Too Late to Turn Back

Tuesday, June 1st, 2014 - The insistent alarm-clock buzzing of my phone is entirely drowned out by the soothing crashing-whisper of the pounding rain. Fortunately the surreal ululations of the call to prayer catch my somnolent mind's attention and I drift close enough to consciousness to remember I need to be ready for an early departure! I scramble to get dressed and throw everything in my bags, and then go down to the hotel's small restaurant to see if I can eat anything while I await the Organization's landcruiser. I needn't have stressed, it's an hour late of course. I sit in the hotel's small restaurant taking my time with delicious croissants. I probably won't have internet where I'm going so I make the most of this possible last opportunity to be online. The TV mounted high on the wall shows doctors in head-to-toe protective gear moving bodies on gurneys, and shows a graph with a curve exponentially rising -- the local ebola epidemic. "Completely out of control" they're saying. This is concerning but I feel perhaps strangely unafraid, with that it won't happen to me confidence. Besides, I have a really good immune system, if there's a 20% chance to survive it surely that'll be me.
   By the time the Organization's white landcruiser arrives, the sun has come out and warmed the puddles up to a steamy ferment. "Sorry, our normal driver died on Saturday."
   The other volunteer, an older woman named Edie, and I throw our bags in the car and begin the agonizingly slow slog out of the city of Conakry. The city is built along a narrow peninsula and our hotel having been near the tip of it, we need to cross the entire city to get to the interior. The traffic is bumper-to-bumper the entire way, with steaming potholes so big we pass one car that appears to be stuck in one so deep its driving wheels are off the pavement leaving it helpless like an upturned beetle. Water spouts off roof gutters, cascades down walls, fountains out of horizontal drain pipes and flows down the roadways like the entire city is a water feature, all accompanied by a fetid biological smell that leaves one's fevered imagination just picturing amoebas multiplying by the millions in every bit of mouldering water, and, further, as if one could forget it for a moment, that deadly biological infections could be anywhere out there very readily to be encountered. And wait, who has a fevered imagination??
   I'm only too glad to leave the city behind, though from here we're just plunging deeper into a place strangely distant from everything familiar -- wifi, internet, dependable electricity ... medical attention, prompt evac...
   We're suddenly out of the city into the embrace of the mainland, as the steep forested sides of a valley on either side of us blots out the phone signal. The highway --this seems to be the only one-- is in surprisingly good condition outside the capital, apparently a recent construction snaking its way into the interior, though portions are still under construction requiring us to randomly drive sections of bare dirt the forces of vehicular traffic have shaped into rippling waves of dirt.
   We pass steep green hills and forests of palms and jungley trees. Steam rises from the thatched roofs of huts in little hamlet clusters, though more often the little towns the road passes through consist mainly of cinderblock walls and corrugated metal roofs. In the center of the largest of these towns grand old colonial buildings slowly decay with green algae eating away at their stately collonades and grass growing on their shingle roofs.
   At a place known only as "Kilometer 36" we stop at The Organization's Country Director's family compound. It was a pleasant leafy place with the canopies of tall trees providing dappled shade both within the compound and without. Inside several of the Director's children run around, and in the flurry of meeting people it's hard to keep track but I'm pretty sure several of the adult women we meet are the director's multiple wives ranging in age from his fiftyish to mid twenties. We also meet Baro, a stolid but very kindly looking man with a pronounced limp, who was apparently the country director of the Organization in neighboring Mali until he recently had to come here due to instability there (incidentally, within a month Guinea's Peace Corps volunteers would be evacuated from Guinea to Mali). The Country Director and Baro both throw their bags in the car and join us as we continue the journey.
   "What's that drink they're selling in every village?" I ask
   "Hm?" the Country Director asks
   "Those bottles of red liquid being sold on tables by the road everywhere, see like those"
   "Oh, that's petrol!"

   In the town we were going to get lunch all the restaurants are closed for Ramadan. We continue.
   After a few hours we enter the town of Mamou.
   "Why are there Xs spray painted on all the buildings and walls by the road?"
   "Oh they plan to expand the road so they'll all be knocked down.
   We leave Edie at a relatively nice hotel just on the outskirts. Before we leave she has already determined that among other things it doesn't appear to have running water. A business development consultant, she's quick to notice all kinds of problems, which of course never get fixed. After deploying me, the Country Director will come back to be her translator, apparently she won't accept anyone less. As we pull away I notice even this nice hotel has Xs painted on its cheery red and yellow outside walls.



   Slowly, ever upward, the road gains altitude and the terrain becomes downright mountainous, dewey clouds blow across the road. Over a ridge we come upon the town of Dalaba, or at least as much of it as can be seen before the further parts of it are shrouded in cloud. I notice that as we've gotten further from the coast there have been fewer people in jeans, especially women, and more people in traditional garb, including women in full body coverings although that is still a minority. I also realize that neither in any of these towns nor the capital have I seen nearly anyone over the age of about 40.
   The country director leaves us here, he will buy bags of rice and catch the Organization's car on the way back. Baro, myself and the driver continue.

   We continue, now descending the mountains. In one small village there's a monument to three Peace Corps volunteers who died in a car crash. We drive through another larger town, Labe, and shortly after we finally turn off the highway and drive through the countryside on rutted dirt roads for half an hour before coming to a wall with a gate in it, which some children run and open for us.
   After Baro and I have disembarked with our bags and the driver has had a stretch, he gets back in the landcruiser and rumbles back out the gate out sight.
   "We had a Peace Corps volunteer" someone helpfully mentions (through Baro's translation) "but he died."

   The village inside the wall is an idyllic little village, small square cinderblock houses with fading paint, corrugated roofs -- there are just a few thatched huts here and there. The common areas are free of the trash I've seen blowing like autumn leaves all about other villages, the ground a clean volcanic gravel. Tall stands of corn grow between houses, and chickens fuss about. There's just enough light for my host, a man named Abdul, to give me a tour. All the crops (corn and cassava mainly, but some other vegetables) are inside the surrounding wall, while outside the goats freely wander and the forest around this particular village is filled with beehives. The village children run from my approach to peer at me around corners, running also to the next corner or stand of corn to continue to curiously follow my progress from a safe distance.
   Abdul himself has the grey hair and lined face of an old man, but the good natured smile of an innocent little boy, which impression is also enhanced by his small stature.



   There is, of course, no electricity. After the initial excitement of arrival dies down and the immediate surrounds have been explored, Baro and I sit on the porch of the house we'll be put up in. Abdul and some other local men join us and chat with Baro, though they are speaking the local language (Pular) and I can't understand. I read my book, "Heart of Darkness," until the light has faded away, and then I just sit in contemplative thought. Lightning flickers silently on the horizon, and Baro makes tea in a metal kettle over a small brazier of red glowing coals -- slowly pouring it out from a height into a cup and then back into the kettle, over and over again. Finally he's satisfied with it and fills a small cup with this concentrated, potent, very sugary tea. There's only one cup so once I've downed it he refills it and offers it to someone else.
   Why do I come out here? To the ends of the earth risking the kind of horrible death it doesn't seem like anyone in their right mind really ought to come anywhere close to risking? Because, well, to me, a life of only suburban strip malls day after day, comfortably watching predictable TV shows in a decorous living room every night, doesn't sound like a life worth living at all.

   It begins to rain heavily, all of us on the porch sit companionably in contemplative silence. Presently the call to prayer breaks out, but slightly tinny -- I realize it's coming from his phone.
   "Come, it's time to break fast" Baro says to me. Umbrellas are handed around and we leave the porch and join men coming from other houses to all troop along the narrow paths between the corn to the village elder's house. The men all do their prayers in the large clear room of the house that I suppose is kept for that purpose and then large bowls of a sweet millet soup are brought by women. The men sit in groups on the floor around the bowls and consume from the communal bowls with ladles. More bowls are brought out with a couscous like dish, a Guinean grain called fonio. Everyone's eating it with their hands so I endeavor to do the same. And, the light being very dim, I only discover by putting my hand in it that there's some kind of gooey stuff in the middle of the plate. Apparently one takes some of the gooey stuff and combines it with the fonio, as well as a pinch of spices from another bowl. I find the growing gooeyness of my fingers rather unsettling and resolve to in the future ask for a spoon. Also, slowly growing in the back of my mind are thoughts about how ebola spreads, by bodily fluids such as, for example, saliva, as I watch a half dozen hands (right hands only) disappearing into mouths and then returning to the same communal bowl.

   We walk back along the paths through the corn, the rain has stopped, the corn stalks dipping. Invigorated by a bit of food now, the men more enthusiastically talk around me on the porch. I had thought the food we'd had earlier was dinner but around 10pm suddenly the women start bringing more big pots of food. In Nigeria, even in electrified villages, food had usually seemed pretty rudimentary, but here, in the dark, without electricity, the village's women had prepared several interesting courses.
   Two kinds of rice, with a sauce made of cassava leaves; a lettuce & tomato salad with balsamic dressing, fried plantains (which I love), and a beef stew. We, about a dozen men, once again eat from communal bowls. Someone has a transistor radio and puts on the live broadcast of the US vs Belgium worldcup game, which comes through tinny and distant connecting our cozy lightless community to this game around the world in Brazil. The US lost.

   I fall asleep to the once-again sound of pounding rain outside, and the call to prayer. This morning we'll begin the training. I wonder how that will go. And looking at my phone, the battery is almost dead. I hope I can find some electricity somewhere.

---

   Lest you think I'm just writing whatever I would have written anyway with no regard to the prompt, I'll have you know I re-read the first chapter of Heart of Darkness specifically to give myself ideas as to how to really develop this as a retreat from the society I knew into the depths of something quite separate. I don't know if I succeeded, but the prompt has truly guided the way I focused this.

   Entry title is from the title of Graham Greene's book about journeying in the same area in 1935