Things quiet down for rainy season

1. the fetish stall during market day - those are a crocodile head and a hyena head, various animal horns and antlers, turtle shells, whole birds, snake heads, whole chamelions, monkey hands, and various other tidbits. Not pictured is the pile of animal skins, which include hyena skin, lion skin, hippo skin, rock python skin, and various others.

2. my dog, who I've named Suruku, warming up in the fire pit one chilly morning after a rain storm. Suruku means hyena, since he's quite fond of playfully biting just about everyone, all the time.

3. the stagnant swamp that's formed next to my concession, with approaching rainstorm

6/24

Well, things are much quieter around here. Dao and Adjara (Haidjara) have gone en brousse for the rainy season, so the face of my host family has changed yet again. As per usual, very little was said to me about it beforehand, and suddenly they just disappeared. Danger had told me weeks ago that they'd be heading off to his brother's for the rainy season some time, but nothing had been said since then; when I came back from a 2-day trip into the city they were gone. I'll miss Dao the most, it's been fun having a little 4-year-old with boundless energy for a little brother, but I suppose it'll be nice not to have to listen to him crying for a while, or to have to listen to Adjara's sinister laugh when making him cry, which is probably worse than the crying itself.

Dao's job for the rainy season will be Cow Herder. Well, "herder" is probably the wrong word - the cows are pretty much allowed to wander, in a group or not, so long as they're not eating all the growing crops. The image of Dao, who can't weigh more than 50 or 60 lbs, herding a bunch of of cows who weigh... well much more than that (besides having huge horns) with a small stick as his only weapon is frankly terrifying to me, but that has to be his job since he's too young to till the soil, and someone has to do it. I thought the other day "it's lucky cows are so dumb" but then I suppose luck really had nothing to do with it, that's how we raise them.

Overall I've been amazed at how docile the animals are in this country. Everyone knows the phrase "kicks like a mule," and while we don't really have any mules here, donkeys are everywhere and horses aren't that scarce either, and I figure the gene that says "kick!" had to come from at least one of them. It's a more or less constant fear of mine that I'll be wandering through marked one day, minding my own business, and suddenly find a hoof embedded in my right temple. Still I've never once seen, or even heard of, someone being injured by a pack animal here. I once heard back home that if you are going to touch a horse on its hindquarters for whatever reason, you have to start from the front and run your fingers along its side as you walk around back to let it know it's you, otherwise it'll get spooked and kick you. I don't know whether or not this is true of horses back home, but it certainly isn't the case here.

Actually we volunteers have a generally accepted theory about why horses and donkeys don't kick here, and that's that any tendency to kick would be evolutionarily unstable. That is, any animal that actually hurt someone would just be immediately destroyed. On the other hand if there's no gene for kicking humans (the donkey courting ritual involves the female spending a lot of time kicking the male in the head) then it's just beaten out of them at an early age.

What really worries me though, rather than horses and donkeys, are the cows. As I implied before the cows here are huge (or do they just seem bigger 'cause I get a lot closer to them than I did back at home?). Besides their bulk, they are the long-horned variety, with horns usually 1.5 - 2 feet in length, if not longer. I've never really worried about cows before- while in Ireland walking from Doolin to the cliffs of Mohr I took a shortcut through some pastures marked with signs warning of an ornery, territorial bull, and lived to tell the tale. Still it's a bit different here since cows just wander everywhere (even in the streets of Bamako, which is a Big City housing over 1.3 million people), but mostly because a friend of mine here was gored by a cow a little while back, and ended up with (among other things) a pierced uterus. Not that I worry much about my own uterus, but I've got other internal organs I'd rather keep un-pierced for the foreseeable future.