One year, baby!

Hello, beautiful people. Happy late Fourth of July. One year ago, on July 3rd, a scared little white boy stepped off a plane and onto Africa. So congratulate me. They say it’s all downhill from here.

Speaking of downhill, I left a few stories on cliffhangers last time, so let’s wrap those up now.

My dog, Chulo, managed to rip out about half his stitches again almost immediately. I said hell with it and just tried to keep the wound clean, along with spraying him with the purple disinfectant every few hours. I had a lot of fun trying to get back to site. You see, one of the lesser-known tenants of Islam is that you’re not supposed to travel with animals. Tying them to the roof is okay, but even having an animal in the hatchback of a car with people riding in the backseat is taboo. I find this hilarious, because I can’t count the number of times I’ve ridden in a taxi rubbing cheeks with a goat. Their breath is about as nice as you’d imagine.

To get to my site from the capital you have to take a ferry across a wide river, then catch a bush bus from the car park. The bus usually takes about two hours and costs 35 dalasi. No one would take me and Chulo for anything less than 300 dalasi, which I refused to pay, so I sat in the car park for several hours, arguing with the drivers. I called up my contacts at the area council and asked them for help, and they said they’d send someone. Two hours later, well after dark, he shows up. I pick up my bags and ask, “Where’s your car?” He says, “What car?”

Turns out he lived in the town I was in, and was simply sent over to help me negotiate, not give me a ride. Why it took him two hours to get to get to me when the entire town is less than a mile wide, I don’t know. He argued with the drivers for a while, and they told him exactly the same thing they told me: no filthy animals in their cars for less than 300 Dalasi. I said I wouldn’t pay that. So he paid them one hundred from the area council petty cash, and I paid two hundred. Except that the council already owed me one hundred for other expenses, so basically I paid what I originally swore I wouldn’t. At that point I was sick, stressed to hell, with a bleeding, terrified dog, and wanting to kill every person in this stupid country, so I gave in.

Chulo’s wound healed up pretty well, in the end. Not even much of a scar. Of course, as soon as it did, he developed a cyst on his rib cage. This dog has had more twisted health problems in the last few months than any creature should be able to survive. He’s been run over by a car, had mango flies lay eggs in his testicles, gotten weird bruises and swellings on his legs, had his side ripped open, and gotten a cyst on his side. He’s still the most active and irritatingly energetic dog I’ve ever seen.

The other conflict I left hanging has not resolved itself so well. My neighbor, a swell guy named Jobatie, who happens to be a wife-beater, a drug-pusher, oh, and the chief of immigration, has basically stopped paying his share of the electricity bill. When I got back from Kombo at the beginning of last month, we had a calm conversation about it, and I agreed to pay a little more than what I had been, just to keep the peace. I ended up paying rather a lot more, and he still was barely paying anything. So the lights went out, my fan died in the stifling heat, and when I asked him to pay more he told me to go to hell.

Now, you all know that I am normally the soul of diplomacy. A gentle lamb am I, filled to the brim with the soul of human goodness. But I have limits. So I yelled. He yelled back. Things ended up a little violent. Not a lot violent, but a little. He pushed me, then waved his belt at me like I was going to fly at him in a bloody rage and he would have to fend me off. I just walked into my house. He stood outside for a while, shouting bizarre threats like he would have me deported. That would be a neat trick. The next morning, he and I both left the compound at the crack of dawn, at a near run.

The race was on.

You see, in America, with a dispute like this, the parties involved would file a complaint with their landlord, and if it got really bad, they’d take it to the municipal court. In the Gambia, the court of public opinion is the only one that matters. Whichever of us could get the neighborhood on his side would get to stay in the compound. The other would have to find a new place to live. For the next week he and I basically ran an election campaign, canvassing the neighborhood, talking to everyone we could, trying to get our respective versions of the conflict heard by as many people as possible.

It was really quite a learning experience. Power structures in West Africa are subtle and many-layered. I had to speak to the governor (yes, the one that threw the stapler) and the chief of police, of course, but I also met with the imam (the Muslim priest) and the alkalo (the village’s traditional leader). But that was only the beginning. I talked to women’s groups, which are a lot more powerful than most people realize, as well as student’s groups, even the football teams. I’m sure the good folks at the Peace Corps will be proud to know that I’m using the skills they taught me to get back at people who screw me over.

Anyway, the whole thing is still up in the air. I managed to shift public opinion enough to get the landlord to agree to kick Jobatie out, but long hard experience in this country has taught me that just because someone says something’s going to happen doesn’t mean it will happen soon, or ever. So we’ll see.

I got a nice break from the stress last week, when admin put us all up in the Sheraton for a few days. We had a meeting of all the volunteers in the country. It was amazing. The place look like it had been designed by Picasso after reading too many Dr. Seuss books and playing Legend of Zelda for three days straight. It took at least twenty minutes each morning for me to find my way to the breakfast buffet, wandering lost but happy through labyrinthine turns, twisting staircases, inexplicable dead-ends, and the occasional pit lines with spikes.

But it was worth it, because they had bacon. They could have put me up in the janitor’s closet and I would have been happy.

We had another open-mike night, an evening when we put together a malfunctioning microphone, several dozen volunteers with more courage than talent, and lots and lots of alcohol. It was a lot of fun, especially when a guy from Georgia broke out with his personal rendition of “Achy-Breaky Heart” a capella, which for reasons I never discovered he performed while doing a chicken dance. I wrote another poem, which you lucky, lucky people get to enjoy here. It doesn’t quite have the lyrical flow of the last one, but it’s one of the most honest things I’ve ever written. But don’t read it while you’re eating.


My future is eating me.

His table manners are atrocious.
Sometimes he uses his fork and knife, but usually his fingers
Pulling off bits of me and shoving them greasy into his red mouth.
His chin is soft and slick with juices.

He starts at my feet.
Eats up my child dreams, my story heroes.
My I want to bes and my nightmares.
Everything that seemed special and true.
They slide down his gullet and turn into things he used to believe
Things he knew when he was half-made and stupid small.
Things he put aside.

He eats past my knees.
Picks the gristle of my scars from his yellow teeth.
And all the places my legs have taken me.
Between his molars he grinds every mountain I’ve climbed.
He slurps down every path I’ve walked like dirty pasta.
They squish and splish in his belly, buried under mortgages and memos.
Pumped into his varicose veins.

He eats my groin.
And with it all the women I’ve loved. He over-seasons them;
Salts the stolen kisses, saturates the sex with Splenda
Until he can’t taste the sweat, the need, the furious passion.
With his fork he mashes all the lovely heart-ripping soul-cutting pain they gave me,
Whipping it smooth so it won’t give him heartburn.

He takes my insides one by one.
Gums my anger till it’s soft.
Chokes down my shit poems and half-written novels.
Plucks out my hunger with his fingers.
Drops the bones of my arrogance on the floor.
My jokes are all on me.

As he eats he gets fatter, older.
His hair thins, his eyes dim,
His hands shake. Lines drip down his face like melted wax.
A body and mind neglected and befouled.

Around my rib cage he finds my Peace Corps service.
Eats it slowly. Lovingly. A delicacy.
He keeps the bullshit for his resume, edits out the failures.
Chews my stories again and again until they’re a gray paste lining his gums,
Coming out in a fine spray of flecking spittle.

He sucks the marrow of my life through my neck
Like a middle-management vampire.
He eats my education, my opportunity knocks and my campus dreams
And shits out a do-nothing go-nowhere job.
Pulls the skin off my face and blends it until it blends on in.
Just like everyone else.
My hair he rips out in clumps.
My eyes see nothing when they are popped into a gaping maw.

With a meaty belch, he pats his chin dry
And flips on the TV.