Life has come more or less full circle for me. When I arrived we were deep into peanut season; now, again, life is full of peanuts! There are seriously mountains of peanut plants piled in peoples' compounds, or in the fields. Most of the day can be occupied sitting in front of one of these green hills, pulling out the plants one by one to strip them of their nuts. The other day I spent a total of six hours "xontent gerte" - that's pulling peanuts. It's calm, repetitive, brainless work that I find strangely soothing. For the most part, the millet harvest is done now. Charettes loaded with millet stalks now traipse into town; the stalks will become new fences before long. Behind my family's compound is an enormous stack of millet, as tall as I am! My host father says we'll eat it all, but it sure looks like a lot of millet to me. Still, I guess it does feed about twelve people, twice a day. The girls and young women get a workout pounding the grains into flour, sifting it, and going through all the other steps of preparing "cere", the grainy cereal we eat for dinner and breakfast. At first I hated the taste of millet cere, but it's growing on me. And I'm getting pretty tired of rice.
So, this past week I've been pulling peanuts mostly. But I took a day to harvest my sesame, which is ripe now. I had to cut it and stack it upright on a piece of cloth, because the little seed pods will burst open and spill sesame seeds everywhere. So, now they're mostly contained in a bucket and hopefully I won't lose too many. Yesterday, I biked to Taiba Niassene to give out the scholarship to the winning student from last year. The principal of the middle school was delighted that I came with prize money for a promising young girl, and she seemed equally pleased (though shy) to accept the 30,000cfa and her winner's certificate. To the three other finalists I gave a letter of recognition, that hopefully they can present later on to show that they were indeed one of the top four female students in their school (at least, according to me, who read their essays, teacher recommendations, and did an interview with each of them). I didn't know what else to say besides congratulations, and tried to emphasize that this scholarship is designed to reward girls who are serious in their studies, and to help those with limited means to continue their education; hopefully I managed to get some of that across in my mangled French/Wolof.
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