Au Village

I don’t much feel like writing today. I have a headache from staring at my computer all day long, I am tired from being inside my house all day too, yet feel I should be able to last longer than a few hours at my desk. Somehow I get tired here, I don’t know what it is, maybe not having someone to spur me on, maybe it was my hepatitis jab.

I have been out in the village for two days this week, a couple of hundred kms from Dakar, doing a story on a religious group who have started a commune and a clothing business. Their stuff is made from hand-woven cotton in colourful patchwork and stripes. They make hammocks, clothes, wall hangings, bags, shoes. Their things are sold all over Europe and the USA and are well-designed and well-made. I have been buying their clothes for years; all the toubabs in Dakar buy their stuff because despite this country being full of artists and crafts people, very few people have cottoned on to the fact that for art to be interesting it needs to be unique, or at least not a direct copy of someone else’s copy. The products from Maam Samba have hit the mark and the shop is often stampeded by NGO and UN wives in the four wheel drives after the lastest striped baby booties. It is like the Northcote Road, just hotter.

I have been meaning to go to the village for the last year and finally got a BBC and Reuters commission so decided it was time to go. I arrived at the nearest town, Bambay, at nine o’clock on Monday morning. I was immediately hit by the sound of a young boy’s voice singing a religious song to the people inside the car, begging for money. The voice shot right through me. It was perfectly in tune, not like the warblings of most of these boys who are usually under 10 years old, and vibrating perfectly so that it kind of melted through my body. But I lost sight of him in the confusion of finding another taxi to take me to the village, 11 km through the bush, off the main road.

The countryside there is sand and baobab trees and the odd horse and cart rattling through the landscape (see photo of girls collecting firewood for an idea of what it looks like). I arrived at the village, essentially a religious commune, a bright, clean place with rubbish bins (unheard of in Senegal) dotted around, horses tethered under the trees, plants and cactus, bright flowering bougainvillea. The leader of this group is Serigne Babacar (see picture of the man in white a robe), a sixty-something spiritual guide who received a sign whilst in the Pyrenees and returned to the village of his father with his wife, Aisa (a French woman-turned religious devotee).

Over twenty years they have built up their commune, and a flourishing clothing business. The cotton is hand-woven by 120 weavers around the 15 villages on long looms, making 100 metres at a time. It is then died either by natural mud dies or chemical dies by local women (see photo of Khady collecting the died cloth on her head), tailored by a team of tailors (see photo), then sent out to its various outlets. The company employs 360 people from the 15 villages around the commune and most of them have only recently come back. Before there was the clothing business the men were forced to go to Dakar to look for work, leaving only children and old people behind. There were no schools, no hospitals, and mostly no water.

Now there are two French schools, one Arabic school, a hospital (see photo of the doctor's daughter Fatim infront of the hospital), a maternity clinic, two deep wells with enough water to grow organic vegetables and cotton and over 300 children going to school. The leader, Serigne Babacar, went from village to village trying to convince the men to let their children do to school. Many of them refused but slowly they have come round to the idea that a French education may not be such a bad thing.

I was deeply impressed by this place. They gave me a room to stay in for two days, food and water and looked after me and let me go around interviewing people without telling me who I should speak to. I found the 5am chanting to the spiritual guide a bit hard to deal with, as well as the PR man telling me to lose 10kg (he later said 2 would be fine), but apart from that it was an amazing experience. The work they have done there is more than anything I have seen either the government or any NGO do in this country. Religion really can be a driving force for development, so it seems.

Part of the success of this business is that this particular sect follows Cheikh Ibra Fall, who was the right hand man of Senegal’s holiest guide Cheikh Amadou Bamba. Ibra Fall’s philosophy was that instead of praying and fasting, one should work hard in the service of those who are praying. “We have time to do all the things that those who pray don’t have time to do,” said one man in the commune. He had been hit by a car in Dakar 17 years ago and come to this village for healing. He is still in a wheelchair but earns a living, and leads a dignified life, by making jewellery.

One of the things that was most noticable about the people at Ndem was that no one called me toubab the whole time I was there. No one tried to make special friends with me, no one looked at me and though "VISA". They were all leading a very normal, but dignified, life, with a job to go to in the morning, on time, and money at the end of it. After seeing how people struggle in the rest of Senegal, how demotivated life without work is, how time has no concept because there's not much to be on time for, it was wonderful to be there.

The man who runs the 120 weavers was a very normal, illiterate but highly skilled, man of about 50. When I asked him how different his life was now that he could stay home and teach his sons how to weave plus earn a good living, his face beamed like the sun. What a difference Senegal would be if people had reliable jobs doing the things they are good at, rather than the useless things that help no one, like standing in the middle isle of a motorway for 10 hours a day selling a cheap Chinese iron that breaks after 3 uses. the phot of the boy crouching on the floor with metres of white cotton stretched out infront of him is this man's 14 year old son.

When I left the village on Wednesday, I made it back to the town where I sat in a dakar-bound car and waited for it to fill up. Across the garage came the voice of the young boy I had heard the first morning and I managed to record him singing. He’ll be going out, along with my report, on the airwaves next week.

'Wass'

'Wass' means 'to gut fish'.

I don't much like fish but I eat it because that is what we eat here. Sometimes you buy it from the fisherman and it is still breathing. When you get it from the market it is at least dead, but still very fish-like. Because of a run-in with the fish-gutting cartel back in March I have decided to gut my own fish and not hand over money to the fat woman who keeps a stock of young girls back behind the market stalls, taking far too much money and not doing any of the work herself.

So today I came back from market with 12 fish, some little ones and 4 big ones. They were very beautiful, pink-ish in colour with a bright purple fin (is that the word?) on the spine (do fish have spine?). But they had to be gutted so Badji, the hero of the neighbourhood (who not only removed frogs from my house when I first moved in but recently put out an electrical fire in the house next door to mine) said, "go and get a stool, a bowl of water and two knives. Here starts your 'wass' education".

So we perched on the ground behind Now's shop and he showed me how to pull out the little fins and the one under its chin, then get my hand inside its gills, pull out that gristly thing (this was the worst bit), then slit its stomach and pull out the guts. Dudu, Kine, Now, Samba,Binta and Ishmaela all gathered round to watch the education of this white girl who can't even gut fish and I closed my eyes and got my fingers in and did the deed.

Then the flies came. Big and fat and vibrating, they landed heavy on the fish and me and the guts and Badji didn't seem to even notice they were there but they made me feel sick and I wished I had a little girl there who would bring a branch and swat them for me. After 12 fish I felt positively sick and had to go home and drink tea and listen to The Archers Omnibus (thank god the soap box derby's over).

But it means I am now initiated, I am now a functional woman in this society, and I can now prepare my own fish. It will be a while before I am able to do it with my eyes open though.

Badji and Ishmaela, my guardian, came to help me cook dinner. Badji, it turns out is a whizz at cooking. I brougt in the rice to pick out the stones and he said he would do it. Ishmaela said that rice was the job of a woman and he shouldn't touch it. But Badji is a good Casamance boy and proud of being able to treat rice in the right way so he sat and picked out the grit (this is what he is doing in the picture, Badji is the one on the left). I cut the onions and made a tomato and onion sauce, as well as fried some butternet squash. The fish was lovely, very sweet and light. We were 8 of us for dinner, all around a bowl outside Now's shop, some of us balancing on gas bottles, some on little benches, the bowl on the sandy ground. As people came to the shop to buy bread for dinner, we took it in turns to serve since Now was eating. This is what constitutes a dinner party in Senegal, and the best place ot be on a Saturday night with no plans.

Ok, Ok...

OK, Linda is my mum.

I had the feeling she got kind of sick being called 'mama' everywhere she went in Senegal, and I had to keep on reminding people that she may be a mama but she is also a Linda, whose youngest offspring now lives far away on a different continent.

Was this really the thing that stood out most from my entry, that I didn't call my mother 'mum'? What about the fact that I had to climb a tree to pick up mobile phone messages (or did I forget to put that in?).

The Royal Visit

Leaving behind the inane world of French couples on holiday, Linda and I hired a boat and got as many miles between Cap Skirring and ourselves as possible. Our boat driver was called Paul, he came from a village about half way along the Casamance River system so on our way to Carabane, we dropped in to his village to say hello. We met a painter who designed t-shirts in a thatch hut (see photo) in this village that has water only in the rainy season and no young people. During the dry season (now), the young people leave the island to go to Ziguinchor or Dakar to work. A dry, barren village on the banks of a tributary of the Casamance River, no road, no young people, just the odd old lady cracking nuts with a machete under a tree and another one boiling oysters that grow on the mangrove roots that line the river banks. Despite that, and apart from Linda and I deciding that of all the places in the world we could live, this would be the last, it had a pretty spectacular view down-river. Some of the t-shirts had a condom design on the front as an advery for safe sex. I wish I had bought one. A mad old rasta with a pretty god message.

Between this village and Carabane, Paul picked up a beautiful young woman and her tiny daughter who were paddling their dug-out to another village. We stopped to give them a lift, attaching a rope to her boat and speeding along with them laughing and chatting behind. We dropped them off and quickly picked up some old mamas who were waiting with their goods to sell by the side of the river. They might have been there for days. We took them to Elinkine, a largish village opposite the island of Carabane.

I first went to Carabane Island with Hermione two years ago. We had a perfect four days on this road-less, car-less sandy island, sleeping in a room metres from the water's edge. We lay in hammocks and listened to music at night and swam a great deal. It was one of those trips where I thought if I ever went back, it wouldn 't be as wonderful as it had been the first time. I approached it up the river with apprehension. What if the owners of the house we had stayed in were no longer there, or didn't remember me? I couldn't even remember their names.

Paul, Linda and I saw the house perched on a tip of land at the far end of the island and slowly moved the boat around a sand bar until we could go no further. I saw two figures watching us draw near and as I waded ashore there were smiles and hugs from Medoun and Louis, the two men who live and work in Carabane's eco-guesthouse.

The bedrooms are now even closer to the water. The island is fast being swallowed up by the rising sea level and when you lie in the old rope hammocks that swing between the wind-swept trees that shade the round house, high-tide will wash beneath you. Medoun estimates that in five years time his house will be under water.

During my last visit with Hermione, I had been pre-occupied by work. This time I had nothing to do and so I went about with Medoun as he worked about the house and garden. About a mile away is the well and in the morning we carried 20 litre containers across the mud-flats to fill them up. Near the well is the organic garden, a paradise in this fresh water-starved, salt-water encroached land. Coconuts, avocados, lettuces, hibiscus (for drinks), courgettes, parsley, bamboo (for roofing), all organic, all lovingly watered every day by Medoun and Louis. We picked Cashew fruits (look at the pic!) which grow wild around the garden, filled our water containers, looped the ropes around our waists and dragged the water back along the mud-flats. The rope cut my skin and my shoulders ached from drawing water from the well. it was hot, sweaty, hard work and I loved it all. When we got back to the house we dived into the sea and I instigated under-water swimming races.

Racing against men who do physical work all day long and live their lives by the sea is not a good idea if you want to win. I could swim half the distance they could. We discovered that I am buoyant: my head goes under the water but the rest of me floats to the surface.

After that Louis and I went fishing. Well, I watched and squirmed as the fish were left to suffocate on the sand. He took a circular net strung together by some weights and ropes, held the centre in this teeth, crept into the shallows like a cat on the prowl where he could see a school of fish and flung the net out, releasing the ropes from his teeth at the same time. The net tightened like a purse around the fish and there was dinner, plus food for his family and Medoun's.

It was Medoun's dream ever since he was at school to live in an environmentally-sound house. He is the first Senegalese person I have ever met who even has any awareness of the pressures we put on the earth. Senegal is the land of the plastic bag, but Casamance, with its endless tributaries and mangroves and sleepy languid waters, as well as its bright clear coast and beaches, feels so far away from the rubbish tips of Dakar. Pretty much wherever I am in Casamance I wake up in the morning and feel something akin to magic around me. Medoun has carved out a magical place within that, a solar-powered living-off-the-land haven on the banks of the river that is probably right now my favourite place on earth.

One afternoon Medoun came back from the village with a small boy called Abdoul Rahim. He was about four years old and had seen Medoun in the village and asked if he could come to spend the day with us. he had never been this far across the island and it was a real adventure for him. We played in the hammocks and when it came to going home, I carried him on my back the two miles along the beach to the village. He was so sad to go home. I like how Africans borrow children and it never occurs to their parents that something bad might happen to them, even in Dakar. There is an amazing trust in other people because everybody knows that no one would hurt a child.

So the Royal Visit over, I think I showed her a good time. Linda seems to get what I am doing which means a lot to me. We had power cuts every day in Dakar and she made out it was a real adventure and didn't complain about anything, ever. It's the only way to get by in Africa, not to be bothered by things, something I could learn more of.