11 August 2012
Post by Lara
Right now, as I type, there is a hunk of Gouda sitting in the
bottom of our water barrel. Don’t worry-
it’s vacuum-sealed, and we’ve checked on it at least once to be sure it isn’t
leaking. It’s one of our most prized possessions at the moment, and for good
reason. For one, it cost us Le 40,000 at Bo Mini Market today. That’s 40 loaves
of bread, or nearly 9 wheels of Laughing Cow cheese (which is a staple for us
Americans- it’s “cheese” that doesn’t need to be refrigerated and keeps for
several months!). Most importantly,
though, it’s real cheese, that up until today was kept in a real refrigerator,
and in a few days will be melted onto several very real and very much
anticipated grilled cheese sandwiches and dunked into homemade tomato soup. This
Gouda is going places, my friends. But before it goes places, it is sitting in
the bottom of our water barrel because that is the coolest place we’re able to
keep it for the next three days.
In the words of Ron White, “I told you that story to tell
you this one.” We left the hustle-bustle
American life two months ago and found ourselves in an altogether new
environment, where time tends to walk, not run. And slowly. This means that our American mindsets have
had some adjustments to make, and one of those is finding ways to pass the
hours. We like to “go waka” [go walking around, generally with no destination
in mind], play cards, write blog posts, and quite often, catch up on the books
that we’ve been meaning to read since high school but never found the time for.
Here in Salone, there is always time. We’ve
decided to work on a series of posts that will function as book reviews, but
with the added twist that we are reading them in Sierra Leone, either by
sunlight or by headlamp, looking at everything through a new and different lens
than we’ve ever been able to before. We
shall call this series Tek Tem book
reviews [“Take Time” in Krio].
My first book review will be on Kristin Kimball’s
The
Dirty Life, a memoir about her decision to start a farm on 500 acres with
her fiancé, a hard-working and ambitious “Do-it-yourself”-er, and the first
year of their farming life in rural New York state.
First, a spoiler: this book is primarily about
food. Good food. And Ms. Kimball has a knack for describing textures and
flavors so exquisitely that you start to crave things you’ve never even tasted
before. If I had read the book in the states, I think I would have focused my
energy on eating tasty farm-fresh deliciousness even more than is the norm for
me, but I am not in the states, and while we’re living with our host family I
don’t generally cook my own food, and my diet here is quite monotonous compared
to what it was when Kevin and I were cooking for ourselves.
Essentially, the book can be torturous at
times. That being said, it’s fantastically written in my opinion and draws a
surprising number of parallels to life in Salone.
Ms. Kimball spends a lot of time contrasting rural life with
city life, since she spent several years before she began farming as a
freelance journalist in New York City. She
describes the interactions between people in the farming community as much more
inter-dependent, to the point where everyone tended to know everyone else and
what they had for lunch yesterday and how many bushels of corn they harvested
that season. So far in my experience, Salone
is also very much this way. When one of
our colleagues got sick and missed a day of training, many of us found out
where he was from our host families who had all learned about his illness by
the time we got home from training. We
also tend to meet new people who already know our life stories because it turns
out they are married to our mother’s sister’s friend or something of the sort. Ms. Kimball also points out that friendship
in her upstate New York farming community doesn’t always require one to go out
of one’s way to have meaningful conversations—sometimes you just sit in one
another’s presence without talking for a few hours, and then go your separate
ways. This is another parallel to Salone
life. “Quality time” is time spent together, not necessarily time spent
speaking or doing things together. Just sitting in the presence of your family
or friends is important, and it’s a difficult thing for many of us Americans to
get used to.
The book also chronicles Ms. Kimball’s relationship with her
now husband Mark as they made their way through their first year of farming
together. They were the only full-time workers on their farm that year, and
they had moved very quickly from meeting to dating to living and working
together. Their relationship was not
always smooth sailing—they fought over how to do the farm work, which jobs were
more important, and any number of other disagreements that managed to
surface. They had their share of
difficult times and challenges, which were amplified in part because they spent
so much of their time together compared to the typical American couple who tend
to spend at least 9am-5pm on weekdays doing their own thing. In the same way, Kevin and I are still
learning to adjust to the fact that we spend most of our time together every
single day. We were aware that this
would be a challenge from the start, and it has been, though so far it hasn’t
been quite as challenging as I feared it would be. Our relationship has survived a number of
radical changes through the years- from budding high school romance to 4 years
of long-distance dating (5 months of which I was living in Galway, Ireland and
Kevin was in Columbus, Ohio), to married life living together but on completely
different schedules as Kevin finished college, to working the same schedule and
cooking dinner together every night, to Peace Corps. Every one of those transitions worried me a
bit, but in hindsight they all went quite smoothly. Kristin and Mark also had to find a balance
in their relationship, and much of the driving force that got them from one day
to another was a sense of duty. Someone has to milk the cow each morning, rain
or shine or snow or hail. They stuck
together in part because they had a shared goal and were working so hard they
didn’t have time to stop and think about it too much. Kevin and I know that feeling now.
At the end of the day, The Dirty Life is about hard
work, its challenges, and its rewards. I
tagged a quote from the book that fit so well into my frame of mind that I felt
a rush of serendipity as I read it:
“When we would talk about our future in private, I would ask
Mark if he really thought we had a chance. Of course we had a chance, he’d say,
and anyway, it didn’t matter if this venture failed. In his view, we were
already a success, because we were doing something hard and it was something
that mattered to us. You don’t measure
things like that with words like success
or failure, he said. Satisfaction
comes from trying hard things and then going to the next hard thing, regardless
of the outcome. What mattered was
whether or not you were moving in a direction you thought was right.” (page 77).
Many of you who are reading this know me personally, or at
least know another Peace Corps Volunteer.
We all tend to have a few things in common, and one of those things is a
sense that obstacles are meant to be hurdled (or climbed over, or walked
around), and that life is worth living when one is living up to a
challenge. I read this book at a time
when I was just starting out in a new country with new languages and cultural
norms, new frustrations nearly every day, and reading this paragraph reminded
me immediately of why Peace Corps was so important to me in the first place. I
knew it would be hard, taxing, demanding, even sometimes unproductive, but I
also knew that it was going to change my life and allow me to offer something,
however small, to a community which could benefit from my skills.
In my time so far in Salone, I have learned to enjoy the
rice and plasas or sup
which comprises at least 2/3 of the meals we eat. I can tell my taste buds are
changing- I can handle our host family’s crazy amounts of pepe [chili pepper] in our meals, and I don’t mind chewing on the
same piece of meat for a minute or so to soften it enough that I can swallow it
[note: it turns out, fat cows have tender beef. Not a lot of fat cows in
Salone. Also, most of the meat we eat is decidedly not cow]. Still, some days the foodie in me starts to
shine and I get a craving for pancakes with maple syrup or teriyaki chicken or
grilled cheese and tomato soup. Reading The
Dirty Life brought about quite a lot of these cravings, and I’d be lying if
I suggested that it wasn’t incredibly frustrating at times to be reading about
amazing American food that I know I won’t get to eat for at least two years,
but it helped me remember that it’s ok to take time now and then to indulge in
a taste of home. Like I said, that Gouda
is going places.
