Striking a bargain

Forty years ago yesterday, I started a garden in Africa.

I’d been living in a Gambian village for about seven months. The Peace Corps asks you to stay the course for at least six, no matter how miserable you are, because that’s how long it takes to even begin to adjust. I hadn’t gotten very far. Anxiety had me by the throat. I was always on the edge of tears. I had to constantly fight the urge to flee to the city and take the next flight home.

I felt like I should have adjusted months earlier

But I couldn’t go home. If I did, I would have failed. I would end up right back where I started, a place I didn’t like. I couldn’t leave my village, but neither could I stay. 

Something had to give, so I made a bargain with myself. I’d already figured out why the women didn’t listen to my health lessons: I’d been telling them to improve their diet with vegetables, the very thing they didn’t have. Although I’d never grown so much as a carrot, I decided that I would organize a garden. If the women participated, I would stay. If not, I’d admit failure and go home. 

The women said they liked the idea, but I couldn’t tell if they meant it—they often said “yes” to be polite. We formed a club and they paid dues to buy seeds, but when the appointed day came, only my counterpart—an older woman named Ya Mari—joined me. We dug one vegetable bed and began another, embarrassed for having started a club that only we wanted to join.

We’d almost finished our third bed when I heard a little boy calling my name. I looked up. He’d run ahead of his mother, who was striding toward us with a cluster of women trailing behind. Smiling and waving and swinging their buckets, they looked like they were on their way to a festival. 

If they hadn’t shown up, I would have understood; they already had way too much work. But with my emotional well-being at stake, but I would have honored my bargain with myself and started packing for the sad trip home. Instead I returned to my hut, tired but happy. I glanced at the calendar, surprised to see that the date was inked in red. I looked closer and laughed. It was Thanksgiving. I’d been too busy to be homesick, and the holiday had passed me by.

A little boy helps his mother water her vegetable beds

People do strange things when lonely in a new culture.

Sometimes people do strange things when lonely in a new culture. When I arrived in West Africa with my fellow Peace Corps volunteers-in-training, we drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of jamba. Some of us fell in love right away. When we were sent to our posts, scattered to the far ends of the country, some of us got so sick we had to be sent home. The loneliness could be excruciating until we learned the local language well enough to make friends. If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, what got you through it? A lot of people have to find something comforting to hang on to for those first several months. My something was a tree.

When I arrived in the Gambian village that would be my home for the next two years, the chief and his wife showed me to my house. It was nothing special—a two-room adobe without electricity or running water—but when the chief opened the back door, I was greeted by a mosaic of green and golden light. I rushed outside, spilling over with happiness: I had a tree. Gambian yards were usually sunbaked, hardscrabble lots, but the spreading branches of this tree—which I was told was a cassia—canopied my little enclosure, splintering the hard, equatorial sunlight into gentle wisps. The leaves reminded me of ferns, the blossoms of yellow violets. I didn’t know it yet, but for the next several months, when I felt like I was about to split open from loneliness, I would wrap my arms around the cassia, holding on to its smooth trunk until its quiet presence calmed me down. It was my first friend in a strange new land.

Almost twenty years later, I returned to my village for a visit. Within an hour of my arrival, I was fighting back tears. My tree had been cut down to make room for a house. I felt like I should have known—like one of those people who wake up in the middle of the night, gasping from the piercing awareness that someone they love has died. I should have heard the trunk crack, the air sighing through the leaves as the cassia crashed to the ground. I hurried back to the room I was staying in, locked the door, and wept.

Fast forward fifteen years: my husband and I are celebrating our anniversary in the Caribbean. As we’re exploring a little town in St. Maarten, I glimpse something out of the corner of my eye and before I know what it is—as if it were calling me—I dash across the street. In front of a school stands a tree with smooth bark, spreading branches, and leaves that reminded me of ferns. Looking up into the foliage, I spill over with happiness. For a moment, I’m home.