tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26292816968845710542024-02-19T00:14:47.330-05:00The Things We Knowamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.comBlogger96125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-61913949500557149952010-10-12T02:08:00.000-04:002010-10-12T02:09:46.269-04:00Fall<p class="MsoNormal">October is just over a week old, and the leaves are beginning to turn.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I first saw significant amounts of warm colors on the trees along 116<sup>th</sup>, and have begun now to notice the change everywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This is my first fall in three years, the last of the seasons I was able to experience after more than two years in the monotonous climate of Western Africa, where, always, it is hot; sometimes it rains.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">There were many things I missed when I was abroad, comprising all categories of cravings, from the material (albums, books) to the gustatory (artichokes! Subway!) to the spiritual (less gris-gris) to the climatic (snow, different colored leaves).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Each yearning had its own level of virtue.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">I left Africa in December, dreaming with almost masochistic anticipation of the cold of a Midwest winter, the pure white glint of new snow.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I longed to see a landscape muted by white, mounded and rolling, instead of the scarred look of burnt-out cornfields, or the stubble of felled plantations.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Even the grease-spotted asphalt of the airport parking garage, the loops and lanes of the highways, were to me like the brush strokes of a master painter.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Winter came and went, the first Christmas back.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The New Year in Chicago; a homemade birthday cake in February.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Then spring, and the return of the twins from university, the purchase of a quality badminton set.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Horseshoes and bocce and all the wonderful lawn games warm weather permits.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The mowing of a real lawn with a real lawn mower.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Then summer, with its endless sunshine, evening bonfires, tennis matches, and dips in the pool.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Fishing in retention ponds and drinking too much beer.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Now, finally, it's fall.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The best smelling season.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I was worried when September came and the leaves stayed green.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>After missing the season for three years, I'd forgotten entirely when and what was supposed to happen.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But now they're changing, and the stores are selling pumpkins by the ton, and I've been eating caramel apples by the dozens.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>High schools and universities are holding their homecomings, shy teenagers asking shy teenagers to dinners and dances, twentysomethings sneaking drinks before games.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There is reverence and revelry in the air.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A calm grasp for the joy of harvest and bounty, before the sobering chill of All Saints Day, the cold of November leading us into winter.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I am waiting, patiently, watching the leaves as they fall.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-85019023892691826122010-04-18T17:54:00.003-04:002010-04-18T19:23:37.953-04:00Georgie Was a Friend of MineThe drives to the Unisys building from our home in Elgin took approximately twenty-five minutes. It was an agonizing half-hour, but it beat waiting at home for Dad to come back, because then the fun would be delayed twice as long. I remember very little from the drives except the giggly anticipation, the way the evening twilight blended with the streetlights to make everything look exotic, like we'd done nothing before as interesting as this in Carol Stream, Illinois. And I don't remember anything about the Unisys building, really, except the valet-like driveway before the front doors, and the lobby, which I remember being enormous, though I know now that at eight years old I thought so many things were. Gaetano and I spent those tense moments in the lobby pulling on Dad's wrists, begging to know how much longer we'd have to wait, while Dad watched people come out of doors and elevators. And eventually one or the other would open and a tall man with large glasses and a moustache like a dust broom would step out, and my brother and I would terrorize him for hugs while Dad told him how glad he was to see him; George was in town.<br /><br />Dad and George met in college in New York in the seventies, and had remained great friends ever since, even after my father left New York to settle down in suburban Illinois. George was a groomsman at my parents' wedding. He worked for a company called Unisys, and I never figured out whatever it was he did, but occasionally the company would send him to their offices in Carol Stream, not far at all from our house, where George would stay, under my parents', and eventually their children's, insistence. I don't remember the first time I met George, or getting to know him or anything like that. His visits, as eventful and thrilling as they were, seemed like natural and essential pieces of a childhood.<br /><br />Gaetano and I adored George for many reasons: with every visit, our toy collection, specifically in the Lego sub-category, would increase dramatically; he would spend a large portion of his time in Illinois on the floor of the living room--a room vast and cavernous, a room suited to space-necessary tasks--helping us put together the new Lego sets he had brought us (indeed, our devotion to George was evidenced by the meticulous care with which we preserved the state of the pirate ships he helped us snap together on one visit, so that we could show him on his next just how much we loved them and that those sets were probably the best presents we'd ever received); and he would speak to us, while studying the how-to-build-'em guides, or while telling us of all the things he'd seen at FAO Schwarz when he'd been shopping for our presents, as though we were no less than two of his best friends in the world, albeit probably the youngest. I never realized until today, reminiscing about his visits, how much influence his manner has had on the way I interact with children now that I, too, am an adult.<br /><br />I was thinking about his visits because, while our family has aged and we no longer collect Legos, or live in Illinois, and no talk about seeing George again had come up for probably many years, we were informed yesterday that all the times with him have been had; George was dead.<br /><br />He died of a heart attack. He was sixty. Dad had talked to him only three weeks ago. George's ex-girlfriend Alice called us yesterday to give us the news. Even she had heard about it too late. His funeral had already been held; he is buried now somewhere in a cemetery in Brooklyn. My brother just called and I told him what had happened. We shared a silence over the phone that was unique between us. Our younger siblings never really knew George; we had moved to Indianapolis by the time they were old enough to buy Legos for, and George's company had no offices near us to visit. I guess that makes me and Gaetano pretty lucky. George was the kind of friend every child should have. And for that alone, if nothing else, he was a great man.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-18268896956833266922010-03-23T21:52:00.003-04:002010-03-23T22:02:53.461-04:00The Water Under the BridgeFreshman year of college, at nights during the warm months when I couldn't sleep, I'd change into shorts and a long-sleeve t-shirt and go running. I'd run straight out the dorm and down <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-error">Neeley</span> toward the White River, and then I'd run along the path that led past the river, along the railroad tracks, to the south side of town. I'd race the trains as they came along, or jump in fright at the first bark of a dog. Some nights--at midnight, three a.m., whenever--I'd run as far as the graffiti murals the city had sponsored on the concrete walls abutting the path, on the stretch of the track just past the bridge, where once during the spring the area was so flooded Travis and I had to turn back; the water was up to our hips. I stopped running so late, eventually, after several people were murdered that year.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-87973042679612001122010-03-09T20:45:00.002-05:002010-03-09T21:23:43.967-05:00Quoi?Parfois je ne sais meme pas quoi dire. Vous qui savez le francais, je vous demande pardon pour la manque d'accents. Les claviers anglais, ni l'internet, ne me permettent pas m'exprimer en cette langue avec tout soin. Ce soir j'ecris en francais afin de me permettre vous communiquer sans me repeter. J'ai l'habitude d'etre pedant dans mes articles, de donner mon avis comme ce l'est le loi. Je meme comprends pourquoi mes amis me regarde comme con arrogant. Alors, je vois qu'on n'avance pas. Cette explication est inutile. Comme toutes les miennes.<br /><br />Je viens de regarder "Le Dernier Metro," un film de Francois Truffaut, qui l'a mis en scene. Et pour terminer la nuit, pour me guider au sommeil tranquille, je vais regarder les particularites bonus, les commentaires, les documentaires, etc. Parce que chaque nuit je dors avec difficulte. La plupart je m'occupe des pensees de la mort, la fin de la vie, le but de l'existence. C'est stupide, a mon age, d'etre paralyse par ces choses abstraites, mais je ne peux pas les nier. Elles sont insistente. Je suis embarasse. Voila pourquoi j'en ecris en francais; mais je ne sais pas pourquoi je m'inquiete. Il est sur que presque personne ne lit ce blog. C'est encore une demonstration de mon arrogance a penser que mes occupations de la tete peuvent vous interesser. Je parle en desordre.<br /><br />Je m'inquiete toujours de quelque chose: ma sante, ma forme, mon intelligence, ma personalite. Qui suis-je? Que fais-je afin d'ameliorer le monde? D'aider quelqu'un? J'avais essayer plusieurs fois a repondre a ces questions, mais je n'ai aucune reponse. Alors, je termine. Excusez-moi cette parole. Je le sais bien que c'est pretentieuse. Mais, quoi faire?amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-53568913646889660222010-01-25T20:52:00.003-05:002010-01-25T21:20:03.510-05:00Kill the Humorless!There was a while there where I was known for being a real asshole. Oh, not everybody thought that. But a good enough number of folks did that it worried me. And they would tell me this to my face. "Am I really an asshole, like all these jackasses have been saying?" I'd ask. My comrades would tilt their heads slightly and extend, palm up, a hand, to indicate to me just how fucking obvious it was. "That is shocking," I'd say, "just shocking."<br /><br />I don't mind being considered an asshole, but I do mind being considered an asshole when I have no conception that I am behaving as one. I've always felt like I've had a pretty good prismatic view of the colors of my personality; if there's one thing I dislike about myself, it's that I feel painfully self-aware, second-guessing nearly every thought or emotion. Generally, I feel like I know when I'm being an asshole. So, having a <em>reputation</em> for being one was something I couldn't fathom.<br /><br />The result of this revelation, coupled with self-doubt following breakup desiderata, was that I felt much like Hal <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-error">Incandenza</span> toward the end of <em>Infinite Jest, </em>when he loses total control of his facial expressions and, eventually, his abilities to communicate in any form. People look at Hal, who is seriously troubled by a friend's forehead predicament, and ask him what he thinks is so goddamn funny. Today at work, actually, I was unusually pissed off, yet several people, when passing by, asked why I was so goddamn giggly this morning. This only increased my frustration; I wanted to break a mop handle over the backs of the humorless.<br /><br />Back when this started, though, the direct result of the asshole+desiderata emotional state was that many times when speaking seriously with someone (admittedly, due to drunkenness, those times were rare) I would spend twice as much time assuring them that what I was saying was sincere than I spent saying the sincere things. And the Chinese Handcuffs feeling of it all was that the more I assured them I was totally and completely <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-error">unironic</span> at the moment, the less assured I was that they believed me. It always reminded me of the time I told a fantastically true story to my aunt, prefacing it with the comment, "This story is absolutely fucking true," which prompted her to scoff and say, "Well, now I don't believe you." And she didn't.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-65494854696768269062010-01-07T14:13:00.006-05:002010-01-08T11:37:14.676-05:00Why The World Needs SupermanIt's been snowing all day, and nobody in the family is working. We've rearranged the living room furniture and, most importantly, taken out the old bulky speaker system and replaced it with a compact Bose version. New settings means we must sit in them; new speakers means we must listen to them. And so we shall. All we need is the right film.<br /><br />Nick and I turn the volume as high as it goes during the scene in <em>Superman Returns </em>when Clark Kent, who has just returned to the Daily Planet offices, rushes to the street ripping off his shirt to go save the damaged airplane/space shuttle combo--which said airplane/shuttle contains, conveniently enough, Lois Lane.<br /><br />The score is marvellous. I've never been a big Superman fan, but John Williams' Superman theme is astounding, especially when coupled with the sight of the Man of Steel gently placing a <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-error">de</span>-winged, flaming wreck of a plane on the pitcher's mound at Metropolis stadium. Nick had goosebumps; I had tears in my eyes. Welcome back, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-error">Kal</span>-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-error">el</span>.<br /><br />Of course, now that we've watched <em>Superman Returns</em>, we're obliged to continue the streak. Next will be <em><span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-error">Spiderman</span> 2</em>, because it's the best of the three. Then probably <em>X-Men 2</em>. I would be up for some Batman, obviously, though I'm not sure which one to pick; they're all just so good. Through every one of these films I'll be cheering and shouting and cringing, because I love them.<br /><br />During a job interview last week I was asked why I joined the Peace Corps. Because of Batman, I said. Because, as naive and idealistic and just plain silly it sounds, the Peace Corps was my way of being a superhero. I'm already embarrassed that I wrote that, but I'll man up and let you ridicule me. It's what Samurai Jack would do.<br /><br />And maybe my military friend(s) will scoff, but I bet you that, at least subconsciously, Superman was part of the reason they decided to serve the country in that particular idiom.<br /><br />Sure, on both sides of the spectrum, there are distinguished histories and inspirational stories--true ones--that more directly influence a person's choice on how they serve their country. That's why the Peace Corps has such cool looking propaganda posters; that's why we have the Military Channel. But reality can only take us so far.<br /><br />Modern Americans don't have anything they would consider mythology (outside of their religion). The story of the fishes and loaves is as real to certain people as the story of Prometheus was to the Greeks. And I like both stories, I really do, but that doesn't necessitate I be a Christian any more than I be a pagan in the Ancient Greek tradition.<br /><br />I am no longer a Catholic (I'm not even a Christian anymore) but I really appreciate being brought up as one. I like the values of the system, the morals, the call for sacrifice as a means of both personal and public redemption. The problem with religion, though, is morons. So I've distanced myself.<br /><br />However, I wonder now, as I think into the future, a future I hope to be replete with a large and boisterous brood of offspring, how will I raise my kids with those kinds of values but still keep them out of the clutches of people who think Leviticus 18:22 is the most important rule in the Old Testament? The answer, as I see it, is comic books.<br /><br />Comic books are modern America's mythology. And it's a beautifully serpentine system of mythology, because everyone living at the time of this mythology knows it to be false; but that doesn't stop people from believing in it.<br /><br />That last sentence is not a paradox. I don't really feel eloquent enough to explain it, so I'm going to rely on reader identification. I mean, I know Batman isn't real, Superman isn't real, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-error">Spiderman</span> isn't real, but because they stand for everything worth standing for in this real life, they are just as important to me as policemen, firemen, Marines, and development workers.<br /><br />This is especially apropos for little kids. A child might not grasp the gravity of the situation in Sudan, or of people blowing up planes, or of Robert Mugabe being a fucking maniac. They know that evil exists in the world, but that evil is not palpable until it is distilled into the Green Goblin or <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" class="blsp-spelling-error">Lex</span> <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-error">Luthor</span>. And all the people who sweat and struggle and die to combat the evil in the world are in no way slighted by being represented to a child in distilled form as a comic book superhero.<br /><br />I am not a comics scholar, but I know that one of Superman's biggest roles in his early years was as a seeker-outer and ultimate-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" class="blsp-spelling-error">punisher</span> of Nazis. Same with Captain America (why do you think he was even created?). Same with any number of superheroes who have been remembered or forgotten. Thanks to them (and to Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and any cartoon character in a propaganda film) war bonds were bought, national rations were strictly followed--and people signed up to fight. As wars ended and comics evolved, evil villains went from Nazis to moronic hoodlums to the Joker. The superhero genre became more symbolic. More mythic. More capable of tackling the big theme of good v. evil. In this way, more lasting. Nazis die. The Joker can live forever.<br /><br />One of the things that pained me while I was in Togo was the lack of a disseminated mythology. Being in <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_8" class="blsp-spelling-error">Kabye</span> country, I was interested in their creation myths, in whatever stories they might have that would help explain who and why they are. Whenever I asked after these stories, though, all I got were Bible chapters.<br /><br />These stories do exist, but none of the youth know them, and few of the old. This frustrated me so much because cultural identity (usually linked to cultural pride) is essential for a people's development. Many folks I spoke with, young and old, held such a sense of shame of being Togolese that they gave up believing they were capable of being any different. Imagine the cultural divide. I come from the land of Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Daredevil, and the Batman. Thanks to them, I believe I can do anything.<br /><br />The fact is, we<em> need</em> mythology. We need it to tell us, unequivocally, what we are capable of. Real life has so many shades of grey that it is absolutely necessary to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, in strictly monochromatic terms. Religion can't satisfy those needs; if Muslims are going to hell according to Christians, and Christians are going to hell according to Muslims, we have a very confusing situation. But the Joker will always be evil. <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_9" class="blsp-spelling-error">Lex</span> <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_10" class="blsp-spelling-error">Luthor</span> will always have an ulterior motive. And Superman and Batman will always do what they've done best--stand for truth, justice, and liberty, and inspire people to do the same.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-71813028244786257262009-12-14T03:13:00.005-05:002009-12-14T03:52:05.736-05:00On How I Don't Write Letters, Before Devolving into an Assortment of Subjects, None of Which Offer a Unifying Theme or Satisfying ConclusionOh, I'm terrible at keeping in touch. I remember before I left thinking that I was going to write to friends and family all the time, multiple letters a week, a day even. I remember making that promise, too, to several people. I didn't keep the promise. My parents didn't care, though. The Dudes didn't care. I don't think Laura cared too much either, though she did always say it was nice to see those envelopes, rare as they were, fingerprinted with dirt. Vina and I don't ever really need to talk; we always seem to understand each other.<br /><br />Andy and I talk about girls still, though at our age I suppose we should start to say 'women.' Same subject with Tim and Justin and Mike and my brother. Sometimes it makes me feel immature. I'm not sure how to get over that, though, so I just keep plugging along.<br /><br />The first night back I couldn't sleep. I was up all night, wandering around the house, wanting desperately to go into the spare bedroom and sift through all the drawers, find out what I'd left behind that I'd forgotten. I finally fell asleep the next morning around nine, on the couch, a dog nearby. I woke up an hour later, with no idea who or where I was. Dad said I called for him, though; I think it was just instinct. I poured myself a glass of juice, my hand shaking the entire time.<br /><br />I've been going to bed late lately. Tonight I haven't gone to bed at all. Tim lent me a Batman comic<em>, The Dark Knight Returns</em>, one of those Frank Miller's from the mid-80s. For some reason it made me think of death. I tried to turn out the light and sleep but the sky was the brown of a decaying orange and my cat was staring at me instead of sleeping, the little light of the night catching and turning green in her eyes. I was terrified by it. I could feel a panic attack coming. I've been able to control them for a long time now, haven't had one as potent as I used to when I was a kid. As soon as I feel one coming I block all opportunities for it to take hold. Sometimes this means listening to music, which I can do in the dark, with my eyes closed, until I fall asleep. Sometimes this means staying up all night to find other distractions. Maybe when I'm done here I'll make some pancakes.<br /><br />I saw Chris the other day, which was nice. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to hang out with people who love literature. I mean, really love the stuff. Not just people who read and enjoy and recommend, but people for whom writing has serious weight, who sigh at the good lines, who laugh in admiration at the better ones. We talked about flash fiction, publishing. We drank beer, ate lunch. We watched Muppet videos.<br /><br />Two days after my return Andy and Justin and I drove ten hours to Philadelphia to visit Vina. We were there too long, and Vina was busy with classes, but we had a great time. The first night, at a hookah bar, I met a Moroccan waitress, and we talked to each other in French, over the heads of my friends. While Vina was in class, the three of us went to Independence Hall, where the Founding Fathers came up with and signed the Constitution of the United States. The tour guide spoke of how Lincoln had stopped in Philadelphia in 1861, on his way to assume the presidency. He quoted Lincoln from memory, something about the importance of the Union, the solemnity of the signing of two of the world's most influential documents, and I began to cry. After the guide liberated us, we went into another building where we saw one of the original printed copies of the Declaration of Independence, and another of the Constitution. I squeezed in front of the woman taking no-flash photos, and in the low light of the display, found my favorite lines:<br /><br />"We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.... [W]e mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."<br /><br />Again, I cried. And then I had one of those moments, one of those beautiful moments when you step outside of yourself and realize how wonderful everything is, when I felt so damn welcomed, so perfectly <em>right </em>to be back in my country. It was a good way to come home, I felt.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-90955581022122921762009-12-09T15:26:00.009-05:002009-12-10T09:52:34.436-05:00A Sun CameBefore leaving Togo, I sat down with the medical officer to go over some final paperwork, discuss the voucher system for getting my teeth cleaned, etc. I still had a few questions that went unanswered during my final medical exam a few months before. That exam was done by a Nicaraguan woman the Peace Corps kind of just hired as a temp while the PCMO was on vacation. She could do the technical stuff, but when it came time to talk about the depression and the insomnia, I got the feeling she wanted nothing less than to talk about something as scary as emotions.<br /><br />So I asked the PCMO about the depression and the insomnia, even though then, two days before my departure, they were no longer problems. She said those are pretty standard pre-au revoir symptoms. Though, she said, if they recurred when I returned to the States, looking up members of a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer network could help, to have somebody to talk to, or at least to get contacts of other people who are good to talk to when you get back home and feel like a stranger in your own country.<br /><br />No thanks, I told her. I didn’t exactly have the greatest time for the past two years. I think the last thing I’d want to do is talk to somebody who probably thinks Peace Corps service was the pinnacle of their young adulthood, if not their entire life up to date. I don’t regret doing the Peace Corps, but I sure as hell don’t want it to define me. It is something I did <i>because</i> of who I am. It is not who I am. That may seem like a thin line, but it’s a significant distinction.<br /><br />I was speaking with a volunteer once who asked me if I could ever imagine marrying someone who had never been in the Peace Corps. The guy’s a great volunteer, and fairly intelligent, but that’s one of the dumbest questions I’ve ever heard. Just because someone didn’t serve in Togo or some other shitty place doesn’t mean they’re not interesting.<br /><br />I told all this to the PCMO, about how I kind of worried about this indifference I have to the past two years of my life (when I say indifference, I mean to say that I’m glad I did it, even though I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but I’ll never do it again; and I don’t mean to imply that being in Africa had anything to do with it, so those of you inclined to racist inferences can just shut the fuck up; you know who you are) and the PCMO said that, well, maybe re-integration won’t be as much a problem for me as it is for others. The ones that have the hardest time, she said, are the ones that just can’t get over the fact that they were volunteers. Those poor bastards, I said. Yeah, she said, tell me about it.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">- -</div><br />Halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, four hours into an eight hour flight, the captain puts the fasten seat belt sign back on and the flight attendant gets on the intercom to say, in three languages, that we’ll be hitting some bitchin’ turbulence, and that we are strongly advised to fasten our seatbelts and not walk around the goddamn cabin, s’il vous plaît. The woman in the seat next to me, a Moroccan who has been living in Boston for the past fifteen or twenty years, is terrified. She’s been nervous the entire flight, but now she’s just kind of silently flipping out beside me, and I do my best to calm her down. It’s all that strong ocean air, I tell her. We’re at the crossroads of the west-bound currents and the east-bound currents, it’s always really bumpy this far away from land. I don't know if this is true, but she stops shaking, at least, so I put my headphones back on and try to close my eyes, because now, thanks to her, <i>I’m</i> freaking out. Two years, I think, of riding in overloaded, poorly maintained bush taxis on shitty roads—including that time the brakes went out coming down the mountain from Kara—and this is what finally gets me. No, I tell myself. I deserve, if nothing else, to see my brother and sister. Whatever is in charge of the universe won’t cheat me of that.<br /><br />Now, I have a firm belief that God, in whatever form he may take, does not listen to human prayers. I don’t believe in predestination, in fate or kismet, and I don’t believe that he will save anybody from death, no matter how good that person is. We are, as individuals, far too insignificant to have any pull with the big guy. But since I am a hypocrite, when faced with the fear that my life is in danger I raise my spiritual voice. Like that time I biked eighteen kilometers in the rain, with lightning striking along the roadside. Like right now on this airplane, with a Moroccan woman convulsing beside me.<br /><br />We make it, though, alive, to JFK. I wait for about four hours at two different bars, drinking inordinately expensive beers. Finally it’s time for the plane home, and I get on, and now I’m the one shaking, but with excitement. Because after two years and three months; after bush taxis and failed projects and a feeling of complete social impotence; after bribes and poverty and that one time I got stopped by the police with JT; after a project I paid for and never saw; after all those sorcery deaths; after two terrifying flights to get off that continent; I will be home. We take off and level off and I spread out on the seat next to me and sleep away the last three hours of this long exile.<br /><br /><div><div style="text-align: center;">- -</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The airport was clean and comfortably empty and just the right kind of cold. The terminal was a long tall-ceilinged hallway with large glass walls looking out on the empty boarding alleys folded up like accordions. The Indianapolis airport had been remodeled since I'd left. I didn't recognize anything unique, anything outside of the generic airportness of the place, to tell me that I was Home. A security guard was seated at a podium-type desk at the point of no return for arrivals, a tall black man with a clean navy blue sweater, and I had the desire to walk up to him like a little nine-year old and tell him, just to keep him up to date, that I'd been gone for two years and now was home. In the week that I've been home, I've been getting this urge a lot.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I was trying to take everything in, doing my best to not miss a single detail, which meant I missed it all, because suddenly, as the hallway I was in zeroed down to an arched opening leading to some kind of massive lounge, the woman standing next to the potted tree shouted, "Oh my God, it's him, I hardly noticed him!" Hello, Momma. Nick ran at me like a Welshman. Dad had his camera out and snapped photos. Something hugged me around the middle, and I looked down to find Anna, my adorably short sister. Waiting behind them in a polite line, with the kinds of smiles people wear when they don't want to appear <i>too </i>happy, but, of course, actually are, were four of my best friends, Justin, Mike, Andy, and Tim. I was ecstatic. But, strangely, I was remarkably calm. In every daydream about my homecoming, I imagined myself blinded with tears (of joy). I don't know if it was the fatigue of travel, or simply the great sigh of relief of being home, but instead of tears I just felt exhausted, immeasurably content, and, actually, a little hungry. So when Dad put down the camera and pulled a sack full of Arby's roast beef sandwiches out of his coat, everything was fine.</div><br /><br /></div>amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-71430841364069477642009-11-16T16:11:00.000-05:002009-11-16T16:18:55.389-05:00The Land Where They Let the Children Cry<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CJUSTIN%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><link rel="themeData" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CJUSTIN%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx"><link rel="colorSchemeMapping" 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mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal">*<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">I like the title game; you guys did a good job last time; Newg was remarkably swift with his response.<span style=""> </span>So I ask again, where does this week’s title come from?<span style=""> </span>Hint: it’s not a film.<span style=""> </span>Also, quick note: I was writing this on the stoop when the last paragraph actually happened.<span style=""> </span>It is not a device; those were my thoughts when I heard the notes rise to my ears.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">It makes me laugh, sometimes, hearing the children cry.<span style=""> </span>Especially the young ones, the under-fives, the ones who speak in squeaky voices, with no conception of grammar.<span style=""> </span>It’s even better when there’s more than one and their voices chorus and Doppler, wobbling in and around each other, like the sound of a tuned guitar string ringing over that of an un-tuned one.<span style=""> </span>I like this sound, this shrieking choir; I smile whenever I hear it.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Because the kids are young, malleable, prone to eating dirt and running into walls, and usually (at least the ones I’m around) well cared for by their families, I know when they cry that nothing, really, is all that wrong.<span style=""> </span>A scraped knee, perhaps, or porridge for dinner instead of rice.<span style=""> </span>At the worst, the kid’s bit his own tongue, or peed his pants, or was pushed by another crier (who, though in tears him/herself, is automatically disqualified for cuteness due this habit of pushing other children to the point of tears).</p> <p class="MsoNormal">I like the way these kids cry because, really, it’s just so honest.<span style=""> </span>I know that whatever they’re crying about isn’t a big deal; I also know, and this is what makes it so damn poignant for me, that these kids, these little children—who will remember probably nothing before their fourth birthday, who have absolutely no frame of reference, who are absolutely and excusably naïve—they believe that whatever hazard has shown itself (including, but not limited to, any of the scenarios listed above) to be the most devastating tragedy they can imagine.<span style=""> </span>There is sincerity to their tears, an emotional honesty that cannot but be beloved and admired.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">I admire this so much because it is corrupted so quickly.<span style=""> </span>Though character varies from child to child and cannot really be categorized by age, I lump the six-to-ten year olds in the group Children Whose Tears Annoy and Anger Me.<span style=""> </span>Children in this group cry even when they know they have not been wronged, or that worse things have happened or will happen.<span style=""> </span>These children are attention seekers, standing in the street like Pharisees, there for all to see.<span style=""> </span>For them, crying is not a form of self-expression, as it is with the adorable ones; rather, it is a way of manipulating their (weak-willed, likely morally corrupt themselves) parents.<span style=""> </span>These budding con artists are easy to spot.<span style=""> </span>Their eyes remain calm in their distress, and all cherubic features are hideously distorted (needless to say, cute cries look even cuter when they cry, like my little buddy Pilakyem, whose face squishes together so that his nose looks like a chocolate raspberry ready to pluck); they also exhibit tantrum symptoms, like The Throwing of Rocks at Others’ Shins, The Slamming of Doors, the tell-tale Unnecessarily High-Pitched Screaming, and the give-away No Visible Nose Running.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">In my compound Theo and Bien-Être are the con artists.<span style=""> </span>They cry when it is convenient, when it is too quiet, when, simply, they have not heard a plaintive wail for what seems to them too long.<span style=""> </span>They can turn it on and off at will.<span style=""> </span>They hit their mothers and defy their fathers.<span style=""> </span>They are not welcome on my stoop; I will not stand such behavior.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Thankfully, though, the little dickheads are balanced by Pilakyem and Martine.<span style=""> </span>Not once have the tears of either of these kids upset me, except to direct my wrath toward the other two who, inevitably, either pushed them down or stole something from their tiny, beautiful hands.<span style=""> </span>You really should see them cry, Pilakyem and Martine.<span style=""> </span>It’s almost too cute for words.<span style=""> </span>Pilakyem, with his skinny legs and his big brown eyes; Martine, who I suspect is retarded, with her chipmunk cheeks and her skin like creamed coffee shining in the sun.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Whenever I hear them begin to sob I want to run to them, sweep them into my arms, cover them with kisses.<span style=""> </span>Which, come to think of it, is all I ever really want to do to them; but when they cry, the instinct is irresistible.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Ah, there goes Pilakyem right now, crying from the other side of my fence.<span style=""> </span>I will go to him.<span style=""> </span>I will lift him to the sky, his scrunched, distraught face shining down on me.<span style=""> </span>I will pull him close, and hug him, and tell him everything will be fine.<span style=""> </span>Oh, I will hold him, notched above my hip.<span style=""> </span>I will hold him, wrapped around my belly, while he snots in my shirt.<span style=""> </span>Yes, I will lift and comfort this beautiful, beautiful child—unless, of course, he’s peed himself again.<span style=""> </span>In that case, well, I’ll let his mother handle it.</p> amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-83281179097281526262009-10-29T06:41:00.005-04:002009-10-29T11:57:26.172-04:00This Town Needs an Enema*<span style="font-size:78%;">*You tell me what movie this quote is from, I'll get you a present from Africa, like amoebas, or guinea worm; also, this post contains foul language, and really bizarre subject matter, and may not be appropriate for infants.</span><br /><br />When my next door neighbor died and we found out it was the devil himself that took him, we were all a little upset. Knowing what <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">scheisters</span> those devils are, the family called upon all of us present to pray for the giant's survivors, that the devil might not take it in mind to attack them, too, and collect his due. Within a week, it was confirmed that we hadn't prayed hard enough; the giant's twin daughters, adorable, feisty ten year <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">olds</span>, were apparently just ridden with the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">sonsabitches</span>. And to prove it they summoned a black poisonous snake onto my compound-mate's terrace, just to give him the willies.<br /><br />Snakes aside, they were fairly benign devils. The girls were still allowed to come over and watch TV, provided they sit outside, and I would take turns singing and dancing with them evenings when I was bored. They got a little pushy in their demands for candy, though, and I didn't hang out with the twins for some time.<br /><br />The twins' grandmother, now, there's a real sweetheart. Slightly crippled, French-deficient, she is nonetheless one of those people I really enjoyed saying hi to in the mornings. Back when I went to Spain, she asked me what I would bring her as a gift; I told her a handsome young man. When my cousin came in May, I introduced him as 'that gift I promised.' The old black cheeks actually blushed.<br /><br />But here's the trouble: for the past two months she's been bed-ridden. I haven't seen her, but my neighbor's tell me she's in a bad state. The girls stay home from school a lot so they can help take care of her. I can't say I'm surprised. Even back when the giant died, I figured she wasn't going to be too far behind. She's been hanging in there, though. She's a tough old broad. I mean, she is African.<br /><br />But now so here's where things start to get interesting. Because she'd been sick for so long, her family was starting to wonder just what was up. The traditional medicines weren't working, and neither were the modern medicines. They decided to call in a charlatan to see if there were any bad spirits about that might be to blame. I bet you can guess what the verdict was.<br /><br />Devils. A fucking lot of them.<br /><br />So, here's the geography of the situation, to help clarify things. If you stand at the baobab tree near the old kitchen foundation and look to the west, directly in front of you would be the old lady's house, where she lives with the twin imps, plus <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Felli</span>, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Felli's</span> mother. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Felli</span>, for those that don't know, is the adorable little girl who enjoyed the Gettysburg Address in the video I posted on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Facebook</span>. Okay, and then next door on the right is my compound, where I live with the Laos and the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Bamazis</span> and various combinations of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Kpekpeous</span>. Looking next door to the left (of the old lady's house) is the house of the old woman we call La <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Maisoniere</span>. This is the lady to whom I pay my rent, because her youngest sister, rich and fat and living in Kara, owns all three of these compounds.<br /><br />So this lady, La <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Maisoniere</span>, she's kin to the ailing, devil-riddled old lady. She decides to call the village chief, an old, dignified man, to intervene on behalf of my old neighbor. Cast the fuckers out, as it were. The chief, well, he used to romp with these chicks, so he accepts the invitation. But little did he know...<br /><br />... that fucking Mani was back in town! Actually, he did; I exaggerate a little. A lot of people knew Mani was back, because Mani had dropped out of school and disappeared about a year ago. Everybody assumed he was trafficked to Nigeria (which he was) and had been killed by the Ibo (which he wasn't). He came back with a radio and some funny hats, and started working in the flour mill just down the path from my house, the one housed in the abandoned former school building. So Mani, right, he's around twenty years old, he lives with the sick old crippled woman, and he's been helping out around the house a little, cooking some of the food, pumping some of the water, beating the possessed children. Etc.<br /><br />So why is Mani's presence bad news for the chief? Somebody just go ahead and throw out a guess here. Go ahead, say it out loud. Did you say devils? Congratulations, my friend, because you are spot-fucking-on. Mani, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">unbeknownst</span> to the rest of us, contracted a powerful strain of foreign devils when he went to be a slave in Nigeria. So, when the chief comes to scope out the situation with the old lady, Mani attacks the old man. Stories branch off at this point. Some say he simply cast devils at him, others say Mani physically attacked the chief; I don't know the details. Nonetheless, the chief grew gravely ill, and the whispers in village were that Mani and the devils were trying to decide who to kill first, the chief or the old lady. While all this was going on, by the way, my compound-mates were freaking out. It's all they talk to me about, still, and they end pretty much every sentence with, "Well, faith in God will protect us." I don't have to worry, because supposedly this kind of sorcery can only be used against people within the same ethnicity. Devils just don't attack white people. Or, as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Bamazi</span> put it to me, when white people have devils, they do good stuff, like build skyscrapers.<br /><br />Sunday morning: I wake up around five or so and lay in bed till six. I do my push-ups and sit-ups, sweep my yard, brush my teeth. Last night was the attack on the chief, so there's a buzz in the air. I've got nothing going on, so around eight o'clock I decide to head to the boutique and have a few shots of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">sodabe</span>. When I leave my compound, I walk by my crippled/ill/bedeviled neighbor's house, and there is a huge crowd seated on benches filling the entire compound. It looks exactly like it did when the giant died, and so my first thought is that the old woman has passed. Kicking and screaming, no doubt. I am in no mood to hang around, given the nature of all this new shit that's come to light regarding my neighbors and the status of their souls. So I skip on down to the boutique. The lady pours me a shot of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">sodabe</span>. I ask her about the weather, the crops, the army of demons running rampant. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">DG</span> shows up. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">DG's</span> real name is <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Kossi</span>, but he's always on top of things, so we all call him <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Directeur</span> General. If anybody knows what's going on with the collection of people occupying my neighbor's yard, it's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">DG</span>.<br /><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">DG</span> says that since Mani infected the chief with his devils, the village charlatans were performing a ceremony to exorcise the chief. Only the chief. Charlatans charge a lot of money for the ceremonies they perform, and the chief was the only one with enough francs to qualify for treatment. But they have to perform the ceremony at Mani's house (the old lady's house, the house between mine and the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Maisoniere</span>) because that's where everything happened. They're in the middle of the ceremony, actually, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">DG</span> says, and he has to go back. I tell him I'll wait around the boutique, he needs to swing by when all is over and give me a full report. He slams back his <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">sodabe</span>, and says he'll see me in an hour or two.<br /><br />This conversation with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">DG</span>, actually, is where a lot of the details I've just given came to my attention. I knew there was sorcery trouble, but <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">DG</span> provides me with all the hard data. I'm a little bowled over by it all, so I decide to have another shot of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">sodabe</span> to pass the time until <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">DG's</span> return. When he finally does come back, this is what he says:<br /><br />The ceremony went off well, freeing the chief of his demons. The charlatan had to do inventory, though, and shake out any demons that hadn't yet been identified. Like a thirsty cowboy with a dowsing rod, the charlatan pointed to the old lady's bedroom. There are devils in her, he says. Then he turns to Mani. There are devils in you, too, boy. What have they made you do? At this point, Mani declares that he's been busy with a lot more than infecting the chief. Mani has an invisible <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Lhoso</span> airplane--I've heard about these planes in the past--and during the night he gets in his plane and proceeds to fly over the village, stealing people's souls while they sleep. He then transports the souls to an all night voodoo spirit market in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">Niamtougou</span>, about 150 kilometers to the north. At the market, sorcerers buy parts of these peoples' souls, and then, before dawn, Mani returns in the plane and redeposits whatever souls/parts of souls he wasn't able to sell. Well, I'll be damned, boy, the charlatan says. Where, by chance, did you get the plane? And I'm sure Mani must have said, in whatever mangled, demon-ridden <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Kabiye</span> he was speaking, that the charlatan only had to point that dowsing rod a little further amongst this crowd to find his benefactor. The charlatan did as he said, revealing none other than--<br /><br />--At this point I am just fucking blown away. I can't even believe <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">DG</span> is telling me all this with a straight face. He's sober as a pigeon. I'm on my <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">thirt</span> shot of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">sodabe</span>, because frankly, I need it. The <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">boutiquiere</span> is clucking along to the story. The cluck is the sound we make when something is just unbelievably sad and true, and somebody should have known better, and one demon is understandable, but this many demons just borders on carelessness, and--<br /><br />--La <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Maisoniere</span>. What? La <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">Maisoniere</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">DG</span> repeats. Wait, I say, you mean the short old lady who collects my rent every three months? Yup. La <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">Maisoniere</span> had had devils for some time, the charlatan discovered. She and Mani were working together to steal souls at night and take them to the market. She was the one who bought him the plane! I interrupt <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">DG</span> again and ask him, did Mani say where he kept the plane during the day? You betcha. It's parked in an <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">acajou</span> tree just behind your house, Tony. I've eaten fruit off that tree, I think.<br /><br />Then, I asked the inevitable question, What Happens Now? Well, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">DG</span> said... the chief's fine... wouldn't accept anything you haven't prepared yourself from your neighbors... don't let the kids in your house... you know, the usual.<br /><br />I'll admit, as much as I pitied the family and all its troubles, the only thing going through my mind at that point was that in a month I have to get a legally valid signature from La <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">Maisoniere</span> acknowledging that I don't owe her any more rent, and, boy, won't that be a joy to recover?<br /><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">DG</span> had to leave then, so I went home and huddled beneath my mosquito net, coup-coup under my pillow.<br /><br />The next day I was with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44">Nabede</span>, my best friend. We were going to reclaim some wood a carpenter had stolen from me (long story) and on our way to his house we decided to have a few calabashes. I asked him if he'd heard all the news about my neighbors. He had. I asked him if he believed it. He did. Then I asked him about the plane. If Mani only takes peoples' spirits, and not their bodies, and if the plane is invisible, how can there be any proof that this story is in any way true? Well, he said, a few years back there was a similar situation in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_45">Adjengre</span>. Young feller, invisible plane, soul theft. The charlatans and the villagers discovered what the boy was up to, and when he confessed to the plane, one of the elders asked him to prove his story. Show us the plane, he said. Well, I can't do that, said the boy, the plane's invisible. In fact, it's here right now, you just can't see it. Well then, said the elder, get in and fly it. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_46">Nabede</span> said the boy stepped up into the air and was held aloft. And he <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_47">kickstarted</span> it, or turned the key, or spun the rotor, or whatever the hell he had to do to get his invisible spirit plane going, and suddenly there was a blast of heat, a roaring sound in the air, and everybody present was knocked backwards off their seats from the force of the lifting craft. They never saw the boy again.<br /><br />That night, I went back to the boutique. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_48">DG</span> was there, the nurse from the dispensary, and... the chief. The chief doesn't speak French, and I don't know what kind of questions are taboo following an exorcism, so I didn't try to ask him anything about the day before. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_49">DG</span> was talking to him, though. The chief scowled as he sipped his <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_50">sodabe</span>, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_51">DG</span> asked him something in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_52">Kabiye</span>. I heard Mani's name, but he spoke too quickly and I couldn't catch the question. The chief finished his drink, licked his lips, and said, in a voice that negated any need for translation: "Fuck that kid."amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-29636468989946341472009-08-18T09:01:00.002-04:002009-08-18T10:12:36.729-04:00A Disordered PostThe writing of a new post is taking a long time. I want to describe the emotions of being at the end of my service, the strange twist of desires to both stay and go, and I just can't get around to making it sound right. I need more time. But since I'm in Lome, I wanted to get something posted.<br /><br />My time in village now is spent pretty much just relaxing and hanging out with kids. I've planted just over a hundred moringa trees at the dispensary, but that's about it. Whenever I'm in village, alone, I'm fine with this, but when I'm around other volunteers, and they talk about their garden projects, or the fifty thousand trees they planted, or the special week-long day camps they put on, I get depressed, and feelings of failure and worthlessness come creeping back in. The plain and simple fact is that I was not the volunteer I wanted to be. Some of this is my fault, much of it is the village's. I don't really want to go into it, so if it's all right with you I'll just skip it.<br /><br />My summer has been spent, like I said, mostly at home, but for two weeks, including this past week, I've been at our training site in Pagala, working with Camp UNITE. Camp UNITE takes four groups of kids--Boys Apprentices, Girls Apprentices, Boys Students, and Girls Students--and trains them for a week in "Les Pratiques d'Une Vie Saine," or, the practices of a healthy life. Themes include self-confidence, communication skills, family and future planning, HIV/AIDS prevention, and sexual harassment and rape. Depending on the group, the angle of approach for each session is different. I did camp for Boys Apprentices and Girls Students, and the session with the biggest difference was Sexual Harassment. With the boys we had to emphasize that a lot of what they do is wrong, and they need to stop it. With the girls we had to emphasize that they don't have to take it, that the law is on their side, and we tried to encourage them to just keep saying no, to be firm, to never give in. Other sessions are different, too, but you get the idea.<br /><br />I had only signed up to do Girls Students, but last-minute circumstances left the coordinators in need of another volunteer for the Boys Apprentices, so they called me and I went. Young Togolese men are not a very appealing demographic, so I wasn't expecting to enjoy myself. Never before in my life have I so poorly misjudged something as that week of camp. I had more fun than I've had in a long time, and I came to respect the boys, and believe in them, and see the changes in them as they were happening. I could talk forever, but since I don't want to I'll just say that I was really proud of those guys.<br /><br />So then this past week I did Girls Students, which means that I've fallen in love with fifty underage Togolese girls. I can't even begin to describe how fantastic these kids were. The energy level was amazing, especially after Wednesday night, when we did presentation of traditional dances. The participants and even the formateurs are divided up several ways. Every person has a cabin, an animal, and a color. Sessions get juggled between animals and colors (all the lions over here for AIDS, all the greens over there for Rape, etc.) but challenges are always colors, and then small discussions are always the same animal of the same color. Traditional dances, though, are by building. <br /><br />I was with a group of girls in the Davie building, and we renamed ourselves the Belles-Fortes (which means The Beautiful and the Strong; there's a beer here called 'Beaufort,' or, Handsome/Strong, so we played off of that). The idea behind the dances is that the girls learn songs from outside their ethnicities. For the Belles-Fortes, we danced Akposso, Moba, Kabye, Ewe, and Lhosso. I danced with the girls, and they wrapped me up in pagne just like they were. It's an incredible thing to watch, because after the dances, the solidarity amongst the girls just goes through the roof.<br /><br />Thursday and Friday, then, you could see a big change in how the girls behaved. Even though they were happy and participated well, they were still a little timid. But at breakfast on Thursday, girls came to the mess hall singing songs from the night before, songs from camp, standing up and dancing around the tables. At lunchtime you couldn't talk over the roar of voices chanting "Camp UNITE ne perira pas," or "Tire bananes, tire tire bananes!" At dinnertime, every time you sat down to get ready to eat, somebody else jumped up with another song, and the dancing started again. This energy showed itself during the sessions, too. Girls who hadn't answered a question all week were raising their hands; small group discussions went from counsellors talking to participants talking; nobody wanted to go to bed.<br /><br />My favorite girl from the week, a bottle rocket named Delali, would run up to me after sessions to teach me songs she knew in English. My favorite moment with her was when we were playing ping-pong on Friday night, after the girls' big presentation of dances and skits; she asked me to teach her a song. We traded verses on "Stand by Me."<br /><br />Same thing as before: so much to write about, I need to get it all clear in my head. So I'll just say one last thing, and we'll end it there, disordered and long and not very specific. When we were leaving Saturday morning, the girls grouped around the taxis going to the five points of Togo. The energy from breakfast was subdued, and their faces took on grave expressions. Eventually, one of them broke down and started crying, silently, but with full tears. This started off the others. When we were all in the cars and leaving the center, the weeping turned into full-blown sobbing. After a week of fun, a week in which they were respected and loved, not harassed and ordered around, they were going back to their homes, back to boys who don't leave them alone, back to sweeping and cooking and laundry and babies on their backs, back to fathers who don't listen, mothers who guard traditions. I turned my head to the window and pulled my cap low over my eyes, so they wouldn't see me crying too.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-20570039178448269252009-07-09T02:41:00.001-04:002009-07-09T02:43:06.821-04:00Jean in SokodeWe had heard that the president was on a tour of the country, a short, three-day trip that would take him from Lomé, the capital in the south, to Dapaong, the capital of the northernmost Savanes region, though not the northernmost city. My village was on the roadside, and we could have seen him easily from the small boutique where I drank at night with the old farmers, tobacco-stained men in sandals made from old truck tires, carrying around their radios in the dark. We decided, though, to go up to Sokodé, the capital of our Centrale region, thirty-six kilometers to the north. There was a nice bar there along the road, and if we staked out the day there we could eat and drink and most definitely see him.<br /> <br />We left my village early, while the sounds of small brooms sweeping the dirt were still loud in the air. As the driver pulled into Sokodé we could see groups of red-bereted soldiers on the side streets, not directing traffic, but diverting it by their presence. The driver let us off near the market, and we walked up the road to the bar.<br /> <br />The sun was higher now, and the heat of the day established. All my days in Africa have been hot, the state of the heat monotonous, its intricacies describable with only a handful of adjectives. Muggy, dry, or blazing, it is always hot. Only during and for a few hours after heavy rains will it cool down enough to put on a sweater, or zip up a jacket.<br /> <br />The bar ladies were still sweeping out the porch when we got there, but the door was open and the tables set up. Two grills, each made from a half of a fifty-five gallon drum, stood at opposite ends of the bar’s porch. Both grills made the same things, roasted chickens and beef kebabs, but I preferred the meat from the grill on the southern end. The cooks arrived. The older one, who wore lopsided glasses and a dirty wool snow cap of indeterminate original color, established himself in the small enclave between the bar and a phone cabine, to start killing and gutting chickens. The other, a slim, smooth-headed younger man, lit the coals and began slicing the beef into ribbons and skewering it. <br /><br />We sat down at my normal table in the lower corner near the meat men, and arranged the chairs so we were both sitting against the wall of the bar, watching the road. Across the street the breakfast ladies were scraping the bottoms of their large marmites for the last of the rice and beans they dished out in the mornings. One of the waitresses, a tall, flat-faced woman with her baby wrapped to her back, was finishing off a hunk of fish under the breakfast ladies’ small lean-to. The other waitress, her hair in a kinky ponytail, brought us two beers without being asked, and we began our stay.<br /><br />We were hardly halfway through our bottles when a man I know, a French expatriate living in the city, rode up on a moto taxi. Jean is a tall and skinny man from the Basque region, with thick, curved glasses, and a lanky shock of greasy, sun-filtered hair. He raised his hand to greet us, and then shouted one of only two English phrases he claims to know, “Oh my God!” He pulled up another plastic chair and sat down with us.<br /><br />Jean has been living in Togo for twenty years. I go to his house sometimes, in the Lohso neighborhood, and we sit on his porch drinking whiskey while his Togolese wife brings me pictures of them taken in the bar they used to own in Lomé. He was handsome when he was younger, but now, at the age of thirty-six, the African sun has dried and darkened his skin so that he looks eternally as though he’s just gotten out from under a car and has not yet taken a shower.<br /><br />The waitress brought him a beer, and he plied fifty francs in her hand and sent her to a small stand down the street to buy him cigarettes. It was around nine-thirty now, and the walking vendors were out, trying to sell us watches or screwdrivers or DVDs. It is always a pleasure to watch Jean with the vendors. He has both the arrogant knowledge of an expat that this is not his only home, as well as the experience of someone who has spent twenty years not living in a walled compound with servants and chauffeurs. He terrorizes the vendors with his knowledge of the proper prices, and will barter with a boy until the kid thanks him profusely for his business, apologizing about the initially high price. Jean knows everyone in the city, it seems, and makes fast friends with those he doesn’t.<br /><br />“So,” he said to us in his rapid French, “what brings you two into the city?” We told him about the president’s journey, and how we wanted simply to get out of my village, and see the convoy.<br />“Ah,” he said, “he won’t come until late this afternoon, most likely, so you might as well stay the night. Come to my house later, and I’ll cook for you, real French cuisine.”<br /><br />Jean makes his money by traveling back to France every summer and cooking in a restaurant owned by one of his friends. Each trip he takes ready made pagne outfits and sells them to European tourists as traditional African wear. Despite the fact that most of the cloth in Togo is printed in Denmark and China, it really is the kind of stuff that the Togolese wear on a daily basis. Most non-Africans I know in Togo, no matter how dedicated to their Western couture, have at least one pagne outfit.<br /><br />We told him we’d love to stay for dinner, and he finished his beer and said he had to go home and tell his wife so she could get to the market before it closed. In honor of the president’s arrival, the market would be shutting down at two-thirty this afternoon. He stood up and made to pay for his beer, but we shouted him down. “Merci,” he said. He held out his hand, and we both shook, and as he was leaving we heard him shout the second of his English phrases, “I go swimming naked on Tuesdays with my cigarette!” before he disappeared up the road.<br /><br />We stayed at the bar all day, getting up only to go into the back and piss in a hole in the floor. We ordered platefuls of kebab meat, which the meat men mixed with grilled onions and tomatoes, and small mountains of ground red pepper. Vendors came and we politely refused them. Children walked up to beg for change, and we sent them to buy us cookies to earn their money. Around two-thirty, Jean came back, and said that everything was ready for dinner tonight. Along with the food, he’d bought two bottles of whiskey, so that when the sun set and we were full and comfortable, we wouldn’t have to leave his house for anything. The three of us then ordered new beers, and settled in to wait for the president.<br /><br />By three-thirty, the clusters of red-berets we’d seen earlier were spread out along the road, directing cars and moto taxis into side streets to either find their way home on rock-ridden dirt roads, or to wait until the president’s motorcade had passed. Looking out from the bar, the soldiers formed a line up and down both sides of the street as far as we could see. Most boutiques and bars turned off their music, and people walking around looked continually up the street, hoping to be the first to spot a car.<br /><br />Finally, around four-fifteen, the first car came. It was an olive green military jeep with a mounted machine gun, packed with soldiers. Two more of these followed, and then the cumbersome motorcycles of the gendarmes led into view a black river of SUVs, windows up and tinted. The president’s limousine sat in the middle. Spectators strained from behind the linked arms of the red-berets, trying to see in through the windows for a glimpse of the president. The three of us, the only white people I could see in that part of the city, sat unconcerned at our table, able to see over the heads of the people from the elevated porch. After the last SUV, there were more gendarmes on motorcycles, and then again three jeeps with mounted machine guns. Ten minutes passed, and the first taxi came down the road. The red-berets found benches in the shade and waited for a transport truck to pick them up. The Togolese shook their heads and continued on.<br /><br />“Well,” Jean said, “what did they expect?” He lit a cigarette and leaned back against the concrete wall of the bar.<br />“I heard he threw money from the sunroof in Kamina.”<br />“Can you imagine your president driving around, throwing five dollar bills into the crowd?” Jean asked.<br />“No,” I said.<br />“Exactly,” Jean said. “That is no way to save a country.” He nodded to himself. We finished our beers and got up to leave. The waitress came back with our change. Jean handed her a tip of one hundred francs. “Merci,” she said. He winked at her.<br />“Oh my God!” he shouted, and we walked up the road.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-7912126498724204862009-07-09T02:25:00.002-04:002009-07-09T02:33:22.247-04:00Daydream in the Rain<p>It’s overcast and has been raining off and on all day. The paved road running through the village is wet and deep black and steams when the sun comes out. Along the road the air has the stink of worm/amphibial carnage. I remember walking from my house to the bus stop when I was a kid, a quarter-mile hike up and down a long hill, seeing the flattened bodies of nightcrawlers and toads. One toad I found had his guts spilling out of his mouth, the back half of his body completely flattened, painted cartoon-like with the imprint of a tire tread.<br /> </p><p>Here, though, in the sandy, tropical soils, worms are rare, and rarely as fat or long as the nightcrawlers of my youth. And while toads and bullfrogs can be heard chorusing in the night, their corpses are never found on the road post-rain mornings. Here it’s the crushed, snot-like bodies of snails splayed out along the rumble strips and the crumbling asphalt edges. Nights during the rainy season are murder for squeamish folks making frequent latrine sorties. Try going out without a flashlight or other illumination and the crickets’ rhythm will be interrupted on nearly every footfall as the full-bladdered person steps on innumerable escargots. They pop like lightbulbs. I shined my torch before me once during one of these excursions and found an uncomfortable amount of snails carpeting my little bit of grassless yard. Two or three at a time were gorging on my mucuna bean plants, leaving trails of worm-like shit and slime to dry over the leaves. My neighbors’ kids come into the yard often to collect the snails, and when they’ve got a decent amount stored under an inverted basin in their yard, they shuck them from their shells, skewer them and grill them. I’ve declined every invitation extended me to these feasts.<br /> </p><p>But so okay I’m on the road to go to the boutique to buy cookies, because there’s nothing better to do in the rain than to sit huddled under my paillote hidden from the kids to munch on biscuits, little drips of rain falling from the brim of my hat, my hand curled over the cracker, the crumbs tumbling and whirling through the air. I’m in a zip-up hoodie sweatshirt I bought in Spain in January, and I’m wearing it not so much because I’d be cold if I didn’t, but because during a rain wearing it doesn’t make me too warm. The temperature doesn’t ever really fall below 65 ° F, so I take whatever chances I get to bundle up.<br /> </p><p>My two years are officially over 6 December, but I’ll be able to leave no-questions-asked thirty-one days before that, so really I’m out of here like mid-November. Which means four months left in Africa. Twenty-two months spent here. I have dreams about icicles hanging from the eaves over the pick-up/drop-off areas of the Indianapolis airport, the defogger on my parent’s car wheezing with exertion, my teeth deliciously chattering despite every layer of elemental protection I brought with me, which, in the face of a Midwest winter, is nil.<br /> </p><p>The dream continues with arrival at the house, the yard lost beneath snow, perhaps a distress snorkel sticking up through the white, the only indication of a misplaced pet. A trip to the Marsh to pick up two cases of Budweiser, which we’ll bury in the backyard’s white mounds, while inside the house delicious-tasting things go through various stages of preparation and mastication. When everybody’s gorged and satisfied, me and the family go outside and hunt for twelve-ounce cans like Easter eggs, cracking them open and enjoying what’s inside. That’s my daydream. Cold weather and snow, good food utilizing more than two ingredients, and delicious beer served in reasonably sized containers. That’s what I miss, material-wise.<br /> </p><p>And but so like let’s snapshot me here, though, crossing the route to the boutique, watching a couple of kids in oversized windbreakers kicking empty tomato cans around beneath a palm-frond awning. I’m not unhappy. I’m wearing tan pants with brown piping down the legs and the imprint of a rooster perched between the words ‘Le’ and ‘Coq’ on the front in the left thigh area. I’ve got my grey hoodie, and a blue Texas Rangers hat given me by a recently departed volunteer. I’ve got a believe-it-or-not beard, which my family laughed at me over the phone when I said I’d managed to facially grow something resistant to a cat’s tongue. I’m twenty-fucking-four. Gasping for breath. When I left home I was un-tan, totally smooth visage-wise, and a sprightly twenty-two. Way ignorant in terms of third-world realities. I had a pretty quality digestive system. Etc.<br /> </p><p>Larissa and I had been with the new group of trainees on Wednesday, to talk to them about Volunteer mental health, how to avoid becoming an alcoholic, how to be a good listener. At the end of our presentation, there was time for interfacing, and a new-but-older trainee and I were talking about how the big advantage of Peace Corps service is internal, i.e., it changes you, and if you’re lucky you can step outside of yourself every now and then to observe these changes. The crux of the discussion was that it’s naïve to think that these changes or personal revelations are always pleasant, or conform to the propaganda Peace Corps uses to recruit people. The advantage of your service might be to reveal to you that you have no interest in doing stuff like this. Or that you’re way more cynical/conservative/racist than you thought. Ahem. Just speaking generally here.<br /> </p><p>So like then let’s return here to me snapshot crossing the road, at what is approximately revelation-time in terms of service, for me. I’m not unhappy. I’m disappointed in the way the ‘development’ work went (or didn’t). I hate the inability to blend in, the conspicuousness of my skin. When I say hate, I mean like loathe with my very core. I nearly had a nervous breakdown while biking from Sokodé to my village, shouting “I’ll fucking kill you!” at everybody that called me 'Anasara.' Women and children, too. I’m embarrassed, but I have to admit it. I probably would have really snapped if my village had been any farther away, because just when I felt I couldn’t take it anymore, on the edge of the teak trees that divide Babadé from Nima, somebody I didn’t recognize looked at me and shouted, instead of the ‘Anasara’ I was expecting, he shouted he said, “Mazabalo, bonne arrivée!” Mazabalo is my village name. And so then but like every single person I passed from him to my door waved to me and said “Bienvenue, Tony!” or “Bonjour, Mazabalo!” I felt like I’d let go of a breath I’d been holding in too long. I was back in village. I was home.<br /> </p><p>Not that I’m not impatient to get out of here. Every morning I draw a little symbolic X through the day before, arriving ever closer at the symbolically circled mid-November day of departure. It’s more like I’ve finally relaxed and realized that nobody is mad at me because there are things I didn’t do. They are happy with me because of the things I did. I know who they are, what their lives are like. They know the same about me. This makes being here a lot more pleasant and relaxing, realizing this does.<br /> </p><p>And but so like now I’m in the boutique. I’m unfrozen from the middle of the road. The kids kicking the can are pulling their jackets up to their ears while they say hello. The little one holds up her arms and says in her squeaky voice, “Tony!” I hold up my arms and say “Elli!” and bend down to give her a hug. Their mother is behind the counter, listening to some guy on his third or fourth shot of sodabe talking about himself. She sees me and straightens up and asks me if I’m cold, is maybe why I’m wearing all these limb-covering garments. I say I’m just pleased to be here. She smiles and asks me what I’d like. I hold out my money and simply say, “You know me.” </p>amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-59535162532719652352009-07-09T02:17:00.002-04:002009-07-09T02:25:01.256-04:00The LightningMany months before, the uncle of one of my good friends had died. He was old, but not old enough that his death was considered a joy, as are the deaths of the crippled women I often buy drinks for when they hobble in to the boutique, supporting their weight on a large teak branch. My friend’s uncle was an important man, a teacher and a middle school director, well known in the community, and equally liked. According to tradition, following the internment of the body, there was no funeral. Now, in March, the tail end of the season for such effusions of grief, it was time.<br /><br />I had been in the capital for many weeks before the funeral. In truth, I <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">hadn</span>’t known about it until my return to the village. I was weary from the journey, and my pockets were <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">considerably</span> lighter. The local cuisine has a bland, usually fishy taste I cannot get around to enjoying, and even when meat takes the place of fish, the fat and the cartilage attached to the normal edible bits turns me off as well. Nonetheless, unwilling to cook, and having nothing really with which a proper meal could be made, I decided not only to go to the funeral to pay my respects, but to capitalize on the food.<br /><br />My friend, whom I call by his family name, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Nabede</span>, welcomed me and bade me sit inside his house, where there was a television. I would have been content to sit in the circle of small stools, most of which were occupied by the village’s older men, doing much the same as I and scraping back all the food their hosts were willing to offer them. Perhaps it was my fatigue, or my desire not to make any kind of scene, but I did not protest to remain with the men, and allowed him to seat me on an <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">uncomfortable</span> high-backed chair in his parlor. The walls of the house were of mud brick, and the roof was the standard tin sheets nailed to a central support beam. In the afternoon sun, the room was stifling. There was no fan, and the breeze through the small barred window flickered feebly in through the lace curtain. He turned on the television to a sports channel and left me.<br /> <br />His wife, a couturier in another village, came in to bring me a calabash, a dried, hollowed out bowl-like gourd, of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">tchouk</span>, the local beer brewed from millet. She left and returned almost immediately with a large plate of rice mixed with overcooked spaghetti. The sauce was thick and red, and a fall of palm oil dribbled down from the sauce into the rice. There was a dark brown hunk of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">indeterminable</span> meat.<br /> <br />I ate and watched a recap of the previous year’s European Cup. By the time I had finished, I could hear thunder in the distance, and the sunlight was fading into the alkaline clarity of a semi-obscured twilight. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and stood up to leave. I shook the hands of all the men on their stools, and thanked my hosts. I walked home alone, watching small rolls of lightning in the clouds against the horizon.<br /> <br />I awoke the next morning to a muted world. It had rained in the night and no one was out. The houses were calm, the green of the verdure so fierce it seemed the world was plugged in. I felt comforted by the scent of wet soil, the air on which you could actually taste the filtering effect of various trees.<br /> <br />I put on some shorts and went outside. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Lidao</span>, the ten-year old son of one of my neighbors in the compound, was sweeping my portion of the yard, pushing the papaya and palm leaves that had fallen in the night into a compost hole I’d dug. “<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Bonjour</span>,” he said, and then he asked, “Did you hear about what happened last night?” “You mean the rain?” I asked. “No,” he said, “the deaths.”<br /> <br />Over the next few days, everyone I asked gave different versions of the story. Some say the people had been outside, dancing in the rain; others said they were huddled under the small eaves of the roof; yet others averred that they had all been sleeping inside the house. Whatever the details, though, the story remains essentially the same. After I had gone home, the rain arrived. The rain here seems to be one of Nature’s angrier forces, for it rarely falls with the monotony and disinterest that is common in temperate zones. Nearly always the rain is accompanied by fierce blowing winds which, despite my efforts, blow water in through the wooden slats of my windows and under the space beneath my door. Then there is the celestial lightning, and thunder that shakes the water in its cisterns.<br /> <br />That night, aside from the driving rain, the lightning was low and rolling in the clouds. I remember watching it before going to bed; it seemed as tumultuous as a sea storm, and washed down from the north with frightening speed. All recounts of the story agree that, despite the rain and the lightning, the sound system and the large speakers were not only not <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">disconnected</span> from the main power line, they were not turned off at all. As the rain fell and the lightning broiled, the funeral attendees continued to dance.<br /> <br />Around midnight, according to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Nabede</span>, the only people left dancing were a group of about fifteen adolescents. As I said, what exactly they were doing at the time the lightning struck is disputable. Even the exact site of the lightning strike is unknown. <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Nevertheless</span>, what happened is irrevocable and only too painfully known. All the houses branched on to the power line in that area had their light bulbs burst or burn out; meters were fried and the numbers frozen; those with televisions still plugged in had their sets destroyed. But the brunt of the electrical force was directed at the children. Whether dancing in the rain, huddled beneath the eaves, or sleeping under the tin roof, the lightning struck them. Two, a twenty-two year old <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">lycée</span> student, and a fourteen year old elementary schoolgirl, were killed. Four were seriously burned, to the point of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">disfigurement</span>. The rest were burned on their hands, chests, and heads, painfully but <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">superficially</span>.<br /> <br />When <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Lidao</span> finished his version of the story I went to speak to Lao, another compound-mate and good friend. He told me his version, and we sat on the steps of his terrace in near silence, speaking <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">intermittently</span> about what happened. “They say it is because God is angry,” he told me. “We have defiled the funeral ceremonies for too long, and now God has punished us.” <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Kpekpou</span>, another neighbor, said that it was not God, but the fetish priests who were to blame. Somebody, he said, associated with the grieving family, must have angered the priests, and to punish them the priests had called down the lightning. It could simply be bad luck, I said, but they clucked in disapproval of my theory.<br /> <br />I made my way to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Nabede</span>’s house. His wife welcomed me in, but she was withdrawn, and immediately went to lie down again. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Nabede</span> was sitting in a chair, hunched over, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. He vaguely indicated the burn marks on the walls of his home, where the surge had scorched the mud behind the power lines. His light bulb was intact but burnt out, a dark black smudge coating the interior. He had been this morning to help dig the graves. Now he was trying to rest, but he could not sleep. I told him about what my neighbors had said, that it was either God’s punishment or the work of fetish priests. He shook his head. “It’s just Nature,” he said. An explanation all the more <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">incomprehensible</span> for its simplicity.<br /> “What happens now?” I asked. He looked up at me as though he did not understand the question, or the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">impertinence</span> to ask it. “Nothing,” he said. “La vie continue.”<br /> <br />The next day, Monday, I was teaching <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">troisième</span>, the oldest class at the middle school. The director came in and made his way over to a student who, I had not noticed before, was burned on his forehead and his left hand. “Don’t you know better,” the director said, “than to play near electronics in the rain?” It’s the question I’d wanted to ask, though he posed it with <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">considerably</span> less tact.<br /> <br />Class ended at noon, and the students got up to file home for the long break until afternoon classes. I called the burned student over to look at his wounds. His skin was split open along the knuckles of his hand, the flesh pink and beginning to dry out. There was a small split in his forehead. The surrounding skin was a dark purple color, and the outer edges of the burn were the green of an old penny. He said he felt fine. The only people left at the dispensary were the four who were severely burned. <br /><br />I <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">didn</span>’t hear any more of the incident for the rest of the day. It had been a bad month, with several deaths, and despite the grotesque nature of Saturday night, the sadness was subdued and it seemed as though the incident would go the way of the storm, leaving nothing for memory but a slowly eroding imprint on the ground.<br /> <br />The next day I had no classes, and woke up late to the sounds of people conversing in the compound. Every day, several women in the village make <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">tchouk</span>, and people go from house to house to drink. The woman in my compound, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Lidao</span>’s mother, whom I also call <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Maman</span>, makes what I consider to be the best <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">tchouk</span> in the village, and the benches she arranged around the fence securing my part of the yard were filled with men, farmers either on their way to their fields or coming back from them. A few were discussing the lightning from Saturday night. Most, though, were lamenting the state of their fields. It was not yet the rainy season, yet they were already decrying the lack of a strong downpour. That seems to be the way with the farmers. Either there is too little rain or too much. Rarely does Nature get it just right.<br /> <br />I spent the morning drinking with the men, and by noon I was lightheaded and exhausted. Though it might not be the best way to become known, I’d built up something of a reputation for being able to drink like the villagers. When I first arrived, I would slowly sip one calabash while they would chug back two or three. I’d finally gotten used to the taste, and could drink just as fast and just as much as the men. My record for a day is nine calabashes, a feat which most people only attribute to the village drunks. I may have had four or five that morning, so I made myself some lunch, and went to sleep.<br /> <br />I woke around four o’clock, which is essentially the end of the day. By this time, afternoon classes are over, the men are done in their fields, and even some of the women are beginning to make dinner. I got dressed and decided to head to the boutique to see if any of my friends were out, starting on their nightly round of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">sodabe</span>, a moonshine brewed from the sap of palm trees. On my way out of the compound, Madame Lao was sitting in her kitchen, a small room separated from the rest of the house so that the smoke from the fires does not become a nuisance. “Good afternoon,” she said, “are you heading up the road?”<br /> “What’s up the road?” I asked.<br /> “The judgment,” she said, “for the sorcerers who killed the children.”<br /> <br /> The sky was already turning to twilight, an orange-purple glow infused into the atmosphere. The green of the mango leaves faded into the darkening sky, blurring the line where the trees ended and the night began. At the boutique, I asked the owner’s wife about the judgment. “C’est finis,” she said. Up the road, lines of men were heading in our direction, among them my drinking friends. Magi, a thin old man with a tobacco-stained beard, led the column, and was the first to turn into the boutique’s yard. “I just heard,” I said. “What happened?”<br /> <br />That afternoon, the chief was approached by two people, an old, stooping woman of nearly eighty years, and her son, a disfigured man I’d noticed in the village before. They’d presented themselves to the chief as the sorcerers who had called down the lightning during the funeral. “They said that they hated those kids,” Magi said, “and had been performing a ceremony for many months to have them killed.”<br /> “Why would they confess to something like that?” I asked.<br /> “They <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">wouldn</span>’t have,” he said, “but ever since that night they haven’t been able to sleep. In their dreams the children come to them to ask, ‘Why have you done this?’ They confessed so that their spirits would leave them alone.”<br /> <br />The chief then called the sub-chiefs and the village elders, and they held a judgment. The woman and her son were questioned and beaten, questioned and beaten, until the entire truth had come out.<br /> <br />“The old woman started the ceremony,” Magi told me, “and her son finished it for her.” There was no real motive given for the killing. Perhaps it came out during the judgment and was lost in the retelling, but I doubt it. People here are not concerned with motive, simply with deeds and their <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">consequences</span>, with crime and punishment.<br /> “This is bizarre,” I said.<br /> “But it all makes sense,” Magi said. The son, a man of about fifty, is noticeable in the village because of his deformity. It’s as though his face had been smashed and then smudged to the side like wet clay. He has no nose to speak of, just a lumpy scar over two nostrils under the inside corner of his right eye. His mouth, more a gaping hole with teeth than a usable appendage, starts in the middle of his face and slides into where his right cheek should have been. Magi said, “His face is like that because of his sorcery. He eats the bodies of his victims.” This was such a crime against Nature, he explained, that the man’s features contorted to reveal the depravity of his soul.<br /> “What happens now?” I asked.<br /> “Tomorrow they will be beaten again, and then they will be banished. They’ll never be allowed to return to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Babadé</span>.” I stopped my next question before I could ask it. What about the gendarmes, or the police? What about justice? But they could do nothing. This is a case of sorcery, something the government formally denies no matter that every person I’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">ve</span> ever spoken to, peasants and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">functionaries</span> alike, believes in it. The best justice we can hope for is that these two will never hurt our village again. For the people of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">Babadé</span>, that is enough. Grief resides in the unknown, not in the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">inexplicable</span>. Sorcery is derided by the West, and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">missionaries</span> have done there best to replace voodoo with <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">Christianity</span>, but in the end, what’s the difference? Voodoo is a religion as any other, with tenets and beliefs and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">practitioners</span>; it is a gathered set of mythology and ritual used by people to give meaning to the unknown. <br /><br />The next day in the village people were discussing again the lightning strike, the dead and burned children, the man who ate his victims, the mother who began the spells. Their tone seemed as grotesque as the crime itself, for there was an air of relief palpable in all the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">conversations</span>. What happened was terrible, the explanation bizarre, and, in my opinion, all the more frightening, but hey, thank God we know what happened, right? I had never believed in the talk of sorcery in my village, and though when my neighbor died I had to accept the verdict that the devil had claimed his soul, I never really took it as validation for all the other stories I’d heard. This, though, was something else. There was an accident, wholly explicable by nature and electricity and human negligence; there was no inquisition, and no wish to begin an inquisition; yet there it was, the confession. We did it, we killed them. We cast a spell and called down the lightning, we killed those we wanted to kill, on the night we wanted to do it. How can I deny this? If I subscribe to the insanity of the sorcerers, I must subscribe then to the insanity of the entire village, and that is not possible. I have to do as my villagers have done, and be comforted by the fact that it was not God or Nature or the ignorance of the children and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">soundmen</span>. It was sorcery, which can be controlled, either by an expulsion of the source, or, more common in less serious cases, by more sorcery. I won’t try to seek any logic behind it. Crime and punishment; that will have to suffice for me now.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-67320291679319656482009-04-29T03:19:00.003-04:002009-04-29T04:49:19.319-04:00It's All HappeningAs most of you know, there was a wedding ceremony between myself and my girlfriend Larissa on April 11th. We aren't what you could call married, exactly, certainly not legally. If you saw any of the photo albums on Facebook, you probably noticed the word "Fwedding," our barely creative euphemism for "Fake Wedding." The best way I can think to explain the purpose of having the ceremony would be to say that it was a celebration of our relationship in its Togolese context. Obviously, that's its only context currently, but the future is better left to itself than to speculation.<br /><br />We showed up to Agou on Thursday, two days before the wedding. Larissa had been just a few days before, on Sunday, to give money to our wedding planner, the neutral Edith, to start buying supplies. Between Sunday and Wednesday, though, there was a bit of a spat between our host mothers and Edith. This was the first thing we dealt with on Thursday. Sitting the mothers down at the Afrikiko bar, we explained that Edith had done nothing wrong, and that where we are from we use a third party wedding planner. The moms felt that the responsibility (dispensing and holding our money) lay with them, and not someone outside the family. We quelled the unrest pretty easily, and from there on, it was all smooth sailing.<br /><br />After spending the rest of Thursday and Friday shopping for food, the alcohol for the dowry, etc., Saturday arrived, and with it plenty of our volunteer friends to help us celebrate. As the morning turned into afternoon and the hour of the ceremony approached, Larissa retreated to her mother's house with her bridesmaids (and one bridesman) while the other volunteers, including my groomsmen (and one groomswoman) hung out at the bar. I got dressed in a white lace pagne outfit that had been made on the quick by the tailor next door to my mom's house.<br /><br />When it was time, Maman Afrikiko kicked everybody out of the bar and took up place at the head of the procession with me and my mom and the women carrying the dowry. An old woman had the alcohols in a bucket on her head, and two teenage girls wearing traditional skirts and palm frond ankle bracelets, their skin dusted with chalk, carried the pagne. David, a groomsmen, had some sweet iPod speakers, so we marched to Larissa's house dancing to various Michael Jackson songs. When we arrived at the house of her uncle, where the ceremony would take place, the guests took their seats, and my mom and I, along with a host-uncle, sat down on one of two couches facing each other. The other was reserved for Larissa and her family. At the first sound of the fanfare, the drum and brass band of the village, David stopped the music and we listened as the sounds of Larissa's procession grew louder. She finally entered with her entourage, the fanfare on their heels, aunts and other host-moms tossing confetti into the air.<br /><br />The ceremony was pretty cool. The chief supervised, speaking in Ewe, and a man in the audience translated for us. The chief spoke about the connection between individuals, and how our connection to each other was the result of our connection to our families, and the connection of America and the beautiful Agou-Nyogbo. The chief then requested that the dowry be presented. He gave it his approval and Larissa was asked to choose one of the drinks from the amongst the liquid portion of the dowry. There were gin, whiskey, a wine called Dubonnet, rum, five liters of palm wine, four liters of sodabe, three types of beer, an orange soda, a fruit cocktail soda, and a Coke. Larissa got up, picked the orange soda ("Because it's your favorite," she told me later) and put it on the table. The chief declared that by picking the orange soda, Larissa was ensuring that our home together would be refreshing and sweet, and that we would always remain even-tempered and calm.<br /><br />Now, he said, as Larissa sat back down, we have heard that the son of Hadzi [me], has found a beautiful flower in the village of Nyogbo, and he desires to pick that flower to guard with him forever. But, he continued, in a village like Nyogbo, there are so many beautiful flowers. Which one would he like to pick? Because even though he has indicated the beautiful flower sitting across from him, it is necessary that we verify this for the village. The chief then invited all the "beautiful flowers" present to get up and present themselves to me. The fanfare began playing and one by one, two of Larissa's bridesmaids, two volunteers from the audience, and my groomswoman got up, bowed before Larissa, and then danced in a circle around the table between our couches. They lined up near where the chief was sitting. When they had all danced, Larissa got up and made her twirling way around the table and in front of me, shaking her hips to the rhythm of the big drum. When she was lined up in the middle with the other beautiful flowers, the chief invited my mother and I to indicate to the village which flower I would like as my own. When I took Larissa's hand in mine, the audience exploded in applause, confetti was thrown, and the fanfare upped the rhythm. We then went back to my couch, where my host-uncle left his seat and Larissa sat between my host mother and me.<br /><br />Now the floor was open, the chief said, for people to speak. David, my best man, gave a brief speech, and then Golda, Larissa's maid of honor, got up to speak. David's speech was a standard best man speech, good, touching. Golda's was a little different. As these two begin their lives together, Golda said, we want to make sure that they keep no secrets from each other. If there are any secrets from their lives before they were together, let those secrets come to light, so that they will not spoil their future. Then, one of the male volunteers stood up, walked up to Larissa, and sheepishly threw a pair of underwear into her lap. The audience roared. He sat down and yet another guy stood up, walked up to her, threw underwear. Hearty laughter turned into a rumble of approval. A third volunteer walked up, did the exact same thing. Larissa was laughing to the point of tears, the chief was chuckling in his seat, the whistles and the applause from the audience were deafening. Again, a fourth male volunteer stood up, walked in front of Larissa. This time, though, he sheepishly threw a pair of underwear into <em>my </em>lap. Explosive, uncontrollable, nobody-can-breathe laughter.<br /><br />This is wonderful, said the chief, stifling further giggles. Now, he said, because you [talking to me] have taken the daughter of the Koffi family, they must be assured that she will be happy always with you. Larissa's host-father then rose, draped in his traditional kente cloth, and said, "You have taken our daughter, and we are happy that she has accepted you. In our home she received all that she required, and in your home this must also be so. We must know that she will never go hungry; that she will never be cold for lack of clothes; that these clothes will never be allowed to turn to tatters and rags; that you will not in any way harm this flower you have picked; that you will never neglect her for another woman. If you guarantee these things, we accept with full gratitude, the union of our families." Naturally, I said yes.<br /><br />He then reached into a bag he had kept under the couch, and pulled something out and walked over to us. He presented us with a wooden chain, the ends of the chain being small wooden statues, one of a man, one of a woman. "Take this chain," he said, "as the symbol of your bond." We each took the statue of our respective genders, and he said, "Now, ensure that, no matter what force may arrive, this chain, and this bond, will never break." We pulled against the chain. It held tight, and the fanfare erupted again.<br /><br />After that, the rest of the dowry was opened, starting with the gin, and then quickly moving into the palm wine and the sodabe. Shots were poured for nearly all present, and the fanfare played, and everyone was invited to dance. When the gin was gone (that took like three minutes) Larissa and I led the procession from the ceremony all the way through the village and down to the house where, when we first arrived in this country, we used to do our training. The fanfare followed, with the volunteers and the village, dancing, singing, laughing.<br /><br />At the house, Larissa and I were arranged on a couch, and chairs were set up facing us. Someone read a small bible passage and prayed, and then my host-uncle made a brief speech. Following that the cake was presented to us. We cut it together, and, as is custom, shoved it into each other's face. Food and beer were then passed out, and the cake was cut for everyone. When everyone had eaten and drank, our bridal party declared that, according to American custom, Larissa and Tony had to arm wrestle to see who would have the power in the relationship. Once again, laughter from the audience, cheers when I let Larissa win. More beer was passed out, and the families and the volunteers retreated to the back yard to take photos. The ceremony was over.<br /><br />The villagers had, for the most part, retreated to their homes, or to their small stands along the road. The volunteers headed up to the Afrikiko, and began the party that would last most of the night. Larissa and I went to our respective homes to change before heading to the party. Maman Afrikiko had set up a grill, and her son/employee was grilling beef kabobs, chicken, goat. Throughout the night volunteers would come up to me, put their arms around me, and say, "This was one of the best things I've ever been a part of." I told them for me it <em>was</em> the best thing. And we left it at that, our faces hurting from the smiles that refused to leave our faces.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-79433997849669250082009-04-05T08:44:00.002-04:002009-04-05T08:47:07.123-04:00The Demon and The GiantTwo days ago my next door neighbor died. He was only in his early thirties, immensely tall, quiet. The last time I had seen him, reclining on his chair beneath the baobab tree on Tuesday the week before, he seemed healthy. I was going to Sotouboua. “Bring me back some bread,” he said. “You bet.” In Sotouboua the bread ladies refused my worn-out bill and I came back empty-handed.<br /><br />He died around five o’clock on Friday, they said. That night, I looked out my back window before going to bed. The compound had never had electricity, even though the owner of the houses, Tchao’s sister, was well off enough to install it. He didn’t want to pay the monthly bill, he said. But Friday night I was attracted to my window because of the almost neon glow of a halogen bulb coming from the compound. Sitting around the courtyard were all his female relatives. No one was speaking. I went to bed, and woke up twice during the night, as is my habit. Both times the light was still on, and the women were outside, though now they were sleeping on the wooden benches instead of sitting upright. They were like that until the morning.<br /><br />On Saturday I dressed and shaved and went next door. Benches were arranged outside the compound for people to sit on. No one was really speaking. At that hour, there were only two rows of benches, so I greeted all the men, and then went inside to where the women were waiting, and greeted them. They led me into the room where Tchao was being kept. His wife sat at his feet under the window, and another woman sat at his head, waving a plastic fan over his face to keep the flies off. He was covered up to his chin in a purple blanket patterned with gold. His head was cushioned on pagne.<br /><br />I haven’t seen many dead people. Only four. Two in America, two here in Togo. Three of those bodies were clearly devoid of life. The skin looked plastic and painted, the muscles seemed to have shrunk and fallen from their bones, the proud jut of their chests had crumbled and caved in. But Tchao looked normal. When I saw him he’d only been dead about fifteen hours. I even thought I saw his eyelid twitch. It made me think that children’s responses to death are the most honest, much more honest than the wailing and the tears of the adults. Death to me is just very confusing. Sad, yes. But mostly just bizarre. Silence is the best response I can think of.<br /><br />The crowd outside the house grew larger but stayed silent. I stood in the shade of the baobab. Around ten-thirty an open coffin was brought. On the bottom were two handlebars, one at the head, one at the feet. They set the coffin down at the entrance to the compound. They brought the body from the room, leaving the purple blanket behind. The woman began wailing again. The wails of the women are throaty and wavering, and they rise and descend like a song. Just before they’d brought the body out the deceased’s mother had been scolded for not mourning properly. She immediately began her song, and soon was sobbing. Unlike her scolder, I never doubted her grief. But she is an old woman, arthritic, slightly handicapped, usually in pain. No doubt she feels that her death is near as well. As I implied earlier, I can understand why she felt no need to weep.<br /><br />They placed the body in the coffin and covered it from head to waist with an animal hide. Tchao was a tall man with large feet, and his toes stuck up over the rim of the coffin. A group of men bent down and they lifted the coffin onto the heads of two other men. Their heads were padded with palm fronds woven into fat green donuts. They then loped toward the cemetery, and the village followed. Periodically the men carrying the coffin would grow tired and a new man would take his place. The cemetery was half a kilometer from the house. It is not cordoned off or indicated by any plaques. A passerby sees only the concrete and tile tombs resting in the dubious shade of teak trees, the ground bare of undergrowth, covered only with the dried mantas of old leaves.<br /><br />When the procession reached the cemetery the women turned around. It is forbidden for women or children to view the actual internment. I continued with the men. A hole had been dug in the ground about four feet deep. It was half covered already. Logs had been placed over half the hole across the width, the cracks filled with rocks and leaves, and then a large pile of dirt placed atop. The men who had dug the hole were standing barefoot in shorts with no shirts. They removed the hide from over the body, then lifted it out of the coffin. One man was already in the tomb, hidden by the half-covering. He received the head, and the men placed the body gently in the hole. One by one they made an effort to turn the body on its side and tuck the thin faded blue blanket under his whole body. The feet were still exposed. I couldn’t see the head. When the body was arranged they climbed out and handed a hoe to the dead man’s uncle. He grasped a handful of dirt in the bend of the hoe. He gave a brief eulogy in Kabye, which I did not understand, but which I’m pretty sure contained the promise that we would all meet again on Judgment Day. He tossed the dirt into the hole. The spectators were all invited to take one last look on the deceased. Then logs were placed over the remainder of the opening, and the tomb was covered. It was only at this point that I noticed all the other mounds around us. I’d thought that every family built a concrete tomb, and had been a little skeptical about this hole in the ground, with stray roots stick out from the walls of earth. When I looked around I saw at least twenty mounds of earth, all covered with rocks. I left before they finished the mound.<br /><br />On Saturday after the internment, I was walking with one of my students, a fourteen-year old in cinqieme. He had been bitten by a snake a few months ago, was on the verge of death himself, but his father and some charlatans had healed him. I remember seeing him at school; the whites of his eyes were blood red. His skin was still an ashy grey. He looked like the snake that bit him.<br /><br />When we were walking together after the internment, he mentioned the snake bite. It had been sorcerers, he said. His father had gone to the village chief, and together they’d performed a ceremony to find out if there were any reasons behind the boy’s being bit. They’d found out that it was revenge sorcery, and the name of the man who had gone to the charlatan to make sure it was done. “What about our friend’s death yesterday,” I asked him. “Is that sorcery?” He said that we don’t know yet. “But we’ll find out tomorrow,” he said.<br /><br />That night it rained. The sky was clear most of the day, but toward three o’clock we could hear thunder in the distance. The sky took on an orange tinge, but not the tinge of Midwestern sunsets I know so well. It was the hue of coming rain, of disparity between heat and humidity, a drop in the pressure. Around six o’clock it began to rain, just as the sky was losing all traces of twilight. The rain was heavy and straight, but the wind was fierce and wild. I closed all the windows of my house, and the front door, but the rain blew straight through it, and a large pool of water collected along the base of the north wall. The lightning was bright white, not a trace of blue. We could hear branches and fruits falling from the trees, whole woody fronds dropping from the palms. One of my chicks, and three belonging to my neighbor, drowned.<br />In the morning there was the ceremony to find out how Tchao had died. When Lao had told me of his death Friday night, he said that Tchao had been gravely ill for about a week. But what brought on the illness was unknown. Two charlatans were hired, one by the widow, one by the uncle.<br /><br />Like the day before, many among the village were there to watch, arranged on benches enclosing the open space outside the compound. The chiefs were there, the widow and her sister-in-law, their kids. Most of our quarter of town. Two women were leaned against the wall of one of the compound’s buildings. One was tapping a calabash with piece of wood, the other was tapping a hunk of concrete with a piece of steel. Tap-clink-tap-clink. The charlatan was moaning and wailing lightly. He came shirtless out of the compound wearing on his head one of the frond donuts used in the procession the day before. On top of that sat a ceremonial bow, loosely strung, and a chunk from the husk of a baobab fruit. The charlatan was rubbing his crotch, and his arms shook like ribbons of water. The uncle, an old limping man who leaned heavily on his cane, came up to the charlatan, lifted the piece of husk and placed it on the ground. Then the widow walked up, picked up the husk, tapped it three times to the bow and donut, and replaced it on the ground.<br /><br />The charlatan began speaking. It was not in tongues, just Kabye. A man sitting in front of me slipped out of his sandals and went to stand face to face with the charlatan. They spoke in short bursts, finding a rhythm alongside the tapping women. I could understand nothing except the occasional “What did you say?” and frequent grunts of confirmation. At one point the chief took over the dialogue and the other man sat down. After about twenty minutes altogether, the charlatan stopped speaking. The chief sat down and the charlatan tilted his head back to let fall the donut and the bow. Some water was brought to him, and he washed his face. Then he left.<br /><br />My friend told me that the vision had not been clear. “He gave many reasons for the death. First he said Tchao had had the devil in him. Then he said someone in the village had killed him with an evil song. Then he said that it was not an evil song but an evil object. He just wasn’t clear at all.” What would happen next? “Now the second charlatan will come. Hopefully he will be more specific. If he isn’t, the family will find a charlatan from another village, and they will perform the ceremony privately.”<br /><br />I thought then about the whole business of sorcery. I told everyone I didn’t believe in it. I’d been saying that for awhile back when I’d first heard about its prominence in my village, and after of few of these declarations one of my friends took me aside and told me I needed to stop it. “You don’t have to believe. But you can’t tell people that what they believe is lies.”<br /><br />In about five minutes the second charlatan came. He was young and thick, whereas the other had been old and thin. He took his shirt off behind us, near the lime grove. He began whistling shortly and slapping his body. His chest, his back, his shoulders. He whistled with his upper lip hooded over his lower, blowing short bursts of breath out to make a sound like the women make when they prepare food with the grindstones. While he was doing that, one of the men from the crowd, a carpenter, stood where the other charlatan had stood, with the palm donut on his head. When the charlatan approached him, the carpenter gave him the donut, and the charlatan entered the atrium of the compound. He continued to whistle and slap, hitting himself in the armpits, pulling his skin and rubbing it. Like the crotch-work of the previous man, it looked vaguely sexual.<br /><br />The charlatan came out of the compound with the palm donut on his head, and he stood where the other had stood. Two different women than before were beating out the rhythm on the calabash and the concrete. The uncle hobbled over, picked the husk of baobab from the ground, tapped it on the charlatan’s head, put it back on the ground. The widow got up, tapped the husk three times on the man’s head, and again replaced it. Then a new man from the crowd stood before the charlatan, and they began to speak as before. Again, within twenty minutes the ceremony was over. The charlatan washed his face. The people began to disperse. I turned to my friend for the translation of all that had been said.<br /><br />“This time it was clear. The man who died had the devil in him. He was of a mean nature, and he signed a contract with the devil. He was supposed to pay the devil with alcohol, and food, and to sacrifice to him sheep. He did not fulfill this part of the contract. The devil came and took him.”<br /><br />Before everybody had left, the uncle stood up and walked to the center of the circle of benches. He spoke in Kabye, and my friend told me this is what he said. “I am sorry to find out that Tchao died like this. But it cannot be changed. Let us give what thanks we can that it was only of his own hand that he died. And let us hope that his pact with the devil will not return to act malevolently upon his family.”<br /><br />Once again, my only reaction to all this is confusion. I cannot understand this. I cannot dismiss this verdict as superstition, though neither can I declare my belief in it. I just know that Tchao died mysteriously. He rarely smiled. He seemed often tired, and not just from the fields. The kind of things that seem to line up after the fact, but would never have aroused suspicion without this bizarre declaration. Nobody could tell me what he was supposed to receive from the devil according the contract. I can’t think of anything myself. The only thing I can think to say, if you were to ask me if I believe this, is, “I kind of feel like I have to.”amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-57709083266886733432009-01-26T07:50:00.008-05:002009-01-26T11:39:13.878-05:00The Cold and the Spanish Sun, pt. 2We finally got the hotel room, complete with cable television, hot showers, and a free voucher for the buffet lunch, which included veal, bow-tie pasta with a creamy sauce, salad bar, and a fruit platter, amongst other things. We took a nap, and then went down to check out and catch the shuttle back to the airport. Some Nigerian travelers who were in a similar situation as us were already on the bus. One of them was in the front-most seat, where on the ride to the hotel the baggage had sat. The driver, an Egyptian named Mohamed that Larissa and I had determined was "a nice guy," asked the Nigerian to please move to the back so that he could load the luggage up front. The Nigerian didn't like this, and with a sharp look to his two sycophants, they began to ridicule Mohamed. He, Mohamed, shook his head and Larissa and I threw him our spiritual support. We were not fans of the Nigerians.<br /><br />When we got to the airport, the Nigerians beat us to the EgyptAir counter, where a representative was holding all our passports. The Egyptian, a large-nosed younger man with close cropped hair, was sitting in front of a computer. We assumed he was taking care of something for the Nigerians, so we didn't say anything. After a moment, the man looked up, saw us, and asked us where our transfer was. "Casablanca," we said. He picked up our passports, walked out of the office, and said, "Follow me." As we turned to be led past security and into the proper terminal, the Nigerians' eyes followed us in disbelief. Their jaws dropped. They had been totally ignored.<br /><br />The flight to Casablanca was nice and uneventful. We landed at 11:40, twenty minutes before the last train to Tangier, where we needed to go to take the ferry into Tarifa, Spain. We got my bag from the claim, went through customs, and headed to the train platform at the base of the elevators. The conductor was walking towards us from the platform. "Come on, come on," he said, "we go now. You pay on the train."<br />"We don't have any cash," we said.<br />"Oh. Sorry. Tomorrow morning, then."<br />The next train, then, was at 7 am. It was midnight. We decided to sleep in the airport. The unheated airport. For the next seven hours. We piled on our clothes, huddled together on a leather bench in the check-in area, and shivered in our sleep.<br /><br />The next morning, still cold, we got our tickets and boarded the train. Since the three-car train that leaves the airport only ever goes as far as the main Casablanca terminal, we had two hours to kill in the central part of town before our six-hour train ride to Tangier. It was a cold day, but the sun was bright, and silhouetted the clock tower of the station before us. We headed to a small cafe along the main road, and Larissa got a grilled cheese and egg sandwich, and I got a yogurt. We ordered orange juice, and the man squeezed it in front of us. When we finished eating, they brought us some complimentary tea, which Larissa used to warm up her nose. Then we walked down the street to a small park with tended lawns, clean benches, small trash cans, and palm trees. We like Morocco, we decided.<br /><br />We spent the last thirty minutes waiting for our train to arrive at the station sitting between two women. The woman on our right just stared at us and the woman on the left covered her face with a shawl and stared at us. Although slightly warmed by the sun, Larissa was still shivering. The woman on the left offered her one of her gloves for two minutes, which Larissa accepted. Finally our train arrived and as we got ready to board, the glove-lender raised her hand as if expecting some change for her two-minute one-glove lending service. We both feigned ignorance, threw her some of our best innocent grins, and boarded the train.<br /><br />A brief note on Moroccan winter dress/fashion: these people know how to battle the cold. The women wear brightly colored shawls, while the men wear hooded robes that look like Franciscan monks had their winter coats designed by Klansmen. They are dark or light brown, go all the way to the floor, and have hoods which remain remarkably pointy, even in the wind.<br /><br />The train ride was nice. We slept for most of it. Morocco is in the middle of their rainy season, however, and through the windows of the train we could see the whole countryside, covered with a green velvet sheen. Herders with their meager flocks sat amongst their grazing sheep, cows wandered over the countryside, donkeys loaded with vegetables made their way to market.<br /><br />We finally made it to the Tangier station about three in the afternoon. We took a taxi from the station to the port and bought tickets for the ferry which would take us to Tarifa. At the customs desk to get on the ferry, a man had hijacked all the disembarkation forms. To fill one out, you had to give your passport to one of his flunkies, who would then fill it out for you. At first we thought they were officials who did this for a living, but their jump suits said "Sanitation," not "Immigration." They were janitors, and when they were done, they held out their hands for a tip.<br /> <br />The thing is, though, that we'd spent all our Moroccan dirhams on the train, the taxi, and the ferry tickets. All we had left were one dirham coins, about 12 and-a-half cents. We held them out to the janitors, and in their Arabic accents they said, "One dirham? You give me one dirham?" They shook their heads in disgust and let us past.<br /><br />And then we were on the ferry. A thirty-minute ride across the Strait of Gibraltar was all that was left of the journey to Spain. My parents, who had flown into Madrid on Saturday and rented a car, were waiting for us in Tarifa. Since we had no way of contacting them, and since they had been expecting us since the morning in case we'd gotten that midnight train, I was nervous as the sun set over the waters, the blue of day turning into the purple of twilight and finally into the inky black of night on the sea. But when we got off the boat, they were there. So excited to see us, they waved with all their hands.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-57426609469419399262009-01-25T07:38:00.005-05:002009-01-25T10:13:32.983-05:00The Cold and The Spanish Sun, pt. 1After some trouble with a money-changer at the Togo/Ghana border, Larissa, a husband and wife combo from PC/Niger, and I rented a private car from Aflao to Accra, a three hour drive. The beginning of the road was similar to Togo. Potholes and dirt, the flora along the edge of the asphalt painted burnt ochre by dust. But as the road became smoother, the painted lines whiter and crisper, the mud huts and the tin roofs gave way to massive fenced-in factories, signs for local farms, and finally subdivisions and duplexes. I felt like I was in a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale.<br /><br />In Accra itself there were overpasses, exit ramps, readable signs, working traffic lights. Larissa and I got out along the highway, and crossed the road to the mall, to spare the driver a time-consuming turn through the highway's cloverleaf. In the mall we ate fast food, played Wii in a bookstore, checked out the movies playing in the theater, and shopped in a real grocery store. When we were done, we took a taxi to Champs, a sports bar, and feasted on Nachos con carne, washed down by draft beers and a whiskey on the rocks. Except for the occasional piles of trash, and the ever-present little black market sacks, it was hard to believe we were in Africa.<br /><br />The airport seemed slick and shiny, with clean plastic check-in counters. The attendants were polite and helpful, and we got our tickets and checked our bags with no trouble. The only "African" experience I had during those hours in Ghana was at passport control, when the attendant asked me to give him one of the books I was reading. I told him no, so he gave me his phone number and told me to call him when I got back, so that we could be friends.<br /><br />At 11:15 pm, our flight to Cairo was announced. We all walked outside into the little bus that carried us across the tarmac to where the plane was waiting. We boarded, met a Yale business student who knows a former volunteer we know, and then fell asleep in the cold recycled air of the plane, the lights flickering into dimness, the hum of the engines steady and true.<br /><br />We landed in Cairo at 7 am, with thirteen hours to kill before our flight that evening to Casablanca. The Egyptian sun rose later than in West Africa, and the air was so cold our breath escaped in clouds. When we finally made it to the transfer passengers waiting area, we were told our complimentary hotel room would be ready within an hour, and if we could just sit inside the waiting area to the left, they'd call us when it was ready.<br /><br />While I was in the bathroom, trying to jump out the door over the mop of the tip-hungry bathroom attendant, Larissa was approached by a representative from EgyptAir in charge of QuickTours, who offered her a pamphlet with possible tour options during our layover. When I got back, Larissa brought me up to date as the man came over.<br /><br />"Hello, Hi, my name is Ahmad." He told us the options we had in lieu of a hotel room. For only $70 each, for example, we could visit the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx. If we threw in an extra $30 each, he'd throw in a tour to the Egyptian Museum as well.<br /><br />"Hmm..." we said. "We'll have to think about it."<br />"Okay, I'll tell you what I'll do." Ahmad sat down and straightened his tie. "I'll go talk to my people and see if, since you are Americans, I can bring ze price of ze pyramid trip down to just $55 each. " People think it's just the French who say 'the' with a z, but apparently it's the Egyptians, too.<br /><br />And then he rushed off. He came back fifteen minutes later with our other options:<br />"Okay, so, you can take ze hotel room and just rest. Or you can take ze tour, for only 55 US Dollars each, for both ze pyramids and ze Sphinx."<br />"Well..."<br />"Or, you can forgo ze hotel room for free visas, so zat you can walk around ze city yourselves."<br />This option made me a little curious.<br />"So, I have a question. If we just take the hotel, does that mean we have to stay inside the hotel, since we won't have these visas? Or are we allowed to leave and walk around?"<br />"Oh, yes, you can walk around, zat is no problem."<br />"Then why would we give that up for the free visas?"<br />"Tell you what," he said, "I have another choice. If you want to leave right now, you can skip ze hotel room, we go to ze pyramids and ze Sphinx for 55 dollars each, and I will cook you breakfast here."<br />"What? At the airport?"<br />"Yes, yes."<br />"Tell you what," we said. "We'll do the pyramids and the Sphinx for 55. We'll just need to exchange a little money first."<br />"Okay, zat is no problem, I will make ze arrangements."<br /><br />What we didn't know, though, was that none of the exchange banks in the airport, and really, throughout most of Africa, accept traveler's cheques these days. And they also wouldn't exchange Ghanaian Cedis, or West African Francs. Between us, we only had about 40 USD. So when Ahmad came back, with a sign-up list (or maybe his breakfast menu?), we had to tell him that, really sorry, we just wouldn't be able to do the trip, so could we just get that hotel room please?<br /><br />Ahmad disguised his disappointment well, and said that, yes, no problem, he would take care of zat right away for us.<br /><br />Thirty minutes later, however, Ahmad came back to sit down in front of us. "Okay," he said, "I have one final option. You see zese people over zere?" He nodded behind him. Yes, we saw them. "They have signed up for ze tour, but zey are only three, and the tour needs at least five. If you would like to go with zem, immediately, you pay only 25 American dollars each, and you leave right now."<br />"Sorry, Ahmad," we said, "But it's the same problem as before, we just don't have the money." He nodded and said okay. As he was getting up to leave, we asked again about that hotel room. "Oh yes," he said, "I will take care of zat right away."<br /><br />Two hours later, we are sitting in the same seats in the waiting area. Other EgyptAir employees have been calling people by their destinations, taking them to their complimentary hotel rooms. We have heard nothing about us, about anyone going to Casablanca. We have not seen Ahmad since his last promise to us two hours ago.<br /><br />Around 12:15 Ahmad walks into the waiting area. He's not wearing his suit jacket, however, and he doesn't make eye contact with anybody in the room. He's carrying a sandwich. He proceeds to eat it. He finishes at 12:45. He gets up and leaves.<br /><br />A few minutes after he leaves, I find Ahmad and ask him about that hotel room he said he was going to work out for us.<br />"Oh yes," he says, his shoulders slack in their disinterest. "Well, you see, zat is not my department. You must go over to zat desk right zere."amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-47934547546369021982009-01-09T09:00:00.004-05:002009-01-09T10:06:21.206-05:00Tony Peeks Under His Own Hood<p>Sometimes I wish I'd studied something in college a little more practical than English. Like physics, or some short-bus version of engineering, or biology. Although, I doubt I could biologize, or physicize or even engineer as easily and readily as I can write. Maybe it's not such a big deal that I don't write as much as I think I should. What do physics majors do with their free time? I'd probably juggle a lot, to admire gravity. Or shoot a hose at a high arc, google-eyed and slouch-jawed about the molecular structure of water, which really is probably the most pleasurable thing I can think to watch.</p><p>Or maybe another language, studied in detail, till the point of fluency. I speak French pretty well, and I have enough interest in it that I know I'll speak it pretty well for a long time after I'm done using it in Africa. Honestly, I'll probably speak better French when I leave here. I try to read novels in French sometimes, and I get them, I understand them for the most part, but I never get that suck-in-your-breath feeling like when I read DFW or Jonathon Safran Foer or Saul Bellow. But I'd like to, you see.</p><p>And then there's all the kinds of handy skills I wish I knew. Horse-shoeing, metal-working, complex carpentry, even plumbing or being an electrician. And what about brick masonry?</p><p>I feel like if I were younger, still influenced by the Romantics, still taking myself way too seriously (it's actually pretty embarassing how seriously I took myself from, like, 10-16; it got better after that, but I'm still a bit of a self-important weirdo), I'd consider all these desires as an indication of the question, "Who am I?" But, you know, I feel pretty comfortable with who I am. I've got a good grasp on that, like an old woman gripping her morning mug. I just want to make the me that's here and now a better person for whatever might come up in the future.</p><p>Also, I'd like to be the kind of guy who can reference a funny anecdote whenever the occasion calls. Like when people interviewed Kurt Vonnegut, and instead of responding directly to their questions he'd say, "Well, you've heard about the man who fell off a cliff, right...?" Or something like that.</p><p>You want to know how to tell if a friend of yours is a genuine person? Feed them a Sloppy Joe. The cleaner their hands at the end of the meal, the less you can trust them. That's a fact. Like, right now, I'm eating a sandwich while typing this, and let me tell you, it's hard to see my shirt through the breadcrumbs. I'm a man who keeps his word.</p><p>Speaking of Kurt Vonnegut interviews, I just read an old one I found on McSweeney's, and the interviewer mentioned a movie in which the afterlife was individualized, with every person reliving one memory, just one, for the rest of eternity. Vonnegut said his would be this:</p><p>"I think it would be the moment where I was doing everything right, where I was beyond criticism. It was back in World War II. It was snowing, but everything was black. The trucks were rolling in. I was surrounded by my buddies. And my rifle was between my knees, my helmet on my head. I was ready for anything. And I was right where I belonged. That would be the moment. It would have to be the moment."</p><p>What would my moment be, if I had to choose right now? I can't think of a specific year, but it would have to be one of the many Fourth of July corn roasts at the Lake. What would yours be?</p>amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-39629008968351266602009-01-07T08:08:00.006-05:002009-01-07T08:40:47.587-05:00Passing ThoughtsOn Saturday I go to Spain with the gf. To meet the parents. I'm in Lome now, getting my Ghana visa. We're flying out of Ghana. Into Cairo. Layover. Into Casablanca. From there, if all works out, the midnight train to Tangiers, and then the seven-thirty ferry to Tarifa. Where the parents will be waiting with a rented car, not likely red of color, eating tapas in the shadow of a church next door to the restaurant.<br /><br />Tim and I have been emailing dreams. How we'll make money once I get back home so that we can go to Japan. The book he wants to write, how he wants me to be a part of it. It's a travel book. I told him I'm in. I haven't told him that travelling abroad secretly scares me. Visas and passports and WHO cards with all the proper vaccinations. The conversion of money, the unknown market prices. Some people tell me that travelling in West Africa is harder than in other places. I wish I could be comfortable knowing there are things I don't want to do. But I just feel a kind of personal weakness.<br /><br />Have you heard? I am having a wedding. With the gf. The dowry is: two bottles of sodabe, four bottles of whiskey, a case of beer. My host mother wanted to get it town to just two bottles of whiskey. The gf thinks she's worth all four. Maybe five.<br /><br />At the Ghanaian Embassy, two middle-aged Canadian missionaries were filling out visa applications. I said, "Hello, fellow North Americans." The man, looking out of place in Africa in a baby-duck yellow polo, said, "We're from Canada actually, but close enough." I think he misheard me. The wife was nicer.<br /><br />I walked from the Embassy back to the Bureau. That's a taxi ride of about 800 F CFA. That's pretty far, for a white kid. Or so they tell me.<br /><br />The thing I most want to do in Spain is to go bowling.<br /><br />Monday night, before leaving village, Lidao and Adele came to hang out with me before I left. I had to grade papers, so I set up my little laptop and put on <em>Kung Fu Panda</em>. Theo came in shortly after. I couldn't concentrate on grading. I kept looking at the backs of those little black heads as they shook with laughter. They were beautiful.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-9272983171172817642008-12-26T11:53:00.004-05:002008-12-26T13:09:06.183-05:00Maman and DanielWhen I was helping with the training group in Agou at the end of November, I didn't go eat as often with Maman and Daniel as I had when I was there in October. I'd gotten a little sick last time, and by the end of the week wasn't eating any of the food that Maman was preparing, so this time I didn't want her to waste anything on me. Nonetheless, I would go over there when I could. Daniel was out and about most of the time, or wandering around the courtyard searching for something he wasn't sure he'd lost. I helped Maman make the couscous she served me one Tuesday, and when I couldn't find an egg sandwich on the side of the road, she insisted one night that I buy the necessary ingredients so she could make it for me at the house. She really is a great mother.<br /><br />I've recently come to enjoy fufu, the pounded yam dish that is a staple of the Togolese diet. A few days before we were to leave Nyogbo for the swear-in in Lome, I asked Maman to prepare it for me. She says she'd eat fufu every meal of every day if she could, so I wanted her to eat with me, instead of just serving me my couscous or salad at the table and then retreating to the kitchen to make her own lunch. Okay, she said, and we agreed on the next day.<br /><br />She let me pound the yams along with Daniel and the little girl she took in shortly after Gerson died. When it was done and the sauce was hot, she scooped blobs of the white pasty yams into aluminum bowls and poured the sauce all over it.<br /><br />We sat in the mini courtyard in front of the kitchen, in the shade of the overhanging tin roof. Daniel was off playing in the abandoned church next door, the little girl was washing some clothes in the yard, and the trainee was studying in his room. We ate in silence at first, my fingers burning against the sauce, my tongue scalded by the chicken. It was delicious.<br /><br />It's not a Togolese habit to talk and eat at the same time, but Maman knows me well enough to humor me with conversation. She's a lively discussionist, her face a panoply of expressions. We were probably talking about the training, the upcoming departure, my work in village. Whereas before it was I who would steer the conversation towards Gerson's death, this time Maman picked up the thread.<br /><br />"I still don't know why he died," she said. Her confusion is both physical and existential. The doctors have been unable to tell her what killed Gerson; she cannot understand why God would take such a good man so soon.<br /><br />"They say," I said, "that only the good die young." It was weak, but I had nothing else. "Maybe God takes the best of us early because he needs them with him."<br /><br />She didn't like the explanation any more than I did. "He had so much left to do here," she said. Then, in a voice a little more broken: "Why would he leave me?" I didn't look up to see if there were tears in her eyes, but I heard the sniffles.<br /><br />"I don't know, Maman. But he was a good man. We were the ones lucky enough to be here with him. We have to remember that." My eyes were moist now, too. Maman wiped her nose silently on her apron.<br /><br />"I worry about Daniel," she said. "He doesn't want to study. He doesn't want to go to school. I tell him to go to his uncle's house during the breaks, but he refuses."<br /><br />"He's afraid to leave you. He's afraid he might lose you too."<br /><br />"He used to be first or second in his class. Every year. But now he doesn't care. I said, 'Daniel, why have your grades fallen?' He says because now that Papa has died, no one will buy him a bike if he gets first, so he doesn't try. He's looking for his father, and he knows that he won't find him."<br /><br />"Maman," I said, and I looked up at her. "You don't need to worry about Daniel. He's a good kid. A great kid. And I know this for two reasons: he had a great father; and he still has a great mother."<br /><br />She was no longer sniffling. Her face was constricted, as though she were slightly in pain. She was looking away from me, into the fronds of a palm tree behind us. Her voice was shaky now.<br /><br />"Lately I've been waking up at night from my dreams. In each one I'm some place I don't recognize. I'm surrounded by people I don't know. I get scared, and in the dreams I start to cry. I go into a corner to try to hide, and I hide my head in my hands, wanting to escape. And then I hear a voice calling 'Maman, Maman!' I see Daniel. He's waving at me, running toward me. And I know that he's coming to protect me."<br /><br />We finished our meal in silence, and I helped Maman with the dishes. "Do you want me to get you some plantains for when you leave again?" she asked.<br /><br />"No, Maman. Then I won't have an excuse to come back here and eat with you."<br /><br />"You need an excuse to come back here?" She looked at me with her not-really-insulted smile.<br /><br />"Never, Maman," I smiled, "Never."amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-5822255725007963042008-10-25T16:38:00.003-04:002008-10-25T17:56:12.430-04:00AIDS RideOn the last day of biking for AIDS Ride <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Centrale</span>, both teams headed from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Wassarabo</span> to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Agoulu</span>, stopping in one village each along the way for a morning <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">sensibilisation</span>. The road was hilly and rocky and beautiful, and some of the bikers had to walk up the hills. Those that pedaled up stopped at the top for breath. Going down the hills was absolute, wonderful terror.<br /><br />AIDS Ride consists of groups of volunteers and Togolese counterparts riding to hard-to-find villages and giving <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">sensibilisations</span> about AIDS prevention. Each region coordinates their own routes, and how they'll perform every <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">sensibilisation</span>, but we all do it the same week. Funded by two organizations here in Togo, we were 'required' to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">sensibilise</span> at least two hundred people at every village, the majority of them from the target demographic, which group is obvious when I tell you that we handed out lots and lots and fucking lots of condoms. It was tons of fun.<br /><br />The two <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Centrale</span> teams ate together almost every meal every day, but we rode to different villages to maximize the number of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">sensibilisations</span> per day. Each group did one in the morning, one in the afternoon, with the time between spent biking or eating.<br /><br />On Wednesday, orange team did a morning <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">sensibilisation</span> in a Muslim village (no alcohol), and then headed two kilometers down the road to our village for the afternoon, where there was, while not a bar, a small boutique with Flag beer and a fridge. We ordered some beers, and sat under the big ugly tree in the center of village, where in two hours we would do our afternoon performance.<br /><br />Depending on the day, I either hate kids in this country or love them. As I rolled up under the tree on my bike, a group of about twenty kids had gathered round the rest of the volunteers already seated on straw mats on the ground. One of the easiest ways to amuse ourselves in this country is by chasing little kids, so I rode straight into the group, dispersing them, and then hunted one down to give him a pat on the head. The fear in his eyes was entirely real, and the laughter of the men and women sitting on the fringes of the public square echoed between the mud walls of houses.<br /><br />One rule of thumb when dealing with kids is to never pay attention to them if you want them to go away. Thanks to my little pursuit on the bike, the group had swelled to at least fifty kids. I opened my beer, and saw several little ones smiling and pointing at me, so I casually got up and then chased them on foot, capturing one, who was crying when I reached him. This, naturally, made even more kids want to come around. By the time I reached my mat and took another sip, there were well over a hundred children encircling us.<br /><br />It's a feeling I always hate, even if I provoke it: being trapped by children, stared at like a zoo animal. They smile and laugh and call us Whitey, they point and imitate and ask each other questions, but the moment you approach them, no matter how calm your walk or benign your intentions, they scatter in utter fear. I've seen kids too scared to even run properly, and in the melee they stumble, nearly trampled by their peers, while the very white man he or she was running from comes over to pick him up and dust him off.<br /><br />I decided I would no longer chase the children, so as they crept closer and closer to us, I tried calling them over. Only one was brave enough to come, and when I shook his hand the rest of the kids giggled. I get a real kick out of speaking to them in English, so I started telling the kid a knock knock joke. He started repeating me, and did pretty well with it, especially the word "banana." I noticed other kids in the crowd mouthing along, wanting to get special attention as well. I started the joke again, indicating to all the kids to repeat, which they did. Call it a simple pleasure, but that was one of the funniest things I'd heard in a while, and I was so giddy when they finished that I just had to chase them again.<br /><br />Since white people can hold a kid's interest for hours, we decided to change the strategy from trying to run them off to trying to wear them out enough to go home. Another volunteer taught them freeze tag; I taught them the hand jive; we played a rousing round of the Hokey-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Pokey</span>; the freeze tag guy, Marcus, taught them Red Light Green Light, which they didn't understand at all; at the end, just as the hour of our <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">sensibilisation</span> approached, Marcus just started clapping his hands, trying to work them into different rhythms. When syncopation failed, he went with the classic Queen stomp-stomp-clap. By the end he had all the kids singing "We will rock you."<br /><br />Things have been going well for me here, and AIDS Ride was amazing in all its aspects, and that afternoon with the kids gave me enough happy memories to last for a little while now. School has started again, and I'm much better prepared for it this year. I'm teaching the kids how to write expository and persuasive essays, so that they can articulately express the concepts they learn in class. Tomorrow I head off to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Agou</span>, to spend a week with the trainees. I saw the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">gf</span> for her birthday, and we 'celebrated' our one-year-together mark on the twentieth, while she was sleeping in a dispensary in some small village and I was sinking into the cushions of a couch at the volunteer's house in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Tchamba</span>. There exist every day small and large frustrations, and the desire to get this second year over and done with is big. But I understand things better now, I'm more patient, less influenced by smooth talkers, and I've begun cutting my own hair. Things have, if not gone on the upswing, at least levelled off. I'm hoping to keep this up for awhile.<br /><br />p.s.<br />I haven't written any letters at all in a long long while, so to those who think I've forgotten about them I say "Nay." You are just as loved and missed as before.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-39015213442790688402008-09-18T12:24:00.007-04:002008-09-18T13:38:53.043-04:00A Brief Entry on Health, With No ThemeYesterday, instead of going to the Embassy to meet with the relevant secretary, I spent pretty much all day sleeping on the couch in the volunteer lounge, or shitting out my guts in the volunteer lounge bathroom. Whereas in the States, bodily waste is either number 1 or number 2, here in PC/Togo we have 1,2,3, and 4. The first two are the same; 3 is when you don't so much shit as you piss out your ass; 4, which is more common than I care to reflect upon, is when you both shit (either type-2 or type-3) and puke at the same time. Yesterday I held steady at number 3. This was accompanied by extreme abdominal pain, extreme headache, extreme nausea, and general weakness that left me either unable to get up or on the brink of fainting every time I did.<br /><br />Today, however, I am fine.<br /><br />In terms of health, I'm probably one of the most resilient volunteers here in Togo. There are other volunteers who rarely get ill, and when they do their illnesses last only for the short term, and require little medication but lots of rest. There are also those who have had no health problems but who then become gravely, frighteningly ill.<br /><br />I can't really accurately say what the average health/sickness cycle is for most volunteers, because many of the illnesses (amoebas, giardia, other shit living intestinally) last for a long time (often due to lack of treatment due to unwillingness on volunteers' part to go to the med unit) and become part of the daily ignorable routine. I do know, however, that my girlfriend gets 'sick enough' about once every month or so. Not so sick that she has to be rushed down to Lome, but sick enough that she's in pain/on the toilet for more than one day in a row. Not to reveal anything too personal, but she was the first person to define number 4 for us, from experience.<br /><br />So I consider myself lucky, when it comes to health. The sickest I've ever been was the night of a cluster-mate's going away party. The four of us in the cluster got matching bubus, with are like mumus, and then had ourselves a beer and tchouk crawl. I personally drank 3 liters, 30 centileters of beer, and three calabashes of tchouk (chugged; we were racing against some Togolese dudes at the tchouk stand). Needless to say, the rest of the night was immemorable.<br /><br />My relatively good health here in Togo, in conjuction with my capable language abilities, often leaves me (usually while sitting at a bar) thinking to myself that, yes, I can handle being overseas. I can survive living in Togo, or another part of Africa, or even a place a little more 'accepting' of my skin color. But right after I have this thought, I realize that I don't <em>want</em> to survive in these countries, I want to go home. This always leaves me feeling slightly guilty.<br /><br />Guilty because it brings up the questions that I sort of addressed in the last post, about privilege and luxury and all the aspects of zero-sum theory, which, at its most basic, says that one cannot have without depriving another. My good life in the States must is directly correlated to the poor life of someone somewhere else. If I'm totally wrong on my interpretation of zero-sum, I apologize, and would look forward to explanations helping me understand it further.<br /><br />I try not to let the guilt overtake me. Dave Eggers wrote, in, I believe, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, though it might have been AHWOSG, that being born into privilege (in my case, white middle class in the United States) is so far beyond the choice or guidance of the individual that to feel guilty is useless. What are you going to do, give away everything you have, become poor and suffering on the side of the street? Sure, you could, but being a semi-utilitarian, I think you should never throw away the opportunities you already have. After all, my privilege has brought me to Africa, in an attempt to help an apathetic populace (my remarks are very editorial), which most people would say is a good thing, which deep down I still believe has merit and value, despite the reality that I've seen here face to face.<br /><br />The other thing that eases my guilt is the simple and plain fact that I love the United States. Geographicall, socially, politically (despite some really frustrating shit), and emotionally. I am not a European, or an Asian, or an African, I am an American. It's weird how I'm just now beginning to get comfortable with that. When I was young (like, 22 and below) I thought so highly of people who spent long stretches of time living overseas. I thought that any capable, intelligent person would not only be able to live in a foreign country, but would choose to do so, and that those who could not, or would not were missing some key element in their lives. I no longer hold the expats in such high regard (though neither do I fault them; to each his own). It's both humbling and comforting to realize how important my life in the States is to me, and that I don't ever want to let it go again.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-28326591993532621232008-09-18T12:24:00.006-04:002008-09-18T13:36:50.638-04:00Je suis dumbassAlso, I just found out that 'quotidian' is an English word used much like the French word 'quotidienne', which I misspelled in the email post.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2629281696884571054.post-50379239575593728922008-09-16T12:44:00.003-04:002008-09-16T13:31:53.513-04:00An Email to My Friend, Which I Decided to Share With You All, Except for the Juicy PartsI've been away from my village for sixteen days now, and I'm loving it. Kara, Lome, Agou, Atakpame, and now back in Lome. I don't really want to go back, to have to start again teaching sixty kids to a class, with their inability to spell or form complete sentences. But the money won't last me here in Lome, and as much as I hate my village, I suppose I'm committed to helping them out. After all, it's only one more year.<br /><br />I hate to harp on things, even, if not especially, good things, but our AIM conversation the other week really pumped my spirits up, and I guess this little email is my attempt to carry on a conversation with you again.<br /><br />I'm alone in the Peace Corps bureau, which is rare. There is a volunteer lounge, most definitely the filthiest part of the building, because sometimes upwards of fifteen or twenty volunteers occupy it at one time. There are couches, filled bookshelves, a water cooler, bathroom with a shower, and a computer room, as well as sixty or so lockable cubby holes that volunteers countrywide use to store Lome-usable-only items. On the coffee table at the center of the square of couches is an internet hub that those with laptops use since the two computers in the computer room are almost always occupied. At least, that's how it's been every day I've ever been in here, until today.<br /><br />I'm not in town just to dick around, though most of my time is spent doing just that. Yesterday I got some information about funding sources for a palm plantation I'm trying to get started, and I touched base with my boss about revamping the technical information binder that every volunteer in my program gets, in preparation for the new group of trainees, who arrive Saturday.<br /><br />So, this morning one of the tech. trainers and I went over the binder, pulled out what was useless, added what was missing, made the necessary recopies and adjustments, and then by two o'clock sent the final product to the general secretary so that he could ship it off to the printers before the week is out. Tomorrow I have an appointment at 9 a.m. at the U.S. Embassy to have the palm plantation project proposal 'edited' by the woman who reviews them for the ambassador, and then I'll spend the afternoon sending out requests for funds from private donors, because I'm almost positive that the villagers won't get the amount of money they've asked for from the Embassy. And then Friday I'll head back up to village and start teaching again. I'll have two breaks, the last week of October and the last week of November, when I'll be at the training site, teaching the young 'uns about Togo's educational system, and approaches we can take to implement environmental education into the curriculum.<br /><br />If that sounds exciting, maybe it is, but for me there will still be plenty hours of boredom in between the occasional one or two hours of real work each day.<br /><br />As you went through life did you ever ask yourself the question, When will I really grow up? You get your driver's license and think, this must be it, this is responsibility; but then you hit eighteen and graduate high school, and realize that this time it's for real, that is until twenty-one comes along, and then a year later college is over and now, really, this time you know you're a competent, knowledgeable adult. But time goes on and your confidence in this conviction rises and falls, is one day at one end of the spectrum, another day at the other end, passing back and forth like a sunflower following the sun. So you sign up for something responsible, like a job, or the Peace Corps, saying to yourself that now you'll take the time to really think about the future, to put off adulthood with this little excursion, that once this is done you'll be ready to accept whatever comes your way, no surprises, but then--well, i'm still in the middle of this last part, so I don't really know what comes next.<br /><br />One of my favorite authors recently died. It was a suicide, hanging. Obviously, I never knew him, but you know what it's like when you really admire somebody, someone who, through every piece of writing, every interview, every televised reading, comes off as one of the most genuine people you could hope to know. You get sad, and you begin to doubt once again what you thought was a sure thing, no matter how simple. For someone who has given up religion, it shares whispers and shadows of the kind of mental devastation that comes with a loss of faith. I'm not incapable of continuing to believe in his writing, but now every time I read something he wrote, I'm going to interpret that curiosity and penchant for minutiae as the search for some kind of truth, a search not desperate, but casual, accepted, like a blind woman's gentle hands on your face, feeling out your features. He wrote a lot for Harper's Magazine, and right now they're offering an in memoriam of all his articles they published, so my time will be long occupied with that while I'm still here in Lome. If you want to check it out, go to <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557">http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557</a>. I recommend reading, at the very least, Ticket to the Fair, about the Illinois State Fair. It's absolutely hilarious.<br /><br />What really gets to me, though, is that I would consider myself searching for the same kind of thing I imagine he searched for. A reason, unbreakable and without caveat, to believe in humanity, and purpose to the universe. He believed in God, though I don't know exactly how, and even though I believe in a thing you could call God, I still think that he's not the answer to the worth of all that he has laid bare before us. I wasn't planning on finding any solution in my time, but I was buckling in for what I figured would be, as most would probably glean from his writing, an amusing and wacky journey into the quotidenne, which is French for 'daily,' and I'm sure used as incorrectly as its English equivalent would have been in that sentence. So if someone as intelligent, capable, and seemingly comfortable as DFW was unable to find anything to keep him around, I worry about the eventual fruits of my future labor. Granted, according the newspapers, his problem may have been chemical, as he was on anti-depressants for many years, and I, fortunately, can disengage myself enough from disappointment and frustration that I could never be honestly labelled as 'depressive'. But that's kind of what bugs me, too. It's kind of like that blog post I wrote a while ago, about how you have to leave behind your thoughts to be happy, and if that's the kind of existence you have to lead, then why lead it? That post was in a very Togo-specific setting, but when I think about how in the States I can think all I want and still be fine, then I wonder about luxury and excess being the breeding ground for idle thoughts, and the injustice of the world, the zero-sum game of resources and development, racism, jingoism, obesity, genocide, teen pregnancy, famine, global warming, injustice--and then I take a deep breath before I pass out, and search for a bar.amshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910904378075038119noreply@blogger.com1