Emails, October 2, 2007- April 2, 2008

October 2 2007
Onjarama!
We are now 18 days into Ramadan, a fact that is frequently mentioned, along with the party and new clothes and feast that come at the end. People fasting sweat only in the mornings and in the evenings: the first drop emerges with the first plastic cup of water they send a child to fetch for them after sunset. I am continually amazed by the women in my family and in Foulamory Demba, the PUla Fouta village; they must cook two meals in the evening instead of one. The breakfast gruel they now drink in the evenings requires hours of pounding. I help as much as I can, as I am drinking water! We gather under the mango trees in midmorning, with bowls of each family s millet or sorghum, and pound. People are crankier, understandably, but people also cling to each other and relationships more than usual. Every word they speak, every step they take, requires more effort, so those everpresent greetings seem so sincere, close, and warm. People also get slightly goofy and loopy: a joke comment is , Soumai naggi mbo, or fasting has affected her! Not everyone fasts: some women just choose not to. Aminata Sabely, Abdulai s wife, chooses not to fast on days that she has to do laundry! She is turning out to be one of my favorite people, especially since she takes such good care of her children. Unlike the women in my family, she makes sure that her children, who are not fasting, GET LUNCH, even though she wont be eating it.

Most volunteers say that they cant get any work done in their village during this time. DId I mention that I am constantly amazed by the women in my village? Well, the men are incredible too. I had our first budgeting class on thursday. The procedure for calling these types of meetings is as follows: day before, go compound to compound in Foulamory Demba to inform, as Abdulai can take care of the more organized Foulamory Yero himself. Greetings, reminder of the meeting and why I m having it: remember our town meeting where YOU said the biggest problem you face is money? Day of: wait around until about half an hour after the meeting has been scheduled, then go compound to compound to tell them that people have started to congregate, a little white lie that gets them going. We had it in the two room schoolhouse, and someone found me chalk and a sponge. Greetings to the men, pass out my spreadsheets, get them to labourously write their names on the sign in sheet. Abdulai, to whom I had explained everything and who was extremely excited about the project, could not be present, so I stood up and tried to explain. People nodded, but that does nt necessarily mean they understand, a fact I ve learned from my family. Luckily, however, the local school teacher asked a question, which meant that he got my point. So I told him to stand up and explain. THEN people really got it! Nods, interruptions, questions, excited feet tapping. We are doing monthly tracking of expenses and yearly planning of expenses, in challah. Yesterday one of the least literate men sat down under his shade structure with a labourously written list of his yearly food needs: sacks of rice, dried fish, salt, bullion cubes )which is why I m also doing nutrition classes) and oil. "So I should buy these as soon as I get my cotton money, right? Then my wife will stop pestering me for money to buy bullion cubes every day for lunch!" I nearly hugged him I was so excited and impressed. And maybe now they will see how much of their money is spent on tea, sugar, cigarrettes, snuff, and KOla nuts! )just like how much of my money in the states is spent on diet coke and gum???)

Friday was a nutrition class for the women of Foulamory Yero, Saturday Foulamory Demba. For the developing world, there are three basic food groups: proteins or body)building foods, grains; oild and sugar or energybuilding foods, and vegetables and fruits, protection foods. I drew little cards of the foods they...

Read more...

The Waiting Room

The Waiting Room


Sunday school was in a yellow room with a closet big enough to hide the entire class. Our teacher carried a beige nanny sack filled with books about the savior. When the teacher would cry her tears would run down the pages of our storybooks in beads, crinkling the page with smooth, intersecting lines. Our teacher was alone. She never found a man to love her because she never looked for one. I used to think that I loved her because she ate lunch by herself, finishing each meal with an apple that she ate with the nervous fervor of a chain smoking claustrophobic after an MRI.

My first pair of sneakers were white Reeboks just like my father's. I wore them to baseball games at the town hall and when the laces unraveled I replaced them with a green neon pair. My father chewed Nicorette gum while I grabbed for a pack of Big League Chew. I liked a girl who ate the smallest oranges that I had ever seen. She would peel them with stub fingernails, chipping with tomato colored nail polish. She would sit on the bleachers and wait with a thermos for her seventh grade boyfriend to finish the ninth inning. They never kissed but I caught them holding both hands and hugging tightly in the dugout of an unplayable field. I never wished that I was anyone else and this occasion was no exception. I looked down at my neon laces and wondered if she could see me from my bench thirty feet away. Anybody could tell that I was alone; I didn't even have a dog to walk. I was slouching like there was a thirty pound magnet on my shoulders pointing south.

For dinner we had baked chicken and my father lost his job. He was a banker and he never made enough for us to eat steak, spare maybe once or twice a year. I never liked the way the blood would seep out of my food while I was eating it. It wouldn't be until years later that I would be able to appreciate the suffering of the dead.

“In my mind I am at peace with everything and I will stay in that place forever and ever”. After that I died. That was the first poem that I ever wrote and when I wrote it I was thinking about my girlfriend’s hair. I was running about a bracelet thick piece of it through my fingers. My peace came from the idea that it was mine, hers and ours at the time same. In my poem she was my girlfriend even after death, which made sense at the time in a very sixteen year old way. I wore a corduroy suit jacket with pen stained suede elbows and a ripped breast pocket so that paper would fall down into the recesses of the coat. People said that I was deep because I carried a green notebook and sat transfixed upon it in the hallways between classes. I never edited any of my work back then. I didn’t believe in it. My work was something that simply came out of me and stayed on the page in its virginal state. Most of my poems were about my girlfriend, who hardly ate a thing. She would have five napkins on her lap at the dinner table, all full of food boluses. She would ask to be excused from the table and run to the bathroom to flush the napkins down the toilet. When she got down to eighty five pounds her mother realized that her daughter was beginning to take the shape of her own skeleton. She tried feeding her whole milk and chunks of chocolate. Jenny had a special place in the back yard for throwing up. It was an old sunflower pot that her mother used for transplanting sick flowers until they were well enough to be placed back in the garden. They took Jenny to the hospital once they found out what she was leaving in the flower pot. She also weighed less than eighty pounds. It was a relatively warm day in November and all of neighborhood kids were playing detective games before meatloaf suppers.
My parents only allowed me to visit Jenny in the hospital once. They said that it was an awful thing that she did to her body and to support her would be a way of condoning the behavior. I thought that my parents were full of shit...

Read more...

Smoking pills Directory

Stop Smoking Pill - How Does This Fight Withdrawal Symptoms?
For some people, bewitching a pill is easier than using the patch or trying to clear cold turkey. ... of these filters, including charcoal and ceramic filters, de ...

Contact Us
ways to withdraw from smoking. Smoking pills. stop smoking pills. using charcoal pills to stop smoking ... © 2008 To Stop Smoking dot com - All stuff to stop smoking. Quit ...

using charcoal pills to stop smoking - To Stop Smoking dot ...
Then my mate will stop pestering me for money to buy bullion cubes ... stop smoking pills. using charcoal pills to stop smoking. pills to helper stop smoking ...