So after returning to village, mostly healthy, I started working again in my fields this week. Now that the planting has been taken care of and a few more rains have come, everyone is in the fields cultivating. Have to kill all those weeds for a good harvest and no starvation! Having a field, I've realized, is perhaps one of the best ways to integrate in Niger. Six days a week from about 7 am to 5 pm, all the men, most of the women, and all the children old enough to work in the fields leave the village to farm. There isn't a sound except the wives and mothers who pound millet to make lunch, but even this ends around 11, when they take food to their sons, daughters, husbands, etc.
Without a field, I'd be bored out of my mind. Even more so than hot season. Hot season was just too hot to want to do anything. Rainy season is actually quite nice, but it's a lot of work. I've been waking up before dawn to walk the kilometer south to my gardens to water. I return about an hour later to eat breakfast, drink a lot of coffee, and start the 45-minute hike to my fields, which are north of my village. In all, I've determined that I walk about 10 km every day now. It's exhausting, and I usually return from the fields to eat leftover breakfast and fall asleep for 3 hours or so. Then it's up again around 5 or 6 to go out and water my gardens again. Then a bath, dinner, and bed, which by that time of the night is very welcome indeed.
We farm with a tool called a kumbu. it has a blade on the end that's shaped kind of like an arc. It's about 8 feet long with a handle on the other end. Basically, it's like a giant spade that cuts off weeds at the root. I spend hours every day in the field with a break for lunch. The heat is a killer, but you do what you can. I usually go out with about 3 liters of water, and when that runs out, I'm done farming for the day. I hear it's easier work when it's rained, but I've yet to farm after a rain for one reason or another. I'm building up some ridiculous callouses from the work, and hopefully getting a lot stronger. It's hard, but I do what I can do. If it weren't for my iPod, I'd go crazy.
If anyone wants to send me a package full of energy/granola bars, they're AMAZING for a lunch break after all that work. Clif bars are so damn tasty...
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Sterling, I do believe that you are the Hunter S. Thompson of the Peace Corp. The only thing your dramatic interpretation of your encounter with the scorpion is maybe a Donald-style manical laughter. But I understand the haste with which you might have to write these posts. At least you don't have malaria, or gonorheaa. And don't fuck monkeys, you'll get the HIV.
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