The Cape Verde Chronicles Part 4

Memory Lane

From the last time we met, I found out that I was assigned to the desert island of Sal.  No plants, no vegetation.....just dunes, the sparkling warm crystal blue ocean waters of the Pacific, and yet the sight of another drier island known as Boa Vista covered in sand dunes nearby.  We would experience the "Bruma Seca" or the Sahara storms off the African continent as they traveled hundreds of miles across the ocean.  The winds would be so strong at times that cars would be turned on their sides.  I even remember a fork off the road was picked up by the wind and thrown against our home window which shattered the glass panel.  Everyone was to move to the inside of the home.  Everyone thinks living on an island is wonderful, but I'm here to say....it's not:)  There's nothing like feeling helpless or trapped as an ominous dark cloud approaches your home from across the ocean....and there's nowhere to run.  My move to Sal would be "the snap" that I needed to help me focus on what is important in this life.  Today if I ever travel back, my view of the world will have changed and I would look at this country in a new light.  A beautiful woman by the name of Cesaria Evora would teach me the meaning of "Sodadi" or loneliness in my own American way. RIP my barefoot diva...your music is some of my prized collections.  Your words haunting and full of yearning...."What more is there?" So here are more chronicles of my experiences...

Corn makes cachupa!

Dated August 29th, 2000. "Mr. Hankey would like to sing you a song.....and it goes something like this...."Poo is in the air....everywhere you look around!!! I am "emailing" you from the sunny and windy Sal....Things are going well here....and at first I thought I was going to hate this place....but things have turned out better than I ever could have imagined. This is the biggest place for tourism and until this weekend I didn't know why.....but then I saw the miles of beaches. The sapphire sparkling water is warm, the waves incredible, and it's only a walk away from our house! However I can see both sides of the island at certain points. I'm trapped here."

Our farewell..

My letters get progressively worse. Dated October 26th, 2000. "I miss Central America, South America....Mexico.  I wonder if coming to this part of the world was the right decision. My group that was once 30 is now 24....another volunteer has returned back home.  She was on the island of Santo Antao....the GREEN island! Last night my awesome roommate, Syd, made some type of fried egg sandwich which tasted really good.  I don't know what I'd do without her.  She has kept me from going insane.  The students here are a nightmare and not like the ones on the main island.  We had a knife incident, a 20 something guard having relations with one of my 8th grade girls,  a teacher dating one of his students, rocks thrown in thru my classroom windows at other students....one getting hit in the head.  Is any of this worth the headache or the frustration?  Or the worst part...tourists interrupting my class to give the "poor" African children candies.  All they want are handouts.  None of them know how to do things for themselves.  It's a strange culture.  In Espargos, the capital of the island Sal, the students are really wonderful, but then I have to head to Santa Maria for the other half of the day.....and this is the tourist town.....and the real issue.   To find happiness, I go to my rooftop and watch the planes fly overhead.  Big large planes.....flying to different destinations all around the world.  Sometimes I just hang out at the airport to be around people coming and going....to make me forget.  I've taken so many things for granted in life.  A kitty comes to my roof and looks at me.  I remember both my cats back home and I offer our little visiting friend leftovers.  She stares back at me."  This cat would become our "pet".  She was feral but she also controlled our cockroach population.

My awesome future roomie on the island of Sal!

October 28th, 2000.  "I hate it here.  I've walked the island and while it has its beauty, there aren't any plants!  My neighbors have several in pots and they are treasured....like gold.  Water is a finite resource here and it only comes once a week to fill our tanks.  If we forget to turn the spicket on, we won't have water to wash our clothes, cook our meals, or take cold showers with!.  They say Tuesdays are the day, but that isn't always true.  It requires constant checking to make sure that we don't flood our tanks and have water flow into our home.  My roomie is wonderful.  In a moment of inspiration, we went to buy concrete blocks to create planters on our patio.  Thank you Grandma and Mom for sending vegetable seeds.  Our patio is now a container garden.  I don't know what I'd do without it.  Everyday I check to make sure caterpillars aren't eating the leaves.  I've set a box near where I garden for my cat friend to sleep while I work with the plants.  The soil here on this island is no good.  We brought soil in from the other island and it is doing the job. "

Watch your feet while swimming:P  These little black sea creatures will sting you:)
Tomorrow I finish the series of this life changing adventure.....

 Ancient ruins from a time past....near Cidadi Velha.

 My worst fear.  Fish food.  Looking at this pic makes me sick. But maybe you think otherwise:)

 Traditional Batuk dancers

 An island in the middle of nowhere.  Sodadi.

The last shot is the one that seemed to always happen to us.  We had an exhausting day and during a quick sit, goats decided to rain on our parade.  But to be honest I had some fun here.  My friend was irritated:)  I mean who doesn't love goats!?

 Chilling with my host brothers in a ribeira where farmers grow their fruit trees

Market day

Cape Verde

<><>

<>

<><>

Me and my Peace Corps buddy

Tarrafal

Teaching in Sao DomingosCidade VelhaThe foraPedro Badejo

During the beginning of the millenium, I left the US and joined the Peace Corps in Cape Verde to teach English and help train others in the teaching profession.  A lot of things happened there that  made me grow up and become the person I am today.  There was a day that just clicked for me and everything became clear and challenged everything I had done in my life.  It was one of  those singular moments of clarity that lead me to where I am today. I remember it....painting my bedroom walls and listening to Melanie C on my boombox:)  We don't have many of those in life, but when they happen, we must act on them or sacrifice the person we are meant to become.  My first was in Mexico, my second was in Prescott, AZ, and my third was in Cape Verde....and I think it was my last:) They all relate to profession, family, and place.  Cape Verde was about place and hobbies. It was here that my love for gardening started to grow. So on this hot, steamy, cloudy, monsoon day....I thought I would talk a bit about the beautiful islands known as Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa.

In my previous blogs, I wrote about gardening with my family in Wisconsin, growing potted plants at school, and now this is the account of how I started a garden at my home in Cape Verde on the island of Sal. One of the things that I discovered moving to the islands was the need for having great vegetables.  The islands had avocado, some eggplant, green beans, and that was about it. Cape Verde is a network of about 9 main islands.  They were occupied by Portugal and released in 1975 to declare their independance. These islands suffered from severe deforestation and soil run off into the ocean resulting in starvation and desert conditions on mostly all the islands. The people  had used  up their finite resources which is a familiar tale across the world...just look at Haiti as the leader of that particular issue. Cape Verde had become almost inhospitable to live and many thousands of people fled the country  to the main continent of Africa, Europe,  and the East Coast of the United States.  Today you will see neighborhoods of Cape Verdeans around the Boston and Baltimore areas.

My first day arriving to the island of Sal, I discovered how different this island was from the rest.  It was like moving to Mars or what I would imagine to be Mars:)  It was nothing but dunes and beautiful blue beaches. Coming from the Bay area, it was quite a shock to my system.  How can people live on an island without trees or gardens? I realized that without plants, life was somehow less and that I craved the presence of them in my life.  Apparently, I wasn't the only one who valued plant life on the island.  At that time, plants were expensive to purchase and good soil was hard to come by....but it was possible:)  The ground was hard and inhospitable so plants would have to be in pots.  I became real familiar with the "ice plant".  On the islands of Boa Vista, Maio, and Sal you will find a lot of dunes and very few palm oasis. There are plants, but not many...and the ones you see are cherished by the locals and migratory birds on their stop to the African continent.

We left Sal and took a hopper flight over to Santiago, the main island where agriculture happened.  It was also there that we discovered that the University of Arizona was helping the country repopulate their forests with mainly mesquite trees.  It was like walking back into Tucson again as xeroscape and sun friendly plants were grown.  We spent a whole day in the center of the island listening to the goals.  I sometimes question the dangers of introducing non native trees, plants, and animals into an area, but there was logic in the plan.  Precious soil used on the island was getting washed out into the ocean because there weren't trees there to stop the soil erosion.  Today you can see the success of the program on the islands and how is has helped increase their production of crops.  If you travel to the main island of Santiago, which is a real treat, you should visit the "fora" or countryside village of Sao Domingos.   During this time, most of the farming took place in the washes where the rain would collect....and they grew everything from bananas, avocados, mangos....but they did it in a different way than most.....everything was just tossed into the tight ravine wash area and to me, it was a very bizarre and unorganized way to farm...but it was the only space they had to use.  In several of the pictures above, you will see me standing on top of a cliff and in the background below , you will see the "strip" of green in the washes where the farmers worked. 

When I needed to get my "green" on, I went to the city of Cidade Velha (the old city).  It seemed that on the island of Santiago, there was one sacred place that trees and other plants were not affected by the devastation or plant massacre.  Here you will see some lovely spaces where you can relax by the beach and drink a cold bottle of Sagres(a Portuguese beer).

It's not to say that Cape Verde was completely void of plant life, but it was noticable in many areas.  While progress has been slow on the islands, it is happening and the Cape Verde I knew then is probably a whole new creature today offering its' yearly thousands of European visitors beautiful beaches and an escape from mainland.

I was eventually moved to the desert island of Sal where my hunger for good vegetables began.  There was a limited supply of fresh produce and so the only way of having a variety was to grow them myself.  I saved my Peace Corps stipend and bought blocks of cement to line our courtyard with homemade planters.  There weren't any garden seeds around so my mother and grandmother sent me a package of them from the States.  I purchased my soil, planted my seeds and began my adventures in my own little peace of heaven.  I battled catepillars and slugs everyday, but it was rewarding.  It also made me realize how important plants were and fueled a passion I didn't know I had and so began my gardening adventures.  Sometimes you don't realize how important things are until they are absent from your life.  Happy gardening!!