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.

Business centers and punching camels

I know, it’s been a while again. This once every two months thing won’t get to be a habit, don’t worry. I’ve just been very, very busy. Things in Kerewan, my new site, are going great. Hectic, stressful, and often surreal, but I’m finding that’s the way I like it. I’m a teacher, a bureaucrat, a DJ, a small business owner, and a building contractor. I wear so many hats I sometimes get rug burn switching them. I’m learning more about the realities of business and government in developing nations than I ever thought I would (or should).

The big project I’m working on these days is building a business center / rest area just outside of town. Twenty or thirty years ago Kerewan was a thriving economic and cultural center, with restaurants, shops, a huge street market, and even a bar. Its place on the main road, in the center of the North Bank District, made it a popular stopping place for travelers and tourists. Now the bar is closed, the market has shrunk and split in two, and the restaurants have all closed but one (and that one struggles to make ends meet). Vehicles passing on the road blow straight through on their way to larger cities, without ever spending a Dalasi.

So I’ve been working with the local area council on plans for a center where local businesses can cater to travelers. There are some abandoned building on the edge of town that are perfectly placed, with space for shops, food vendors, and craftsmen, with an open area for cars and buses to park. One of the buildings even has a few broken toilets, and I should be able to get the utility company to reconnect them. As I indicated in my last post, toilets are incredible luxuries here. There’s also a large building in the back with a kitchen and dining room that would make beautiful restaurant, with a cathedral ceiling and large windows overlooking the river. We could sell condoms at the bathrooms for almost nothing, which would be great, since truckers moving across country are among of the biggest contributors the spread of AIDS. I’ve been talking with local suppliers and builders, and they’ve agreed to some deals that would keep the price tag below 125,000 Dalasi, or about $5,000, easily doable with grants and loans.

This is the point where I have to be careful, though. All too often well-meaning NGOs and charities dump loads of money on a really cool-sounding project without ever consulting the community they say they’re helping or taking the realities of life in the country into account. So if I’m going to get the money together for a project of this size, I need to talk to community leaders, business owners, bus and cab drivers, tourist companies – everyone who will actually use the place, and make sure they actually will. So that’s what I’m working on now.

I’ve been finding this work very rewarding, which is strange, because I never pictured myself as the middle management type. But I’m shocked to discover that I like meetings and memos, and smoozing politicians and businessmen. I like working with people who have power and getting them to use that power to help me. Convincing Gambians to do anything that requires labor or concentration is often difficult, which drives most volunteers crazy, but I’m finding it an interesting challenge. And since they are generally so passive, I can get them to agree to a lot of things if I speak quickly and give the impression I know what I’m talking about.

The only person that hasn’t worked on is the governor, because he uses exactly the same tactics on everyone else. He and I have had a few run-ins, and in the beginning it looked like he was going to be the main obstacle to almost all of my projects. He’s a powerful personality, and he’s used to bulldozing over people, and when I wouldn’t just buckle under it caused some friction – our first three meetings were mostly screaming matches. He threw a stapler at me once, left a bruise. But I actually found it refreshing, because he was the only guy I was working with who will give me a straight answer. Most people, if I ask them if they’ll do something, they will say yes, but mean no. Or they’ll say, “yes, Inshallah,” an Arabic phrase that literally means, “if God wills it,” but here actually means, “not a chance in hell.” Working with the governor is great, because if he isn’t going to do something, he’ll just say so. He has no desire whatsoever to please me. On his end, I think I’m the only person he works with who isn’t afraid of him, which he kind of likes. So although I’ll never invite him over to paint our nails and gossip about boys, I think it will be a good working relationship.

On top of my work in Kerewan, I’m still heading up the Regional Strategy Plan in the North Bank. For those of you who found it too boring to remember from my last post, this is an idea I picked up in Senegal to get all the volunteers in my region together to work towards some common goals, share skills and resources, and get some hard data from the ground level about how close we are to meeting those goals. It’s been an incredible headache. Getting Peace Corps Volunteers to do anything together is like herding ADD cats in heat. But we’re making progress, at a faster pace than I’d originally thought, and most people are getting pretty excited about it.

In the last meeting, as we were going over plans for a village survey that each of us would conduct, a difficult and time-consuming job, one of the newer volunteers finally called bullshit on me and asked me to explain exactly how all this work would actually benefit her service. I’d been expecting and dreading that question for a while, because I didn’t have a perfect answer to give. This whole project is experimental, and even though I’m the one who’s supposed to have the vision, I can’t say for certain what the real outcome will be. But I discovered something interesting about leadership: if you do your job right, you don’t ever have to defend yourself. As I was struggling for an answer, all the other volunteers, whom I’d been cajoling and pushing in this thing for weeks, jumped to my defense with arguments that were much better than anything I could have come up with. And when they were finished, and the criticizing volunteer was slightly mollified, I told everyone straight up that I had no guarantees that this would work or that all their work would be justified, and that even if it did help our service I wasn’t sure what form that help would take. Oddly enough, they all seemed happy to hear that. People are strange.

So that was March. In April I didn’t get much done at site, because I was gone for most of it. The first week and a half was taken up with IST, or Inter-Service Training, which was a chance for my training group, six months after swearing in, to come back together and talk about what we’ve learned since training, what we’ve accomplished, what problems we’ve encountered, etc. We had some sessions on various education-related themes, like non-formal community teaching and classroom discipline. The highlight was a session I taught on drama groups. I went over the best ways to form a group in the Gambia and put a show together, then took everyone outside for some drama games and warm-ups. Sotl-ites will be happy to hear that I taught them “Lion Face / Lemon Face” and “Mother Pheasant.” That last one was fun, because it’s a tongue twister that sounds dirty but isn’t, and the house we were using was right behind the US Embassy. If having a dozen Peace Corps Volunteers screaming psuedo-profanities at the US Embassy is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Then came the Morocco journey. This was a trip that had been planned by a group of my friends months ago, and they were able to get tickets dirt cheap. By the time I decided to go, the price had moved out of my range. But I heard rumors that it was possible, although extremely difficult, to get there overland. I had thought that it wasn’t allowed for Americans to travel through the area of the Sahara south of Morocco, but apparently there was one route along the coast that held only a mild chance of being abducted and murdered by desert nomads. I did my research, and found that it would be four or five days of dirty, uncomfortable travel, in fruit trucks and bush taxis, through countries that don’t speak any languages I’m familiar with, some of which are actively hostile to Americans, and I would be doing it alone.

So I figured what the hell.

The only difficult part of the preparation, aside from convincing an understandably reluctant admin to let me go, was getting a visa for Mauritania, one of the countries on the way. I had been told that I would be able to get one at the border, but two days before I left I found out that wasn’t true. This was on Friday, and I had to leave on Sunday if I wanted to meet my friends. Friday is a holy day, when everyone stops work to pray at one pm, so I sprinted downtown to the Mauritanian embassy at twelve forty-five, ran breathless into the lobby past the crack security team out front, and stopped the Mauritanian ambassador as he was walking out the door. I was… extremely persuasive, and so I got my visa processed, a procedure that normally takes at least 24 hours, in ten minutes.

The trip itself was just as difficult and uncomfortable as I expected. Getting through Senegal was relatively painless, and only took a day, but transportation through Mauritania was slow, frustrating, and often insane. There were guard stations every twenty miles, and each one took an eternity as I gave them my passport, answered a series of bizarre questions in French (my grasp of the language improved remarkably on this trip – that is, from none whatsoever to the ability to say “I have no cocaine or pornography”), then they carefully looked over every single page of my passport, slowly wrote down all my information, and let us on our way.

A quick side note – the new American passports are gorgeous, with beautiful pictures and famous quotes on every page. I hate them. Every goddamn person that examined mine had to look at every single pretty picture in the goddamn book. I think at least three or four hours of my trip were taken up waiting for random guards to admire the images of George Washington and the moon landing.

It was in Mauritania that I ended up chasing the camel. I was in a small car, only the driver and three passengers, at midnight, trying to get to a town on the border. The driver got a call on his cell phone, spoke for a minute, then turned the car off the road and into the desert. This was the Sahara, just like you’ve seen in the movies, sand dunes and all. He switched off the headlights and we just coasted through the sand. After a while I saw the dark silhouttes of camels near the car. A few dozen of them were walking in a loose line in the night, and we coasted among them for a while, like a ship floating past icebergs. There was no moon, and the stars were like white embers. It was surreal and beautiful, and only slightly marred by the fear that they were taking me out here to kill me. Eventually I saw a man riding on the lead camel, oblivious to us. The driver silently maneuvered behind him, then flicked on the headlights and honked the horn at the same time. The guy whirled around, stared at us for a second, then started to run.

So of course we chased him.

If you’ve never seen a camel gallop, it is hilarious, like a giant hairy slinky on toothpicks. But the car was driving in sand, and we couldn’t go very fast, so it was actually a real chase. The driver stuck his head out the window and screamed at the guy, and after a second the passengers in back stuck their heads out and started screaming, too. So I figured what the hell, stuck my head out the window and screamed.

“You better run! We’re gonna cut you up, man! We’re gonna feed you to your camel!”

Finally we caught the guy, and the driver got out to go yell at him. They shouted at each other for a while, then the driver turned and punched the camel. This was not a light tap. I heard it from inside the car; it rocked the camel back a few steps, and this was not a small animal. The driver walked back, looking satisfied with himself, and we drove back to the road.

“What the hell just happened?” I said.

He smiled.

The next day, on a twenty-four hour bus ride through West Sahara, a Frenchman got on and sat right next to me, although there were plenty of empty rows.

“Hello,” he said, in broken English. “You smell very bad.”

“You’re French,” I said.

“Yes! And you smell very bad.”

I sniffed, and he was right. I had been traveling through the desert for days without showering or even changing clothes. I turned back to my book and tried to ignore him. I’d brought James Joyce’s Ulysses, figuring if there was one time in my life I would have the time and lack of stimuli to tackle that massive, incomprehensible tome, it would be this trip. It’s a stream of consciousness, one of the most impenetrable books ever written, and it was taking all my concentration just to follow the plot.

“What are you reading?” my new friend asked.

“Ulysses.”

“Read it to me!” he said. I declined, until he started petting my head and making up his own version of the story. "Once upon a time there was a rabbit..."

“Other hand a sixfooter with a wifey up to his watchpocket,” I said to shut him up.

“Amen!”

“Um… ok. Long and the short of it. Big he and little she. Very strange about my watch.”

“Amen!” He threw up his arms and stepped into the aisle. “Amen!”

“Wristwatches are always going wrong!” I was getting into it. I stood up too, and adopted a Southern evangelist accent. “Wonder is there any magnetic influence between the person because that was about the time he!”

“Amen!” The Frenchman danced up and down the aisle, then took off his hat and started soliciting donations from the other passengers.

“Yes, I suppose, at once! Halleluiah!” That last part was my addition.

We preached the gospel of James Joyce for a while, until the driver made us sit down. We actually collected about ten dirham, enough to split a cheese sandwich at the next stop.

I met up with my friends in Marakesh, and we traveled around Morocco for about a week. It was absolutely beautiful, and I highly recommend it as a travel destination to anyone. The food was great, the people were friendly, the cities and the mountains were beautiful. We met some Moroccan volunteers, who showed us some of the real life in the country that tourists don’t usually see. We had tajines and kebabs, hiked up mountains and through waterfalls, and just generally had a blast.

We even tried out the himmam, a Moroccan bathhouse that’s like a giant steamroom. The idea is that you sweat for a while, then scrub off the sweat, dirt, and dead skin with a rough brush. But the Moroccan volunteers told us that the ritual was fairly elaborate, and that unless we knew what we were doing we should pay someone to scrub us. I was a little dubious, but I figured what the hell. So when I walked in and a giant Arab man asked me if I wanted to pay for a massage, I said sure.

I have never been so terrified in my life. This was not a massage. This was an assault. He twisted me like taffy, grabbing appendages and pulling, seemingly at random, grappling and kneading me until I was a whimpering puddle on the bathroom floor. The worst part was that he kept making sound effects. I think in his head he was a pit crew, and I was a race car, and he had to completely overhaul me in less than five minutes. A sample of our conversation:

“Whoosh.”
“Ahhh!”
“Zip zip!”
“No! I – uhhh!”
“Bam!”
“Ow”
“Bam!”
“Oh, God, why?”

Then he dumped a bucket of scalding water on my head and scrubbed my skin off with steel wool. After the massage, it was fairly relaxing. He didn’t speak point. I felt used. Although I have to say, when he finished, I have never felt so clean in my entire life.

It was as I was leaving that I ran into trouble. I had paid when I came in, but the guy who had given me my towel and brush stopped me and indicated that I should pay him more money for them. Now, at this point I was getting really tired of people claiming I owed them money after the fact. Guys had been trying to charge me after they gave me directions, or I took a picture with them in it, and I was sick of it. If people wanted to charge me money for something, they should tell me before they did it. So I argued with the guy for a while - I’ve gotten really good at arguing with someone without speaking their language. Through an impressive series of pantomimes he told me to perform an act on myself that is physically impossible, so I just started to walk out. At that point he tried to get into a fight with me, but because the floor was so wet and he was a small guy he mostly just slid around a lot. I fell back on years of locker room brawls and flicked him with the towel he was trying to charge me for until he stopped.

Outside I met my friends, who had gone to a separate himmam, one for women.
“How was it?” they asked.
“Interesting,” I said.
“Did you remember to tip the bath attendant?”
I looked away. “Yeah.”

I think karma caught up with me, because the trip back was much worse than the trip there. Nothing particularly exciting happened, just an endless series of delays and irritations. Cars broke down, rides were late. At one point a bus tried to leave without me, with all my stuff inside. I managed to chase it down. The Moroccan police turned my car away at the border, so I had to walk the mile or so from the Moroccan border to the Mauritanian one, which for some reason has no paved road. Walking through the Sahara in the middle of the afternoon is just as hard as they make it look in the movies.

I never thought it would feel so good to be back in the Gambia. Better the insanity you know, I suppose. I’m going back to Kerewan as soon as I post this, and I’m looking forward to being home.

On one last note, a few people have asked me what kind of things I would like in care packages. The thing I need most is protein, so any kind of protein bar or powder would be great, or canned meats. I'm also starved for news of current events, so magazines like the Economist or Newsweek would be great. If anyone could burn some CDs of movies or TV shows, that would be great, as you run out of digital media here pretty quickly. I've written a few people letters, but I don't have anyone's address here, so if you'd like a letter send me your address.

I've got a toilet!

So this has been a big month. For those of you who have not heard about my adventures in January, I’ve written the blog post, but I’m probably not going to post it for a while, so send me an email if you’re really curious. Suffice it to say that Peace Corps admin got a little irritated at me.

I tried to worm my way back into their good graces, because I wanted to get a site change. The projects that I posted about a few months ago kind of dried up. The computer classes became monotonous and largely pointless, as most of the students I was trying to teach couldn’t read. The drama club never really happened because the majority of students going to Njaba Kunda School don’t actually live in Njaba Kunda, but in one of the surrounding villages. Many of them walk for an hour or two to get home every night. It doesn’t matter how motivated a kid might be, he’s not going to walk two hours home and two hours back in the evening for rehearsal. The club had a lot of interest in the beginning, but after three meetings where four kids showed up (then three, then one), I had to admit defeat.

There’s a nearby town, Kerewan, where I’ve been doing a lot of interesting work. It’s the seat of the regional council, and it’s got a radio station, multiple NGOs, businesses, and schools with drama clubs already founded. It got a little ridiculous, to the point where I was spending two or three nights a week there, sleeping on my friend’s bamboo couch.

I had a simple solution. The amount of work I did in a week in Njaba Kunda I could probably accomplish in a day. Kerewan is about an hour’s bike ride away, so why not just shift over, living in Kerewan and spending a day or two every week in Njaba Kunda? I would be able to accomplish much more, working with the regional council, helping draft policies that affect thousands of people. The radio station reaches a good chunk of the country, and everyone listens to the radio, pretty much all the time. You can’t find a better medium for public messages. There’s a resource center with a meeting space and computers that the American Embassy donated, just sitting there without someone to run it. There are professionals who want computer training, who will understand the concepts and apply them in their jobs. And the drama club is well run and energetic, and just needed someone with some experience with larger productions to help them start performances for the public. And I would still get just as much done in Njaba Kunda.

That was the pitch I sold to Peace Corps admin. They were understandably hesitant. They don’t like moving people from their sights when they’ve been there less than a year, unless there’s a security risk, because they feel volunteers should give their sights a real chance. Plus, like I said, they were less than pleased with me at the time.

So we wrangled and argued for a while, until I had to leave for WAIST. WAIST is the West African Invitational Softball Tournament. It’s a meeting of groups from all over West Africa, mostly Peace Corps but also some embassies, to play softball and socialize in Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

I had gotten really sick the weekend before, vomiting and whatnot, and I hadn’t been able to eat for a few days, so I lost about five pounds. If you saw me these days, you would know I can’t really afford to lose five pounds. So when I went to Dakar I went crazy. Hamburgers, hot dogs, beer, Indian food, pastries, beer, steak, chocolate mousse, and lots of beer. At one point during a game I had to put down my can to catch the ball, which was a great sacrifice. I gained back my five pounds and then some.

Through a weird series of circumstances, I ended up being captain of Peace Corps Gambia’s C-team, the third-stringers, the ones that, when asked if they wanted to play, said only if they were allowed to drink on the field. Many of them had never played softball or even baseball in their lives. We didn’t win a single game, which was fine. No one expected to. More than once we walked the other team’s entire batting line up straight through. It was strange being captain, though, because I felt a sense of responsibility, like even if we weren’t going to win we could not completely embarrass ourselves. It made me oddly tense, which was the exact opposite of the point. Eventually I just said hell with it and drank more beer.

I actually got a lot done on that trip. I met a woman who worked at the Embassy and we started talking about West Africa and development. She had some fascinating stories to tell about the foreign service, and she seemed really interested in some of my ideas about economics and outsourcing in developing countries. I told about her some of the projects I was working on, trying to get some advice, and she gave me her card and told me to email her and we could follow up. It was only as I was walking away that I looked closely at the card. She was the American ambassador to Senegal.

So that was embarrassing, but great. I’m sure she’ll be a great contact. I also attended an all-volunteer meeting for Senegalese volunteers. They had a number of interesting round-table discussions, including one about something called a Regional Strategy Plan. I can say without exaggeration that that discussion changed my entire Peace Corps service.

It’s a little too complicated to fully get into, but a Regional Strategy Plan is a way of creating a framework for the projects of all the PCVs in a region by finding common goals, quantifying them, and coordinating efforts among volunteers to accomplish them. Basically it gives PCVs some extra credibility and authority, making their work part of a larger effort rather than just an individual’s good idea. It’s an amazing plan, and I walked out of the meeting knowing how I was going to make my mark in the Peace Corps.

Back in Gambia, fired up with my idea, I started networking and making meetings, getting all the volunteers in my region of the Gambia together to start making plans. We actually had our first regional meeting last weekend, and it went well. If we can pull this off, it will be a model for all the other regions of the Gambia, and it will change the way we do our services.

In the midst of all this passion and bustle, admin told me I could move to Kerewan. Like a kid with a new toy, I had shifted all my energy to this new project, so when I got the news I saw it more as an inconvenience than anything.

Until I saw the toilet.

You don’t understand. You can’t. Nothing can communicate to you the almost religious awe with which I beheld this porcelain beauty on first site. In Africa, you spend a lot of time on certain unpleasant activities, and when your only outlet is a whole in the ground, it gets old fast. Now I can just sit. Maybe read. Rest. Be secure on my throne, lord of my domain.

If I’m going to be perfectly honest, it’s actually kind of a pain, because I only get water at random hours of the day. It’s even less constant than the power. But when it’s working, man. Watch out. After I’m done, I wash my hands. In a sink. The luxury is overwhelming.

Mad skillz

This has been a slow month, so this post will have to be a little shorter. There've been a plethora of holidays and school functions, so in the last month I've only had about a week of actual classes. I've spent most of my time hanging out with my host family, going to the various prayer ceremonies and watching bootleg copies of Gilmore Girls. I'm really living the life, let me tell you.

I love going to Muslim prayer. They don't really like me going to the regular ones, but for the special events they're more than happy to have me tag along. I don't understand the Arabic prayers, but the workout of falling to my knees, touching my head to the ground, then jumping up again twenty or thirty times is great. The head rush helps with the religious experience. Plus I usually stand in the back, so I get the indescribable experience of having thousands of Africans all moon me at once.

All kidding aside, I really do enjoy the prayers. There's an intensity, a fervor created by so many people all focusing on a single idea, united in their belief, performing rituals they've done their whole lives, so many times it's part of their muscle memory, but still finding it them some solace, some connection with each other. It's not something I can really understand as an outsider, but I appreciate that they at least give me the chance to be a part of it.

Their big December celebration is called Tabaskie, a celebration of Abraham demonstrating his faith in God by being willing to kill his son and God demonstrating his faith in Abraham by not making him do it. In the story, Abraham kills a ram instead, so on Tabaskie every family that can afford it (and most of the ones that can't) slaughter a ram and have a feast.

When my family killed their dinner they asked me if I wanted to hold the head still. I couldn't really think of a way to decline without looking like a wuss, so I got to keep the ram from thrashing around as my brother cut its throat. I thought I would have to look away when it happened, but I couldn't, even when I tried. At the last second, before the knife cut all the way through, it stopped struggling, its breath calmed, and I swear it just looked at me. I thought I saw something as it died, in its eyes. I'm not sure what. I kept looking until they shooed me away to skin the body.

That night they had a party at school, which was a lot of fun. Call me a racist if you want, but every African kid I've met can dance like hell. Put me to shame, certainly. Everyone was having a blast until they up and kicked us out and told us we had to pay 25 Dalasi (about a dollar) to get back in. That's a hell of a lot of money for a Gambian kid in the bush, so most of the children in the village just milled around outside and listened to the music. There was a vague feeling of shame in the whole crowd.

I was feeling tired, and annoyed, and not in the mood to be extorted on a religious holiday. So I grabbed my host sister and started swing dancing. She shrieked, of course, and tried to run away, but I persisted and soon we were doing all kinds of twirls and tucks and turns and whatnot. Once she stopped freaking out she was actually pretty good, so I grabbed a random guy in the crowd and told her to dance with him, then found my other host sister and danced with her. After a few minutes I had a good thirty or forty people all dancing, spinning and stepping around on the dusty road, in the middle of the night, as the music filtered out to us from the mostly empty party. There was a lot of falling over.

It was certainly my best Tabaskie.

The next day I was feeling good. There's a tradition of kids walking from compound to compound and asking for salibo, or little gifts like candy or money. It's like trick or treating, but a lot more annoying, as they tend to ask for a lot and don't have much shame about hitting you up again if you've already given them something. I wanted to keep my good mood, so I decided to hit the road.

A friend of mine in the middle of the country had left for a few weeks to visit her family in America. Another volunteer and I decided she should be punished for this. We took a bus taxi to her site, told her family we were her friends, there with her blessing, and painted her walls with as many garish and terrifying colors we could find. It looked like Jackson Pollack had a seizure, with twisted streaks of red, blue, and green streaking her walls, scattered with bizarre pictures and vulgar phrases. We forgot to buy paintbrushes, so it was finger-painting all the way. All in all a fine artistic achievement.

Karma caught up with us on the way back, however. We were in another bush taxi, this one quite large, and the driver was having some problems with shifting. Most of these vehicles are at least ten or fifteen years old, never been tuned up or maintained. They're absolutely terrifying the first time you ride them, and it seems like they're about to fall apart at any second. I think it's a testament to how the Peace Corps has made me a much less flappable person when the driver, speeding down a hill, stalled out the car and couldn't get it back in gear.

I have to admit, though, I got a little worried when he pulled the gear shift completely out of the floor. He looked at it for a second, almost curiously, as though he had no idea what this thing was or how it got into his hand. Oddly enough, the car wouldn't work after that. As they were trying to fix it, the man who owned the car and was riding along told me that there was nothing wrong with the vehicle, that this was a new driver and it was his fault we broke down. I don't know. I've met some bad drivers, but I've never seen one so bad he could dismantle a car with his bare hands.

Maybe by the time I leave, I will have learned such skill.

Oh, before I go, I'm linking to a blog of a friend of mine, Marcus Walton. I'm not great at taking pictures, which is why I haven't posted many, but he's amazing, so if you want a visual picture of the Gambia hit his site up.

Thoughts on hyenas, urine, and microphones

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wonder if he volunteered.

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

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

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

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