Two days into my village stay and my neighbor Mamadou takes me for a tour of the village, hand in hand from house to house. “Diop, Diop, Diop” is the refrain, “Alhumdulilay” (Thanks be to God) the chorus. The villagers will ask me “Nanga def?” or “How are you?” over and over again, maybe because they think it’s all I can understand, but more I think because that’s just how it works here when greeting someone. I can hardly make it more than half a “block” before someone is calling “Manssour!” asking “Fooy dem?” “Where are you going?” They also ask after Harit, or Angela, the volunteer I’ve replaced.

Angela did quite a job with the park and the people, but also kept a distance or existence unto her own as the villagers tell me about her “husband” who I know to be here boyfriend, and about her weekly trips to “church” which were actually days spent at the beach or a campement. I wonder what and how much I will feel compelled to disguise myself.

The days here feel slow, much the way they did in Thies. My breakfasts have been very relaxing- hot toubab coffee, baguette with butter, beans, or a fried egg. My hut is comfortable and bright with two big rooms, one my bedroom, complete with a double bed (rice sack, straw filled mattress), end tables, and a mirror. The other room has a single bed that doubles as a couch, along with a small desk and makeshift kitchen made up of a cutting board table and shelf, along with a gas stove that serves at night as my gas lantern.

It is at night when I truly feel the difference of living in the village versus in Thies. Everyone gathers on the veranda of the house in the light of the family’s single gas lantern, seated on mats on the concrete. The smell of charcoal fills the air and we eat dinner as the sun goes down, me with my own bowl of thiebunebbe (rice and beans with remnants of fish from the thiebujen from lunch). Having eaten around the bowl with my family in Thies it feels a bit odd to sit alone and eat while the rest of the family, all 13 of them, crowd around two large bowls. But this is how Harit did it, and my father Adama tells me that I would hardly get a scrap if I had to compete with the kids.

My two moms, Tabara and Fatou, alternate in making the attaya as the rest of us eat peanuts after the meal. The stars, “biddeo” are unbelieveable here, Orion moving from the Southeast horizon to the top of the sky throughout the evening. It actually gets chilly at night and to my disbelief I am happy to have the comforter that I bought from Angela.

I made it to the park the other day and was introduced to my new office my Mamadou Sidibe, my new boss and Conservateur of the Langue de Barberie National Park. As we looked over the office computer, “In” box, “Out” box, and CB radio, Mamadou cradled his two year old son Bamba in one arm as he guided me with the other. The office has cracks in the walls, bugs buzzing, dusty books strewn about, but a certain charm that American Property Management could never produce in Portland, even with a window office.

My first call to duty was assisting Mamadou and the other park staff in “repairing” the radio antenna before the minister of tourism’s visit to the park this Sunday. I put repair in quotations marks because what we did was re-splice a frayed cable that had already been spliced many times and attach it to a new antenna extension that will add three feet of reception. The antenna however, didn’t fit on the existing bracket, so with undersized U-bolts and a ton of electrical and packing tape, we “fixed” the antenna only to watch the cable snap in the process of raising the tower.

“C’est pas grave” says Mamadou, “No big deal,” and we lower the tower to jury-rig it once more, this time with success. My Leatherman was handy for the job, a sophisticated tool compared to the plastic bag full of rusty tools as our disposal.

After the antenna incident I got a boat tour of the park with my counterpart Arona Fall, our piroguier pilot Sayibou, and four toubab tourists, two Spaniards and two Canadiens. The pirogue is an interesting vessel in design- somewhat reminiscent of a Native American canoe, though wider, and pretty tippy. The park is a mix of river, ocean, beach, lizards, palms, turtles, birds, birds, birds, and wait, garbage. Sure enough, the folks in Saint Louis and every other upriver community haven’t been sensitized to the effects of littering in the river. “Pristine” is a relative term here and while the banks of the river do collect old bottles, bags, and flip-flops, it is still an incredibly beautiful place, and holds fantastic potential for ecotourism.
Later in the week I went with my brother Pape to the family’s fields, a two kilometer walk in the bush behind our house. The soil is actually just sand mixed with manure, but seems to work just fine for the onions, tomato, and manioc that I could see. It was really something to walk past the old ruin of the Balacoste, which I now understand to be a remnant of one of the first French colonial outposts from the early 18th century.

Weaving between cactus, palms, and the dunes we passed a small Pulaar village. The Peuls, or Pulaars, are a gentle people that originated in Ethiopia but are dispersed across the continent because of their traditional lifestyle of herding and animal husbandry. We made it to a filed of onions, 108 1.5’x 3’ plots of green sprouts. Pape showedme the not so easy task of how to water the plots as he pulled one gallon of water for each plot, hauling bucket after bucket 15 feet from one of the many wells that dot the landscape. We carefully poured the water around the border of the each plot, using a mesh of straw and fishing net as a filter to protect the newest seedlings. Pape smiled each time he passed me my buckets and never once grunted or even sighed as he labored for the better part of an hour.