10 dec 2002 tuesday - 19:57

i am 22 today. i made some goo balls out of granola, peanut butter, two kinds of honey, cashews, raisins, and cinnamon. about half of them i also added melted chocolate. theyre shit good, i brought some to class to share like when youre a little kid and everyone sang me happy birthday, to which i said fuck you very much. but i said it with love. word. so i was going to say fuck off to everyone (except my dad) cuz i havent seen a single birthday wish from the rest of y'all in my email but then i remembered that its actually like noon over there in the midwest. plus most of you probably have impaired memories from, um, all the deep thinking. yes. so, the farm. i asked to work on an organic farm; expecting to learn organic farming techniques. well, the farm was actually a joint project between the iraelian and senegalese governments - its a pilot farm demonstrating how you can grow anything in the desert if you have a small water source and a pump via a drip irrigation system. we grew dates, watermelon, a melon similar to muskmelon, tomatos, hot peppers, sweet peppers, onions, something called gombo, papaya, mangos, guavas, arbes forestiers (trees for wood that are big enough to kill in like 4 to 10 years), some other stuff. yeah, well manipulating the desert to grow tropical plants isnt really in the theme of organic farming. they used pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, all chemical except this one field where there was a student seeking her PhD by experimenting with microbes from two types of mushrooms to use as a fertilizer instead - in theory, the microbes would have a symbiotic relationship with the plants and dispell the use of chem ferts. the farm, however, was a good project in that the goal was to reduce poverty and dependence in senegal. if people can switch to agriculture theoretically this would provide jobs and reduce the dependence on imported goods in senegal (they import a lot of their produce here) and create an export market. there isnt much of one right now, and the way the world financial systems work senegal would benefit from an export market. so it was interesting to take a close look at a situation in which human rights and ecological ideals were in conflict. i very much regretted that i did not have expertise to offer the farm, because the directer offered to give me a hectare to experiment with organic produce. he claimed that it was to expensive to produce, ive read otherwise but of course i dont have the experience to back up what ive read.... the farm, which was started as a development project by the government in 1998, actually made enough money and was so successful that its one of the only govt projects to have turned around and actually started to be a source of revenue for the govt for the past few years. unfortunately, there is a lot of corruption. the head coordinator (who is between the govt and my on-site director), basically has been stealing a lot of the profit to build himself a nice home, and is planning on giving a lot of the land to members of his family. my director told me he was so fed up he was going to get his gun and kill the guy himself and then realized that was a bad idea and that he should maybe just find a different job and give up on his dreams of helping the region prosper. he told me he also thinks the farm will get privatized soon. it's really sad; actually-- the project has so much potential. i wished i had 20 years experience in land issues and was fluent in french and wolof and the local culture; unfortunately i had none of these qualities so i didnt really feel like i could do anything to help the farm. i also certainly didnt want to do anthropological research and produce a publishable report, so i knew pretty much right away that i didnt want to stay there to do my internship until may. as such, i tried to just make myself useful and stay out of everyones way, so i helped the phd lady (elle s'appelle astou ndiage) run the experimental fields and weeded the fields all day. let me tell you, ramadan is a lot more of a bitch under the sun in the fields all day than wandering through the chaos of dakar. but, after a couple weeks i couldnt work in the fields anymore because something very strange was happening with my skin. in the first place; i hada bout 100 mosquito bites at any given time, most concentrated on my feet. so, then some of the bites started to get sort of green and full of pus and they hurt really bad. then more started to do that. and despite using iodine and an antibacterial soap called pharmapur they really werent getting any better at all and in fact sort of grew in this wierd way. and new ones started growing. if anything touched them at all it hurt like fuck and they were constantly weeping. really gross. i took pictures for jordans wound gallery. i thought maybe it was just infected mosquito bites and my skin couldnt heal very well coz i was maybe dehydrated from fasting, so i started taking water during the day after a week or so but that didnt really do anything except make me piss more than i was used to. and everyone started asking me "ana yoy yi?" "hows the mosquitos?" like 6 times a day. i got really sick of being like "mu ngi fii" "they are here" or whatever else i would respond with. they; i mean like almost every single person, would proceed to ask me if i used a mosquito net (yes; duh) and if i used mosquito spray (yes duh) and if i covered my skin at night with cloth (yes i had a whole fucking system worked out--problem being that i couldnt cover the areas that were infected because it hurt and damaged the tissue that was trying to repair itselfif anything brushed it even slightly). i know it was out of an urge to help, but it was still really tiring to respond to the same set of questions 95 times. or; when people saw my skin, theyd be like, is it the heat? the people that i talked to there really all just thought that was some kind of normal reaction toubabs have to the sun or to mosquitos (a lot of people didnt believe me when i said there were mosquitos in the states, just not the same species), and i tried to explain that there was nothing normal about it and no one really believed me. and i shared a bed with a little girl who was extremely squirmy and would roll on top of me at night and the transportation to the farm was crowded and dirty so basically my nerves were completely shot from trying to avoid letting people and things touch me. i mentioned this to my host family one day and they proceeded to provide me with a bed in the chicken shed, so at least i could sleep at night in peace. only it wasnt really in peace. it was way, way better than sharing a bed...but there isnt really any sound insulation in the chicken shed and the thing about kms is that there are wild packs of dogs (like 30 dogs runnning together) that fight each other for the best chance to fuck the female all bloody night long. they are LOUD. and then the fucking rooster in the yard starts at like 4 am and cree-oo-ooooooos until like 7pm at night without any apparent reason. i wanted to kill it. i thought; the next time i eat chicken i am going to think of you and enjoy it about six times more. (i never saw anyone eat chicken in kms, i think its too expensive for the income available there) and i did. we had chicken the other night and i thought about that stupid fucking rooster and chewed happily away. anyway. i ended up leaving the house early because my left foot, which had the most mutant holes; a loving nickname i started referring to my problems as (to my diary since no one there spoke english); actually swelled up and i couldnt see my ankles. at that point i got a little concerned. so i arranged to leave and i saw a dermatologist and he told me i had impetigo, which is something ive actually heard of and there is medicine for and now i just ahve pretty pink scar tissue on several spots on my arms and feet/lower legs. some of them still hurt a little but they are sooooo much better. i dont even give a fuck about the scars i am just happy to have almost normal skin again and now i can wear shoes and dont have to have a heart attack every time someone moves slightly near me. holy shit i have never worked so hard to not hate a place in my life. i am SOO SOO happy to be in dakar. im glad i went, i learned a lot despite being unbelievabley BORED...after my mutant holes got too bad to work in the fields i had to pretend to do things in the office for 9 hours a day and 6 days a week since they didnt know i was leaving yet (my instructors wanted to tell them in person so i had to wait until they came for a site visit just a few days before i left to be like, look its pointless for me to come here) and i didnt want to waste anyones time by finishing the interviews i was in the middle of when i found out i was leaving for real and my instructors would find me another internship in dakar with a non profit womens rights advocacy group. more about the new intership some other time. so i did my homework and read my entire french-wolof dictionary and slept on the floor and wrote.. really; really boring. really. yeah. and people called me toubab constantly, which ive decided i hate. even some of the people that knew the name that my family invented for me (astou mback�) would be like, hey toubab. so i learned how to say dont call me toubab, my name is kelly or if you prefer, astou mback�. thats like this: bul ma wax toubab, kelly wante astou mback� laa tuddu. or if i am talking to more than one person at once i change the bul to buleen. i already knew how to say fuck off, but i didnt think that was a very productive response although i thought it a lot despite my efforts at understanding the historical reasons people would call me toubab instead of my name. anyway. thats an eyeful ill type more some other time hommies. love and mutantness; kelly

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26 oct 2005 wed - my dead diary.

14 jun 2004 mon - drug use et al.

11 jun 2004 fri - stuff to take care of

01 jun 2004 tue - quit again again again

30 may 2004 sun - u n l o a d