February 18, 2003

It’s been a long time since I last sent a group email. Nothing monumental has happened, although each day has been filled with challenges and small triumphs. My outlook on rural life has improved since Christmas, probably because I know that I have so little time left here. I savor each day in my house, which now has so much personality with the murals and personal touches I have added.

In the last month, I have had three Peace Corps visitors, including the Country Director and our temporary medical doctor (permanent one is in the USA with husband who was diagnosed with cancer), as well as a new volunteer. Everyone keeps saying they love my decorating, the bird house gourds painted in vibrant colors in the patio area, a few quotes and poems stenciled tastefully on the walls, Senegalese batiks, a dry latrine with all the amenities, etc.

Yesterday, I had one of my weekly Women’s Painting Group classes. Two young mothers showed up, as well as 8 kids (4 boys, 4 girls). It’s amazing how devoted the kids are to coming to the class, given that they have no art offered in their primary school. They take it very seriously -- nobody talks. There’s only an exchange of colored pencils as they studiously copy my images into their notebooks, small hands covering areas they are embarrassed for me to see (distorted houses, people with abnormally shaped bodies). After the class, I touched up my mural out front, and every woman heading to the adult education classes (following my class) greeted me warmly. I kept thinking to myself that I have experienced a huge transformation at my site. When I first arrived, children begged me for money and nobody knew my name or my role in the community. Now, I am respected and admired, in a sense, for my artistic and leadership qualities, but not for the lack of daily hard labor in my life (such as that involved with having many kids, crops, and livestock).

As I walked home along the rocky riverbed, I glanced up at kids that shouted my name and waved. Two of my young neighbors were walking with their donkeys loaded with yellow, 2 quart containers of water back to their houses in our cluster. As they walked, we talked and joked. It was as if I were their older sister. When we reached the cluster, I came upon Almazinha, an infamous character in my life in the Laranjeira (mother of baby Nelson, husband that sleeps around, daughters who don’t go to school). She was sifting sand from the riverbed in one of the pits that she had dug.

Each family in my cluster has been laboring away to get sand/gravel for construction since January when it was obvious the rains would not return (they stopped in October this year, instead of January, like in 2001). Instead of selling most of the sand/gravel, each family has added on a room to their house in the front. It’s quite exciting for me to witness the transformation of their houses. Tinha is building the first bathroom with a real flush toilet that will require them to fill a water tank on the roof each day, using water carried in buckets on their heads or on the donkey. With seven people living in Tinha’s house, I am not sure how they have been surviving using their small bedpans to relieve themselves for so many years, and I also can’t imagine how the small tank beneath the bathroom will sustain the quantity of water they will flush. But it’s a step, I tell myself, to improved hygiene in this cluster and the village. Soon, word will travel, and everyone will switch to a cleaner system. Right now, they all use bedpans and perhaps the cow house. It’s one of those mysteries that you never understand unless you happen upon someone in a compromising situation – I never have.

Almazinha and I exchanged words briefly, and she actually became quite jealous when Nelson, the baby who is now 15 months old, stumbled over to me and reached up to be held. In the past month, he has become so fond of me that I get that warm feeling each time I see him and he smiles while trotting my way. He associates me with the tasty food he receives at my house (yogurt and fruit), as well as the interesting toys he finds (clothes pins, cat toys) – it’s like going to Grandma’s house! Although Almazinha stopped breast-feeding him a few months ago, she still tries to lure him back to her on occasion by raising her shirt and exclaiming, “Look, Nelson, at my breast. Come get it!” I find it to be quite immature, considering she only does it when he heads in my direction – she must feel like one day he may love me more than her. She tries to re-establish that dependency he had on her when she breastfed him 8 times a day. Now I see why she has so many kids because some women need that feeling of self-worth that comes with knowing a small human is dependent on them for survival.

Shortly after, as I made my way through the immense haystacks in front of my house, I decided to sit and enjoy the company of my neighbors as they did their chores. Ana, my little eight-year-old informant, sat down beside me and proceeded to give me all of the gossip about what’s been going on. “Guess what, tomorrow we are putting the roof on the bathroom and having a big (house-blessing) party. My mom just killed a goat for the party. We had to borrow some of the construction materials from Nha’s house because we didn’t have enough. Mingu’s (12 year old brother) cut on his leg is almost healed now that you but that you cured him yesterday. Mine is almost better, too.” I looked down at her feet, and saw only one of the water shoes she had received in January when I returned from the States. “Where’s the other one?” I asked. “The top just ripped right off a week ago, and I’ve decided to wear this one everywhere until the same thing happens. One day, I’ll just be running and it will ripppppppp and going flying off,” she says in a very dramatic tone while smiling. Then she continues,“Eva’s (4 year old cousin) shoes just broke the other day. She wore them all the time. Dani (5) and Odair (3) haven’t even worn theirs once yet” (my neighbors who never let their kids use anything I give them).

I prompted everyone to gather together for a group photo on the hay, and they all struggled to be in the center. I smile in amazement at how open they had become in the time I had lived there. They used to be so camera shy, and now they looked for opportunities to monopolize photos because they knew I’d give them a copy, eventually. As I made my way up to my house, adult neighbors peltered me with the obvious questions they ask to make polite conversation, “Where’ve you been?” “At class,” I say, although they know that’s where I’ve been because I told them that’s where I was going two hours earlier when I left. “Oh, at class,” they say as they nod their heads in unison. “You’ve been working so hard. Well, see you soon. Ah hah, see you soon.”

On certain days, the repetitive, obvious questions really annoy me. In my head, I nearly strangle them for asking things that they already know the answers to, and especially for the questions that are just plain prying, like “Where are you going? What are you going to do? When are you coming back?” I resent them asking things that I never ask them. I KNOW they will get water, feed the livestock, make the daily meals, wash laundry, go to adult education classes – I never ask except on weekends when their responses vary: “We’re going to church, then to visit family in so-and-so village.” Just last weekend, the association and scouts took a trip to Praia to visit inmates at the prison and see the new airport road (asphalt, not cobblestone). When I asked Nha, my neighbor and water girl, what happened at the jail, she said, “We asked them what they had done and talked a bit.” “What did they do?” I asked, as we emptied the water from her buckets into my 50-gallon water barrel. “Well, they said they had killed someone, had problems with their woman (wife, inferred), or a child.” I thought to myself, “What a great trip -- murderers, wife beaters, and child molesters.”

We quickly changed the topic to when I would go over to her house again (inferred that I would bring the game ‘Candyland’ to play for hours on end). Lately, everyone begs me to their house to have dinner because they know I’ll bring ‘Candyland,’ as well as prizes that have included: popcorn, fruit slices, candy canes (to go with the game theme), and juice. They get really competitive, and repetitive winners gloat in their luck for days on end, “I won three times and got 2 apple slices and one candy cane. I have so much luck. Marisa didn’t win anything at all.”

I have decided that my favorite time of day is at night when I am at my house, not the neighbors’. Because I hooked up my butane refrigerator about six months ago, I can eat whatever I wan, unlike the first year when I cooked one dish and ate it all day before it went bad. Nowadays, I make Old Bay french fries with ketchup from Portugal, french toast with coconut bread, all kinds of soups with fresh vegetables, fish in olive oil and spices, Spanish omelets, Thai food with canned coconut milk, and pizza bread with my homemade sauce and sliced cheese from Praia. Nobody stops by after 9 p.m., so that’s when I warm my bath water, eat my dinner, and revel in the beauty of the stars and interior candlelight. I curl up with books and my cat (second one never returned after Christmas), which last week was “A Walk in the Woods” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.” Bruce, the neighbor’s dog that thinks he is mine, growls from his doggie bed, an old mattress cover near the front door, at villagers walking past our cluster late at night. I hear an occasional cough from a neighbor’s house because our tiled roofs are so thin, and take pleasure in the country sounds of crickets, owls, donkeys, and a sporadic rooster.

I imagine how my life will be so different in six months when I move to suburban Tokyo, and how much will remain the same here. I wonder if there will be a ‘next’ volunteer at my site, and if they will have an experience anything similar to mine. In my head, I see photos of me posed with the traditionally dressed women in my painting group or the kids on the haystacks, and wonder how I will interpret my “Peace Corps days” when I am forty or sixty. Our temporary Peace Corps doctor, who once served in Seychelles back in the 1970’s, tells me that you always remember it “fondly” no matter what obstacles and annoyances you suffered at the time. I know she is right. Pretty soon, the memories of rat infestations and mudslides will be replaced by images of Nelson reaching up to me, or Ana by my side.