Under the Neem Tree

"Under the Neem Tree" is the story of a young American woman who finds herself in a desolate scrap of Moslem Africa - a Pulaar village along the river which marks the border between Senegal and Mauretania. It is a stark reality she is totally unprepared for, with a job she is equally ill-equipped to handle: to teach the Senegalese how to grow fish in the Sahel, a land dying of thirst. Slowly, the author becomes a part of her village, is adopted by a family, and asked to take their last name. One of them wants her to be there when she gives birth; another asks her to drive his mother's corpse to the village graveyard. She must prove to the men who work at the fish station her right to be their boss. it becomes a showdown between herself and the Senegalese foreman, Dabo, If he wins, she will have wasted two years, and if she wins, he will hate her. Her biggest war is with her body, which is continuously attached by parasites. Beryl Markham writes in "West with the Night", "so there are many Africans. There are as many Africas as there are books about it as you could read in a leisurely life". "Under the Neem Tree" is the Africa of one woman's daily life, and the understanding which comes when it is no longer an adventure or a study of another culture, but simply your reality. It is not air-brushed or quaint, nor is it a stereotypical American picture of Africa. It is full of dust, death, heat, and flies, and also Pulaar laughter and the brightness of desert stars.