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.

Feeling Sick

Having cholera would feel much better than being told my three year old friend had just died from it. Tolo was brazen. He must have been the most theatrical kid I’ve known, his gravid eyes always reminding me of stage makeup you would see on a Pharaoh. Touting water and often having to aggressively defend myself, too many times this berserker among children would prove my most worthy opponent. Not settling for a ten-foot charge, Tolo always gave himself a ten yard runway, focusing his energy into his foot-long legs instead of shouting like his myriad of other attacking peers.

“Juvenile fools,” I always imagined him thinking, “let me show you how to topple a white man.”

Our encounters always ended the same—me with spilled water all down a leg and him with a size 11 ½ footprint square in his chest. I used to wonder if the little guy needed prescription contacts (how could you run at an outstretched leg for thirty feet and still manage a full-speed collision?), but eventually amended my opinion: black-baby descendant of Braveheart or he loved slapstick comedy as much as I do. But Ya-Ah’mamy stopped me with my bucket of water yesterday to tell me he had died. Her own eyes, expressive as her grandson’s had been, looked like melting glass before she started sobbing.

You were so awesome, little guy. Your family misses you and I sure do too. Heck, given how many times I saw you sharing your rice with Knut, I’ll say he even misses you. There’s such a loud silence on your porch, in our neighborhood, that we have to listen to every day now.

What’s been burning me since your grandmother cried out an explanation of your last few days to me isn’t so much the thought of you hallucinating till the last system in your dehydrated body shut down, but the image of those standing by your bed during your last bit, refusing to take you to a hospital. Devils and an uncontrollable force didn’t take you, Tolo, it was a treatable sickness, superstition, and a bent kind of love.

I’m making that long, hot trip to the Luma market tomorrow for you and your playmates. Hopefully people use the boxes of soap I bring back. Ibrahim even said he’ll help me distribute, so maybe instead of laughing at my mangled Temne our neighborhood will learn a thing or two about hand washing and how to prevent the sickness that killed you. I can’t help but think this should’ve been done sooner.

Future Jared Tomb Raider

America had faded from my peripheries, shrunk in my rearview, and now might have floated off to Australia for all I knew. I was standing on my porch in Mambolo, 8,000 miles away. After my two day home-to-home transit, my keys had sunk to the deepest level of my bag. Their jingling was mean spirited laughter as I completely unpacked outside to find them, water splattering all around more like marbles than drops. The rainy-season was welcoming me home. Flicking aside the key to a truck parked on another continent, I plunged my house key into the lock, twisted, then opened.

It had been so easy in America to laugh of worries about my African house and properties. Let future Jared deal with whatever goes wrong, alright? Well now I was future-Jared, and it was time for me to face the music. Was that really a leak sprung in my roof three weeks ago the night before I left? What happens to a back yard in the jungle left unattended? Had vermin, chickens, and children taken to cohabitating in my house? And where was Knut anyway?

“TombRaiderBAM!” I shouted as I kicked my double doors in. I wanted whatever rat, snake, or goat in the place to know the SWAT team was home and trigger happy. Congratulating myself on a forceful entrance I unsuctioned the usual crowd of porch children that had attempted intercalation into my legs and took a bold step inside. Hollywood has certainly taught us how not to enter an abandoned building filled with cobwebs. Namely alone and in the dark, but I know the other obvious things not to do—like meekly say “hello” as the wind slams the door shut behind me. That behavior summons men with axes.

The first thing I noticed was the green tumor/chandelier that was bulging/hanging from my ceiling. Very vivid green mold. Noted.

My next observation was a few shades stranger and more worrying than even late 1990’s Michael Jackson—dead mice scattered across my floor. Don’t get me wrong, not-living mice warm my heart, but four intact, un-nibbled carcasses gave me pause. The circle of life is vibrant in the deep bush where I live, even the chitinous exoskeletons of the cockroaches I smash in my latrine at night are gone by morning. So why had Mufasa decreed these mouse lumps be allowed to lie in state? Anthrax? My unwashed socks smoldering in the corner? The roided-out bully rat that had been eating my protein powder? I uneasily filed this mystery away.

The rest of my place was alright. The weeds in the back had gone all USSR and were threatening to destroy all life as my corn stalks knew it, but I showed them how it’s done in ‘merica and paid someone else to destroy them. After that the only thing left to do was inhale all the dust from my bed sheets later then violently sneeze it out through my eye sockets that night.

I’m settled in now though. I’ve been napping a bit lately to ease the jetlag. Two or three good naps a day. Accompanying my naps have been the best dreams—vampire killer, superhero, war general. One day, feeling more like a loaf of bread than a human, I had been waking up only long enough to saw off then consume generously sized chunks of pepperoni before re-hibernating. After being elected dream-president of Sierra Leone, I kindly waited till after my inauguration parade to wake up again. Upon waking I had this urge to go out and be amongst the people (inception?).

Anyway, after confining myself to pants for the first time in four hours, it was radical to find the sun still so high. Going to the warf was the activity I had planned, so I followed through and found myself sipping Fanta with the usual crowd that haunts the Warf. Like everyone else down there I either sat quietly or argued.

“Lightning doesn’t strike white men.” I stated.

“What? Yes it does. You’re so tall, Oputo, you’re dead once the storms come. Thunder will Kill you.”

“Lightning. Thunder kills no one ever.”

“Lightning then.”

“Lightning never killed anyone in Mambolo!” (Volume is key to being right.)

“It killed my Grandma.”

“You’re lying.”

“Ask anyone. She was chopping down a tall coconut tree with an iron axe.”

“Oh… well that actually sounds like a lightning strike scenario.”

I chugged my Fanta and retreated back to bed. I can’t believe I have to leave this place in less than a year.

Going Home

My eyes and little pieces of associated brain interpreted it as a mechanical whale lying on an untroubled concrete sea. The closest I’d been to a plane in the last fourteen months was 35,000 feet away (they look so small from that distance), but now up close I could finally believe that this marvel was not only large enough for me to walk inside, but could loft me at least part of the 8,000 miles towards my home in the United States. It seemed like the biggest concentration of organization ever, entropy taking hardly anytime to scratch its head at this flying beast before it moved on to trouble some bush road or more susceptible, rusty lorry. All the apprehension I’d been feeling about going home over the last few days tripled at the sight of this winged leviathan… then disappeared completely when I heard that they served food and gave passengers entire cans of pop- for free.

You see, some time back I received a message from a human I like quite a bit saying he was going to get married to some chick. “Marriage,” I thought to myself, “is a wonderful thing. I must go to this.” So after selling my every vital organ, the airline exchanged digital money for a promise to take me home for a little over two weeks during my school break. Images of Dairy Queen, pizza pies, Cap’n Crunch, and Bacon had been pogo-sticking through my dreams since I received that promise.

When the evening to leave came, I presented myself at the airport and, with hesitant, dirty feet, shuffled across the tarmac and into the belly of the whale. Which was airconditioned. With TV screens. And had funsize blankets and pillows. “Why was I nervous to go back at all?! This is great!” Too busy berating myself, I of course greeted the hygienically exemplary Sterwadess in the most awkward way possible, probably not making sense in any of the three languages I threw at her then apologized in.

The next two days of traveling back were exactly the same as those first five minutes: fun and embarrassing. The airline had promised to get me back, but they did it in their own time. During my 27-hour layover in Brussels, my auspicious parents had reserved a hotel room for me in the center of town. After riding the train twenty minutes past my stop I decided to get serious and ended up finding said hotel in good time. Over the next day it would be my base camp as I sallied out between very long, hot, unnecessary showers to harvest chocolate and drink fermented things. “Sarah” who worked at a waffle stand turned out to be a great tour guide- even if it did get expensive and filling talking to her.  Brussels was gorgeous, mild weathered, and made me feel like a complete villager. At one point, skeptical glances from modern-suited fellow sidewalkers drove me indoors to buy a new shirt and clean flip-flops.

By the time I taxied to my gate at PDX a day later I felt like each of the last thousand miles had hit me in the face with a frozen water balloon. On the other side of the angry men in blue TSA uniforms, though, were my parents I hadn’t seen in a year, and after hugging them began the blur that has been my last two weeks. The wedding itself has its own, clearer set of memories, and I suppose I could account for the other days and nights, but it all seems to have flashed by. Frozen in my mind for a year, America was quick to thaw- identical to when I put it on ice with very few, very positive exceptions.

And now, after bacon, pizza pies, a walk at Alton Baker, good days, family, wedding rings, and drinks with friends, I’m left with a strange feeling of leaving home to go home.  One more quick year in Sierra Leone to get as much done as I can.

Summertime Freefall

“A good toiling is what I need.”

My ancestors' Mennonite blood was simmering, and, like the Mongols of old who felt compelled to plunder and raze from their perch atop swift horses, I too was feeling compelled to descend with all the wrath and fury of a pacifist-farmer on the square of dirt behind my house. My genes were demanding in chorus from their tiny Nuclear Parliaments- Must! Garden!

You see, I was having an extremely “Levin” or “Constantine Dmitrich” moment. After seeing farmers working every day on their plots as I went and came from school, I needed to get a tool in my hands and do something tactile. Far from a matter of survival (no matter what you see in those awful commercials, food is abundant in this country) planting then pulling food from the ground just seemed right.

Any first step for the novice agriculturist? Lacking The Home Depot, let’s go to The Blacksmith.

I didn’t do anything nearly so epic as give my new ho a name, but I tried a few handles till I found a good fit, then sat and watched as Ibrahim smacked, heated, plied, bent, and beat the head nito the handle. I left boasting a smirking swagger and an embarrassingly clean tool.

Fast forward forty-eight hours and one seed buying trip to ROkupr, you’ll find me thoroughly cured of my need to toil. Less concerned with making mounds and straight rows, I’m more concerned about a sore back and wondering what the heck I’m going to do in a few months when fifty stalks offer me one hundred ears of corn. Maybe make an extremely linear corn maze for the neighborhood kids…

Mennonite ancestors-  appeased.

Anyway, besides mucking around and throwing seeds over my shoulder, I’ve been placed in a frightening situation as of late- summer vacation. It’s as if all the rush-hour traffic that made you buy those books on tape has disappeared- completely. All the lines at Sam’s club keeping you from getting home to dinner have evaporated- entirely. All those electric harbingers of busywork and meetings laying siege to your inbox have seemingly deleted themselves from existence. No voicemails to answer, no projects t complete, no deadlines to beat by a day… sudden freefall. Besides the making and subsequent devouring of my lunch’s vivacious cucumber salad, my obligation meter for the day is laying down dead on zero. September 10^th is the next time the seal on my school will be broken, and that leaves me feeling about as important and needed as a river steamboat captain in Indianapolis.

Far from being frustrating, though, after recovering from the initial stomach-lurch of obligation freefall, I’ve charged myself with a new set of chores. Learn another language, read more, learn how to throw a clay pot, write a grant, make home improvements, cook edible things, train for a marathon, help with community projects, and do whatever else- all outside the borders of alarm clocks and pressure.

Sound like a workload you’d be interested in? Well, https://www.peacecorps.gov/apply/now/index.cfm?clearform=1 I'll bet you won't though.

The New Guys

I’ve always had a problem fitting the right words to a given situation. My clunky brain grabs its ladle and dips into whatever pot presents itself first- the result sometimes being a half-cooked stew of mostly sensible, though strangely spiced, words. I like the pace of writing by hand on my back porch. The jungle doesn’t roll its eyes at me when I cross a sentence out, and Knut doesn’t take a bite out of my foot (too often) when my brain slips a gear and my pen stalls over paper.

So you can imagine my apprehension was equal to my alacrity to be among the first volunteers to greet the forty-five incoming PC trainees to Sierra Leone. But remembering my own myriad of questions up on arrival here, I had to wonder if my conversational faculties had atrophied past the point of providing sound answers to simple questions. The worst case scenarios of interactions ran through my mind thus:

“So what’s your favorite thing to do in your village?”

“I like to… weather hot… sit naked on my back veranda at night drinking Kool Aid and the BBC…listening.”

Or:

“What are some of the projects you’ve done in your community?”

“Yes.”

In practice, though, I’d like to think I played my part better than dreaded. Unless I repressed the memories I don’t remember saying anything too many shades off color, and at the end of my several weeks with the ‘new guys’ I feel like I left them more knowledgeable about the country. So there must have been a filter working, right? I imagined I shouldn’t bring up the traditional practice of FGC the first evening at the airport, and maybe kettling or illiterate students weren’t meat for conversation the first week. I avoided trainwrecks by saying, “Your body’s tolerance to alcohol greatly reduces in this climate,” instead of “ONE second I’m cracking open a Carlsburg, the NEXT thing I know my naked butt is running towards starlit waves."*

The result of my filter in action, though, was a kind of constant, internal chuckle as I remembered weird stuff that has happened.

“Do you use candles in your house?”
A simple question. But I’m sure my eyes glazed over as I remembered one night maniacally hacking the lid off a can with a knife I’d made earlier at the blacksmisth’s-exploded tomato paste giving me a seemingly bloody visage- when I leaned too far over the candle in my kitchen and spent the next handful of seconds with my head literally on fire. “Yeah, I use candles. With the state of waste disposal here, I’d hate to be throwing out batteries constantly.”

Smooth.

After my few weeks with them I feel surprised and encouraged anew to be in an organization constitued of such like-minded, different people. Even the steps taken to get on- and especially off- the plane in the good mood they did is a testament to the caliber of these ‘new guy’s’ character. Heck, after a couple of week they even made me feel comfortable like I could talk good.

*Naked body surfing is just an example...and (probably) something that I've never done (twice).