Saturday, November 29, 2008

Thoughts on hyenas, urine, and microphones


There's a new addition in my household. He's six inches tall, brown, and he leaks so much liquid I think sometimes he must be part sponge. He's called Chulo, Spanish for gangster, a name he has so far completely failed to live up to. He cries and whines and bitches more than any creature I've ever met. He's terrified of everything, all the time, and once spent twenty minutes cowering in fear from a dropped saucepan. Sleep has been a little more exciting since I got him, because two a.m. is usually the time he decides it's time to play, and when I don't wake up he tries to chew my face off. On the plus side, his bean-bag-like body handles being thrown at the wall pretty well.



Yet another way Gambians are weird: the women are scared of puppies. When I bring him near them or he moves around their feet they scream and flail like they've sen a rat. They don't have any problem with the grown dogs that roam around the village, mangy curs that I can hear trying to rip each other to pieces at night outside my compound. These poor creatures have been in so many fights and live in such terrible conditions that many of them look like zombie dogs, with gaping wounds on their scarred faces and chunks missing from their bodies. But my little eight-pound puppy is the terrifying one.

I got to be pretty scary myself, last week. I got to be a hyena, an evil hyena. I was defeated by science! (Possibly blinded, too). Maybe I should explain. About a month ago one of the teachers came into my lab, told me they were starting a science club, asked if I wanted to help out. I said, "sure." "Great," he said, "we're announcing the launch at assembly later today. You should stop by." So I said "sure," again. Like a fool.

So I'm standing near the back of the crowd at assembly, watching the teacher give an impassioned speech about the importance of science, and clubs, and the combination of the two. He whipped them up into a frenzy, painting utopian visions of a world governed by reason, truth, and bake sales. And just when they reached a fever pitch, he pointed at me and said, "And let me introduce our founding director!"

I said, "Huh?" And they all applauded.

So apparently I'm the head of a science club now, a job title which seems to mean doing all the bitch work. I've been organizing debates and making ID cards for the officers, inviting guest speakers and whatnot. It's actually been a blast, mostly because the people I'm working with are pretty motivated and things that they say will happen actually happen. Like a debate we had last week over the economics of solar power versus fossil fuels. It was my idea, but when I proposed it I only half-thought it would ever come together. Eight days later we got the whole school, along with the elementary school next door, in a hall that hadn't been used in eight years and was now spotless, with new chairs lined up in perfect rows, with banners proclaiming to glory of our science club festooning the walls. We even got a local DJ to bring his massive speaker system and microphone.

The night before, as I was leaving school, the same teacher came up to me and said that he wanted to do a play. I said, "when?" He said, "tomorrow." I said, "no." He ignored me, explained the teacher coordinators of the club thought it would be great if they all put on a show about the importance of science, and how it can be misused, and it should be funny, but with a serious message, and with lots of action, and it should demonstrate different scientific principles, and it should be simple enough for the younger students to follow but interesting for the older students. He said the only time he could get the teachers all together to rehearse was in half an hour, so could I have it written by then? I said, "I hate you."

So we did Chicken Little. Each of the teachers was a different animal - we had Donkey Bonkey, and Horsey Norsey. I was Hyena Xena (I figured what the hell). I narrated most of it, then I dropped into character when it was time to trick the animals into going into my cave, where I promised they would be safe from the sky falling. I don't want to spoil the story for you, if you haven't read it, but I was actually planning to eat them. But I was defeated by my arch-enemy, Lion Vion the Scientist. He used his scientific knowledge to show that the sky was not falling, and because he studied animals he knew that I was, you know, a hyena, and I was going to eat them. So they chased me behind the speakers.

All in all it was a great success, although I can't take much credit. The microphone died while I was crawling on the floor and being evil, so most of the students had no idea what we were saying. They just liked watching their teachers pretending to be animals. The guy who played the donkey kept shaking his butt at them, and I think that helped. It was possibly the most powerful production of my theatric career.

There was a creepy consequence to all this. The Mandinka words for "dead" and "killed" are the same, and they don't make much distinction between past and future tense. So ever since my stunning Gambian theatrical debut, people from villages all round who either saw the show or heard about it have been coming up to me and saying, "Yahya, you are dead!"

Considering my fragile emotional and mental state, this is a little disorienting.

Microphones in general seem to hate me lately. I went to the Peace Corps Open-Mike Night last night. I wrote a little poem for the occasion. It was about a bug. I was proud of it. But one of the country directors, an American, decided to bring his kid, and while my poem was hardly pornographic, it had a few words that I wouldn't feel comfortable saying in front of the sweet little seven-year-old who parked herself in the front row and gazed up at each performer with worshipful eyes. So I asked the organizer to bump me back until after she left. Then a friend of mine gave a inebriated delivery of the Angry Vagina speech from the Vagina Monologues, complete with gestures and vernacular. His pantomime of the metal duck-beak at the gynecologist was particularly entertaining, and when the father didn't raise an eyebrow I figured I was in the clear.

But, of course, he who hesitates is lost, and the moment before I got on stage the mike died. So I got to bellow my artsy little poem, with all its carefully drawn metaphors, at the top of my lungs to a crowded bar. Most of them didn't hear me, but it's just as well, since the ones who did were a little too drunk to really follow it. Ah, well. I should have gone with my original plan done my impression of Donald Duck doing an impression of Malcom X. That always gets them.

If any of you happens to be curious, here's the poem. For a little clarification, GMT (Gambian Maybe Time) is a phrase we use to refer to the sort of vague time frame in which things in this country tend to happen. Meetings start hours late, appointments are kept the next day or next week. Seconds and minutes have a fluidity that's hard to adjust to.

There’s a bug on my ceiling.
He’s been there for a month-year now,
A chuck of that chewed-up Peace Corps maybe time.
When you skip through seasons and stumble through seconds
When time turns back on itself.

He was in that corner of my room I like
That point where if you twist your eyes and slant your mind
It flips out and whips you out and now it’s the outside corner of a cube
And you’re standing. And spinning in space.
Alone.

And this little bitch bug’s being on my ceiling,
On my spot, pulling me back to the world.
And I say, bug
I say, bug, you fuck off
Bug, you go get your own universe.

But he don’t leave.
He turns in a nice, tight little circle.
Pivots on his back leg.
Again and again.
Turn and turn.
And he stops.
And he starts again, throwing his legs up and eating his trail dust
On his one-bug, all-kicks, born-free little Route 66.

And he was there the next day, the next, each, beat-up blended Gambian maybe day
For three maybe months.
Walking, jiving, slipping and speeding,
In his smooth long circle-waltz
And his stately way of proceeding.

Maybe he thinks he’s progressing.
Developing.
Sustaining.

He’s got his own buggy maybe kinda time
On his high circle march of mercy
His brain is so small and his world is so tall
The two-second revolution
Seems like two years.

He doesn’t know he’s walked this way,
Played this game,
Danced this dance a thousand times.
This ol’ howdy pilgrim’s walking the straight line
Toward some sacred and succulent salvation.

Maybe I’ve got him all wrong.
Maybe he’s coursing the Icaran heights,
Touching the gods, kicking their teeth, bucking their rights,
Secure in his god-damn, god-high sights.
Yeah, and though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I shall fear no evil, for my little bug buddy is watching out for me,
Watch it, watch out,
Lord and shepherd of all he sees.

I wonder if he volunteered.

Maybe he thinks I’m his god.
Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah.
Maybe I’m his fire and bile and riled up god,
Ready to smack him back him back down if
He fucking thinks of
Stepping his little stepper out of step
Or shining his light out of line.

I’d like to be a god. For just a maybe day. To just a maybe bug.

So I checked.
Three months, real, hard, sun-up months later
Me, the fucking empirical-goddamn-imperial-stupid-imbecile,
I wanted to see what was up.

Stuck in a cobweb,
A little buggy carcass hung an inch from my ceiling,
Turning in the air.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Stupid Democracy

I'm working in the education sector of the Peace Corps, specializing in ICT (information and communication technology), which is weird because I have no ICT experience. The closest I've got is a summer job as a web designer, where I almost got fired. I think it was because I never actually built a webpage. People are so picky.

Although I originally had some reservations, I'm glad I'm doing ICT. Compared to my students, I'm a freaking wizard. They actually applauded once after I demonstrated my amazing forty-word-per-minute typing speed. They've also never done anything like using a computer before, which means I have a lot more freedom than other volunteers in my teaching methods.

I should probably explain that. The education system in the Gambia is occasionally a little frustrating for Americans, as it's based more on memorization than analytical thinking. A typical scene in a Gambian classroom is a teacher holding a textbook and writing what it says on the blackboard, while the students earnestly copy it down, without a word spoken. I teach a few math and English classes on the side, to help out the chronically understaffed school, and I keep having the same problem. I'll try to explain an idea for a good half hour, with absolutely nothing getting through, until finally a light bulb goes off for one of them. He'll explain the exact same idea with slightly different words, and suddenly everyone will understand. Turns out they learned it last year. They have no way of relating different concepts, or even the same concept worded differently. They know it the way it was drilled into them or not at all. It drives me insane.

But with computers, they don't have any paradigms burned into their brains. It's totally new, self-motivated, requiring analytical and problem-solving abilities that they've never had the chance to use before. Some find it intimidating, and can't handle the lack of a rigorous structure, but the ones who get it are like genetic alcoholics on their first sip of Jack Daniels. I have to kick them out of my lab, and they're begging me each night to open it up and let them practice more. I even find that things go more slowly when I actually try to teach, guiding them step-by-step through some activity. I get a lot more out of them when I just switch on the computer and let them go to town, exploring, making mistakes, while I'm there when they need a tip or crash a program.

Although the liberal populist in me hates it, I'm realizing that I just can't reach all of them. Not even a large portion. In fact, if I leave here after two years and I've only really taught five or ten kids, I'll be happy. Because those are the kids that really want it. They're willing to fight for it, bleed for it, break through the malaise that's infected their culture. They're the ones that will study, go to school, start a business, really go somewhere, and maybe pull their country up with them.

The main project I'm working on right now is turning my computer lab into an internet cafe. The lab's got eight or ten decent computers, and I've just finished a deal with the country's telephone company to hook up a land line. Now I've got to convince a telecom company that it would be worth their while to give us free dial-up internet. If I can do that I can teach internet classes to the school, which would be nice, but I've got bigger ambitions. I want to turn it into a full internet cafe, servicing the community, run by the students. It would be the only full cyber cafe in the region, and if we can expand our small bank of solar panels it will be the only cyber cafe outside of the capital that is open all day - the power only being on for a few hours in the morning and a few hours at night. It would open up access to the internet to my village and those surrounding, as well as teach my students small business administration skills. I've already got a few students as my protegés, who help tutor the other students and run the lab when I'm not around.

I'm also working with the school's peer health club to put on some short plays about health issues, like malaria and AIDS. It's a little annoying, because while I agree those issues are important, I'm not PBS. I don't care if knowing is half the battle. My goal is to branch out into plays about Gambian history and culture. It's part of an overall initiative that I've been working on with some other volunteers to improve the African self-image. Sometimes it feels like the entire continent has a insecurity complex. I can't count the number of times a Gambian has told me he can't do something because he's African. The country is caught between its tribal roots, the Muslim dogma that was imposed a millennium ago, and the Western values of the last century, and it doesn't fit with any of them. Western culture is its dream, Islam is its law, and tribal beliefs are its embarrassing past. Only a few vestigial remnants of the original culture, the one I came here to see and be a part of, remain visible. There's the leaf monster, I suppose. That's kind of cool.

We're tackling this issue a variety of ways. One of my friends, Tara Steinmetz, works at the local radio, an excellent medium for low-technology areas. Just about everybody listens to it. She's working on a Pan-African music hour, playing native music from across the continent and emphasizing the cool side of African cultures. She's also put up posters of African-American models, specifically ones with darker skin, at the radio and in her home. It's been difficult finding them, as most famous and beautiful African-American women have very light skin. I guess some things cross oceans.

From my end, I'm researching old Gambian history and myths. The local story-tellers, called griots, charge ruinous prices, but they're a trove of ancient family and tribal histories. They travel from village to village, attending ceremonies, and for a small donation they'll reel off your entire family history, noting famous ancestors, recounting amusing stories and bloody conflicts. Since I don't have a Gambian lineage, it's a little difficult for them, but I just ask them for their most dramatic stories, and no good performer, even a traditional tribal storyteller, can resist the chance to ham it up. Now I'm working on turning those stories into short plays. I've talked to some local musicians, too, and with a little luck and perseverance my students should be able to start putting on some shows for their villages about tribal stories, with tribal music, showing that maybe an African heritage is something worth taking some pride in, not an excuse to fail. Plus I get to do fight choreography with spears, which is freaking awesome.

Well, that's enough shop talk. I know the only reason you all are checking back on this is for another cute little story. I don't have another monster dance-off, but I do have an important lesson about the importance of voting. So grab your mini American flags and listen up, kiddies.

Because the Gambia doesn't have a functioning postal system, there is a mail-run once a month that travels from the capital up the country, stopping at every volunteer's site. This last one was very important, because it had our absentee ballots on it. Volunteer traveling came to a standstill for a day as everyone made sure to be at their sites so they could vote.

So the mail truck showed up, the guys delivering were friends from training, so we chewed the fat for a while as they gave me my stuff. They handed me my ballot, and told me that I had to fill it out right there and give it back to them. I showed them around my place, and they admired the wiring job I've done (that's right, I wired my own house. What've you done this week?). They had a long way to go, so they bade a fond farewell and climbed back into the truck. I went back into my house, and the cleverer of you can guess what I found: I was still holding my ballot.

I ran out after them, just in time to see the truck pull away. I was wearing shorts, with no shirt or shoes, so I grabbed my bike, bit the ballot between my teeth, and sped after them. The truck and I had a sweaty, slow chase through the streets of my village, as I wove back and forth through side alleys, trying to catch up. The pedals of my bike have spikes on them, which drove through the soles of my bare feet like tiny torture devices. The faster I went, the more it hurt. I shot through a gap between compounds and splashes through what I thought was a giant pile of mud. It coated me, and I quickly discovered it was not mud. This was seeming less and less like a good idea. But in a strange way, the more I suffered, the more determined I was to press on. After all, it couldn't get much worse.

I almost caught up with the damn truck at the junction with the main road. I was two feet behind it, waving my arms and screaming through my ballot, when every kid that likes to hang out by the junction after school started shouting my name. Why? Because, that's why. So the driver didn't hear me, didn't look in the rear view mirror, of course. and started down the road, quickly leaving me behind. I did some mental math. The next volunteer was about three miles away, so I figured hell with it. I was damned if I was going to give this up. So as the mail truck pulled away from his house they were greeted by the sight of me, shirtless, shoeless, with bleeding feet, covered in animal feces, eating my ballot.

They stopped. "What are you doing?"

"You deaf people!" (people was not the word I used)

They laughed when they heard what happened. A lot.

Of course there was no room in the truck to give me a lift back, so I got to put my bloody feet back on the Marquis de Sade pedals and shuffle my slow, stinky way back home.

The best part is that when I finally got to fill out my ballot I was shaking with exhaustion, so I think the election counters were probably a little surprised to record a single vote for "Ehdug Usdfe."

Let no one doubt my commitment to the democratic process.