Polaroids

It is our last week in Bagamoyo, Tanzania. Three weeks of settling in and the last played out with a bang of activity. We scrape the barrel for every last drop, experience, image, walk, conversation, kitengue purchase. What an incompetent scribe memory is - with only room enough for the most splendid and the most wretched and so little to spare for what’s in between. It bends like copper in the fire around self perception, takes liberties under the interrogation of time and holds no loyalty to anyone. I am afraid that there is nothing sturdy in my human brain to lash those memories to, nothing to make them stay and keep them from rotting away to a few select polariods. Maybe the only way to know them someday will be to trace the way they will have carved me like a canyon, in the red, rough rock layers after all the water is dried up and gone. I hope I will be worthy enough of their then archeological narration. Just a passerby called upon to recite a great chief’s eulogy. What a shame, because there can be so much said about villages like this one and only so much time, only so many words with which to use. For now, these paragraphs and glimpses will have to suffice in the current moment and the rest to fare as best it can when thrown to the dogs of my memory.