COS conference

At the place where the two main roads between the towns of Praia and Assomada meet, you get out of a stuffy over-crowded Hiace, van, and climb into the back of an Hilux, pick-up truck. Brace yourself for another ten minutes at a break-neck pace on a curvy, snaking road towards the town of Santiago if you are Cape Verdean or Pedro Badejo if you are Portuguese. Up and down green mountains, you reach my house at the foot of one zona, neighborhood (Achada Costa) and up a valley from another (Levada). My town, Orgãos, hardly receives a mention in most every travel guides about Cape Verde but is what my reality and understanding of the country is based on. Along the drive I wave to neighbors washing clothes outside and walking with their inxchadas, hoes, to their tend to their crops. I buy mangoes from the women in the back of the car. She is on her way to the next town, Santiago, the port town, to sell in the street market, with the other women who sell produce and fish.

“Maria’s leg? Is it better?” I questioned Maria’s son as I expertly jumped out of the back of the Hilux, pick-up truck, in front of my house. He shook his finger indicating "No" and informed me it had become infected. I asked the standard response, was she taking medicine, he nodded, and said she would find me later today. I shouted greetings to my neighbors who tell me they had soledadi, missing or longing, for me while I was gone for the last 5 days.

After being away from site for 5 days at our Close of Service conference, I am relieved to be home. Immediately I feel a difference in my body. The tension eases and my muscles relax. After all that is what this place, this house, this town has become to me. It has been my home for two years. The skies are dark today, the rain comes intermittently, and people are carrying their inxchadas, hoes, and walk to their fields to begin to plant new crops, beans and corn. Just like the rest of my town, for me, simia, planting, is an exciting time of year. A tangible, visible symbol of change and better things to come.

I yell upstairs in Kriolu “Dja bem,” which translates as “Already I have come,” and is what you say when you return home, or to a group of people you know well. My mom kisses me on both cheeks and tells me excitedly she saw me and the other PCV’s on the news. She hands me a frozen plastic container of cachupa, corn and bean stew, that she cooked yesterday when she thought I was coming home. She gives me two eggs to place on top of the cachupa, after frying it in oil. I gave her the wallet I made from an old milk container, a project that has had huge success all over Cape Verde. She smiles and hands me a ripe payapa. We talk for a bit about people in town, the rain coming, when she will plant her crops. Downstairs she gives me several bananas. There are old milk cartons she has saved for me to make more wallets.

I make coffee with my broken French press, the one with the plastic red electric tape holding it together. My bed with the flower sheets and mosquito net, the pictures of friends and family in America and Africa on the walls, the drawings kids in my town have made for me. My mom walks into my kitchen to borrow something. How can these things that were so foreign now feel so ordinary so comforting? It is amazing how many options for our lives we have as humans, how much free will and choice we have.

I hear my mom talking to people outside. It’s Donda and Sany’s family, walking down the road to their fields. The young daughter sees me and says “Look at Elyse there,” they all shout greetings and ask where I have been. They ask me to come simia, plant, I assure them I will after I talk to Maria, my counterpart, about our bathroom construction project.

“I feel so strangely optimistic,” a quote from the film “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and I do, at my house, at my desk, with my morning coffee. I don’t know what I will do today, Maria and I might go talk to the local government about our bathroom project, hopefully we will go buy supplies, but if none of that happens, I will help my neighbors plant the crops that will sustain them and me for the next year. Or I will watch a movie inside. Uncertainty use to hold such trepidation but throughout my two years I have made my peace with it.