April 8, 2003

I have not written in a while, and my memories of recent events are slowly fading away. These group emails are my diary because I can type almost as fast as I think, although by hand I get frustrated when my thoughts trail so far ahead.

I. The Painted School

Three weeks ago, I arranged $500.US in paint for the GonGon one-room schoolhouse. GonGon is one of the three villages I work with, although it is a one-hour hike from my village Hortelao. I woke at dawn for two days to get there by 8:30 a.m. In reality, it was the villagers who were supposed to paint the school, and I was supposed to hike up the following day, a Sunday, to paint designs. However, on the hike up, I stopped some women coming down, who informed me that the school had not, in fact, been painted the day before. I sighed in frustration, and continued along the path that wove in and out of mountain cliffs. I decided that the school was much bigger than I had imagined, and would need some helping hands. I enlisted the help of 3 fifth graders, two boys and a girl named Zita. Zita is the cousin of a neighbor in my cluster of houses, so I know her quite well. Her mother immigrated to Portugal to earn more money, so she currently lives with her blind grandmother in GonGon, doing all of the house chores.

I figured that they would do a messy job, and I would correct it, but, in the end, I would save some time and make headway. A few hours later, I couldn’t have imagined how messy they would be, oil house paint sealing their fingers together, blotchy walls screaming for a touch-up. At one point, an adolescent boy arrived, perhaps 12 years old, who ripped the brush from Zita’s hand and started to paint. She began crying, and I ripped it back from his hand and yelled at him for being so rude. He then started to insult me with comments about how white people do nothing good, etc. You should have heard my sermon about how it was the ‘white’ people who were painting HIS school, and it was the horrible ‘white’ people who built it (USAID). “Maybe you’ll learn something someday from a white person, huh?” I said.

Then he started on some smart-ass tangent about how women were useless and shouldn’t be allowed to paint. I was so upset that I grabbed his shirt, twisted it in my hand, pushing him against a wall while saying, “Don’t you ever forget that your association president is a WOMAN not a man! She’s the one who gives orders around here, you hear me? And it’s the women who run this village. Go home – I’m not letting you paint!” All the other kids laughed at him because they were in shock that an adult was reprimanding him. I would come to learn that he’s the one bully and brat in the village. His mother feeds him and throws him out in the street because even she can’t control him.

The next day, he reappeared, and stared at me incessantly with a look of disgust. He found the most opportune moments to take a brush and paint, especially when his teacher took a break from painting or when I was going to look at the progress we had made. I found it annoying that he got his way, but I also realized his bully behavior was indicative of his cries for attention. We eventually made peace with each other, and he came to understand that ‘white’ people do good things for them. Heck, I was the one breaking my back to paint HIS school, even more than the villagers.

As it ends up, nobody showed up to help paint, but the kids. By the second day, I refused to let kids paint because they made such a mess. I scheduled the upcoming Thursday as a day when the two teachers should cancel class and paint. The three of us could possibly finish painting it if we put in one full day of work. Thursday, we painted until noon, and then the teachers started to wash up. I assumed it was for lunch, but it ends up that they were done for the day! You can’t imagine how much I was fuming at the thought of them canceling class, so they could paint for 3 hours and then go make moonshine liquor at their local distillery – a very lucrative business. I expressed my anger at the village, who lacked community support for projects and said I wasn’t coming back. When I said it, I meant it.

I took the extra paint I knew they would not need, and I left everything for them. I was so furious hiking down the steep mountain path with 15 liters of paint in my hands in the ardent 2 p.m. sun, that I told each villager that passed me and asked when I’d return, that I was never going back and why. They all looked so disappointed, and continued on their way. It ends up that not even the association president helped me paint because there is this myth that women will become sterile if they have already had kids and then smell paint fumes. They are ok to paint if they have not had kids yet. I didn’t know this until recently, and it explains why women will never help me paint, but teenage girls that don’t have kids always will. In order to vent my anger, I stopped at the poorest house in my village on the way down and painted their doors and windows, which had never been painted. When they showed up 10 minutes later, they were pleasantly surprised to see their shack now had color.

The reason I was so rushed in painting the school was that the General Assembly meeting of OASIS, the umbrella organization of all of this island’s associations, was meeting in GonGon the Saturday of that week. Kevin, the other rural volunteer, came and stayed at my house for two nights to hike and go to the meeting. When the car taking other association presidents to the meeting passed my house at 11:15 a.m., instead of 9:30 a.m., as planned, then we decided not to hike up to GonGon in the mid-day heat. I also took it as an opportunity to express my anger at their inability to mobilize mature adults to paint THEIR school.

II. Family Death

Have you ever written a letter in your head so many times that when you finally wrote it, you just didn’t know how to start? I ponder ways to express how much my life has changed over the past two years from what then appeared to be inconsequential events at the time. Each experience, the mudslides, mugging, broken foot, bureaucracy, etc., I take as accelerated personal growth. As I said in my Rotary essay, ‘each experience has unequivocally taught me something new about myself.’ This week has been more than just something new – my reality has changed forever.

I had been playing Candyland at Natalia’s house, who lives directly above me. Around 9 p.m., I sauntered down to my house with my flashlight, and laid in bed reading the final chapters of the “Poisonwood Bible” as I waited for the water to warm up for my bath. Amidst my thoughts of the chaotic Congo and the death of the youngest daughter, I suddenly hear screaming from my neighbor’s house. At the time, the whaling seem sporadic, and I even contemplated that it was the one-year anniversary of the death of the person living in the cliffs 500 ft. above our houses. Perhaps they were whaling and the sound was being carried down to us.

But it continued. The whaling, “Oh father, oh father, you must fight. Come back to us. Oh father, oh father,” kept on getting louder. In my quick realization that is was my neighbor, I grabbed my flashlight and ran over there. Many immediate neighbors, their family members, all related, had already arrived. Everyone was crying and whaling. I asked who had died, and they said Ti Tio, the grandfather. Even now as I write, tears come to my eyes because it is such a tragic story of a developing country and cultural traditions that more times than not keep people from seeking necessary medical attention.

Tanazia, the thirty-something year old daughter who never married, is the primary caretaker of her elderly parents and the two children of her irresponsible sister Oladia. Oladia is the only person that is considered a neighbor who I really dislike because she always asks for things from me that she could buy. She tries to take advantage of me, and I resent that she has left her kids with Tanazia, so that she can sleep around at night in her house outside the valley. Tanazia had asked me for fever medication 3 days before the death. I gave her 3 doses that would last 4 hours for 3 grown adults. All three of the adults in the house were sick that day. I was so busy planning all of my final projects that I didn’t stop by the next two days to ask how they were doing. I assumed it was a normal one-day fever. Apparently, the morning of his death, Faustino (77) has showed signs of shortness of breath and an inability to do his normal chores. He laid down that night and never woke up from his fever-ridden stupor. The Peace Corps nurse later told me he probably contracted pneumonia from his prolonged two-month cough. A quick trip to a doctor and a week of penicillin would have cured him and his wife and daughter who all had the same thing.

You have to imagine the scene. Nine o’clock at night, a new moon, hence sheer darkness, a broken path to their house because they are building a water cistern in their front yard to collect rainwater, along with three other neighbors. I stand out front, wondering why I didn’t notice. Why I didn’t stop by when they needed me most. Why they didn’t go see a doctor. I am not about to whale with the other women because they would probably be offended, so I decided to get my best beeswax candles from Germany and light a path to their house like in “Field of Dreams” – “If you build it, they will come.” I build it, and they come by the droves within an hour. Villagers can be seen carrying candles or flashlights from distant mountaintops, lured by the dismal cries of women whaling in disbelief.

I make it my job for the next eight hours to ensure that the candles remain lit, even after the wind picks up, Faustino making his presence felt. Everyone shows their gratitude that I am making at effort to help out. The next eight days will be harder than the challenges most Americans ever endure in the period of a week. I have learned more about Cape Verdeans now than at any other time. It’s as if they want to suffer along with the family of the deceased, so they purposefully go without sleep for two days at a time for 8 days straight. There is a very set schedule of activities that must occur for the deceased to be properly honored. I stayed up from 9 p.m. until 4 a.m. the night of his death. My neighbors stayed up the whole night. While I was busy getting ready for bed at 4 a.m., I smelled burning hair and thought my house was on fire – perhaps a candle had fallen on a table. It was their pig that they killed and were burning the hair off before cooking it.

The next day, villagers came by the hundreds to our tiny cluster to attend the burial. The burial day is filled with customs that include, greeting the family of the deceased, grinding corn, conversing with other villagers, chanting the Catholic sermon, and going to the cemetery. After sleeping at 4 a.m., I woke up at 7 a.m. to catch a van to a nearby town to buy 20 gallons of water to make juice for the funeral meal. I knew the family was grieving and would not have time to buy proper drinks. As it ends up, they sent a messenger who bought tons of extra food and soda, although my cold juice was very appreciated. When I returned at 11 a.m. with water jugs in hand, about 300 people were crowded into our tiny cluster of houses, sitting in every possible area with shade – the heat was unbearable at 90 degrees and no wind.

Instead of closing my front door, as everyone lingered in the shade and watched my movements, I propped a broom in the door while I mixed the water with instant juice mix. Slowly, women started filtering into my house, and I just couldn’t stop them for fear of appearing rude. They sat at my table, covered in papers and American items, like rollerball pens of mine. Luckily, they decided to entertain themselves with the books another volunteer had lent me, two photo books displaying items found in one’s house in 30 different countries (“Material World” and another called something like “A Woman’s World”). As I played the good host, I also served as translator for the images they observed because I had read the histories of the families in English, and could answer their questions.

It was such a Peace Corps moment to have 5 traditionally dressed women leaning on my table, looking at photos of other rural families in Burma, China, Cuba, and Mali, etc. They noted the similar metal plates in Mali that are from China, the same garden tools in Burma, and the same food as those in Haiti. When they saw the photo of the Haitian girl crying by candlelight, they asked ‘why?’, and I explained that the family cow had escaped earlier in the day and, although she later found it, she cried because she almost lost most of the family’s wealth. They nodded their heads in agreement and expressed a profound understanding of such a loss, being that they lead parallel lives.

For two hours they stayed until lunch was ready, and then later greeted me throughout the day as if we had been friends forever. They asked why I wasn’t married or didn’t have kids, and I explained the stigmas of marrying young. After the Catholic sermon, we all piled into a trail of vans and trucks from the village that were bound for the cemetery while the family members, shrouded in black, whaled beside the casket in the first car. In my head, I clicked photos of the scenes I was not courageous enough to take. Five women veiled in black, tassels on scarves blowing in the wind, majestic mountains climbing behind them, feathered clouds curling like tides going out to sea. Then again at the cemetery gate, Oladia rocking from front to back and whaling over her father’s casket, bathing it in tears as hundreds of people pass around her to the actual grave. Then again when they laid the casket on the mound of dirt beside the bones of ancestors before they lowered it into the grave. Children stood in awe as the dust picked up in the wind, creating a dramatic scene of well-dressed men shoveling dirt and throwing bones onto Faustino’s casket, nine skulls to be exact. He would make ten.

Exhausted by the whole ordeal, I slipped into the luxury of my house when we reached home. The next 7 days would be exhausting to the same degree. The day after the funeral, nobody is allowed to visit, according to tradition. However, for every subsequent day, the family in mourning continues to kill livestock (as needed) for the visitors and stay up all night, every night, sleeping when they can. The most disturbing part of this 8 day ceremony is that they strip the house immediately of all possessions, storing them in one small room behind a locked door. They set up a religious shrine, and line their two main rooms with chairs for people to sit and pray. What was once familiar becomes foreign -- disturbingly foreign. They cease to do their regular chores, cease to follow their normal schedule, cease to look the same, and cease to act the same. I cannot describe how different the cluster will always be, especially until I leave. Even the dirt paths between our six houses have shifted from so many visitors. It’s as if I am visiting after being gone for 5 years, and this is what I find when I arrive.

The night of the funeral, I stopped over at their house and actually went inside after Nha, my water girl, said they all had fevers. I take aspirin, and am shocked to find the grandmother, Tanazia, and young granddaughter (3) with fevers of 103 degrees. I give them medication, and then return in two hours to take their temperatures again. They dropped to 102, but I still put wet, cool wash clothes on their foreheads and felt like Amy Marsh in “Little Women.” They told me they couldn’t imagine living without me when I leave, and how much they’ll miss me. By the next day, their fevers had broken. I have been taking them nutritious soup ever since, and occasionally French toast, even though they have big 40 gallon pots of food there all day. My soup is varied in flavor and content – tomato with noodles and veggies, mushroom with tuna and veggies, seafood with veggies. They enjoy having something new and different, but mostly my conversation and humor that brings light to the situation.

I have to run back now to the cluster. It’s getting late here in Calheta, and it will take me 40 min. by van to get home. More whaling tonight, more board games, more soup to calm the soul. Each time I dwell on the fact that it was such a preventable illness, I contemplate the other avoidable deaths that happen here so often. The little infant thrown into burning hay by his younger sister, the little boy that died of a sudden fever and diarrhea, the elderly woman with a cough. I tell myself I am lucky to come from a country with such good medical care, lucky to know a bad fever can lead to death.



April 24, 2003

So much has happened since my last group email. I find myself writing this every month now. Things are warp speed as my service comes to an end in Cape Verde. I write the stories in my head, and slowly the details slip away until I finally write them down. I don’t keep a diary because I find that I am best at expressing myself on the computer where I can easily edit my thoughts. Even though some of my stories may be of little interest to you, I write them for posterity’s sake and for myself, when I am 45 and can’t remember how the funeral ended.

I. Exodus, Part II, Vespera

In my last email, we were about 6 days into the 8 day funeral process at my neighbor’s house. I think I aged about ten years in that week due to lack of sleep and general exhaustion. I didn’t outright say in the last email that in the USA we are always worried about others being comfortable, but here you are supposed to suffer to show your sorrow at a funeral. If someone arrived at a funeral reception very tired and haggard, you would tell them to ‘go home and get some sleep.’ Here, you sit on a hard rock for 24 hours, on and off for 8 days with little sleep to show you loved the person who died. It’s all about who sees you ‘there’ at the ceremonies. I can’t tell you how many random people have approached me and said, ‘Elektra, I saw you there at the cemetery’, as if acknowledging that I cared about my neighbor enough to show up at the burial.

The final night of the funeral ceremonies, the eighth day, was another Peace Corps moment. The women, my neighbors, had been slaving over the large, cauldron pots for days, cooking the pig they slaughtered, then the cow, then the goat on the final day. It was somewhat like a wedding ceremony that had lasted too long because the dirt paths to and from our six houses and the eating area were worn, like grass at a weekend festival on the ‘lawn.’ Dirty dishes lay here and there, and women occupied themselves with the tasks at hand, which were focused on the dinner to be served that night. Ten women ground corn in the distance, others sifted, and remaining ones cleaned goat intestines for sausage or washed the used dishes.

As it grew dark, over fifty women arrived, the twenty or so men sitting in the patio area, while the women prepared the food in the cauldron area under the acacia trees. We looked like sleeping butterflies because women always carry ‘panus’ (pah-news), or brightly colored clothes from Indonesia around their waists. A hundred years ago, weaving was a strong cultural tradition, so the ‘panus’ were actually woven here. With globalization, the women have little time for weaving and now buy them from Chinese import stores. At night, they wrap themselves in these ‘panus’ to keep warm. The twenty of us that were not working sat on stones near the cauldrons, wrapped in our ‘panus’, while we commented on recent news and what was happening right there. A group of women slowly formed that took the ground corn, rolled it into balls and sticks, then threw it into the cauldron to make the corn mass. They were going to serve goat with corn mass and boiled green banana (like potato in consistency and flavor).

Around 10 p.m., I grew really tired and was going to leave, despite the fact that everyone else was staying till 6 a.m. when the eighth day officially ended. But they coaxed me into the house because they said I had to hear the ‘men singing.’ I was shocked when I entered and found the funeral room filled with twenty old men singing in a very archaic Portuguese. It was more beautiful that anything I have heard in years, and so moving and sad. It was something like whaling that makes you want to cry because you feel the sorrow in the music. Two elderly men knelt before an alter with two burning candles and a white cloth adorned with a black knotted cloth. I am still not sure what the two cloths symbolize, but they give it an air of animism and African tradition. The men squinted into a small book of prayers that they sang, and then the crowd, seated behind them on benches repeated in a call-and-response manner.

The words they sung were unintelligible, even to me with advanced Portuguese, but I stood and watched out of admiration and awe. They were going to sing from 9 p.m. until 6 a.m. almost non-stop. I ran home, grabbed my camcorder and returned to film a few minutes of it because I felt I would never be able to imbue the beauty of their songs in the words of my stories when I returned. At 6 a.m. the next morning, I woke up to a chorus of elderly men singing a hymn for his spirit to rise to heaven in peace. The words echoed through my roof, into my room, and I told myself that I was blessed to have experienced such a private, rural ceremony as an outsider now considered an insider, a daughter, a nurse, a friend.

II. Health Workshop in Principal

A week after the funeral ended, I held my second Family Health Workshop for villagers in Principal. I had just finished painting their kindergarden after six trips out there, so we held the workshop in the kindergarden. I paid two girls to cook the food, which I purchased in Praia and hauled out there via minivan a few days earlier. Rita, the Peace Corps nurse, came in a Peace Corps car with the driver Malam, who is just the nicest guy. He carried me on his back to my house across the riverbed a year ago when I fractured my foot and was in a cast. At 5’4’’ that was a quite a feat, given that I’m 5’9’’ and 140 lbs.!!! I later gave him gifts to thank him for going above and beyond the call of duty, and also told his boss at Peace Corps, so that she might take notice when evaluation time comes.

Rita brought a bunch of visuals to show people information on malaria, cholera, oral rehydration salts, etc. Only fifteen people initially showed up, so I got angry and told some of the kids to go find more people. In about 30 min., an additional 20 people showed up and stayed until lunch. Everyone was embarrassed with the hygiene talk because they hate to admit that they have bad hygiene. Rita was explaining such simplistic things as how to wipe your ass correctly (front to back vs. back to front) and bathing practices. When she pulled out the mammoth sized pictures of head lice and ticks, old women began pulling their grandkids from the audience to show them bugs nesting in their hair. It was quite exciting and embarrassing, as Rita pointed to nests of eggs and said, ‘Yes, you need to take her to a doctor and get treatment as soon as possible.’ I just prayed none of them would land on me in the one day that I was there because lice could be quite a problem in my long hair – I might have to go pixie!

After lunch, I was really impressed when ten young guys (18-25) showed up for the sex education talk. Mothers sent their kids home, and the remaining audience was twenty 15-65 year old men and women. The discussion veered towards STDs, their treatment, HIV/AIDS, contraception, and family planning. At one point, Rita explained that women should not have sex for two months following a pregnancy, and the men laughed, muttering under their breaths, ‘Not my woman!’ Rita beckoned them to obey the rule because ‘women are not completely formed yet after pushing an 8 pound mass through their vagina.’ I was very happy that I reminded Rita to cover family planning techniques as she was ending because it was perhaps the most important information. The women couldn’t stop asking her questions on how to stop having kids and how the injection works (Depro Provera) vs. the pill. Rita explained that the rhythm method is commonly called ‘Pais’, or ‘Parents’ in Portuguese, because you almost always get pregnant on that method! She demonstrated how to put on a condom, and the men eagerly asked for the free ones I held up. In ended up being a hormonal show of fertility when the men grabbed the 150 free condoms and split them between the 10 of them, some getting 5, some getting 40. Later, two of them stopped me outside the room and asked if I could get more for them. Right across the dirt road from the kindergarden is a health clinic, but nobody wants to go there out of embarrassment for asking for them.

III. Earth Day

We didn’t celebrate it on the actual day, but we did a great job. Over fifty kids showed up to clean Hortelăo because I promised to put on a movie and party afterwards. Instead of giving out the usual expensive t-shirts, I merely rented ‘Titanic’, English with Portuguese subtitles, and bought fruit, cookies, sandwiches, and juice. The kids had a great time picking up trash for an hour, running here and there screaming that they hand found another large pile to be picked up. A crazy woman even started throwing stones at us from a hillside, and we all laughed. A group of five tourists finished their hike in the middle of the village, and took photos of us cleaning. A few of my biggest admirers, little six-year-old boys, kept filling my bag with trash, smiling each time I praised them, then running off again to get more trash for more praise.

Titanic was a hit because everyone here owns cheap clothing imported from China that were probably memorabilia made for ‘developing countries’ or stuff that didn’t sell during the Titanic craze. They all show ‘Jack and his lover’ on the hull of the ship. Nobody had ever seen the movie though. Even Celine Dion is a celebrity here with her Titanic songs being played in every minivan and truck on the island. When the boat started sinking, everyone was saying the funniest things in Creole that made me laugh, like ‘Ay, nha genti, barko ta fundi. Nhos corri faxi!’ “Oh, people, the boat is sinking, get the hell out!” It was comical to see their reactions to things, like when Jack and the protagonist woman would kiss passionately. They all laughed, mostly out of embarrassment because holding hands and kissing in public here is taboo.

Last night, we held movie mania before our Tourist Inauguration Ceremony in Hortelăo. A few people who own gas generators and television had VHS cassettes to loan us. We put on the television and VCR, showing movies from 8 p.m. until 3 a.m. The first was a movie about Jesus (thank God I wasn’t there in time for that one), and then I got to pick the next ones, including: Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone (in Spanish), The Jungle Boy (in English), and some Kung Fu movie from China in Chinese. The kids LOVED Harry Potter, and I wondered if some of them believed that you could fly on a broom if you tried hard enough.

Around 10:00 p.m. I got really sleepy and decided to leave with Bruce, my dog, and my kerosene lantern in hand. Halfway home on the riverbed path, my lantern blew out with a slight breeze, despite the glass cover. The moon was not out, nor were the stars, because the valley was covered in dense clouds. ‘Shit,’ I thought, ‘what the hell am I going to do?’ It was too dark to walk back, and too dark to go forward. I started to walk very slowly on what I thought was the path, and didn’t hit any major boulders. Bruce could smell the path, so he guided me for about 10 minutes, then disappeared – he ran home without me. Miraculously, after praying extensively to God (surviving Peace Corps has made me more religious), I made it to within 300 feet of our cluster.

However, an obstacle course lay before me. My neighbors have pits they dug to get gravel and sand from the riverbed for cement to build extra rooms onto their houses this year. I could try not to fall into one of twenty 3 foot deep pits, or I could walk up a 50 degree slope on a hillside and possibly fall twenty feet to the right side if I missed a step. I started to walk up the hillside VERY slowly, but kept hitting boulders with my feet (in flip flops). I realized that I was doing something quite dangerous, so I called the nearest house and woke them up. At 10:30 p.m., they had already been asleep for an hour and a half. I got matches from them and made my way home. I realized what I had done was really dumb, given that I almost didn’t make it home.

IV. Tourist Inauguration

A month ago, I painted two beautiful tourism signs to place near our Tahiti-looking tourist hut where tourists can rest or picnic in the shade of a woven, grass hut. The town hall of our municipality put my signs together, instead of apart, and in a bad location, which angered me a bit. They were meant to be placed apart, so that one would catch your attention, and the other would draw you into the hut. At the ceremony, representatives from the funding agencies for the project showed up, including GTZ (Germany), the Austrian Corporation, and the Portuguese. Village women had prepared lots of food that everyone enjoyed. Two other volunteers from Calheta showed up (Sally and Liz), so we chatted for a while.

V. Kindergarden Painting

Last week and this week, I painted designs at 3 local kindergardens with the help of 5 teenage girls. Each kindergarden is in an impoverished area and has a post-WWII feeling of cement and metal – very bare, very utilitarian. We used my Disney books in Portuguese to pick designs to paint, which ended up being different at each kindergarden. I took lots of photos that I will post on my website when I return in May. At one kindergarden, the local kids gathered around and commented on which designs they liked best. The young girls across the street watched me paint big, bright numbers near 1 hen and her 19 chicks on the wall for the kids to practice counting 1-20. As she thrust her arms down to grind the corn in the ‘pilon’ (big mortar and pestel), she counted in rhythm ‘Um….dois…tręs…’, practicing her numbers. I was happy to see that someone was learning something.

There are still quite a few kindergardens that we could paint, but, for lack of time on my part, we have concluded the project. I am very nervous about finishing the required Peace Corps reports, along with two other personal projects I have (see VI. and VII.).

VI. Rotary Youth Exchange

Last summer, when I held my second GLOW Camp in Calheta, I met this 15 year old girl named Tętę. She was so proficient in spoken English that I asked where she had studied abroad. It ended up that she was self-taught and had learned some from Pat, a former volunteer. Since then, we have kept in touch when I come to Calheta. I mentioned my interest in helping her get a Rotary Scholarship to do study abroad in high school. She also expressed an interest in helping organize the kindergarden painting. So, we kept sending messages back and forth via the minivans that go to my valley.

I emailed Rotary International back in December about who to contact in Africa to submit an application for her. The said some random person in Ghana that was the district governor of District 9100, which includes Cape Verde. I put the project on the back burner in February, and finally decided to email the USA again and complain that I didn’t hear anything yet in early March. One random day two weeks ago, I was checking the email in my Hotmail trash box (Inbox Protector Spam Mail), and found 5 messages between Ghana and Canada. Ghana was elated to hear from me, and Canada said they wanted Tętę to go there for a year starting in January 2004 if Ghana would endorse her application.

We quickly printed out the 24 page (complex) application and discovered we had a TON of things to do in order to get it to Ghana, including a medical exam, dental exam, recommendations, essays, etc. We have been slaving over this application for the past two weeks, and even went to Praia to have her required photos taken. I have been using kindergarden painting money to cover her costs when we travel and eat together. I want her to succeed so badly because, as I have gotten to know her better, I see that obstacles have always stood in her way from achieving her goals. She is in the top 10% of her high school class, despite being from a single mother family of 4 with her mom employed as a street sweeper for the last 15 years. Her brother, is a talented fine arts painter (21), and even won a scholarship to go to the USA for 2 weeks last year, but he has not been able to find another scholarship to return to the USA to study art long term. Last week, they didn’t have soap one day, so she couldn’t wear her uniform to school as required. They are very poor for American standards, living in a predominantly cinderblock house (2 rooms are finished, and 3 are not), but middle income for the town of Calheta. She wants to be a television journalist for an organization like CNN, and she speaks good French, Portuguese, English and Creole.

Tonight, we are going to the weekly Praia Rotary Club meeting where she needs to win their approval to be sponsored. She needs money to cover the costs that Canada will not cover, such as her round trip plane fare, medical insurance, luggage, some new clothes, and spending money. As it is, she has 5 cavities that we need to fix before Ghana will even review her application. I have $300. US in remaining painting money, and wanted to use $150. to take her to the dentist. However, if Peace Corps finds out, they will be very mad. I also want to have a suit made for her to wear at meetings in Canada, submit her passport/visa request, and buy her a piece of luggage. I am hoping that tomorrow night we can get some financial support from club members to cover these costs. They have the money, but whether they are willing to divulge it for her cause is another story.

She keeps telling me that she doesn’t know how she will ever repay me for helping her out. She tells people that God will help me because she cannot. Just today, we were walking, and she put her arm around my waist, saying she didn’t know how to say thanks. I said, ‘Study hard in Canada and get good grades. Apply to colleges in Canada and the USA. Follow your dreams, achieve your dreams, and I will be VERY happy. That is repayment enough for me.’ She smiled and said she would try. ‘Don’t forget me,’ she said, ‘I will always remember you and what you have done for me.’ I told her that I had always heard Rotary Youth Exchange was better than AFS, the program I did in Spain. The families are supposedly stable and supportive in every way. I told her that she would be realizing my dream, and that I would live vicariously through her success with Rotary Youth Exchange – she would have what I never did.

VII. Jeni

This is an epic story that cannot be fully told in the minutes I have remaining before I must leave for the Rotary meeting. In short, I have been helping a very dirt-poor family in Calheta since I arrived in 2001. They were friends of Pat, the former volunteer. I helped get an extra room built onto their two-room shack, and this week helped them start selling tuna empanadas along with their liquor shots. The family is comprised of Fatima (30+ years old), her alcoholic mother (60+) with a leg that has gangrene, the daughter (20, with two kids, 4 and 6 months), the next daughter (16, school drop out), another daughter (13, Red Cross scholarship to study at local high school), son (7, in school), and baby (1 year). Fatima was pregnant the week her husband died, so she gave birth nine months after his death. With nine people in a two-room shack, I always try to help them out.

Tętę recently told me that one girl, who I assumed was their daughter, is a child abandoned by another woman. This girl, named Jeni, is a 6 year old that looks 4 or 5 because of malnourishment. She had the typical distended belly from worms, and is bony in the legs and arms. They rarely bathe her, like with their own kids, and she walks around in dirty dresses without underwear for days at a time. I noticed she was very intelligent and later asked Tętę why she never was put in a kindergarden or school. Tętę said she was not theirs and they didn’t have even 50 cents to pay each month for her to attend kindergarden.

I dwelled on Jeni for a week in my head, and thought of contacting a few families in the USA to try to adopt her. Tętę thought the family would allow it because they are dirt poor, but it ends up that they refused and even said they had no contact information for the young mother living in Praia. Tętę conspired with me to get the contact info. via another source, and we finally got some random bit of information that she lives in an area near old police quarters in a ‘tin house’ neighborhood. The day we went to have Tętę’s photos taken, we ventured out onto this random hillside of cement and tin houses. You wouldn’t believe it, but in 15 minutes, we found the mother’s house! She was not in, and the neighbors were very polite and said she worked with her husband from 8 am to 7 pm each night. They had a small son that was in kindergarden. We told the neighbor to tell her that we would be back on Easter Sunday, so she should stay around.

On Easter Sunday, we went back, taking some cookies and juice as an offering. We waited at her door two hours because we had just missed her as she left to get water at a well in more developed neighborhood nearby. Around noon, she came back with huge containers of water and we entered the house, cement, metal, and scrap wood. Despite being one room, she was living better than Jeni in Calheta. After 30 minutes of chitchat between Tętę and her (they know each other from a few years ago when she lived in Calheta for a few months), we cut to the chase and said that Jeni was not doing well. She was shocked because she had been told she was doing great, hence why she had left her there.

In the end, she got really angry that she had been misled by Fatima that Jeni was being well cared for. Tętę recounted stories I had never heard of Adelsa, the 16-year-old daughter, slamming Jeni down on the floor by her neck because she had stolen 10 cents from the table – 10 cents that a man spent on a shot of liquor. The mother was horrified at the condition of her daughter, and her talkative three-year-old son handed me photos and things to look at as we talked. The mother, Chi, said she would need help in getting Jeni into a school in Praia because she had never been to kindergarden, which is law. I offered to help. However, Chi wants to leave her home alone through August because she is too old to be in kindergarden and it’s too late to start school so late in the year. I will go to Red Cross tomorrow and see if they will make an exception to allow Jeni and her brother to attend the kindergarden until August. Otherwise, they’ll both be home alone in a tin neighborhood full of dangerous trash and weird, unemployed men.

VIII. Sinking

There is an epic saga of a birthday party that went awry, and a finishing boat that sunk in the ocean with me on it, but I have no time to tell it today. Another day you will laugh at how the 16 of us survived off the coast of Santiago Island. Let’s just say that I’m not Catholic, but I believe in a higher state of being, call it a God, call it enlightenment. Whatever it is, it has saved my life many times recently. I can only offer to be, become, and do the most for others as repayment for my survival. I take Japan as a reward for what I have done up to this point, and what happens thereafter will determine my path.