Home and Garden Dan-nel

See what I did there?

Now see what I'm doing here.

This is my house, freshly painted, by me, a couple weeks ago. The first two are my living room / kitchen. The papyrus mat on the left wall is covering up a big metal door that went into the other half of the building which is either someone else' house or an office of a primary school -- I've heard both and don't know which one is true. But the metal doors were ugly to look at and a little too prison-y feeling, so the papyrus looks a little nicer. The map of Africa is from a 1950 National Geographic which is awesome but also makes me a little sad that I won't be able to go to places like Upper Volta and Bechuanaland. Then the third picture is my bedroom, again covering up a prison-style metal door. Please ignore all the unfolded laundry. Some of it is clean, some isn't, but either way I usually give it a smell-test before determining if something's ok to wear for a third time between washings. Then there's my bike and the blue color that I painted the window-walls in both of the rooms. And then there's the pictures of some of those pretty faces I left in the States. It's nice to have everything finally done, especially since it took six months to get all of this finished.

And this is my garden. It's a little bit hard to tell the mound of dirt from the rest of the dirt, but it's there. If you look at it from the top down, the whole in the middle -- there's no dirt in the middle of those sticks; that's where the compost goes -- and the little walkway in front make a keyhole shape, hence the name. Next time, I'll do a little better on the construction of the compost pit in the middle. The sticks are longer than they need to be and come together too much at the top, but, other than that, it's looking pretty good. I just planted a week ago, last Saturday, so not a whole lot is coming up yet, but the second picture is the two little cucumber plants that have sprouted nicely. There are also about six or seven beanstalks coming up so far, but for the lettuce and carrots that I planted, I'm having a hard time telling, right now, what are vegetables and what are weeds, so we'll see. The thorns that I put around it, I didn't get those out there until four days after I'd planted the seeds, and so I'm hoping the chickens didn't come and nom on all of my seeds. I also tried to follow the planting instructions on the seed packets, but I didn't know what things like 'sow thinly' meant, so I ended up going with the 'put a bunch of seeds everywhere and hope things grow' approach. Our rain has been less than consistent lately, too, so there are days where the entire garden is drenched and days where, at least on the surface, the soil is totally dry and cracked and rock-hard. So, green thumbs crossed. The last picture is part of the rest of The Nursery, what my org calls the field. All of that used to be long, pretty grass to lie in, and now, unfortunately, it's a buncha dirt. But I'm hoping that I can help plant there next planting season and we can try to do some biointensive techniques that I've been reading about in a manual I got from the Peace Corps office. But, in the distance there, is the big rock that marks the beginning of town, the one that I was on top of the last time I posted the pictures of town. So that's all that.

I've gotten some pretty good reactions towards my garden from people in town, too, which has been fun. A couple secondary school boys who'd come to help me cut the branches for the middle came back a few days later. I was just finishing up and getting ready to plant the next day, and they came up and said, Daniel! What is this you have made? I told them it was a garden. Sure?, one of them said, in the traditional high-pitched Ugandan-English exclamation of disbelief. Pretty sure, yeah, I said, and explained how it was supposed to work. Eh, one of them said, shaking his head in wonder, I have never seen such technology before in my life! Technology isn't quite the word I'd use to describe a pile of dirt and some sticks, but I laughed. It made me feel like I was building an alien spacecraft out in the field.

When I went into work a couple days after finishing, my supervisor said, Danieli, what is that you have made in the nursery? I told her that it was my garden. Ah, she said. We thought it was a trap. I laughed, again. Not quite.

And, last time I wrote about the garden, I mentioned the boy who lives next door to The Nursery, who comes over and chats with me whenever I'm out there, and when I say chats with me, I mean that he speaks in really fast Ateso, 99% of which I can't understand, and so I just talk to him in English about whatever. Every once in a while, I'll be able to pick one or two words and get the gist of what he's saying and formulate some sort of coherent answer. So, he came over when I was getting ready to plant. I greeted him, Yoga noi!, literally saying hello very much and asked how he was doing, Biaibo ijo? He said he was fine. Biabibo esomero?, I asked. He said school was fine. And then he said, Ateso ateso! Ateso ateso ateso ateso. Ateso? Ateso ateso. And I said, Oh, I know, right? I can't believe it, either. He laughed, like he always does when I talk to him in English, and said, Ateso, ateso ateso. Ateso ateso ateso etogo ateso?, and he made a motion to go down the walkway of the garden and crouch through, into the middle part. He was asking if it was a house. I laughed, again. Ejai etogo kon?, I said, asking him if it was his house. He said it wasn't. Ikoto ijo etogo?, I said, asking if he wanted it to be his house. He said he didn't. Aso... I said, disappointed -- Well... And then I explained that there were going to be carrots, cabbage -- because I don't know if there's a word for lettuce -- and beans and cucumbers. He seemed disappointed. Maybe I should've just told him that it was a house.

(And, speaking of cobbling together sentences in Ateso, one short, last sidestory: There's a restaurant in town that I've been going to fairly often in the last couple months. All they serve is posho -- a cakey sort of thing made of maize flour and water -- and beans, but it's a ridiculous amount of food for 1000/=, and, since that's all they ever serve, I can go in there and just say, Eong da inyamat. This always makes me happy because that literally translates as Me also food. It seems like the most appropriate way to ask for a two pound bowl of food.)

Sunset Bike Rides

Sometimes I really love it when there're only four colors here that are visible as far off into the distance as I can see and they're each clearly demarcated from the others, they each have their place, their thing they're made of, and they don't mix. Red dirt road, pile of red bricks; green grass, green bushes, green trees; blue sky, painfully blue; white clouds, puffy and scattered and then gathering. But then something else will come along and it won't care about the four colors and the demarcation and the not mixing. Sometimes it's yellow jerrycans balanced on someone's head, sometimes it's a couple kids in fluorescent pink school uniforms, and sometimes it's even better than that and it's a woman in a wrap skirt that's such a garish neon orange that it's refusing the onset of night and competing not with the four colors of the daytime but with the thousand shades of a fading sunset that seems to be sucking the color from everywhere else and combining or rearranging or remixing it all back together and then flinging it across the western sky so that there's no color anywhere except where the sun wants there to be, because it's egotistical and jealous and it wants you not just to look, but to stare, it's telling you, Look at me, I'm a sunset, and everything else is soaked in gathering darkness, a dull purple-gray, and there's only her in her wrap skirt, one woman who's refusing to be covered by darkness and refusing to let the sun have all the color.

I saw her a few nights ago when I was riding my bike while the sun went down. This has become one of my favorite things to do since I got a bike a few months ago. It's cool out and beautiful and sometimes it's fun to race the rain home and all the bugs I ingest when they fly into my mouth or get stuck under my eyelids -- I always try to remember to take out my contacts and wear my glasses instead but I always forget -- or burrow into my ears are really good sources of protein and picking them out of my hair keeps me occupied for a good thirty minutes after I get home.

Everything else had given its color to the sun, which spread orange and purple and pink and soft golden yellow across dark black rainclouds with absolutely no regard to the daytime splits between red, green, blue, and white. So the sunset was colorful to an obscene degree, the sun was angry, out to prove a point, and everything else was simply darkening, shaded over, dusk. And then she was there and it took me a few seconds to figure out what it was, this glowing bit of orange in the middle of a field, anything but shaded over, lighting the area around her rather than simply growing dark, she was bent over, hinged at the waist, digging -- gardening -- in the small field near her huts and that skirt, that neon orange, was her challenge to the setting sun because she still had work to do and as I pedaled past it seemed like she could have kept digging all night if she wanted to, lighting her fields with that bit of sunset wrapped around her waist.

So the sun eventually gave up, having proved its point for the day or having realized it would never get the color from that woman's skirt, and all that was left were broad swathes of gold and silver across black clouds, all off to my right as I rode south back towards town. But once the sun is down, here, it is dark almost immediately and when there's no moon I have to get off my bike and walk because I can't see the ruts and potholes and puddles in the road anymore and, with no shocks and a hard plastic seat, hitting any of those things at any speed is less than fun. Darkening, shaded over, turned to dark, pitch, and cloud cover blocked the unbelievable number of stars you can see here and the shimmering line of the Milky Way, and, as I walked, I was left with three sources of light.

The flat, solid layer of clouds overhead was pulled and bunched and piled up in the distance, south and west, and there was the lightning, you knew it was coming, just bursts of illumination inside the clouds. And then there were fireflies, more than I think I've ever seen, flickering on and off, no fewer than a hundred lit up in front of me at any one time and they'd strobe their way over the fields and they'd blink their way across the road and, once, and then two, three times, one flew right past the side of my face, leaving a comet trail of yellow light lingering in my peripheral vision. And then there was another light ahead of me, small and round and indistinguishable, at first, from the snowflakes-under-a-streetlamp-at-night of the fireflies, until I realized it was constant and growing, quickly, the headlight of an oncoming boda, and it got larger and brighter and closer until it swallowed everything else, the lightning and the fireflies and the darkness and me, until the whole world as I could see it was dusty yellow light, just for a second, and then the boda was past and everything was darker than before and shapeless until the light from the fireflies poked through and I could make out shapes again, or maybe not shapes but just variations of dark, and could be sure I was still on the road, not walking through a field, like the time I didn't realize I was in someone's cemetery until I tripped on a headstone, and when I got back home and the power was out, three or four fireflies came inside with me, the only time I've ever liked having bugs in the house, and so, for a little while, I left the candles unlit.

Chronic City Redux

One more from that book that, I think, gets at the heart of this here web-log.

These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I'm helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don't. Yet I go around forming sentences.

I think that about sums what I do on here.