Showering in a Forest

Last week my village received the first rain of the year, the only precipitation since August of last year. These are called the Mango rains and I have been told that they signal when the tiny mangoes are ready to eat. It is believed that if you eat them before the mango rains you will get meningitis. I have tried to convince my friends that there is no way that this is possible, but I was about as successful as the time I tried to convince them that the monkey in the village was a baboon and not a gorilla, this even with visual aids of the two. The same day a huge lizard was killed outside my house and its tongue was ripped out. If you leave the tongue in after you kill it, it comes back to life at night and eats your baby. Who am I to question? So the mango rains came and they came with a vengeance. At first it was a nice rain and I was outside jumping in puddles with kids getting who knows how many water born illnesses, then the wind picked up and branches started falling. I took shelter with my puddle hopping friends in my house and then it started to hail. Everyone, kids and adults alike, where running outside and snatching up pieces of hail and popping them into their mouths with looks of mixed excitement and pleasure as if they were pieces of candy hurled at the earth from above. I suppose I would have done the same thing if I hadn’t been spoiled by America and grown up with ice only w few feet away at any time of the day or night. Oh, another weird village thing, apparently the women are afraid to go the fields by themselves because of the gorilla danger. What gorilla danger you ask? First of all, there are no gorillas in Burkina Faso, but one would assume women would be afraid of angry gorilla attacks. One would be wrong. The women are afraid of a gorilla having its way with them. I am also told that gorilla-human hybrid babies exist from such encounters. Not right now of course, but in the past the friend of the friend of the friend of the sister of my neighbor had a monkey baby. It was all covered with hair and had long monkey fingers but it didn’t survive more than a year. God doesn’t approve of monkman babies, I am told. But again, who am I to question?

With only four months left of my Peace Corps service, I have realized that it is now or never for all of the secondary projects that I have thought about doing over the past two years. I put some of them off for far too long and if I started them now they will never by finished, so I decided to focus on one and go all out. I am going to try to accomplish a massive tree planting in the courtyard of my school and transform it form a barren, rocky redness similar to the surface of Mars to a green, shady oasis inviting to the enlightenment of young minds. Several tasks needed to be accomplished in order to make this vision of green a reality. First, talk to my principal and see if he was onboard with plan oasis. He was all about it, especially when I told him it would be free wince all of the labor would be performed by me and the students. Second… seeds. What kind? Here do I get them? Where do I find my misplaced green thumb? Who can answer all of these questions? My friendly village forester, a.k.a. tree guy, that’s who. I trotted on over to his office, I actually more walked than trotted, and I probably sweat more than walked, it is hot in Africa, but he was not there and I was on a tight schedule to get to Fada, buy my seeds, and get back. When I got to Fada, however, I immediately regretted this decision. Fada is a big place, and I had no I idea where they sold seeds. I reasoned that plants like water so I should head towards the city water hole. It is really a large pond/lake thing in the middle of the city that supplies the city with water. I am sure there is a better word for this in English, but the French virus has infected that part of m brain and I have lost the word. It turns out my hunch was correct, plants do like water and luckily plants come from seeds and that was what I needed, but how many and what kind? I ended up buying an obscene amount of seeds for a similarly obscene amount of money. Equipped with huge sacks of seeds and partial knowledge of what to do with them, I returned to village with high hopes. The next task, fourth maybe, was to find sacks to plant them in and allow them to grow for two months before putting them in the ground. Water in America is sold in plastic bottles, in Burkina, it is sold in half liter plastic bags. Perfect. Also, in Burkina there are no trash cans, so the market is full of discarded and unloved water sacks for my tree planting needs. Perfecter (the fact that they are available, not that there aren’t any trash cans). Also I have dozens of children on spring break, annoying me and willing to do anything for a piece of candy. Perfectest. At the end of the day, I had about 700 water bags and no candy. Long story short, a mixture of sand, dirt, poop, and child sweat, I now have about one square foot to shower in since I put the 150ish trees in my shower, the only place the animals cant get to them. I never asked my principal how many trees he wanted to plant. I hope it is a lot, otherwise the volunteer who replaces me is going to have to shower in a forest.