Na'i din yakay hudo suudu an!

The Rainy Season is over!  Also, the cold dry season is over too.  Darn.  That means that it is the hot dry season.  Prepare to sweat, it’s gonna get hot in here.  But shifting away from the rainy season, we no longer are growing any field crops.  The women in my village actually started a beautiful garden near the well in my village.  It was all their initiative, they secured the funds, and they water it multiple times a day.

do you have to grow jaxatu though?!

But I’m not going to talk about that now.  Do you know what I’m going to talk about?  Cows.  That’s right, it’s another cow blog post!!!! 

As I’m sure you’re acutely aware, I am a cattle herder/sometimes farmer.  But though we grow corn, rice, and peanuts, our cows are our most important asset in village.  We even give them names!!!  I am ashamed to say that I haven’t spent enough time with them lately and can’t even distinguish Ibrahima from Mamadou.  During the rainy season every morning we would wake up, untie the cows, and then shoo them off into the bush.  Someone would go and look after them the whole time until evening , when we would herd them back to the cow field to tie them up to stakes we drill into the ground (or fallen trees or bushes or whatever is free standing).  Apparently it’s called a “wouro” in Pular, but I’m not sure if the name fits because I always assumed that wouro’s were enclosed with a fence.  Nah, we just tie them up to logs and stuff.  We also move this cow camp throughout the rainy season.  We continue this process from when we first plant all the way until rice is harvested (June-December).

But that season is over!  It’s kind of bittersweet because now I don’t have to tie up and untie the cows every day, but I also don’t get to, it can be pretty fun.  So what do the cows do these days?!  I don’t really know.  We shoo them off into the bush and they just kind of wander around until the next rainy season when we spend a day adventuring through the woods looking for our wayward cows.  So I rarely see our cows these days. 

  I actually heard a story from RPCV Cameron related to this (sorry if I butcher it).  So Cameron was hanging out with his rather elderly father one day.  All of a sudden his father jumps to his feet in surprise.  Now, this is an old man, the kind that doesn’t move very fast, but he jumped to attention.  He exclaimed, “that’s my cow!!!”  To Cameron’s confused look he added “last rainy season he didn’t come back, but he came back this year!”  He was very excited.  The moral of the story is that this particular cow spent two years living out in the bush before just deciding to wander on back home.

So there aren’t many cows around, but you still see a few.  They come in and out of the village as they please, so you see them around.  But since they have free range it leads to a particular problem.  “Na’I din yakay hudo suudu an! (The cows eat my roof thatch!)"  Some mornings I’ll wake up at the incredibly unreasonable hour of 6am.  And what wakes me up at this god-forsaken hour?  The slow chomp and rustling of the thatch on my roofs.  That’s right, the cows will walk up to your roof thatch and start eating it.  Dude, cow, what’s up?  Can’t you see that this is the only thing keeping rain out of my hut in the rainy season?  It already leaks enough!  Then you’ll have to get up out of bed, unlock the door, walk outside, and give them a thorough “ATCHA!!!-ing”  Then when I eat breakfast in the morning my host mom will say “hey, I saw you this morning.  Cows eating your roof thatch huh?  Yeah, that happens.”  But in her defense if she ever actually sees the cows eating my thatch she will run over and try to ACHA them.  I mean, cows eating my thatch doesn’t happen often, but it still does, and when it does it sucks. 

It does lead to a fun greeting though, “Est-ce que na’i din yakaali hudo suudu maa? (have the cows not eaten your roof thatch?)” 

Village life can be peculiar.  Let this sink in: cows are trying to slowly eat my house.