2.21.09
We just got a brand new baby goat. For clarity’s, lets call him New Dinosaur Face. He wasn’t really very interesting his first few days. Except that while kittens seem to be born with full-grown eyes, which makes them look like little aliens, goats seem to be born with full-grown knees. Except they definitely don’t have fully-developed stabilization muscles, so they weeble and wobble and bend in all directions. So if you’re a little newborn goat and trying to get to your mother by walking straight towards her, if you’re not careful you might just end up going some other which way. And goats don’t really end up all that smart, and they start off much less so, so that gets confusing.
Anyway, about day three New Dinosaur Face discovers that, indeed, ITS FUN TO BE ALIVE! and he decides that he wants to play. Now, a three-day-old goat about splits the difference in size between adolescent and adult chickens. When you’re young you evaluate play-mate potential based on size. Bigger is always better, but bigger rarely wants to play. And NDF looks around the yard and sees dozens of potential playmate options. So the young man starts weeble-wobbling around after all the chickens. Now adult chickens may not be big, but they also don’t want to play. And chickens, I’ve found, are teh most irritable animals I’ve ever encountered. And they’re not shy about expressing their displeasure. And baby goats are easily frightened but quick to forget. So its been noisy and rather comical lately.
And then I think the kittens must have staged a hunt with poor New Dinosaur Face as prey, because everybody used to live in peace all together, but now my cats are terrified of his mama, slink around all the time and five her such a wide berth that if she’s anywhere near my door they won’t even risk coming inside to eat. The just howl at me angrily from the other side of the yard. This could have happened, I think, because I’ve seen those two looking thoughtfully at the chickens. And the goat is about the same size, but obviously less fierce. But its good that they were put in their place, because I’m terrified of whats going to happen if they take it into their heads to actually start hunting chickens. Once little Hal stepped on a baby chick’s head with his claws out and it flapped its tiny ineffective wings and squeaked a lot, but that was about food, and he does that to his sister, sometimes, too. It might have been little Naani who later died, but I hope not. By the way, only one of the batch survived through IST, but I think he’s finally out of the danger zone. And we haven’t had any more chicken babies, since.
It was nice coming back to Koury. I hate traveling in this country, and the motoritigis on the way in made me super-angry, so I was hating life when I arrived, but everyone was so welcoming and I’ve been keeping busy (busy in the PC-Mali sense of the word) ever since. I think maybe its the dying season, which I find surpriseing, because I would have expected more people to die during the rainy season. Maybe they did die then, too, and I was just too clueless at the time to notice. But Malians are dropping like flies and there’s always some funeral or other to go to or people are going to some other place to go to funerals. I got to go to a traditional masked funeral dance, which was actually a lot more scary than I thought it would be. While it may be tragic that people’s friends and relations are dying, it has led to a great deal of information exchange, and I have had many opportunities to witness women discussing how much vegetables are going for in other markets right now. And if we learned nothing else from the Lion King, we learned that the Circle of Life is continuous, and deaths notwithstanding, it is also the birthing season, and there are babies popping up like weeks. Both of these things make for logistical complications at meetings, because women are housebound both after the birth of a child and after the death of a husband for a proscribed about of time. So after the meeting for the people who could attend is over, the whole lot goes trooping all around town to the homes of the members who couldn’t come, to greet and bless and chit-chat. And on certain unpleasant occasions, to make me hold the brand new baby. Which I do not like doing. But the fact that I obviously don’t like it just makes it that much more fun to watch. And once i think I might have eaten dog-head rice. But only the rice, because my host mom forbid them from giving me any meat. For which I was grateful.
NB: I found out that indeed, it IS the dying season. They call February the bad month, or the doctor’s month, because so many people die then. It is a lot better now than it used to be. The guy I was talking to said that it used to be – only twenty years ago – that a medium sized village would regularly bury ten kids in a day in February. It is because the wind blows off of the Sahara, and it is dusty which is bad for breathing, and maybe it brings along diseases. Because it is since the introduction of vaccines and Western medicine that people have stopped dying so much. But, of course they are still reproducing as if they were still dying so much, but that is a different issue. So there you have it, good observation, Kelly.
