carrots

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago.  Actually I think it was New Year’s Day.  Better than listing what I did today!

This is a story that is not about carrots.  It will seem like it might be, so pay attention.  Right now, about 12 inches to my left, there are two small carrots.  They are laying on a black, plastic bag on a table in the corner of my living room.  That corner is also my kitchen, and that plastic bag is my produce shelf.  There are also two green apples, a small tomato, one quarter of a purple onion and a bag of garlic that has been picked over for the past three weeks.  I bought the rest of that stuff on Saturday when I was in Maroua.  A man came right into the concession of the Peace Corps house and laid his vegetables out on the porch.  I bought green onions, zucchini, bell peppers, and carrots.  The carrots were bright orange and they still had the leafy stems attached.  I got about 10 for 100 cfa.  That’s almost a quarter in US dollars.

Have you ever been embarrassed of vegetables?  On Sunday, I came home and laid out my vegetables on the table on the black, plastic bag.  And there they sat.  There were so many of them.  People came over and they could see my vegetables because they were just sitting there, not even covered.  Kids stared at them, women pointed at them.  When there weren’t people in my house, I tried to figure out what to do with them.  The first two nights I had stirfry.  I didn’t use too many because I wanted them to last as long as possible.  On Tuesday, there were 6 carrots left.  A little girl came over and I think she took a carrot.  She told me she brought it from her house, but it looked very familiar.  She must not have known I was saving it.  That night, I had vegetable soup.  You couldn’t even tell the vegetables were soft; I really am becoming a better cook.  That soup lasted two meals, even after I shared with another little girl that did not steal a carrot.

This morning there were three carrots left.  They were no longer bright.  The ends were brown and the skin was wrinkled.  When you picked them up, they gave a little to the pressure of your fingers.

The little girl that took the carrot was here again just now.  She saw the dark, soft carrots and an expression of horror came over her face.  She furrowed her brow and started talking very quickly in that language I still don’t understand.  She grabbed one of them and went outside.  She came back and still had the same look on her face with the string of Guiziga flying from her still chewing mouth.  But no more carrot.

I am a dramatic person.  One time I was upset about something and my mom told me, “Ashley, you are making this into a big thing, when really it is very small.”  (She was right but the way, don’t you hate that?) Maybe this story is really only about carrots, but it seems much bigger than that.  I always feel a tension here.  And it mostly has to do with things and how I should treat them.  The people that I am living with have less things than I do.  There is a part of me that wants to give a lot of those things away.  Especially when girls come over and ask if they can go get my water.  Or sweep my floor.  They look for ways to be generous.

But there is another part of me that wants to keep my things guarded and secure.  Especially when little girls take carrots or paint their fingernails with my polish everyday for a week.  I want them to learn to take care of things and not take without asking.  But maybe they understand better than I do.  This is the part where I say some wise and witty statement about rotten carrots, but I think you get the picture.