A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Goodbye to Africa

Douala airport smothered under the heat of a hot and stormy summer night. The earth outside was sliding with mud under the stamping of the hot rain, which clapped against the windows. The storm wore on into the night, as we contorted in our seats in a pathetic attempt to stay awake and monitor our nearby bags through the night. The rows were speckled with sleeping forms but no sound came from them that could whisper above the storm. The whine of rabid mosquitos would graze our ears intermittently, but swatting is of little use when sleep is tugging you numbly away from your body. No concern for our bags or malaria could keep me fully awake now. Hours and more hours waned on toward early morning. This was our last night in Africa.

Right around 1pm, as expected underfoot of the rain, the power cut and the airport terminal swam instantly in darkness. The Africans around us didn’t stir or exclaim, so usual and everyday was this occurrence to us now. In the sweltering darkness, under the overture of lightning bursts, we recounted our past months on the continent and waited for a slow-drip departure back to a world that so few here would ever see. The fatigue of those many months made my teeth chatter in the wet-hot heat of the buzzing room. The figures of those I had met and the moments we had spent together made me question myself - my origins, my former life, my reality and that of the world over. The seen and the unseen. The known and the very, very unknown. And still. I slept.

The yellow sands of Bagamoyo with its sticky coconut breeze and smooth, oily, delicious bread. Tanzania’s oasis of friends, western and African, who made room in their sun-baked lives for us. Saved us from naivete, from boredom, from disease when we might not have saved ourselves. The empty school room full of our 30 primary school kids holding hands in a circle, who, led quietly by the lovely voice of their new Tanzanian teacher, erupted into a full chorus of giggles and song. Each one lit-up and big in the eyes and bobbing their heads in ecstatic enjoyment. It may have been a little out of key sung by six-year-old voices, but it was an Aria to me. I could hear them still now, in my half awake state of sleep. And remember the weight of my Josephine’s soft little head in my lap during storytime. It had been months since I had seen her and it would be a whole lifetime before I did again, which meant most likely never. And even if I did, she might not remember. All she might see of me then would be old and white and unfamiliar. But in this lucid dream in a dark airport under the watch of another tropical storm, I can grasp that eye-welling spark of what I imagine it might be like to be a mother.

The crunching snows of Kilimanjaro came to me next, of which I have yet to write down in words. The high moon in its clear, dark doorway watching over us as we crawled toward the summit. My small breath that came less and less, my lungs that were filled with the fluid of illness, my head that was afraid for where on the ascent I would give out, and my heart that liquefied in sheer desire to reach the top. Now we are on our way back from the frozen and lifeless eyelid of the summit, skirting the black and icy rim of the crater. We are beginning our descent just as we watch the thin lip of the horizon spread slightly with pink and then split with orange as the sun begins to rise. When I saw the crest of its red-orange head break over Kenya, I knew I had really made it. Just in time to be sick behind a rock.

Late night laughter with friends in Uganda. The grating voices of the roosters and the children playing in their bucket baths outside. A night dancing feverishly and foolishly until the early morning hours in Kampala. Dust rising around our boda boda motorcycle as it winds around the dirt roads and through the rambling bush on our way to the next town - an unruly and freeing experience worth smiling about. Cold baths from a bucket, crouched in a lutrine whenever there was water. The bright expressive faces, unhearing cries and loving arms of the deaf children at the little school a few miles down the red road, their eyes clinging to every detail. The unknown little patch of sandy earth where they live under the sun, a place that I was both honored and aghast to visit. They run through my dream just as they did in life, springing with joy on bare feet during a silent but happy game. They have defined for me the barest, most essential meaning of life - and proved that it can be lived without words, without things or without means. But hardly without friends. Gargoyle storm clouds out over the open hills of Uganda, ready to fall.

Relief and rest in Rwanda. Silent towns gathered in annual mourning over the remembering blooms of a 17th spring. The glittering pool of Hotel Rwanda, Kigali city lights reflected in its smooth and uninterrupted visage. A long journey through the green hills that never stop growing.

Cameroon at last. Rows and rows of sweet palms and great green plantains. Grey, rocky foot paths down to school and taxis stuffed with strangers whipping through the rain toward the coast. The bath-warm water of the sea, rolling over your ears as you lay under its gentle tides, black sand rolling up to the mainland. Classrooms of faces - if only I could remember each one. Malaria. Cold, sweaty malaria. Nights awake listening to the dogs fight and waiting for dawn. Cold drinks with friends in town on a hot and humid school night. Bus rides galore, watching the wooden market shacks pass. More storms in the night - the growling trumpets of the coming rainy season. And now, the end.

The power clicked back on and dim lights flooded Douala airport, chasing darkness and memory from the wire bench that had riddled me with wiry red sleep marks. Slowly, people began to line up in wait for the opening of check-in. This morning, our plane would inch out into the world in darkness and turn its nose toward our own world, that world glittering in lights, loves and small cruelties that were waiting to receive us. Would we follow it without thinking and never turn back to our current selves, these phantoms in transit between what we used to believe we were and what we aren’t so sure about now? Will we run, tired and thin, into its freeway arms under its skyscraper gaze and go right back to the way we were before? Warm showers, ready food, clean bed sheets, fine wine, new jobs - would these newfound delights soon become just daily assumptions for the unthinkingly privileged? What would we say to the friends we missed for so many months - or would words desert us? What would it feel like to belong again?

We walk side by side down the long, half-dark and empty hall to the Gate. Unsteady and unsure but full of new inquiries. Throwing ourselves on our futures and hoping for the best.

Dictionary of a Dream

There is a pale light leaking through the curtains—legs of the leftover sunset dripping down the walls. I am at my usual post, one foot in front of the standing fan. Thank you God for reliable electricity in this place. Tin roofs, furrowed at the edges, slide into one another gently outside. Fat-fingered palm trees exhale happily in silhouette. My bare feet hang off the foot of the bed, a foot or two above a concrete floor.

Nothing in Africa holds its breath at night. I adore the carefully fringed houses of my neighborhood in Colorado - the sound of new spring winds from the high country and cars crunching through freshly plowed snow. But there is something tight around the throat when night falls, when everyone waves and goes into their big houses and no sound seems to make it out of there. In winter, even the trees stop their blustering and all heartbeats go underground. But here…here everything has a voice, especially after dark. Doors are open without screens, cooking smells carry, lush trees and gardens squirrel with activity. If it isn’t the dogs woowoowoo-ing each other or the rooster crowing well before dawn just to get a headstart, then it’s the crashing rain on the tin roof, preceded by unseparated rolls of thunder for hours. And if you manage to sleep past dawn, then the mothers and small children of the entire continent will do you the honor - cheerfully muckity mucking to each other, singing low and lovely as they hand wash their laundry and squawking to their children about this or that in between beautiful breaths of the morning. The early evenings are the quietest when everyone sweats out a day's worth of hot sun on their backs and enjoys the breeze frothing up from the sea.

This evening is such an evening. Just like the last and most likely just like the next. The American in me sometimes gets so bored I could read a physics textbook in one night. But then again, that is the same me that runs around in high boots trying to please everyone at once and holding my breath the whole time while doing it. I like that about myself – always burning up like hot oil over this thing or that which I'm hoping will lead to something meaningful. Crunching whatever sanity I have left between my teeth just trying to be something I can be proud of. Chasing everyone else's tail in the search of what I can work to the ground until it taps and feel like I made people's lives better. Something I deem worthy of remembering. But frankly, I’m surprised I’m not downright purple after 27 years of it. And like I said. Nothing holds its breath at night in Africa.

Tonight I am thinking about writing while I’m doing it. Trying not to delete some things that look imperfect to me and just feeling it flow out of me like hot boiling water through a metal strainer. Sometimes when I finish a book I feel jealous. Isn’t that funny? Every time I read a good line, part of me gobbles it up and wants to shake the author's hand—and the other thinks, damn, it should have been mine. Reading the author's biography is the hardest part. Especially if she was some hidden gem, some accountant or librarian that suddenly produced this golden egg with a Penguin Publisher stamp on it and now the world wants to know every little thought she ever had, everything she ever wrote and every fleeting feeling that passed over the pages of her life. I'm sure it sounds silly, ironic and rather obstinate to you to hear this. Those closest to me tell me I'd have a better chance of someday writing something worthwhile if I'd just get off my fanny (or get on it, in this case) and write more often. Of course they are 100% right. No one to blame except, well, you know who. Funny how cheeky one little dream can be.

See, I've been wanting to be a writer since I was five. You think I'm kidding. But I wanted to be a writer and an illustrator. The library at my public elementary school bought a little miniature book binding machine. And I was in the library pretty much anytime I could be. It was half to hide from the little boy I'd had a one-day handhold with who thereafter stalked me like an alcoholic ex-husband just out of prison (seriously, that guy was scary, even at the age of eight) and half because I was the smallest, shyest girl in school. Sounds like the perfect introvert turned dazzling young writer story, doesn’t it? Don’t get too comfortable. As I said, this machine – you could write and illustrate your own little story on printer paper and choose the patent leather color of your book's binding. Then after a few days, the library would hand you your very own book. And your name stenciled into the fake leather on the front cover, sunk into it like this product was yours forever. Wow, this was neat. I mentioned earlier that I grew up in an affluent, middle class town. Read therein that while inner city kids were on the subway selling candy to buy a three ring binder, I was fancying around pumping out my own little bound books faster than I could write them. I'd of course been encouraged to write since the day I was born, every story and picture I produced was treated like it was the Iliad of the 1990s. Not exactly the rags to riches story that gives many writers that knuckle-biting hunger, destined to be laid bare on finger-tingling pages within the kind of masterpieces we can only salivate over. This I know. But I remember those productions with more pride than I do any of my more recent professional achievements. Receiving every last one of them hot off the press was like getting married every month of the year. Nobody but me ever read them. But all of my little heart was in ‘em. And I guess in life, that’s all that really matters. That and how many hearts you have at your disposal for throwing into things like that.

Through high school and middle school I took my writing underground, lined up in secret stacks of bad poetry in my room. I liked keeping it away from the world because it knew me well by then. Knew me just how I wanted to be known. And it made me feel bigger, stronger than myself. Kept me from disintegrating into doubt or worst yet, complete silence. It had the worst job of all - being the keeper of the ugliest of secret feelings, none of which I knew how to label yet.

In college, it didn’t take me long to put the ingredients of the old dream back together into life again. I went at it hard again, bolstered by academic encouragement and post-pubescent confidence. I majored in writing in college and even though the critique workshops were like fingernails in my eyes, doing it was the only thing I could do every single day and feel all filled up. Never got sick of it. Not sure if I got any better at it. But that’s the nature of the beast. When it came time to graduate, I applied to every prestigious writing grad school program I could. Which of course is only a handful. I handcrafted, edited and reedited the short story for the applications. It was about a wild-hearted Latina and a stiff-lipped white southerner. Id never been to Louisiana. But I described it anyway as I imagined it. I saw pieces of my self in that story like I was looking back at my life in the sideview mirror. At all these new and interesting angles. I loved the characters, I loved the setting, I wanted to KNOW them. It was my best and I hoped that was enough. Colombia and NYU, of course, didn’t think so. So when a local company in my hometown offered their writing intern/restaurant hostess a job in marketing, I traded the dirty kitchen flats for high heels and hit the office, without thinking about it too much. Given the choice between making a decent salary to write press releases and going to graduate school in my hometown, the only place that had accepted me, I guess I chose what seemed most reasonable. They always said in my writing workshops, “write what you know”. At the time, I suppose I figured I didn’t yet know enough.  And who knew, I loved business too.  I liked business the way I like really honest and frank people – sometimes their blunt, objective observations can sting a little and won’t ever make them good at politics , but at least you always know exactly what they are thinking. The dream changed then – opened bigger at its edges to be just four words. Write for a reason. Make it matter. Book, blog, or newsletter…whatever.

Five years later. I am in Africa, sitting like a human crescent moon on the bed. My face is arching toward the fan with the heat of the laptop making my belly sweat. After a big move to New York City to carve out a new life, it seemed I had changed so much that writing was the only thing I still had in common with my old self. The monologue running in my head non stop just the way I’d write it down, with unacceptably long fragment sentences and far too many adjectives. So when my brother got sick and we all played the role of crisis negotiator for the 12 months that death held him hostage, it came out like a broken sewage pipe. The writing was a way to pass that terrible time, to feel the feelings from outside myself, a reprieve but also an ode to the experience in hopes of never becoming a eulogy. I thought for a while that this would be the story it was my earthly job to tell. This would be the turn the words had been waiting to take. But when he thank heaven recovered and escaped certain death with his life - by the skin of western medicine’s teeth I might add - it became clear that it was a story that belonged only to him. Not only that, but I wasn’t sure that I could hem in the feelings satisfactorily in a controlled environment of 200 pages, or handle the subject safely from the distance of a writer’s stethoscope. Cancer had changed him and it had changed us too. It wasn’t so easy as I had hoped to turn that into something we could all sign our names to and blow off like an eyelash from a fingertip.

I left my job in the silver tower over Ground Zero and started again. Yes one more time, this time with a backpack in Africa. I came here to volunteer, learn and crack open my heart wide, but most of all I came to write. People kept telling me it would be the inspiration for that book that was coming to me. This, they said and I told myself, was surely a story I could tell safely and passionately. Bringing global paradox to light and singing in a million unheard voices. Excavating everything in need of empathy and forcing it under the nose of the unconscious world.

There are nearly two weeks left in my trip to Africa. In an effort not to bore you, I wont list the things I learned, only highlight a few of the biggest ones in passing. Life is much smaller and shorter than any of us ever thought. Nobody gets out alive and so going out laughing instead of going out crying is a more enjoyable approach. Doing something that you love alongside someone that you love is an even bigger gift than living a long life. Home is where your heart is, which is not always where you are. True friends are everywhere. Life dreams are like teenagers - they only turn out alright if you let them grow and change their clothes a million times until you hardly recognize them. But you knew all this already.

I may not have helped the human race all that much - and whose to say it needed help, let alone mine. But I sure have come to respect it more. Respect in a love/hate kind of way. Which is the true nature of respect, I guess. If you’ve never seen a little something to hate in someone that you love, then you don’t love them all that well. After all these months, I’m sad to admit, there is no book, not even a short story. I don’t want to write a book about Africa. Africa doesn’t need me to write their stories - it is a job that I am highly unqualified for, from my small seat in the global amphitheatre. I respect the people I have met enough to realize I don’t really know them, their country and their lives - not to the level that they do. And the ultimate disrespect to anything or anyone is thinking you know what you can’t possibly. But sometimes, deeply sincere respect is good enough. And what’s more - I don’t even know if a book is what I will write at all. Its not the book binding or the cover art that I’m writing for.

So I will return these months later with pen in hand and ready to walk back into the life I was born into. With all its warts and childish misconceptions, I still love my country in that love/hate kind of way. Even watching it do what it always does, swipe at the world with a big clumsy paw like the biggest kid in the sandbox. This is who we are and we are always changing. I too am changed. A little younger, a little older. A little happier despite myself to walk into the arms of my friends and family. To take a seat back in my very small section of the global audience, from which perch everything on the universal stage of life will look just a little different to me from now on. That’s enough for me. Book or no book.

And as for what to write or do next - I’ll just have to wait and see what change tomorrow has in store for me. But this time, I won’t hold my breath while waiting for it to sweep me up in its current. As if in response to these words as I write them, the massive theatre of the African sky yolks up with night clouds and starts an overture of lighting flashes. A new storm is coming - coming for me.

Circle of Life: The Untold Story

The pig hit the ground, stunned, and the red dust rose around it. The heads on the old bus swiveled in unison out the dusty back window. Stiff from arching my shoulders forward without the room to straighten them and my knees mashed into the wall of the bus, I struggled to turn enough for a clean view. It took a few moments to register as the driver rushed out into the red dirt road and crept up behind the pig, which sat dumbfounded and wide eyed on its haunches in a swirl of diesel exhaust and dust. At first I thought it had been in the road and we hit it. This curdled my throat. But then, I realized as the entire bus erupted into laughter and pigeon English, that it had been tied to the top of the bus with the luggage and the plantain bunches as cargo and had come crashing off as we sped around a turn.

Blood ran down its pink nose and it made no effort to escape as the driver approached but instead eyed us dolefully from afar. The roof was a good twenty feet high and we’d been thrashing around that dusty turn. The young pig made a good effort to casually gander off but it didn’t look to have the strength to run. The driver dove for its hind leg and carried it back to the bus, dangling its bloodied body from one leg while it squealing pitifully. It was then tossed up to the roof and lashed to it once again with a strap. The bus roared as the driver put us into gear and the sun hit on its hottest midday high note.

Its not often that those of us from the first world think about the source of things. The source of our water, our power, our food, our clothes. And all that is by design of course, because if we appreciated the source of things we use, we probably wouldn’t use or buy as much of it. I myself am a first class second-hand consumer. All I care about is what I get when I buy something that has reached the shelf but thinking any farther back into its history than that just irritates my conscience. I’ve been lucky to visit this continent because that, I can promise you, will change for me in the future. Maybe not so much the reality of my consumption habits as my thoughtfulness for what I consume and who made it. After all, sometimes it’s the thought that counts.

In Africa we have seen all kinds of interesting things that tend to stay out of sight in our own country, only one of which is the live animals grazing just nearby that end up on our dinner plates. If you want chicken or goat meat, you have to buy one from a local farm. You have to see it alive, kill it yourself, clean it and cook it over an open fire. If you want vegetables, you buy them from a local who grew it behind their house. What you eat is therefore much limited to what is growing or living nearby at the moment and so you don’t complain much for lack of variety. When it rains very little or very much, the power shuts off, most of which comes from fragile hydroelectric sources. When there is no money to build an efficient water infrastructure (or even when there is), you’ll be trekking with yellow jugs to the local spring to hand-carry everything from bath to cooking to drinking water. Kids as young as five can be seen with a jug in each hand bigger than they are on their way back from the spring each morning. And if you are unlucky like our current town, then things like cholera epidemics are a dark reminder of the source - or lack thereof - of everyday things. When there are no mystery trucks that come by like the tooth fairy in the early morning to collect your trash, you simply pile it in your yard and burn it. Sure burning plastic is a carcinogen but it will kill you a lot slower than unsanitary diseases living in rotting garbage outside your house. However inconvenient these things are when they are visible, they are also very real. The real causes and effects of human life, just like the life of anything else on earth.

In general, its difficult to see how most Africans treat animals. In fact, most of the time its downright disturbing. Barefoot children throwing rocks at their dogs for enjoyment while adults lead the way by kicking and beating their dogs until they become both skiddish and mean. I cried once at the deaf school for young children watching them mistreat their dog, who endured the kicks and punches like a silent martyr before following behind them obediently back up to the schoolhouse. I welled up and smacked the hands of the children who had hit the dog, but they looked up at me confused and hurt as to why this strange white person would be angry at them for doing what their teachers do every day. Dogs are things not people, right? And pigs are only food. The irony was sad and painful from a group of kids who are forgotten and stepped upon themselves by their own communities because they cant hear. Every day in Uganda we had the pleasure of hearing a pig get killed next door, the sound of which will haunt my every nightmare until the day I die--and here they do it much more humanely then they do it in secret at home. A dozen live chickens tied together at the neck hung upside down and carried on the back of a motorcycle on a bumpy highway. Cardboard crates of small yellow chicks stacked on top of one another on the ferry to Zanzibar with their tiny beaks bleating pathetically all at once. Goats tied to a foot of rope cowering under a banana leaf in desperation for shade from the midday African sun. These are things, and much worse, that I know for a fact happen in our own country. And it seems to me that the only way we Americans can afford to differentiate the treatment of our pets from the treatment of the animals we eat is by not having to see it before it ends up on our plate as a rack of lamb. But seeing it as a part of everyday life, seeing it as a source and a real live being, is a little harder to ignore. At least for me. And in that way maybe Africans are doing it right - earning the right to eat what they kill. At least they are consistent. The moral quagmire of it all can be hard for we westerners. And while the rest of that bus was laughing at the everyday comical nature of a pig falling off the roof, something in that pig’s eyes got right up in my throat and choked me. Because in my opinion, everything living deserves a little dignity. Even if it has to die.

I don’t see myself as an activist, a tree hugger (well, maybe), or a weirdo and Im certainly not about to throw red paint on someone coming out of Bergdorf’s. I don’t think that everyone should be a vegetarian, buy only used clothes or stop living life the way we want to, because the first thing you learn in Africa is that people gotta live and the circle of life is more than just a great Disney anthem to this great continent. But I do think that a little more respect is due from all of us here at the top of the food chain, the economic chain and the overall state-of-the-world chain. Even if its just a moment at the grocery counter, a moment over a bite of food, or a moment in the seat of our car to think about who it was that cut, cleaned, packaged and shipped it to our doorstep for us. To think about the massive global spider web hanging from the walls of our world stringing us all along together. Every small vibration is absorbed by its invisible fibers but still, on some level, it is felt by all.

Lost and Not Yet Found

I don’t write much lately. Not altogether sure why. But in times like these. When the hot breeze outside the lowlit window. Dies on the ledge before it reaches my outspread toes. When I search for meaning and pride and one unselfish desire. When there is no clock on the wall to tick down the minutes I spend idle and impotent to do anything. Anything truly useful. This is when I write for real. Not for rent or for recognition. Not for redemption or ruin. But just to right the horizon when I am awash in the world, my cabins filling with its waves and my stern making eyes with Davy Jones.

When you were a child, were you ever lost in a grocery store? Running from isle to isle of towering boxes and bottles, iron teeth of metal carts and frosty freezers full of fake food. You just slipped away from your mother to examine a box of sugar cereal and before you know it, she is gone. A bright and interesting world it is, a grocery store to a child. Canyons of treats, colors, costumes, donuts to be bitten into and boxes to be hidden in. Other children around every corner to be taken in. Misty rainstorms over the vegetable counters to be danced in. But now, now you have strayed from your mothership. The isles seem higher and even less interested in you than inanimate objects could have been before. Carts don’t see you and run over your toes. You can’t reach the best and brightest things on the shelf from your measly height. The rainstorms leave you damp and cold. The other mothers are too busy buying with their own children to want to be yours. Suddenly you feel as if the dog food healthy cereal you have at home would do just fine for the rest of your life if you could only find the one who gives it to you in the morning. The only option now is crying and waiting for someone to notice you to take you to the customer service counter and mispronounce your name over the loudspeaker. You are a big, bad, brave six year old. A million miles from land and blubbering like a baby.

It seems you are never too old for this feeling. Never too brave or brazen. Captain of your ship on the sea of your life, there are sweltering dolldrums, triton storms, smash-rock shores or days of cabin fever, that will bring you to the brink once you seek them out. A mutinous wind is blowing and sending you so far off course that you wonder what you set off looking for in the first place. The world is a jungle and maybe you just can’t handle it. Are ‘helping people’ or ‘making a difference’ relative terms? What did you really mean by them? You thought you could fix the pain of the world? Who did you think you were anyway? Maybe you should just go back to your palace in your half-blind country and chalk it up to naivete. You spent most your life getting here and maybe you’ll spending the rest of your life back at home learning to live with yourself for being born. Spread eagle on the bed, sweating all the experiences and feelings and wonderings and loneliness and paradoxes of the last few months, heck the last 26 years, out of every pore. There is no loudspeaker. Sometimes your name doesn’t sound like yours. Even when you see its every wart, your home cart, your home country, your mother, feel very far away. How long can you stay wandering among the isles before you notice how lost you are?

Reflections on Status

About status. What is it, exactly? How does it define every one of us in some way? How is it that we should spend our lives looking for it, abusing it, cursing it, observing the world through its unseeing eyes. From the beginning of time, even the first societies and clans were organized into had and had nots. And today, its not too much of a leap to say that everyone you know has one - and walks around in society according to it daily. Our statuses are like our pointy-eared dopplegangers that follow us around and either pull us along on a societal leash or trip us under our feet. Status has many forms, some of which disguise themselves as things like personality - your job, family, education, skin color, age, gender, neighborhood, speech patterns, marriage, hobbies, beliefs, you name it, can all be a status. All of which can be related or completely unrelated to who you really are, but usually status has your number because of its great influence on your daily life. Deny it you might, but it follows you everywhere without asking and it wont leave until you do. Its like plasma to your hemoglobin and it requires a painful and sometimes impossible psychological surgery to extract your true identity from your status. Usually, scraps of old status remain always, even when status changes. And learning to live honestly along with whatever you think your status is, well, that can be a bit of a Descartian process. No one can really tell you what your status is - that’s something you and society negotiate together based on your perception and those around you. But ultimately, you know you have one. And illusory and ambiguous as it might seem, ignoring it as an important piece of your path to self discovery means it can eventually have its way with you. And then you wont recognize the difference between you and it. This thing you will always have but never own. Haven’t you heard, being born is going blind. And then spending your years learning how to see again. In my experience, most of the time this means learning what you are not in order to find out what you are…underneath the tender tissues of your status.

If you think that there is a society on earth that doesn’t operate based on status, then you are most likely wrong. For some, the status might look pretty different than what your society has chosen. In Africa, having fair skin and many children is a sign of status. In the states, its being carefully tanned  from a vacation in the Bahamas and having a job that may or may not leave you time for children. In Africa, feeding and refreshing any expected or unexpected guests with beverage and a meal is a necessity and one of the most basic cultural curricula, even if you are poor and have little. The cable guy will join you for dinner after he works. In general, you are always very welcome. It does not matter what or how few clothes you have, but when you come to church they should be clean and well-ironed. Who you know matters. And in a country of vast corruption from the bottom rungs all the way up to the top, it’s sometimes the only thing that matters. We watched a well-known journalist friend of ours shout down a local policeman aiming to intimidate Scott out of his camera with one or two important names, which were enough to bring about the shame of the first testament. A very gravely mistaken judge of character on the part of the policeman and it showed on his face. But it was clear, had we not been with such a man of social stature, we would be filling out a very expensive claim for travel insurance. Who you know is just as important back home of course - but has a little less of a visibly sharp edge on a day to day basis. When traveling in Africa, being white has a meaning unto itself that I never thought about before - one that brings me right round into the face of my doppleganger, my inherited status. In most cases, our stories, opinions, financial situation or even our purpose for being here is irrelevant. Our white skin blinds like the sun on a white-hot summer day. If we don’t know someone very well, and sometimes even when we do, let them believe whatever they might about us because nothing is likely to change that perception. The children we don’t know love to come “touch the white man” (its woman, if you please), they sneak a feel of my hair or just stare blankly at us and when I reach out for their little hand, they withdraw it as if I were a ghost. And I am. I am a ghost. I am  “a white” who has wandered too far from my country and bleeding the same color blood as those around us to them seems sometimes impossible. And you of course cant blame them. They are friendly, curious, welcoming and smiling, glad to have you on their front porch sharing a drink. But it’s a hard realization that many don’t really want to get to know YOU. They just want to know a white. They want to shake hands with your doppleganger. One that is so different, so vastly far from the life they know, that they cant imagine having such a person as a real friend. And after you’ve taken a long hard look at that doppleganger, and another one in the mirror as your mind starts to pick pieces of your privileged life apart in an effort to make sense of who you are, after all that, you realize you can’t blame them one bit. Your people would probably do the very same. Because status at first sight always commands the conversation. And only later, once you really spend time with someone very different than you, taking pains to strip away the layers and stop blinking into the blinding light of status indicators, then you can really start to see the smoldering candle glow of who they really are, the one that burns so steady and warm underneath it all. Maybe you can start to see your own. Getting there is a challenge, and when you do, be cautious - status still controls the laws of motion for everyone on earth, like streetlights at an intersection. But the glimpses are more fun than every neon light in Vegas.

St. Anthony's secret

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and it was only out of polite obligation that we didn’t cancel on our new friend Jonas. But went we did. And as the equatorial sun moved toward afternoon, we made our way down the dusty red road out of town. It was true, a more beautiful day you would be hard pressed to find the whole worldwide. Sunny and breezy with shadows just now starting to flicker over the road. Soon we were leaving our hilly haven far behind and descending down into the heat of the open African bush.

I had to admit, I was not at all prepared. Startled even. St. Anthony’s school was a few squat brick structures with holes for doors wide open to the rolling grasslands surrounding. Sand, paling in the sun, covered everything in view. It had become hot and sweat was on our backs. They came to meet us in the neck of the path after we turned off the road - a whole pack of them, faces turned upward into a burning sun and big baby-toothed gaps for smiles. Their little hands reaching up to us, clasping our fingers and thumbing our shirts. What was left of their too large, dusty old clothes were drooping down their chests and off their shoulders. All sets of curious eyes were on us and we were - for the moment - the very center of the universe. Expressive little sounds replaced words and signaled their excitement. “How are you?” they signed.

All were deaf and none could speak. A few had known speech as small children and from them you could sometimes catch a word in their sounds, like “mama”. Some had been deaf from birth. Untreated malaria or other fevers had claimed the hearing of the rest and for an unlucky few, took other pieces of the brain too. Uganda had too many hearing and speaking children to educate and to-be adults to find work for already, so it had no use for these children. Their parents didn’t know what else to do with them or how to communicate with them. So they were sent here - a small school for the deaf funded by small donations of churchgoers and what little guilt-money the government would drop. Orphans of functional society. This Sunday in particular had been a very special day - parent visiting day. Out of 36 children, 6 parents came.

But this did not keep them from smiling this afternoon. Within a few steps of our arrival, we were mobbed by children, and all our hands actively held. As we took a tour of the school, we were flanked by barefoot escorts who were walking through the brush in order to stay right at our sides. We saw the vegetable gardens where they worked to raise a little money of their own and the well that had been overrun with red mud. We saw the bunkbed dorms where they slept, mosquito nets full of holes and little old suitcase at the foot of each bed not much bigger than a lunchbox or just a few plastic bags - their belongings were not so numerous as to require much more. We saw the classrooms where they learned to write and to sign. More importantly, they were learning small trades and skills - ones that could perhaps someday allow them an income for themselves. Every last child knew how to work - garden, carry large jugs of water, lift a spade as soon as they were able. We took group pictures of them and loved to see themselves afterward - marked by a series of signs we didn’t understand and subtle squeals. We let them play with whatever things we had on us - an umbrella, a ponytail holder, a watch - and all were of immeasurable fascination and enjoyment. And then, we all went out back to play.

What kind of things can one play in a big empty field when no one can hear or speak? Answer = almost anything. The favorite game when the mzungus came was to be swung around by the wrists so that their little feet were airborn and their heads thrown back in happiness. Some of the older boys had set up a hurdle of sorts made out of sticks and they were competing jumping over it. There were backflips and handstands and cartwheels, ranging from impressive gymnastics to imitative tumbling and somersaulting in the grass by the little ones. These were the things you can practice when you don’t have toys or Tvs or sports equipment. In an effort to divert a fight between four children who wanted to hold my only two hands, I started ring around the rosie but without the song - they would just watch me eagerly for when it was ready to “fall down”.  Oh this, this was a good game. And it showed on their faces - exploding with excitement and suspense, fixed on my every move so as to leap into the air when it was time to go round again. With children, it seems that one little smiling face can sometimes expand to three times its normal size when having fun. And African children especially get these huge happy eyes and this incredible irrepressible expression - that when fixed on you is perhaps the greatest gift anyone ever gave you. Nothing was too simple to be thoroughly explored and enjoyed. And when that got boring, something else would surely present itself, in whatever form the spindly African bush and its white visitors would provide. They rarely cried when scraped - which happened often in bare feet. Instead some would cry sporatically in an exaggerated fashion in order to be picked up and held. For these young ones, being held in the arms of an adult no doubt happened rarely if ever. So we obliged them, we the big white santa clauses coming to town.  Yes, we were the headlining entertainment for the day. And tomorrow, surely there would be something else, if you knew how to look for it.

Soon it was time to go. The evening storms were coming and could be heard roiling in the distance. Time to make the long walk back up the hill before dusk. Goodbye was a non-event. No cries or fits,  just a smile and a wave. Loss was normal, goodbyes quite usual and everyday attachments far too fragile to fuss about. Come back soon, said Father Anthony, one of the three hearing and speaking adults helping run the school. Yes, we said. Couldn’t wait.

Three hours earlier, I had arrived, broken my own heart over the scene and cried quietly all over their little heads. Children of a society that never wanted to know them, who didn’t even have the words to express what that must feel like. No toys, no parents, no clothes or shoes to ease the pain. But when I left, I dare say, I felt quite cheerful. Quite happy indeed. They had infected me. Set me straight for that second. Shared their secret, one that not even most poor Ugandans knew. A secret that we could never fully unravel or take home with us. A gift from your God to his “forsaken” that none of the “saved” could know. That life is not worth waiting for. Promises not worth making. Comfort and convenience not worth knowing. The future not worth planning. Because without all those things, even without hearing, the metric system of life measures only in moments. These ones. Right. Now. Not even memories are worth more than a few shillings. Life is pennies in a pond - out of reach as currency but so very pretty when the sun catches them like that under those gliding, glittering ripples.

Killing Time in the Serengeti

We lost sight of her in the tall grass. Straining, we struggled to keep our binoculars to our eyes, like a bunch of khaki possums waiting for sundown. She was there. We had seen her watch the herd of wilder beast from afar on a rock, seen her slink into the grass in a C shape and into a ditch so as to avert their collective eye. For nearly an hour we had followed her, just a tiny shadowy speck among the high grass as she moved inch by inch closer to the herd, stopping every few steps to avoid being seen. The endlessly, flat wheaty Serengeti grasses cloaked her effortlessly - she disappeared and reappeared like a ghost or a mirage through tepid night air. But it was noon. The heat waves showed themselves on the flats.  The few clouds served little practical purpose other than an impressive aesthetic one and offered little protection. You could count the trees and bushes for miles and you wouldn’t even make it to ten. The rest - a wide and perfectly flat spaghetti plain, itself transfixed on that huge peacock sky. The grasses as they waved in the dusty breeze made subtle patterns if you looked closely, circles of fading green and darker brown, waving yellow, and it was these that made her tawny head virtually vanish underneath the breeze.

Close to an hour dragged on now. We knew she was interested. She had been watching the wildebeest herd ever since we spotted her and had now she flanked them like an ambushing army, just her ears showing from time to time. She drew ever closer, even as she stopped to lie down below the grass for minutes on end to keep out of their sight. We scratched, swatted at flies, muttered to each other, contemplated the sky and tried to keep the binoculars steady in our hands as we waited to catch another glimpse of her. Only three jeeps left now, the rest had gone to ogle the male lions lounging by a tree a few miles away in the shade. A few wildebeest strayed from the herd. Right about then, she disappeared from view. We were sure that this was the time. She would pounce at any moment. There was one, so close within her clutches it had wandered all by itself. But still nothing. She was either stalking or sleeping. Too hard to tell which from this distance. Her patience showed her hunger. More minutes passed.

All at once it was on. She leapt from her keep and the herd of wildebeest panicked. A whoop rose from the jeeps like a hunting call as we watched her latch onto the front of her target - a large, stray wildebeest. The struggle that ensued was fierce and from a distance looked almost like a passionate dance. The lioness pawing for the neck as the wildebeest bucked for its life face to face with its fate. Our guides in the three jeeps were speaking hurriedly in Swahili until finally, without a thought, our guide pulled the jeep off the road and out across the plain toward the two, locked in their fateful battle. Standing in the back of the open jeep, careening at full speed over the prairie under that full breath of sky, I felt a rush of freedom - like I myself was a part of the race for life.

A cloud of dust had risen, lioness and wildebeest taking their turns at fate. One moment she was up hanging at its side on a ride for her prize and the next she had fallen under it, her feet tumbling in the air in an effort to bring it down. Desperation in every step of the dance, knowing every twirl was just inches from the edge of the universal stage. Both for their lives. She for another day of many without food and he for just seconds now, squalling in the dust of his fleeing herd. He was too strong for her to get a good grasp by the throat and so the fight came hoof to the tooth and both would go down fighting.

At last, as the jeeps leapt into the tall grasses where they struggled, she sunk her teeth around his muzzle and brought him with a creaking groan to the dust. Our jeeps crowd around her as she grips him with her paws and holds his muzzle firmly in her jaws. He was too strong to break around the neck. So, panting, she will suffocate him to death. His great black body weight was heaving beneath her paws. His black eyes rolling in their last terrible meeting in this life. His swelling belly still rising and falling in desperate last breaths. He shuddered as the air backs into his body. She held fast and tight, her jaws clenched around his face. He knew death was on him and he made a last, resigned effort with his legs. His suffering, from a Toyota jeep loaded with white-clad tourists snapping photos of his death throes, is almost unbearable to watch. Alive is this being we are watching like a reality TV show heaving in the labor of his last moments at the hands of a frantically hungry lioness. Oozing blood from the puncture wounds in his side, he is like a great king brought to the scaffold as his horns hit the ground and his eyes flare with fear and a searing suffering. Snap go the cameras. All of us, three jeeps in the middle of the Serengeti plain, bore witness to the ritual, a whole truckload of French children narrating it with flippant quips and airplane noises, and a walkie talkie radio hemming in the background. Death is so godless.

Exhausted, the lioness was panting heavily from the effort, her body heaving and her veins popping from her skin. Beads of sun ran down her golden fur when she moved. The jeeps had her almost surrounded now, like a pack of vultures were, within 10 feet of her and her kill. She glared hopelessly from one jeep to the other. There was no shade or tall grass for miles and the noon sun scorching our forearms. She looked desperate to drag her prey somewhere safe. But there was no where to go and no liberties to be taken as these three strange objects threatened the kill she so badly needed. She stood over the dead wildebeest, tongue almost completely from her mouth in exhaustion and heat. But her eyes darted from one human to the next in the trucks, asking us what we wanted and warning us from her hard earned meal. They were enough to shame a monk, those eyes, pupils almost disappeared completely in burning prairie fire as they looked at you. She was afraid and she was exhausted. All we could hear was the wind in the grass and her heavy breathing as she blinked her yellow eyes into the sun as if they led to the center of the earth. Many times she attempted to drag the prey a few feet, fruitlessly away from the jeeps, before she once again bent to pant in the sun. I flooded in shame, like a scantily dressed intruder in a place of devout worship. Something was sacred here and we had exploded upon it without grace. Like intruding on two lovers of great vitality and purpose. It had been a dance of brutality, beauty, achievement and loss. And an awful thing to behold.  It left me feeling singed with its violence and its sincerity and its desperation. She has no mercy and yet she is not a demon. In all her glory, she is already absolved.

One by one the jeeps departed. The smoke rose from the drama that had been taken to that holy ground and life on the prairie moved on in silence. And we left her to her great plain, disappearing from view, a tawny, panting speck among the tides of the Serengeti grasses. 

The Lady of the Lions

“Look,” he stopped us dead in our jaunt and pointed to a clearing in the spindly high prairie grass that bore powder-white soda sand. He smiled jubilantly with his brown-flecked teeth and swatted a fly from his forehead. “Lion tracks. And dey are barey fresh.” We knitted our eyebrows; suddenly our casual early morning stroll through the national park savanna seemed to us to have gone on long enough already. Hadn’t we seen enough anyhow? If you count one hyena and one stray warthog. Naturally at this point, I stopped looking for the overly aggressive Egyptian cobras our young guide was just telling us about (“as beeg as your arm”) in the grass and started searching the bushes for lions. This walk was really going swell. But Kelvin, our guide, had that ethereal, possessed look in his eyes that the locals get when talking about the great animals that walk these grasslands, and said with a hypnotized, nonchalant smile, “Lion still here. We heard voice of lion in staff quarters last night.”

Back on the public porch at camp, we were headed back to our canvas bungalow, when she routed us off at the stairs. “And?” she said with an air of mischief in her accent, “how was the morning walk?” She was a white woman from Botswana. Her hair short, blonde-grey and wild as if constantly in the wind. And the strangest color eyes. A piercing, light orange with very small pupils going back into themselves. Her smile, wide with overly pronounced canines. It was as if she could smell the apprehension on us as soon as we made it back to the camp. “we saw lion tracks.” She smiled with one side of her mouth using mostly her right incisor. “Yes. I think she is still around. None of the animals have returned. Normally there are huge herds of them moving through here in the morning.” (and Kelvin told us they were just sleeping…) A lioness had killed a zebra next to camp the night before we arrived, she had told us before we left for the walk. The staff said they could hear the hyenas whooping laugh all night as they heralded the kill. “it was…quite beautiful really.” she said, still with that same not-quite-right smile. We asked her if there were often incidents with the lions. She nodded mysteriously, paused as if out of pious respect to the sacred force being discussed and then reported a few with great animation and wild energy in her eyes. “At my old camp in Botswana, one of them got my guide. He was protecting a client during a hunting trip. The client shot the lion but only wounded it and…it came.  My guide’s gun misfired. He had the gun between him and the thing but it got him all up the arms. After we shot it, you know what I did? I plugged the holes in his arms full of tampons. They expand, you know. When they finally airlifted him, the doctor asked “who has the sense of humor? Lady, you saved his life.” After that they made tampons a requirement for every emergency kit at local camps. And he got to wear the talon around his neck according to African tradition. You can’t wear it if you just shoot a lion. It has to be up close and personal.” Her eyes were aflame now and awake. She turned them toward her holy land, the pridelands before us, their grassy flats empty as if in curtsy to the presence of their tawny queen. And then there was the ridge marking the edge of the Great Rift Valley rising like alter smoke above the fields in the distance. “Its funny, all the tourists laugh about the spears the staff carry with them. Some of them intently request a gun to be carried on walks or at night. They don’t understand that these guys couldn’t hit one with a bullet if it were right in front of them. But a spear or a bow and arrow? One shot, quick like lightning. That’s all it takes. Quite amazing really. That’s the kind of weapon they know best. When I was 14 growing up in the bush in Botswana, my father bought me a gun. We had cattle and the lions used to come through our village and down into our herd and stables. I was so excited, you know. Me and the local guys, we stayed watch that night, me with my gun and them with their old spears. I thought, how much better am I than them, when those old lions come down. Sure enough that night the lions came. And when they did my gun went this way and I went that way. The local guys had them out of there with their spears in a matter of minutes. Har har. They used that story against me for years.”

We were riveted. But our guides weren’t and they made a bit of a stirring behind us as the morning was wearing on. She brandished her canines in the pure joy of telling and opened her eyes a little wider for a moment. “They are smart. They know. They know they are in human territory. They stay out of the way and the Maasai villages as much as they can. And when they cross through here in the night, they generally don’t make a sound. They even know when hunting season starts and ends. I think they can smell the guns.” Her complete possession by this powerful, amber-eyed soul of an animal and the ever-forgiving grass lands it haunted was transparent by now and she appeared almost trembling with the heat of it. Her orange lion eyes contracted in the morning sun as we shook and said goodbye. Even her ears covered with the fur of her fair hair looked to twitch as we walked to the truck. So uncannily similar did she seem to her animal spirit captor that I would have believed her to be a shape shifter, walking dusk and dawn the line between their world and ours. Following the thread of fearful respect that runs between those who share this grassy corridor. Between human and lion, in these parts each will kill the other without remorse and without ceremony. Such is the agreement. But both in silence bow to the might of their opponent. And lay watching one another perpetually through the high grass.