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.