Journal Entry 1.7.08

Certain misgivings and streams of consciousness
It’s a cold day in Africa. I don’t think hell has frozen over, and I think a snowball still has a chance, but sure enough it is cool, or at least a cooler day than most. It’s not like you wouldn’t sweat if you labored under the sun, or that this day could still be compared to August in Portland, but comparatively, and everything being relative, I woke up clinging to my sleeping bag, socks on still, not wanting to face the cold morning air or freezing bucket of water that awaits a shocking pour over my head. Like a trooper I got out of bed and the Hermasten winds have been blowing hard. It’s a t-shirt and jeans day but everyone is a little extra bundled and complains of the chill. It’s like an Indian summer to them, but instead of snow drifts on the horizon it will soon be the hot season.

This is the apex of West Africa’s cold season, dry, windy heat, instead of dry, still, penetrating heat. My area is known to reach temperature of over 40 degrees C in April and May. I am enjoying every second of this weather as best I can. The mornings and evenings being cool means getting a biting shock every time I shower outside, even my solar shower, soaking in the sun all day, offers little relief to the grip of that first liter of bucket water I use to rinse and wet myself. The precious warm solar heated water is the finishing rinse. Treating myself to its warmth like dessert, like Tres Leches after a plate of sour beans.

I can and have been working almost daily morning and evening in the garden. This has really been my pride and joy. Since the integration part has been the real kicker this first month opposite that of training where all my focus was, or I remember it to be with my family and sitting and sharing meals with them. This family is different, the compound is different, there are no walls, their row of “houses” or rooms is detached from my free standing two bedroom hut, a mansion compared to theirs. And for whatever reasons it seemed to them to serve me my meals in a small bowl for me to eat in the privacy of my own home. This is a nice treat that I didn’t like at first because I wanted to integrate with them like my training family. But these families are different from each other. So I eat alone, which causes me to spend the little time around meal time to also be alone, either with my thoughts, which are many, or my work, which is also many, or with reading or stretching two daily activities which have become like clockwork for me.

After sunset I bathe, then come in and lay out my prayer mat to the east of course and do the minimal amount of yoga that I learned so long ago, along with some bastardized Pilates and sit-ups and push-ups. Despite digging and lifting and fetching water and pumping water and more digging, I still want to keep diligent on things like push-ups if only to normalize a routine. Then the food bowl comes and I eat, return the bowl, crawl into bed and read. I have been here four weeks and have read just as many books. A first for me. I am not a diligent reader. But with no beer and no TV…and so with the majority of the day I am alone, working and reading and thinking. I can’t shut my brain off it makes me dizzy sometimes and I can’t sleep some nights. So integrating has been difficult. They speak differently than I learned. Certain words and the dialect is blurred and fast and instead of explaining to me what I don’t understand, they just repeat the same thing over and over, confused why on the 12th time I still don’t understand a word I have never heard before. Showing me or drawing a picture in the sand or using a different word or hand gestures seems to be all but beyond them. So it’s up to my ear to decipher and that, for me, sucks ass. My ears don’t like other languages, and outside the classroom structure, where I “excelled” in Pulaar, I am now at a disadvantage and sinking slowly and to combat the frustration of trying unsuccessfully to communicate, I am left to retreat into my work. I should be writing things down, consulting my notes and staying hard fast at tying to communicate but it’s just so very hard at times that I want to just escape into my house, into my backyard, into a book. That I do. I give in and find comfort instead of rising to the challenges of communication.

Even now, right now!! there is a girl talking to me and playing with my hair and I am ignoring her so I can finish this sentence. But during that elipse I just spoke and played with them, one little cute girl was biting on a rusty nail. I took it out of her hands and put it out of reach and now she’s crying. These kids cry at a drop of a hat and I assume it’s because deep down, they must realize how shitty they have it. Playing with rusty cans, filling it with dirt, sand, biting on tetanus nails. They can’t imagine the world where I come from where sandboxes are now exiled from schools because they carry germs and replaced by plastic playground made from recycle shoes and other rendered excess. Here, their lives are filled with germs and beatings and scraps of tin and holey clothing and they don’t know any better, not at these young, young ages.

But they must know something because it’s all smiles and laughing and then at a moment’s notice as some other kid smacks them a little hard or someone takes away some piece of trash which they happen to be coveting at the moment, it’s like a dam bursting, the yells and tears and crying from both girls and boys, from birth to even 14/15 years old is so painfully obvious and obnoxious and riddled with the hardships of generations past. It’s like they cry not from the pain or unfairness of what just happened but from the ghosts of their ancestors whispering in their ears all the sadness and knowledge of sadness that came before them and will surely follow their lives until they die.

I have not been to a funeral yet but I’ve been told that the wailing appears in adults during this occasion when it is socially acceptable to grieve and vent and exhaust the emotional torture and stress that builds up everyday. The kids must cry for this build up because their tears cease just as fast as they begin. Once they’re reminded of the cruelty and unfairness of their lives and let it wash away and slowly they realize the futility of crying and then stop and are happy again. The girl with the nail has forgotten that it was taken away and now she laughs and plays and I have drawn a star on her hand. This seems to please her. But sometimes it’s the crying which I’d love to console, that drives me back indoors and I begin to escape again. Sometimes being here it’s like watching a forest fire that was created by lightning, standing helplessly by with buckets of water and resources but having the inability to use them because this fire was not begun by man but by God, and if a fire is what God wants, then that must be the way. And who am I to interfere. Nature sometime must burn. If this village is representative of Africa then all of Africa is on fire. It is contained and it is controlled, but it still burns. Watching it from afar, even now as I am in the throws of it I am still not here, protected from the flames somehow as if my white skin is a retardant of some sort. Their afflictions are not yet my afflictions, but similarly, their joys are not mine either. Much like the dancing of the flames, bright and colorful, my whiteness can only reflect, not absorb.

For every celebration I am an observer, same with every illness. I know not my place yet and am uncertain if I ever will. I am afraid to share all I have because I know they will ask for more and I will not have enough. At the same time, at sometime, they have to live with me and it must be hard to do so, seeing my pens and books and what oddities they must be. To illiterate communities that knows the worth of such tools but has only the jealousy of wanting them and I not the skills yet to properly teach them the difference between wanting what I have and needing. Of course they know the difference, I am fooling myself to think that I have the answers that will serve and determine their lives. I was not here a month ago, and one day I’ll be gone. Why not give them a pen, some children are in school and need them but who gives them the pen when I’m gone? They need to get the pens themselves. That’s what we’re taught and what we believe. That’s why this fire still burns, we’re all waiting for them to put it out themselves, just as nature intended. A bolt of lightning may strike a tree and burn it down. Maybe even take down a whole forest. But it won’t burn down the whole world, that’s not in its design.

Leave man to start that fire. Only man is capable of burning down the entire world and where will we be then? Probably not too different then they are here in this village. Poor and with nothing sometimes not ever food, even though it can grow all around them, they just don’t know how to do it, how to keep it, and sustain it. And so the fire continues on a slow burn. And maybe that’s the trick. With all of the “civilized” world thrusting its power into this continent, it remains little if changed. And when the “civilized” world burns out, which it most likely will, here it will be the same. Little will change. Our lives are drastically altered when the power shuts off. Theirs when it suddenly turns on.

My mind has been going on a lot of these tangents lately. Escaping to philosophizing as if ideas will help me learn Pulaar. All that will help me is time, and so, I’m taking a break from the book learning of language comp and I’m trying to just sit here and let the language filter into my brain, through dams and roadblocks of English daydreaming and Agfo manuals and Cormac McCarthy and ipods and the other auditory barriers that I give myself to combat my days.

Work was working. My backyard was like the rest of my house, in shambles. They “fixed” the holes in my roof, my thatch roof by throwing more dried grass up there, but I can still see sky when I’m inside and that means water in the rainy season.