Sunday, 01 May 2005

  • Lord of the Flies

    I looked at the squealing pig we had just bought and thought to myself: Now why again did we think this would be a good idea? My best friend and teammate for the past year, Dean, was completeing his Peace Corps service and heading home in two weeks and we decided to have a big dinner to celebrate. We had pretty much been daring each other to do it until we suddenly found ourselves with a highly intelligent, verg strong, and very pissed off piece of pork on our hands. There are no pigs in our immediate area so we bought one in the regional capital and stored it at my friend's house overnight. The softies among us decided the tie around it's back legs was too tight and that we could "fix" it (what in the world do we know about how a pig should or should't be hog-tied?!) But the softies won out and replaced the expert pig handler's rope with a loosey-goosey conconcoction of cloth and duct tape. Returning from errands we discovered the beast roaming freely around my friend's house, snorting happily of course. Now we had to recapture the thing. We had no idea what we were doing. It took six of us dog-piled on top of the thing to hold it still, with the thing letting out the most godawful scream you ever heard--think Deliverance in surround sound.

    We finally got the thing tied into a big sack with just its pink snout sticking out to transport it the four hours to our town. The transport operators had never hauled a pig before and were absolutely terrified of it. They loaded it on top f the overloaded beat-up van, building a kind of cave of luggage around it to protect it from the sun. Everything was going just grand until an hour before our destination when all the passengers noticed a metallic tinkling sound from above. With just its little snout exposed, the pig had managed to reach over and eat into another passenger's bag of grain, and now the precious grain was leaking out on the highway! Voices were raised about what the crazy white people were up to now, and Dean and I slunk down in our seats up front trying to stifle our laughter and hoping to flee before a full mutiny broke out. Once we got it to our destination, we left it in another friend's yard who was out of town for two weeks (he wouldn't mind) while we returned to our villages. We built a makeshift pen where it was to be fattened. We named it "Tina" just so we could say the line "Eat your food Tina!" over and over when we threw slop in its pen. At first we were worried someone might try to take it in our absence, but luckily the pig was too novel and terrifying for anyone to dare get near it. Although the thing smelled to high heaven I have to admit I grew rather attached--it was kinda cute wallowing in its own filth and snorting greetings...until it escaped again and the proprietor returned home to discover a pig enjoying the all-you-can-eat salad bar of his garden. But not a moment too soon the big day came and we were more than ready to kill the beast. I cleverly lured it out of its pen with an eggplant proffered on the end of stick, and then we captured it in a hammock. Luckily we were at least smart enough to enlist some locals to help with the slaughter. They decided last minute that it needed to be done "Halal," or according to Islamic Law, which entails facing the animal East towards Mecca and slitting its throat while saying a prayer to Allah (an Islamic slaughter seems a little ironic at this point since strict Muslims aren't supposed to be eating pork anyway...). As six of us piled on top of the squealing beast, there was momentary confusion as to exactly which way was due East, and we found ourselves trying to keep the flailing thing penned down while also rotating it in search of Mecca. It was beginning to see like maybe the whole thing wasn't worth it--but then we all tasted the barbecue-roasted pork stuffed with pineapple and were ready to do it all over again right then and there! We put the pig's head on a pike a la Lord of the Flies--complete with sunglasses and a striped hat--just inside the entrance to our yard as a warning to obnoxious children, though the Malians didn't seem to understand our morbid literary referance. Oh well. The artist is always misunderstood.

    How to Use a Toilet 101

    Last month I took one of the village women to the Malian capital for a week-long workshop on adopting more modern and hygenic methods of child delivery in rural areas. She had never left the area, never been to a large city, much less the spraling capital. I watched as she experienced a week of firsts: personal vehicles, stoplights, cement buildings, electricity, restaurants. We stayed at another volunteer's apartment in the city the first night. As she surveyed the opulent surroundings she said, "Amadaga, why does your friend live in this palace in Bamako and you live way out in the desert in a mud hut with us?!" I had to admit this was a fair question. As we showed her around the apartment, it fell to me to do something I never imagined I'd ever have to do: teach someone how to flush a toilet. This seems like a fairly straightforward enterprise, until you consider that you're dealing with someone who has no concept of pipes, or septic tanks, or toilet seats, or water pressure, or porcelain, or levers, or toilet paper. After my friend and I had stayed up late talking we noticed that the light was still on in her room. We had forgotten to teach her how to turn off the light.

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