October 19, 2001

Let me start off by saying that I live in a zoo. The first night, I barely slept. Even my Dalmatian “Snoop” was so scared that he hid under my bed and whined at the sounds of donkeys, cows, kingfishers, roosters, other dogs, and crickets chirping. There is one bird, I believe it may be the kingfisher, the national bird, that makes a scary HE HE HE noise, like a hyena. I thought maybe a pack of wild dogs had come to eat me.

If you think that roosters crow only in the morning, you are completely wrong. They crow all night, starting at midnight until dawn. The valley walls are so high that noise echoes. One crows, it echoes, another crows back. The valley comes alive at night, and let me reiterate that I have been getting very little sleep. My dreams are permeated with images of people coming after me, of not knowing where my home is, and of this inability to fathom the situation I have gotten myself into. The night I get 8 hours of straight sleep will be the night that I know I have adjusted to life in Ribeira Principal.

The first night, I thought someone was in my house because I heard a noise in the living room, which ended up being a cricket trying to escape. I also jumped up on average 5 times with my flashlight at the sound of footsteps. One time it was cockroaches in the dog food bowl outside. They are the size of your thumb and make noise like mice. The other time it was a cat that was eating Snoop’s food – I later moved the bowl inside. I left the door to the patio open because I thought Snoop might need to pee, but it caused me great stress because I kept thinking someone was breaking in.

The crickets, flies, and cockroaches are not just outside your house, they are inside, they are e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. I have a mosquito net over my bed, looks like I’m in “Out of Africa.” The woods beams of my roof are exposed, and you see the red clay tile. I have hung the net from the beams. The net keeps out not just mosquitoes, but large, VERY large spiders. I am told they are not poisonous, but they are huge, and many are females with huge, white egg sacs on their bellies. Every room you enter, there are spiders on the walls and roof beams and tiles. I don’t kill them because I avoid killing anything living. All pesticides they use here are toxic ones that were banned in the USA anyway. I like that spiders kill other insects, like last night when I saw a 3 inch wide one, like a small tarantula, that was eating a cricket on my latrine door.

The flies are another story. They are also everywhere, but only during the daylight hours. I have now gone from sleeping at midnight and waking at 8 am to sleeping at 10 pm, and waking at 5:30 am. This is October, the Month of the Flies, as Cape Verdeans say. They claim that flies breed when it is the most humid and wet. I guess that would be this month. I also used to think that I had never seen a fly die in front of me, but now they die around me all day. I think they have a 7 day life span, and there are so many that hundreds of them die in my house each day. The mosquito net also serves to keep them off my sheets, since they die and fall all over. They like the heat, and will fly in huge swarms out on my small 8’ x 10’ patio. There is an eternal BUZZZZZZZZZZ that is the entirety of the flies conversing together. I have never heard such a noise in the USA. Now I understand when in the National Geographic photos there are so many flies on everyone’s mouth and hands. I am told that there will be less when winter comes.

The weather in my valley is very interesting, to say the last. I have discovered that it is coolest in the morning between 5 – 8:30 a.m. By 9 a.m., the air is hot and you will want to stay in the shade of your house. Ât night, the temperature drops into the 60° range, I assume – enough to want to use a blanket. The sun sets around 6:30 p.m., and it’s best to light all candles or lanterns before then, or you could get lost in your own house. This has happened to me, and I have run around in panic, looking for my flashlight, trying to find the matches to light some candles while avoiding grabbing a spider. I have a gas lantern, but it’s not working yet. I think it has to do with the way I put on the cotton cover over the gas outlet. I hear the gas and smell it, but the spark doesn’t light. My boss is supposed to come over and help me put the cover on correctly.

I live in a group of six houses on a mountainside. The day I moved in, Wednesday, a few of my neighbors came over, carrying my gear on their heads up to my house. When the work was done, we all stared at the sheer quantity of my stuff filling the living room. One woman picked up this English language book I have and pointed at the animal, a raccoon, on the cover, and asked if it was a rat. I tried to explain that they live near rivers and eat fish, bugs, and trash. They couldn’t understand the concept and asked me again if it was a cat. Then they all decided to leave after helping me assemble the bed they bought me and the kitchen stove. The Peace Corps driver took a neighbor to help fill my 50-gallon water tank in the village center, and picked up a tank of butane gas, so that I could start cooking on my stove. I kept hoping they would give me some food for lunch, something already made, but they excused themselves and went home for their own lunch. I was left with this immense feeling of being overwhelmed. What had I gotten myself into? Could I really survive out here?

I was supposed to get a gas refrigerator, but Peace Corps is so bureaucratic that oftentimes the staff uses the excuse of “needing government approval” before they do anything, which can take months or years, believe me. They didn’t authorize me to get one until the day before I left for site, so a PC employee spent the day searching for me. Apparently, a store in Praia had 3 the week before, but they all sold out. He then went to every store in Praia looking for one elsewhere with no luck. Because everything is imported, then it could take months to special order one from Europe or elsewhere. I am been quite depressed about not having a refrigerator because I have come to realize that it is essential for saving time and staying healthy. If my health is in any way affected by not having a refrigerator this month, then I will have to decide if I am really capable of living in a rural river valley. The whole problem is that the current PC director in Praia takes my complaints and insists that maybe I shouldn’t live there if I can’t live like my neighbors. She says that Calheta, the town near me, has electricity, and maybe that would be better for me, like the other 4 volunteers already there. Oftentimes, I think she is just playing games because it’s common for her to threaten to take things away from volunteers or move them, as a means of control. PC just spent over $3,000 on refurbishing my house, and I doubt that they are wanting me to move.

Just yesterday, I cooked my first real meal on the stove, bow tie pasta, carrots, and canned tuna. The canned tuna that they sell in Cape Verde is canned here on another island. Each can sells for $2.50. US because it is a large quantity to feed 2 people or for 2 meals. That is expensive for Cape Verdeans because you can buy 5 small fish for $1.US. I basically had to eat half of it and give the other half to Snoop because there isn’t any way to preserve fish without a refrigerator. I have no idea how long it can sit out, covered, or I would have eaten the remainder a few hours later. The problem of refrigeration is solved by many Cape Verdeans because they have an average of 8 kids. They also all have cows and goats for milk, so they drink it immediately. I was at a neighbor’s house recently and noticed one female goat had a large metal can around her neck. I asked them why, and they said because she turns around and suckles on her own nipples if she is thirsty. I also met another family that is caring for a two-week-old goat – the mother died giving birth. They feed it milk, but it is still thin. I think it needs to be fed more often. It’s hard to decide when I should and should not say something.

Yesterday, I decided to venture out and meet my neighbors. They are so curious about my possessions and me, in general. I have not yet cleared out the living room, so I never open the front windows. The breeze enters my house from the direction that faces terraced corn, bean, and tobacco fields, thus I open those 2 windows. However, neighbors that live above me on the mountainside carry huge bundles of grass and weeds on their heads for their animals each day and pass by the windows. About 10 people passed by last night before dark, and we talked about everything. I’ve noticed that there are no men between 25-60 years old in my cluster of 6 houses. They have all immigrated to Portugal to find better work, leaving their wives with 5-10 kids and the grandparents. The grandparents, despite their age, work all day at home, preparing meals, and caring for the pre-school aged children.

My impressions of my neighbors changed when I finally entered their houses. I assumed that they led modest lives with few, well-cared for possessions. However, their houses were very dirty, and I wondered why they were not all sick (Note: by 2003 I didn’t even notice this aspect of my rural life. Everyone has a main sitting room where you sit and talk with them as often as possible. Sofas do not exist, but they do have small wood stools or chairs and one or two tables with, oftentimes, dirty tablecloths. Every living room out of the few I saw had a framed photo of Jesus Christ and the Last Supper. They are very religious, very Catholic here. All of the houses I saw had walls painted in contrasting colors, pink and blue, or red and green. They appeared to not have been painted in five years or more, although it’s probably more like two with heavy wear and tear.

The clothes they wear are very old and worn. Some girls wear very frilly feminine dresses, like doll clothes, but they are brown from the dust. Most children under 1 year old do not wear clothes, and most boys over 1 year old only wear a shirt. You will never see a woman or girl without a lençu (LEHN-SUE), or decorative bandana on her head. They cover their heads from the sun with these, and I believe it also allows them to avoid braiding their hair (Note: later learned they still kept it braided underneath). I have a few I bought in the USA that I wear because I want to keep the bugs and dirt from blowing into my hair.

One thing I find very beautiful about the culture is the way they carry their babies on their backs. A young 8-year-old girl named Juliet that lives nearby walked into a neighbor’s living room with her 3 month old brother tied onto her back. His head rested on her back as he slept, and then she slipped into the back room to leave him on a bed before returning to sit and stare at me in the living room. Last night, she came down with a neighbor to visit me at my window. The baby, named Elton, was naked in the neighbor’s arms, and at one point he released diarrhea down the side of her skirt. She ran into the cornfield to clean him off out of sight, and then returned as if nothing had happened. I had a UNDP, UN Development Program, magazine and they all flipped through it in awe at the pictures of development programs in other countries.

I am typing this letter at the micro credit office in the coastal town of Calheta run by my boss, Nasolino. A woman just entered the business, walked over to me, asked for my bread and water. I was, of course, thrown off guard because I was typing, and responded that I could not give food and water to everyone who asked. She stood above me, in a condescending voice, ‘You are American, aren’t you?’ I said that was none of her business, and that I could not give her anything. She was insulted and remained there. Nasolino was on the phone, so he just stared at my cries for help to get out of the situation. Sometimes I think that men are so unperceptive. He could have cared less if I was stuck in this odd situation, and laughed about it when he got off the phone. She later left and he said she was just joking. I don’t like people that try to manipulate a situation of need to see how generous a foreigner will be. I told her that if she got bread and water, then 5 more Cape Verdeans would ask tomorrow.

My question now is how long I can survive here. I never knew that Peace Corps could be so hard. People work in the terraced fields in my valley from dusk to dawn. They walk miles with water or weeds on their head. It’s such a sight to see a huge bundle of corn, grass, and beans on a small child’s head, like a hat, their faces hidden in the shadow. My neighbor in her seventies (or maybe younger, but aged by work) left in the darkness of the morning around 6 a.m. to pull weeds to feed the animals, ambling past me with her cane, saying the heat would soon start. On the bush taxi to Calheta, I saw her walking on the side of the road back to her house at 8 a.m. with grass for the animals: 4 goats, 3 pigs, 8 chickens, 1 donkey, 2 cows. Nobody has fences here. They keep the animals tied by one leg to prevent them from grazing in the fields where food is plentiful (Note: later learned this only happens in the wet season, in the dry season they are free to roam). I feel sorry for them because in the heat of the day, few have shade, and none have bowls of water. I wonder when the USA was like this. I wonder if I will be able to make a place for myself in their world.