My friend Raili and I decided it would be really funny to write a blog post describing what we think of the other person's life, throwing together all the snippets and fragments to create as whole a picture of each other's lives as possible. And if you guys at home think you are getting an incomplete picture, just remember that 90% of the phone calls my friends in country are getting are when something really devastating or traumatic just happened. But Raili did pretty good job - my corrections are bracketed.
The Villagoise Life of Pa(l)mudo – a secondhand account replete with inaccuracies
Camille lives in a small village in the northern Borgou called Ingardidaboo (more or less). [It's called Angaradebou.] Her village is in the commune of Kalalé, which she shares with two other environmental volunteers. It is in the middle of nowhere, where cell service does not exist and where it can take you all day to find a ride out of village, a feat which can break your fragile spirit if you cannot find a moto. [TRUE AND ANNOYING STORY; it took me 5 hours to get out of village one time. Dumb.) She is vraiment in the bush - it takes her 70,000 hours to get from her site to her workstation town of Parakou.
In village, she is known by its 200 inhabitants only as Palmudo, which in Fulani means roughly “a person who comes to fix all of the problems.” [Pamudo, and it means "one who pays close attention and thinks ahead. But I'll take it!] Each day, Camille strolls the red dirt paths toward her community garden, illustrious hair disguised under a fulard, sword at the hip. [I don't have a sword YET but I can get one any time I want at the market, and when I do I'm gonna wear that shit all day everyday, and I'm gonna intimidate all the annoying children. Swords are the northern version of machetes, which are the southern version of "unnecessarily large and scary thing that does everything."] She’s growing all of the things in her community garden (the best in the commune!), and trying to convince her fellow women gardeners to eat things like lettuce and eggplant instead of just tomatoes and onions and peppers.
In addition to the fruits of her garden labor, Palmudo eats a lot of pounded yams, and the meat and cheese from the Fulani cattle who roam freely throughout the bush. [I don't eat the meat, it really grosses me out.] She does not eat poultry because she simultaneously despises and is terrified of them. And occasionally she also eats Cheeze-Its, when someone from America is awesome enough to send them to her. (Cough, cough.) Because the village is so small, she can’t buy food in her village, but instead has to go to market in a nearby village and cook food on the floor of her house. It’s kind of like indoor camping, complete with the gas cookstove, lack of electricity and indoor plumbing, and the mosquito net tent. [TRUTH.]
Because she has no electricity and because she is a machine, Palmudo reads a book a day. Other hobbies when she is not working in the garden include: scrubbing bat poop off the walls of her home, biking out into the bush in search of cell reception, practicing extensive Fulani greetings with everyone in her village (“Napinday! Seyja! Wodeedama!”), and blaming any and all her epidermal problems on the sun because it’s easier than trying to explain it in Fulani. Oh, and trying to avoid accidentally wandering into Nigeria. Dumb. (But not really...actually, it's pretty rad.)
Pretty good, huh? Welp, that's my silly life. You can read my idea of her life here:
And my lovelies, c'est tout pour maintenant. I have to jet off to market before I go back to village. Or I could wait a week for market day but I ain't got no food and that don't work. I hope this finds you well and enjoying snow and drinking hot chocolate with real marshmallows, and watching Christmas carols and decking the halls.
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