nothing better than bare feet

In the last memory of his recorded life, he saw through a haze and it seemed to him he’d lived the last two decades barefoot on the beach, as a tree.

Nothing was strung anymore through time or space, as the fabric of anything he’d ever known had unraveled into this, a pulsating mass of feeling, of remembering, and he knew, although he couldn’t prove it, that he was no longer a physical being.

A barefoot last walk on the beach, the foamy water receding over his footsteps, and when he turned around, in the spaceless space that he could not visualize, the wife and children around him were now simply voices that called to him from what could be a little boat, next to him, beyond the mist that was now setting in a golden light.

He was hearing the lapping of the little waves against the boat, as if everything was taking place on his cheek.

He could feel their breath, and hear the inflexion of their voice and he was still barefoot on the beach, but now was standing waist-high in water, and he saw himself at four. Now the mist had cleared and he was sitting cross-legged on the grass right in front of himself, in a clearing in the yard of the school for autistic children that backed up to the park of his childhood house. He was playing with a little girl who had been crying.

And he knew without doubt, without knowledge but with absolute Faith that he was being shown one of the purest selfless acts of kindness he’d committed in his life.

And he’d forgotten it.

At that same moment, an amazing thing happened. Everything around him, everything he’d witnessed in the last timeless time he’d been standing or being where he was, everything around him, memories, feelings, sounds and nothingness, somehow penetrated inside of him and became him.

Nothing could explain this, but he remembered once, standing in Prague and posing a strange question to the Universe, a question he amused himself with, about waking up illiterate, blind, and amnesic, and what he would retain if he could never regain words and memory. What had happened in Prague was this strange feeling that everything around him, suddenly penetrated electrically through the hair at the base of his wrists, and crawled under his skin into his very marrow and coursed through his blood.

At this moment it seemed like this would be the closest parent to what was happening.

It seemed to him that he was transported into another moment in his life, after Prague, after the divorce, after the loss, to his trip across Africa and that one early evening when the women had gathered to pray for the sick ones.

He saw everything from that evening, again, with increasing bliss, remembering how happy he had been then. He saw the small room, all the women holding the prayerbooks in their reverent cupped hands, drinking the words in and offering them to the needy world, he remembered the unison of the voices, rising as one and reverberating through the walls and the ceiling of the room. Finally, on her hard smallish chair, he saw the young woman who had so impressed him and who he had somehow forgotten, and who humbly mouthed, eyes closed, with all her heart and soul, every prayer said that night.

She knew every prayer by heart, and her heart was mouthing each prayer.

All of a sudden the rudest thing happened and the alarm went off and he woke up on his back staring at the ceiling, stunned. He curled up his knees against his chin, holding them tight and reached over to his wife, waking her with his sobs.

“We only take our prayers with us…we only take our humble moments…”

The three amigos do Paris!

Dad, my brother and I (poor mom was already back in Congo, otherwise
we would have SQUEEZED HER IN!!!!!) This photo was exactly as much fun
as it looks!
Ah…the memories. I think we stopped a little crowd in the
Chatelet-Les Halles station with our doubled-over breathless laughing
fit!

A fumbling search for Africas

Sleep is eluding more and more, because of those devastating bats which are now no longer as darkly charming as they initially were, my first night here. I hate them and I’m thinking of calling the exterminator or climbing up the tree and throwing a mosquito-net over their branches so they can’t rest on them like the rabid maniacs that they are, folding their stupid little sticky wings over themselves like Nosferatu in his black coat. Yukeddy-YUCK! They’re blind, so why couldn’t they just be mute too?

So I spend my nights reading by the smelly petrol lamp and my shrinking candles until I doze in and out of sweaty sleep criss-crossed by the strangest dreams involving elephants and Tiffany stained glass bookmarks and reading the motley crew of books that line my four walls, compliments of dad’s shopping in used bookstores from Pasadena to Capetown.

I read about two books a day, now, and in this reading frenzy I read pretty much everything, like a termite burrowing through soft wood for sheer survival, and it’s amazing to me that I can actually digest the pages that I flip feverishly.

So yesterday I read “A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali” by Gil Courtemanche.

He was a French Canadian journalist in Rwanda and this is a book of fiction based entirely on true facts and real people whose names he hasn’t changed. It is beautifully translated by Patricia Claxton, because the only version I have is in English and not in the original French. The only shame of this is that the poetry of Paul Eluard, which occupies an important place in the book had to be translated, and it’s impossible to translate poetry. You just have to re-write it.

God that book was hard. It’s an Africa I have never really admitted to. One of semen and machetes, sweaty sex and butchery, and it’s incrediby graphic and traumatizing in both. I suppose if I could have put the book down, and processed that the information would scar me in some way, I really would have, but I just couldn’t put it down. I had to go deeper into the madness, the horror, the beast, the sex, the violence, the carnage, the holocaust. I hate reviewers, but they said that it was the most important book about Africa since “Heart of Darkness” and I just had to know what about it was that important. And frankly, it was so graphic that I was gripped. For me the best introduction to the book is the one Courtemanche himself writes in the first two pages where he relates how the novelist wrote the events that the journalist saw.

I can’t say I liked it. In fact, I would simplistically hate it if it wasn’t too simple an attitude. If it didn’t stir up so many complex emotions in me. I didn’t care for the writing because it was the simple, un-beautiful writing whose words doesn’t move, not simple in the Hemingway style, because that simplicity is eloquent. It was simple in the sense that it was a sort of a litany of acts, very gross violent acts and sexual acts, and a simplified, stick-figure tracing of complex historical events, even if I don’t know everything about the Rwanda massacres, I know it’s a lot more complicated than the simple interactions between the simplified characters.

And the people that gave the book rave reviews were people who’ve usually not set foot in Africa. Other people in places like New York or Paris who think “yes, to me that is what I think the place and the events were probably like, two thumbs up, mate!”

But I have to say it affected me, and shocked me, because I have witnessed much more watered-down version of some of the characters’ behaviours, and I have been around to hear some version of them recounted by people who lived through them.

I’ve always known of some of these things. The way that a certain class of white male expats treat and rape African women, sometimes for money, and sometimes not, the violence of the military, the rapes, the butcheries.

It’s as if, in my later years of growing up in the Congos, I sometimes saw the dark tips of these other faces of Africa rear their ugly head, warning of the darknesses beneath, sort of like the fins of sharks that dip in and out of hte dark waters, but never revealing the violent flesh-eating beast they are attached to.

I’ve always turned a blind eye to that reality because I didn’t want to dwell on it even though I always knew it was there, I didn’t want to write about it, I didn’t want to share that side of things. Ugly dark things.

And even when the fins raised through the waters, I had a choice to turn away and focus on other things, not spend time with certain people or in certain places where I would have been exposed to them at length and in depth.

When you write things down, you give them power. I would rather give power to things I know and things I’ve experienced. Thank goodness I haven’t experienced the things Courtemanche writes about.

I suppose that sometimes they need to be talked about, and I’m glad that people like Gil Courtemanche and Joseph Conrad do, because I certainly couldn’t.

In the face of this reality, AIDS, and reckless sex, and carnage and orphans, real-life troubles real-life tragedies that affect people’s lives, maybe my essays about people in flowing robes on the beach are childish, or innocent, or in denial.

But you know…I’m not really sure that they are.

This is something I was thinking about a few months ago and that I started talking about when I read Dan Eldon’s diaries. (I can’t remember when I posted that, but it was a while ago). He was a photojournalist in East Africa who died at 21 stoned in Somalia. He photographed the dark and the light side of Africa, reporting to the world events that needed to be broadcast and outraged over, and taking for himself snapshots that conveyed the beauty of people and places.

I think for people living in Africa, working in Africa, writing and shooting in Africa, there has to be a struggle inside, just like the one inside tortured Dan Eldon. A struggle that the juxtaposition of horrible events and unspeakable realities and beautiful people caused inside of us who know and care deeply about this complex multi-faceted place.

I suppose the book caused doubt within me. I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to show a white woman’s Africa that is blemish-free and perfect, like some natural Eden where the natives are pure. That’s not true, I know that this place is fallible and dangerous and real. But I don’t want to dwell in the mud, either. That’s not how you participate in building a better world.

But how then, do you straddle informing people about what they need to know, while not dwelling on it so as to make the information useless? And how do you keep a sensitive eye out for the beauty while not idealizing the country and the people?

I put down Sunday by the Pool in Kigali and sort of stunned, walked around in a daze, that evening, sweating. I picked up Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” and plunged in.

I think I got another perspective from this, and I’ve been turning the plages with anticipation and a restfulness that comes from reading someone who perhaps looks at the world with the kind eyes of a certain type of writer, closer to my sensitivities. Of course, he’s not writing about Central Africa, but he is writing about a place changing and about people in it, which is, in a simplified essence, what Courtemanche was doing in his corner of hell, and what I love to write about.

Steinbeck travels thoughtfully through America with his poodle, making thought-provoking observations and looking at everything with the opinionated eyes of someone who’s lived on this earth sixty years, but with the open mind of a man who’s educated enough to know things aren’t black or white, and even though he hates submarines, can find some place in his heart to look at them a bit differently than before after a conversation with a young officer on the deck of a boat, for example. That’s the kind of sensitivity I’m talking about. Firm but open-minded.

Anyway. He compares how he and a travel journalist guy went to Prague and got two completely different takes on the ancient city. He went with the gypsies and bohemians and the other guy read the maps and the histories. This is what he tells us to warns us about his book on America:

“For this reason I cannot recommend this account as an America that you will find. So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.”

That calmed me and I came to a peace with the pool in Kigali and my flowing robes on the beach.

There is a lot written about Africa from the point of view of white people. Not often do you have books from African writers like Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” a book of huge stature that really makes it and is widely read. Often it’s books or movies like “Out of Africa” “Nowhere in Africa”, “I Dreamed of Africa”, “Hatari”, “Born Free”. Works that sometimes idealize the continent a bit.

It is that sort of nostalgia I think is human and that Steinbeck addresses later in his book with a simple beautiful sentence: “What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless.”

I don’t much believe in nostalgia, and I don’t want to dwell on the dark side, and I want to stay away from idealization, so I have to think and work hard to find my voice, a voice that I can stand by, and not be ashamed to re-read later.

Maybe in digging to find that voice, I will come to a greater sense of peace, in my relationship to my only home, that I sometimes belong to but that never really belongs to me.

the vertical sun

A man in colorful cotton walks making animated hand gestures next to a woman in colorful cotton. Beads of sweat on their faces, the sun.

Under the shade of a coca-cola parasol five or six young men sit, lay, legs apart, as if at some point the inexistant breeze would start up and cool them. But if you stay very very still and exert absolutely no motion whatsoever, you practically, you almost don’t sweat at all.

Three business men walk, almost sill, followed by a near existent shadow. At one in the afternoon, the equatorial sun is directly above everyone’s head, melting everything, even the shadows, into sweaty balls of nothing. So the only thing you see of anyone walking is really stubby shrunk legs and a bobby-pin head that swings around a scrunched mid-section, their shadow a round thing, probably forty centimeters long.

The man and the woman in colorful cottons are now covered in the hot dust of a speeding forest-green SUV, driven by a white man who really doesn’t need to be driving that fast and whose eyes we’re going to borrow, since we can look through them as he drives to places we can’t walk to.

As he passes a couple he doesn’t notice, he cuts through the Post Office where huge and small colorful paintings of Africana art hang leaving little spaces for PO Box holders to pass through with their tiny golden keys and retrieve their sweaty mail. Not easy to find original art here, but it is colorful, and it doesn’t melt. Two good things.

The Pathfinder barely slows as the man in the shades waves the pass around his neck to the military in his green uniform, with the red bloodshot eyes under his black beret who thinks to himself he’ll have to wait for another a slower car to come in with windows down to ask for cold beer money.

Right and left of the entrance to the industrial port of Pointe-Noire, a dozen fluorescent-orange figures barely lean over their brooms and sweep mounds of yellow sand from the long flat avenue that the cars busily speed down towards their millions in transit on the docks.

A section of the forest lies, branch-less, leaf-less and tagged, on its way to China or some other faraway place where no one there either will care that an acre of the Congolese forest is bald. Huge, gigantic trunks and skinny smaller ones lie, branded, painted, sorted by size in a large area before you see the boats.

Thirty small rusty fishing boats with strange names are docked, crunched together before the important, valuable, monstrous transit ships lined up one after the other, after the other, over miles and miles of docks. Workers pee against the boats into the water, pee against the containers, lie in the shade, again, legs splayed, resting between the loadings.

Two black Mercedes cars are lifted above the green SUV, still speeding, towards a point we’re not going to get to, because we’ll have gotten the point by then and moved on to think about something else, and borrowing another pair of eyes to do our seeing through.

The American boat from George Town is being maintained by busy Americans in white hardhats and navy-blue mechanic uniforms who don’t look at anything. They could be anywhere, really, and if they don’t look at anything, maybe they’re not really in the hell-hole they can’t believe they’re in, that smells of rotting fish and smoked fish and grinding flour and forest wood. Ports are usually not beautiful places.

The Chinese boat has opened its huge storage gut and millions of tons of rice in its Chinese bags, yellow with red logos and writing, are piled on the ground of the dock, with workers laying on top of them. One wooden crate gives in to the humidity which has been rotting it from the inside for the past two months and breaks, and a hundred rice bags spill from the crate and fall on the dock, in a quiet mess you can’t hear inside the air-conditioned car.

The last boat is loading tree carcasses into its cavern and the site of this hecatomb is too much so we leave the driver to his business and retreat into thinking about a world where the rainforests aren’t depleted.

We’ve seen enough for one drive.

Tales from the Equator.

My winter coat. My black winter coat from London molded.

So did my tennis shoes:

The Osteopath.

Lessons come to you daily in all shapes and from all directions. You generally only need to keep an eye or an ear out for them, and sometimes, as in my case, an inability to walk and aching bones.

My most recent life lesson recently came in the form of a bearded osteopath from Les Vosges, the mountains to the east of France, in between two cities of healing, one of mineral water and one of famous baths I think.

He was imported to Congo by some of his faithful clients, like some gastronomic cheese one can’t live without.

I saw the ad pinned to the cheap board outside the “Sporty Beach” restaurant, in between the sale of a fridge and a generator, and I knew this was going to be it.

He unfolded his Crayola sea-green professional table and read all my bones with an imperceptible touch. He fixed all of the old ankle sprains, mis-alignements, inflammations, sprained cervicals, painful vertebrae, contracted spasmic muscles and phantom pains that I had started to live with and adjust my life around.

There was a lot to fix. And I slept for two days after that, constantly parched, swimming up from my sleepy coma only to drink more and take consciousness of how profusely I was sweating, and realize I wasn’t in pain anymore before sinking back into alternatively fitful and deep sleeps.

But as my health was unfolding under his hands, the most important lesson was his beautiful life. He talked about his calling and his long arduous studies, and his specialization in so many different types of osteopathy as to make anyone head’s spin. And about how fulfilled he was in his practice, for the last 24 years, 14 hours a day, with no vacation, and how upon taking up a medical profession he’d abandoned vacations and used his free time to simply regenerate himself by cooking gourmet French food, learned from his grandmothers.

He talked simply but excitedly about what he was seeing in my aches and pains, what the story of my bones were, about how much he loved getting to know people and interact with them in his work that he loved so much, and about particular patients of his that had taught him huge lessons about the body’s miraculous and extraordinary interrelationship. He talked about the people he treated in the villages who sometimes couldn’t pay him, and of his stone house in the village of ten.

Work is worship.

Some spiritual aphorisms remain meaningless in the profoundest sense, even if you’ve lived them and experienced them and believed them your whole life sometimes, until you meet a walking example, a pure example. It’s like seeing an illustration of the truth, something affecting and beautiful, that you always think about with gratitude.

I will be thinking about his courageous, his noble and beautiful life for a long time still…

Les Soeurs Fachees

I saw this movie in Paris and really enjoyed it but haven’t really been able to tell anyone about it. –Although one unfortunate thing about it is that a central theme is marital infidelity and marital unhappiness, it mainly follows the relationship of two very different sisters. This was unfortunate for me because this movie was the first in a series of 15 incidental movies which dealt with unhappy marriages and adultery. How completely depressing.

If the two main characters had to be inanimate objects, Isabelle Huppert would be a dried up stick, rigid and lifeless, and her sister played by Catherine Frot would be a rising ball of happy dough, full of promise and warmth. That’s how different the two are, and so brilliant in their roles. French actors are all mostly from the theater background, at least this generation, and their acting is so good it’s a pleasure to watch.

I think you would have to be French or have an appreciation for French culture to fully enjoy the movie because it’s really just so mean. It is so mean, in fact, that I curled up in the fetal position in my seat for a few minutes, then, when that didn’t do the trick, I shot up, and ran to the bathroom (intelligent movie theater they have one stall INSIDE the movie room, isolated by double-doors).

If I remember correctly, the first line of the movie that Isabelle Huppert addresses to her husband across the breakfast table is “Do you have to breathe so loud? Really, have some consideration. You’re ALWAYS BREATHING.”

Of course part of what made the movie so amazing was the sheer brilliance of the dialogue, an absolute pleasure to listen to and follow. Such a tight dialogue, so profound, so hurtful, so touching, so right on.

Part of the cultural idiosyncracy of the movie too was the fact that it illustrated the antediluvian opposition in France between “Parisians” and “Provincials”. You see, France has always been divided in two: Paris, and the rest of the country, the Province. One of the sisters (the mean and unhappily married one) made it out of the country, married extremely well and has never told anyone of her roots. The other is happy, she lives in the country and comes up for a visit to try and get a book she’s just written published.

During her visit, the Parisian sister realizes that her life has just fallen apart, and to watch the two interact through this crisis is incredible. One’s life is falling apart in every way, the other is charting a clear calm course without the bitterness and the anger, proving that it’s possible to live a full life without being numb to the inevitable sufferings of life.

I’ve rarely seen two women act against each other so powerfully. It was amazing to see in the performances of the actresses how their different reactions to the same childhood pain (an alcoholic mother) defined two different women, two different existences.

But oh..to watch them weave into each other’s lives. A masterpiece of acting.

Oh..and since the movie is French, yes. Graphic sex scenes.

Miss Kouilou 2005

There are so many beautiful girls in Pointe-Noire already, that to pay 3,000 CFA (5 Euros or $6) to attend a beauty pageant seemed
something redundant, in a way.

Two of my beautiful decked-out friends and I headed for the place where the “Election de Miss Kouilou 2005″ (the Kouilou is the southern
region of Congo where Pointe-Noire is) was to be held. We didn’t have to “head” very far since the place is about thirty steps from my house. But that’s about right for the scale of the city.

We bought one ticket on entering and the young man who was selling us the ticket kept harassing us with his sweet-talk. I don’t know how
sweet talk can be when it’s so insistent and close to your face, but it was fun, all the way to our seats. Guys here don’t take no for an answer and come up with all kinds of variations on cliche pick-up lines, which really makes you laugh a lot of times.

I was walking in the street the other day and a guy was crying out loud “Oh I need money! I need money! (pause. Looks at me, stares at me) if I had money, I would be able to marry a beautiful girl like YOU! I like you like bread Miss, I like you MORE than bread!”

I was trying to look all severe like “don’t mess with me, Mister!” but I just started laughing because his tone was so funny, and he got so sidetracked from his money talk. All the great soliloquists walking around this place.

Anyway. Miss Kouilou was fun. The photo below shows the three finalists.

The middle one in a moment of gathering her spirits, is Miss Kouilou, and the one in green is the runner-up an and the one in purple is the
second runner-up.

We laughed most of the time. The audience was just ruthless. They were so rowdy! They made fun of this one’s walk because she was bent over
her long body and her arms swung limply. They made fun of this one because she totally mis-pronounced the name of the mayor of
Pointe-Noire. They made fun of another one because she answered the question “Why did you want to become Miss Kouilou?” by “Well like any child, or any girl, I always had a dream, and that dream was to grow up and be admired by everyone. And this is a step in that direction.“

They howled when the contestants came out in swim-suits and towering stiletto heels, they yelled out the wrong answer to the question about
naming a minister of the current government and tore the house down when the young lady repeated their misleading answer. They cheered
when one of them worked the crowd. They hollered when they knew someone, declared their love or asked them to pack their bags. It was
hilarious.

Interspersed with this already entertaining event (the emcee was a very short repetitive young man who had to stretch out his arm to hold
the mike up to the ladies) were “musical performances for your delectation and enjoyment”. Those were a lot of fun too, but it will
sound too mean if I say anything about them. Better left imagined. Although I doubt if some of the acts can be imagined.
In the end, a member of the jury was asked to come and announce Miss Kouilou, and did so, blah-blahing away, as is the custom here, saying
a lot of nothing. But she did say something that I thought summed up very well a lot of the situations in the country recently, this beauty
pageant included, both for its truth and its vagueness:

“We had to make do with what we had, so that’s how we ended up with what we’ve got.”

flowing robes on the beach

We took refuge from the screaming kids at the school, sitting on the veranda at the beach. Mom’s passion-fruit “sorbet” never melted in the hour that we were there and ended up looking like a round slice of whale fat, and I played with my cold Nutella crepe, and we were almost lying on the table, enjoying the overcast freshness of the sea breeze. So thick, and salty.

These two days have been a muslim feast called “Tabaskee” from what I gather. It’s more fun to take people’s random comments about it, and it seems like everyone’s killed and eaten a goat and then the ladies went out yesterday afternoon for ice cream and cakes and sodas with their children, and all the men went walking on the beach today.

The women in the diner-like cafe yesterday evening looked like models. Mauritanian and Senegalese women, tall, slender, very regal, dressed in incredible flowing robes of batik and finely embroidered yards of cloth, of so many different colors, like live desserts, sitting then standing. A delicious fragrant ballet inside a cheap patisserie. Their unbelievably beautiful dark skins, smooth and soft, blemish-free and their fine fine features, perfect features of women from the far West, those desert lands of mysterious peoples. They would sit, with calm, almost leonine expressions, and once in a while, would grab one of their screaming boys (they all had boys, so either they all only made little boys or they only paraded around their little boys for everyone to notice) and hold him to their breast, feeding him through the magically huge sleeves of an outfit that almost became that of a Wizard. What else could they pull out of that large robe with the gaping sleeves?

The little boys dressed in their perfect embroidered robes looked like they inhaled the cakes, always the highest, creamiest cakes in the bakery, or more like they would press the cake against their taut round face, as if they could consume it by osmosis. Then they would stand on their chair and turn around for everyone to see the accomplish feat. The mothers, yogic in their calm would just turn their head slowly and the boy would sit, again, to try and consume the huge cake.

The men today, on the windy beach, would walk in groups of three or four, again with these superb robes, a bit wrinkled, as usual, you could tell even from that far away. They held hands sometimes, not uncommon in Africa for men and women to hold hands between friends, and it is all quite innocent, though it always takes foreigners by surprise.

Robes waves and palm-fronds all flowing in the crazy overcast wind, under the grey skies against the beautiful grey sea. With the threatening rain that never falls.

Another Friday afternoon in Pointe-Noire.

the three-week blackout

It’s fine if you’re in a village and there is, from the get-go, no electricity and running water.

Problems, however, start to arise, when you’re living in accommodations engineered for not only functioning only with electricity and running water, but built to function only with air conditioning, and all of a sudden, as usual, there is a blackout.

Toilets flushing? Showers? Refrigeration? Breathing? Clean clothes?

All of a sudden these things start to float into semi-distant memory, and you are lying on a bed, sweating profusely, unable to bathe, unable to bring yourself to go to a toilet you won’t be able to flush, and thinking…I wish this was a village. At least the mud hut would be cool…

GAH! The real problem is a feeling of anger that my little beautiful country of only 2 MILLION PEOPLE, which is an oil producer, and a heafty one at that to warrant the visit of the French President…is going to be deprived of electricity for the next three weeks, and that I am reading of all books, V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization.

Note to all in a potentially similar situation: Do not read A Wounded Civilization if you are in a place where you can do nothing about the situation, particularly if you are in a place like Congo, India, or any place where you will be unable to do much but be increasingly more frustrated about levels of poverty, corruption and a culture/civilization in the making or in the process of transformation.

On the plus, I understand how my parents have rekindled their love of books. I’ve devoured books in the emerging blackout, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans to I am What I am, the tale of Joan Hannington, England’s Jewel Thief, to this one and Persepolis, the graphic novel about a young woman returning to Iran, and I started reading Treblinka but wasn’t quite able to start coping with graphic tales of the Holocaust.

The matter at hand is difficult to deal with because I realize that if I want to become someone who writes knowledgeably and hopefully and well about this continent I so love and in the end, believe in…I’m going to have to find a way to come to terms with its growing pains.

But it’s a lot easier to be hopeful, and light-hearted and jolly and all that when you can flush the toilet, wear clean underpants and take a decent shower, and think in a cool, dry place, and you don’t have to throw all your food out every day.

Well. This is the other side of the coin, I guess. And I’ve only been here, what…a week?

More tales of the whimpy white girl to come later.