Points of light

In January I finally got to go hunting, something I’ve been wanting to do for over a year now. I went out in bush one night with a friend of mine, a teacher named Saho, and a few other volunteers. We never shot anything, or even saw anything worth shooting, but it was a beautiful evening, without much of a moon, so the stars were burning. It’s funny, I keep realizing something over and over, and every time I do it’s fresh: Africa is scary at night. I suppose that seems obvious, but it’s really, really true. There’s something about the darkness here that’s thicker, more alive. It seems to bunch behind you in twisted knots, move in the corner of your eyes. All the white people spent a lot of time spinning around, sure there was something behind us. Saho found this hilarious.

At one point we saw a light off in the distance, maybe a hundred yards away. It was just a pinpoint, and I figured it was another hunter and started to wave with my headlamp. Saho clamped a hand on my arm. I protested, and he shushed me violently. “It’s a witch light,” he said.

I’d heard about these. Little lights that appear in the bush, with no cause or explanation. No one knows what they are, mostly because people who see them up close tend to die. I had been wanting to go out some night and try to track them down, but none of my friends wanted to take me. The light flicked out, but immediately flicked back, some fifty feet from where it had been. It’s possible it was two lights, but if so they were perfectly synchronized.

Now, I hope that any regular readers of this blog will know by now that I’m not easily frightened, nor do I shy away from unusual experiences. But something about that light bothered me. Maybe it was because I couldn’t tell what color it was – it seemed orange, at first, then white, then sort of green. Maybe it was the way that looking at it made me feel like I couldn’t quite get enough air, like my chest wasn’t big enough for my heart and my lungs. As a group we opted for the better part of valor and decided to leave this mystery unsolved.

I managed another first this month, attending a wrestling match. This, too, was something I’d wanted to do since coming to this country, but any time they had one in an area near me I had always been busy. Finally they had one in my village, on a night when I was in town, and I got my game face on.

This thing was epic. Hundreds of villagers gathered in a football field on the edge of town. Light was provided in dim islands by a few scattered bulbs that hung from logs shoved into the sand. The power station had been having some problems lately, so the lights flickered drunkenly – they would switch suddenly off, slowly light again, then off a few seconds later. In and around these indecisive patches of illumination, dark bodies twisted and grappled. The multitude of feet kicked up so much dust that the whole field was covered in a haze, and as the men fought in this African fog they appeared and disappeared from view like dreams.

West African wrestling isn’t like what you see on American TV, or in American gymnasiums. There was no artifice, no bullshit name calling or expostulating. No one used any complicated holds or strategies. They wrestled standing up, face to face, and the winner often ended up picking the loser entirely off the ground and throwing him through the air.

It’s worth mentioning that this was also the night I discovered that palm wine isn’t always terrible. I’d had it once before, after being warned by more seasoned travelers, and found it to be the most vile substance I had ever consumed – and I survived on public school lunches for years. It wasn’t harsh like strong liquor; it just had this sickly, nauseous quality that made my entire body rebel and my throat spasm. But a friend from village had some that he said was better (bad, bad Muslim), so I figured what the hell. It was drinkable. Not good, not by a long shot, but drinkable. Also very, very alcoholic.

Now, for the benefit of the good folks in Washington, I want to emphasize that I did not get drunk. However, it is possible that the alcohol had something to do with my agreeing, after a lot of prodding by my Gambian friends, to participate in the contest.

There was a lot of good-natured joshing and elbow nudging as I made my way out into the wrestling area. Quite a few catcalls in Mandinka that I don’t think I was supposed to understand. My opponent was a big guy, with solid muscle sheathed beneath a decent layer of fat, which isn’t a common build in West Africa. If men are muscled here they’re usually slender and ripped. He was wearing a purple diaper, which I thought was a little weird, but far from the weirdest thing about the evening. He didn’t seem to like me, and I’m sure the palm wine on my breath didn’t endear me much.

We stepped close together. He grabbed my pants. I grabbed his diaper. Then I was in the air. Then I wasn’t.

I lay on the ground for a few seconds, trying to resolve the gyrating shapes and the cheering, laughing crowd into a coherent image. The damn flickering lights really didn’t help. My friends ran over to me, asked if I was all right. Their concern was belied a little by the fact they were all trying hard not to laugh. I said I was fine, and they said, good, then you can do the second match. I said, what?

It was the same guy. Now, instead of a contemptuous sneer, he had an amused and contemptuous sneer. Well, hell with this guy. I stepped forward, wrapped my fingers around his diaper, and as soon as I felt his hands on my waist I shoved forward, as hard and as fast as I could. The momentum knocked the chubby bastard on his ass, and me on top of him, right when the lights went out. I felt him struggle and curse at me, and I hopped up, victorious.

Oh, man, he was pissed. Everyone else thought it was hilarious. We circled and were going to come together for a final match, but the lights went out for good. It’s just as well, since that trick would only have worked once and he probably would have killed me.

It’s funny. Nothing I’ve done, none of the development projects, classes, or social functions have won me anywhere near the acclaim that five minutes in the wrestling ring got me. Kids run up to me in the street now and adopt the stance. People I’ve never met shout “champion,” which is funny, since I never won. I think everyone knows that I had no business out there, and that I have no actual wrestling ability. They just like it when they things they care about are taken seriously.

I also got myself all cut up this month. Several of the local tribes do ritual scarring, usually on the face, to signify passage into adulthood. They cut two or three parallel lines, then rub the ash of peanut shells into the wound to make the scar darker. It’s become a tradition with Peace Corps volunteers in the Gambia to get their own scars – though not on the face; that might be a handicap at job interviews or dates. I’ve never had a tattoo or piercing, mostly because it seemed a little silly to intentionally damage your body when so many things in the world seem willing to do it for you. But this seemed different. Something that would be a mark of my time here, a symbol of the changes I’ve been through, the incredible things I’ve seen and done in Africa. Plus chicks dig scars.

So another volunteer and I visited a little old lady who was well known in the area for her scarring abilities. I wonder how you get to be good at that kind of thing. Did she practice a lot? Was there a training program? Maybe she gave away free scars while she was a student, like a hair stylist. We brought our own razors, as well as medical gloves, hand sanitizer and gauze. We were dumb, but we weren’t stupid. We drew with pen where we wanted the scars to be, gritted our teeth, and she set to work.

My friend wanted hers on the sides of her wrists, which I thought was a little odd, especially since she wants to be a school teacher when she gets back. She bore the experience with manly stoicism. I wasn’t quite so tough.

I had two spots where I wanted scars: the back of my neck and my ribs; I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. The ones on my neck weren’t too bad, really, I was surprised when she was done. The ones on the ribs, though… there’s not a lot between skin and bone around the ribs, especially when you’re an emaciated Peace Corps volunteer, really just a lot of nerve endings. It was excruciating, and slow, and the lines were long, and it was in all not a happy ten minutes for me. The old lady maintained a professional demeanor, but every time I gave a muffled whimper I saw a little gleam in her eye, and thought I knew why she’d chosen this particular profession. When she was finally done, and my side was on fire, she grabbed a big pinch of peanut ash and rubbed it hard into the cuts, twisting and pulling at the skin. I swear the witch was humming.

We bandaged ourselves up, pained but proud, glad it was over. She handed us a bag of ash, and said that every day, for the next three days, we had to open the wounds back up and rub more ash inside. This woman was the devil.

It was all character building, I suppose. So now I have the distinct pride of looking like a bored child doodled on me with a pen.

I told this story to an American friend of mine, who’d had a gigantic red dragon tattooed across her entire right side. I described the level of pain, and she looked thoughtful and said, “Yeah, that sounds about right.” I asked how long it took, and she said, “About five hours.” So I guess there’s always someone more badass.

I got my revenge on old African women, though. I showed them but good. Remember that business class I’m teaching for local women? No? Tsk tsk. There’s gonna be a quiz at the end of all this, you know.

Well, as a recap for the slackers, I’m teaching a class to a dozen women in Kerewan who sell vegetables and other goods. We’ve been learning the basics, like supply and demand, the idea of competition, scarcity vs abundance, and so on. The thing we’ve been hitting the hardest has been basic bookkeeping – tracking income and expenditures, calculating profits.

These women have a strange relationship to math. They can calculate change in their heads faster than I can do it on a calculator, even for triple digits. But put those numbers on a blackboard and their minds switch off. They have this idea of written mathematics as this arcane discipline, far beyond the reach of simple minds such as their own. So we’ve been working on that, and most of them can handle basic arithmetic with small numbers. But their businesses don’t operate just in small numbers. They need to calculate expenses for entire crops, as well as seasonal profits, which are big, scary numbers.

So I taught them how to use their cell phone calculators. First I drew a big calculator interface on the board, complete with the phone keypad. I gave them simple math problems, and the women would come up one at a time, press the imaginary buttons, and I would write whatever the screen should display.

In order to really picture this scene I need to paint you a picture of a typical village woman when she’s dressed up. She’s wearing a beautifully cut dress, made of a shimmering, incandescent cloth. It’s always a striking color – neon green, or yellow, or crimson – and it’s usually covered in sequins. Her head is wrapped in a similar cloth, tied in an intricate knot known as a tika. Finally, when it’s hot she drapes a diaphanous cloth over her head and shoulders. It’s incredibly beautiful, and it’s amazing to see, in these villages of dirt and stone and rough metal, these floating visions of color like flowers in a muddy river.

The first woman to muster up the courage to try my fake cell phone was in her sixties, wrinkled and bent, but still dressed to the nines. She was in the toubab’s class, after all, and she had to look her best. She inched forward, staring at the chalkboard distrustfully, then extended a bony finger and stabbed a button.

“Beep,” she said.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Beep,” she said, and she stabbed the button again. “Mobiles say beep when you push them.”

And for the rest of the lesson, each woman would beep merrily as she dialed the chalkboard.

I just have to take a second to talk a little more about these women. They are absolutely incredible. They wake up before dawn every morning. They feed the children, work the garden, wash clothes, pound rice, and cook dinner in tiny, smoke-filled rooms that about as closely approximate Hell as any four-by-three space can. They work in the rice fields, travel long distances to market to sell their goods, and chop the wood. While the boys and men rest in the shade for eight hours at a stretch, the women do everything that’s needed to keep the massive households together and running, and they do it without complaining, without even being aware that they’re being taken advantage of.

And then they take the time to dress up in their best outfits, outfits they had to work their fingers to the bone to earn the money for, and come to my little business class. The truth that both they and I know is that I need them far more than they need me. There’s nothing I can really teach them about life.

Just a quick caveat - this isn't the standard bleeding heart bullshit about how hard life is for rural women in developing countries. I don't feel bad for these women, and I don't want to lift them out their drudge and misery. They live more and better than just about anyone I've ever met. All I'm trying to do is help them get something close to a fair return on the insane amount of work they do.

Someone complained that I don’t give a complete picture of my work here, that I just dole out funny little anecdotes that I think will make me look good. So here’s a quick rundown on the things I’m working on.

The Council’s strategy plan is still going, although very slowly. I made the mistake of including mostly concrete suggestions that can immediately be acted on, rather than vague policy shifts that will have no real effect, and that disturbed people. So I’m working on blunting it, while retaining some level of effectiveness.

I put got a web page for the Council together, with descriptions of its projects and the major problems facing the region. Finding someone to host it in the Gambia for a reasonable price turned out to be quixotic, so I’m looking elsewhere. Suggestions would be welcome.

The regional strategy plan (which is a bad name, since it’s neither a strategy nor a plan – it’s the thing where we did the play where I got stabbed by a big stick) is going decently well. We did another skit, although we did it two months after we were scheduled to, this time about the importance of planting trees. It was a nice little skit, a lot like the Giving Tree – a farmer takes from a tree to make medicine, food, a fire, etc., until there’s nothing left but a stump.

We used children from the audience to make the tree, and I, as the farmer, chopped one of them down every time I needed something. Now at this point my old theater buddies are shaking their heads at my stupidity. I broke one of the cardinal rules: never work with animals or children. They can’t be controlled. I, in my white man’s hubris, assumed that they would be so in awe of us that they’d do whatever we asked. Turns out they were so in awe of us that they ran away in the middle of the performance. I guess being chopped down and eaten was a little unsettling.

I’m still helping out with development projects for the Council, mostly by following my counterpart, Keita, around and trying not to get in his way. We recently visited a mosque that had been started a few years ago and then abandoned from lack of funds – which is very, very common here. You see a lot of buildings that look like they’ve been bombed, but actually were just never finished. We were called in to assess how much it would cost to finish it. It was a sad little half-building, with no roof, no floor, and crumbling walls.

The alkalo (village leader) showed up and started explaining why it was the imam’s fault that the mosque was never finished. The imam showed up and started yelling at the alkalo. Some of the elders showed up and started yelling at everyone. People were ripping chunks out of the mortar with their bare hands to demonstrate the quality of construction. My man Keita just waited, calmly, like a rock in turbulent waters, until there was a break while everyone took a breath. Then he began listing the improvements that were necessary, and exactly how much they would cost, and who they should call to do the work, and how they could mobilize the labor, all in a perfectly calm, professional voice. After a few minutes everyone was nodding seriously and agreeing to commit resources. This man is a genius. He has a way of cutting through the bullshit, dealing with hard reality in a way that makes problems seem solvable, and everything else unimportant.

My drama club, alas, is not doing so well. Last year most of the talented and dedicated members graduated, and the people I’m left with aren’t so much bad as lazy. Only about a third of the rehearsals I go to actually happen. The rest of the time there’s always some excuse. And even when we do manage to get them all together, they’re watching the clock the whole time, waiting to be done. It’s discouraging, but I can’t teach people who don’t want to be taught. I can’t force them to care. So I’m picking out the best, the ones who actually seem to give a damn, and having private rehearsals outside of school. We’ll see if that goes anywhere.

I recently got to be loan collector, which was a lot more fun than it sounds. It was actually one of the best days I’ve had in this country. Microfinance organizations issue small loans to village businesses. The rates they charge are usurious by Western standards – as high as 30% - but since the original loans are so small, interest payments don’t come to much. There’s an organization called Reliance that offers microloans in a nearby city, so I shadowed one of their loan collectors for a day to learn more about it.

The first thing I noticed was that everyone loved us – well, him, I suppose. He was the market’s golden boy. People gave us free food, called out boisterous greetings, and generally couldn’t be happier to see us. Little old ladies ran up with their hundred-dalasi bills clutched in their hands, then watched proudly as we entered the payment into their account books. There was one guy who three months earlier had taken out a loan for three thousand dalasi – about a hundred and twenty bucks. The loan was for six months. He’d bought some supplies, started a business that took off, and that day he repaid the entire loan, straight out, then immediately took out a five thousand dalasi loan. The money here is printed in a variety of colors, and the big fistful of torn, stained bills that he held out to us looked like a rainbow.

Every project I’ve worked on, just about every development project I’ve heard of, tells a story. In that story, the main character is me, or someone like me, doing noble works and saving the day with daring do. The people being helped are side characters, movable set pieces of misery and need. But in that alley, in the sun, holding out his pride in a rainbow fist, that man was the main character. I was just, I don’t know, comic relief. And that felt right.

So I tried to bring the whole thing to my village, Kerewan. I talked to Reliance about extending savings and loan services to business people in my community, and they said it could work, if I got enough people and organized the payment structure. The problem would be payments. Reliance usually sends out loan collectors every day, which makes it easy to spot and deal with defaulters. Kerewan was over thirty kilometers away from their nearest office. So one of the conditions of the deal would be that someone in Kerewan would be responsible for collecting the payments and getting the money to the company. I said we could work something out.

For the next week I canvassed the community, talking to shop owners, carpenters, vegetable sellers, anyone who offered any kind of good or service for money. Over two hundred people, and most of them were interested. Many said that they’d tried to secure a loan, but the banks had turned them down. I even got them to agree to the payment structure, and appoint two representatives to be the loan collectors. We set up a meeting with an administrator from Reliance. The guy showed up five hours late, during which time most of Kerewan’s business owners came, sat around for a while, and left angry. Finally the representative arrived, so I went back into the town, re-gathered all the annoyed and busy villagers, and we had a meeting. It went well – the locals asked intelligent questions about payment rates and services, and the Reliance representative, while lacking in people skills, seemed to have the answers.

We scheduled another meeting for two weeks later, at which point people would actually sign up for accounts. The timing was crucial, as the shortest loan was for four months and it was exactly four months until the rainy season started and money became tight. Two days before the meeting I called to make sure everything was on schedule. The administrator said, “Oh, yeah, sorry. Upper management decided not to work in Kerewan. It’s not worth the risk.”

The worst part is that my people didn't seem very surprised when I told them. They were used to being ignored and taken for granted, and they expected people not to take them seriously. I was just one more outsider who promised a lot and didn't follow through.

So yay. Instead of ending with that depressing story, I’ll tell you about a game my friends and I invented. It’s called XP, or Experience Points. No, not like in a nerd game. You earn XP any time you have an experience. It can be good or bad, important or trivial, silly or serious. It just needs to be unusual, or interesting. It needs to let you know that this is real, that you are alive. Just about everything I’ve written in this blog is a time I or someone else earned XP.

You earn it when you climb a mountain, and when you get into a car accident. You earn it when you meet someone you haven’t seen in years and you have a great conversation, or when you get into a fight at a bar. You earn it going to your child’s birthday party, or when a relative dies. Any time you’re tested, any time you sacrifice. You get bonus points if you participate, instead of just observe, and you get bonus points the weirder or more powerful the experience is. It’s a great game because it keeps you aware that you are here, now, and you are alive. So the next time something terrible, or wonderful, or weird, or scary happens, be happy that you earned XP, that you’re earning the life you’ve got. The object is simple: get as much as you can until you die.

Role models

The general philosophy in Peace Corps is that the first year is really just a warm-up. You learn the language and you make some connections; you run the gauntlet of pit latrines, cockroaches and bush taxis, watch project after project crash and burn, and slowly learn how things get done. Volunteers aren’t really expected to accomplish much their first year, which is nice, because they rarely do. It’s the second year when things really get moving. You’ve found your stride, made your connections, and you finally start to have a real impact, which is an unfamiliar and disorienting feeling.

For me, things have been steadily improving since I passed the one-year mark, and when I got back from America everything clicked. It’s hard to pinpoint the difference. It’s not that my job is any easier – if anything, it’s harder; my week isn’t complete unless I’ve had a screaming fight with a Gambian. All the old obstacles are there: the apathy, the lies, the pervading atmosphere of fatalism and failure. But when I smash my head against one of these walls, instead of lying down and crying, I keep smashing until the wall breaks (or I get a concussion).

I’ve been learning a lot from my friends. There are a few exceptional individuals here, people who have a spark in them, something strong and hungry. They jump on every opportunity, learn everything they can, usually have multiple jobs and do well at all of them. Those people exist in America, too, but they’re harder to pick out of the crowd. Here, they shine out – just look for the guy who’s a teacher, owns a hardware store, works at the radio and is automatically invited to every village development meeting. Or the woman who cooks and cleans for a family of thirty, sews her own clothes, owns a small business selling beans or ice and runs the local women’s group. These people have something in them that just won’t let them give up or ever be satisfied with where they are. They tend to be fantastically successful, not least because there isn’t much competition.

My closest counterpart is one of those. A guy named Alasan Keita, the Physical Planning and Development Officer at the council, which means that he does all the work worth doing there. He dropped out of the school at fifteen when he realized he knew more than his teachers, travelled around Africa for years, learned farming, carpentry, and architecture, married a woman from Mali, then came back to the Gambia and built them a house. With the skills he taught himself he planted a mango orchard and a massive vegetable farm, built several beehives, started a poultry breeding project combining local chickens with Moroccan imports, kept a herd of goats, and headed up dozens of development projects for the local area council. Keita and I have a simple relationship: I teach him how to write effectively and use a computer, and he teaches me how to be awesome. I think I’m getting the better part of that deal.

The big project I’m working on right now, with heavy input from Keita, is a ten-year strategy plan for the council. I’ve never had lot of respect for things like this, honestly. In most organizations I’ve worked for you keep extra copies of the strategy plan around in case you run out of toilet paper. When the head of the council asked me to write one up I assumed it was a makework assignment that would take me a day or two at most. But Keita pointed out that this was an incredible opportunity. No other area council in the country has a strategy plan; this would be read by every NGO, government official, village development council, embassy, and dog catcher that ever worked or will ever work with the council. It’ll provide the one thing this organization, and every development organization that’s ever existed, desperately needs: accountability. If the big talking heads at the council and the upper levels of government sign off on the plan, then the council will be bound to actually do some of the things it says they will.

So we’ve spent the last couple months interviewing every staff member, from senior councilors to secretaries. I’ve poured over budgets and expense reports for the last ten years, which was fun. None of their files are electronic, protected from the elements or even organized very well, so my afternoons have been spent in a cramped, stifling file room, chest deep in ancient, moldy papers, trying to figure out how the hell this organization has been spending its money for the last decade. The good folks in Washington don’t like it when I talk too frankly about how things work here, so I’ll just say that the results were interesting.

I also found that the council is nowhere near fulfilling its potential, or even its obligations according to the original act that created it, and with Keita's help I laid out a step-by-step ten year plan for how it could do so. Mission statements, internal analyses, budgets, timelines. It revises the way expenses are reported, projects are taken on and completed, and staff are hired. Keita and I have been writing it piecemeal over the last few months, and yesterday we put it all together and printed it out. It's a little intimidating. A printed copy is sitting on the desk next to me, and I swear it growled at me a minute ago. If the council follows even a quarter of the strategies it outlines, it’ll have serious, long-term effects, not just for the council but for the region it serves.

Now comes the fun part: the politicking, the negotiations, the arguing. The strategy plan calls for sacrifices from everyone involved – staff, councilors, contractors, village councils – everyone but me, actually, since I won’t be here, which is causing a little resentment. To get it approved is going to take a lot of dealing and concessions and coercion, which I’m sure will be fun for everyone involved. The nice thing is that I’ve build up enough momentum and gotten enough people excited that anyone who tries to block it risks getting labeled as a dissenter, which is just about the worst thing you can be in Gambian culture. So knock on wood for me, and hope this thing gets approved. And that once it is people won’t just dump it in a filing cabinet and never think about it again.

As least one part of the whole thing will be tested soon. The council's tax collection system has been a mess for years, bringing in about a third of what it should. Some of the missing funds stay in the pockets of people big and influential enough not to pay, some magically disappear on the way to the bank, and some just never get collected because of sloppy records. I've been working with the Director of Finance to completely overhaul the tax record system, with detailed schedule for hitting the entire region, redundant safeguards at every step of the collection process, a fully transparent record and filing system that will account for every damn Dalasi at every step, along with accountability checks so that no one has the opportunity to accidentally slip some cash in their pockets. It's going into effect as I write this, and within the next month we'll see how it goes. By a conservative estimate it should increase the year's revenue by at least 50%. I never thought I'd be so excited by taxes.

Anyway. Enough shop talk. I know that none of you read this thing to hear about the work I'm doing, toiling away to fight the good fight. You want zany stories and wacky misadventures.

Well, you’ll be happy to hear that I sank the kayak again. I had help this time, which made it more fun. For a long time it’s been bugging me that the kayak is a one-seater, and although I can use it to explore the hidden waterways and secret jungles of West Africa, it's a shame that I can only see all that beauty alone. So I made a raft. It is possibly the most brilliant thing I’ve ever done. As I was rooting around an old storage room at the council, trying to find some missing files, I came across four ancient life vests sitting in a cabinet, collecting dirt and rat poop. I cleaned them off, then tied them together in a line, ending up with something roughly the length and width of a person. My vision was a sort of floating couch, like some people have in their pools. I called it the Life Lounger. The finished product was one of the ugliest things I’d ever seen, but it worked, after a fashion. It kept the rider afloat, but not entirely above water, and it had a tendency to buckle right under the waist, leaving one wet but alive. I needed something easily portable to tie it to the kayak with, so I used a busted extension cord that rolled up onto a spindle.

Oddly enough, few of my friends had the courage to try it out, and my genius sat unused and unappreciated for a month. Finally, after a good amount of begging, a girl named Tara agreed to be the guinea pig for my ground-breaking experiment. She clumsily mounted the Life Lounger, balancing with difficulty and soaking herself immediately, I got in the kayak, and off we went. Tara had the presence of mind to ask if we shouldn’t leave our cells phones on shore, but I assured her it would be fine. Ha. Things went fantastically well for about five minutes, just long enough to get a ways downstream. Then the extension cord, a cheap Chinese knock-off that apparently hadn’t been built for its load bearing capacity, snapped.

Reflecting on this later, Tara and I agreed that the stupid part was not trying to head back immediately. Instead I just pulled alongside her and we floated for a while, eating watermelon and enjoying the sunshine. A car full of white tourists stopped on the bridge and stared at us for a while. I’m sure up to that point they had been very impressed with themselves, roughing it through the wildness of Africa, and I like to think that the sight of Tara and I lounging in the river, eating watermelon and sunbathing, ruined that a little. I’m a giver.

But karma, as ever, was not my friend, and the current was a hell of a lot stronger than I’d estimated, so as we were congratulating ourselves on how badass we were we got swept out of sight of the dock. At that point we gave serious thought to how the hell we were going to get back. We tried a number of options. She clung to the back of the kayak, which was of course devoid of handholds, while I struggled in vain to paddle against the current. Every stroke threw a small wave into her face. When Tara fell off for the fifth time she tried holding on to the front. The image of her face beaming at me above the water, arms and legs wrapped around the point of the boat like a demented, backwards figurehead is one of the images from Peace Corps I’ll hold onto forever. Finally she tried to clamber up the back of the kayak and sit behind me. As she was struggling up the inside slowly filled with water, and the boat sank.

It’s funny, at no point in any of this was I worried. Partly because between the two of us we had five lifejackets. But also because the entire thing was so ridiculous, it couldn’t possibly have any negative consequences. We were close to the edge of the river, so we swam-shoved the kayak up to the mangrove trees and wedged it between the branches. There was no bank, only trees, but with great difficulty Tara and I tipped the boat on one side and emptied it enough that it would float. I climbed through the branches above the long-suffering, beleaguered craft and plopped down into the cockpit. She couldn’t row the kayak on her own, so she had to slog through the mud and mangrove fields a few hundred yards to the road. I got mine, though, since the tide was so low that the water was below the pier, and I had to wade through mud up to my chin, finally using a fishing net to haul myself hand over hand to shore.

It’s impressive how one stupid act can build on another, until disaster doesn’t so much strike as inevitable arrive. The kayak was fine, as were both of us, and the only casualties were our cell phones and our dignities. For those of you keeping score at home, the tally is:

Phones destroyed in the river: 5

Times sunk the kayak: 2

Self-respect left: 0

The funny thing is, I felt great afterward. I was walking on clouds all day, even covered in scratches and caked with mud. I'm not sure what it is here, but so much of the time I feel muted, sedated. It's hard to muster up enthusiasm for much of anything, even things I know I'm excited by. Most of the conversations I have, with Gambians or toubabs, are essentially recycled copies of old dialogues. Other volunteers here feel the same way. I think a lot of it is the diet, the fact that we just don't have the physical energy to throw ourselves into something. Another factor is that this country doesn't often reward short-term enthusiasm; the harder you strive or argue for something, the less likely you are to get it, whether it's a project you're working on, a disagreement with a local, or even bargaining in the market. The laid-back approach always works best. That's not something I'm particularly good at, I partly blame the cognitive dissonance for my general lassitude. Hell, maybe I'm just lazy. But having a real adventure, needing to struggle to save life and property, even if it was all caused by my own lack of common sense, was a nice wake-up.

A week later the streets ran with blood, which helped.

It was Tobaskie again. Some of you might remember this from a year ago: it's the biggest Muslim holiday of the year, commemorating the day when Abraham was willing to kill his son Isaac. God had mercy and turned him aside at the last minute, so Abraham killed a ram instead. I like the directness of Muslim celebration. In Christianity they celebrate their leader's birth with decorated trees and blinking lights; they celebrate his death with bunnies and candy. For Muslims, a dude killed a ram, so they kill themselves a ram. Rams, plural, actually. Like, a lot. Each compound that can afford it slaughter one, but I saw some families do in six or seven. My god, the gore I saw that day. No horror movie can compare. The phrase "rivers of blood" is one that shouldn't ever be used literally. I saw more severed limbs than a tree trimmer.

At one point a Gambian friend of mine stopped by my place for a while. We sat in my living room, playing a board game, for about ten minutes before I noticed a strange smell.

"What the hell is that?" I said.

He said, "It's from my bag."

"Oh, you've got some ram meat?"

"Sort of," he said. He wouldn't look me in the eye.

"Sort of?"

"It's the head."

"What?" I looked inside the bag, and sure enough, glaring back at me was a severed ram's head, its tongue stuck out like an insolent child. Blood was leaking through the bag and onto my floor.

"I will boil it," he said cheerfully. "Do you want some?"

I said, "I'm good." We finished the game (he destroyed me) and then he took his head and left.

24 Hours in Dakar

Not a whole lot to tell this month, because I spent most of it traveling – to America, in fact, and most of the lovely people reading this blog saw me there. It was a great trip. I saw a lot of people that I hadn’t seen in a while (exactly fourteen months, in fact), and it was great to reconnect. Shockingly enough, my job is occasionally lonely, and with the miserable cell phone networks here communication has been spotty, so I’ve felt a little cut off at times. Seeing my friends and family again, even for such a short time, helped me feel grounded again.

Getting there, however, turned out to be tricky. The cheapest flight I could find to the States left out of Dakar, the capital of Senegal. I’ve been there before, and there weren’t any problems, so I was anticipating smooth sailing. My flight was at one-thirty in the morning, a target I thought even I, with Fate’s big bullseye on my back, could hit comfortably.

Before I even left the Gambia the ferry broke down, and we had to wait for the emergency back-up ferry (and you can imagine what a proud and noble vessel this was) to get started up and take us across. The ferry normally takes an hour to cross the mouth of the Gambia river; this time it took five. This same trip I heard from someone that the French had offered to build a bridge there, but Gambia turned them down. They wanted their independence.

Then no-one wanted to go to Senegal. Then everyone wanted to go to Senegal, and all the cars left without me. Then the border official felt the need to cause trouble. Normally these guys see that I’m Peace Corps and basically wave me through, but this particular GI Joe had a problem with the fact that I’d been issued a two year visa, when the maximum was supposed to be one year. I explained that his government had issued me the visa in an agreement with my government, and that although I’m sure both of them had meant to make sure it was all right with him, it had probably slipped their minds. So that took an extra hour or so. Then at the car park people kept lying to me about where they were going, when they were leaving, and how much it would cost. The lies seemed entirely frivolous, not trying to cheat me so much as to see how gullible the toubab was. What a fool am I, to believe someone when they say they will take me somewhere. So that took another four hours, and I spent a lot of time counting to ten.

Finally I got on my way, crammed into a station wagon that had been converted to hold seven passengers, driving on the comically bad African road. This road had been paved, once upon a time, but since then had turned into one giant pothole, with occasional patches of smooth asphalt. No one ever drove on the paved road if they could help it; instead they drove on the medians, gradually widening them until the whole thing was really just a wide dirt road, with a crazy obstacle course as a median. I did the math, and figured I was going to make it with about an hour to spare. That’s when we were robbed.

It actually took me a while to realize that was what was happening. The military stopped us, which is common, but they didn’t search anyone’s bags or check our passports. They talked to the driver for a few minutes, then he started yelling, then they slapped him (lightly, like a bad dog) and walked away. And then we sat there. And sat there. No one in the car spoke English or Mandinka, and I think they were all embarrassed by what was happening, but eventually I figured out that the police wanted money. No justification, not even a pretense. It was highway robbery.

Fortunately, I’ve spent a lot of time negotiating bribes. I got a pen and paper and strode over to the shoulders. We spent an amusing half-hour bickering in the moonlight, scribbling numbers, gesticulating, throwing pieces of paper around, until I got the price for my car’s release down to a reasonable level. All the passengers were put in, and we were off. To thank me for my assistance the driver sped like a demon the rest of the way to Dakar – all on the partly paved section of road. It was like driving a monster truck rally in a Prius. It was actually a lot of fun. Every few minutes I’d shout out how many minutes were left until my flight, and everyone would groan and scream at the driver to go faster.

And in the end I got to the airport half a damn hour after the plane left. The next flight, of course, left at the same time, the next morning. So. Twenty-four hours in Dakar.

The airport left something to be desired in terms of comfortable seating, or places where I could nap without worrying about being stabbed for my shoes, so at three a.m. I headed off into the city. Outside I could see, thrusting up from the buildings, silhouetted by a faint light, what looked like a giant headless guy trying to kill a baby. This was good. I had a goal now.

A garbage truck stopped outside the airport to pick up some trash, and I just marveled at the novelty until it started to pull away, going in the direction of the behemoth. So I grabbed my bags and hopped on the back. When the truck stopped again and the two guys got out they seemed a little surprised to see me. I gave them a little wave, my best Arabic greetings, and then picked up one of the trash cans and emptied it into the truck. I don’t know if this kind of thing happened to them a lot, or if being a garbage man in Africa just makes you generally unflappable, but without a word they loaded up the rest of the trash and moved on, with me standing on the bumper.

I ended up riding around with those guys for about six hours, helping out at each stop. I never got much closer to the statue, but I did end up seeing almost the entire city. I’m not qualified to comment on the amount of funding going into waste disposal in Dakar, but as far as I could tell, this was the only garbage truck running in town, because we went everywhere. The downtown business district, the artisan village, the beaches, the Presidential Palace, the slums (and nowhere does slums like Africa). We stopped to chat, whole communities greeted us. Well, they greeted the real guys. But I got included.
And these guys were smart. It was Ramadan, the month when you fast from dawn to dusk, which means people put a lot of effort into their breakfasts. And, of course, when someone stops by, you invite them to eat. We had breakfast five times. It was delicious, although usually had no idea what I was eating.

Right before dawn we stopped outside this tiny little nightclub in a dirty part of town. People were still partying, and a number of them had taken it out into the street. When they saw us they started chanting something (I can only assume it was “garbage man” in French). As we collected the trash they swarmed around us, dancing a kind of rhythmic shuffle in time to our lifting and throwing. I got annoyed, but the real garbage men started dancing along – pretty well, actually. They were men cut from a very special cloth. We spent a while grooving with the drunken revelers and tossing trash bags back and forth. One girl decided to climb inside a garbage can and dance, which would have worked a lot better if she hadn’t knocked it over once she was inside. She gave a little yelp as she rolled away, and my colleagues and I decided it was time to move on.

We finished our shift and I bade them a fond farewell. One of them gave me an egg. Raw, as I discovered later when I tried to eat it. I got a fix on the statue, the original object of my quest, and set off. Passage was complicated by the fact that half the streets were closed off for construction. There’s a building craze sweeping the entire city, and everywhere you look there are cranes and scaffolds and half-finished structures. This continually confounded my progress and I felt a little like a tip of a pencil line in a puzzle-book maze, until I remembered my magical toubab powers. I found a busted up old hard hat, put it on, and strode through every construction site that stood in my way. My way was unbarred. Doors opened at my touch. No one bothers a white guy in a hard hat.

When I found what I had first assumed was a headless man murdering a child, it turned out to be a little more disturbing. He was indeed headless, also huge and absurdly muscle-bound. Like a cross between He-man and the Stay-Puf Marshmallow Man. It was a baby in his hand, but this was a far from helpless creature. It gazed boldly out into the ocean, one majestic arm stretched forth to point the way. The way to the future. Its baby face was settled into a stern and shockingly precocious expression of the most intent purpose.

The man wrapped a woman in his other arm. She was my favorite. Her Western-style hair swept back dramatically as she folded into his embrace. Her dress, which wasn’t much more than a sheet (although a giant bronze sheet a hundred feet wide), barely contained her… ampleness. And, worst of all, it rode above her knees. This is a big deal. No West African woman ever shows her knees in public. They’ll walk around with their breasts bare without a blush, but a flash of a knee and they’re shamed for life. I was seeing thigh here. Miles of it. I was surprised to find I was actually offended; it seemed indecent.

Having reached the veritable Holy Grail of my quest and found it wanting, I moved on to the next thing I could see on the skyline: a giant lighthouse. Thrusting the mocking voice of Virginia Woolf firmly to the back of my mind, I set off, threading my way through yet more construction sites and fruit markets. On the way I stopped and feasted on a beef sandwich that tasted exactly – I mean exactly – like the Sloppy Joes my mother used to make. This was turning into a strange day.

The lighthouse was one of those strange old affairs where it wasn’t really a functioning civic structure and it wasn’t really a tourist attraction, so you’re never sure if you’re welcome. It was beautiful, though, and the view from the top was incredible. You can see the entire city, and miles out into the ocean. It was like I was on top of the mast of a big urban ship. I amused myself for a while tracing the route of my shift that the morning.

A friend of mine visited this lighthouse once with a guy she liked. They bought a bottle of wine from a grocery store and (discreetly, this is still a Muslim country) toted it up the windy staircase to the lighthouse. I imagine there was a lot of bumping and giggling, although she didn’t supply details on that point. They crawled onto the very top, through tiny winding staircases, ladders and trapdoors, and snuggled on the rickety little metal ledge. They watched the sun start to set as they leaned back, stammered a little at each other, and tried to open the wine, only to discover they had no opener. So the guy crawled back down, found the old caretaker and his family at dinner, and asked them if he could borrow a knife.

They spoke Wolof and he spoke Mandinka, so he resorted to a series of inane gestures to convey what he needed. Why the white man climbed up to the top of a lighthouse, with a young girl, just before dark, and then suddenly remember he needed a knife, they didn’t know or want to know. They just handed him the biggest butcher knife he had ever seen, offered him some dinner out of politeness, and said goodbye. The guy crawled back upstairs, at several points having to hold the small sword between his teeth while he used both hands to climb. Scared the hell out of the girl when he popped his head up. With a glance at the setting sun, he took his machete and pried at the cork of what was supposed to be the ice-breaker.

I can only imagine the frustrated rage that powered his wrists, because he snapped that knife right in half. They both stared in slightly hazy disbelief as the gleaming point flipped end over end down the side of the lighthouse, rhythmically catching the sunset’s light. With heavy hearts, sword shattered, bottle unopened and boundaries unbroken, they limped their way back down to the ground to tell the family they’d broken their knife.

Take that, Virginia Woolf.

After the lighthouse I walked on the beach for a while. Some older men hanging out in a shallow cave gave me a grilled fish. We had a long conversation (in the few words of different languages we had in common) about how, although they were fisherman, and good fisherman, they had an excellent and rational reason not to be fishing fish at exactly that moment, and indeed at any second they might be taken with the urge to do grab a real and go to town, and if they did, woah, watch out. For my end I relied mostly on the time-honored Peace Corps conversational tactic of saying “Eyoh!” (meaning OK) and nodding my head. I’m sure they thought I was a genius.

What was interesting was a latticework structure frame on the wall behind them, woven out of wood, pieces of rebar, and strips of canvas. It stretched most of the way up the cave wall. Tied to it were hundreds of small carvings and talismans made of bones. The meta-fisherman explained that each of these was a ju-ju (they pointed to the one on my arm to demonstrate) to commemorate someone who’d died. It seemed a lot more complicated than that, something about both staying and leaving.
It’s funny. This was exactly what I’d come to Africa to see. This was the reason I’d flown across half the world, braved hippos and camels and bush taxis, pit latrines and heat rash. To see something like this, something totally new. And here it was, in a cave, and I'd found it by mistake.

The beach called to me, and the waves. I stashed my bags under a rickety roof someone had built into the cliffs near the water, got down to skivvies, and went in. These, however, were not the gentle waves of the Gambian beaches, or the soft current of my river. These things were serious. Every time I forged in they tossed me back on shore, disdainful of my puny self. After seeing my feet above my head for the fifth time I began to wish for a surfboard and a Ninja Turtle. The embarrassing headlines that my death here would cause flashed through my head and sent me back onto dry land.

Where there was a guy sitting on my bags. Lots of emotions made themselves felt as I dripped over to him. Anger, at first, of course, then a twinge of unease as I wondered if he was crazy, then embarrassment, as I realized he had on the outfit of an imam, a Muslim priest. I’d been righteously offended at the Big Bronze Striptease, yet here I was in my underwear dancing around someone’s beach in front of an imam. But when I sat down that little bit of unease came back; his eyes were so red they were almost black, and he was spreading dozens of ju-jus on the ground. He was a witch doctor.

He spoke Mandinka, which helped, and he explained that these were not ordinary ju-jus. Not like the crap I had (no offense). These ones would make me Bruce Lee, Donald Trump and Spider-man all rolled into one. He had some for defense, some for wisdom, some for potency, some for avoiding traffic jams. I asked if he ever used any ju-jus, and he lifted up his tunic to reveal what looked at first like thick leather skin, encrusted with jewels. He had thousands of these ju-jus; each one was a square pouch of leather an inch or two on a side. Some had fake gems on the outside, some had pieces of mirror, some had patches of cloth or animal skin. Some were like thin leather belts and some were necklaces, and he had them all. The man was a walking tannery. I was amazed he could move. He also showed me his fine selections of magic powders, which he said would make me fly like an eagle. I believed him.

Then he pulled out the prize of his collection. His face was a mask of reverent awe as he lifted up a long strip of white cloth, with a simple pattern sewn in. I had to admit it was at least better craftsmanship than the others. The maribout (witch doctor) said that this ju-ju would make me invincible. I said, I thought the others ones made me invincible. He said, well, yeah, but this one makes you really invincible. Like, from anything. Bad spirits. Bad thoughts. Bad fate.

I asked how much. He named an absurd price, five or six times my monthly stipend. I told him to go to hell. He came down, but not a lot. It was obvious we weren’t going to make any kind of middle ground, so I said no thanks. He was getting a little agitated, and his dark eyes made it hard to tell where he was looking.

Then he took off. Just left all his stuff and staggered toward the edge of some high rocks. He called out, watch. The crazy bastard was going to throw himself off. I cursed and sprinted after him, and he giggled when I tackled him to the ground. It must have hurt. He said, see? I am safe!

I said, I’ll take it. What can I say, the guy was a hell of a salesman. I pulled out some Dalasi, the currency of the Gambia, and said that I’d have to pay with that. I meant the type of money, but he thought I meant the bill itself, and snatched it. It was only 100 D, about a hundredth of what he’d originally asked. He examined the whole thing carefully, from one end to the other, sniffing at each tear and smudge like it was my fault. He pointed to a number scribbled in the corner and asked if I’d written it. I said no, they all had that. He nodded, satisfied, and shook my hand.

I made my way back up to the road and kept walking, figuring eventually I'd find something else insane. It was the hot part of the day, though, when the air is thick and muggy and seems to be cooking in chunks on the sidewalk. I walked for a couple hours, lugging my bags, in sodden and sandy clothing, and eventually ran out of water. The streets I passed were all residences or office buildings, no restaurants or anywhere to just sit. But damned if that ju-ju did not work as advertised. Just as I was starting to see the upside of passing out, a big wooden building with the words “Gallery and Bar” appeared like a sweet mirage.

Inside was dark and cool, and I blinked away the afterimage of the day outside. Hundreds of masks lined the walls, some sized for a person, some five or six feet tall. Every surface held carvings and statues of fantastic things, some recognizable shapes, some not. They drew the eye in a way that was hard to resist. The hostess appeared from the darkness and asked if she could help me. She was as beautiful and calm as the room was, and I was very aware of my filthy, sunburned, and bedraggled appearance. She explained that the bar was not open yet, they were just setting the business up now, but she had some cold water, would that be all right? At that moment nothing had ever sounded better in my life.

As we sat and I drank we talked. I asked her about life in Dakar, the gallery. It was going to open up at the beginning of the month, a pet project by a wealthy French and Senegalese couple who wanted to compile artwork from all over the continent. She gave me a tour, and it was quite an education. To be perfectly honest, although I’ve always loved African art, I’ve always felt that if you take away its exoticness it isn’t actually all that beautiful. But what I’d seen were the quick tourist rush-jobs, or the Smithsonian anthropological oddities. This was art. These were masterpieces, created by men and women with an understanding and passion for beauty greater than I’ll ever have. The hostess pointed out to me spears from Rwanda, paintings from Tanzania, works I had no name for from places I’d never even thought about.

She showed me the whole place, top to bottom; she was very friendly. I met the management and some of the staff, and helped move around a few heavy pieces that they were still trying to find places for. They were going to have a restaurant attached, and the chef was trying out some different recipes, which they invited me to share to break Ramadan fast. I reflected, not for the first time, that there’s a lot of things we do better in America. But there’s a lot of things they do better here.
As I left the gallery it seemed like Dakar took its bow. Go out on a high note, they say, and it had been a stunning performance. I made my way simply and without incident back to the airport, read and took a nap, then got on the plane to America.

While I was there I saw some of you lovely people. I won’t go into details; this entry seems long enough and no one’s signed off the rights to have the details of their lives exposed and mocked here. But it was wonderful to see everyone I visited, family and friends, and I wished I’d had more time with each of you, especially the ones I didn’t get to see at all. Thanks to everyone who rolled out the red carpet and gave me a bed or couch to sleep on. And thanks for checking in on this blog. I was surprised how many of you had read it. I was annoyed, at times, too, because every damn story I had to tell you’d already read. And I didn’t even get to see your faces at the really big lies.

The Many Labors of Yahya

I started a business class for the local women this month. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, but haven’t had the social capital in village to pull it off. But after I managed to get my neighbor kicked out (his bosses finally transferred him once I got the alkalo to make a call), my street rep improved to the point where people would actually show up to something if they said they were going to.

So a few weeks ago twelve local women and I gathered in a sweltering little room in the back of a local shop to discuss profit margins and budgeting. We immediately hit a few road blocks. Only three of the women could read, and only six could do basic math. My Mandinka was good enough get across the basic ideas I wanted to teach, but not to understand and answer all the questions they had. After about an hour of stammering, misunderstanding, and scribbling on pieces of paper, I realized I’d fallen into the same stupid paradigm as every damn aid agency on this continent.

Before even meeting with these women, I’d decided what was wrong, what they needed, and how to give it to them. I planned out a lesson, gathered them together, and lectured them on how to do the jobs they’d been doing their whole lives. All I knew about their businesses was what I’d seen from the outside and what I assumed to be true.

So I started over. I threw away the papers, grabbed a friend from the compound next door to translate, and sat down so we were all at eye level. Then I asked each one to tell me about her business, what the challenges were, and what she’d like to learn. Turns out the biggest problem most of them face is that profit margins are razor thin, and the slightest hiccup can send them into the red. They can’t raise their prices or become more competitive because the laws the market follows are social, not economic. Since they’re all competing for the same small customer base, in their eyes it’s a zero-sum game: make more money and the person next to you makes less. By the same token, the culture of charity means that any revenue – not even profit, jut revenue – is eaten up by family and friends who sponge off anyone with a job. It’s impossible to build up capital, so tiny businesses stay tiny forever.

It’s not all grim. The women have a collective that works sort of like a combination group savings account and microfinance loan agency. Each woman contributes a certain amount each month, and then at given intervals they give the whole fund to one woman, decided by vote. It’s actually a lot more complicated than that, but the main idea is excellent, and I arranged to talk to the whole group at one of their meetings and see how I can lend a hand.

For the purpose of the classes, right now the women and I are trying to do some basic bookkeeping. Almost all of them sell foods and perishables, so a lot of it gets wasted when people don’t buy it. If they can figure out exactly how much is going in and out, it will do a hell of a lot to improve their profits without biting into their friends’ businesses. The problem, of course, is that they’re illiterate. So I’m putting together a system with pictures and colors that might work. They’re all pretty excited about it, at least. So we’ll see. Whether it works or not, it’ll be on their terms.

It’s nice to have some work that’s actually solid. Ramadan started this month, which has been a whole lot of fun, let me tell you. Now, before any of my vast Muslim reading audience gets offended, I have every respect for the fasting tradition. It’s a way for Muslims to bond with their families and communities through shared privation. It gives them a clear way to prove their faith through sacrifice and suffering, things that are highly underrated in our culture. It puts everything you do in a more religious context, so good deeds during Ramadan count more, and sins are doubled. I’ve tried it, and it really does clear your mind and make you more aware of yourself, your place in the world.

It also makes you grumpy and hungry. Not eating or drinking for fourteen hours during the most humid part of the year will put a damper on anyone’s mood, no matter how pious you are. Trying to get anyone to do anything requiring effort is an exercise in futility. Work more or less grinds to a halt.

The funny thing is that I’m still busy, just not with anything cool. Construction projects have mostly been put on hold because of the rains – we’d like the buildings to last at least a year before they melt. Once Ramadan ends and things dry out I’ll have a dozen projects to deal with at once, so while things are slow I’m doing a lot of paperwork and preparation. More thrilling adventures in the Peace Corps.

The puppies started walking this month, which added a whole new level of psychosis to my life. I was really hoping that once Chulo was potty-trained it would be a while until I had to deal with dog poop as a daily aspect of my existence. This month my house was a mine field. Every step had to be examined first, every trip across my living room to be weighed for its potential gain and risk. Going to the bathroom at night was sheerest folly.

The puppies themselves were fun, when they weren’t irritating the hell out of me. I’ll spare you the details – just read the entry nine months ago from when I first got Chulo, then multiply by five. They were certainly active, with sharp little teeth and a taste for toes and socks. Chulo is terrified of them, which is hilarious. He refuses to go near them and sleeps on chairs so they can’t get him. They love him, though, and like to chase him around the house. Watching my badass gangster dog flee in panic from a few tiny puppies has been the best entertainment I’ve had in a while.

After a few days I noticed one of the girls couldn’t walk. Her back legs stuck out rigidly from her body and she had to drag herself around by her front paws. For a while I thought that it was just a muscle problem, that she’d get over it. I spent hours manually moving her legs and trying to teach her to walk. But sometimes her front paws would be paralyzed, too, or her head. Her crying would wake me up at night and I’d find her lying in a puddle of her own urine. There were signs of mental problems – she didn’t respond when I picked her up or one of the other puppies tried to play. I had to clear a space for her to feed, or else the others would shove her out of the way, but even when I did she often couldn’t manage to get her mouth around the nipple. She was in a lot of pain.

When it was over, I carried her body out into the bush late at night. By the light of my head lamp I dug a pit in the mud near a rice field. It needed to be deep so that the hyenas that roved near town couldn’t get to it. It seemed very strange to me that she and I should be there, at that moment, together. If each of lives only once, how does it make sense that this dog’s only chance was a few miserable weeks of pain and fear? In some literature the significance of a character lies far beyond his life; he’s a symbol, written out as part of a word he’ll never read, that has no relevance to him or to his pain. If he ever found out, how furious would he be with his author? Would he even care what the word said?

Anyway. Something happier. I got to die again, which is always fun. This time I was stabbed through the stomach with a tree branch. The experience was only marred a little by the fact that the guy who did it was wearing a giant purple dress. I made sure to scream and flop around a lot; everyone liked that.

Remember that Regional Strategy Plan I talked about a while back? Probably not. It’s just a group of volunteers trying to combine efforts. For months it’s been a lot of empty talk and frustration. That all changed when we decided at the last meeting to quit messing around and do a damn project. We were going on tour!

Some background: a few years back a PCV in Mali invented a topical medicine called neem cream that makes a better mosquito repellant than anything you’ll find on the shelves. It’s cheap as hell and easy to make – all you need is soap, cooking oil, and the leaves of the neem tree, common in Africa. Volunteers in the Health Sector are required to do a certain number of neem cream demos a year, getting a group of villagers together and showing them how to make it. As a sustainable project it doesn’t usually work that well - people are happy to get have the toubab make it for them, but won’t pay a lot of attention or make it themselves afterward.

So we did the mother of all neem cream demos. We wrote a skit, translated it into Wollof (a tribal language I don’t know), and took it on the road. I got to stretch my theatrical muscles as the evil villain who wanted everyone to die of malaria. At one point my opening monologue scared away the entire audience. We didn’t have enough women (which was weird), so one guy had to play the wife. I choreographed a quarterstaff fight that ended, like I said, with him stabbing me through the stomach. (I had to drop my script for the fight, so to my meager Wollof vocabulary was added my last line – “You’ll never stop me. You’ll have to kill me.” You’d be surprised how useful that’s been.) We made several huge batches of neem cream and sold them at a nice little profit, donated of course to the needy volunteer beer fund.

The audiences were insane. We performed at the luumos, which weekly markets held at different vilalges across the region, to absolutely packed crowds. Even though we were speaking their language, I was the only one who projected enough to be heard over the constantly chatting crowd, so most of the plot was lost. They liked my death scene, though, as well as the chase scene and some other physical comedy. And they paid attention to the part where we actually made the stuff. A week later, I got reports that people were making and selling neem cream at the luumos.

So bam. A win for the good guys. Not to overload you simple folks with too much introspection in one entry, but it occurred to me as I took a bow after the last performance that I am really, really lucky. To be doing this, working my ass off in the heat and the dirt, with good people, at something I’m good at, doing something that really might save people’s lives – it’s not too bad at all.

Animal Planet

This month I helped birth a litter of puppies, met a devil, failed to steal a monkey, and lost the good fight.

So one of the great things about living in my new site, Kerewan, instead of my old site, Njaba Kunda, is that in my compound there is another dog, a sweet but not very bright girl. Her fur is mostly white, so they named her Brownie. The reason this is great is that in Njaba Kunda I was having some real behavior problems with Chulo – ripping things up, going crazy in my house, giving lots of little bites and nips when we played. He wasn’t a bad dog, he was just lonely. He needed to bite something, and since he didn’t have any friends I was the next best thing. As soon as we got to Kerewan and he met Brownie all that ended. He’s generally a much happier dog, and much easier to deal with.

Brownie, in turn, has fallen in love with the two of us. Although she is technically my neighbor’s dog, she spends all of her time in my house. I’m the one that gives her attention and affection, I’m the one that goes running with her. She has a favorite chair that she sleeps in every night. It’s been great, except for one thing.

There’s a reason I got a boy dog instead of a girl. A few months back Brownie became quite popular with the male dogs in the neighborhood, a fact that caused Chulo no small amount of consternation – especially because he was too young to engage in such activities himself. In general Brownie kept her distance (except for one memorable occasion when she and another dog ended up stuck together. I’ll spare you the details, except to say that I have never seen two creatures look more uncomfortable and embarrassed in my life. I imagined the male dog saying, “So, do you want to get breakfast or something?”)
But there’s no stopping nature, and Brownie’s stomach began to swell. She started doing weird things like scoot under my bed or behind a dresser, wedge herself in, then freak out and try to scramble back out. More than once I had to lift my bed off her so she could escape. She was insanely hungry, developed an appetite for strange foods, and stole out of the trash more than once, usually something bizarre like eggshells or coffee grinds. Finally one morning I woke to her whining pitifully and trying to climb up on my bed, foiled by her big belly. I was mostly asleep, but some intuition told me not to let her up, which was a good thing because at that moment her water broke.

I’m not sure I can adequately describe to you just how disgusting the next few hours were. I moved her outside, where I set up a nest of old pieces of fabric and sheet. She couldn’t walk properly, so I had to carry her, doing my best not to squish the little creatures inside. As I wrestled for a hold and she wriggled frantically, a paw poked out. I didn’t know much about puppies, but I knew with people that’s bad. I had nightmare visions of having to reach in and turn it around, or it getting stuck and all the others being trapped inside. I called everyone I knew who might have the vaguest idea what was going on, babbling words in a panic like “alien creature,” “clawing its way out,” and “placenta everywhere.” Turns out that’s totally normal, and the little beast popped out just fine. It was tiny, slimy, and wailing like a fire truck. Some… other stuff came out with it, which Brownie slurped up. (She wasn’t hungry that night, which surprised me until I remembered how much she'd already eaten.)

Five more came out, all with relative ease, over the next few hours. Brownie licked each one thoroughly before settling back, looking exhausted but proud, to let them feed. My heart finally settled into a normal rhythm and I even let myself be happy about the whole thing. More than one person had expressed interest in adopting, and I felt confident I could get them out quickly. But it turns out that puppies have to stay with their mother for at least six weeks after birth. My neighbor assured me that they would be no trouble during that time; Brownie would take care of raising them, feeding them, everything. All I had to do was make sure Brownie stayed fed and hydrated.

What neither of us took into account was just how dumb Brownie is, and that she would probably pass on this dumbness to her offspring. She’s a terrible mother. She often forgets that her puppies are there, and will roll over on top of them without realizing. The whole process of feeding mystifies her. She never lies in such a way that the puppies have easy access, and will often wander away and take a nap in another part of the house, ignoring the puppies’ pitiful squeals. Even when the little monsters are right by her belly they seem incapable of figuring out exactly what it is they’re supposed to do unless you put their heads right in front of a teat. So every few hours I’m notified by a chorus of whimpers that my governance is needed. I grab Brownie and force her onto her side, then take each of the six puppies in turn and line its head up with a nipple, until all are suckling happily. After a few minutes Brownie usually gets bored and wanders away. This game is especially fun at three o’clock every morning.

Needless to say, I spend a lot more time out of the house these days. Running has become a lot more interesting these days. You see, the Gambia doesn’t have normal season, like summer and winter. Instead it has two – wet and dry. During the dry season, it doesn’t rain for eight months, temperatures routinely top a hundred degrees, and during the hot parts of the day movement is simply impossible – the only reasonable activity is lying in the shade and trying not to die.

But the wet season is worse. It’s not as hot, but the air is so thick you can cut chunks out of it with a knife. It could be seventy degrees and you’ll be drenched with sweat. This is the season of heat rash, of infections, of fungus. It’s when the mosquitoes come out in force and the clinics explode with malaria cases. It’s when the ants, the cockroaches, and the spiders all come out to play in every corner of your house. It’s also known as the hungry season - when every food bowl gets pretty skimpy and every stomach gets pretty empty, since it’s been a full year since the last harvest and the food stores have run low. Normal work (such as it is) grinds to a halt as every able-bodied person goes out to the field to plant. Every aspect of your life gets worse in the wet season, except one. The country turns absolutely beautiful.

It’s kind of surreal. Eight or nine months out of the year the countryside is brown, barren, especially in the heavily deforested areas like my region. As soon as the rains start the growth is explosive. I usually run the same path every day, and every day the plants are noticeably higher. The land turns so green it’s unreal, like someone took a neon paint brush of life and swept with heavy-handed strokes over the whole world. You can just stare and stare. It’s a overpowering example of a principle that I’ve been noticing more and more in the Peace Corps – that good things after a lot of bad. When I get chocolate, or wine, it doesn’t matter that it’s low quality – it’s still better than anything I ever tasted in America. And when I see green here, real green, the life of the land exploding for a precious few months – it’s almost worth the heat rash. Almost.

So I go running, usually with some kids from my neighborhoods (for those of you paying attention, these are the same kids I almost drowned). One day I wanted to go a little farther than we had before, toward some trees in the distance that looked interesting. After a few seconds I noticed I was running alone. I looked back and saw the boys hanging back, with a mixture of fear and embarrassment. They said we couldn’t go there. I asked why. They said there was a devil there. I laughed. I shouldn’t have, but I did. These were smart kids. They were going to school, doing well. We would sometimes do math problems or practice spelling as we ran. But they were honestly terrified to go to this place that didn’t look to me any different from anywhere else in the bush. It’s not like a lot of people had died there, or there were dangerous animals. But apparently everyone knew that a devil lived there, and you shouldn’t go.

So I went. I figured what the hell. It was... I don't even know how to say it. I’ve seen a lot of pretty amazing things in my life, I like to think. I’ve visited some of the great cities in the world, hiked canyons, mountains, walked on a glacier. But I have never seen anything as beautiful as this place. There's nothing awesome or sublime about it - but everything there is perfect. It's amazing. There is a small pond, surrounded by reeds and trees. It’s quiet there. It seems more alive, more real, than any place I’ve ever been. Chulo likes to run along the edge of the pond, where the water is only a few inches deep. I don’t know why, but he goes crazy for it, sprinting back and forth, biting at the splashes that he fountains up. There’s a tree growing at a strange angle, almost horizontal, with a crook that fits my back perfectly. It’s more comfortable than any bed. Birds and monkeys talk in the trees, and I even saw a bush pig come up and drink at the pond once. I’ve gone back at least every other day when my schedule allows, and I just sit there, sometimes for hours. If there is a devil there, he’s got good taste. The boys still refuse to go in with me, but that’s all right. It feels like mine.

My other encounters with nature have been less blissful. My neighbor and his family acquired a monkey from somewhere, God knows why. They seem to hate it. They spend at least half an hour each day shouting at it and whacking it with sticks. They keep it tied up to a tree, with the other end of the rope cinched tight around its waist. The other day I walked outside to see my neighbor holding a stick so big it was more like a branch. He kept swinging it at the monkey and shouting in Mandinka. I didn't catch everything he said, but at several points he called it lazy. Which seems a little unreasonable. It just glared at him, its expression clearly saying “What the hell is your problem?”

So I decided to free it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly a hippy Greenpeace type. The whales can shave themselves, for all I care. And if I were to save an animal, it would be one much cuter and nicer than this nasty little creature. But seeing something that has clear moods and facial expressions get the living hell beaten out of it every day just gets to me. So the last week, the night before I went to the capital, I snuck out at three, creeping my quietest past my neighbor’s house. I untied the end of the rope, and granted the poor monkey its freedom, feeling like a master criminal with a heart of gold.

It wouldn’t move. It just glared at me. I grabbed a stick and poked at it, the irony heavy in the night air. It just kept glaring at me. “Psst. Monkey. Fuck off. Be free.” Nothing. Then Chulo decided to lend a hand. It should be no surprise to anyone that he hates this monkey, and chases it up the tree every time he goes outside. He saw me engaged in epic battle with the beast so he let up a primal howl to back up his master, probably waking up everyone in a three block radius. The monkey snatched the stick from me and threw it at the dog. Then, deciding I was the lesser of two evils, it hopped into my arms for protection.

So I was busy trying to shush Chulo, watch my neighbor’s door, get ready to bolt, and contend with a squirming mass of terrified monkey in my arms. I knew that he would come out to shout at Chulo at any second, so I did what anyone would do.

I threw the monkey.

It was a pretty good throw, if I do say so myself, especially considering I didn’t have much of a grip. I tossed it over the compound wall and it gave a forlorn little shriek as it sailed away out of sight. Then I grabbed Chulo by the neck, dragged him inside, and slammed the door shut, heart pounding. When I didn’t hear anyone stirring for a while I went to sleep, feeling tired but righteous. Except when I came back three hours later to catch my bus, it was still there, sitting on the wall. Its glare was especially murderous in the silver dawn light.

Now I had a dilemma. If my neighbor came out that morning and saw the monkey there with the rope untied, he would know that someone had been messing with it, and I’m the only real suspect. So I had to tie it back up. But the monkey no longer trusted me, perhaps with good reason. So I had to chase the damn thing up and down the wall until I managed to grab its rope and drag it squealing back to the tree.

So just to recap: in an effort to save the monkey from being tied up and beaten, I jabbed it with a stick, threw it over a wall, yanked it around by the rope, and in the end tied it right back up. I’m a real hero.

Most of my efforts to play the hero seem to come up short these days. I work on a lot of development projects, and I usually have two main roles: speed up the process by kicking people until they do their jobs, and slow down the process by bringing up issues they’d rather ignore. As you can imagine, this sometimes causes problems. The issue I run up against again and again is that land use in West Africa is usually divided along tribal lines, with the village leader allocating land according to need and contribution to the community. It works about as well as you’d think, with lots of corruption and favoritism, but it’s been the system for thousands of years, and it’s worked – until about forty years ago, when the Gambia went “modern.” They adopted Western property laws, with deeds and sales and whatnot, which means that ninety percent of this country is legally squatting on the land they live on.
Now, before I anger the nice people in Washington who monitor this blog, I am not claiming the government of the Gambia is in the habit of stealing people’s property. All I’m saying is that if there’s a project underway, even a development project intended to benefit a community, and someone’s house or business happens to be in the way, it’s real easy to find legal justification to… reallocate the land use. I recently had a nasty run in with a contractor when we found ourselves on opposite ends of this ideological line. I can’t get into details here, but it’s an interesting story, so if you want to know, email me.

What’s frustrating is the attitude of my counterparts every time an issue like this comes up. They patronize me, like I’m a childish idealist who doesn’t understand the way things really work. I understand it fine. I just want to change it. Maybe that’s a tad ambitious for a two-year service, but I hate feeling like I’m part of the problem. But at the end of the day, I have to believe that I’m doing more good than bad, that most of the injustices would’ve happened anyway, and that by remaining involved I’m keeping it as clean and effective as possible.

There’s a phrase that keeps repeating in my head, something about the road to Hell…

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.

This month I sank my kayak, almost drowned a couple of kids, built a slaughter house, re-did the record books at a hospital, stitched my dog’s leg, and got caught in a domestic dispute.

Let’s go in order. On arriving back in Kerewan I found, predictably enough, that none of the projects I’d set up to continue developing my in absence had progressed at all, and every meeting I’d organized for my return was cancelled. Good times. Most of my projects had actually taken some big steps backward, as people who were firmly on board when I left had gotten cold feet or just stopped caring. The schools were in full grip of exams, a period when pretty much all activity shuts down as students try to take these tests, which they have in no way been prepared for but are crucial to their future.

The resource center, where I taught community computer classes, lost its power line; publicly I complained but inside I cheered. I hated those damn computer classes. The only reason I was teaching them was to spare the governor and the donor groups that built the center the embarrassment of yet another useless development project, a big shiny building appropriated from the community and used by no one. Hell with it. I have enough of my own mistakes without having to cover for other people’s.

My counterpart at the council got transferred, making all the work I’d done with him on the rest area I talked about last time essentially useless. His replacement, a young guy named Keita, is a good guy, though, and I’ve begun working with him on a few other development projects.

He asked me if I wanted to help build an abattoir, so I said yes, not wanting to admit I didn’t know what an abattoir was. So I spent a while putting together item cost spreadsheets, writing letters, and drawing sketches, all without having any idea what the hell I was working on.

At one point Keita pointed to the middle of my sketch and said, “That’s probably where we should put the groove for the blood.”

I said, “What?”

It turns out an abattoir is a slaughter slab. It’s a concrete floor, with the necessary groove, with a roof and a small trench leading to a pit. We went to visit the one they have now, and it was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen. Blood soaked the ground. When I walked I crunched pieces of splintered bone and skull. Standing pools of gore drew clouds of flies. The stench was overwhelming. And it was right in the middle of a residential area.

“The people,” Keita said, “say they don’t want this here any more.”

“Really,” I said. So we went to the new site, on the very edge of town. We measured and marked and squinted at the ground a lot. My job was finding round rocks and rolling them to see which slope was steepest, for the afore-mentioned blood groove. Construction started fairly quickly, which surprised me, and the next week I went out to check on the progress. To mark the boundaries of the structure we had used the exact and professional method of jamming sticks into the ground where we wanted the corners, and I guess this must have confused them, because they were building the whole thing backwards. When I pointed this out, they didn’t see the problem, and I spent a good half hour explaining to them why blood can’t flow uphill. I was tempted to use some of theirs as an example.

The other project I’m working on with the council has been a lot more frustrating. They gave me a project proposal to build a new ward for a health center in a nearby village and wanted me to fix the wording. I found it a useless document, with absolutely no hard data about admission, infection rates, infant mortality rates, or anything that might convince someone to donate money. When I asked for some of this information, they said they didn’t have it. They said they didn’t need it. They said that the French NGO sponsor would donate the money no matter what, and all they needed was a piece of paper asking for it. I said that’s insane. I spoke to the head of the clinic and asked him about the expansion, and he said he’d never heard about it. That’s even more insane.

Basically, this whole thing is another donor project that’s just an excuse to spend money, without taking into account what the community needs and what the impact of the project will be. If I had my way, the whole thing would be scrapped and the money would be spent on something more worthwhile. But I don’t have the power or influence to simply kill a project yet, so I did my best to rehabilitate it. I visited the health center, looked at the facility, actually talked to the people involved, went through all their books and came up with all the information I’d originally wanted. Maybe they didn’t want a real project proposal, but I was going to give them one anyway. I cut out about fifty thousand Dalasi in useless expenses and put it back in with renovations to the maternity ward, silly things like mosquito nets, running water, and beds that don’t fall apart. So maybe something will be salvaged out of all this.

Outside of work, I’ve been spending more time with some of the village kids, which has been great. They love my kayak, and we spend a few afternoons a week just messing around in the river. Usually I swim, one of them uses the kayak, and one of them uses the life vest as a big floating diaper, flipping it upside down and putting his legs through it so he can float around. It’s possibly the most Peace Corps thing I’ve done in this country, and I’d feel like a cliché if it wasn’t so much fun.

This has not been without mishaps. At one point I and some of the bigger boys were trying to get into the kayak in the middle of the river. Every time we tried it would tip a little, and a little water would get in, until there was too much water and the damn thing sank before our eyes. We watched, disbelieving, as it disappeared into the murk of the river. I couldn’t believe it. After everything I’d done to get the wretched vessel to Kerewan, I’d lost it with an unbelievably stupid mistake. So the boys and I took turns diving to the bottom of the river, dragging it a few feet through the muck, and resurfacing. It took about an hour to get it on the bank.

A week later, I was swimming while two of the boys were paddling around in the
kayak. The current was strong, and they were uncomfortably far from the dock. I yelled at them to come back, but fear swept the rough instructions on using the kayak I’d given them from their minds, and they started paddling frantically in the wrong direction. So I chased them. They were screaming hysterically, fleeing down the river like Bonny and Clide. I’m not the best swimmer, but the current worked for me and I finally captured the fugitives, whereupon I swam back with one arm, towing them after me.

That’s the great thing about Gambia. In America, someone would have sued the hell out of me.

I think, in general, recent events have shown that I’m not qualified to take care of other living creatures. Chulo, my dog, had a very bad month. Mango flies have been all over him, since the rains are starting, laying their eggs in his flesh, giving birth to maggots that squirm out of his skin. It’s exactly as disgusting and painful as it sounds. Then last week he got into some kind of fight, I don’t know how or with what, that left him with massive gashes all over his back leg. He had a few puncture wounds and a flap of skin torn away about the size of my palm. I carried him to the Kerewan health center, on the other side of town, where they refused to treat him. They told me about the veterinary technician in Kerewan, whom I’d never heard of, so I spent most of the day tracking him down.

This was a great guy. Really stellar. He didn’t have any anesthetic for dogs, but he brought his kit over and got to work. He was halfway through the first stitch when he looked up at me and said, “I am feeling the smoke.”

“What?” I said, then "oh." He was high. So I had to stitch up my dog. My experience with medicine is limited to a first-aid class in high school, and while I usually enjoy doing things I’m not qualified to do, this was a little much. There was blood everywhere. The needle and thread kept slipping away, Chulo’s thrashing knocked them out of my hands, and the flaps of skin refused to come together. I can’t imagine the pain my dog was in. Fifteen stitches, none with anesthetic, many having to be re-done by a scared and bumbling amateur. I’ve never heard any living creature howl like that.

In less than two days he’d ripped the stitches out. I did everything I could. I made him a neck cone out of pink construction paper and duct tape. I used medical tape, Ace bandages, and finally pinned a pair of my boxers on him, trying to find something, anything, to keep the wound clean. It was a bad couple of days. Finally I took him into the capital and paid an absurd amount to get it done by a real vet. The best part was when he peed all over the back seat of the cab.

As if all this wasn’t enough, I got involved in another domestic dispute, something I’d sworn never to do again. My neighbors, the chief of police and his wife, had an hour-long screaming match the night before I took Chulo to the capital. I was already a little stressed out, as you can imagine, but I did my best to tune it out. It was only when the shouting stopped that I got worried and went outside. Most of the neighborhood was gathered in the compound, watching the man drag his wife on the ground by her hair and punch her in the head. Sometimes I feel like a one-trick pony. A few people were trying to pull her away, which just seemed to be doing more damage. I had to use a full nelson to get him off her. Of course, as soon as she got up, she attacked him, and I became an unwitting accomplice, keeping him from defending himself. This is why I try not to get involved in these things.

The next morning she was gone. Apparently the police had to escort her out of the house. The man, with whom I’d always had a cordial if not friendly relationship, was riding a wave of vindicated masculinity and told me he was no longer going to pay his share of the electricity bill. So all in all it’s good times.

Sometimes this country makes me tired.

A request: if you read this post, would you do me a favor and post a quick comment? I'm tying the blog in to a smaller project I might be working on, and I'd like to get an idea of how many people are reading. Thanks.