Striking a bargain

Forty years ago yesterday, I started a garden in Africa.

I’d been living in a Gambian village for about seven months. The Peace Corps asks you to stay the course for at least six, no matter how miserable you are, because that’s how long it takes to even begin to adjust. I hadn’t gotten very far. Anxiety had me by the throat. I was always on the edge of tears. I had to constantly fight the urge to flee to the city and take the next flight home.

I felt like I should have adjusted months earlier

But I couldn’t go home. If I did, I would have failed. I would end up right back where I started, a place I didn’t like. I couldn’t leave my village, but neither could I stay. 

Something had to give, so I made a bargain with myself. I’d already figured out why the women didn’t listen to my health lessons: I’d been telling them to improve their diet with vegetables, the very thing they didn’t have. Although I’d never grown so much as a carrot, I decided that I would organize a garden. If the women participated, I would stay. If not, I’d admit failure and go home. 

The women said they liked the idea, but I couldn’t tell if they meant it—they often said “yes” to be polite. We formed a club and they paid dues to buy seeds, but when the appointed day came, only my counterpart—an older woman named Ya Mari—joined me. We dug one vegetable bed and began another, embarrassed for having started a club that only we wanted to join.

We’d almost finished our third bed when I heard a little boy calling my name. I looked up. He’d run ahead of his mother, who was striding toward us with a cluster of women trailing behind. Smiling and waving and swinging their buckets, they looked like they were on their way to a festival. 

If they hadn’t shown up, I would have understood; they already had way too much work. But with my emotional well-being at stake, but I would have honored my bargain with myself and started packing for the sad trip home. Instead I returned to my hut, tired but happy. I glanced at the calendar, surprised to see that the date was inked in red. I looked closer and laughed. It was Thanksgiving. I’d been too busy to be homesick, and the holiday had passed me by.

A little boy helps his mother water her vegetable beds

A phone call from Africa

When I returned home from West Africa, I was glad to be back but I also felt sad, thinking that I would never again get to talk to the friends I’d made in the village where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer. There were no phones there, much less an internet. To receive mail, you had to have an address in the capital, and even then letters could take anywhere from two weeks to three months to arrive. Now that I was home, I was cut off from the people I’d been living among for the past two years.

Today, almost forty years later, my cell phone lit up as I sat down to write. It was Neneh Jallow calling from The Gambia, courtesy of Facebook Messenger. I picked up, and the line was unusually clear and free of delays. I was speaking to the little girl, now a woman, who used to come over to my house to do her homework and play with my cat. Neneh and her parents had a battered old tom who earned his keep as a mouser, not as a beloved household pet. She took after her quiet, observant father and didn’t get easily excited, but the first time she saw my kitten wiggle and leap to catch the piece of string I was dangling, she burst into peals of laughter. Whenever she came to my house after that, she cuddled and played with my pet.

Neneh is in her mid-forties now. A community-health nurse, she began her education in the village, in a one-room, mud-brick schoolhouse. A wife and the mother of four, she works as a community health nurse in the capital. She cared for her mother, Chimban, one of the best friends I’ve ever had, in the last difficult years of her life. Chimban kept telling Neneh she would never get to hear my voice again, so last year Neneh called me up on Facebook Messenger for the first time. Chimban didn’t speak English, and my Wolof had grown rusty, but we were able to say everything that mattered—that we missed each other, that we’d always remember each other. She called me by my African name. “Ehhh, Sainabou,” she kept saying, words that took me back to who I was decades before. 

Facebook and other social media platforms have gotten a lot of flak lately. They’re monopolies that need to be broken up. Cannibals harvesting our data. So driven by advertising that they won’t get serious about monitoring hate speech, misinformation, and Russian interference in our elections. This may all be true, but stop and think about the people you’ve loved and lost—not because anything was wrong but because life moved on. You’ve probably reconnected with some of them on social media. If not for this amazing invention (and the ones it’s built on) the friends you found might have been lost completely. 

Who have you searched out from your past? Who was the hardest to find? What was the most surprising outcome? If there’s someone you’d like to reconnect with but haven’t, I recommend doing it. Maybe like me, you’ll not only affirm a bond, but also reconnect with a part of yourself.

People do strange things when lonely in a new culture.

Sometimes people do strange things when lonely in a new culture. When I arrived in West Africa with my fellow Peace Corps volunteers-in-training, we drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of jamba. Some of us fell in love right away. When we were sent to our posts, scattered to the far ends of the country, some of us got so sick we had to be sent home. The loneliness could be excruciating until we learned the local language well enough to make friends. If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, what got you through it? A lot of people have to find something comforting to hang on to for those first several months. My something was a tree.

When I arrived in the Gambian village that would be my home for the next two years, the chief and his wife showed me to my house. It was nothing special—a two-room adobe without electricity or running water—but when the chief opened the back door, I was greeted by a mosaic of green and golden light. I rushed outside, spilling over with happiness: I had a tree. Gambian yards were usually sunbaked, hardscrabble lots, but the spreading branches of this tree—which I was told was a cassia—canopied my little enclosure, splintering the hard, equatorial sunlight into gentle wisps. The leaves reminded me of ferns, the blossoms of yellow violets. I didn’t know it yet, but for the next several months, when I felt like I was about to split open from loneliness, I would wrap my arms around the cassia, holding on to its smooth trunk until its quiet presence calmed me down. It was my first friend in a strange new land.

Almost twenty years later, I returned to my village for a visit. Within an hour of my arrival, I was fighting back tears. My tree had been cut down to make room for a house. I felt like I should have known—like one of those people who wake up in the middle of the night, gasping from the piercing awareness that someone they love has died. I should have heard the trunk crack, the air sighing through the leaves as the cassia crashed to the ground. I hurried back to the room I was staying in, locked the door, and wept.

Fast forward fifteen years: my husband and I are celebrating our anniversary in the Caribbean. As we’re exploring a little town in St. Maarten, I glimpse something out of the corner of my eye and before I know what it is—as if it were calling me—I dash across the street. In front of a school stands a tree with smooth bark, spreading branches, and leaves that reminded me of ferns. Looking up into the foliage, I spill over with happiness. For a moment, I’m home.