little man about four years old who has more character and expression than anyone else I’ve met out here. He’s hilarious and its obvious that his charm works even on his own family, when normally the parents and siblings can be pretty harsh with their own… Still, our new little friend is a ball of energy and hardly stops talking. He reminds me of Arnold from different strokes (of course that may have something to do with the fact that the actor playing Arnold actually WAS much older than the character he played). You can almost see him saying “whacha talkin’ bout Willis?” and I’m sure it wouldn’t take much coercion to get him to say it… In our first day our brother told us that the boy talks like he’s an old man, and so that has become his nickname. While our older brother, it seems, has assigned himself as our primary language tutor (or maybe the chief assigned him, I’m not sure) and spends a good part of the day teaching us words and helping us understand what he’s talking about or learning to say things for ourselves, so far my favorite times have been when he’s called “little old man” over and instructed him to do various things. When he wanted us to understand “pick this up” or “put this over there” our object lesson was him telling old man “hey, go pick up that thing and bring it here” and when he got there, “take this and put it back over there”… back and forth, back and forth. Or older brother would throw it on the ground “pick that up and give it here” only to throw it on the ground again and have little man fetch again… It was hysterical for us, and even little man didn’t seem to mind doing as he was told over and over again.

Riding bikes here is like second nature to most people (even though they often have the odd habit of sitting on back rack—where you would carry another passenger or a sack of stuff—instead of on the seat itself) but we were finally given our first shot at riding one in our wrap skirts the other day when our new younger brother decided he wanted to see for himself if the silly american girls actually COULD ride a bike. Climbing on in the unfortunate skirts without flashing some indecent thigh never seems to be a problem for the african women, but its much trickier than it looks, especially for someone who prefers to never wear skirts… but I managed to climb on and… as the saying will tell you, you never really forget how… but then I had to climb back off and get on the back seat so lil brother could peddle me around a while… not sure why, he just felt the need to drive, I guess. Getting on the back rack was even more awkward than getting on the seat and I struggled with my skirt the whole time, shaking the bike unstably and almost causing him to wreck several times. Still, we did prove that we could ride a bike, even clumsily in our skirts, and satisfied him for the time being…

Our first few days out in the village we spent a good deal of time sitting and watching our new older sister as she prepared the meals and did everything else required for taking care of the whole compound… Most of the village is aware that we are out here to learn language and about their culture, but it didn’t occur to us at first that for us to be learning how to do all the women’s work (pounding the grains, cooking ‘to’ and ‘kili’, drawing water from the well, working in the fields, ect.) looks an awful lot like we’re being trained for marriage… I think I noticed it first when I caught the eye of one of the young men as he watched us at our sad attempts to pound grain… As though everyone here has this thought “a few more years and some more practice and they may be good for something after all…” Oh well, even our incompetencies in cooking and cleaning do very little to deter the constant teasing of the old women and grown men who try to give us away to someone several times a day. All we can say in response is “No! I don’t marry now.” Our new family’s wives have even added to the morning’s list of blessings “May God give you to someone,” or better yet, “May God give you to one of the chief’s sons…” Oh great… that’s just great…