Only skin

We are restless things

A ride with mountains humming in my ears, and I gain that needed reaffirmation of that out of reach feeling here, of brights too bright and darks too dark. The dirt road is bright orange despite itself. It’s smelled of rotten mangos since I got back, the end of the hot season’s tired offering. The scattered trash somehow sparkles today, and all the peoples movements are deep and heavy, struggles complete and through the skin. We pass a stalled car pushed by five teenagers, a kid wheel-barrowing sand, dusty donkeys. The burning trash offers a mystical grey smoke which gives the sky a sort of ethereal look, a hazy backdrop behind these ever-moving people, slow and meandering. Their energy is hot, melting, crystals dripping off dark skin.

So here we’ve stopped at the truck stop and someone thrusts a cup of tea at the driver. The ladies in mismatched fabrics with the plates on their head shout out their goods, boiled potatoes or eggs or luxurious apples, and men hold up boxes of generic cookies with uncomfortable names; cream bite, cream4fun, full cream.

Back at village, at Soliba’s house, we sit around in the usual circle. The men are deep in argument, snapping their fingers and giving hearty mhmmms. Soliba lays her 8-month old daughter Boubagari on her lap, massaging her back as she cries. She’s had diarrhea, but is on the upside. She has been making the oral rehydration salts, “healthwater,” that I taught her to make a few months ago. A half-tea glass of sugar, two pinches of salt, mix with boiled water. Soliba wears the earrings I gave her last year when I came back from America. She said she was wearing them while I was gone last month. I’ve been talking in her ear she says, reminding her that I’m coming back. She asks about the doctors that were here today; doctorwomen, I tell her, three and a driver who came to give our village women free birth-control.

Earlier in the day I sat there, watching them implant contraceptives into the women’s arms, and I was proud of the familiar faces that lit up when we told them they can prevent having children for five years. Many are scared though: at the sight of the blade, at the thought of their husbands. One walked out as we told her she wouldn’t be able to pound millet for two days, as the heavy work would hurt her sore arm. “Just say you are sick” we suggest; finally the doctor convinces her. She lays down suspiciously but walks out grinning, now after six kids she can “rest.” I tell Soliba about the five-year contraceptive, and promise that I’ll let her know when they all come again next month. She’s excited. They want this, they just need a little push.

And so I’m back to my hut now with its fiercely mustard mosquito net, and I realize it’s been two years under there, sweating with Mefloquin night terrors and squeezed with napping sitemates. The mud walls are full of termite mounds like swollen veins. They collide into conduits and diverge and eat my wood picture frames and their dirt falls all over my floor. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of keeping a mud hut clean.

And I am thinking back to last month when I said bye to a friend, my face as always in his chest and all tears – if only for your skin I think – because then we felt so far removed from this brightness, things are important and changing. But today Soliba with her big walk walked me home and we shook with her big dark hands and mine small and white and we were right there. The music is playing with its xylophone-like clangs and shrill voice of a Jeliwoman. I wonder when It will stop – faga – the verb also means to kill, but I am starting to feel the creeping pre-nostalgia and I know I don’t hate it so much. I’m just tired and my skin is prickly inside here. But hey, it’s only skin.

The Beige

Everything is organic, a shade of taupe – mud and bamboo and straw and wood, except for the occasional tin roof or a blue plastic bag half hidden in a pile of discarded peanut shells. Even the leaves of the mango trees are pale and powdered with sand-dust. But everything else – the chickens, the old broken buckets, the chairs and gourd bowls, the goats and piles of hay and the weaved baskets and even our skin – are all a continuum of white and brown, so quiet you feel subdued by their modesty, but nonetheless unjudged. Perhaps out of fear of being lost in the Great Beige they wrap themse3lves in rebellious fabrics. The royal blues and seafoam greens and magentas and lemon yellows lay on their body loosely, like an extravagant afterthought, in concentric circles, repetitive patterns of abstract stars, flowers, strange items like pinapples, purses and ladders. The women fill the paleness with these colors, sitting forwards and backwards on the wooden benches, all of the younger women with a baby strapped to their backs with a mismatched sheet.

We drove here from our “big village,” the doctor, midwife and I, to talk about women’s health issues – pre-natal care, giving birth, family planning – and how they can improve all these issues by coming to the health center. The fifty or so women in the last few villages seemed mixed. I asked if they could think of any benefit to birth control the outspoken old woman screamed “none;” the younger ones, though, seemed focused on my explanation of contraception, or how to count your ovulation days. Today, as the doctor mentions birth spacing, a fight breaks out between him and the old men listening, citing Allah and words too quick for me to grasp, clear though through their dramatic body language. When we talk about going to pre-natal conversations or giving brith in the health center, the men groan about the $2 fee. I do the math with them, and we realize that they only need to drink tea twice a day instead of three times, for only a week, and the money’s there. They gasp, laugh. But will they give up their precious tea? This is nothing new; even in America people with buy flat screen TVs and not health insurance. I get it.

After our little talk we get ready for tomorrow – another village, a few more women. Maybe we are just rubbing the sand in our throats but it’s something to talk about. If fabrics can’t combat the meek, subdued Great Beige, well maybe sex is a start.

If I forget thee, Jerusalem

In the almost finished fenced garden the women’s association we celebrated our success, the women thanking me over and over for completing the project as we danced to the djembe; my cheeks sore with grins. Wonderful. Incredibly awkward. I did dance bit and was surprised with how naturally I fall into their dance style now; my body leans and my feet swish and I move easily, not like the awkward days in the beginning, and I get laughs and ahs as much as the next muso. We did lots of dance-walking in the circle where the women grabbed my arm up high in recognition, “shooow!” We stopped when the hot sun was high for dinner and baths, later reconvened after in the town center. This time it was dark, and the drums seemed to beat more passionately as the younger girls danced and kicked up dust, backlit by streams of flashlights and hazy, like some dark sultry jazz dance – easier to dramatize the animalistic fervor in the dark. The fires of hay were sometimes lit to soften the animal hide drum tops, it smelled of cold and moist and sweet smoke. Finally after a few hours we marched together to greet the village chief and danced and sang in his concession. His old bent wife came out in her wizened excitement and sang “Dugutigi ma bo – mga a b’I fo!” The chief won’t come out, but he greets!

I step outside later to pee – the dust swirled in front of my headlamp, and I smelled the dust-desert, acrid and deep, it seems dark and dry in my nose and I remembered sleeping in a Bedouin tent in Israel and always at night the sand still holds the heat scent of the desert despite the night breeze. Love studying here, yes, even MCAT prep is okay; even the ugly orgo, the awkward carbon chains seem friendlier, more digestible than before, and I remembered first learning this under the fluorescent lights with the projection so far ahead, so inhuman and antiseptic and now there is always a child with his head resting on my lap or jumping over my shoulder as I try to explain what this is and here this is a brain – the head owner – and they grasp and laugh so that I can’t help loving these heavy MCAT books even though I’m scared shitless of my future I’ve got these bright white teeth giggles glowing in the bonfire to remember.

Light Chasers (or, Everything is Illuminated...sorta)

Oh, my stifled bleeding heart! What a tourniquet development can be.

Passing half-built suburbs; skeletons of mud bricks, it’s hard to tell whether they are being built up or are falling down – the progress of ruin I guess. Reminds me of the crumbled Roman ruins, beautiful but far. Such hollowness there, like humans were never quite involved in it’s building at all, just a cheesy reproduction of Pompeii or Casarea – but no, it’s the slow sad beginning, only the thwarted start of the great crawl towards development.

Came back in January with bounding satisfaction. The solar electricity I had fundraised for had been installed, and I hopped on my transport with anticipation. With grumbling resolve it had been installed without me; I had waited a week for the electrician and the doctors to show up I finally had to leave for my conference in Senegal. The next day my villagers informed me they showed up, and I was happy to give up some control. Because this is, after all, their health center, their village. As a driver of ‘sustainable development’ part of my job is to empower them to do things on their own.

I got off the van and walked in the (intensly orange unforgiving) late afternoon light. There sat the doctor and some of the other members of the health board, those I worked with to raise their 25% of the cost. They jumped up and praised me for the work we did to finance the solar panels, and my ego rose and fell in cruel repetitions as my graze locked in on the wire snaking sickeningly from one of the six panels atop the health center into the doctor’s house. But he already has a solar panel my mind argued, and I smiled as they told me how well the lights all work – ah yes how wonderful! They can work now at night, the midwives can give birth with real light! - but oh man why the hell is it in his house. They took me on a tour and it is really incredible, a light outside when people run here for emergencies and one in each room, the vaccination room, consultation, pharmacy, maternity, the long recovery room…but then the vaccination fridge, one of the main reasons for installing the solar electricity, wasn’t working.

“Why did you take a wire?” I asked the doctor and off spurned a long soliloquy about how it’s helping the community by way of improving his personal space. “Well I would have put it in your house but it was too far.” Totally missed the point. I tried to explain to him that we cannot fund anything that benefits the individual. After meeting with the electrician I finally got the picture of what happened. It seems the electrician had not checked on the power of the fridge, which blew the system the first day it was hooked up to the solar panels. An expert does not necessarily mean expert knowledge. So instead, we still have a fridge which we pour thousands of francs of gas into, and extra electricity to give over to the doctor. We are working with the electrician now to siphon off the energy, so that the lights and the vaccination fridge will work. Maybe it will, or maybe this will just be another development project that only got so far.

The next week I began building the women’s community garden. The women had scraped together the incredible sum of over $200, from women who have to beg their husbands for a few dollars to give birth at the health center. I raised the remaining $2,000, and together we built the 8,000 square meter garden. Success, yes, we’ve built a fence. Now what. We need a well, we need the land cleared, and most of all we need to have faith that we, the village women, will get the use out of the garden that we hope. Will it save the village? No. But it’s a step, right?

So of course these projects are important. Not only for the shallow ego, or the tangible results of an actual structure (I built this, goddamnit), but as a means to help them, well, help themselves. The garden will allow the women to grow their own vegetables to feed their vitamin-deprived children, or even an opportunity for them to sell the vegetables and make extra cash to save for their children’s clothes, school supplies, pre-natal consultations. The electricity will increase the availability of healthcare during the frantic hours of the night, and to provide better quality care in the dark. But in the end, I have mer faith in the sustainability of the impossibly slow process of teaching, sensitization, and promoting behavior change. I can paint the3 whole town full of murals, all yellow and blue and bright, or give sweet talks on hand washing with soap, rubbing hot pepper or honey to drive my point; but it will take generations until these practices are actually done on any measurable scale, a significant sigma statistic somehow erupting out of these impossible constraints. Any my trainings to screen for cervical cancer will always be limited as long as the Malian government doesn’t think it’s a priority. . The more the word gets out, the more healthcare workers are capable and empowered to screen for it, maybe there will be less cases of invasive cancer, a death or two thwarted. Dooni dooni. Small small.

So here’s my grand inconclusion: aid is as devastating if given purely monetarily and even more so if given without a great follow-up system (sorry, because they ‘deserve it’ is not always enough), and as empowering if given from the painfully slow route of teaching and sustainable ‘leg ups.’ But these lines are more then blurry. So just like most volunteers I know, I can channel the frustrations of Ayn Rand as easily as I do the endless humanism of Mother Theresa. So, will Mali, Africa, the developing world ever get there?
Man, I don’t even know where there is.

Journey to the end of the night

Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.
It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It’s a novel, just a fictitious narrative.
And besides, in the first place, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes.
It’s on the other side of life.
- Louise- Fedinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

Journey to Sikasso
So off I went. Thanksgiving was around the corner, so I guiltily told my village I’d be gone for a few weeks and headed to Kita, in time to take the night bus to Bamako. Our excitement at the empty bus waned to terror as - who knew we’d freeze to death in Africa? - the bus whipped on without windows through the cold night at 80mph; the four of us huddled in our flimsy clothes during the torturous scathing wind of the 4 hour trip. Finally the wind stopped, and we cautiously lifted our heads from inside our shirts to find ourselves in the cold brightly lit bus station, smelled like nighttime latrines. From there we were hustled to a busted bus company to Sikasso, spiked our Gatorade, and stumbled out of the steaming bus in the raw afternoon light 8 hours later ready for a nap.
The party was huge as peace corps usually goes, kids throwing off their Tabaski fete best, guys leaving behind the long dress-outfit called bubus, ladies their heavy head wraps , all to assemble for American style confusion, turkey tubs of squished potatoes Malian beer. We’re quite a site, walking through the markets, girls in pants and Northface backpacks past rice sacks of dried caterpillars and raw amber-like gum. Sikasso is on the Burkina Faso/Cote d’Ivoire border, and you can feel the intensity of mixed nations; young people scouring their borders wondering if there’s something different over there. Scary night at a club, as I as leaving a man with overwhelming testosterone insecure misplaced anger grabbed me to dance, wouldn’t let go, he slapped me after I fought him how dare a woman humiliate a man the other volunteers and I yelled while the Malian prostitutes laughed and the Malian men put their fingers to their lips and told me to shut up. You don’t understand, we shouted, we get to choose. He followed us back, freaked us out in the deep night to yell “I sorry!”, told us he was just embarrassed and lost his cool but I couldn’t even look at him; in fact every Malian man filled me with animal rage. A lesson learned, of course I am never alone and it could have been worse but even so, as comfortable as I feel here it is still a man-fueled place and a woman who doesn’t know her place learns. A sad comfort at being an alien here, the not-a-Malian-woman, and I know my defenses go into overdrive but I don’t know where to place American feminism into cultural integration.
Rest of the trip though calmed down and we piled into a station wagon to camp out by the waterfall. Too tight a squeeze so after we passed the gendarmes I sat on top, the great immense windy bush in front of me, speckled with mud straw houses. Sat under then cascade with Kristin and a box of Don Simone, ran unclothed at night in the freezing water and danced around the campfire, warm at night with three of us in the little tent. Good people.

Journey to Senegal
Left for Bamako and the next day Senegal for their All-Volunteer Conference, where three of us were invited as guest-speakers. I gave a power point on cervical cancer training and screening, got a terrific response, heard about some interesting projects – visual aid ideas, ameliorated porridge, rural libraries, community lead total sanitation techniques, simple cheap technologies like garden pumps and peanut grinders. The Senegal volunteers of course welcomed us into their world as the incredible community-love of volunteers goes.
And after, lovely, lovely ocean! The three of us found a car to take us to a beach town on the Atlantic Coast north of Dakar, Popenguine, where we found a house on the beach and were quickly befriended by a 60 year old French café owner Agnes and her 30 year old Senegalese husband, Malike. Ate lutte a la crème, a delicious Senegalese fish dish, and wine and crepes with ice cream. Found some djembe players and Owen and them energy-drummed and the beat called others in the island and we danced and swirled our arms and drank shots of sweet home-made orange-cinnamon rum – yumrum we declared – “To Universal People!” and more Senegalese musicians and artists came and Kat and I jumped and twirled more. We met the artist Gade, pronounced god, he told us it meant “the gatherer.” We went to his house to see his expressionist paintings made from cola nuts fermented and oxidized and talked about the citizens of the universe and gazed at his baobab trees sculpted from the soft clay of the cliffs nearby. We hung out at his house most of the day with Senegalese hippies; many of them live with him in Switzerland or help run the small art therapy program he operates. Went down to the beach and played with the café owners and their dog Pussy, tried to understand their strange but genuine love. Watched the sunset and waited for a car to take us to a club but it took too long and we sat at Gade’s wide round porch – what are we doing Owen asked? Watching the stars…
Hiked to the cliff in the morning on no sleep, the vistas over Popenguine were exquisite. Finally got to the shore and tried to make our way along the base of the cliff with the rocks and soft clay yellow ochre and burnt sienna and pale grey and alizarin crimson; we smushed and crumbled along in my too-big market flip flops (lost my Chacos in the waterfalls). The ocean sprayed us and licked the colors and it was so wildly passionate but soon the sea crashed at our feet, sending walls of cold sea water and I crouched to protect the camera bag. Now soaked, we realized there’s nowhere to go it seems – the waves are crashing vehemently on our disappearing path; maybe there’s a path on the Cliffside but as we ascend the rocks crumble ominously with each grip and all we find at the top is more climbing and prickly plants. We watched down below as a couple of nicely dressed African women try and the ocean crashes helplessly on them, soaking their leather bags and absconding with a shoe, leaving them hanging on. They make it past though, and we decide we need to try our chances on the shore. We climb down slowly dooni dooni, a boulder falls when I move my foot but we make it and saunter along the cliff walls and we’ve made it to the smooth beach again.
We made our way back to Dakar. At the bus station I hop over the driver’s seat of the bus I am leaving and as I get out the door the driver sees me and yells in Wolof. I ignore him, but how dare I, so he grabs my wrists and struggle as I yell; finally he lets me go I fall down to the ground and I stop myself from throwing the pile of rocks I have in my hand. Again, I am not alone but still even in the bright day sunlight I feel pained at his need for masochism and I still can’t understand why. Then comes the limp of desolation – how sad this misplaced anger, my helplessness, that evil energy. I walk off with my friends and the woman next to me hands me a scarf to wipe the dirt from my knees and I put my sunglasses on cause my eyes are filling up. But there’s too much love around me right now and all I find I can do is love the hate, that’s the only way to understand this I think.

Journey to Morocco
From Dakar I boarded a hazy 3am flight to Morocco to check on the same medical issues I had just talked about in Senegal. I boarded on autodrive and landed in Casablanca as the sun began to rise and the driver dropped me off in the mosaic covered Peace Corps office in Rabat. Went to the clinic to check out my stuff, thankfully everything was clear, and I was amused at having the visual inspection procedure done to me (I have a damn beautiful cervix, thank you) So I had the rest of the time of my medical evacuation to discover Rabat. Walked into my room to find a large curly man, another PCV in the other double-bed, bearlike and cozy and we immediately talked flowing encompassing spirit-energy, made up each other’s creation stories. Met some other Morocco volunteers and again felt immediate connections; we all have this common value system and passion, not easily shocked by cross-cultural oddness and American eccentrics, and genuinely interested in each other. Some of them invited me to the Moroccan-American ambassador’s house for a dinner party. We lit the Hannukah candles for the last night (he’s Jewish) and talked about the difficulties of development work. Spent days in the Medina, wandered around the spiced narrow markets eating olives, it reminded me of Jerusalem’s Old City. It smelled like coriander and dates and coffee, loud and wonderfully chaotic. Meandered through the Kasbah, the city-fortress on the sea painted bright blue and white with windy little corridors and beautiful wood doors.
On my last day another Mali volunteer was med evaced, we did some shopping in the market, and at night we caught dinner with some of the PCVs. As we walked back a group of Moroccan teens commented on her head wrap and dark skin and grasped her backpack. Freaked us out and were weighted down with the ugly feeling of pity. But remembered that this stuff happens even in America and people can be strangers everywhere. Flew back to Mali on another nighttime flight, grinning on the way to the airport at this quickly tilting lifestyle (do I ever want to give it up?), later though as I wrote I fell quiet as I sat and watched how small and far away people seemed; the vibrating sound of a mother shushing her child made me tired, glazed men with briefcases, all sad and waiting but so much alive. Arrived as the darkness was beginning to clear; the intense energy of the night, in its soothing questioning strangeness was disappearing in the Mali morning.

I’d be brimful of courage then. I’d be dripping with courage, and life itself would be just one big idea of courage, that would be the driving force behind everything, behind all men and things from earth to heaven. And by the same token there would be so much love that Death would be shut up inside it with tenderness, and Death would be so cosy-comfortable in there, the bitch, that she’d finally start enjoying herself, she’d get pleasure out of love along with everyone else. How wonderful would that be! What a production!

-Celine, Journey to the End of the Night