“Lessons for a Tukkikat”

Alone, on long walks, the memories still come to me, arising out of the streets of Chicago or along the pilgrim’s path of Santiago, blurred but pungent, those intimations surface of days and nights in the land of the Mandinka and Wolof. They appear, like apparitions, unannounced, one calling forth others, bringing with them emotional chords long buried, and the lessons I learned living among the farmers of the Sine Saloum. There, alive on the periphery of my mind, I can see the sandy paths through the savannah, the smoldering sun, the baobab branches clawing at the sky, the children, mouths wide open, running about to catch the first drops of rain.

Though I would do little to alter the daily struggles of the Senegalese, they would, in return, have a lasting influence on my future life. I would not realize it at the time, but my education as a writer began in that small farming community twenty miles from the Gambia River.

Fresh from a failed attempt at acting in Chicago, fleeing Reagan’s America and the tumult of my sexual life, I joined the Peace Corps. With little training in community organizing or agriculture, I landed in a devout Muslim community of some five hundred souls in the southwestern corner of Senegal.

It didn’t start out well.

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