A Short Interim Summary of Where I Am

More than two months have now passed since I arrived in São Nicolau, and I'm still not living in my permanent house in Fajã. Fortunately, I know where it is — I've visited it many times — and I expect to move in next week.

Of course, if you knew that I've been saying that for the last eight weeks, you might take it with a grain of salt. You might not believe me. Heck, I don't always believe me. But it's true: I'm moving in next week.

The reason, simply, is that I've rested quite enough by this point, and I'm excited enough by the ideas in my head that spending two years on their realization is exactly what I want to do.

Key word: want. When I want something, I make it happen. I wanted to visit my friend in Beijing, so I did. I wanted to ride my bicycle to San Diego, so I did. I wanted to live abroad, and now I do. But for a while I didn't know why; I didn't know what I wanted here. Problem of my life, if you ask me. Don't want enough. Unambitious? Maybe. I remember the words of quiz kid Donnie Smith:

"I have so much love to give … I just don't know where to put it!"

I have enough brains and gusto to achieve nearly anything, but that's the kicker, that nebulous anything. It's too big. Hard to find a part of it that I like. That I want.

So for these last two months — months of trails hiked, books read, meals cooked, and meetings gingerly scheduled but not attended — I've been stuck in my house in Tarrafal largely because I didn't want Fajã badly enough. Agriculture work sounded like fun, but only in the way that it would have been fun to take agriculture courses in college: as a diversion, a sweet first sip from an entirely unfamiliar font of knowledge. As for what I could actually do in the realm of agriculture (besides something hopelessly vague like "improve peoples' lives"), I didn't know. My various quasi-bosses gave me some direction: we had a week of training on post-harvest management, and I just completed another week of training on drip irrigation. Give this knowledge to farmers, they said. Okay, I said, taking responsibility but not ownership. Not wanting.

But slowly, and by now completely, something has changed. I am invested. It's like some extra layer of vision has been switched on: now I can see the problems, and from what I've been taught in the last two months, I can quickly come up with some possible solutions. And most of these solutions are easy. Most of them don't require any appreciable amount of extra money or effort; farmers just have to do things a little differently. Quite often, they don't need technology or new equipment or handouts … they just need knowledge.

Which is exactly why I'm so excited.

I came to Cape Verde (and later, to Tarrafal) to teach basic computer skills. It wasn't what I picked. I asked for environmental work, imagining that I could teach myself about cheap ways to harness renewable energy and then re-teach it to local people. (You know — help save the earth by ensuring that developing nations make progress without walking in the developed world's oily century-old footsteps.) Peace Corps, being the rationalists that they are, decided to put me in a field where I actually already knew something (IT). That made me hesitate. After all, I had applied to Peace Corps largely to get out from behind a computer screen. But I took the job anyway because it involved teaching, which was something I wanted to try, and which might eventually qualify me for totally non-computer work.

I wanted to try teaching, by the way, because I like to play god with ideas. I don't get to do it very often, but I like understanding something so well that I can pull it apart and reconstruct it and even mash it together with something completely different. I love [finding] metaphors. Simplicity arising out of complexity, that's good too.

So when I still thought I would be doing computer classes, I got really excited about teaching the idea of the Internet. I came up with the metaphor of a network of couriers and planned an activity where students would be tied together in a web of strings; they would pass messages to each other and see, simple as shoelaces, how the whole thing works.

I never taught that class. I never solved that knowledge problem; I never finishing playing with that idea. Instead, I got a new job in agriculture. But what I figured out in the last few weeks is that my "new" job is actually my old job in a new field. I'm still teaching. I'm still here to play with ideas. But there are three important differences:

1) The novelty. IT was something I knew well but cared about very little. Agriculture is totally new to me and I care tremendously about learning it because we can't understand humans' relationship to Earth without understanding food supply.

2) The [immediate] impact. Computers could transform the way Cape Verde operates, but since most households here don't have a computer (let alone an Internet connection), that future is probably way more than two years off. I will probably still work on some IT projects in my spare time, but I doubt I'll still be here when the fruits of my labour ripen (assuming I even have success convincing Cape Verdians that the benefits of IT are worth the costs). Agriculture is infinitely more concrete. Change the way you water, and in 3 months you have bigger tomatoes. Change the way you transport those tomatoes, and 50% more of them are intact and salable by the time you get to the market. Instead of throwing them something totally new that they might reject, I get to play around in the realm of what they already know. Feels more like incremental improvement and less like imperialism.

3) Flexibility. I would have taught computers in a classroom. Agriculture, however, entitles me to teach in any way I see fit.

Let me expound on that last difference by giving you a little more background about what I've learned and what I'll be teaching. The first training, in Praia, was on post-harvest management — basically, everything you can do to ensure that agricultural products get from the farm to the consumer in the best condition. This stuff is routine for farmers in the U.S. and other developed nations: rapid cooling after harvest, cold storage, cold transport, humidity control, careful packaging and handling, sorting, grading, etc. Cape Verdians tend to have some understanding of all this stuff, but it is only sporadically reflected in the way they actually do agriculture. They complain about diseased plants, but fail to cull them from their fields to prevent further infections/infestations. They constantly pour tomatoes like liquid from one oversize bin to another, seeing that the tomatoes look fine immediately afterward but not realizing that bruises will appear a day or two later. Addressing oversights like these would allow them to sell much more of their produce at the market (instead of throwing it away because it's bad) without ANY extra water, land, or labor … if only they knew.

Of course, there are some variables nobody knows for sure: how much water and what kind of soil, for example, are best for a 3-month-old papaya tree? Hard to say. Fortunately, a government-sponsored organization called INIDA has research-based Cape Verde-specific guidelines for questions like these on nearly every plant that's grown here. The information is published in the local print language (Portuguese). I've seen the book. Unfortunately, not many farmers know it exists, even fewer have it, and even if they had it I'm not sure they'd get the information out of it very easily.

So my job, as I see it, is to make this existent information accessible. That means teaching, which is cool, but it also means advocacy. This is where the flexibility part comes in: to make sure that all these best practices get into the minds and fields of farmers who would otherwise keep committing the same oversights again and again automatically, I have to get their attention. Maybe that means creating and handing out easy-to-read info brochures. Maybe that means putting ideal fruit storage temperatures on posters. Maybe that means inviting everyone in Fajã to a demonstration farm and serving them free food. I don't know yet, but I get to play around with it. I get to pull apart, reconstruct, and recombine these ideas with my own ideas until I find something that actually does achieve that mercilessly vague goal of "improving peoples' lives."

And that's exciting. I want that.