Slept decently, perhaps even well both of my nights in Doungee. I can’t get over the feeling that I want to stay longer here. The village has a realness to it, a hardiness, that is incredible and deep. I’m up by about 7:30. First thought is coffee. It’s my addiction on this trip. But it’s easy with my little stove.
Breakfast is brought sometime around 8. Fodé Samba’s wives and Babacar’s wives have been preparing and delivering me truly generous plates of food. I feel guilty about how much I eat. Truly I am spoilt. This morning is no exception, as Tigidanké, one of Fodé Samba’s daughters drops off a large bowl of yanketank, rice mixed with ground peanuts, along with a nice bit of powdered chili spice. Solid breakfast. But before I eat I need to get my battery plugged in and charging. I didn’t strategize right yesterday. I thought the little tiny solar panel set up in Babacar’s backyard, if given enough time during the middle of the day, would eventually charge my battery. It simply did not. By the time I realized I needed a different plan, my phone was down to like 20%, and it was late afternoon. I asked around to determine if there is a better solar panel setup in the village, and I am pointed to a hut just up the hill. I can see a large panel on the roof, but unfortunately I learn that the owner is gone for the night, so I can not access the charging station within the hut.
This morning, I go up to the same hut, and the owner is still not back. Damn. I walk around a bit, and come across a medium sized panel set up next to a work site. I ask if I can leave my battery there. No problem. Seems like I might be able to get a bar or two with this panel.
It is unfortunate that I have to spend so much time on this trip obsessing and strategizing over how to keep my battery/phone charged. I am sure that to the people in these villages I come off as a screen obsessed goober. But what else am I to do? My phone is my map, my camera, my gps tracker, and so much more. If I were to do this trip again, I would consider bringing a second external battery, but for now it is situationally unavoidable. I am beginning to not trust village solar panels smaller than ~1x.4 meters. I am also, as it were, gaining wisdom about how to strategize. If I knew not to trust Babacar’s little panel, and to ask the right questions from the start, I might have avoided this situation.
Battery plugged in, I go back to the hut for breakfast. It is good. Very good. I feel good too. Before leaving today, I want to visit the other section of the women’s garden that I did not get to yesterday, and which, I am told, is even larger than the area I did see. So I walk back down towards the creek, veering more northward, and following along with a woman and her kids heading to the same spot.
After the 30 minute walk we arrive, and the garden is unbelievable. It is indeed larger than the area I saw yesterday, and, like that other area, is extremely repetitive. It’s quite a scene, another huge checkerboard of green rectangles teaming with women who descend a steep, dusty trail to a little pool of muddy water, step in to above their knees, dip a basin or bucket, and walk back up the trails with, I’d guess, 40-50 pounds of water on their head. And they do this after the hike down here, often while carrying babies on their backs. The amount of work that these several hectares of garden beds represent is staggering. It kind of depresses me, to be honest. But I am chipper and greet everyone and take picture and videos and have to weasel out of a couple demands for “materials,” which could mean anything from a motor pump to a chain link fence, to a well. I wish I could do something here. But there is so much going on with this trip, it's just not something I even know how to consider entertaining at the moment. I am traveling. I am sorry.
After hiking back up the hill I find that Samoura, the guy with the big solar panel, is back. I plug my phone in with him, even though it will only be for an hour or so. Then I pack up my bike, give some money to Fodé Samba and Babacar, and it is time to go. I get my phone back after a bit more than an hour, and it has charged about 12%. This setup would have worked. My battery, meanwhile is still blinking on one bar. So I am setting out from Doungee with phone at 85% and battery at or below 25%. I have no idea if there will be any charging capability in my next village.
The ride to Toubacouta is relatively casual. One substantial hill to get over. Hardest part is knowing to take the road to the right just north of Doungee, but I had already seen the crossroads on my walk to the garden this morning, and checked with the lady I was with about which way to go. During the ride everything feels fine, maybe even good, with my bike. Chain is rubbing a bit in my second lowest gear, but not so badly that the gear isn’t useable.
I get to Toubacouta at about 2. It is much flatter than Doungee, on a plain right next to a creek. I see some gardens when getting into town, and my first thought is that they are so much closer to the village here than the gardens in Doungee. The village is smaller, and, somehow feels every bit as “bush” as Doungee, perhaps even more so, though I can’t exactly say why I feel this way. The mosque is handsome for a village of this size, sporting minarets, albeit very modest ones. Town feels empty at first. I greet some women, then a dude at his house. He is surprised to see me, but chill, and really nice. I head farther into town to find/greet more kébaas, thinking that there will be some old men sitting under the shade tree by the mosque. It is never quite obvious how to kinda just stroll into a village and find a host. There is no manual or blueprint for this. It’s never the same. But it always works out.
I end up coming across a dude working on his moto under a mango tree. There is a little bench, and he implores me to sit as we greet and chat. He’s calm and knows my toxoma. In fact, he visited Dar salaam last year. His last name is Jaxité, and he is a full -on first cousin of my toxoma’s first wife, Fatoumata “Nanding” Jaxité. He brings out water, then a chair, and we continue to chat. I give him my spiel, and he seems to get the idea right away. Then we go to another shade tree around the corner where a small group of people forms— the greeting committee. Everyone knows my toxoma, everyone knows Dar salaam, most people have the last name Jaxité or Keita.
There is a man in Dar Salaam named Boubacar Keita who was one of my official Peace Corps counterpart/work partners. Boubcar speaks Wolof, the lingua franca of coastal, urban Senegal, so he would go to the work partner trainings in Thies instead of Mamadou or Ousmane, who don’t know much, if any, Wolof. I never really ended up working with Boubacar all that much, but I’ve always like him. I’ve actually ended up working far more with his first wife, Mariama Ba, who, despite being Pulaar, is one of my favorite people in Dar Salaam and the president of the women’s gardening group. She and Boubacar have lived and traveled all over Guinea, Senegal, and Gambia, and are among the more well informed/worldly people in the village. Anyway, Boubacar as it turns out, was born and raised here in Toubacouta. I find myself sitting next to his older brother, who is a really fun, jovial, and old. The connections between DS and here are explained to me constantly, and by every adult I meet.
Then the guy who had been working on his moto, Muhammad Jaxité, asks if I ate lunch today. “No,” I say, laughing a little,” I left before lunch in Doungee, but it’s fine.” I was imagining I’d coincide with lunch here. I arrived before 2 PM, and, in my experience, in a village like this, one typically eats around 2-3. But I have not seen any bowls or heard the clink of serving spoons. They have already eaten. Jaxité says something softly to a woman, who slips away, and I soon see smoke rising from a nearby zinc roofed hut. They are literally cooking a meal for me. What hospitality. I have a host.
I get a little quiet for the next hour or so of conversation, just kind of sitting, greeting new people, thinking, trying to follow the conversation that continues on around me. People are really nice. Muhammad Jaxité, my host, who I will refer to henceforth as MJ, comes and goes. Toubacouta is a very pleasant, very slow village, full of smiling, earnest Jaxankés. This is the kind of place I am in Guinea to see and experience.
During all the greetings there was one that was a little bit bizarre. A young man came up to me and shook my hand much more firmly than is normal and greeted in Pulaar. He also kept holding my hand and didn’t really continue/respond to the Pulaar greetings I dished back. It became clear that this guy is a person with a mental handicap of some type. I really don’t know what specific condition he might have. It’s not Down syndrome. He mumbles and walks around and repeats the same Pulaar word when people talk to him. He’s not the first such person like this I’ve seen in villages like this, and I have been low-key fascinated by the dynamics regarding people like this. Nobody says anything about him to me. No hushed warnings or explanations. And, as I observe, there are no constraints on his activity. He is free to wander around, greet people, and play with the kids.
A little later my food is ready, so MJ and I go into a room to eat. The amount of rice we are given is a lot, so MJ puts enough for the two of us onto a plate, and the rest is set aside in another dish. The man with the mental handicap is nearby, and MJ brings this extra food and gives it to him. While we’re eating I ask MJ about this fellow. “Yea,” he says, “he walked down here today from the Pulaar village up the hill. Does so regularly. Comes and goes. Sometimes he’ll sleep in the front room of that (pointing) hut on the floor.”
“Wow,” I say, "and when he comes here, he is welcome, and you give him food, and he hangs around around.”
“Yea,” says MJ, plainly, “He does not hurt anyone, he does not scare anyone, he plays with the kids, so there is no problem.”
In describing this I don’t mean to paint some rosy picture, as if this is a perfect and obvious way to deal with such a situation. But the guy does seem happy, for what it’s worth. I consider trying to explain that in America we might keep someone like this separate from other people but decide not to. Instead, I ask more question. Turns out this guy is capable of farming, and indeed helps in the fields during the rainy season.
The food we eat is good, though it is a dish that is becoming repetitive. I realize it is the meal of the Futa Jallon peasant, at least during the dry season: rice with a drizzle of red palm oil, a bit of msg, and chopped/boiled onion leaves. As the dry season sets in, the only sauce material available is increasingly whatever is available from the women’s gardens, and they are very serious about having lots of onions growing, for both leaf and bulb. The dish is not bad, and it fills my stomach, but it doesn’t feel all that nourishing.
After the meal MJ leads me on a quick walkabout to say hi to more of the families and Kébaas in Toubacouta. We pass by a copse of mature trees that is right in the center of the village, between clusters of huts, near the mosque. “Gabaro,” MJ, tells me pointing. I’ve heard this word, but I thought it meant funeral. I’m close. He explains that the word refers to a sacred grove of trees where they bury people. Nobody cuts this grove, and you typically don’t walk through it. It is indeed a little section of very mature forest, with a few large diameter “Tabo” (Cola cordifolia) and “Jallo” (Khaya senegalensis) trees, as well as several types of vines. Even now, in the middle of the dry season, with everything at its driest and most desiccated, this “Gabaro” exudes an aura of fecundity, and the lushness of untouched forest. A glimpse of what this landscape was once like. Unfortunately, such woodlands are increasingly rare in the Guinean bush at large, though they do certainly exist.
Toubacouta is a humble village. It is encircled by a fence, through during the dry season there are several openings, and cows, sheep, and goats come as they will. Having one collective fence around the whole village seems to be the norm for Jaxanké villages in Guinea. This is not typically the case in Kédougou, where instead, each farmer will fence in, independently, their own fields around their compound, but the village as a whole will not have a single encircling fence.
It might be worth explaining the basic dynamic of livestock management here. It is essentially the inverse of what we consider the norm in the US. In the United States, livestock are penned in. Sometimes these fenced in fields are vast, but ultimately livestock are contained in certain areas. Meanwhile, everywhere else outside of these fences is without cows, sheep, or goats. In West Africa, it is the opposite. The domain of domesticated ruminants is everywhere besides certain areas from which they are excluded. Such restrictions are only really maintained during the rainy season. People fence in their corn, rice, or peanuts fields, the animals are ushered out, and left to wander around the bush/periphery of the village. But after the harvest is completed, the fences are opened, or simply stop being maintained, and the animals enter to eat the corn stalks, rice husks, and any other byproducts of the year’s agriculture.
Some compounds maintain a small, inner courtyard, right between the huts, which is fenced in and maintained as an ungulate free zone even during the dry season. This is very pleasant. But many compounds do not have this inner, secondary fencing. In these cases there is literally nowhere, during the dry season, where animals may not roam. This is the case in my host compound in Dar Salaam. It can be a bit jarring. Goats wander into the cooking hut, cows and donkeys run at will straight through the area where people sit and live their lives every day.
Anyway, the Guinean model— fencing in the village with a single collective fence seems superior on several counts. First, this uses far less wood (read: trees) than having every individual field fenced separately. Second, and related, one large fence means far fewer meters of fence to maintain and repair overall per capita. Fences are the bane of farmer’s existence during the late rainy season, when crops are high, but not quite ready for harvest. One rupture point, and a single cow getting through can result in significant losses in a matter of hours. It seems as though maintenance would be far more feasible if shared among the whole village. Interesting differences between Guinean and Senegalese Jaxanké village layouts. I also just realized I have not seen any donkeys in Guinea, I will have to ask about this.
MJ and I continue to walk around, visiting compounds, and greeting old men and their families. People describe relationships with people in Dar Salaam. I simply cannot follow all of them. I hate to admit it, but I actually don’t even know everyone in Dar Salaam, even though it’s only about 220-230 people. Names are mentioned that I’ve heard, but can’t quite place. The complex web of family relations linking the people of Dar Salaam with the people of Salamata is unspooled before me, but I can’t quite read the specifics. I should try making a family tree, but I honestly don’t know how to include polygamy, and dozens of half siblings on a family tree. Seems like it would get extremely complicated after just one generation/line. Nonetheless I do my best to follow, and nod and smile, and ask questions that probably suggest to people that I am a bit slow.
After this walkabout we go down to the gardens. I’d seen some of them on the way into town, but now see that there are many, many more, stretching along the banks of the mostly dry creek that runs near town. The gardens here are so, so much closer to town than those cultivated by the women of Doungee. It’s a five-minute stroll. They are otherwise quite similar: the creek is similarly depleted, though the pools of water are not yet fully exhausted; and the vegetable selection is about the same. I walk around, smile, greet, and I take pictures. I tell anyone who will listen that in every Jaxanké village I visit, the women have extremely impressive gardens. And I mean it.
Back to the village. I am shown my room, in a little zinc roofed hut across from MJ and his wives’ compound. Then I wash off with a bucket bath. After this I feel really good, and relaxed. I sit and chat a little bit. It is a very slow village. I sit with a group of men, talking a little bit. Even after 2 years in West Africa I can forget that in places like this, during this time of year, there is often, for long periods during a day, simply nothing to do— at least if you are a man and are not expected to cook, clean, garden, and care for children. MJ’s kids run around the hit each other with little twiggy sticks. His second youngest is a little girl who can just barely walk, but she totters around swinging her twig at the older kids who run away in a feigned show of fright. It’s absolutely adorable.
I am pretty tired. I read my Kindle for a bit while sitting outside on a chair. I am reading “Serotonin,” by Houellebeqc. It’s good. His description of the challenges facing dairy farmers in France feel personal. The postmodern malaise and exhaustion of the main character is vintage Houellebeqc. I want to read his newest, which is called “Destroy,” I believe, in English.
After a bit, as it gets fully dark, I go and lay down on the bed to read. It’s a firm, straw mattress, and extremely comfortable. After a while, dinner arrives. It’s “mafé soup:” watery MSG sauce, with a bit of oil and chopped onions and “bits of spaghetti.” It’s filling, and the MSG is delicious as always.