by Aaron Barlow
The next day Diallo started to look better; within a few days the swelling and pain were almost gone. He received an additional shot, per the book’s protocol, a week later and after that, besides some residual weakness, he seemed back to his old self.
Diallo thanked me, but it did not appear to be that big of a deal to him or anyone else. The villagers went about their business as if nothing really happened, though I felt I had witnessed a miracle. I didn’t think anyone, even Diallo, realized he could have died. But I was wrong.
Although he felt better, Diallo was still too weak to continue working in the fields under the hot sun. He was a guest of my village family and was earning his keep by working in their fields. He decided to go back to his native country, Guinea, to be with his family.
Before I knew about his plans for leaving, he stepped into my hut one morning and asked me if he could have a picture of me. Irritated, because he was the umpteenth villager to ask me for a photo, I asked him why he wanted one. He told me he wanted to show his mother a picture of the girl who saved his life.
That was how he really thanked me.
Genevieve (Wittenberg) Murakami was a Health Volunteer in the village of Allah Bougou, in the Tambacounda region of Senegal, West Africa, from 1999-2001. She is currently a Registered Nurse who cares for newborns and new mothers in the postpartum unit of a local hospital. This story is the winner of the Jason and Lucy Greer Foundation for the Arts Prize.
A Tree Grows in Niamey
Stephanie Oppenheimer-Streb
American connections, a brother’s death, bring a Senegal volunteer to Niger.
This is a story of fate, chance, and remembrance. It speaks of the power of relationships, no matter how brief. And in the end, it is not entirely mine.
My own Peace Corps experience in Senegal years ago made me eager to return to West Africa. The desert and cultures of Niger had fascinated me for years, and I embraced the opportunity for a six-month stay. As the departure date approached, I found myself in a new relationship, one about to connect me to this land-locked desert nation more than I could have imagined.
Chris was twelve when his older brother left to serve in Peace Corps Niger. Mark had been so anxious to know whether Peace Corps accepted him that he handed the letter to his little brother to open and read to him. It was 1985 when Mark left for Niger, where he completed his first three months of training. In the middle of a February night, he boarded a bus for the northern town of Arlit where he was to spend two years as a medical technician. About six hours outside of the capital city, the bus was hit by a truck—the driver is rumored to have been drinking.
In the basement of Chris’s house, over twenty years after the accident, we found a box of Mark’s things: group photos from training, a copy of his last journal entry, and signatures of those who attended his memorial at the embassy in Niamey where Volunteers planted a baobab tree and marked it with a plaque bearing his name.
After getting settled in Niger, I visited the Peace Corps office and mentioned Mark’s name, knowing that many of the mechanics, drivers, and guards spend decades in service to the Peace Corps. A man in a khaki suit approached. He spoke very little French, and his thin body told the story of so many Nigeriens—one of poverty, hunger, and sickness. He seemed unsurprised that someone connected to the family would be now sitting in front of him, twenty-some years later. “I went to get his body that day.” We stared at each other in silence before he continued, “For years I passed the site of the accident—the gnarled metal left at the side of the road haunted me.” He was now an old man, sick and tired, but he remembered vividly.
Several months later, Chris traveled for the first time to Africa. He arrived to see me, but also to pay tribute to his older brother, to make a journey that fate forbade years before. The bus carried us north for fifteen hours, and I imagine the road has not improved since the 1980s. Large buses barrel down the eroding pavement, unable to stop should a goat, cow, or child be so unfortunate as to cross their path. Large trucks pass the buses so closely that divine intervention alone must keep the side mirrors on the vehicles intact.
The site of the accident passed us so rapidly it hardly seems possible that something so tragic could happen so quickly. We quietly gazed out the window at the dust in the air that swirled around the mud huts and granaries.
Chris carried Mark’s guitar and played it on our travels, its song lifted to the night sky in an oasis on the night we became engaged to be married. I now wore Mark’s godparents’ ring on my left hand. The guitar joined the celebration in duets with Tuareg musicians and paused only at the cue of clinking tea glasses: as the tradition says, one for death, one for life, and one for love.
Before departing Niger, I stopped by the Embassy and said goodbye to the new seedling now flourishing under the over-attentive Embassy sprinkler system. The old baobab tree next to the plaque had long since died. Turning to leave, I almost ran into a man who had silently approached. He had a hoe thrown over his shoulder. His clothes were tattered and, although his face was aged, he still carried his youth in his chiseled muscles.
“Was it you who planted the tree? I have been asking for you. I was there when we planted the first one. I remember.” We stood for a moment, our eyes locked. A shared nod broke the contact, and I turned again to leave.
In his last existing journal entry, Mark expressed hesitation about leaving his new Peace Corps friends and departing for his post. He compared the anticipation to riding a roller coaster and feeling the first dip. “It is going to be incredible out there, that first time out on my own. I am sure it’s something that I’ll never forget, and after several months of hot season I expect to be a seasoned, emaciated, Peace Corps marine.” And he writes, “I’ve just got to keep in mind why I’m here: (1) adventure; (2) to learn about another culture; (3) to learn a language; (4) to help people here; (5) to be less materialistic; (6) to have something in life to look back on; (7) to demonstrate willpower and resourcefulness and skill; (8) to finish something I started.”
For Mark and other Volunteers who live on through the memories of so many people around the world.
Stephanie Oppenheimer-Streb was a PCV in Senegal from 1999-2001 where she became good friends with amoebae, which eventually inspired her to pursue a career in public health. She currently lives in Baltimore with Chris, where she strives to make the perfect crabcake.
Jaarga
Betsy Polhemus
Politeness, and respect, can make family as strong as intimacy.
As Nanaman Diamanka and I walked across the scorched sand behind our family compound, he turned and smiled warmly at me. With his smile came so many distinctive facial effects: the flash of a few resilient teeth, weathered and shrunken skin drawn up into thin creases around his mouth, and sunlight reflected off of the moisture in his bloodshot eyes. I had been living in his compound for five months, but on that day the affection in his smile convinced me of my place in his family.
In high school I felt incredibly confined. I found breathing room in college during road trips to Canada, Seattle, the Redwoods, and Mexico. Needing more distance still, I went with the Peace Corps halfway around the world to Saare Foode, a small Pulaar village in the Kolda region of Senegal.
Scores of people were raucously awaiting my arrival, their deep black bodies overflowing on blazing off-white sand. My compound for the next three years was marked by a baobab tree, a species revered culturally and religiously in Senegal. This one had a crooked trunk, bent over at the waist, extending a branchy hand in welcome. I was breathless for my first appearance, pedaling my standard-issue bike through winding paths of loose sand. Stomach afloat, my first impression of the village left me numb, blank, dizzy, dry-mouthed, grinning uncontrollably.
The group rushed toward me, drawing me into a swirling tide. One by one I shook calloused palms with my right hand. Horrified children ran screaming from
me in all directions, a few never having seen a white person before.
Young men huddled around a small teapot resting in coals, unimpressed by my arrival. Women leapt, danced and clapped to drum beats, bare feet thumping the earth, elbows tucked in tight at their sides. A little girl meticulously stripped feathers from a limp, headless chicken while kitchen-hut smoke swirled black behind her. A cast-iron pot, so large I could have stepped inside, boiled fiercely over burning wood. Goats bleated and left trails of round droppings among trampling feet; donkeys let loose with horrendously foul flatulence.
The children returned from fleeing, lime-colored mucus dribbling over their mouths and chins, and began to stroke my arms and legs with their rough and dusty hands.
I was shown into the largest hut of the compound, now bursting with bodies. When my eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, I allowed them to wander shamelessly between the faces of men, seated on a thin mat made of quilted rice sacks. Some wore battered beanie caps, long tattered robes and cheap silver rings; others wore aged slacks and stretched polo shirts. They did not return my glances. I knew instinctively that these men ruled Saare Foode. As I sat on the hut’s rickety bed, a platformed foam mattress covered with a ghost of a sheet, the group began to pray. With hands cupped together in their laps and open palms facing up toward Allah, the men grunted in unison as the leader paused for breath.
It was only after their prayers were complete that they saw me, an awkward moment for all. Brown eyes rested on me. Stiff bodies shifted on the mat. I looked down at my feet, comparing my new rubber slippers with theirs, old and worn, some fused together again with heat. I looked up at the roof, lashed together with bamboo poles, the wedge-shaped spaces filled in with dried grasses.
One by one they acknowledged my presence, hoping for good things to come from my work. But what could a young American girl do to improve Saare Foode? Did the village need a millet machine, vegetable garden, bigger boutique? Fingers pointed; the discussion became heated. Men stood and raised their voices. What I had learned so far of the language did me no good; I was lost.
A stretch of silence followed the chaos. The group then exchanged nods and murmurs of approval. The meeting was over. One man began to stand slowly, slightly wobbly from the stiffness of age. His skeletal frame revealed a height of six feet or more; a shadow of graying hair covered his chin. I knew this must be my father, the chief.
As he made to leave, I cleared my throat and surprised even myself as I asked, “Hono woni inde am?” He stopped, turned to look at me, and replied that I would now be called Sona. I nodded and added my consent, “Awa.”
After he named me, I addressed him as jaarga, or chief, in the Fulakunda dialect of the Pulaar language. He seemed to appreciate the respect, but the rest of his family laughed at the stuffiness. At my mother’s advice, I tried using baaba, or father. He seemed just as content; however, knowing that the words for father and for donkey sound alike, I grew self-conscious about getting it wrong. In the end I settled for Na (pronounced with a Spanish tilde over the n), short for his first name, Nanaman, just like everyone else.
For three years, he and I exchanged greetings each morning from the doorways of our neighboring huts. First he performed ritual ablutions of his hands, feet, face, ears and mouth with a plastic kettle full of water while I scanned the compound for the broom made of bound palm fronds I used to sweep my entry. Then he’d turn my way and ask how I had woken, and if I was with peace. I replied that I was jam tan, with peace only, and asked the same of him. These greetings are central to Pulaar conversations; I experienced the same with numerous people each morning, but my first exchange of the day was usually with him.
Truth be told, I grew closer to the other members of Na’s family than I ever did with him. His only wife, Wonto, quickly became another mother, tucking me under her thin little wings to guide me through her extraordinary world. My older brother, Wuura, exceedingly intelligent, understood better than anyone where I had come from. His wife, Wopa, and I had a turbulent relationship, culminating in mutual admiration: her firstborn was named after me, and I intend to do the same for her. Na’s only daughter, Maimuna, who has since passed away, immediately fell into place as the only sister I have ever had, sharing snickers with me over bad hairdos and saisai, tricky men. My three younger brothers, Daoda, Djibby and Diao, took care of me in any way that they could, preparing hot tea or a rare treat of fried eggs, running errands, guiding explorations via cattle trails, taking me to soccer games. Na remained remote, perhaps hesitant to fully embrace my cause or abilities. Despite this distance between us, I respected him deeply.
I presented both Na and Wonto with gooro, or kola nuts, wrapped in strips of torn paper bags, on a regular basis. For many of the cultures in Senegal, kola nuts are a respectful gift, offered and received during traditional ceremonies and holidays. The price fluctuates regularly, but never too far from affordable, even during the close of a meager dry season. Men sell them on street corners in Kolda town, out of large burlap sacks set upright, the nuts split into layers of variegated pink and brown. Both Na and Wonto endured an addiction to the nut’s caffeine, suffering through headaches when not chewing on the rubbery slices. I could count the number of teeth left in their mouths on one hand; what was left was stained yellowish-brown by their habit.
My mother tied her gooro into a top corner of her saba, or sarong, secured inconspicuously at her waist. I asked her where Na kept his, since his billowing pants and tank top left little room for secret stashes. She flashed me a gaping grin, and told me that Na buried his kola nuts under a young mango tree behind his hut. I responded with disbelief, laughing at the picture in my mind of Na digging a hole in the soundless night, shifty like a prisoner spooning his way to freedom.
A few days after she told me this, Wonto appeared in my doorway. Na had gone to the fields, she whispered, and we needed to hurry. Not knowing what she had in mind, I dutifully followed as she led me through his hut and out back. It only took her a few minutes to find his treasure, carefully wrapped in a scrap of worn material and secured with rope. She smiled at me, and with her fingers pantomimed sealing her mouth in secrecy, her version of zipping up two lips and throwing away the key. Then she reburied the package carefully, just as we had found it.
Saare Foode’s chief lived with a stutter. He could pull off ceremonial events without a hitch, yet the presence of strangers seemed to block his speech. Great patience was required to hear the final details of his stories; rounded “o” sounds were especially challenging for him. Mean-spirited children teased him behind his back. Spiteful adults attributed his stutter to poor leadership skills and a lack of power. In truth, Na’s traditional ways did frustrate those who wanted to incorporate modernity into Saare Foode. He spent free afternoons coiling rope fashioned by hand from baobab bark he had harvested and dried; he indulged in lazy gossip and card games at the boutique. He did not understand banking, books or batteries; he was uninterested in lessons. Decisions, which by cultural rule should have involved the chief, were sometimes made in his absence.
Wherever I went in Senegal, guests were always escorted out of the compound when leaving. We would accompany a guest from the bumbaa, or the women’s hut, across the compound while making small-talk, and then down the short sand path where the main road began. If the person was especially respected, we might escort them further, the slower the better. The day before I was supposed to leave for good, rumor had it that the entire village was planning to accompany me a mile, into Kolda town. I did not wait to find out if they actually would.
I had learned of another Pulaar custom surrounding a person leaving for a very long time: it is acceptable to sneak out in the middle of the night. The evening before I left, I told only Na that I would be gone in the morning. I did not want anyone to worry for my safety, and felt he deserved a sincere thank you for allowing me to be a Diamanka. He told me my decision had brought him relief and ha
ppiness, and then he wished me peace.
These days, Wuura and I talk on our cell phones sporadically, always on a Sunday. He called once and I knew something was wrong from the hesitancy in his voice. I allowed the conversation to meander; finally Wuura told me that Na was sick, and in the Kolda hospital with heart problems. My thoughts returned to Na’s smile, and his acceptance of me as another daughter. He slowly recovered, although he will never work alongside his sons in the family’s millet fields again. Wuura will someday become chief of Saare Foode, and in his capable hands I imagine the village successfully blending tradition with technology.
In my dreams, I see Na seated on an old mossy-green rice sack, spread out in the shade of his hut’s bamboo overhang. He’s surrounded by the makings of his rope: strips of dried bark coiled in loose loops. His limber body allows him to lean forward, his arms reaching along the length of his long legs, stretched out in front of him. Na’s hands deftly twist and turn the strips, anchored around his oddly shaped big toe. Heat sizzles the ground, Wonto brings him a plastic cup full of cool water, and his wizened eyes shift between his work, the road and the sky.
Wuura called. I was hoping for another routine Sunday chat, filled with the familiar exchanges of jam tan. Instead, his voice shaky, he told me that my village father, Nanaman Diamanka, had passed away. Wuura had put off the phone call for weeks, he explained apologetically, not wanting to upset me. I remembered with a shudder what death encompasses for the Pulaar: thick emotional mourning, tears heavy with grief, and oftentimes a very real physical reaction. Women wail out loud in gut-wrenching tones, their cries heard in neighboring villages, and sometimes roll on the ground, as if trying to shake the pain of anguish from their bodies. Preparations for the funeral of a chief would have been all encompassing. So I did not blame Wuura for not telling me right away.