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Just wanted to spread some love. Love of the dance. And of the treadmill.

zen and the art of home pest management - part ii

I have a little mouse problem. Much better than a giant rat problem, which some of the other volunteers have (bush rat is apparently quite yummy and one of those suckers is a hearty meal) but still I need to do something about it so a little while ago started telling people I was interested in getting a kitten. What I was probably saying was something along the lines of "me want child-cat" but I think I must have gotten the point across because last Friday at the crack of dawn (ok more like 7 but still way before visiting hours) I woke up to someone calling "Aminata Porto" (that's "white girl Aminata) from my front porch. Crawled out of my mosquito net and slid the bolt back from the front door to find the neighbor girl Aissatou holding a black and white furball. "Baby cat!" she said proudly, holding it up to my face where it hissed at me. "You want a baby cat right?" Um, well, yeah.... "OK!" she smiled, set the cat down on the floor, and closed the door. The kitten slinked around the door to my kitchen, bumped into the wall and spat at it, and disappeared inside.

Um, well, looks like I got me a cat! I decided to let her chill in solitude under the bamboo shelves where she was hiding for a bit while I got some supplies. I looked up the word for sand in my Pulaar dictionary and set off to get 1) sand for litterbox and 2) fish for food. Simple, right? Yeah, right. There was a giant pile of sand sitting in a lot down the road so I went over and asked a guy nearby, "I want sand. I have baby kitten. I take?" He said I had to ask the owner of the sand, he's "over there" with a wave of the hand down the road. Directions are really imprecise around here, I mean not like there are street names of course but you could do a little better than "over there." Anyway I went over to where "there" looked to be and tried again: "I want sand. You have sand? I take?" No luck, I had to ask the maitre who lives behind "that door there." Awesome. I went down the alley he waved at, picked a likely looking door, and walked into a courtyard where half a dozen women stopped their cooking and clothes washing to stare at me. I put on a big smile, "Hi! I have baby cat. I want sand. I take sand? It is good?" They all stared at me for a few more seconds before bursting out laughing and talking. "Eeeeh! White girl speaks Pulaar! Ha ha, porto has a kitten. Ah! Porto wants sand for her kitten!" They helped me fill up my bag with sand, laughing and chatting the whole time, made introductions all around, invited me to eat breakfast with them, and waved me on my way. Sweet! Step 1 down.

Step 2 was a longer goose chase that sent me all around town (stocks get kind of low the day before market day during the hungry season) til I ended up at the health center where the Chef's wife had some bonga (dried) fish (there are some great words in Pulaar). Everyone seemed to think it was hilarious that I was buying fish for a cat, oh silly American with her strange ways! I headed back home with a small parade of children that kept growing as kids shouted out to other kids "Hey, Aminata got a cat!" I shooed most of them away when we got to the door but there were about 10 kids I let in to peer at the kitten crouched in her corner. I said she was sleeping cus I don't know the word for terrified, and then we all sat down and flipped through my photo album and magazines and public health picture flip books for the rest of the morning. One of the girls asked at some point if the kitty was a Diallo or a Bah (the last names of about 95% of the people in my town, there's a kind of friendly rivalry between the two--you know, Bahs are cattle thieves, Diallos eat beans, hahaa it's good for hours of entertainment) and I said actually she's a Kamara and since it's a custom here sometimes to name babies after the day they were born on she's now Juma Kamara. So mice in my house be warned cus you are mouse brochette just as soon as Juma has enough coordination to walk for more than two feet without falling over!

zen and the art of home pest management - part i

One of the things I was hoping to get out of this experience is a better appreciation of what I take for granted. Well check that one off, I got it, and then some.

As far as things go, sure there are things Stateside I appreciate more now—bread without bugs in it, movie houses that show something other than Bolliwood films and Chuck Norris-type circa-1988 macho movies (not that I'm knocking Bolliwood films, they're great fun and any film where the bad guy breaks into dance is AOK I say, but variety is a beautiful thing you know?), dental procedures with the aid of pain killers, icecream more than once every three months—yeah there are things I'm going to appreciate a whole lot more when I get back. But more than that, beyond it and at the root of it, is what it means to have the luck to be living above the level of need. Like for instance, when I tried turning my patch of side yard weeds into a garden and some neighbor kids started helping me pull out plants, very enthusiastically. I tried to stop them from tearing out some plants I wanted to keep, ones I figured were going to pop out nice flowers eventually.

"O'owooye," I said (that means no and it's one of my favorite words ever) as I mimed pulling up the plants. "These ones are pretty."

"But...you can't eat them."

"I don't want to eat them. They're pretty. O'owooye."

"But...you can't eat them."

Well they refused to be convinced, and as I looked at the poor uprooted plants later I tried to figure out why. I think maybe I got it. It didn't make sense to them; why waste time and energy taking care of something that's not going to fill the belly? I'm sure they thought they were doing a big favor for the poor silly porto. Beauty is a luxury, food and safety are the real concerns. People are really into weeding their yards but only because snakes live in tall grass (don't worry I haven't ever seen any in my area--and besides, now there's absolutely nothing to hide in). Everyone has a garden but there’s nothing ornamental about it, it's always all food. Needs first, and beauty, that comes much later.

I had a similar experience with ants. I am at war with them in my house, a very hard thing to do when the walls are adobe i.e. mud and the floor is cracked concrete laid on dirt. I asked my neighbor what she does to get rid of ants, but she didn't understand the word in French and I didn't know it in Pulaar. I tried to describe them without luck--spiders? she guessed. Scorpions? Other scary insects I hadn't heard of before but was now terrified were living in every corner of my house? Finally I gave up on the verbal communication and took her into my house and pointed.

"Oh, kumujojo. But...they don't bite."

"I know, but I don't like them and I want them to leave."

"But...they don't bite."

So lesson #2 is that there's a line between harm and inconvenience and if something doesn't cross it well what's the problem again? But there's a time for acceptance and a time for action and ant invasions, yeah this is an action situation. So...any good home remedies out there?