Stealth Gardening

September 20, 2010 at 8:30 am (Uncategorized)

I’ve long held the belief that there are certain inherent traits in us that have corresponding genes that are just waiting for some silly scientist in a lab coat somewhere to discover.  Favorite flowers and Christmas songs come from grandmothers, the propensity to talk about the height and general well-being of corn is surely a trait straight from grandfathers, and such phrases as “grinning like a jack-ass eating briar” could only come from a father.  But here’s yet another, this one coming sneaking in fro, a certain mother:  I have become a clandestine waterer.

Part of getting settled in at site as an actual volunteer (and I could never have expected how much actually swearing in as a volunteer, with an official ceremony and all would make me feel somehow justified, as I sat with tears streaming down my face at swearing in ceremony) is planting a garden.  Which is fortunate because it gives me something to do in my masses of free time.  So I took up my seeds and my saba and told my homologue that I was going to grow things.  After waffling a bit about it being rainy season, he agreed and changed into his farmer’s outfit:  pants screaming with primary colors, a blue down jacket with a fur-lined hood, and a straw hat.  Please picture that for a moment.

We went out and planted watermelons, cantalope, cucmbers, squash, tomatoes, peppers, radishes, beets, onions, and carrots.  Who knows if they’ll grow, but I’ll be damned if I’m not serenading them with Nat King Cole and Old Crow Medicine Show every day.  I even managed to convince the snarky teenage boys that hang around with my host brothers that they should be helping me dig the massive plot in the middle of the Jardin d’Orphelins.

Where does my secret life as stealth-waterer come in?  With the melons, of course.  My homologue is completely convinced that they don’t need water and I’m equally convinced that they do (which they do).  So I’ve taken to going out at odd times, watering the 30 odd mounds of prospective fruits, pulling water from the well and hauling it furtively.  When my homologue comes out and sees the slightly damp hills, “Did you water?”  “Of course not.  Must have sprinkled last night.”  I’m just waiting to meet him someday perched on the well, armed with a shovel, ready to catch my fruit-saving methods.

I will say that I went to church yesterday with one of my older host brothers.  The service was held in a one-room schoolhouse, with men on one-side of the aisle and women on the other.  Stiflingly hot and two and a half hours long, the prayers were in Bomu, the sermon, by some crazy visiting pasot who mimed a lot about being thrown into the fires of hell and some sort of procession who evidently hopped like rabbits, was in Bambara, and I had some woman fromm the bank trying to translate it all into French for me, which I couldn’t hear over the pastor’s yelling, and wouldn’t have been able to understand even if I could.  I had the strange impression I was something like Tom Sawyer looking dozn at his own funeral.

I will say this, though:  With drums and shakers and singing and dancing, the Malians sure know how to do their hymns a lot better than the Lutherans;