Friday, August 7, 2009

finally, productivity

big cold rain blew in this morning at 6am. 10mm. nice to sleep in that. maybe i can still have hopes for rain this season.

amazing -- today was finally productive. the most productive i've been in weeks. started out with that 6am rain which gave a nice, but excusable, slightly late started to the day.

i went up to mbanda peul with all these intentions to goad the women into outplanting their papayas. a nice little boy walked with me and asked me plaintively for wolfgang. i had to refuse.

when i got there i passed by the pepiniere on my way to penda's house and to my amazement -- outplanted thornies and all the papayas gone! penda is THE superstar farmer. with her own initiative she'd gotten a huge chunk of trees outplanted (some of them -- mangoes and lemons -- too soon...oops). i was so incredibly happy with her. i wanted to hug her. she hadn't finished the live fence yet so we agreed for me to help her tomorrow afternoon.

on my way back to the village i passed through the WV pepiniere where talla, diakho, and moussa were transplanting eucalyptus seedlings. i decided to help them for several hours. diakho found out about penda's outplanting and decided this afternoon she would outplant too. hooray for contagious behavior!

for some reason -- maybe i was a little dehydrated -- transplanting really wore me out. i got back to the house around 11:30 and worked on editing the Agfo manual until lunch. lunch was kind of awful but i got over it by taking an hour hap. it was really hot and humid.

i woke up at 4 and headed out to diakho's field. she wasn't there yet, even though she had interrupted my nap at some point (senegalese have absolutely no qualms about waking somebody up from sleep) to remind me to go in the afternoon. her trees were too small to outplant anyway, so while i waited for her, i transplanted some of her thornies (why doesn't anybody ever thing even though i tell them to all the time?!) for her and did some weeding.

she finally showed up -- she had been working in the rice field so excusable and forgiveable. i explained her tree situation to her but we agreed that the sisal was ready to outplant so she dug holes and i outplanted something like 20 sisals at 1 meter apart. it too was exhausting and i got a little sloppy at the end, accidentally slicing some roots. hopefully they will survive. while we were working we got sprinkled on with some .5mm of rain (i checked the guage as soon as i got back) so it felt nice to have some relief from the humidity.

after 2.5 hours of work i headed back to the village and found i was back just in time for a run. even though i was really tired i decided to go since i could still feel that terrible lunch sitting heavy in me and making me burp all afternoon. i figured the run would either make me puke or get rid of that heavy feeling.

it was a decent run -- slower than usual -- and when i got back i was just totally, utterly, pooped. i sweated for a good another 45 minutes-- even after a shower -- and felt like taking my shower sitting down.

the day ended with dame suddenly freaking out screaming, "mom!!! mom!!! there's a bug in my nose!!!!" we all slightly panicked and aram pinned him down with the help of ndey fatou and gouged around in his nostril with a stick while he whimpered. i braced myself for some big, long, white tapeworm but instead aram pulled out something green and smothered in snot. it was a leaf. dame had shoved it up there himself earlier in the day and decided that now was a good time to freak out about it. strange boy.

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