The Agrinautica

Escape from Guinea

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 11:11:26 GMT

July 16th 2014, Conakry, Guinea - In the early hours of morning I listen to the patter of rain on the windows and the ululating call to prayer reverberating around the city in the dark pre-dawn hours. My back aches, my nose is running, I have a sore throat, a general feeling of fatigue. What are the initial symptoms of ebola, you might idly wonder? Well they are an achey back, a running nose, a sore throat, a general feeling of fatigue...
   I lie there contemplating this until 7, whereupon it's time to drag myself out of bed and pack for my flight out of the country. If they even let me leave the country?? The flight is a full 14 hours away at 9pm but This is Africa and you can't be too careful. I've been told The Organization will pick me up at 8:00 to take me to their office nearer the airport.
   I sit in the hotel restaurant listlessly picking at my croissants and eggs. 8:30 rolls past. 9:00. 9:30. Every half hour I text the Organization staff to ask where they are and strangely they are always "almost there!" I wish I could be in bed, not sitting in this uncomfortable stuffy little dining area. As the morning grows stale the heat and humidity ratchet up uncomfortably.

   At 11 the driver finally arrives, to take me on the bumpy ride through the steaming city to the Organization's offices, where I can feel sick and uncomfortable in a more corporate setting.
   At 17:00 the driver takes me to the airport. He parks and says goodbye as I get my luggage and make my way the short distance to the terminal entrance.
   "You have to pay to bring your luggage into the terminal" the weedy staffmember at the door tells me with a smile like I've made a mistake he's kindly redirecting me about.
   I laugh like it's a funny joke and try to go around him but he blocks my path, a smile still plastered to his face. I'm in no mood for this. Fortunately my driver hasn't left yet, I turn on my heel to return to my driver explain what's happening, while he's barating the driver I walk on through. I've found in Nigeria people in positions such as him often "jokingly" pitch for a bribe but easily laugh it off when you just laugh, but this is not the first time here in Guinea I've found they have a bit of a harder edge about it.

   Just inside the terminal, staffmembers in white medical coats flank the entrance hall watching everyone entering. I do my best not to look sick. I'm sure I don't have ebola but getting quarantined in Guinea on suspicion of having it sounds like the best way to get it. I make it around the corner before having another coughing fit. Fortunately no one seems to be paying attention to me. I sit by the gate trying not to blow my nose too often and/or look too sick.
   Finally I'm able to board the plane. I breath of a sigh of relief as we lift off. Until this moment I'd been preoccupied with escaping Guinea, my innate optimism assuring me that _I_ surely am not the next victim of the worst ebola outbreak in history, despite being at ground zero of it. But now, safely on a flight jetting away from all that, this small idea in the back of my head gets a little bit bigger, what if I am about to become Europe's "Patient Zero??"

July 17th, Göteborg, Sweden - After being miserable on flights for nearly 18 hours, Conakry to Paris to Frankfurt to Göteborg, I've finally arrived at my destination, tired sick, miserable, possibly spreading infectious viroids like some evil Johnny Appleseed to doom millions, but on the plus side there were giant pretzels in the Frankfurt airport.
   Between airports in Europe there's no passport control, in fact they just briefly look at the ticket without even asking for an ID. The guy at the currency exchange in Goteborg is chatty though, he'd spent some time in Australia and asks me where I just came from. I say "Guinea, West Africa," as blithely as I can, hoping he hasn't seen any news about the ebola outbreak and isn't about to connect the dots with my obviously runny nose and sound some kind of alarm, fortunately he does not.
   If Guinea is 3rd world, and the USA is 1st world, European cities like Göteborg must be 0th, the smooth clean high tech access to public transportation is on a whole other level from the US. After an hour on buses I arrive at my destination, the Eriksberg district of town, once an area of commercial docks and shipyards its now full of trendy cafes, hip loft apartments, ubiquitous fit and successful joggers along the riverside boardwalk. And soon my destination is in sight as some tall masts loom over the buildings. The Swedish Indiaman Gotheborg

   As I stop to take the picture that should be to the right here, a proud local starts telling me about the ship -- a replica of a historical Swedish ship launched in the 1730s that made three journeys to China and back, a journey that could be so lucrative at that time that each journey ended up being a sizeable percentage of the Swedish GNP. As for my impressions, the ship is quite a bit bigger than the other ships I've sailed on, with masts towering 54 meters (15 stories) above the water.

   I step aboard as the crew is having their end of day muster. They're mostly Swedish plus a German and Netherlander, but their working language is English. I don't let on that I can speak some Swedish, I'd rather surprise them later than disappoint them with my rusty Swedish. Jonas the bosun gives me a tour.
   The first deck below the upper deck is literally the cannon deck, looking mostly authentic and lined with cannons. The deck below that is compartmentalized with watertight bulkheads and includes a big commercial galley (kitchen), and the forecastle where the crew sleeps. There are some bunks along the walls but they're all taken so I'll have to string up a hammock -- a very traditionally nautical method of sleeping I've never actually done aboardship before. Especially as, in the traditional manner, one fixes the hammock to the ringbolts provided via one's own knotwork, one must be confident in one's abilities! And below that is the thoroughly modern-looking engineering deck.
   I join some crewmembers in a grocery run a short walk ashore, and we all work together to make a dinner of taco fixings, though I'm feeling very fatigued and unwell. As soon as we're done with dinner I string up my hammock and go to sleep.

Friday July 18th - In my delirium I apparently mis-heard what time the morning muster was, and thought it was at 6:55 instead of 7:55 so I have ample time to sit in the pleasant morning light of the aft cabin, looking at my buttered bread (certainly not up for anything more complicated) without an appetite, and wonder if I really might have ebola. Maybe now that I'm in Sweden I should go see a doctor. I picture the doctor's office quickly emptying as I explain I want to be checked out for ebola. At least being quarantined here would be infinitely more comfortable than in Guinea.
   I spend the morning up in the rigging tarring. What is called "stockholm tar" in America is just called "tar" here. Extracted from pine logs, it has to be kept hot so one has to keep refilling one's pot from a pot on a stove on the dock and then scrambling aloft to where one is working, painting the fragrant (in a truly delightful pine-y sense) hot tar onto the rigging. Working aloft with tar is fun (really), and on a beautiful ship like this on a beautiful morning like this normally I'd consider myself to be living the dream ... I feel fatigued and unwell and count down the minutes until fika, the 9am coffee break, and then till lunch at noon. It being a Friday, after lunch we just clean the vessel and then finish around 14:00, we'll be off till Monday.

Saturday, July 19th - Waking up at 8:00, I'm actually feeling better. This was before I learned that tropical diseases are often cyclical in their symptoms. I stroll around the pleasant gentrified neighborhood, and enjoy a cup of delicious coffee and the kind of pastry I dream about at a cafe along the riverbank, served by an attractive blonde Swedish girl with casual pigtails.
   I join the German volunteer, a timid young man named Jonathon, in visiting the islands off the coast outside the mouth of the Gota river -- the area known as Kattegat.
   We buy a ferry pass at a local little convenience store, and boarded a ferry near our nautical home. The ferry stopped at the first island, which consisted of low green hills and little houses, but a number of people, especially with bicycles, disembarked and cycled out of sight over a hill. Jonathon looked at each other and shrugged, and waited to the next island.
   The next island was named Köpstadsö, we look at each other, shrug again and disembark this time. It's a beautiful sunny summer day, in the waters of the Kattegat around us sailboats are lazily tacking about and motorboats are buzzing by with bikini-clad women dangling their feet off the front. I admire some sailboats (funny story, two weeks later in urgent care when asked if I could identify various shapes on a vision chart I'd say "oh no I can't tell if that's a cutter or a sloop!").
   There's a bunch of wheelbarrows on the dock by the ferry landing which we quickly realize is what people who actually live on the island use to take their groceries from the ferry to their houses since there's no cars on the island. We split up, he, a "musical therapy" major, wants to sit in contiplative thought for a few hours, maybe compose poems or something, while I want to explore quaint forest paths and little coves. So we agree to meet again in two hours and I explore the quaint forest paths and little coves of the island. It's a delightful little arcadia.
   Two hours later we catch another ferry to the larger island of Styrsö. Arriving there at Styrsö town I look at a map, see a church ("kyrka") ruin on a map and decide to go there. This time Jonathon comes with me, along a nice footpath through the forest.We arrive at the site of the kyrka ruin in an immersive quiet contemplative setting of lapping water, rolling green hillocks, forest, islands, and the occasional bleeding of sheep. There isn't much to see of the ruin itself but a vague rectangular outline in the ground. Jonathon wants to sit a bit and write some more, so I do a bit more exploring, and take this photo from atop a nearby hillock:

   But it's 20:30 and the sun is near setting, so we hurry along a path through the middle of the island back to the ferry dock. The evening sun streams sideways through the trees and it's quite beautiful. I know we were running late for the nine something ferry but am also keen not to let ferry-catching-neurosis ruin my enjoyment of this beautiful place. We definitely missed that ferry but there's another one around 10:00, so once back by the ferry dock I sit at a bar with bad service and order a beer, while Jonathon went off to watch the sunset from somewhere quiet and contemplative.

   Even after 22:00 it's pleasant on the open air top deck of the ferry - a perfect evening. The sun has finally set and the sky glows a sherbet orange. There are still a few sailboats blithely enjoying the conditions, and on the horizon, silhouetted against the orange glow, giant windmills slowly turn. I feel refreshed from a day of feeling better and enjoying zen-like idyllic little islands.. but will the feeling last?

(spoiler alert: no)

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Guinea 1

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 13:18:33 GMT

July 2nd, 2014, Day 1 - I slowly drift to wakefulness, judging morning on the frequency and enthusiasm of the crowing of the village's roosters. Abdul's wife brings me an omelet and then I sip tea with Baro on the porch as the rain slowly peters and gradually beekeepers begin to gather. There has been no reference to a clock or particular time all morning, this is just the pace of life.

   We set up chairs under an awning and begin with introductions -- it seems of the 20 or so attendees, about 70% have "Mamadou" as a first name, ad about 60% have "Diallo" as either a first, middle or last name. We spend the first morning on introductions and planning for the next two weeks. We finish for the day around 1pm and I explore the countryside around the village -- just outside the low wall around the village its green countryside of grassy meadows and forest. A river runs nearby, where the locals do their washing. Goats wander the meadows beside the village, each with a stick tied to their neck such that it sticks out horizontally, thus making them unable to enter the village through the narrow gates (which are usually kept close anyway but clearly it must be worth this added precaution)
   When I'm in the village the children, who the first day only peered cautiously from afar and ran if spotted, now frequently work up the college to call out "bonjour" to me from a safe distance.
   There's a well with a big hand pump lever in the middle of the village, usually the early-teen children seem to get the duty of pumping the pump when water is needed. The house I've been lodged in has a "western style toilet" (thank god, I'm really not fond of the ole hole in the ground), but because there's no running water line of course, when it needs to be flushed some kids are sent off to pump the pump and bring back water, which makes one rather reluctant to use the toilet unless one quite needs to.

   This and every subsequent evening would be very much like the previous one, with us all trooping over to the local elder's house for evening prayer, and then Baro would slowly make tea over glowing coals. I find he is enthusiastically religious -- not in a boorish or dangerously unhinged way, but in that he seems to genuinely enjoy the strict regimen of ramadan and the wisdom of the ages passed down to him through his lifetime of religious observation seems to fill him with a zen-like stoicism.

July 3rd, Day 2 - After lunch I enthusiastically get my bee suit and equipment ready, because we're going to visit beehives! The trainees look at me with alarm as I come out in the coveralls, saying "there's been a misunderstanding, we're just going to look at the hives, not open them!"
   "But I've got the equipment, let's open them!" I say
   "But no one else brought their suits." ::sigh:: okay we'll go look at the outside of beehives.

July 4th, Day 3 - The batteries on all my electronic devices are nearly all out due to a lack of any electricity for several days now. We still manage to avoid actually doing any beekeeping -- though this is hardly unusual, a seeming institutional reluctance to get stuck into it seems to be a theme of all projects.
   The children are now brave enough to come talk to me, as best they can. I show them pictures from beekeeping magazines I brought. One of the children in particular, Mamadou de Boba seems to have adopted me, spending hours talking to me despite that I can't understand a word he says but the occasional "is that so!" in English seems to be enough encouragement for him.
   I'm told there's a Peace Corps volunteer in the area, as a matter of fact we're a bit further in the bush than where she's based, which, since Peace Corps volunteers are the very definition of being deployed way out bush way, to be further in than one of them really feels like something. Having been dropped from the Peace Corps in 2011, to learn I'm out here further than the nearest PC volunteer feels a bit like, well, I made it out here after all.
   Another peculiar thing is becoming apparent to me. They seem to think it's more desirable to eat indoors. Because houses are literally "home-made" from locally made bricks, the walls don't support large windows and there's never power so it often results in eating alone in the dark while I'd prefer to be out in the light and fresh air but especially with the language barriers its hard to swim upstream against their desire to do me honor by ushering me in to a dark dungeon to take my lunch.

July 5th, Day 4 - we finally get a generator hooked up, which is barely powerful enough to charge some things a bit. AND we finally get to do some beekeeping! The hives as it happens are full of honey and we find we haven't brought out enough buckets to harvest honey into (with topbar hives honey is harvested by cutting it off the topbars into buckets).
   After lunch Mamadou de Boba and I wander around outside the village. I try to instill in him an interest in insects but with a complete language barrier he's prone to interpret me pointing out a cool insect on the ground as an invitation to try to smash it.
   In the evening Baro gets his hands on an avocado. He meticulously peels it almost as if it's some kind of ritual, culminating in removing the big spherical pit, holding it up and admiring it and commenting on where he will plant it, and then reverently eating the soft green flesh. He evidently found a source of avocados because every day he would perform this avocado ritual, including the admiring of the pit and commentary of plans involving it.

July 6th, Day 5 - Baro and I are sitting on the porch in the afternoon when a delegation of three men from the village approach us in a strangely formal manner. Uhoh, am I in trouble for something? Baro smiles knowingly before they even begin to speak.
   "The people of the village want to honor you with a gift of two roosters" he translates "... what do you want to do with them?"
   I'm usually a big softy when it comes to animals but I can't fathom what else I could possibly do with roosters than eat them, so I say "eat them I guess?"
   There's some interchange in the local language -- was this the wrong answer? Should I have had them set free like the pardoned turkeys? their response comes back to me "okay we'll cook the first one for dinner tonight."

   Later in the day we are finally able to spend a good amount of time beekeeping in the hives scattered through the forest surrounding the village.

July 7th, Day 6 - we get a new generator, finally I can charge things! I leave my computer charging while we travel to another village where hives are kept in a veritable jungle. I return to find that my computer had fully charged up, but having been left on, fully ran down to 0% again when the generator was shut off.

   I've been asked to teach about business planning, which at this point I don't have much background in. The expectation makes me a bit anxious, I'm comfortable talking about beekeeping, I know it well, but what know I about business planning that I can teach a bunch of adults most of whom are older than me?
   This first day of dabbling in the subject I'm surprised to learn how fundamentally my ideas of doing business are from theirs. I think of the individual as the "entrepreneurial unit" -- the self motivated executor of plans to make a profit. They have evidentally come from a long history of a more socialist world-view and as a body seem to think of "the co-op" as the essential entrepreneurial unit. The answer to all problems when I ask them to brainstorm is always "strengthening the co-ops!" Strengthening the co-ops is all well and good in my opinion, but the co-ops should exist to support the individual beekeepers, not vice versa.

July 8th, Day 7 -We walk three kilometers through the forest to a neighboring village. The forest is beautiful with lush greenery including tall ferns, no trash or pollution or sign of industrial modernity, just the occasional little homestead of a few cute huts with their own fenced in little crop plots. The beekeepers troop along the forest path carrying their suits, boots, buckets and such on their heads.
   At our destination village we split into two groups to do beekeeping and when we reconvene some women from the other group who had been kind of the the periphery on previous days proudly announce they had worked the bees without gloves, excellent.
   Someone says there's a traditional hive nearby ready to harvest and would I like to see them harvest it? "of course!"
   So we tromp a few hundred yards to where it is. This is the wicker basket style hive, located low in a small tree. They smok the bajeezes out of it and then start tearing it open. It clearly had been going for awhile, has old brood and old hatched out swarm cells. They toss the brood into the bushes, collect the honey, and then put a topbar hive in its place in hopes all the displaced bees will occupy it.

July 9th, Day 8 - We finally got a generator good enough to enable us to do a slide-show assisted presentation -- there's plenty of things which are best conveyed with pictures and diagrams. At one point though the rain outside and on the corrugated roof over our heads is so loud we can't hear each other and have to wait till it dies down.
   In the afternoon I'm out wandering around with my little buddy Mamadou de Boba again. We are joined by another boy of about 9, who shows us a place by the river where there's a bare muddy slope and of course you can take a bucket of water and pour it at the top and watch as it flows down in various channels -- what young boy isn't amused by that?? And very interestingly when you pour water in the right place at the top there seem to be small underground tunnels from which the water spouts out lower down the slope. Neat!
   So this is fun and keeps us entertained for awhile, I try not to get too muddy but at one point I slip on the muddy slope and fall down. Upon returning to the house I was staying in I am slightly mortified to find the beekeeping federation president and his wife, apparently on a sort of formal visit, sitting inside with Bara, all dressed nice, and here I am coming in all muddy. I felt myself like a small boy coming home all muddy to everyone's disappointment.

July 10th, Day 9 - We make candles in the morning, which is very successful. But later we have the business development presentation which I'm dreading as I really don't know what to say.
   Bara, however, has been translator for numerous business development presentations before, from people who specialize in the stuff. Baro, this stoical religious Malian, who spends his evening carefully making tea over coals, and is fond of pointing out the medicinal properties of random herbs he finds by the path, was suddenly holding forth on all the latest corporate boardroom buzzwords and making diagrams on page after page of the large eisel of flip-paper I had barely made use of.
   That afternoon he gets his hands on some aloe and sitting there on the porch, after telling me about its numerous medicinal properties, he carefully, lovingly, slices slivers off the tapered blade of aloe and eats them like they're sacred wafers.

July 11th, Day 10 - We make soap and then conclude the training. The landcruiser returns to bring us back to the capital. We spend the next two days driving back to the capital, ominously passing red cross ebola response convoys heading inland.

July 15th. Day 14 - Back in the capital. In the early hours of morning I listen to the patter of rain on the windows and the ululating call to prayer reverberating around the city in the dark pre-dawn hours. My back aches, my nose is running, I have a sore throat, a general feeling of fatigue. What are the initial symptoms of ebola, you might idly wonder? Well they are an achey back, a running nose, a sore throat, a general feeling of fatigue...

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Too Late to Turn Back

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 12:54:55 GMT

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

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Bee Aid Blog Update

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 09:02:15 GMT

Updated the Bee Aid International blog!

Journey to the Hadzabe - The obvious prequel to this entry.

Hadzaland! - The new entry!

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