Friday, November 4, 2011

Try, try again...

I'm going to try this blogging thing again. This time I promise to stick to the basic blogging format: short simple reports about my daily life. It has taken me a year to realize that blogs are meant to be mundane disclosures about everyday encounters and not long, fully enclosed narratives designed to captivate an audience. Also, now that a year has gone by, things in Mali are starting to appear familiar to me; routine, normal. But then I think, as I'm out in the fields, picking peanuts with my friends and avoiding snakes and scorpions lurking in the brush, that maybe all the boring and tedious everyday activities I do here aren't quite so boring for folks at home.

In the last few months I've developed a keen interest in vegetable gardening; friends call it an obsession. I came into Peace Corps with a sketchy vision of what my living situation would be like. That vision included, along with a whole mess of other exciting artifacts that might satisfy one young-man's naïve search for authenticity, a vegetable garden. It took me until a few months ago to realize just how difficult it is to dig and maintain a garden, particularly here where there is no such thing as a garden hose or a spading fork. There is also no supply store where one might find ready-made compost, seed flats, pesticide and commercial fertilizer. Also, not to mention, I had little or no gardening experience to speak of.

While I may have overlooked some (not so) minor details, I was not discouraged. In fact, encountering all these obstacles only emboldened me. I checked out a food security toolkit from the PC library, which had a comprehensive guide to "Biointensive" vegetable gardening. I read that book cover to cover at least five times; that is, five times over the course of six months during which time I made many, many armature mistakes. Now, I think I'm getting the hang of it. I build two neatly layered compost piles under a tree near my house; I made two seed flats out of a plastic water jug; my hands are rough and callused from working the soil with local farming implements; and my youthful endurance has made it possible for me to water my 100 square foot plot with nothing but a watering can, a 30 liter jug and, at least, five daily trips to the village pump. This last detail will become more complicated once I add another 100 square foot plot to my backyard in December; a time when I can't count on the rain to provide any relief for my aching shoulders. Luckily, (I think) I know a thing or two about gravity fed drip irrigation.

The most surprising thing about my new hobby is that I never get disillusioned or tired after all the hard work (even if my plants suffer an occasional assault by chickens and goats that find a way though my fence). I don't get discouraged. I just want more. I think daily about the possibility (or inevitability) or transforming my living space into a literal oasis; about how I can go beyond the creation of a simple backyard garden and fill every sunlit corner of my concession with some form of vegetation: spices growing along the walls, flower pots flanking the entrance, exotic vines climbing my gua (thatch hangar), rosemary and mint garnishing the windowsills, papayas and mangos hanging heavily from branches reaching into the backyard...

My dream may never be fully realized. Plants can only grow so fast and I will be long gone before my infant trees bear any fruit. Still, I suppose that's not the point. All this work seems to be an end in itself for me (though I suppose it has to be since the yields of my first attempted garden were hardly impressive).

On another note, before anyone accuses me of wasting my time being absorbed in a hobby, gardening is as much a work-related activity as it is a cathartic experience. In December I’m going to help the women in my village develop a community garden. Hopefully they will be as excited about gardening as I am…but I doubt it. People around here get too enthusiastic about all the austere notions I see in growing plants: self-sufficiency, hard work, resourcefulness, patients, contemplation etc. I think they live these ideas everyday without really knowing it, whereas I am experiencing these things, if not for the first time, in a whole new way.

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