November 6, 2001

A lot has happened since my last posting. I hiked up to Gon Gon, the village an hour away by footpath in the mountains, on October 31st. My goal was to do 25 health surveys with the association president Isabel. We started early, following the path up the mountainside, wandering down to random houses along the way where I would drill them on oral hygiene, family planning, and community needs. It was refreshing to enter strangers' houses and see how they live, sit with them, and momentarily connect with women who described they health of their families.

I discovered more through this survey than I had expected. Only 10% of all families have toothbrushes, which means every family has 1 toothbrush for 10 members. Generally, only the mother or father uses it. 90% of the population complains of pain in their mouths, due to cavities. There are very few dentists in the capital who charge lots of money and only pull teeth if they are bad. Children receive no dental care at all. Peering into the mouth of a five-year-old girl, I noticed 2 gaping cavities in her back molars. 100% of the population complains of fever every month in every family member. Fever generally means infection, thus they are suffering infection from poor water treatment, food sanitation, or open wounds. About 50% of the families have one or more children that suffer a chronic illness, such as asthma or seizures. There is no treatment in Cape Verde for people of their income level who cannot afford to spend the night in the capital city or pay a doctor. Only 50% of the population treats their water because they claim it's from a mountain spring, thus very clean. What they don't realize is that that water is passing through fields where humans and animals defecate and urinate on a daily basis. What they can't physically see does not exist. No families own soap or have knowledge on how to clean an open wound. Women, although most are too shy to respond sincerely, do want access to family planning. With their husbands abroad and many mouths to feed, they want to take the choice of pregnancy into their own hands. There is much work to be done! I also discovered that their primary 3 concerns for the community were as follows: 1. family health 2. roads 3. pre-school education.

Currently, they have no health clinic, no road, and no pre-school. I have already begun to meet with people who will assist in funding a road up there in the next 2 years. That will be my focus project along with health and hygiene workshops to benefit the community. If they were to get a road, the association could invest in a bush taxi as a microenterprise and use the money to help open a health clinic or a pre-school. There is also more likelihood that a foreign organization will fund a project if there is easy infrastructure access to that community.

November 1st was All Saints Day in Cape Verde. Families take the day off from work and cook lots of food to celebrate the saints of each day. Like in many European countries, they often use the saint's name of a particular day to name a baby after the day it was born on. I was invited by Nha, my water girl, to feast at her house. I cleaned my house in the morning, and then made Koolaid and cookies to take to their lunch. When I arrived, she was busy pounding the corn with her cousin in the mortar and pestle they use that is human-size. They use their strength to throw a huge wooden pole into a wood pot made from a hollow tree stump that holds the dry corn kernels. Within an hour, the corn is ground to a fine flour. They mix this flour with chicken stock to make small balls or snakes of corn flour they drop into the boiling meat pot. This becomes part of the soupy mixture they eat over rice. Every night around 5pm, I hear the hum of numerous houses grinding corn for dinner, smell their wood fires used to cook the meals, and wait for the stars to appear above my inner courtyard. I imagine Almazinha with her baby, eating the corn mixture all new mothers must eat for the first month -- a tradition that goes back at least one hundred years.

That day, we ate chicken, duck, sweet potatoes, and corn mass -- best duck I've ever eaten! I asked where they had bought the duck meat, and they said it was from one of their ducks down in the pasture that I hadn't seen. One of my neighbors saw me at their house and also offered me a small pot of food to take home for dinner -- goat, carrots, and corn mass! Between helping them prepare the food and playing cards, the neighbor's goat gave birth to twins. One male all brown, one female brown with white spots like Bambi. I heard the crying of a baby animal and ran outside to investigate if it was stuck somewhere, being killed, or tormented by a small child.

I found the mother goat licking her new babies, who could barely stand. The owner of the goat sat watching passively, and I jumped in, stroking the babies, and helping them suckle. The mother was so exhausted that, at one point, she laid down on top of one of the baby's heads, smothering it while it cried out. Within an hour, they were nursing on their own, standing for 2 minutes, then collapsing in exhaustion to the ground. I told the owner that animals in continental Africa are expected to be able to stand and run within the first 5 minutes of birth or they will be considered easy prey and devoured. She laughed in contemplation because the goats here have no predator, no wolves, no wild dogs to eat them.

November 2nd was my first major rainstorm. It wasn't just any old storm -- it was like a hurricane over the entire island. I had anticipated rain in the morning when it began to drizzle, so I moved the dog carrier it further under the roof, in case Snoop needed to find shelter. I went to Calheta to use the computer and meet with a few people. About 2 pm it started pouring. The rain did not stop, so I decided to catch a bush taxi, aka. a minivan, home. We followed the meandering coastal road to my valley, but came upon a curve in the road where a raging river ripped over the cobblestone road and plummeted 30 feet into a ravine towards the ocean. There were already 3 bush taxis stopped on both sides, thinking the water would relent and they could cross with their passengers.

But we sat for four and a half hours, watching the water plummet over, carrying trees, mud, and entire corn fields. Initially, I thought my driver was dumb enough to want to attempt to cross the river, so I was prepared to tell him I needed to exit the vehicle. However, nobody attempted to cross until dark. Nasolino, the association president from my village, came and found me, the only Caucasian person there, around 7 pm. It was dark, and I was finally under the realization that my house was surely flooded and Snoop would not be exiting the courtyard for another 24 hours, if he was still alive. Nasolino hired a friend to drive us back to Calheta for the night. I would stay with Dawn and Sally, two fellow volunteers, and he would stay with the bush taxi driver -- they agreed to pick me up at 6 am the next day.

Dawn and Sally were surprised to see me again; I had just eaten lunch with them earlier that day. They were busy preparing sweet potato soup for dinner with left over spaghetti and tuna. Unfortunately, I would suffer some severe food poisoning that night, although they would remain fine. I never figured out what it was, although I think it was the tuna that was spoiled with the spaghetti. When I woke up at 5 am to prepare for their arrival, I was nauseous and they didn't come until 7 am, instead of 6 am, as planned. Within the first few blocks, I thought I would vomit, but I didn't. Once we reached the place where there was a river the night before, I saw a bush taxi down in the ravine. Nasolino explained how the driver had successfully crossed once, attempted to cross again, and was swept downstream, but survived. The car was destroyed, water pouring out the windows.

When we reached the entrance to my valley, I was told that no bush taxis were entering. The road was washing out at certain points. I would have to walk an hour to my house. The fever was creeping up on me, and I was feeling sicker. I contemplated going back to Dawn's house, but I needed to feed the dog and see how flooded my house was before things started rotting from the moisture. The road was not washed out, but huge mudslides had caused large boulders to fall into the road impeding cars to pass. The riverbed that flows past my house was full and knee-deep. My house was still standing, but my neighbors told me, as I opened the front door, that water had been pouring out that very door just hours before! The house was soaked. The dirt wall overlooking my house had collapsed, mud slid down behind my house, entering my stone-walled bathroom, leaving 4 inches of pure mud. The mud also slid down into the side entrance to my courtyard, flowing over all seedlings. The courtyard had filled so fast with water that it flowed into all adjacent rooms, under doors, under tables, chairs, shoes, boxes. Plastic rugs from Senegal had floated from their proper locations, and cardboards boxes holding items were soaked. I opened suitcases holding clothes that were too fancy to wear, now stained with rust from the bolts holding the suitcase together.

I would spend the day carrying twenty buckets of water up from the river, dumping in on the floors, sweeping out the mud and water to the street and patio. Snoop was eager to see me, and had found one dry spot in the latrine where he laid the entire night, dog footprints marking the exact spot. By nightfall, I was exhausted, and the sickness had come on stronger than before. When Nasolino left me at my house earlier in the morning on the way to his own, I had told him that if I was really sick, I would send a neighbor to his house. He would need to find a car to take me to the capital city for treatment at the Peace Corps office. Unfortunately, no cars could enter the valley, my neighbors were asleep, and I didn't see that anyone could help. I spent the entire night ambling from the bed to the latrine with diarrhea. We have disposable thermometers that 3MM makes, which I used to take my temperature between sips of oral rehydration solution. By morning, I felt weak, but knew the worst was over.

Sunday, I was supposed to hike back up to Gon Gon for a dental hygiene workshop 2 other PC volunteers were giving, but I was too ill. I laid in bed, hoping Dawn and Sally would stop by my house, knowing they were attending the workshop for fun. Bush taxis were now entering the valley, and they had to pass my house on the way to the footpath to Gon Gon. Later, when I felt better, I wandered down to the riverbed and washed all of my dirty laundry, as my neighbors were doing. Looking up at my house and the 5 others surrounding it, I thought to myself that I was definitely in Peace Corps. This was probably the most beautiful site in the entire country, and things would surely get better with time.

Neighboring kids, Za, Joao, Luiza, Odiar, and Dani, all ran around naked in the stream in front of our houses, bathing in the water. The mothers and daughters chose large boulders to scrub their clothes on, and then gently placed the clothes on the small, hot rocks surrounding the stream to dry. I, being an environmentalist at heart, thought of the environmental implications of hundreds of villagers using phosphate ridden clothes detergents in the stream. It would wash to the ocean in a few hours, but it would not be good for the wildlife or plants. In any case, they were accomplishing their daily chores, and I was enjoying watching them, a lone Peace Corps volunteer in a remote river village. The valley had taken on an entirely new appearance with the river bed changed, the road altered, and the crops renewed with energy from the rain -- everything living was aglow in the mid-day sun.