Eternal Spotlight of the Sundries of the Mind

Headlines (Fall 2011)

2011-09-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

Contagion movie oddly less scary than real global health situation. Director graciously kills off Gwyneth Paltrow early enough for movie to still be enjoyable, if not great.
Fight with hair-club victim at center fundraiser narrowly averted when he followed his "Education is a wicked easy doctorate to get..." comment with a small charitable purchase of a book that he probably can't read.
"Hot Dog" creative theme for craft night event fails to manifest to full potential: further mediums will be explored soon.
Somehow recipes online are more interesting when cussing is involved.
Genealogy investigation reveals that Grandpa purchased his high school diploma, far ahead of the current for profit university trend.
Another failed cell-phone exorcism attempted, long after return from Ghana, where spirits are suspected of possessing phone and randomly disabling various features for inconvenient but impermanent lengths of time. That it might be the ghost of Steve Jobs' career tempting me to buy an i-phone a possible theory. More likely it's mold from the Global South.
Once again, I'm doing anything I can to avoid my schoolwork.

You pay for what you get

2011-06-20T03:27:00.000-07:00

(Cow on the beach at Beyin, June 2011)

"Where are you going?"

"Accra, Ghana."

"Oh, is that in South America?"

"No, Africa."

"Oh yeah. So that's... Is that its own country?"

"Yes, it's a country."

"Well what bags are you checking in?"

"Just this one."

"You know you can have two, right? You can have up to fifty pounds. Unless you were going to Brazil. They're the only ones that allow sixty pounds. It used to be more but now it's fifty...

I just have one...

Primed for agitation, the possibility of my bag arriving in Gabon, Guyana, Guinea, Gambia, Greece... Georgia or Akron Ohio suddenly seeming more realistic a fear, I am not surprised when she informs me that I cannot fly today.

"You need to present the credit card that was used to purchase the ticket."

"I didn't buy the ticket. Some guy in Ohio did. That's not going to happen."

"I'm sorry then you can't fly."

I am disappointed that this woman, who can't figure out which one is Ghana Visa (there was no snarkless way, I'm sorry, to inform her that it was the one that said "Ghana" on it) will be the one to prevent my travel. I want my foes to be worthy obstacles, fleets of rifle-toting militants, rabid hyenas, a boat with a hole in it in a lightning storm, not some middle-aged woman who slept through sixth grade social studies.

Somehow I'm sitting in the New Haven hotel in Asylum Down in Accra anyway, watching my laundry dry while the Beautiful Gateway Ministry next door makes a Sunday out of loud and live marathon worship. Somehow I got on that plane after all, the battle less dramatic than it could have been and driven by what I hope was a routine common sense intervention.

"No, she's all set. They showed the card already."

Frankly, Ghana, which is a country, has been nice. We've had helpful encounters at travel junctures (like local airports, which one moves through like a hot blade through fufu) and slow but effective exchanges with the genuinely simplified travel process here. Despite a reputation to the contrary, things work here at face value. While I might wish my students could be spared the solicitations of 30something police officers at checkpoints, at least this is a harmless if inappropriate gesture, and we'll be moving along without a hitch in a moment. Perhaps even a "farewell" or "enjoy!" When the lights go off, they go off, and when the coffee takes an hour, it takes an hour, but you get the coffee eventually, even if it is the chewable kind. And if you have to sip it in the dark, at least you can rest assured that someone will still find a way to heat up the water, which is a lot more TLC and problem solving than you can expect at a certain Delta kiosk at Bradley airport on a certain day.

I have, at many times I'll admit, bemoaned the lack of quality education that Education for All has brought to this region, and I'm not about to drop all concern for the masses of children who bide their time in classrooms without teachers or spend their days chanting and copying things in a language they barely comprehend.

But I won't go bragging about the purportedly superior system in the US either. After all, in my country, you can get a job sending people all over the world if you know how to click through a menu.

The Promise of Javier Bardem was the only thing that kept me watching that egotistical ATV ride through other cultures they called "Eat Pray Love"

2011-05-12T04:00:00.000-07:00

(Heather, releasing some tension at the tail end of the 2011 Mardi-Gras extravaganza in the Episcopal church of Salem. And yeah, she pretty much fed 80 people in one manic swoop.)

First of all, I want to apologize to my blog for a record-breaking period of neglect I've inflicted upon it. Not since my home in Gambia was broken into and my computer stolen while I was sleeping next to it have I gone so long without posting. Shit, I posted more often when a computer was a 20k bike ride and a bribe away with a 50/50 shot of actual connectivity. When I look through the past six years of blog action, I see a few gaps, usually during the times of intense transitions. These usually fall in the fall for some reason- Peace Corps training in 2005, the homelessness/computerlessness period of 2009, not to mention a certain Ramadan ('07 I believe) where riding my bike to the ferry crossing and taking the dusty road to Ferrafenni to beg some guy to spark up the generator for a an hour of internet that mostly consisted of my trying to log in while six guys stood behind me felt like a bit too much trouble to bother with when a perfectly good nap on a concrete slab felt like creative expression enough.
The thing with transition (transformation?) is that we can't really see ourselves. We are just kind of selfing our selves around like we what know that is, but I don't think we do. That's the problem with being ourselves. If we are truly great, it's hard to see (and what a spoiler if we do.) And if we suck, well, it's hard to know. Seeking self consciousness also seems a little arrogant, no? Isn't there something on Hulu instead? People tend to bounce certain notions off of us (you seem to get along with Patrick, I like the way you handled that catfight, you make killer dumplings, etc. ) but that's no mirror, really. It does weird us a little, and feedback probably keeps us in line to an extent, especially those of us who've inherited even a molecule of the McHugh people-pleasing gene. You want dumplings? I'll give you dumplings. But it doesn't change an innate thing about us, not that we'd be able to tell anyway.

Before I get to the "lesson" portion of this dispatch, I share with you two possible rules for self-consciousness, really the only consistent ones I've heard. Unfortunately, they are generally not applicable, as you'll see. I can thank my friend Blair via her dad for this first nugget:

1. There is a Michael Scott in every work environment. If you don't know who it is, you should probably be worried.

2. If you really, really, really have a strong urge to run for public office, don't.

So yes, I must be done pupating for the moment. A lot has gone on this year. I'm halfway through a master's, off to Ghana for the summer, excited about a bunch of things that I never actually share in this format as my 3-8 dedicated readers well know, and I am stressed with the good stress of, you know, learning.

As usual, as per my experience several times in the past, as I wiggle out of my crusty old chrysalis with the anticipation of whatever me six months in a bivouac of my own spiritual goo might have produced, and as I hustle to the mirror, (the metaphorical Wonderland/Narnia/Never Ending Story, Harry-freakin-Potter kind of mirror) I am kind of shocked to discover that I am still a stumpy green caterpillar. Same yellow spots, same undulating love-handles, same little suction-cup feet. Obviously this could piss me off. I could kick up a really tiny bit of dust, get mad, get drunk, demand a refund.

But, if you know anything about me at all, you know my narrative form. I tend to reject the Hungry Caterpillar/Ugly Duckling/Cinderella/Karate Kid plotline in general. I don't get to become exceptional just because it's a story and that's how story characters learn to love themselves. And I don't have to. I suspect, even though I can't see myself, that being a stumpy green caterpillar is possibly great, and at the very least, innocuous. I mean, whatamIgonnado? Eat a leaf? It becomes a comfort, a relief even. I suspect I'm a slightly improved caterpillar, a little more sensible, more apt to listen, etc. Maybe. Can't really spend much more time reflecting on this, because I'm hungry, and the leaves are way up high, and I've got stuff to do.

Superintentions

2011-01-23T07:32:00.000-08:00

(Ducks in a row, New Orleans 2011)

"I just wanted to know if there's something I did wrong," the employee asks. A carrot, previously dangled, has been removed suddenly, and she wants a reason. Your face tenses, you are calculating which smile and which tone to respond with. You choose confusion and empathy, the kind of empathy they train you in once the stress of ill-fitting management necessarily wears away your attachment to the humans on the other end. You are willing to bet that she won't go much more direct than this- because most of the people who work for you should be grateful they have a job and you'll remind them of this every time they bring up an issue with their contract, or their benefits gone missing. Eat your peas because there are children starving in Africa. When I was doing your job, we had no benefits. You remember that it's time to write encouraging notes of positive reinforcement that sandwich a small criticism to foster improvement. Your day is like round two of Ms. Pacman, there's a ghost around every corner and you can't relax, but you can outpace them all by a bit, and you can pause the game for a covert mission in your office. You've done great things, the numbers are up, people need to see this and you need to promote yourself because no one's going to do that for you in life. Philosophy of practice is not in the past so much as an unrealistic side issue, and they can't see that because they don't know all the things you have to deal with. You became the mom who swore she'd never put her kid on a tether at the county fair. Kid doesn't think so now as he pines in vain for curiosities just beyond the cord's reach- but he's better off.

Fakesgiving

2010-11-26T10:14:00.000-08:00

(Photo of Heather at the Wagon Wheel, fall 2010.)

Uncle Roger has a New Yorker with a cartoon of "The Last Thanksgiving" where everyone at the table has a prohibitive and incompatible dietary restriction- a joke you're already tired of and living out in the land of gastro-provisos. Thankfully our meal has no tofurkey glutardenous raw and superior feeling substitutes and the stuffing has organs and the gravy has lumps. It's a bachelor's turkey- roasted in a wok and safety-pinned together, but this more than works. I feel a genetic bond surrounding this turkey, a totally Macgyver'd endeavor with an endemic logic that pairs nicely with the bat pie and brussels' sprouts. We are here for the wine, the scrabble, and the jokes about how fat all our heads are. Yes, there is something otherish about our handling of Thanksgiving, at odds with the Martha Stewart ideal and seasoned with our own perplexed awe that we are even doing this, and yet the ritual surrounding this bondaged bird is still done in earnest. We are each of us holiday hacks, skillfully faking our way into the big time with a dash of salt and a safety pin.

Headlines

2010-10-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

(Arieh's Cat: How best to anthropomorphise her expression, forlorn?)

Up to five blankets and counting; pondering possibility of being crushed by weight of bedding simply trying to keep warm.
Receive an inquiry over whether time in Africa impedes blood-donation on second party's part- not flattered but better able to relate to lepers.
Hoping to be indoctrinated by the "ideology of hedonism" purportedly brought on by colonialism as referred to in student's paper.
Also in related news, discover that the reading of student papers is best left to the latter part of the caffeine-alcohol rotation.
Thankful to conservative talk radio for continuing to bridge the literacy gap.
Anxious to see the enlightened math and economic principal that will magically create 33,000 jobs by cutting sales tax in half.
While unimpressed with recent fashion developments, am happy that the men continuing to wear their girlfriends' pants have opted to balance their looks with beards.
Search continues for a culturally relevant Halloween costume that isn't Snookie or Lady Gaga.

Other lives not selected

2010-10-10T15:03:00.000-07:00

(Deren's Show and Tell chick Photo courtesy Gillian Sohna 2010)

I am in love. He is beside the tarp we've covered in books, panting from the heat inside his deep mass of white fur. I can barely accept the realness of this dog, his wistful black eyes, feather-duster tail and fuzzed-over ears - but since I'm not a pet-crazed seven year old, I didn't know about Samoyed dogs until today. I am politely extracting intelligence from his owners while I plot how I'm going to steal this lovable polar bear and make him the cuddly solution to surviving winter, loneliness and in fact any other tragedy that life devises. He'll have to outlive me of course, but science has come a long way since I've been gone.
I was recently told, as a sort of compliment, that I am "way too selfish to have even half a child," a reflection, no doubt on lifestyle choices that have hindered any advancement towards fulfilling my biological destiny (which I'm assured by many I will fulfill.) While I might have, at one point, rejected a certain paradigm (the one where I marryandbuyahouseandhavesomebabiesandstuff) that is only the accidental result of chances, some of them quite tiny at their time if not their timing in history.

But longing for a huge fuzzilicious friend conjures other possible outcomes, and the thinking of where the slightest nurturing of other possibilities might have led. I cannot have a Samoyed, at least at no point soon, achingly adorable though he was. Is this regret, dissatisfaction? More, it's the pondering, how many degrees separate me from my alter outcomes, wherein I decide to buy that house in Ecuador, marry that guy with the crispy hair, focus on making money, build upon the material rather than the ethereal. But what I'm wondering is if other outcomes die. Were they ever? Would I feel this kind of longing, this love, for things that aren't, if they in fact, were? Or would I rest my head on Koda's snowy side with the bored assumption that something else could have been more meaningful and complete? Would the rise and fall of his sighs underneath my ear be the comfort of a warmer, more familiar life chosen, or a sad disappointment of possibilities never considered?

The problems from the North are showing up the South

2010-08-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

"The problems from the North are showing up," she tells me, this freckled preceptor, "but they are manifesting in the South." Despite the obvious clues, shape-shifting, chairs with a grainy texture like gumdrops, I think I am awake and already look for geographical interpretation. Anything external in fact will do, because I am still fearful of the other possibility.
This message is how she interrupts her own song- which she sings through her smile- right into my face. We're sitting only one foot apart, this is a known and stated fact of this world, it is one foot exactly, as measurable from tire to curb by the driving tester. Somehow her banjo still fits between us, and the observer by my side still holds my hand without having to crank his arm in a shoulder-popping position to do this. Dreamspace is slightly more defiant that way, refusing to give up on what is rightly possible just because of simple matters of matter and mass.
By the way, I am pleased to see her even if she scares me, but the message is muddled by the medium or the fact that I want more song, more lulling, want both hands impossibly held. I can sing along to her silly song, it repeats "You can't cut the grass in the wintertime."
I guess I need to sleep faster, because someone needs the pillows. Waking this time feels like a pop.

Love the Flava'

2010-08-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

"Is the chai sweetened?" I ask the girl behind the counter.

She is puzzled for a second, not like now, as she adjusts her spiky pink ponytail and betrays her roommate's reality TV addiction while the guy with red dreadlocks and an officer's cap outdoes hers with an even more shameful tale of someone else's affection for "Flava' of Love" repeats.

I think she wants to give me the right answer, which brews inside her for a bit until she comes out with this:

"No, it's not sweetened. I mean, we don't add any sweetener to it, but it has a natural sweetness. It's not very sweet." So I order it.

It tastes like ice cream.

Life's little tools

2010-07-06T15:54:00.000-07:00

He still has the citrus peeler, this little plastic doodad that mom bought in like 1985. It's like a crochet hook you pull around the edge of your orange. He said it was from a Tupperware party. You can vaguely recall the sensation that was Tupperware, just as you can imagine a time when this kitchen wasn't built yet, that where you stand now was a bunch of air in the air. One thing you didn't like about that orange crocheting tool was the way it tended to send these little micro-mists of orange peel oil, the most stingy sort, straight into your eye. Now you realized, today in fact, during your awkward stop at that giant country store on 5&10, that they still make those things. But now you put them on your finger like a ring and sort of fondle the orange while ripping around its skin ala Christopher Soprano on collection day. It's an 89 cent pleasure you'll forgo for now. The 80's version was a lot less intimate, but maybe 80's people were a lot less desperate to commune with their fruit and a lot more anxious to store it in plastic. Perhaps some of these memories will come like psychotropic flashbacks, but now that stingy oil taste is in your mouth as you recall biting directly into the orange, ripping off a section and pressing the whole damn thing into your face while sucking it dry. You left a lot of violated fruit out there on dusty roads, while here in this kitchen, a little waxy coil curls politely on itself next to the compost bucket.

Getting a Lift

2010-07-05T13:47:00.000-07:00

Photo from 2005, Lower Basic School WFP feeding program. At least a few of these kids got food before their headmaster sold 80 bags of the donated rice and beans in the open market.

Let's call her Marcia. She has graciously offered me a ride to the other apartment I'm looking at today despite her being a tenant here. At this point I'll be late and I can't figure out how to start the car I've borrowed. (It turns out it was the other key.)

On the way Marcia wants to discuss how to feel good by donating to some organization in Africa. She's heard a lot about corruption and NGO dollars being wasted on overhead and doesn't want her bucks to get eaten before they have a chance to help some weaver woman get a head start, or a school-aged child have a chance at an education. There is limited time on my part, one ride across town and she wants a website I'm sure. I'm wading through the swamp of acronyms I've encountered or worked with, CCF, CRF, UNICEF, WFP, FAO, BESPOR. There is humanitarian aid, microfinance, she could donate a goat, a bednet, a bicycle, her own luxurious hair even. She, meanwhile, announces her disgust over organizations with religious affiliation, because who are they to push their values and agenda on people from other cultures.

Memory one comes into focus. I am holding Sibo's hand (almost 5 years ago) as she tugs me along to her nursery school at the Korean Christian Mission. From what I can see, it's a relatively engaging day of coloring, singing and eating snacks. The children are kept busy and not beaten, a distinction I cannot make about many nurseries I've seen. The education is not particularly deep, but neither is the religious indoctrination. Sibo's parents regard her singing of incomprehensible Jesus songs with the same indifference as her rendition of Turn Me On, which she's heard playing on a neighbor's tape deck and which she executes with frighteningly perfect pitch and timing. She will continue to go to Koranic school after this, no beats skipped. The one offending point of the mission might have to be the annual giving out of random donated crap from the sister church in California, but Sibo surely prizes her one-legged blonde Barbie and her Stitch Toy and ties them both to her back like babies as she wanders through her day.

Memory two is Mr. Ceesay. He has just been promoted to Deputy Headmaster, he says. He was just a mere teacher the last time I came by. He is holding a piece of rubber tubing, which seems to be edging out the traditional stick for classroom discipline tool of choice. Technology is amazing. Suddenly a bell rings (is being rung by a little boy standing in the schoolyard) and Mr. Ceesay announces that the kids receiving food may go eat. Four of the thirty seven students leave the room and the rest continue to be ignored by Mr. Ceesay who's intent on describing his instructional methodology rather than demonstrating it. I question why all the students are not receiving food and he assures me it's only for the ones who pay. I am then invited to partake with the teachers, for whom this food was never intended. The World Food Program likes to take credit for the correlation in increased attendance with their school feeding program which is offered to every lower basic school student, regardless of whether they are able to make a small contribution towards additional condiments or not. Schools exploit this donation on every front, with headmasters inflating their enrollment (on which donated portioning is based) and often feeding only the few who pay. At one school, the headmaster had 35 first graders listed in his roll, but the teacher's log contained only 8. WFP supplied enough food to the school to feed those 35 each supposed day of the school year, which is severely shortened by the epidemic of extended holidays. In a school where 4 out of 37 in Mr. Ceesay's class got fed, the same headmaster had his storage inspected one week after receiving a supply of 96 bags, where suddenly only 16 remained. The beans were also mostly gone, along with the oil. WFP food is a powerful currency, and communities fight over it with headmasters taking the lead in deciding how it's used. Mr. Ceesay thinks I'm stupid, and I am for even saying anything, because a volunteer some years back tried to blow the whistle on abusing donations and got moved to another site by angry administrators accusing her of not understanding what was going on.

I tell Marcia that Jenna Bush had her name on these reusable bags you could buy at Whole Foods that would contribute to WFP donations. She likes Trader Joe's and is excited to show it to me, even though I tell her I've been there many times and that I love those peanut butter filled pretzels. There's another memory tucked inside, of one of the regional education officers complaining that WFP no longer supplies fish and other foods to Gambia, only unpalatable rice, beans and oil. I try to gently explain that there are countries of greater need and limited donations but he remembers fondly his school days of eating sardines on the WFP dole. Of course now the program is so successful that the majority of children are in school, and sardines would break the bank. That is memory 2.5.

Memory three is me, standing in front of some fifth graders after their teacher moves to the back of the room. He's attended a workshop we recently ran on making teaching aids, and he wants to show off the fancy poster he's made of healthy preventative habits and it correlates to their social studies unit on endemic diseases, namely malaria. He has a grasp of participatory methods and asks the class how to prevent malaria and they cite bed nets as an example. "Yes," he encourages them, "and you all received bed nets from UNICEF this year, right?" Most of them nod their heads in agreement. UNICEF had given mosquito nets to school kids in the region and talked to the kids about the importance of sleeping under a net.
"How many of you sleep under a net?" he asks, once in English and then in Mandinka when he sees no hands go up. 2 tentative hands go up and then come back down. They are not using the nets.
It is still me but now I am jogging out in the rice fields and it is early morning. I spot three women pulling up crabs and small fish from the muddy banks beside the path and I greet them with a typical joke about where my breakfast is. One of them pulls up her net, it's a bed net, and shows me the small fish she's caught in there. "It is not enough for you," she says and laughs.

Marcia has waited too long for me at this other apartment. I've had a beer, appreciated the potential housemate's enthusiasm and her bacon tape, ached a little for my home in Gambia. When I get back in the car I am sorry I have made her wait, and any errand she wants to run while we're close to town is fine by me. We go to Trader Joe's, but they don't have those pretzals any more. On the way home we talk about how cheap it is compared to Whole Foods.

An unapplicable question of taste

2010-04-29T04:44:00.000-07:00

I was recently informed that etiquette dictates a lady never boast more than thirteen pieces of flair at the dinner table, lest she be considered some sort of Bohemian Gypsy outcast. Even this total seems a little conspicuous- two earrings, two rings, two bracelets, a watch. Save a row of silver buttons pinning me into my blouse, I cannot think of six more embellishments I'd want on my person, unless I was attempting to attract raccoons. What's left is the question of the minimum. If she doesn't sparkle from each angle of the table, is there something of her ladyhood lost or muted? Is there, attached to this rule, an unspoken ideal number we are too polite to mention? Tell me, is this number set a little high to accommodate some distinguished queen with her dozen diamond necklace? Or purposely low, like a dare. Caroline, my darling, in the many books you've read on such subjects, are you the one to tell me how to ice myself appropriately should an invitation of significance come my way?

25 questions from the front lines

2010-04-14T08:34:00.001-07:00

1. Ms. King, can newspapers be fiction?

2. Ms. King, cat eat rabbit? And also dog?

3. Are chimpanzees friendly?

4. What feeling is white?

5. Where does toilet water go?

6. Ms. King are you bigger than a lion?

7. Why is your name Ms. King? It should be Mrs. Queen.

8. Have you been to a nightclub where people are fighting?

9. Why don’t you have a boyfriend? (It’s time for you to look for one.)

10. Ms. King, when you laugh too much you will cry. Why?

11. Ms. King, you were a baby?

12. Ms. King, when I am old I will like girls? I will marry?

13. Ms. King, when I am 18 I will go to aniversity?

14. Can I take this (penny, scrap of paper, random fleck of lint, popsicle stick, etc.) home?

15. Do mosquitoes fart?

16. Do you go on facebook? (My mom’s on it all the time)

17. Ms. King, lions eat polar bears?

18. Was your dad a King?

19. Why didn’t you try to look nice today? (Ms. Leen did)

20. Can you give us homework with balloons?

21. Can I take this stick home to feed my termites?

22. Feeding my termites, that is good?

23. Are you a Christian?

24. Do you miss us?

25. After dismissal are you sad?

Haikus by Grade 2's

2010-04-12T05:31:00.000-07:00

Recess was so fun
Swinging in the atmosphere
No one disturbing

Deep, deep nail polish
Please I want to put it on
Please mom I want to

Terrible car crash
almost had a heart attack
bad taxi, bad car

Crocodile pool
It seemed like 2 years ago
but it was last week

Playing with my doll
I made her hair so pretty
Where are her hair clips?

Alaskan Rebel Lured to the Dark Side

2010-01-07T23:39:00.000-08:00

(Sierra Leone photos courtesy Blair Cochran on holiday 09 excursion)

A friend of mine recently joined a well-known social networking website and while it was nice to see her face, I had reserved hope that girls who shave their heads and catch fish with their bare hands from glacial mountain lakes don't need that sort of thing. But like everyone else, I probably asked her at one time or another if she had an account- we don't want her tree to fall without being around to hear it. We must have worn down her defenses eventually. "For a while," she justified the conversion this way- "Not being on it was what defined me." There is harm, there is no harm, it doesn't really matter- we are either on it or defying it and either way it is affecting us.

There's the old joking advice that to carve an elephant you cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. The streams of daily status updates feeding into the facebook river remind me of this piece of anti-wisdom. When you have something to say, cut away everything that isn't what you want to say, including the responsibility to your listener. Somehow this should make our sharing better, concise, direct. We stop the stuttering and the padding and the circuitous avoidance and simply say. We are here, we are hungry, we want you to know we've been to the gym, our baby walked, we got into school, we are bored, we like sushi, we had sushi, we wish we had sushi, we bit a lot of chumps. This might appear to be a criticism. It is not. I rather enjoy scrolling the reams and reams of posts. I like the easy voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of nearly everyone I've ever met. I feel uneasy when you choose this format to confess a serious matter, but isn't a sign that we should be listening to each other? It might be the wrong place, but maybe you don't have another place. As I write this I am periodically flipping through your photo album of a party you failed to edit. I am seeing if you've updated your relationship status. I am thinking about what you include, what you don't include, how it all puts the me in medium. I don't think it's so harmful, and if my awesome shorn rockstar friend is on here, then we're safe to assume it's not a complete waste of time. But as for the elephant? I see nothing but a pile of shavings.

You can't take it with you

2009-12-15T07:51:00.000-08:00

(Rams on wheels Photo courtesy Abigail Dejnak, from 2009 visit to Banjul)

Mr.Cheap knows you because you bring everyone you know to this place. You inhabit one little sphere, however exotic; you imbibe its novelties for the benefits of those who still find them novel. You dominate, you big fish, you. This isn't the worst niche imaginable. New people find themselves caught up here,at least for moments in time. They sort of disappoint, or is it just your imagination, when they wrestle free with a batchful of stories and memories in only a short time, like a week or a year. Why do you feel the need to explore every wrinkle in the land anyway. Some questions don't require question marks do they. So, at the risk of no longer getting to answer another rhetorical question ("You must really like it there, no?") you'll soon pack up your donkey cart and mosey on out. It's time to stock up on Mr.Cheap's dried seed pods and painted whatsits, perfect the tan, suck the dregs from the wonjo bag and get out before you become a fifth wife or sad old beach hag with rastafarian arm candy. You'll be so anonymous and cold where you next go, but it looks silly to keep swimming laps in this little crocodile pool.

Do shellfish dream of electric seaweed?

2009-11-11T23:25:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamt that I checked my blog, and all the posts I thought about but never wrote were somehow published on it. The ins and outs of life, the occassional realizations, the struggles, the successes and the musings which are all too deeply archived to ever really access again were all there for me to see, in story book format (my medium of deepest recognition.) The dream presented itself in amazing detail, it was like mining all those fleeting thoughts that you regretfully forget when pen meets paper (when pads press keys) and the best part (I dreamt) was the realization that NOW I HAVE THEM BACK. I became excited by the possibilities; I could be my own therapist and know why I am where I am. I could read these thoughts to recall my journey as it felt inside the most honest part of me, rather than my blogging voice or the feedback of those around me. There was so much tingling potential.

Then I woke up of course.

Are you still here?

2009-11-05T05:03:00.000-08:00

"That's the most surprising thing of all!" says Mohamed, observing our half-cut carrot bought in rough form, days from its harvest, bruised, nearly limp, shoved into the dirt and now sprouting. "It's blushing green," says Josh.

The last few months I haven't blogged. Would snapshots do? Arriving to a power cut, someone's spicy chicken crawling with maggots in my fridge, sending emails to a black hole, giant shoes holding my door open, the lobotomized pizza man serving my overtrusting heart the first piece of humiliation, a prescription bottle discovered emptied by a disappearing lover, an empty bed where my laptop had sat paused on a documentary, texts from the police, could I drive the suspect to the courthouse? A new home full of boxes, a man passing my windowsill, not bothering to speed up when I scream at him, my purse- a few embarrassing contents- spread out in my yard while 2 militants paw through, my own keychain dangling in the door, the sinister glance of the stray cat the day my first (last???) pet went missing, a falling lime waking me, the shadows of banana leaves waving, running everyday, the endless tallying of touting to join me, a collection of "champion ladies," and other zombie-bumster one-liners, a thrice broken fridge, so much loss back home, life-saving smoothies, pitch-perfect little voices, wine in swimming pools, bathing under a papaya tree, anticipating breaking heat.

I've always chronicled small. I assume you see in it the reflection of things bigger, if not then why would bigger matter anyway? Other people's lives contain momentous events, the ones I try to show up for when I'm not distracted, like a child, by a vegetable in some dirt, the ones cuing others on how to handle you. I don't have that construct to tell me if there's good to come, if I've learned, if I'm better for any of it. I just know you can cut apart a carrot, you'd be surprised because if you stick it in the soil, it'll grow.

What rules were meant for

2009-08-08T08:07:00.000-07:00

A brief scanning of the decade past is all it really takes to locate my infidelities in the face of prior convictions. Don't eat meat, don't shave for somebody else, coffee addiction is tragic, don't enable or live with smokers, mouse traps are mean, vengeance is petty, sausage smells, get out of poor countries, don't jump through trivial hoops for academic or career advancement, perfume is suspect (like in Batman), gambling is for people who are either losers or bad at math, if you're not blissfully happy you're doing something wrong, pets are usually a bad idea... I've (historically) experienced this noise that gives rise to these rules that inevitably contradict my mellow and probably eclipse my forming identity. (That's right, in America, you get to develop your identity at any old age.) I recognize that having no rules creates monsters that no one wants to be around, but so does robotically following the plethora you've populated your already complex life with. I wasn't intentionally squirming my way out of previous trappings, but it sure feels good to crawl around in a new space with bigger, more meaningful rules, and nibbling the occasional chorizo with my breakfast dark roast. My latest infraction involves trusting a beautiful smoker's taste in animals and somehow landing a cuddly little cat. Now because my previous rule was "No cats, like, ever" I've needed to seriously rewire the directions of my affection, and though I'm no Lennie, my awkward attempts at feline paw reflexology have resulted in the occassional superficial scratch. I assume this is just a little retribution for selling out to something resembling happiness, for breaking a few rules here and there.

Taste this, Chicago

2009-07-04T20:35:00.000-07:00

Nothing can compete with big cities when it comes to mobilizing people at the slightest excuse. Not to say that a festival dedicated to food is slight- it no doubt weighs itself heavily upon a city, clogging its streets, its arteries, its trash receptacles. Still, wading through thousands of people for the simple attraction of purchasing an overpriced polish sausage, and eating it while walking in a sea of sweaty, moving humanity in the sun is testament to the power of large cities. Could it possibly hold this allure if not for its impressive scale? Would you try to make tacos for ten thousand? It seems intriguingly communal, a mite nostalgic even (think Coney, or for us Mass folk, Riverside.) It's strange, this need to invent a reason to come out and look at each other again. As an event, I would say it's a fail- the elevated risk of botulism, the trash factor, the asshole who made me get buffalo sauce on my pants- these lead to an overall crummy review. But despite the total headache of navigating this rowdy rabble, (why do I always put a positive spin on my rants???) there was something perversely appealing about it, otherwise, why were we all there? It wasn't for the quality of the food or because we love elbowing our way to the next booth with the (empty, Sorry Todd) promise of a German pretzel. Perhaps it's the lure of the crowd and the pleasure of knowing that everyone else, like you, will line up for the same slice of pizza they could get down the street, just for the idea that in collusion something is suddenly happening.

The last chicken

2009-06-15T00:31:00.000-07:00

You are definitely roasting your last chicken of the season, escaping the sweltering kitchen for the porch. It was a totally genius move, putting this mattress out here, affording the laziest twilight possible, like Roxy Carmichael lying in bed with her TV tipped to its side. The dirt-spackled mango tree curbs the potentially nauseating romanticism of this scene: potted hibiscus, porch, glass of water. The flies also help.
It took the whole year to figure out how to enjoy ex-pat 101, and oh, the excuses you’re going to have to make when you don’t really feel like reentering whatever it is that is awaiting you in the fabulous toubabudu, (aka Babylon). “I like hassles,” you once told Cousin Jay, who, of all people, needed no explanation for why you wanted to keep living in Africa, as if the notion of restaurants with monkey sticks* at the tables made poetic sense enough to justify the exile. There’s a restlessness you associate with Awesome America, a constant wall of red tape and telemarketers between you and simple peace. You can get thrilled, taught, fed, entertained, excited, but you can’t ever take a break. But repose in Gambia is inherent, automatic, assumed. If it all seems frighteningly catatonic, the karmic equivalent of an oxycodone habit, then it’s probably not your cup of ataya. All-night mosques and abrasive touts will no doubt stymie your mellow, however, and you might discover a sense of relief in the concreteness of your limitations and a sweetness in the lifestyle you’ve cobbled together despite your finite facilities.
Your little intercontinental tug-of-heartsting-war isn’t an exciting story. It’s probably mainly the result of perceived inabilities in one land and surprising aptitude in another. (Yes, anyone can learn to take naps in the afternoon, consider it confessed.) Goats will eat the entire weeks’ garbage outside your gate in the time it takes your electricity and water to come back on so you can take a shower, but in the meantime you are gloriously gooey from your second attempt at banana cake ala chez Colleen’s overproductive fruit farm. And here come the mangos by the way. So this is your home, for whatever lucky reason, though the blistering June heat makes you glad for the holiday to your past, for the friends/sushi/family/theaters/intellectual community/roads/bandwidth, but you’ll still be pining for the fruit from the dirty mango tree you missed the chance to gobble down while you were gone.

*These are sticks for scaring away, not necessarily beating, gate-crashing primates at up-country rustic dining establishments.

U.K. Holiday Part Two

2009-04-25T04:24:00.000-07:00

Any time someone newish enters your space, a certain amount of tailoring must occur, if not to eclipse any assumptions that your life is not “together” enough, then at least to afford them some comfort. It is not difficult when England comes your way to pull something holidayish out of the sandy surf and to make like (fake like?) your every day consists of reaching for a banana right from the tree*. Easy enough, I suppose, to sweep the lizard turds under the stove for those few days that guests stop by. In the end though, a closer friend comes with a certain amount of abusability reserved normally for family and particular electronics, and all bets for preserving the image of that sunkissed life are off. Underwear finds its way once again strewn on the floor, you condescend (embarrassingly) to your gardener, let produce rot in the fridge. It’s undoubtedly the less enjoyable experience for this visitor, who differs from the others only in his ability to maintain some space in your life long enough to wear down your defenses and expose his own Tesco-working warts as well. Somehow, though, you like to think that showing your slightly more sustainable side, a middling okayness with your existence, could, if he were able to stretch that far, be seen as a compliment to the evolved state of your friendship.

*Though often very stately and tree-like, the banana and its fruit are, in fact, delicious mutations of an otherwise seedy, inedible herbaceous plant and not actually a tree.

What matters about today

2009-03-20T05:48:00.001-07:00

Prophetic signs

2009-02-12T11:00:00.001-08:00

It's own little microcosmo, my class buzzes with the random ("Ms. King, I had MARMITE yesterday") energy of 13 kids preparing for the production of the year. I've asked them a completely self-defeating-and-I-know-it request, to sit down with a book while I help individuals get ready. Their bodies respond accordingly (like popcorn) and no known technique could will them into a state of calm. Parents are already on benches outside as I discover the cheap Chinese face paint doesn't work and bees, snakes, mice will need to retain their people features and maybe Ms. King loses a couple of points this time. Sometimes children are like this: heartaches with feet. Somebody's lip got split at recess time, another one needs to vomit. But they march on anyway. I sometimes talk about this sense I think I have, that I can see your inner child tour-guiding you around, waving at me while you fancy yourself some kind of adult. This works in reverse today as little faces show purpose, fear, anxiety, pride. The face of one of my second grade boys looks up from the row of parents, hosted by a bigger body and set about with stubble. It's disconcerting how easy it would be to pat this grown man on the head, how easily my confusion could set in at such a moment. The same dimples even. Do they all think I'm nuts? A fraud? Is something going to get knocked over? Will there be tears or fighting? Will it matter? It happens in a blur, me in the background conducting and prompting, hoping for the allignment of all possible fortunes that this becomes a source of pride for them, that they feel they've made the sun rise. The resolution lingers, we've written more, and my 3 foot tall narrator triumphantly shushes the premature applause and, like the rightly misprinted sign at the Standard Chartered bank, in a flash "we close," and everything is fine.

U.K. Holiday Part One

2008-12-24T04:40:00.000-08:00

It's the British approximation of those E-network style countdown programs, the ultimate time-vacuum when you're stuck on a Jet Blue flight, but the likes of which you'd rather not admit you'd sat through at any other time in your life. Instead of one-hit wonders or admirable celebrity body parts, this one is trying to sort out the 100 most embarrassing people of 2008. You realize it's not your country when Sarah Palin comes in at a disappointing 52nd, but there's a familiar discomfort in watching this style of television- programmed to come at you quickly and go away even quicker and there's as much time spent telling you what's coming as there is content to come. Before we can find out who the other 51 failures of public popularity were this year, it's time for the Hogmany madness to commence. Night could imitate TV on a day like New Year's, with the drunk girls puking on the sidewalks, or inadequately dressed and clopping precariously through cobblestones and the boys shouting from rooftops and grabbing each other in new and exciting ways that only a night of strong liquid courage could liberate them to do. But instead nothing done or said this evening will register the kind of spite that the fishbowl critique show does- because no one is any position to judge. You're either puking on the sidewalk yourself, or you're holding up someone's ponytail so they can.

My first stalker art

2008-12-12T03:03:00.000-08:00

There will be words to accompany this some day, when I regain cogent thought. In the meantime, I'll let the painting do the talking.

From the ocean to my belly in less than 2 hours.

2008-11-17T09:23:00.000-08:00

I don't have as much to take pictures of living in "urban" Gambia now, but my favorite new spot is the porch of the Bakau Guest house at dusk, where I can watch a fish go from net to frying pan. Fishworld works like this: The market picks up when the boats come in, boys swimming out with trays to meet them. Gele geles pull up and load their entire bus with fish to take up country. Women gut, clean and fry to sell. "Lincoln" the agressive rasta fish-monger adopted me my first time into the market. I reluctantly became his Kilian when I waded my way through the seafood-seeking masses to discover what had been dragged in that I could possibly cook. He introduced me to the comical and meaty butterfish, with its Bugs-Bunny mouth, which he'll yank filets out of for me in under a minute. What a contrast to the waves of the midwestern grass this summer, where a thousand hours of driving led us to Omaha, America's midpoint, with shrimp on the menu. Perhaps it was brought there by one of the huge farting trucks we'd played leap car with for a day or more on route 80. Whatever its journey, I'm certain it wasn't worth it, only to be limply tossed in a bland buttery bread-crumbed thing to be served after the nachos were all gone.
Now here I might not have the micro-brews or the table service, but I can buy a handful of shrimp, still squirming, with the tide they came in on almost touching my toes.

Presidango Obama be bung kono

2008-11-07T08:03:00.000-08:00

Just to give you an idea of the mood over here:
Wednesday morning, the vendors all had their radios blasting with vote counts. They would look up at me, and instead of greeting, would say simply "Obama." Some nodded at me or gave me the thumbs' up, one commented "Africa dingo be white house le saaying" (there's a son of Africa in the white house.) Today is Friday and it continues. Without lifting a finger, Obama has already caused a shift in attitude. They check me for loyalty first, "Mariama, who were you supporting?" If I say Obama, then they give me- and I don't know how anyone knows about this- the victory fist pump. I've met people who don't believe that snow is real, or vending machines, but a black man as president of toubabudu? That's news.

An update

2008-10-08T06:52:00.000-07:00

This morning Mr. Jallow got up from his bench to hand me a slip of paper. In three different colors of ink were his name and number and where he works (the bank.)
I said thankyou but kept on walking.
"I'll be waiting for your call."
"Yes, you will."

Yay

2008-10-07T00:22:00.000-07:00

The only tax I pay

2008-10-04T10:20:00.000-07:00

It is my blessed luck that I get to pass by both the fire station and military barracks on my way to school each day. At 7 am, a half dozen men in blue stand around another, who is slowly sweeping the ground under the tree outside the fire station. They watch as he stoops over with his little bundle of twigs and brushes the night's collection of natural refuse away from the premises.
"Hello boss lady."
"Good morning champion lady."
"Ooh white angel."
I shape the politest dismissive smile I can muster and move a bit faster, pushing my earbuds in deeper. Cat Power will never drown them out completely, but I can always shrug and say, "sorry, can't hear you." I will one day make fun of them in Mandinka, but I'm saving it up, I have 150 more days of school to pass by them after all. I will say something in the tone of an old man telling an important proverb, "How many firemen does it take to sweep up a leaf?"
They will be shocked. They will regret all the times they talked about me as I walked by, assuming I didn't understand it. I will keep walking and add my last bit, "Seven. One to hold the broom and the rest to make sure the leaf doesn't get away." But for now, I'll let them put more lewd comments about my lopey into the karmic bank. For now I'll walk by.

My passing the barracks is normally a bit less charming. "SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Hey. Can I talk to you?"
"Accuse me, one moment please."
They actually want me to stop. Guns and uniforms make it tempting in order to avoid problems, and were this one of my first 1,000 encounters with such, I might actually fall for it. They are really just boys when I look closer, and despite the unwanted attention, I'm glad I'm a woman because they will never turn viscious on me. They stand outside these fake painted tanks at the gates of the barracks, always at attention and looking like protectors of a nation. But up close they are just bored young men hoping for some digits. They could be anywhere.

Before I ever get to them, I first pass Mr. Jallow. He's a big deal, or dressed like one, and sits on a little bench in front of his vehicle in the morning in his suit and tie holding the paper. I'm not sure where the bench comes from, because I never see it when I come back through in the afternoon. For a week I smiled and said hi, and he was nice and cute enough to look a little longer than I probably should have. Then one morning he introduced himself and asked my name. The following week he pulled out his phone and asked for my number. I smiled and asked if he remembered my name. He had forgotten it. "Sorry, not today then." Now Mr. Jallow informs me each day that he knows I'll give him my number now. His confidence is impressive to be sure. I don't see diplomatic plates on the car, so I'm trying to figure out where on earth that SUV goes each day. Strangely though, it hasn't ocurred to him to ask my name again.

So goes my commute. On the way home, the second shift of hecklers are usually out and around the taxi park. Some just want to give me a ride. "Taski! How far you going? I'll give you cheap price. 50 to Cape Point."
"It's ok, I don't need a TAXI."
"Ok, 25."
There's a guy who works the shrimp market by latching onto you as you pass, only he's not a shrimp seller but some sort of bumster broker who speaks on behalf of the shrimp sellers, trying to drag you in to a particular bucket of shrimp, as if it somehow differed. He must get a cut or something, but it's perplexing to think that he could actually improve shrimp sales. He makes me want chicken for dinner.

After passing the three boys who sleep in wheel barrows all day, and sometimes call me "Angel" or "sweetie" or ask if they can help me, I enter the most peaceful part of my walk home.

I escape into the airconditioned Rite Choice mini-mart and am greeted by Maneesh, the young Indian man who runs the place. He looks outside rather than at me.
"It's raining,"he notices.
"Yeah, it is."
"You should wait in here until it stops."
I drink a cold perrier from his cooler and he wraps my bag in plastic. We both miss home, we are both strangers here, but we like it too. He redeems his gender for the time being, and I head home.
I pass the craft market and the old Fula man who weaves. "Hello, Mariama. Are you tired?" These guys remember my name from a year and a half ago, buying trinkets with my father. They used to annoy me, but now they remind me of up-country, where people greet just to greet. They all want me to learn their respective langauges and have a sort of competition going to see which one I can manage best. They talk about me as I pass, not like firemen or the taxi guys, who see white skin. I even hear Nene, the Batik lady say "Mariama is one of us." I cash in a thousand boss lady's for that one kind statement.

Don't feed soup to a snowman

2008-08-16T07:11:00.000-07:00

The most common thing people say to me about returning to Africa is "you must really like it there." When I lack an enthusiastic expository response, that is, for those times when I don't generically mention the beach and the sun and the cash savings, I'm sure they wonder why I'd go back. America has a lot of nice stuff, to be sure. Little Gambia shares a scandalously small line with Senegal for their snail's pace internet, hosts a glut of over-eager Rasta beach bums, and lacks a convenient source of high-quality coffee. But there's something else feeding me there, something I'm unable to define at the moment I'm asked. So, now I'm off to the airport (after disconnecting my phone) for the journey in reverse. If any dear reader needs a DVD copy of Banjul Cops or some birth-control fabric, you know who you are and you can let me know. I'll happily brave the horribly crooked post office to send a piece of love your way.

Ship of fools

2008-07-26T00:26:00.001-07:00

At some point along the way I began to start picturing the child you once were while you were talking to me. Years in classrooms caused me to idly picture- but never to design or destine- the adult each little person in there would perhaps become. I remember my sister describing this feeling- and I remember it too after a season of chopping my own wood- a way of looking at the world with an ax in tow- measuring everything around by how hard it would be to chop through. It made me believe, briefly, that I started seeing people alongside their former and future selves the same time I started teaching, but then memories of my own former me come flooding back- a walk along rocky beaches in Halibut Point, angry at the adults around me for something, vowing to never be like "that" when I was a grown up. At four, I was going to get spanked for something so I dashed out the door, certain I could outrun my parents, confusing my little legs with some version of me yet to come. I remember myself annoyed at those big hairy parents for not stalking the foods I wanted, for tickling me too hard. I made solemn promises to the future me to fill my refrigerator with berries and gingerbread cake and to leave the hopelessly ticklish alone. I was going to know just what to say if my child was crying, and I would never say "don't cry." And she does, that little me, feel like another person kicking up the rocks next to me, giving me the stink-eye when I suck like an adult. Perhaps I'll get arrested for tampering with this well-circulated family photo, but it was begging for an update that only got to happen in my imagination.

We three Kings

2008-07-20T13:46:00.001-07:00

In college I had a professor who had previously taught middle schoolers and still hadn't forfeited her condescension towards those she taught -ironically given that her subject was Child Development with all its emphasis on teaching strategies that are 'developmentally appropriate'. But who am I to say we are ever too old to be talked to like children? It's only that I want to spare children themselves of this humiliation while they still have the chance to avoid the possibility that their schooling might be a game designed by men who sat around deciding the average age at which they should be able to know the sameness in containment between a tall skinny glass and a fat short one. Despite her own inability to meet us in a place where we weren't being handed diapers to hold our poopy factoids, this professor did manage to pare her subject down to one take-away nugget, which is always the mark of a class I should have CLEP'd out of. It's the nature of the nurture, kids, and it doesn't have to stop. Therefore, I won't be roofie'ing Christian Bale just to propagate some higher-grade being, because the extra edge would soon be worn down by inadvertently allowing my child to watch Spongebob marathons and snack on paint chips. On the other hand, and even my professor would agree, it seems there's a lot of wasted energy going into trying to over-nurture children, with gourmet pre-schools and in-utero Mozart, when the most meaningful development comes from allowing the brain to begin negotiating its environment with increasing capability. I'm glad our parents didn't get in our way when we were little beasts exploring our domain. And like my professor, I still see us as children, pouring the water back and forth between the two glasses in wonder.

A deeper shade of Jay

2008-07-18T15:16:00.001-07:00

A woman and her male friend are sitting on a bench outside the Sunshine Market, all three of us minding their own business.
"She thinks she's so progressive because she hates Bush and she's from the Midwest where that's apparently a big deal."
"Yeah, and she goes to McDonald's! It's like hello, are you really that enlightened if you support THEM???"
"Right? I could show her some really progressive literature that would blow her mind. I just finished this... nerble nerble nerble nerble nerble...."

They get up and walk off, and I can't follow them to hear the rest because I'm still eating slippery papaya chunks, thinking about the warmest smiles I've received today, all from Mexicans.
I haven't had an idea in a while, so I try to come up with a reliable test for the order in which we would blow up cities and towns in the future if we had to destroy some, but I sort of need Jay for this. Last night when Deb was lamenting the many dental-related routines she was going to need to go through in order to go to bed, Jay assured us of a future invention that would free us from all the mouthcare hassles, a plaque-eating bacteria of some sort that excretes a minty-flavored byproduct as it removes harmful tooth-decaying gunk. My teeth ache for this innovation, and from the Beard Papa cream-puff earlier, a lesser idea of Jay's, but still, an idea in a land of men yelling at their lovers for something the dog did wrong.

I'm not sure when the delusion of entitlement and titling of overly-available and nearly daily treats will finally end, when the need-chart is re-calibrated for an America that will still be able to see her toes in a decade, but in the mean-time I wander to the bakery where I'm nibbling my way across the case in case St. Helena and its heavenly bakery are chosen to be obliterated before I come back here. Just as strange as the promoting to "specialness" of daily excesses, is the odd presentation of literal treats as daily entitlements through Salumerias, cheese mongers, fuckin' caviar bars. I, for one, feel myself believing the imagery of hanging meats as something I'm to come and get my regular slice of, as something I'm to want and consistently pursue in my life, that someone (the me I want to be) is already doing this affordably, sustainably, as an after thought.
Jay is less afraid than me. "It's lifestyle, man," he imitates the local, lazy permissiveness. It's just enough to make me snarf my pinot grigio to stifle a laugh.

Global Position

2008-07-09T22:43:00.000-07:00

As Wookie and the Baby (the Singstar Evangelists, also known as us) fly through the country in the Millennium Dolphin, the tootsie roll trucks, discount cheese curds, idiotically proprietary wi-fi parking lots, .50 diapers on the Mississippi, towns with names like Kickapoo and Colona, Stations of the Cross motor parks, futile searches for palatable coffee, spontaneous games like “How would you sexually harass each state?” (For Nebraska- I don’t care that you’re flat), bottom-feeding spackle and sprawl that incite thoughts of ending it all, kind and unhealthy citizens of Normal, Illinois who don’t know how to park their minivan, bricks of eventless meatloaf and the antidotal bag of Broccoli from Shnucks Supermarket, anti-meth billboards (No one thinks they will try to tear off their own skin. Meth with change that.), natural variation and synthetic sameness, Cheyanne’s sea of Port-o-potty’s (decommissioned? A sort of modular toilet retirement community?) the winding stretches of Utah and thinking about friendships we’ll continue to tend to like an inherited garden we didn’t ask for, truck stops with bottles of urine in their trash cans and nothing smaller than a 20 ounce cup, the shift from cardinals to cowboys, silos to windmills, the shwagtastic restaurants where we get that nervous feeling that they won’t understand us, and the embarrassment of America exposing itself to us one bobble-headed James Brown at a time all feed us a bit more than we can earnestly digest in this sitting. And it’s a lot of sitting. Is it possible to have your GPS and your Iphone and your road signs and your measured exits and not be lost and still have no clue where on earth you are?

Challenges of the road

2008-07-08T07:52:00.000-07:00

Jay and I made a pact to eat at each awful poison-mongering fast food joint only once on this trip. Unfortunately we knocked the big guys out early.

Nice Midwest you've got here

2008-07-06T21:44:00.000-07:00

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life, that we give to the question of what to do with two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.
- Dorothy Canfield Fisher

This week's headlines

2008-06-24T12:32:00.001-07:00

I manage to get a passport photo that doesn't suck.
Mom calls to let me know that the skateboarding bulldog will be appearing on Oprah this Wednesday.
Coffee shop employees discover my "alternate establishments" tactic to not seem like a complete loafer, which may lead to developing a hobby.
A mustachioed debauchee follows me in his van and offers me a date midday. Could Greenfield actually be a safer town at night?
I am visited by the "Ghost of birthdays past" including photographic evidence of a mutual and decidedly amateur lap-dance, as well as a half-eaten cake, on which I am nonetheless blowing the candles out for a second go at my wish.
My 20's end much the way the 20's did, with extreme deflation. Dirty 30's to commence this weekend. A recent acquaintance eases the potential fear with this statement: "Turning 30 is no big deal. I've done it a few times."

Stomp your feet and go for it

2008-06-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

The male Blue-footed Booby initiates romance with a measured stomping of his feet and wing display. The ritual attracts a female who will lead him to reproductive victory if all goes well, if he doesn't, say, trip over one of his smurfy toes or overestimate his stock's appeal to the potential leading lady. It's not as though a discerning female booby has a lot to distinguish one mate from another, so she most likely sorts them on technicalities, vigor, foot shade, wing symmetry. And if she's not interested, she just walks away, doesn't awkwardly apologize or say they should be friends. She doesn't have to worry whether accepting a drink is a promise of something more, as there's a clear line in the volcanic sand between her and the world of slightly smaller, slightly beadier-eyed males. The dance is an explicitly balls-out statement of interest on the part of the male, a limb he's just going to have to climb out on if he wants to pass his illustrious genes along. I'm sure it takes an exceptional amount of confidence to know what you want and go for it via a goofy riverdance reenactment, but that's what gets the play in the Galapagos.

Once in a while, it's about pictures

2008-05-31T22:49:00.001-07:00

Substitution Table

2008-05-31T22:25:00.000-07:00

Poll Shows U.S. views of Christians.
Findings from a 2004, nationwide poll conducted by Cornell University.

44% of Americans favor the restriction of at least some civil liberties of Christians.
27% of respondents say that Christian-Americans should register where they live with the federal government.
29% supported the idea of undercover agents infiltrating Christian civic and volunteer organizations to keep tabs on their activities and fund-raising.
22% favor racial profiling (of white Christians) to identify potential terrorist threats.

The jaundiced eye sees yellow

2008-05-27T18:25:00.000-07:00

Home and slightly underwhelmed, I must resort back to the American pastime of ranting, if only for a moment.
For holding the title of "land of convenience," the U.S. is falling alarmingly short through the eyes of a recent re-pat. Here are my top 3 picks for ways we are actually behind itty-bitty Gambia, which is no less ranked 155th out of 177 countries on the UN Human Development Index .

1. Public transport is not up to par in Western Mass, and most of non-urban USA. I don't care if it's a donkey cart or pulling myself across the river on a rickety ferry, I could get around in The Gambia. It was pretty bad at times, but I assure you it was better than here. I realize some strides have been made, and I'm going to try to support the bus system, but this culture of "auto entitlement" has definitely handicapped the availability of any real system of getting around. Maybe as we start to pay the same prices for fuel as the rest of the world it'll improve. (Gas is still about $2 cheaper per gallon than in the Gambia but horse-food is more reasonable.)

2. Pre-paid cellular service SUCKS here. (As does all cellular service) In The Gambia, I bought my credit in nearly any place, in any increment. Here you can't get pre-paid service without a background check, and the only convenient way to upload credit is to provide your credit card number and wade through annoying automated menus. In TG, I only paid for calling, not receiving calls or checking my voicemail. Why should that cost me money? Well if The Gambia is any indication, it doesn't have to. When my "Gamcel" or "Africel" account ran out of money, nothing dire happened, I just couldn't make calls until I uploaded it, which I did by entering in a number from a scratch card and pressing "send." Here you have to quickly pay into the account or you're slapped with a 35 dollar "reactivation fee." And to top it off, the advertisements in all the major "prepaid" services (At&t, Verizon, etc.) boast that they allow you to "keep" the credit you already paid for when you reload. (Wow, you don't steal from me, thanks.) It's such a crock I want to scream!
3. The last of my rants includes the annoying way that stores dangle credit cards in your face by offering a huge savings on your purchase. Nobody wants to allow you to just buy something and then move on. They always want your zipcode for marketing purposes, or to thrust a pair of discount socks in your face. How is The Gambia ahead of us with its decided lack of shoppertunities? I may not have the level of choice, but if I want to save money on a purchase, I just bargain. 80 you say? How about 30? No? 50? Great. If you don't want to sell it to me, there are 20 other people selling the same thing right next to you. I've just saved more than any Macy's card would, and won't receive any junk mail. And if I don't have cash on hand, I can just apply "bush credit" by saying "I will pay for this very soon," and making sure I do so, which in turn improves my rapport and credit rating. I never find out six months later that my movie gallery card got stolen and I owe 95 dollars for never returning White Chicks on DVD. It may be annoying to wrestle a vendor into the ground for the right price on a pair of black-market G-Unit jeans, but I believe it still edges out the frighteningly exploitative mall culture that leaves me feeling annoyed rather than satisfied. At least in The Gambia, I emerge from a shopping experience feeling like a gladiator.

I have some additional criteria for the UN to recalibrate their index including the following: How well do available commodities in the country reflect actual need? How well are actual needs met by available services? What level of frustration should be subtracted from the purported conveniences available? These might level the playing field a bit.

So you think villages are peaceful?

2008-05-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

I've often heard it said that parents and friends of peace corps volunteers enjoy reading blogs that clarify and explain life in the country being served. I would also enjoy a blog of that nature, something that approaches the peace corps goal of creating understanding on the part of Americans of the countries being served. It would certainly cut back on the crazy questions, maybe build a bridge between one place and another. These days we certainly have the tools to make the world feel markedly smaller than the era where volunteers went months between letters and drove dusty stretches of road just to reach a phone. Now some volunteers are able to bring an understanding of their lives here to those at home through the blog and similar mediums on a consistent basis. Looking back at all my posts, I realize that mine has never been that type of blog. I open tiny windows and hope that someone feels like looking in, but explanations have never been my modus operandi. Part of me hopes you'll have the same feeling I did when leaf-boy jumped around the village, and I don't want to spoil the confusion with the facts. I'm not assuming that people do or don't understand, or won't be left with questions. After all, being home again following nearly 3 years living in Africa, questions are all I'm left with, so those are what I feel like sharing.

National Anthem, as sung by neighborhood children

2008-04-28T07:56:00.000-07:00

Actual Words:
For The Gambia our homeland,
we strive and work and pray,
that all may live in unity,
freedom and peace each day.
Let justice guide our actions,
towards the common good,
and join our diverse people
to prove man’s brotherhood.
We pledge our firm allegiance,
our promise, we renew,
Keep us, great God of nations,
to The Gambia, ever true.

Poetry for pyros and other distractions

2008-04-25T05:20:00.000-07:00

I found a way to set the notebook on top of the pile so that the wind, page by page, pulls the paper up to catch on fire, like Lucifer speed-reading. It’s amazing what will burn, old bras, (not for any statement save the unreliability of today’s underwire) broken shoes, infested pasta. The neighbors are probably wondering what the acrid smoke that’s angrily pouring over my fence is all about. Or they don’t care, because they light their own fires with baggies or spent hair extensions. Either way, there is no other “away” for all this crap I never thought I’d accumulate by living in a hut.
As for the “low battery” graphic on my phone, I purposefully let the thing run down just to see the little Atari-quality picture pop up of a battery with what looks like some kind of fluid sloshing back and forth inside it impatiently. It’s a graphic that makes me nervous and happy at the same time. I wait for it, and it comes with a little sound, a sort of digital moan whining charge me.
The last Sibo moment is her sitting on a tiny stool in her underwear, brushing her teeth. The toothbrush seems disproportionately enormous, a prop from Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Children in America use child -sized toothbrushes, don't they? This is decidedly more badass, and when I gave it to her, she went around bragging to the other kids in the village and waving it in their faces. Now she’s approximating Animal from The Muppets with her brushing style, certainly not the product of those dental hygiene filmstrips from grade school, but, you know, up and down and all around. It’s not a science after all, and doing it politely is most likely less effective regardless.
This is the kind of stuff I try to distract myself with. Sarjo is able to stand up now and walk around by clinging to things. It's painfully cute to watch. She stood up and there was a spoon stuck to her butt and she didn't notice and everyone started laughing, and she just smiled, too young to feel ashamed. She says "icee" too, for the frozen juice she gets to suck on daily. It's an appropriate first word in this compound, where Betembo exhuasts every afternoon filling little baggies with juice she's mixed in a bucket, or washing out the brake fluid bottles she uses for wonjo drinks. I take my last icee, at least for a while. I've had to wrap up my life here in less than a week, and these are the things I want to make sure I do, see that Sibo keeps brushing, taste wonjo once more, burn the evidence of three years of living, squeeze it all into 2 bags. I could be, should be, taking responsibility for work obligations, making sure I take my leave responsibly, but I just want, selfishly perhaps, to top off my collection of little memories that matter instead. I want to know I haven't been dreaming this whole thing up.

2008-03-11T09:25:00.000-07:00

Sibo is walking along the path from the Arabic school, her tablet tucked under her arm. Her skirt drags on the ground, keeping her slow and clumsy, but then she spots us sitting outside so she starts to run. She crashes through the corrugate gate, whips off her veil and jumps up onto the bantaba. The only teeth left at the moment are on the sides, and she knows this makes her look like a monster, so she grins and growls and grabs her sister who screams and smacks her. Sibo’s hair is clumped and unbraided and she’s feeling the urge to dance in a way that makes her head move side to side, opposite her eyes, which look at everything and nothing while she keeps a beat by smacking her tongue. Then she drops herself heavily onto my lap, pawing at my book with a surprising sense of entitlement, gets bored with it and looks to me for more inspiration, which I’m stunned I could possibly provide. I just laugh a little. “You came?” I ask.
“I’m back,” she says.

Bampha the crazy boy is heading to Soma. He’s got a rope tied around his waist that bunches up his oversized, grimy t-shirt, and this weird little bottle hanging around his neck. He looks like he might be auditioning for a part in Robinhood, Prince of Lower River Region. We see this boy everywhere. We don’t know where he lives, but everyone talks to him and everyone knows him. He has a charm that people revere, even as they make fun of him for being unwell. The last time I saw Bampha, someone had asked him to prove that he knew how to count. I found him walking alone on the road; he was up to 85. Today I’m with my host mother, she asks him why he’s going to Soma, he says to visit someone. She’s pleased because he says it like it’s official business. Far behind us is the truly crazy guy, the one who sleeps in an abandoned colonial building in a pile of glass and guano. Even he is the harmless kind of madman, but his zombie walk is disconcerting and people keep away except the occasional person who will light his cigarette for him. Two pretty girls are in the road, and they want to talk to Bampha, so he stops to flirt as we continue. I hear their little chatter but then Bampha shoots past us. “What’s wrong?” my mother asks him.
“A crazy man is coming!”
The girls are breathless from laughter, and even Bampha seems to get the joke, because he smiles the next time he looks back at the lumbering man behind us. But he keeps on running and I think I see him shrug as if to say, “Well, this is my role here. I don’t want to disappoint,” as he charges along towards Soma.

Things to do when you're in The Gambia

2008-03-10T08:57:00.000-07:00

Get dragged to the police in the middle of the night by an old Guinean meat seller for failure to comply to his random post-prep price change.
Decline eating the meat after the police help pay for it because it tastes like sweat.
Forward your ‘love texts’ to a friend so that he may use them on the girl he’s courting.
Wake up the caretaker who is sleeping under your desk and throw his cigarettes out the door (for added emphasis).
Inform impertinent schoolboys that you left some pens and bottles ‘over that hill’ and watch them run in vain under the blazing sun.
Notice bits of your garbage popping up as useful items throughout the village.
Fear that people know the dish soap bottle they are drinking from was your castoff and are eyeing your backyard for more treasures.
Allow your ceiling to disintegrate into termite dust, despite the loving paint job it received from your site-mates.
Tally the appearances of a certain president’s image on local television in a given hour. (23)
Enlist small children to run your errands with the coveted reward of liking them.
Explain in Mandinka why you can never see the people on the laugh track while watching "Keeping up Appearances" on an old black and white.

Cleanliness is next to

2008-03-03T02:31:00.000-08:00

I don't know what's better, the story of making the clip, or the story of trying to upload it to share. There's always more I'd like to share, and people are often asking for more concreteness in what I do share. I guess, like everything, I like to leave some inference up to you. But on the other hand, who doesn't want to see cute babies? So, here she is, Sarjo the wonder child, taking it like a pro.

2008-02-04T06:47:00.000-08:00

It’s the night before the big holiday and Fatou invites me to help her break her fast with what tastes like last year’s meat. The evening before I'd made homemade minestrone with a close friend, now I have a subtle inclination to cry. Instead I poke this grey matter into my mouth and go from there. Let this go down, I will my gag reflex. I remember this feeling from childhood, the feeling of taking bad food personally, like when dad stir-fried poultry gizzards and livers, or that stew my sister referred to as “beef barfy,” and we’d assumed it was given to us to build character. Now I realize it’s what he liked to eat. I suddenly feel ashamed that Fatou has been up since sunrise without eating but she’s pushing the choice bits in my direction.
“Mariama, what does ‘don’t flat-tah me’ mean?” Hoja is following the Nigerian film Total Disgrace, frame by salacious frame. The leading lady flicks her bangled wrist playfully, “don’t flatter me,” she says. The boss’s son has fallen hard for this sexy secretary and she soon gets sacked for what seems like no good reason…Shockingly, the father himself has had relations with this vixen, both of them having (oddly) waited until his son married her before informing the boy. The movie continues to live up to its title, but I go to bed.
Grandma Kaddy wakes me in the middle of the night to help her break open a kola nut with my teeth. Kola nut = old lady pacifier. She wakes me up again later just to pray for me, cementing her unshakable resemblance to Yoda as her hands hover over me in the dark. It’s something about God granting me a husband and babies, the usual prayer for an aging bachelorette, but oddly timed. May the procreative force be with me I guess, thanks Gram.
Our holiday involves the customary ram slaughter, which the kids watch with indifference or

a disconcerting touch of glee.

Ebi proudly waves his bloody hands around for the camera. He has dunked them into the ram’s gushing body. I’m horrified but these kids are so comfortable with it all. As my friend Dan put it, “Why couldn’t Abraham have been asked to sacrifice some broccoli instead?”

Baby Sarjo, who has filled roughly the same niche as our Atari did when I was seven, has been wrapped up in special cloth. We literally wait for turns to play with her, and campaign for her first word like those obsessive parents prepping their kids for spelling bees. Say Baba Baabaa..

My host mother doesn't recognize herself in the photograph I give her from last year’s feast. “Naa, that’s you,” Hoja assures her, and everyone else moves on but I catch her still puzzling over it later, touching the face on the picture. The expression “all dressed up and no place to go” must have been invented this day long ago. Heels sink into sand, babies

have been enhanced with eyeliner,

we all bring each other meat. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t trust a photograph if I were my host mother, it isn’t a medium she relies on for her memories. But for me, at this point, draped in iridescent fabric, clutching a boiled ram’s foot, I might not believe anything but.

And they all dispersed to their various destinies

2008-01-16T02:26:00.000-08:00

Little volume this time around, just a note. I've been teaching accidental poets, watching the world dry out, rationing my coffee. I don't feel finished here and doubt I will by the end of the third term, but I suppose that was true last year as well. But my oldest friend is getting married and I want to come home to that. I really do miss the home people. I really do love proper foods, winters and mountains. They'd like to hire me here. Grad schools in funny places I'd never considered are now seeming like possibilities. There is always Kyle and Caroline's basement, or their upstairs if they ever decide to go in for the polygamous marriage proposal I've given them.

I caught my host father with the baby tied on his back. I don't suppose you know how unheard of that is?

Monitor baby

2007-12-17T02:36:00.001-08:00

The way it unfolds is this: I can’t tell Sunkari has had the baby because she wears big clothes and she’s pleasantly corpulent, and it’s not yet time I suspect. Each time I pass by, she’s bent over washing clothes or cooking, I realize she practically lives in this contorted position, with the exception of carrying water on her head, a slightly cruel irony. Since it’s not polite to discuss the matter directly, I also don’t ask, and the husband comes to visit, chats, asks me for a “road gift” from America, and never mentions the child. I can afford to sift people at this point- from the day my neighbors gathered around me when a crazy Senegalese vagabond followed me into the village, I knew there were people looking after me. Even old Mailainy stood there with her sleeves rolled up, ready to kick some Francophone ass. So a man who doesn’t think enough of me, or his wife, to share the most important news of his family, but who can make the time to solicit trinkets from abroad, no longer warrants my time or consideration.
“But Wuyeh didn’t inform me, I didn’t know,” I plead to Sunkari who has probably been wondering why I’m so rude as to not come over and see the baby. “And I saw him a few times.”
“He’s not good,” she concurs softly, and puts down the washing, wipes her hands dry and motions towards the house. “Adama is inside.”
I realize she’s had twins- Adam and Eve are the typical names chosen for a pair of girls, but she must have lost Hawa (Eve) and I’ve crossed over into my discomfort zone once again, because I don’t know an appropriate prayer for the death of a baby.
Sunkari looks like she’s sorting through laundry when she pulls out a rolled up wad of tie-dyed cloth and hands it to me. It’s feather-light, this can’t be a living child being stored in a plastic tub full of clothes and a horrifying possibility flashes through my mind, but this is little sleeping Adama’s face poking through the layers of cloth.
“She doesn’t look strong,” I tell my host mother later, as we’re sitting on cement, under stars. “Her color, and she’s small.”
“I’m sorry I forgot to tell you,” she says, but she knows Wuyeh should have said something, she knows he’s calculating and this was rude, but the difference between us that I get mad and she and Sunkari just let it bend them down a little closer to the ground. This one isn’t really the one to get mad about, but such an omission from the long conversations I had with him just comes off as insulting. The peanut farmer himself probably hasn’t taken the time to hold his fragile little child, I think, and I’m sure my eyes narrow as I mentally add this small infraction to the list of subtle insults urged on women by some of the slimier men we live among. What a snake, I fume to myself.
“You know that big lizard,” my mother asks, “It looks like a crocodile but it’s smaller? That’s what Sunkari saw when she was pregnant. That’s why Adama has a wrinkled face. That’s why she can’t get better.”
It no longer occurs to me to make light of this belief. I’d rather blame the magic of lizards than the difficulty of carrying twins to term under Sunkari’s particular condition. And my mother says they will catch a monitor lizard and soak its skin in water for a week and that will help Adama. I think of the crocodile tooth and other jujus hanging around her own baby’s neck, a baby whose umbilical cord was cut with my friend’s Swiss army knife. Magic and religion can be useful because if they don't work, some other counter-magic was probably stronger, or God willed it, and that’s just the sucky reality you’ve been dealt. It pushes the responsibility off of us as well, so we don’t have to sulk about our lot .
God, I can understand, has a will beyond our comprehension, but why does magic tend to prey on those who believe in it the most? I'll let Sunkari trust the lizard skin to heal her baby, but just in case, a little nutritional juju couldn't hurt. And as for husbands, I can have an opinion all I want, but I'm better off looking at the dirt, because I'm not sure there's magic strong enough to do my bidding. But Wuyeh might just get an earful from me the next time around.

Student Killed by Teacher's hand, 2005

2007-11-28T13:19:00.000-08:00

Ending corporal punishment in the Gambia has proven to be a tedious effort that has gained small and shaky ground at best. I recently read a blog entry by my site-mate, (Site mate's blog)
who had to confront the issue in a more personal way than most of us can imagine- by trying to effectively teach middleschoolers who have never known an alternative, and facing the daily obstacle of students who don’t seem to respond to anything else.
As volunteers, we usually walk an obscure line between maintaining our conditioned worldview and acquiring that of the people we serve. For some this is the goal- assimilation, integration. Volunteers may become compound heads, second wives or convert to Islam. They may begin to support cultural practices that as Americans, they once found deplorable, such as female circumcision. Others resist this in favor of maintaining their distinct, “outsider” perspective, and appreciate the culture as a backdrop against which their development agenda may unfold. Of course there is a more common middle ground wherein the volunteer comes to accept their surroundings to the degree they see possible, and finds ways to hold in mind the moral ambiguity of cross-cultural goal-setting as they proceed towards mutual understanding on the part of their community, if not integration. They may never agree with certain religious doctrines, or rites of passage, or corporal punishment, but they understand why it happens.
As outsiders, most of us take exception the use of corporal punishment, but facing the classroom, some come to the conclusion that there is no alternative, a perspective many Gambians would argue is true. And if we decide to cross that line towards integration, does that mean we should stop pushing issues (like corporal punishment) that may seem to gain most of their momentum from “outsiders?” Should we, for that matter, start beating in order to gain the respect that other teachers have? Is corporal punishment really the preference and design of “insiders”? And do those who support it do so because it is the reasonable preference for Gambians, or are they held by the systemic trappings of having no alternative? Here’s my take on it:

Corporal Punishment in Gambian schools was introduced by the British during colonization and continues as a replication of this, alongside other remnants of the colonial education system (rote memorization of information, head boys and girls, assemblies, etc.). It is not an endemic practice necessarily, (nor is formal schooling for that matter) at least not to the extent that one could argue it is "the way" of Gambian society, whatever its level of support in the country. Yes, beating occurs in homes, and many (illiterate, unschooled) families may argue it is favorable for the school environment, though many disagree with it as well. In most cases, communities and families have little knowledge of what occurs in the schools, and only possess a vague desire for their children to emerge with some profit to their betterment as a family/community. At a celebration to honor some visiting Swedes, (potential donors) the representative of our village development committee said ‘We’ve been praying for many years now that graduates of this school will go on to help us all.” This man, like most of the elders, never went to school and does not exactly know what it will take for his children to learn, he just wants them to go into the world, make money, and send it back to the village or family. His notion of whether the child is gaining the requisite skills for this to be possible is based largely on faith and few alternatives. A community member in strong support of corporal punishment in the classroom could just as easily sing the praises of a head master who gives away school furniture or sells donated rice, if it benefits the community. Unfortunately, community members need to understand the inner workings of schools before being expected to rap on the value of corporal punishment.
In a society where age is a sign of status, a parent is more likely to side with a trusted adult than their own child. This does not mean that the child’s rights have not been violated if beaten, and certainly doesn’t prove that it’s “the culture” which perpetuates beating in school, only that some cultural beliefs have kept this imported practice going strong. If the belief holds that when a child does something wrong, they should of course be beaten, then a beaten child will return home and the parent will assume the child has in fact done something wrong. This may not be the case at all. I’ve seen students beaten for a failure to understand, being late, sleeping, or because they couldn’t read the word Tuesday. I’ve seen entire classes receive the same corporal punishment. Were the parents aware that all 40 children did something “bad” on the same day? Isn’t that a wildly convenient coincidence for the teacher? The parents in my community have their way with the stick as well, for infractions such as stealing, lying, fighting with a sibling. Not to condone any beating at all, but am I alone in seeing a difference? If the community Parent teacher associations are any indication, I am not.
When communities in Kiang and Jarra formed PTA constitutions, many community members spoke out against corporal punishment in schools, including for the very reasons we “outsiders” have “imposed” on communities (such as children being beaten for having incorrect answers.) Some also spoke in favor of it, particularly out of fear that their students seem increasingly rude and difficult to manage. Whether in favor of beating or not, most community members were confronting the issue with the most information they’d ever been given, because rarely are teachers, head masters, parents and students all present in such a forum. Most schools would agree that corporal punishment has been reduced in the country, (which is an astonishing thought when I walk by the upper basic school and casually witness any variety of beating, holding up of rocks, kneeling in sand, taking place openly and nearly every day) and some blame the problems with their children on this fact. I’ve spoken with enough teachers and heads to notice that while many have reduced or stopped beating students, very few have actually implemented an effective alternative. They’ve thrown up their hands instead and said, “see, you can’t do this with our children.”
A school system that centers around the numerical ranking of students from best to worst (such as here in Gambia) would be more likely to produce students who would support punishing of offenders by harsher means, in some cases, even by students who are likely to be punished. A student or group of students suggesting corporal punishment to resolve problems does not necessarily indicate that it is fair, or that it is what students truly want. A poor, tired wife will of course advocate for her husband to get a second wife. This doesn’t mean she believes in the strength and correctness of polygamy, perhaps she’s just tired of doing all the work alone. If it was even within her realm of comprehension that her husband could do some of the work, she may choose that option, but that’s not even on her radar, much like alternative discipline is not even a thought to most Gambian students. Students who are the beneficiaries of a beating system, that is to say, children who know how to avoid being beaten, would never speak out against such a system; they don't have any incentive to protect their peers, but every incentive to let them get beaten. Additionally, if beating has been demonstrated to students as the only effective way to curtail disruptive behavior, and they are among the handful that desperately want to learn, why wouldn't they suggest its use? In a world of only coca-cola, I emphatically choose coca-cola. It may taste like shit, but I’m thirsty and that’s what’s available to me.
Add to that the fact that teachers don't have any reasonable motive to implement other means of punishment, except perhaps legal prosecution, which has happened in a few cases, and you can see why it becomes an even harder habit to shake. What teacher would donate, for example, extra time to detention classes for deviants when they can hardly be motivated to teach through the regular school day on the salary they make? It is particularly easy and fast to motivate students through using a stick. Most alternative methods are more time consuming, require a better understanding of child behavior, work better in smaller classes, are more effective if implemented early in the child’s life, and work best when used consistently. The problem is not that alternatives could not work for “these” children, who only understand the stick, it’s all the work these alternatives require, and the time lost to 6th, 7th, 8th graders who would be much harder to discipline through other means.
In the end, changing behavior through other means (imposing consequences for various actions, denying privileges, children coming to understand their rights and responsibilities, utilizing positive reinforcement, etc and so forth…) would probably expose scads of other problems in schools, including the misbehaviors of teachers themselves. Detentions for skipping class? How is Mr. Demba, who’s own absenteeism exceeds 25% going to reinforce that? Is absenteeism of teachers a cultural practice that “outsiders” should stop insisting on curbing in schools? Everyone knows the importance of family here, and missing out on key ceremonies goes against that cultural connectivity and sense of community, doesn’t it? Why should school get in the way?
Volunteers face an interesting challenge, no doubt. There are countless good reasons why corporal punishment cannot easily go away here. Perpetuating sad colonial practices in the name of avoiding "outsider interference" isn't one of them.

A sick story

2007-11-02T04:44:00.000-07:00

On the road out of town, the ram tied up in the back of our truck keeps banging his head against the window every time we go over a bump. He’s completely unkempt, a ram with dirty dreadlocks and cringeworthy genitalia, not exactly a ram to be proud of at the moment, but his owner had to leave him behind a few months ago, and I guess no one but you is going to wash your sheep. On the first ferry, I watch a man drink down a can of condensed milk that he’s poked holes in. All I can think is, damn, buddy, but he seems to enjoy it and then reclines into his car seat and falls asleep, or goes into a coma.
We drive. We stop; pick up a boy, a chicken, a watermelon. It’s beginning to look like a logic puzzle or a joke. Have I mentioned that I’m sick? That’s why I’m making this trip, because of three days of fever and headache and the did I take my larium or not? voice running through my head. I’ve been offered treatment at site- I could inhale smoke from burning leaves, or get some random injection from the health center. Instead I take my expired Tylenol and this free ride to go see our trusted nurse in the city. Sometimes I think I want to try traditional medicine, but then I see an infant’s burns get plastered in tar and rabbit fur and I change my mind.
Tourists on ferry number two are trying to take pictures of our embarrassing ram. My ass is really starting to ache, which I decide is from bike riding. The chicken and I both sleep. I wake up to find that Mr. B, a stranger until today, is sort of holding my hand. It’s kind of creepy, kind of sweet. Nothing gets said about it, I just take my hand back and stare out the window for the rest of the ride.
I say goodbye to the arc on wheels, and make it to the med unit after dark. Blood test shows not malaria, not viral. Some bacterial infection is causing this. But what? No trouble urinating? No stomach pain? Rashes? Anything going on anywhere? Oh no.
The next day I’m laying on my stomach while three lucky people are examining and discussing the hot swollen pustule occurring in my butt. I’m not sure pustule is the right word, I got it from the Color Atlas of Dermatology, which, by the way, is the single most foul book on earth, and yet impossible not to gape at in its entirety. “Can you feel anything moving in there?” the doctor asks. I can’t be sure. Luckily for them, it has “localized” since my arrival and the doctor thinks if we put some ointment over the area, it might poke its head out for air. These are his words as he leaves the room. From that room, I write this dispatch, lying on my stomach, waiting.

Mobile Village

2007-10-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

How can 40 days fly but flying in 40 minutes take so long? This dispatch is brought to you from the Bradley international airport, where magic comes in a foil paper wrapper, and the sun continues to rise over a bald guy's head. Like the last time I deserted my New England post, I watched loved ones fall off my immediate radar one at a time, ultimately prying my buddy Arn's shaking arms from my tear-stained sweatshirt to go through the new and improved security check where I had to throw away my water bottle so I could buy another one on the other side. I had a lot of potential blog posts form and then fizzle in the time that I've been "home" while I was busy wondering why I didn't think of that red paper-clip thing.

red paperclip

While home I tried to marvel at the new things I noticed, like spray-on salad dressing, foaming dish soap, and some people had babies too. I thought about things that make me angry, like the way presidential candidates preface every "thought" with statements like "well as I've been saying all along, George..." and perhaps other, deeper things that make going back to Africa slightly more appealing then it felt while I was enjoying an Early Grey Martini and driving past tobacco farms and maple shacks (not at the same time). I stepped into stores to avoid people whose names I'd forgotten, ordered lattés that looked like movie props, dosed up on plenty of
dark chocolate (hold the meltedness and ants, thanks) and downloaded podcasts into the dawn. There will always be more softserve and sushi, so leaving America wouldn't be that difficult if only I could do away with those pesky pains of missing loved ones who've cared and been so careful for me. So, 40 minutes is done, it's boarding time. Elite members... that's not me, is it?

My long droopy ears

2007-08-28T05:31:00.000-07:00

Ice-cream and sushi. Mmm hmmm.

After a long-awaited and teary-eyed embrace in the driveway, mom announced that she needed to feed her Webkins, one of which (a puppy) is named after me. It had been 26 months since I saw my mother, and she hasn't changed a bit. I watched her log into the cartoon world of virtual pets and tried to get worried about the implications of such a habit, but came up with nothing particularly alarming. They are slightly cute, after all. And she gets to design their bedrooms.

Gambians, and I believe West Africans in general, have a practice of naming their children after someone else in the family or a well-known friend. This person becomes known as your "toma" or namesake. They often have the responsibilities of hooking you up with goods as a baby (a bit like a godparent) as well as checking on you from time to time. Wealthier members of the community are often at risk for having a lot of babies named after them, a stunt my own host mother pulled to guarentee some quality baby clothes. I can't say I blame her, the child (Sarjo) now has a beautiful plastic tub to be bathed in, a lot of nice outfits, and an adorable little baby mosquito net. The toma, adult Sarjo, stops by from time to time to admire the baby and maybe furnish a small gift, and when the time comes, she'll probably pay the child's school fees in order to keep up appearances, and let's face it, it's flattering to have someone named after you, even if it's an online pet.

So now I have a Webkin toma, for which my mother furnished an Africa-themed bedroom, complete with a virtual treadmill, so the puppy version of me can run around a burn up some energy, maybe take her mind off the fact that she's a virtual pet. I don't think I'll be throwing much of a baby-shower for her, but I can at least tolerate her existence since she is my namesake. Meanwhile, Colleen the original is going out to enjoy the finer points of a waning New England summer.

Oh, and I came home to find this in my local paper:

http://www.recorder.com/story.cfm?id_no=4452297

Jarra on 30 liters a day

2007-08-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

It's the eve of my departure to the US for forty days, a nice sort of Biblical length of time. While I'm thrilled to be running into family and friends at home, I have to admit that one of the things enticing me the most is the chance to shop for "necessities." I thought I'd get past that in Africa. Assumedly, living among subsistance farmers was going to rid me of materialism. I would be liberated of the need to, well, need stuff that wasn't absolutely necessary. I would return home to the U.S. and scoff at the Target shoppers towing their children along by harnesses and bungee ropes. I'll still probably scoff, but then I'll get in line behind them to buy a kilometer-high pile of new underwear, razors, shoes, hair ties, toothbrushes, deodorant, markers, snacks, drink mixes, AAA batteries, and a dozen other things that my peanut-farming neighbors neither use nor need. It's not to say that my neighbors live only with what is absolutely essential. I've seen people use two months' earnings on a new outfit and hair weave just to appear opulent at a naming ceremony, while there's nothing in the food bowl but oil and a scrap of dried fish. I'll probably never wrap my head around how people here determine their priorities, meanwhile mine haven't changed that much. I've learned to live without running water or power, without the services of washing machines and all the rest of it. But all I really do is cope, compensate by subsituting, jury-rigging, imitating the comforts of home in my own little way, safe in the knowledge that I'll have them again someday. I'll never throw my ipod into the fires of Mordor, if anything I'm holding more tightly to it than ever, because I know I have to beg Mauretanian shop-keepers to charge it for me and pray their generator's irregular current doesn't blow it up. So U.S.A., here I come. Don't cut me in line at the register.

News of Late

2007-08-04T06:20:00.000-07:00

Unlucky livestock or hungry season conspiracy?

A cow in Lower river region choked to death on a mango. No resuscitation attempted.

A goat in the same region wandered into an open well. Posthumously rescued while onions already frying.
Several chickens in my compound were seen fainting, wobbling in circles and burying their heads in the dirt. Chicken stew was politely declined by myself and visiting volunteer.

Small Hits for Polygamy

A woman in North Bank region bit off her co-wife's lip recently.
Girls learn accurate census statistics in school, question their fathers' statement that the male to female ratio of the world is 1 to 4.
Average age of first childbirth climbing rapidly towards 18, due to increased time spent in school, girls expected to be closer in age to their husbands, more likely to hold paying jobs, and far less likely to want to "share the love."

In their Own Words

"Men are superior to women because we can dig wells. Women cannot do that." - Police officer in Kiang, who nonetheless admitted that he's never dug a well.

"World is Ending."- Lebanese shop-keeper when asked if there were any other shoes available besides what was on the shelf.

" Why condemning me for treating HIV/Aids. Because, the virus has been created to kill non whites and because my medicine has the potential to make them fail their objective of eliminating the black man, they were attacking me. "- Bloggernews quoting one of President Jammeh's speeches in June, 2007.

The delicate line between mockery and celebration

2007-07-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

A valuable lesson from West Africa: Sometimes outfits speak louder than words.

Undertaken in school yards

2007-07-04T00:48:00.000-07:00

Watched sheep give birth (to another sheep.)
Took bucket bath.
Asked goats to leave the library.
Nursed football wounds.
Answered someone's cell phone for them during mass prayer.
Fought over chicken scraps with another volunteer.
Burned books (due to termite infestation.)
Avoided marriage proposal.
Considered marriage proposal.
Woke caretaker from his nap (in a wheelbarrow.)
Startled donkies using pit latrinte (for wrong purpose.)
Explained the use of Beanie Baby Collector's Guide and Bowling for Boys found in box of donated books.
Found common ground with a man who's religious beliefs prevent him from shaking my hand.
Danced with barren women with a gourd on my head.
Marked papers by headlamp.
Learned that Jawoh adds the "h" to his name "according to his feeling" and that's how it appears on his passport.

Headlines

2007-05-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

National:
· Health authorities need not worry, leper is given own food bowl at workshop venue.
· Principal of a school in Central River Region refuses recommendation of powerful Mirabou to sacrifice himself in order to expunge the school of demons responsible for student/teacher possession. Possession continues to disrupt teaching and learning.
· Women return to rice fields for long days of low-profit labor. Men continue brewing ataya and stress the importance of differentiated work in society.
· Nigerian Pentacostal missionary/high school teacher still unsuccessful in removing the “Spiritual blinders” from his students in order for them to be able to read. May be forced to resort to instruction of reading.

On the Homefront
· Temperatures rise to candle-melting levels, posing the question “How am I still alive?”
· I’m yet to marry a host country national, though pressure mounts due to my extremely advanced age.
· A petition to extend my service for one more year, created at the last minute, was approved this week. Campaign for new underwear begins with next mail run.
· Tenth baby born on bedroom floor in our compound. Mother relatively unimpressed with repeated miracle, but healthy baby is nonetheless adored by all.

Running with your mail

2007-04-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

The mission: Deliver this month's mail, medical supplies and packages to all volunteers serving in the field by way of a 6-day journey around the country in a land rover.
The obstacle: Our own incompetence.
Biggest Errors: 1. Gave one volunteer's package to a student at a not-so-rural high school in the hopes that said student would dutifully pass the package on to our volunteer so as not to interrupt his class. Needles to say, package was not recovered. Anonymous youth no doubt enjoying contents.
2. Discovered that we hadn't delivered the packages of 3 volunteers long after we had passed and stopped at their sites, despite our list telling us exactly what to look for. (Did not check list twice.)
3. Found one padded envelope we decided to pack far beneath several heavy boxes. Looked as though Andre the giant had trampled on it and given it to a pack of rabid rodents to chew on. But package was delivered as promised.
4. After discovering several agro-forestry volunteers' villages were abandoned due to an upcoming in-service training, we decided not to bother with one volunteer who was quite far off the main road. Later we received the call that he was indeed there, waiting in his hut for the truck that never came. Sorry buddy.
Greatest Joys: 1. A volunteer's host grandmother who professed her love for him and informed us of their plans to marry.
2. My own host family pretending not to know me when I stopped by. "You have a toubab living here, right?" "No, she went back to America."
3. Delivering a very culturally-insentive but highly amusing "minty bombing" at one volunteer's site. (Watching the children dive at candies we tossed while the volunteer shook his head in horror.)
4. The weeding out of "Fedex employee" as a potential career choice when I return to the states.
Lessons to be gleaned from this experience: If you didn't get your mail, or if your mail was damaged or brought to someone else, consider it a powerful lesson in object impermanance. Don't rely on goodies from home as your crutch for surviving life in Africa. Now I'm off to enjoy my care packages.

Caution: Contents may Deceive

2007-04-19T12:28:00.000-07:00

Sibo wobbled towards the tap with a bucket over her head when we got pushed away by a herd of thirsty cows wandering through the village. I panicked at the thought of horns pinning me by my sleeves to the cement wall. Thousands of pounds of bovine rage were coming towards me, albeit slowly. I thought of two days before, when I had cooked up a portion of one of their relations. The cows could no doubt sense this and would spare me no pity. Then Sibo took a rock in her hand and threw it at one and the herd wandered away without so much as a resentful glance. I’m used to having my life saved by six-year-olds, so we started fetching. A woman came and sat on the bottom of her bucket, waiting for ours to fill. She asked me, “Mariama, do toubabs also dream?”
“Yes, I dream every night.”
“Because you are here, that’s why. In America people don’t dream.”
“They do.”
“Because some of them are black.”
Never mind the larium-sponsored insanity that dances through my head every night as I lay under net-obscured stars, that is a gift from West Africa. Toubabs don't dream on their own accord.We passed by the compound where a woman broke her wrist while running away from a fire she said was started by the two iguanas fighting on the roof who somehow caused the lightening bolt to come down and alight her cabinet.
And then we were home, safe from cows, safe from iguanas. The radio came on with another proclamation of the president's miracle cure for the plague of the 21st century, through prayer and bush leaves. We heard this and thought about it, looking up at the sky, my host mother asking me "Is there a moon in America?" as it got dark.The neighbor's boy came by and stood and told a story of a girl who put her baby in a television box on the top of a bus, but took it down when the aparante told her it was making noise. She brought it to the river to let it go. The point of the story had something to do with "who does that sort of thing?" Then the boy said he was growing his hair rasta style so he could go to the beach and a toubab woman would like him and take him away to toubabland and he'd have plenty of money to send back here. "That's my dream, Mariama. A toubab with a lot of money. Even an old one."
And I remembered the son of another neighbor, young, handsome, tall, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth and a cocky smile. I was told his wife from Holland had come so I got dressed to go meet her and found there a troll with a voice like Marge Simpson's sister. The troll had been hideously cornrowed, was sitting, being waited on by a mother-in-law a decade her junior, and which one to feel sorry for?
Docile bulls, countries with no moon, world-altering cures kept in empty water bottles, if things worked that way, I thought, I'd let my mind stop drawing the line between dreams and life. And I thought about another thing, how if someone asks you if you're dreaming and you can't answer, that you probably are, in fact, dreaming. With electric iguanas and talking boxes, waking life might as well be dreamtime

What's in a name?

2007-03-29T15:02:00.000-07:00

Swimming hole
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

He planned for months, got the thousand requisite shots, had his flight rerouted due to a death on the plane, travelled the dusty road, crossed two ferries, lugged an enormous, bulging suitcase into the compound which got snatched up by my smiling other family, and the first thing my host father proudly said was, "We will call him Ebrima." It might as well have been the lion king, Mustapha (of which I know plenty, it's a popular name) holding a baby Simba (I know one of those too... weird) up over the mountain top, except this was my adoptive father naming my actual father and the moment was most entertaining to me with my foot in both worlds.
I didn't have time to tell Dad about the importance of names here, the way we respond to greeting with a person's last name, and, if possible, citing its historical praise. But here was my father, being called something he couldn't pronounce- Ebrima, Ibrahima, Abraham, a good choice for my confused and bearded dad. But Dad's name was relatively less strange than some...
Here are a few of my favorite names around the village:

Fayi (Throw him/her)
Musukeebaa (Old woman)
Manlafi (I don't want him/her)
Wontonding (Little Giraffe)
Sunkaribaa (Big month of fasting)
Bojang (leave this place)

There's a few I enjoy just for the sound of them: Dudu, Banka, Fanta, I know a woman named Fatou Fatty. And she's gorgeous. I love it.

Theories

2007-03-27T14:48:00.000-07:00

Spider Man
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

1. People dress in spectacular colors to compensate for their monochromatic surroundings. Just as brush fires sweep away the last of the verdure, we happen upon holidays featuring the obligatory fashion shows of one shiny chiffon outdoing another. High heels on dirt roads are the order of the day.
2. A person's exposition of their own culture is one of the least accurate descriptors, particularly when aimed at a party of a distinctly separate culture. Perhaps we come with far too many things we'd like to prove, or to dispell. The communication that occurs between two parties when they stop describing their respective cultures seems far more informative, but can only come when the novelty of being different has passed.
3. People adapt to nutrient poor diets by absorbing more from their food source. There's no other way for me to understand a bouncing, growing 5 year old living on rice and oil.
4. While people can be taught to learn at any age, they will, after sufficient exposure, continuously reject any teaching method (and quite possibly its associated environment) proven to be ineffective to them in the past. An 8th grader who has, as of yet, not been taught to read in a room ruled with desks, will only learn by stepping outside of the classroom, if not physically, then at least metaphorically.
5. The elements of your culture which you were conditioned to perceive as guilty pleasures, or the lowest form of idle time-wasting may never be of use to you due to this conditioning. However, in a place where these things (television, comic books, text messaging) are not taken for granted, they may become a powerful medium and impetus for learning and intellectual development.

Talk some sense into me, please!

2007-02-08T12:58:00.000-08:00

English class
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

I've had crazy thoughts of extending my service lately. Last year I would've sold a family member for a trip to the US, to get to a sushi restaurant, a grocery store, a school with pencils. I came to realize that you trade one set of annnoyances (scraping windshields, junk mail) and joys (New England hikes, pubs) for another....I'm not sure I really want another year of walking down the street to screams of "toubab" and popping out of the crowd like a headlamp on a dark village night. I could live without neighbors believing that I'm a doctor who can miraculously cure a clawed hand or dissolve a goiter with the touch of my finger. The thought of another year of poking peanut sauce and rice into my mouth almost makes me angry. On the other hand I have this sense, just as time winds down here, that I may be just getting started here, that there's so much more to do. I love the little successes here, Ebi's reading coming along, Sibo writing her name. I'm finding out how great it can be to be here in this chaos and still feel like myself. Staying: a powerful, distracting, and altogether illogical thought, so someone please talk me out of it.

Why don't I ever write about food??

2006-11-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

Betembo
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

It isn't that there is nothing to eat but being here has created an obsession with whatever my next meal will be. Foods are available in waves, and can never be kept for long. Right now a glorious watermelon glut is taking over the country, but before too long those will have disappeared from the roadside to eventually be replaced by oranges. I recall a day last year- I wanted to cry- when the market had nothing but rows and rows of bitter tomato, the (aptly named) veggie my former sitemate insisted was poison. Actually, come to think of it, I watch my host mother gnaw on poison all the time- raw cassava allegedly contains arsenic or something. It doesn't seem to spook Gambians though I know that some West Africans have it on the banned foods list. A recent egg shortage threw us off completely but prompted me to discover an alternate (and pricier) protein choice- the canned meat that locals affectionately refer to as "luncheon." Here's a sample recipe from Colleen's hut:
Beans and Greens
Boil local beans with salt- drain and mix with sauteed onion, garlic and finely chopped cassava leaves. Add (pounded) black pepper, thyme margerine and Bacos if you have them. Serve with gatorade.

Back by popular demand

2006-09-27T06:10:00.000-07:00

Bath time
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

It was a summer of muddy commuting, bars with messages like "enjoy your salf" painted on their doors, guys with names like "culture" and "bass man" and living in a hostel where volunteers would watch entire seasons of Sex in the City while soaking their fungal infections. Coming back to site was culture shock all over again. I barely recognized the path to my home, where corn and millet were growing above my head. The kids all screamed when they saw me. I'd forgotten half of the language and it hurt to carry a bucket on my head. Getting to know the place green for once makes me wish I'd spent the rainy season here- listening to rain from my porch and sipping Crystal Light. It also makes me think I'd like to stay and get a little better at this living here.

Proposition number two

2006-08-14T01:24:00.000-07:00

Foot bath
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

Lower River Division Darra
West District Pakalinding
Upper Basic School

Dear Mariama,
I am very glad to write you this letter. My dear is me: Abdou K. Kinteh how are you my dear am very glad and so happy to write you this letter my dear Mariama. The reason why am writing this letter to you is just about a short question and the quistion is all about love. I just want to tell you how much I love you. I love you 1,000. I kiss you 99%. I love you and I want to marraige you. Yas or no. Me and you are lovers. Me and you will MARRIAGE. I love you mariama. 1,000 tims.

May I marriage you?

Learning curves

2006-08-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

Baby Bath
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

Instead of taking some overland trip to Guinea, or hanging out in my hut for the summer, I took a job at the Gambia College teaching a class on "English Methodology" for the future primary teachers of TG. With 275 students and only a box of chalk for resources, I'm a little overwhelmed. The past year has been spent in and out of classrooms, doing low-key professional development for groups of 5-20 teachers, so standing in front of 60 PTC candidates and lecturing is a little intimidating, even in my tall shoes. What gets to me is the attitudes of students. I suppose I naively believed that people enrolled in a program to become teachers would be looking forward to teaching, but many of these students are doing it as a last resort, and they have just returned from a year of "student teaching," which really means being posted anywhere in the country as a full time classroom teacher with very little support from the college or the school. Here's a taste of how they were feeling the first week of class with me after returning from this experience:
"The most importan thing leared in the field is that this qualified teacher are not ready to work when they have a lot in their classroom. Is battle for us to be prepared everyday. " This sentiment was echoed throughout the responses to my question, "What did you learn about teaching while in the field this year?" Here's a couple more: "I learned that teacher trainees has no say in the school administration because we were isolated and stigmatized." "Teaching isn't liked even by some qualified teachers. Reason: Many teachers are either dodging classes or seeking for employment elsewhere." I have to go plan for tomorrow, still not sure what the best use of time is here.

Fast times at Tahir Ahmadiya High

2006-07-05T09:29:00.000-07:00

Me and Sarah
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

As I pass the year mark in TG, I feel like I'm passing into a new era. The new group of volunteers arrive in country tomorrow afternoon, thus elevating our status as "old volunteers." Maybe their newness will punctuate how much I've learned here, how time is the main ingredient in forming some kind of understanding about a place. But ultimately I suspect that even a year of waking up to donkey love is not enough to pretend that I know anything at all. I can pretend all I like, and act less surprised when a woman who has borne twins provides me the timeless Mandinka medicine of stepping on my wounded legs, but really I'm a neophyte here myself.

When this is all over

2006-05-28T09:32:00.000-07:00

Drum circle
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

Am I going to remember old ladies blowing snot rockets into the bushes as I greet them in passing on the dirty road? What about little girls in frilly white dresses, proudly showing me the sheep guts they were given to play with after the slaughter? My neighbor antagonizing her pet monkey, and then letting it loose to terrorize small children? Teachers announcing things like, "that boy's a lunatic and that girl is dumb" when i walk in the classroom? Pickup lines such as "I love you boss lady. How is the beautiful day?" Baby boys with eyebrows drawn on them, a bucketfull of hairweaves sitting outside the shop, my colleagues slugging back water from old motor oil containers, piles of dried fish for sale, old men who can barely see sputtering through their two teeth that I am their wife, assuring me of their strength? Who knows, when this is done, if it won't have all seemed like some kind of alternate life, me cast in the wrong role, but loving it all the same.

If life could imitate school

2006-05-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

Mariama Fula
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

I wish everyone in my village would wear a name tag for one week. I know it shouldn't be hard to remember them since there are only about five names, but that's deceptively simple I'm afraid. Sure, every compound has a Mariama, a Fatou, a Lamin, an Isatou, so there's a statistical likelihood of simply guessing correctly, but having some written thing pinned to them to blaze into my memory would make a lot of sense. And why can't we queue up at the pump so I know when it's my turn to get water? The ambiguity of a system where why you are fetching the water, who you are, and when you arrrived at the pump all factor into to when it is actually your turn is confusing. I guess some things are left for me to figure out, and to keep asking, long after I feel like I should know. I guess I either have to admit I don't know peoples' names, or keep saying, "yes, hi...." to passersby, and act clueless when I bring my bucket forward lest someone thinks I'm intentionally cutting them. We'll see just how long one gets away with being the unknowing guest.

Did thing say it or that one?

2006-04-01T09:18:00.000-08:00

Yafatou with paano.
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

I like the simplicity of pronouns here, how "ning" and "wo" (this and that) are just as naturally applied to objects, people, ideas. Without any supporting noun at all, "This is very rude" implies whatever you might be pointing at. "This cries all the time," "I wouldn't marry that." "It" follows suit in Mandinka, swallowing up him, her, he, she, with just an "a" "It said it was going to do it." The sensation of intuiting which what one is referring to is a bit like reading a Danielle Steele novel. You don't want to read too much into the specific language, lest you become confused by the lack of tense agreement and abuse of pronouns. It's better to ride the plot, look around for other clues, infer. Mandinka, like a good Steele novel, (is there such a thing?)takes advantage of its own predictability to avoid precision. I think this is perfect for the wandering Toubab, who's come in the middle of the story. It's good, that.

What schools may come

2006-03-27T11:29:00.000-08:00

Alphabet
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

"Like prisons," I've heard some schools described by fellow volunteers. And sometimes, when I'm sitting in the back of a second grade with blank walls and even blanker stares, it can feel that way. A disciplinary stick laid across the teacher's desk, being told upon entering the classroom, "these kids are donkies, that one's a lunatic and that one is dumb," five kids squeezed together on a bench, these are constants. My little vision of the way things should be, all that time I've spent in schools and on thinking about learning, starts to feel a little irrelevant in a cement room with nothing but a chalkboard. I can stop seeing potential in children, and sort of zone out, like many of them do, on the wall, on the copied notebook, the head in front of me. It would be easy to keep identifying the problems here, to jump onto that endless but easy track of crying poverty, no resources, throwing blame in whatever direction falls fastest. But there's time after class, and I pull out a box of permenant markers that I permenantly borrowed from the office, and I help the teacher draw an alphabet on the wall. And tomorrow, we'll try reading a picture book to the kids. I tell myself that I'm not here to coerce any kind of change, just to share a little experience, small small, and that way we'll see what comes.

Who's your Baama?

2006-02-22T06:36:00.000-08:00

Lower Basic
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

It shouldn't come as any surprise to me that Mandinka would be sneaking English into its vernacular. I have to say though, that I was taken by surprise when Betembo first stood down the pouring rain from her porch, wooden pestle in hand and proclaimed, "Ah Time Wastah Baake!" Living here, it's easy to see why locals wouldn't have a word for certain concepts. How could one waste time in a place where entire days are devoted to cracking peanuts with your thumb? I like to ponder what drove these words into the language, and how they expand and alter it. This includes countless nouns, like "Telefuno," "Garaaso," and "Moto", but I think the most interesting are the blended phrases. Some top Mandinglish picks I've encountered around my compound:

"Caambano Mang Cibilized" (The boy is not civilized.)

"Ah Kuulta Baake!" (Very Cool)

"Kaana moolu disturb" (Don't disturb people)

"Mbaa try la" (I will try it)

"Africa Mang easy" (Africa is not easy.)

"I buka understand." (You just don't get it.)

Love letter from a man I met once

2006-02-16T01:35:00.000-08:00

Omar's restaurant
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

At Home
No Date
100% Living
Hi Mariama,
It seems to me ages since I first saw you because you are the Diamond of my eyes, the very day heart, the sunshine of my life and without you everything is in a complete darkness and you will spread all my life with happiness and also end it with a sorrowful thing. Your love is like a burning fire Deep down in my soul and it kills me in the middle of the night and give me sleepness night all night long. It's so strong, the feeling of love that I have for you is like a magnet t the steel. I love you above all the ladies or girls I ever met. I love you more than anything else in this world. I love nothing in this world so mwell as you and I am dying of love of you. Hi young girls, your color, I love it. It's like the fifteen (15th) of month when the moon and the stars shine brighter. Oh! The empress didn't make my life to be shame and blame because your love has re-established it empire in my heart and I want to let you know the power of love is stronger than anything. I love you and I want you to give me your love and hope in return for together we live large. I expect you to file me your reply. Your love is pure shine and seal in my heart and I am giving my love in advance to you the empress.
Sign, Yours truely,
Lamin

Grab your Days

2006-01-30T11:11:00.000-08:00

Betembo's rice
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

There's an Aussie film called "Bliss." Have you seen it? In one memorable scene our anti-hero follows his love interest, Honey Barbara, a country lass, to a noisy city hotel, where she forces him to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to find the city quietly waiting for the day to begin. Then she looks over at him, the camera pulling back to reveal a romantically pink and orange painted sky, and she sighs and says to him, "yo-wa alahm clock is yo-wa key to freedom."
I don't have a lot of time in my life. Days, minutes, writing time, thinking time, eating time, they are all too short. When it gets dark I am limited to squinting by candlelight, squishing ants and pondering why my London produced shampoo bottle omits the Oxford comma.
But in the day there is potential on every front, home office, world, language, body, mind, connections. There is more swimming through my mind than I know what to do with, more things added to the list than one uncloned human could ever accomplish. I don't know if I came here for learning, for experience, for escape, for kudos. I'm also not sure if it matters in the middle of the day when I'm trying to create resources out of thin air, make sense of these surroundings, do meaningful work and still get home in time to pump some water and boil a potato. I've never been a big fan of artificial means of waking the life back up each day, viewing alarm clocks as relatively oppressive little dieties. But something's changing here for me. Personal leisure time doesn't feel so necessary, sleep is only possible when I'm too worn out to do other stuff. And I'm usually trying to solve problems in my dreams anyway, so it really isn't wasted time, but quite justifiably used in the scheme of things. I don't know if I should thank the Imam for waking me up with his call to prayer every morning, but I don't want to pound him or throw him across the room, so that's a start. I can't say the same for the donkies, (why do they make that sound?) but I can feel their urgency too. It's time to get shit done. This is not a feeling I expected to have in West Africa, where the answer to "how's is work?" is "I'm on it slowly slowly."

Dreaming of connectivity

2006-01-29T05:07:00.000-08:00

Muso and I
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

When I get home, or to Europe, or to some place with a power grid, I'm going to buy the fastest internet connection my readjustment allowance can buy. I'm going to get something that plugs directly into my brain stem, something where I can google my every whim and download Don Quixote read by Cheech Marin in five minutes. I'm gonna have a hard drive comparable to most universities to store the contents of my entire life. For now, I'll try to find the joy in washing my clothes in a bucket with a bar of soap that smells like old butter, but when I get back, look out Best Buy.

Let's dole, baby!

2006-01-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

Gambian approximation of a Queue
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

When I walked out of the compound where the WFP workers were toiling away, sorting the many generous donations sent to them from former volunteers, a teenage boy who was looming around, hoping for his piece of the action tapped my shoulder and said, "Hey, give me a pen." Maybe because I was out of energy for lecturing, or because I'd had enough of the "you owe me stuff" begging routine for one day,or because I was feeling pretty tired of being mistaken for (yet another)white visitor come to feel good about myself by handing out stuff, I just shook my head at him and walked away. It's not as though people don't ask for things, but after six months, I'm still not comfortable with it. It often isn't even the people who are in the greatest need asking, but rather the people who have benefited from this routine in the past. Every walk to the market is punctuated by various children calling, "toubab, give me Minty, pen, five dalasi, bottle, etc." I don't blame the children for one second, because that fire gets fed from many directions, and I won't pretend that even pious Peace Corps with all our talk of sustainability and transfer of skills doesn't play a small roll in this dynamic. I don't blame NGO's for supplying badly needed resources to communities. I don't even blame tourists for hiring bumsters to carry their grocery bags and do God knows what else. (Okay, I do blame them.)Honestly, it just shakes me, this idea that I can't undo a long-established perception of what I'm here for, that as soon as I leave the respectful shelter of my working community, I'm instantly reduced to refusing to give shit out. I'm a teacher here, I want to say, and where I'm working, that means something. Unfortunately, ten feet from there, I'm just a Toubab, and as a very charming bumster reminded me on the beach today, "You people all look the same."

Not surprisingly, there is no Mandinka word for Maintenance

2006-01-07T13:16:00.000-08:00

Donkey rubble
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

It was a good showing. Even the chief, rockin’ a purple tie and die Kaftan, showed up for the “sensitization” campaign on school maintenance. The social development fund has established a program that will help communities with the upkeep of their school grounds and buildings, which are often left to be digested by natural forces. While the objective was clear to me, it seemed there was a lot of confusion and disagreement in the crowd. So much of the agenda was impossible to translate that a ten-minute discussion broke out on how to explain “maintenance” in Mandinka. It was easy to react callously. Anyone who has loaned their Mandinka friend a deck of cards and gotten it back with 37 remaining wouldn’t be surprised that no word exists to explain the preservation and care of things to prolong their life. On the other hand, Mandinkas will give you the shirt off their back, quite literally I realized, when I complimented my neighbor on his colorful Kaftan and he proceeded to remove it and hand it to me. In any case, the matter was finally settled when someone at the meeting suggested a proverb to explain the word maintenance. After some murmuring, the crowd agreed emphatically to this, ready? "Lamna Siraha bamba dasitirang mantah baato mumeke wole koyta" which translates to: Rather than say the (koranic verse) that protects you from being eaten by a crocodile, don't go to the river at all. That's safer."

On Burning and such

2005-12-27T06:37:00.000-08:00

My neighbor, Sini
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

On Christmas eve I learned that my favorite restaurant, the place whose salads I dream of when I fall asleep after dinners involving powdered milk and bidik margerine, burned down. Information like that is hard to understand from here, too many questions pop up. I want to know how severe, what they're doing, whether the community is helping, why no one told me. It also brought up the bigger issue that I'm confronted with here, the fact that I know nothing. The place I used to bop around in, my homeland, in my mind, is exactly how I left it until someone informs me otherwise. While I'm studying a basket of rice for grains that crawl, things are happening outside over there. Will I return to a Western Mass I cannot recognize, where flowers on bridges have been pulled up, where the health food store has introduced self-checkout, and where cousins occupy former apartments?

More Local Stats.

2005-12-18T03:51:00.000-08:00

Mami and Sibo
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

Over 90 (The failure rate of Gambian students on the 9th grade West Africa examination)

4 (Number of wives legally allowed here.)

"About three quarters" (Percentage of teachers, according to a group of upper basic students I met on the road, who beat them.)

8 (My estimate for how many people can fit around a food bowl before it starts getting uncomfortable)

80 (Percent of The Gambia's total exports of which peanuts comprise. Also the percentage of females reportedly circumsized in the Senegambia region)

100-200 (Death rate per thousand for children in TG)

60 Cents, US (Cost of filling a jar with local peanut butter at the market.)

78 or more (Percentage, estimated by local health worker, of all hospital and health clinic visits reported to be malaria. Actual percentage unknown since clinics do not test for Malaria in most cases.)

Statistics, approximated

2005-12-14T06:34:00.000-08:00

My commute
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

270 (Dalasi spent on Postage stamps in the month of November)
300 (Dalasi spent on rent in the same month)
25 (Percentage of eggs I crack open whose contents scream "Don't eat me!")
6 (Number of holes in my bicycle's tire tubes after returned from secretary)
0 (Number of times I will loan out my bike again)
1 (Minutes until they will "off the generator")
To be continued...

No one likes the blue

2005-12-02T13:07:00.000-08:00

Home
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

I was tutoring the kids, teaching an eleven-year-old the letter sounds, and Fakeba was painting their house a color I can only describe as "smurf." Personally, I liked it, and encouraged him on, and he was incredibly proud that he even had the money to buy the stuff, but I looked over at Betembo, his wife of 26 years, (Who's 39, folks)and she was rolling her eyes and shaking her head. "A mulunjawyatta," she said, to poor Fakeba, who was dripping with paint. "It's ugly." The kids all chimed in with their enthusiastic agreement. But by that time he was done, and a little late for dissent, so the blue remains until next year, marking our compound as by far the most colorful on the block.

Sometimes I wake up

2005-12-02T12:07:00.000-08:00

Amelia and Mama
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

Sometimes I wake up to the Imam calling prayer, long before my body is anywhere near ready to move itself in an upward direction, and I think, "Oh yeah, I live in Africa now." My second thought is often, "What is crawling on my leg?" or "Is that a baby crying, or a goat?" I give my mind some time to re-form, to recognize my surroundings, to connect to my limbs and senses, and wait for some other sign of morning as I know it, be it light, rice pounding, the sound of the pump. There's no sense in missing the sunrise when you're already awake, so I usually pull myself out of my netted cocoon, coax the spiders out of my sneakers, and make my way out of the village. My neighbors yell to me as I pass, greeting me in no less than four languages. They've been up for hours, praying, working, trying to keep ahead of the sun. Still, I'm a curiosity, going out just to go, no bucket or bundle or machete in tow, just me, roaming, me, trying to sneak away for a bit, looking for that perfect space in the day when no one notices the Toubab brushing past on her way to nowhere. It's a strange hobby, being an individual in a communal society.

Campaigning for Girls' Education

2005-11-29T12:19:00.000-08:00

Hoja
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

When Hoja's mother started having babies, she was all of fourteen. She tells me her husband is great because "he never beats me." She wakes up everyday and pounds rice, goes to the field, works in the garden, washes by hand, cooks, prays, and gets up to do it again the next day. Needless to say she cannot read, but has nonetheless acknowledged the value of education and sent her seven surviving children to school. I can't help wondering how she feels about it all, watching those daughters turn seventeen, eighteen, twenty without husbands, watching them leave the bent-over life of rice planting for clerical jobs and jeans. I wonder what goes through her head when Hoja comes to me with a question from her schoolwork, or to explain a word from the latest novel the girl is struggling through. I wonder if she feels left out, or if somehow her children should. I wonder what gets lost in the process of schooling a nation of girls whose mothers and grandmothers never knew a book from a stone, or the individual from the group.

Does the 20 minute login make the bloggin any sweeter?

2005-11-17T10:59:00.000-08:00

I wanted Bubu to compose this blog, but she would only chew on the pen and stare at me, but still, holding the pen more or less correctly, as if to say, "I could, you know". If Bubu could write it, if she could think about anything beyond who to steal her next guava from, I think she wouldn't lament being ripped from a tree as a baby and thrust into the civilization of a village. I think she'd tell you she's glad to be a pet; she's getting fat, not Walmart fat, but monkey fat, a little round around the middle, and she gets loads more attention this way, leaving the quiet anonymity of the bush. She's the source and recipient of much amusement this way. It's hard to miss your home, she would say, the habits she used to know, but she's learned a lot sneaking her way between the homes of the unsuspecting objects of her study. She'll never fit in of course, her chatter doesn't register, but if she could find a way to express herself, imagine.

Time keeps passing here, too.

2005-09-17T17:30:00.000-07:00

Rain Dance
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

I leave for site tomorrow, curtain fabric, bag of lentils, propane tank, and a little piece of paper that says "Peace Corps Volunteer" in tow. Right now it's all about kicking out the geckos and the spiders, and setting up something I can call home. There should probably be some sleep dividing this task and that one, so I'll try. I'll try.

They even taught me how to eat

2005-09-13T15:42:00.000-07:00

food bowl
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

Things I learned in the past 10 weeks:
1. Knock on the pit latrine before you open it so the cockroaches know you're coming.
2. Ataya glass, shot glass, same thing.
3. There is no way to say "that is interesting" in Mankinka.
I feel prepared.

M be Jang Dorong

2005-09-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

Caroline and Jay
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

Mandinka Kango mang kuleya, bari m man moyi foloo.

That's where I'm at this week, as I wait to swear in as an official volunteer, waiting to greet the home people. I'm trying to buy gas to cook with but it takes two gele buses and a boat ride to get to the one place the border closure hasn't affected. A new home, a new name, a new stomach with an alien gestating within and a mild fever all fill my time right now. But it's fun to be here in front of this glowing screen again, like something I used to know how to do.

"Dude, it's too good"

2005-07-03T07:24:00.000-07:00

Anna and Colleen
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

Those are words of wisdom from a former student, a pint-sized Italian thug with a heart of pure gelato. Too good, dude, this life, my friends, the Creme Brulee at Bottle of Bread. For Tony it was the latest Eminem album, or those miniature skateboards, but for me it's the goodbye heard round the world. It's the unbearable luck of being, well, fuckin' lucky.

Poem from Susan's letter

2005-06-24T12:20:00.000-07:00

Rowe lake
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

Part of me waked, is waking.
Think of it, in the light of day:
action, pie, adventure.

I know this girl, I saw her

2005-06-16T14:58:00.000-07:00

catamount
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

Your friend loves you, she just wore awkward shoes today. She can't sit still anymore because life is too present, too available (too good). She knows that her only regret in life is playing it cool, not letting her waxing affection for the world reveal itself until it was too late to be taken seriously. She won't mind being called a fool if it means she can cash in her cynic points for some real human interaction. You've activated her damned chacras, and now she's ablaze, unable to put the Peace in Peace Corps. She's just core I guess, no more peripherals.

Put me in control of the board

2005-06-13T06:59:00.000-07:00

100_9708
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

"Nightclubs for 800, Alex."
"This is the best tactic for ensuring a conquest."
"What is conformity?"
"That's right, for 800, Colleen. That puts you in the lead."
"I'll try impulse control for 1,000 "
"It is important to remember this when caught in a nowhere argument with some guy who is the definative expert on television even though he never watches it and who posesses an intense need to prove in between condescending quips that he's read the New York Times."
"What is not maiming people?"

Things that make you go "Yum!"

2005-06-08T09:18:00.000-07:00

100_9710
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

What I feel when I drive by "The Creamee Dog" soft-serve stand (yes, it's served soft, my friends) is panic. It's the identical feeling I had when a woman I know lifted up her pant leg, proudly showing me her still-scabby misspelled tattoo. I can't even enjoy making fun of it, because it's just too damned sad.

Why laughing aches

2005-06-07T08:49:00.000-07:00

swing
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

How funny to be leaving this life for a while. Making sense of my motives is nothing but a hilarious dance with words, ungainly and futile. For example the words, "I want to understand another culture" ring goofily to me when I've never made sense of the culture I belong to, or at least never belonged to a culture that made sense. And the idea of loving, loving my life right now, as is, what of that? That's funniest of all I think, choosing to walk away from the best moments of my life so far.

I hope this is vandalism

2005-06-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

100_9714
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

Well it seems that today we must find out what happens when we've surpassed our goals. Perhaps we should aim lower, no? Ever lower, until we find ourselves gloriously back to zero. It might be another way to become enlightened.

I won the World Series and all I got was this skewer stand

2005-06-02T10:19:00.000-07:00

IMG_0327,
originally uploaded by mchughtie.

It's amazing the power of sports, especially when possessed by the beauty of the underdog. It resonates with all our ideas of justice and order. We can collectively stick it to the man by embracing the merely ridiculously rich rather than those clean-coifed winning machines with their private jets. Suddenly we find ourselves trading in those baby birkenstocks we bought our children for a nice, new "Yankee Hater" hat they can wear to school. We can send mass emails out of the latest round of Yankee fan jokes. (How Yankee-esque of us, really.) Vicariously losing felt noble, but winning? Euphoric. And I loved it too, I really did.
But what of that charm in hoping? Can we get that back?

The Secret truths of Anagrams

2005-05-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

Route 128
Originally uploaded by mchughtie.

You've heard the famous ones:
George Bush= He Bugs Gore
Desperation = A Rope Ends It
The Morse Code = Here Come Dots
Slot Machines = Cash Lost in'em
and so forth.(Courtesy of wordsmith.org)

I've recently been introduced to my inner anagram reality.
Colleen Mchugh King= Me go hulk clenching.
I honestly can't imagine a better way to begin understanding yourself.