Facts and Observations

So I think there are some things that I learned about Cape Verde before I came here, and definitely since I’ve been here, that you don’t know, and that will help clarify or contextualize my remarks and observations about the country as we go on, and I’ll attempt to delineate a few of those today. Some are just observations themselves, and others are actual statistics given to us by various organizations here in country. Some are obviously more important than others, but all will be helpful if you really want to gain a true sense of the people and culture of Cape Verde. I am by no means an expert on Cape Verde or the problems here, but here are some things that stand out…here goes.

1) There are more Cape Verdians living in the US today than in Cape Verde. It began hundreds of years ago with the exportation of Cape Verdian slaves to the US by the Portuguese. After slavery, Cape Verdians continued to immigrate to the US in an attempt to escape the drought and poverty here, as well as to reconnect with family already living over there. EVERY SINGLE Cape Verdian I’ve met has at least a couple of relatives living and working in the states. 95% of those living in he US are in the Boston, Providence and Brockton areas of the Northeast. A weird side-effect of this is that as more and more CV’s are deported for lack of proper Visas, you encounter Cape Verdians on the streets with these ridiculous Boston accents. Picture a woman with a baby slung on her back and carrying a huge drum of water on her head and coming up to you and in a voice straight out of Good Will Hunting, asking you if “You want I should findya a car ta Assomada?” It’s truly bizarre.
Another side effect is that parts of American culture has invaded Cape Verdian culture (more so on this island than the others as far as I can tell), and almost universally to the detriment of Cape Verde. For instance, relatives abroad will send home a cell phone for their niece or nephew and give them $100 towards their first bill. Now, mind you, NOBODY in Cape Verde needs a cell phone. People here work ALL day long just scrape together enough to feed and cloth their families, and they’re usually cutting that pretty close. (There are definitely no fat people here.) Yet, a LOT of the kids around here have cell phones, and they are NOT cheap, but because it’s from America, and because of the “status symbol effect,” they continue to use them.
Another thing that has found its way to CV is rap music. Everyone here asks me “Bu conxi a 50 Cent? Snoop Dog?” (Do you know 50 Cent or Snoop Dog?) People from America will send their relatives here the CDs and music videos that they’re kids like in America, and consequently, they start listening to them here…although they’re about 5 years behind. (As far as adult music goes, they’re even more behind the times, as Lionel Richie, Bryan Adams and Michael Bolton are all insanely popular here and can be heard on any local radio station any day.) Along with the rap music has come the “Thug” image. (Although they canºt pronounce the “th” sound here, so theyºre referred to as “tugs.”) North Carolina hats tilted sideways, baggy draws, Bling, low-slung pants that reveal the boxers beneath, and most of all, sneakers. You can tell a man’s worth, or at least the worth of a relative he has in America, by his sneakers. A pair of Nike shoes here is like a gold and diamond Rolex in the states. Mind you, it´s image only, and there are very few actual “thugs” in Cape Verde…just a lot of people dressing like “thugs.”

2) This country is POOR. 80% of the gross national product is from remittances from those living and working in the states. There are Western Unions on every street corner, where the locals go once a month to pick up whatever they’ve been sent by family members abroad. Another 10% is made up of donations from charity organizations or the UN. That leaves just 10% for the country to make on its own. There is almost no commerce here, other than income generated from tourism and the ports in Mindelo and Praia. Other than that it’s all just subsistence farming.

3) This country is DRY. It hasn’t rained here, not a drop on this island, in over nine months. They will get all of their rainfall for the year in the coming two months. Consequently, they have spent the last two months a simentera (planting) all of their crops. They do everything communally here. All the friends, family and neighbors of a person go to that person’s or family’s simentera and work all day long, sometimes for a couple days even, and that person returns the favor to each person that showed up for his or her simentera by going to all of theirs as well. The same thing happens after the rains when it’s harvesting time. Another consequence of the droughts here is that there are all sorts of interesting things in place to conserve, recycle, reuse, catch and harvest rain. There is a group of families that live up in the mountains (where there is often a thick fog) that have learned to put up huge nets of fine netting that literally catch the fog. They average over 15 litres of water per 1 square meter of net there, and it is a really amazing project. There are also water tanks, aqueducts, buckets etc. on everyone’s roofs, and everyone here recycles or reuses water. In the house I live in for instance, water is first used for bathing, then its on to the tub for the laundry, which is all hand-washed on a rock or washboard and from which my knuckles are already scarred, and from there the water goes to the tub for washing the dishes, and from there to the garden in the backyard. It’s a similar situation in all of the houses on this island.

4) Much of this island (and less so on other islands) is filthy. There are no garbage trucks or landfills here, so the only thing they do with the trash is burn it or throw it out in the street. In the main city of Praia, and a little bit in Assomada, there is trash everywhere. Also, there are animals everywhere. On my way to school each morning, I’ll pass cats, dogs, pigs, donkeys, cows, chickens, roosters, goats, rabbits, turkeys and the occasional monkey. (Let me also say here that the noises I endure at night are sometimes unbearable…HUGE dog fights that last for hours, roosters crowing just outside my room at all hours of the night, cats in heat, and God knows what scurrying across the floor of my room. Needless to say that although earplugs don’t drown out everything, they have been my savior here so far.) Unfortunately, the animals pretty much all have the run of the place, so they shit and sleep wherever they please. Tanbe, none of the dogs are neutered or spayed, so there is a BIG problem with bands of roving wild dogs. I’m told that just before we got here, they had a big poisoning campaign, where they warned people to put their pets inside for week, then put out poison for the dogs, picked up the bodies then next day, then burned them in the streets. Yuck.

5) This country is SMALL. All of the 10 islands put together are still smaller than Rhode Island. Consequently, if it weren’t for the mountains, you could walk from one side of even the biggest island to the other side in less than a day. I’ve tried to explain to people the size of Texas, and the United States, and they just can’t conceive of it. You can show it to them on a map, tell them about driving on a highway, or tell them how long it takes to fly from NYC to LA, but they just can’t grasp it.

6) This country has HUGE families. My parents here have 7 kids and 14 grandkids, and that’s about average. My neighbor has 28 children with 4 different women. There is no such thing as a woman or a man above 20 years old without kids. PC even told us to invent stories about why we don’t have kids yet, lest the locals think we’re gay or unable to father/mother children…the 2 worst imaginable sins in this country. Teenage pregnancy is an epidemic on a few of the islands here, despite the fact that the AIDS rate here is actually lower than in the States. Men here, even the marries ones, often have several girlfriends, and all of the women involved generally accept this, although there is a HUGE public information campaign going on in the country right now, aimed at educating women about why this isn’t a good thing. The men are, obviously, resistant to this line of thinking.

7) The Portuguese fucked these people royally. After consuming all of the inlands’ resources (including fresh water and timber) and trading the people as slaves for a few hundred years, Cape Verdians finally staged a successful revolt, after which the Portuguese finally gave up, and then pulled completely out of the country, leaving them with NOTHING. No trees, no water, no infrastructure, no education, no identity, no money…Nothing. Today they sponsor a few thousand students by letting them go to college for free in Lisbon, but other than that, they’ve washed their hands of the whole business. It’s really a miracle that any of these people survived, and even more of a miracle that they are one of the 5 most developed countries in Africa, as they’ve done it, more or less, on their own terms, albeit with a LOT of help from charitable organizations and agencies like Peace Corps, Red Cross and Millennium Challenge Corporation. Probably a lot more about that later.

So that should get you started for now. I’d encourage all of you to read whatever you can about Cape Verde…there are a few good articles on Wikipedia, and more available from the country’s official website. I’ll also try to put up some more of these as time goes on.

Hope everyone is well and good. Send me some e-mails!!!

All My Best,

Caley