One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo

by Aaron Barlow

  We walked for forty-five minutes without slowing and were miles away from Kolo Ag School. It was 7:50 a.m. when Boureima asked the students and me to wait under a tree while he went over and spoke with the village elders.

  I sighed. There was nothing to do but wait under the tree. Boureima walked the hundred yards to his village, which was a grouping of ten or twelve low-lying nomadic tents with cattle milling about. Cattle are an essential element of life for the Fulani, and managing them effectively is one of their great skills. As with the Tuareg, the Fulani had been accustomed for years to living in the desert, never stopping for any length of time, avoiding cities and towns. But times had changed with the drought, and they had settled here, twenty-five miles from Niamey, for months, perhaps years, waiting for the rains to resume and their nomadic life to become possible again.

  I tried to appreciate this unique glimpse into a mysterious and fascinating culture. From under the tree, we could see children playing with the oxen, skinny four-year-old kids jumping up onto 800-pound animals. The parents stood by, laughing enjoying the game, evidently impervious to any danger. When I was able to overcome my fear for the children’s safety, I could not help laughing as well.

  At the same time, I could not help feeling impatient. It was already 8:15 a.m., and Boureima had still not finished talking to the village elders.

  Finally, he walked back to where we were waiting and invited us to join him. He explained in rapid-paced Zarma, that one of the students interpreted, that it was necessary for us to talk with the elders and allow them to get to know us before we discussed business. This was customary. Through the student interpreter, I reminded Boureima that we did not have much time. He nodded, but I knew that getting Boureima to follow a schedule was about as likely as getting those bulls to castrate themselves.

  It took ten minutes of conversation with the elders in broken Zarma before Boureima brought up the idea, as if he had just thought of it, of our using the Western-style equipment we had brought to castrate bulls from their herd. Everyone nodded and agreed that this was a good idea. The men dispersed and began to shoo the children away. Boureima helped his fellow villagers; I had never seen a bull taken to the ground so effortlessly and quickly. When he was down, no matter how much the Fulani protested that I was not to participate, I insisted upon being the one who tied the bull’s legs together. After all, I would be the one kneeling behind him, and I wanted to be sure that the rope was secure and tight.

  I castrated the first bull myself, explaining each step to the students as I performed it. They paid very close attention and helped by holding the ropes taut. When we had finished and the bull was released, the students seemed quite impressed. So did the Fulani, who seemed suddenly to realize that a procedure—which had always taken them an hour, caused great pain to the bull, and created the risk of serious infection—had just been done in ten minutes with very little pain to the bull and virtually no risk of infection. They applauded and began looking for another animal to castrate.

  They brought forward a second bull. While I watched and assisted, I let the students do everything this time, including the closing of the pince burdizzo. They did a very good job.

  The Fulani were so excited by the expediency of this procedure that they began to round up every young bull in the herd. Soon, they had a line of twenty bulls waiting their turn. A few of them were too young, but for the most part, it would have been both impolite and inhumane not to have done them. If we had not castrated those bulls with the pince burdizzo that day, they almost certainly would have faced the “stick method.” Nine o’clock, then ten o’clock passed while we were castrating one bull after another; I refused to leave before we were finished.

  By the time we had castrated all the bulls of age, every member of the class had handled the pince burdizzo for at least one bull, and most of them had done two. It was an extraordinary day. When we finished, the village elders brought out a gourd of milk and offered it to us as a token of appreciation. It was, of course, unpasteurized milk in a land where tuberculosis was far too common, but it would have been an insult not to accept. They offered the gourd to me first as the leader of our group. I took it and drank, then passed it on to my students.

  We got back at 12:30. The students had missed their 9:00, 10:00, and 11:00 classes and part of lunch. When we arrived, I was informed that the Director wanted to see Boureima and me.

  Monsieur le Directeur was not an agronomist. He knew little about the agricultural techniques being taught at Kolo or about the fieldwork I was teaching. He walked around the school dressed in a leisure suit, expensive leather sandals, and a multi-colored ascot. He also carried a cane. We PCVs called him “F. Scott Director.”

  It was obvious that he was furious as Boureima and I entered his office. His face was contorted, and he could not keep his seat. I had seen him angry before; he seemed to consider it one of his duties to yell at the school’s African employees regularly, but I do not think I had seen him this angry.

  He knew where we had been, but he aimed his abuse at Boureima, not me.

  “How could you keep the students out this long?” he screamed in French. “How could you take them so far away? You made them miss their other classes. Why didn’t you tell us what you were planning to do?”

  Boureima sat still with his head bowed and said nothing. There was nothing for him to say. It had been my decision.

  “Monsieur,” I interrupted. “I’m the one who took the students to Boureima’s village. It’s my class, not his. It isn’t Boureima’s fault we were late.”

  He refused to listen. “You are new, he is not,” he said, looking at Boureima. “He should have known better.”

  He continued to yell at the herder, then told us both to get back to work. When we were outside, I apologized to Boureima for getting him in trouble, but he only smiled. He did not take it personally and seemed less disturbed than I was at the Director’s outburst.

  “I will see you tomorrow,” he said with a glint in his eye. “Maybe we will stay at the corral.”

  Bryant Wieneke, a volunteer in Niger from 1974-76, has produced a series of peace-oriented suspense novels available through www.peacerosepublishing.com, the website for his own publishing company. He works at UC Santa Barbara and lives in Goleta, California.

  Who Controls the Doo-Doo?

  Jay Davidson

  Confidence about one’s body can be severely tried where sanitation is not quite all that might be expected!

  During our Pre-Service Training (PST), after several weeks of staying with our host families, we gathered for a few days at the town’s broken-down excuse for a lycée, where our daytimes were filled with the routine of medical, cross-cultural, and technical sessions. The highlight was when everyone assembled for a Town Meeting, also known as the “no-talent show.”

  By the end of PST, the offerings at the Town Meetings were getting increasingly vulgar, with more and more skits, songs, and poems devoted to diarrhea and other illnesses. My favorite entry in that vein—and the only one I can remember, now that I am writing this almost five years after the fact—was the one in which a fellow trainee shouted out the question, “Who controls the doo-doo?” He taught us to reply in unison, “You do! You do!”

  If only it were that easy to exercise mind over (fecal) matter!

  One of our language facilitators got married twelve days before our swearing-in, an excellent way for us to witness a non-American wedding reception: we never saw the bride or a ceremony of any type. All we did was sit around in a stifling, enclosed courtyard. Then, just in time to stave off our hunger, we were served some of the goat and rice that constituted the celebratory repast.

  I was careful to go for the rice and vegetables, avoiding the bits of goat. One fellow trainee had pointedly observed the eating habits of the town’s free-range goats, exclaiming, “No wonder we’re all getting sick! We
’re eating the goats, and the goats are eating garbage!”

  In any event, on the night of the wedding reception, just after going to bed, I experienced gastric distress. I had been invited to sleep on the roof of the home of Stacy, a first-year PCV who lived just across the street from my host family. Sleeping on the roof meant taking advantage of any available breeze, making it just a little more bearable in the hot-as-Hades town of Kaédi, where nighttime temperatures were always higher than 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

  I had asked our training director if I could sleep there, citing the fact that my host family not only didn’t have an accessible roof, but had a television blaring in their courtyard until the wee hours of the morning. Half the neighborhood assembled to watch it—and me, the toubab with the strange habits.

  At about 4:30 in the morning I awoke with my urgent need and headed downstairs to the bathroom. I tried to psych myself into believing that I was in charge, mumbling to myself, Who controls the doo-doo? You do! You do!

  Well, I was trying to control it!

  I got downstairs, reached the front door of the house and gave it a yank, only to find that it had been padlocked. It was too dark for me to be able to read the combination, thereby releasing the door, allowing me to enter the house. I was not able to control the doo-doo. The liquid poured forth, into my running shorts, down the back of my legs, and all over the step in front of the door.

  I had visited the house a few times before, and I knew that Stacy got her water for doing laundry from an outside spigot. But I did not know where that freaking spigot was. At various points during the next few hours, when I was feeling well enough to try to find it, I groped around in the dark to see if I could find the water supply, but I never did find it. All I could do was wait there in the yard, squatting against a tree, until somebody sleeping on the roof awoke, descended into the front yard, and could tell me the location of the water so that I could clean up.

  By sunrise, the little critters that were causing the havoc in my body were fully in control. I was weak, queasy, and depressed. One of the first-year Volunteers asked if he should arrange for a Peace Corps car to come and take me to the infirmary on the campus where we were training.

  Wow! They can do that? was my answer. Yes, they could, and yes, they did! The nurse gave me medication, I had to drink a liter of water with disgusting oral rehydration salts, and I stayed all day and that night in the infirmary. I napped much of the day and slept nine and a half hours that night—all in glorious air-conditioned comfort!

  There was a tremendous storm that night, necessitating that everyone move from their usual outdoor sleeping places to the hot indoors. The following day, just about everyone was talking about the awful night that they had. But I had finally had a good night sleep, which totally transformed my attitude. Whereas the day before I was feeling that I would not be able to survive until swearing in, now I was thinking, Only ten more days? Is that all? Bring ’em on!

  Jay Davidson was a teacher for thirty-four years in San Francisco. When he retired in 2003, he joined the Peace Corps and served as a Curriculum Development Specialist in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, West Africa, from 2003-05. He can be reached via his website, www.jaydavidson.com.

  The Ride Home

  Bina Dugan

  Almost anyone who has traveled the way Africans do will recognize at least a part of this experience.

  The inside of the green-and-white B&C bus feels hot and humid, and has since we left Magunje and began traveling on the dusty, red clay and gravel road. I angrily wonder if the sun, recognizing our displeasure with the roads, has given us a more unbearable problem on which to refocus our exasperation. The suffocating conditions intensify with the growing number of people and bags crammed into every crevice of the bus; even the aisles fill, making passage difficult. Human sardines, we slowly soak in our own brine of perspiration.

  Sitting on the right side—the sunny side, the three-seater side—I feel sweat forming into large beads on my face, neck and chest, and rolling lazily, following the contours of my skin. Occasionally I mistake the movement for that of a fly and brush it away.

  When the road offers few potholes (a rare occurrence), the bus increases speed, creating a breeze and brief respite from the heat. An added bonus is the fleeting disappearance of the smell—a sharply pungent mix of sweat brought on by heat and hard work, Chibuku, tobacco, wood-smoke, greasy hair-cream, roasted mealie-cobs, babies, and recently washed clothes never purged of these odors.

  “Hasina matickets,” barks the conductor, searching for passengers who, somehow, have boarded unnoticed and haven’t yet bought tickets. How he thinks this could happen mystifies me, as no one (including me) travels without at least two large bags, one full of clothes and another of food. Some adventurous people add children, a radio, and household goods like buckets, washing basins, pots and pans. Women especially carry a large burden, with a baby tightly wrapped onto her back, a toddler or young child passed over bags obstructing the aisle, and a bag of unground mealies in a plastic woven bag tied closed with twine balanced expertly on her head. Alighting from the bus, additional luggage may be lowered to her from the top carriage, carefully but quickly, by a muscled loader. With incredible agility, he climbs on top with the bus still moving, using the railing, the door hinges, and the door itself as leverage.

  “Zvipane, Zvipane. Uyai, uyai,” the conductor calls, announcing the next stop and encouraging all people departing here to inform him of any goods they need removed from the top carriage, so the loader can retrieve them quickly.

  A growth point, Zvipane has been identified by the government as centrally located and deserving of development, and this status means the town has a restaurant. The existence of a restaurant means that we will stop here for twenty minutes for the crew to eat lunch—a large plate of sadza (the polenta-like staple food) with a few pieces of grizzled goat meat and an oily spoonful of green vegetables—so no passengers heed the conductor’s suggestion to depart quickly. While the crew relaxes in the restaurant, the passengers eat at the bottle store—dry loaves of bread, crisps (potato chips), cold minerals (soft drinks)—or buy outside from the female vendors—guavas, mangoes, wet-but-not-frozen freezits (popsicles), and sweet reeds (a thin cousin of sugar cane). Scrawny dogs with pronounced ribs slink through the groups of people, heads and tails held down, wary of the kicks of cruel men.

  Some, exhausted by the ride and the sweltering heat, return to the bus, hoping to enjoy an empty seat for a few minutes. Teeth or nails in the corners of windows conveniently open Cokes, the slow bending of the aluminum cap producing a hissing that signals the upcoming quenching of parched throats.

  The driver announces our departure by noisily turning over the engine and giving a few short blasts of the horn while the loader urgently yells “Handei” and bangs his fist on the hot metal door. Soon after departure, the conductor announces the first stop: “Chiroti Pa Chikoro,” (the stop at Chiroti Secondary School). No one responds, so we continue.

  Beginning our descent to the Sanyati River, a collective anticipation builds and all conversation ceases. The steep road contains deep gullies created by quick-flowing rainwater making the descent slow and treacherous. The absence of homesteads and fields—and the abundance of the lush, green “bush” taking over the road—underscores our anxiety: Why does no one live here? What dangers lurk? What wild animals roam?

  When we finally reach the bridge, all heads face out, peering through the grimy windows at the river. Everyone wants to inspect the water level; neighbors speak freely about the effect the rain and river have on their own homesteads. The river, now full and rushing quickly west toward Lake Kariba (sixty kilometers away), resembles iced coffee—the result of heavy rainfall stealing the rich topsoil of unfortunate farmers upstream.

  The river signals my arrival at home. After nearly eight hours on this “chicken bus” (aptly named because of the
crowding and occasional presence of chickens), only thirty kilometers of the worst roads remain, so bumpy that not holding your tongue behind clenched teeth will likely result in biting it off. Black-and-blue striped tsetse fly traps come into view and Peter Store, where the tsetse fly-control barricade is situated, looms ahead.

  Betraying the importance of his job, the Animal Control Officer approaches the bus—large, black net ready to capture unwanted flies—with his blue overalls uniform tied by the arms around his waist revealing a hair-speckled chest and a belly stretched to the limit by beer. Before checking for tsetse flies, he buys two loaves of freshly baked bread from the driver (our only daily source of bread and the Zimbabwe Sun). After slowly inspecting the exterior of the bus, he half-heartedly lifts the barricade and, with a salute, sends the bus on its way.

  Traveling up the hill with the horn blasting continuously, we pass schoolchildren trudging home. Munoda’s store and the DDF (District Development Fund) radio antennae appear. “Musampakaruma, Musampa,” calls the loader as he again climbs to the roof. I’m home.

  Bina Dugan, English Teacher/Library Developer, Zimbabwe 1995-97, continues to teach English and improve the communication skills of non-native speakers in her role as a freelance ESL tutor/coach/editor, and as an Adjunct Professor in the American Language Program (Speech) Department at Bergen Community College in New Jersey. She no longer takes the bus, save for the occasional fifteen-minute (air-conditioned) trip into Manhattan.

  The Little Things

  Stephanie Gottlieb

  Bringing oneself into a foreign place sometimes brings the foreign place closer.

  The sun peeks through my straw hangar. The thwack of an axe from across my courtyard and the neighing of donkeys signal another day has begun. In Burkina Faso, the last thing I need is an alarm clock. As if set to a timer—even though usually NOTHING runs on time—my village comes to life as the sun peeks over the horizon. The people—and animals—start their day whether I am ready for them to or not. There is no snooze button.