Journal Excerpt

Been eating lots of ginger (cheap) and eggs (expensive). The end of the dry season brings more weather fluctuation in the past week than has blown through in the past three months. Today the haze was so thick that the morning light was even and yellow, and the sun was only strong enough to run the water pump for a few hours; the water tower was empty again by four. In a suitable segue, I’ve finished Robinson Crusoe and have started Heart of Darkness, which I prefer.

A movie and three pictures

or http://youtu.be/R5HizrVh_EY

Ndiyan [rain]

It rained again today. I was sitting on the porch, reading Bill Speidel’s Seattle history. The sun had been coming and going, showing itself occasionally from behind passing clouds, encroaching on my shady position with each reappearance. Then there was thunder.

Children squealed. It was like when a truck drives through town: a couple deep booms as it clobbers the cobbles, children get excited, adults turn their heads but don’t leave their work, and then it’s over and all that’s left is dust and fading rumbles and clangs. Totally normal.

Two vaporous giants had taken over the sky where before patchy clouds had slid about. One, dark and looming overhead, the other, white and towering, almost confectionary, over the hills to the east. Blue sky shone between them. I quickly got out my bike and headed to the house under construction up on the hill; the porch has both a great view of the valley and a roof. As I left my compound, the rain was beginning to taptap tap the metal roofs.

From the vantage of the second-story porch I watched the first dark giant pass, showering the village. Soon it was gone, over the ridge, to make its fleeting trucklike appearance in the next village over. The rain lulled. I watched a baobab seed float slowly to the ground. The rain had dampened its surrounding tangle of tulle-like fibers, transforming it from a will-o-wisp to a badminton birdie. I took leave of the well-diggers working at the site with whom I had shared the shelter of the porch and continued up the hill. The sun was back, on my back, tracing my sharp shadow on the clean ground.

There are three sensations produced when the first rain in a while begins to fall. First is, of course, the smell. The smell is hard to describe but everyone knows it. It’s always the same, always wonderful, slightly dusty and moist at the same time, and incredibly clear. When it hasn’t rained in six months, this smell can linger for days.

The second is the sound, or rather a series of sounds. There is at first the sudden bustle as laundry is hauled in, as goats run bleating for cover, and as children remind their peers that ‘it’s raining!’ Then there is a lull. Not unearthly quiet like during and just after heavy snowfall, but a dampening, if you will, of all activities. People still talk, motorcycles still blast by, and some crickets still make their noises, but all of these things are perceived in the context of the falling water. The whole world is still there, but the rain smoothens and filters the sound, the auditory equivalent of looking through a screen door.

The third is sudden, subtle, incredible change in how the world looks. Daytime rain is not gloomy, grey, or dull. The sky is a bit less brilliant, but the difference is made up on the ground. New rain turns bricks into ORANGE bricks, dead grass into YELLOW dead grass, budding trees into GREEN budding trees, scorched earth into BLACK scorched earth, rocks and gravel into RED rocks and gravel, plastic pipes and tarps into BLUE plastic pipes and tarps. Where there was once a homogenous landscape, unified by dust and haze, there are now individual, important, components.

When I came back home, the next cloud had moved overhead. I stood at the railing of the porch for half an hour, watching the drips and the people.

In the mountains and high plains of Guinea, the rainy season and the dry season each occupy one half of the year. The last real rain fell in early November this season. The two storms we’ve had this week herald the coming change, but the dry season is not yet officially over. One or two or three showers in late March and April are normal, but their timing is critical. They must fall early enough that the plants in the fields will survive (irrigation is scarce here), and late enough that those who make their livelihood via baked-earth bricks don’t lose their whole muddy crop in a sudden downpour, before the final firing. And now, many Guineans will allow themselves to eat mangoes. The first mangoes ripened almost a month ago, but only now are they “properly washed,” and thus able to mature as they should. Many other Guineas don’t worry about whether their mangoes have been wetted or not, and start eating them as soon as they ripen.

The rainy season will truly have arrived in mid or late May. This fortunately coincides with the end of the school year. During heavy rainfall, the noise generated by the drops on the metal roof creates such a racket in the unceilinged classrooms that it’s not worthwhile to teach; no one wants to be yelled at (or yell) for two hours. Of course, the kids won’t go home; they’d get wet on the way there [or at least more wet than they do sitting in the classroom beneath the holey roof], so teacher and students alike will sit and wait. It makes sense to minimize this: final exams are scheduled for early June.

I made spicy salty oily vegetables over rice as the light inside my house went from dim to none. For some reason, the lightning here (rain always comes with lightning) is bluer, redder, purpler than what I’ve experienced elsewhere. The bolts of white that illuminate the dark dark night seem to have red edges or glows, though they only last an instant. Perhaps the clouds are lower in the sky, or there are more particulates in the air, or African Zeus has his bolts forged in crimson.

Voyage

Imagine the progeny of an arranged marriage between a covered wagon and a roller coaster:

Crawling up hills, plunging down the other side with the vehicle in neutral and motor shut off to conserve fuel, whipping through blind chicanes, the mismatched tires cling desperately to the terra infirma beneath. Four guys are on the roof, on top of the baggage, on top of the cargo net, strategically splayed so as to minimize their already vertiginous position. Pre-deadly passing manoeuvers test the limits of luck. The road is alternately Jarlsberg and Texas Chili, turning to Rocky Road during the rainy season. Inside the vehicle, the heater is on full blast to keep the engine a precious few degrees cooler, the stick-shift is actually a stick for shifting, the children are calm but don’t pack well, the bidon-cum-gastank fumes in the trunk, and dust settles in every fold like dry snow.  Miniscule motorcycles without mirrors ignore everything, one passenger in a helmet, the next in headphones, the third in a headwrap.  The baby is bareheaded.

This is overland travel in Guinea.

Plus, fuel is about $5/gal.

Lunch

Mustard greens with eggplant marinara and a fried egg, 

Bread with honey, Guava kool-aid

Tomorrow

Tomorrow he will wake up early; after the muezzin, and before the chickens. As he closes the bedroom window to prevent the heat of the day ahead from entering, the new goat families asleep in the cool gravel around the foundation of the house will wake up, too. He will light a candle and turn on the radio, and listen to how many people were killed in Syria today. After boiling water for tea so bad it gives him stomach pains if he drinks it too rapidly or if he forgets to put honey in it, he will filter out the leaves using the same gently oxidizing strainer he uses to keep those few opportunistic grains from tumbling down the drain while washing rice and, in a pinch, move hot pots. Occasionally, while he is eating or preparing his lesson plans for the day, he will glance out the window and notice how much brighter the sky is. While he is eating, he will hear the schoolbells; first the clong from primary school’s suspended truck wheel, and then the clang from middle school’s suspended truck wheel, the accelerating crescendos of steely peals elicited by the time-varnished cudgel futily beckoning the youth to get up and go to class. He will put on socks, wipe chalk dust from his shoes with a cloth partly dedicated to this purpose, among others, and put a blue pen, a red pen, a pocketknife, and 3000 Guinean francs in his pockets. Before deflecting the door to allow the bolt of the lock to clear the strikeplate, he will check that there are at least enough half-sheets of paper in his notebook to give one to every student in both classes. He will attach the key to his beltloop and coax the little wooden elephant that is suspended next to it into the top of his back pocket.

On the way to school he will greet his neighbor, Sadou, who will be sitting awake on his bed, his window open, amidst the merchandise of his one room lodging/store. He will overtake and greet a troop of young boys advancing in faux-motorised spurts towards the primary school, their bare calves and knees as carelessly dirty as their shorts. They will call out the name he is called, and greet him using the only French phrase they reliably know, good morning. He will walk through the center of town. The woman who sells porridge will be selling porridge, and the young son of the man who runs the store will wave at him patiently. The man who sells the bread the baker bakes will ask him if he has eaten breakfast. Yes, I have eaten breakfast, he will respond. He will greet the woman who sells donuts, or her daughter. A juvenile chicken scratching noisily for anything to eat in the dry leaves on the side of the road will draw his attention, and then it will notice him, and then it will run to shelter on the opposite side of the road. He will walk through the gate of the school, the third of seven teachers to arrive. He will greet those who were first and second, and take the keys to open up the classrooms. Four will be locked, one will not. He will reflect for an instant, choose the appropriate mixture of colored and white chalk, and go to class. When students arrive fifteen minutes later, he will teach them physics, French, critical thinking, and patience. They will become bored, fatigued, and start to talk amongst themselves in their language. The schoolbell will be struck; he will make concluding remarks and release them into the sunlight. All will be loud as they shout to hear themselves over the noise they make. He will walk to the next class, clean the blackboard with a piece of foam, and write the opening problem on the board. As students burble in, he will give them the paper on which to do the assignment, and check that his materials are in order. About one hundred and ten minutes later, he will again release them into the sunshine.

On the walk home he will greet the same people he greeted in the morning on the way to school. He will check to see if the loaves of bread on display are crisp and a bit warm, from that day, or soft and cool, leftover from today. They will be soft and cool and he will not buy any. He will brush his too-long hair out of his eyes, face, glasses. It will go back to where it was, instantly. He will unlock his door with a bang, and enter the relative coolness of his house. His eyes will adjust rapidly to the darkness, so he will not raise the thin curtains shrouding the two windows. After washing the chalk dust from his hands and then mixing a bit of drink mix with tepid water from his filter, he will sit at his desk and look at the dirty dishes on the stove. He will reheat the beans from yesterday and fry an egg. He will eat and read: Harper’s, egg, Cervantes, beans, Darwin, orange, dried nectarines, water. The radio will tell him the tentative number people killed in Syria that day.

After the hottest part of the day has passed, he will emerge from his house. He will have traded his collared shirt for a white tee, and his chalky loafers for flip-flops. He will walk past the boutique, past his students reading excerpts from the Koran written on wooden tablets, past the children pulling each other in a wheelless wagon made from half a plastic 20-liter oil container, and past the tattered soccer goals. He will pass the lady selling peanuts and cigarettes and new onions and the other lady selling peanuts and cigarettes and dried fish. He will follow the road up to beyond where the village stops, and then further, to the rock in the middle of the burnt grass where he sits to make phone calls. There will be no service. He will sit in the sun a few more minutes and then walk back home. He will take the route that bypasses the center of the village and goes by the dispensary and the Franco-Arab school and the well that no one uses anymore. Once at home, with a display of impressive motivation and forethought, he will take out his notebooks for the classes the next day and think about how to teach the proscribed lesson and in what order. He will build and test the demonstration which provides the tenuous but essential link between the gibberish on the blackboard and unflinching and inescapable reality. It will almost work, and thus will be good enough. The wind will play roughly with the outward-opening door as it creaks its metallic complaints. The sound will bother him but he will not get up to close it or prop it permanently open. As the sun lowers in the sky, the radio program he dislikes will start, and he will turn off the device. He will disrobe and take a tepid shower, giving the water ample time to soak his skin and impart a temporary sense of clean and cool. He will wash his hair with soap, and shave. Afterwards, it will be too dark in the house to see well. He will make ‘indian food’. He will start by heating a mixture of cumin, mustard seeds, and dried chilies in oil. He would then add potatoes, onion, and garlic, but he will only have onion and garlic. He will add them in vegetable-like quantities, to compensate for the lack of tubers. Then he will add cabbage and tomato, and more spices, and salt. He will make rice with raisins and cardamom. He will eat, and listen to the radio. As he finishes his second serving, the radio will tell him how many people were killed in Syria that day. He will do dishes.

He will again leave his house, and return to the rock on the hill above the village. He will, successfully, call a friend. They will talk about development work, students, and their next voyage away from their sites, in about two weeks. They say they will talk again soon; if they can reach each other, if God wills it. He will walk back to his house, playing Kid Cudi songs from his phone into the dark. He will unlock the exterior door and remove a small praying mantis with a light brown body and big purple eyes like every alien from the interior screen door. He will go inside, close and bolt the door, and open all of the windows to improve circulation. He will brush his teeth and move his phone, watch, ipod, magazine or book, and flashlight to the bed. He will write four lines in a journal about the day and what he saw in the sky at night, and read for a while. He will turn his flashlight to the picture on the headboard, sigh, and go to bed. 

Goats Update

Life and Death and Goats update:

The day after posting the entry below, I returned to my site. Sleeping in the shade of a stack of bricks in my front yard were a mature female goat and her newborn kid.

Three weeks have now passed since watching the vultures. There are at least three different new goat mothers and their five-plus kids that play and bleat and forage within the concession where I live. One of the new mothers is Flower, the one with lopsided horns. The sound her kid makes when calling for her is exactly the same as a dog’s squeaky toy. Exactly.