Friday, October 26, 2012

Field Trip

“I’ve made a mistake.” I thought with something more than serious chagrin. I was feeling like my friend or I was about to die—it was my dehydrated state versus my height, but given the shiny, well hydrated mud coating my visible (and invisible) skin, I guessed the lightning would choose me as a lightning rod rather than my companion… a full two feet shorter than me.
When Ibrahim and I had started our tour of the farms, everything had been blue skies and butterflies. Knut had come on our walkabout and could only be seen like a gangly white dolphin as he arced in and out of the chlorophyll-green fields. After a fifteen minute gloppy walk away from the road across the beautiful rice though, cannon fire started in the eastern skies and an obscenely phallic cumulonimbus announced its unswervable intention to steamroll us into the thigh-deep mud.
Crossing my eyes- one pointing to the clouds, the other observing where the deep green of his well-fertilized field ended and the yellow tinge of his neighbor’s farm began- I immediately affirmed Ibrahim’s suggestion to return.
A short two minutes later, my tympanic membranes went scrambling for a bomb shelter before they were exploded. The low, dark forerunner of the perversely shaped cloud brightly connected the short distance to the ground every handful of seconds, bragging immediately after with serious boomness. Being the tallest object in a square mile, I spent a few seconds, ostensibly the last of my pre-lightbulb life, wondering if my post-jog dehydration was enough to dissuade a million volts from illuminating me. Then the rain came.
“Double time?” Ibrahim asked without a trace of question in his voice.
The rain falling felt like a marriage of the line-drive that nailed me in coach-pitch and the time I wore shorts and tanktop to paintball in. The mud turned to muck then again to mostly liquid just as Ibrahim and I reached the raised road running through the farms. Ibrahim chuckled because we were the same color, then summed everything up nicely, “This field trip has embarrassed us.”
By the time we made it back to Mambolo proper, the rain had washed most of the embarrassment off us, but somehow had left Knut incredibly filthy to create a swamp in my parlor.
I’ve been having ‘different’ days like that lately. A few afternoons ago I was desperately trying to not make Brontosaurus sounds. I had been carted off to a great location- another swamp- this one so big it disappeared with the horizon. The sun was spraying through a bordering palm forest tattooing golden globs on newly planted rice shoots. The fog heaving out of the ground lent the prehistoric feel that was encouraging my narrowly suppressed Jurassic Park reenactment.
The other humans with me were speaking deep, mumbled Temne I could understand, so I had been keeping up a steady chat with my brains. IT was boring conversation and went something like,
“This is the DEEP BUSH.”
“Yup. If this bush were any deeper it’d be poking up in the Solomon Islands.”
“Yeah. So deep.”
I’d been having such a great day, and at that point didn’t even know some kid was about to run out of the bush, give me a veritable barrel of bananas, then leap back into the bushes. A little banana ninja is what he was.
The reason for that evening’s excursion was to find a weaver in the bush that would make me enough country cloth to cover my body. Someone recently said my body is “becoming to be gigantic,” so a truly skilled artisan was called for. Such a man was only found days later- living several hosues away from me.
Ayway, with the 10-month-till-home point in my service securely passed, I’m trying to have as many ‘different’ afternoons while I’m here to have them.

Call It What You Will

Just a student lying on the staffroom floor twitching. Five teachers sitting at the table trying to look bored. One casually opens a dictionary to look up a tricky English word, a woman in the corner languidly looks on as the girl quivers—now violently, now quietly pulsing.
A man arrives on an Okada, unassuming in his baseball hat and Hawaiian pattern button-up. He takes her socks off and begins to remove her demon by pulling her small toes sideways. A choked ‘no’ escapes her and she gives herself over to the seizing barrel-rolls that have characterized her episode. Now, grabbing her twisted, rigidly adducted arms, he strains against this small girl’s strength to bring them together, breaking her flexed, crucifix form.
Her mother appears in the doorway exhibiting the expected affectations—wailing, bowing beating her chest—pausing for a moment to add a genuine tear as her daughter’s body writhes away from the man now whispering softly in her ear.
Smoking embers are brought to choke her demon. The pall of smoke takes the place of what little conversation was left hanging in the room. A rhythm less dance begins around the girl, teachers placing chair cushions where the girl is expected to convulse to.
“Demons” everyone murmurs as the girl is carried out, her body completely rigid between the hands carrying her at ankles and shoulders. Her eyes remain tightly shut as she’s made to straddle a motorcycle, her face thrown back and arms out to the sun as she’s motored away between driver and father.
“Demons.” Everyone mutters again before returning to the table and their books.