kitchen party

Every culture has its rites of passage – and of course, getting married is one of the most important. This past weekend, we hosted a “kitchen party” for the fiance of my sister’s husband (who is, in name at least, also my husband, but I suppose that would require more explanation than I’m prepared to give at this moment).

A kitchen party is a bit like a combination of a bridal shower and a bachelorette party. It is a celebration for a young woman who is getting married; she’s surrounded by other women – no men allowed, and no women below marrying age – who shower her with gifts. Most of the presents are, of course, for the kitchen, and the giver instructs the bride-to-be in the use of each gift. But they also give her advice about being married, how to treat her husband, difficulties that they may encounter, wifely ‘duties’, and so forth.

So by 3pm on Sunday, we had a houseful of joyful women – mostly Zimbabweans, but also Namibian and Zambian friends – waiting to celebrate with and advise Marylyn on her upcoming nuptials. Yes, I was the only white woman present. And no, it wasn’t awkward. Our husband’s sister was the mistress of ceremonies – and I can’t think of how to describe her other than to say that she is positively hilarious in any language. When I met her and she was informed that I am second wife to her brother, she made me kneel in front of her and take her hand, head bowed, showing deference as she is my auntie. We laughed. But this was not nearly so funny as her later leading performance of songs about sex, acted out with a single finger wagging straight out at pelvis level to remind us all of what “the thing” was all about.

I am not really supposed to say too much about the advice given and the songs sung and the topics of, uh, discussion (and laughter) that arose. But let’s just say that while most gifts were for cooking, Daisy and I had chosen to give the bride-to-be a set of towels and rugs for the bathroom. You would not think that towels could lead to a crass and giggling enactment about luring one’s husband into bed, but they did. And we were in an uproar. I was never so glad to have bought bath sheets.

catching up in windhoek

Saying that Daisy is my sister is not something I say in the usual African way of referring to women around my age as sisi. It means that what I feel for her is familial - and it’s all that much more so, for me, because I don’t always understand her, because we do disagree at times, because we each make decisions that the other finds incomprehensible.

The other night we were watching CNN. Anderson Cooper was reporting on a study about children’s perceptions of race that the network had commissioned. Not shockingly, as has been found countless times before, children react to skin color early and often – and even when they are black, tend to prefer pictures of children who are lighter-skinned. The white kids are thought to be smarter, prettier, and better behaved; those with darker skin tones are mean, unliked, and stupid.

When I first met Daisy some eight years ago now, she was distant. Polite, but measured. She hesitated about me - not in a manner demonstrative of a lack of confidence or fear, but from a place of grounded experience that showed it was likely there might be something about me to keep at arm’s length. I chose not to attribute this to anything at first. But in time the cause worked its way out.

One night at a conference in Vic Falls some years ago, we were sitting at the bar. As the only two women in the group that had come from Namibia, we were sharing a hotel room. Well, it was really more like a little house unto itself, with multiple bedrooms, a kitchen, and a sitting room where the Chief joined us late in the evening and rather unexpectedly. But that’s another story entirely.

Most of the conference participants had gone back to their rooms. But Daisy and I sat talking with the bartender, and out of nowhere, the Chief joined us. We kept him lubricated with J&B until we found out he had never had a Springbok – a shot of half Amarula and half crème de menthe layered in a glass to show the line between the emerald shade of the mint and the creamy tan of the Amarula. We ordered three and drank. The conversation wandered into talking about white people. Maybe it was the contrast of the liquors that did it, both on the bar and in our blood. Daisy pressed her forearm up against mine. About racism, she knew, she said, speaking with the certainty of growing up black in Rhodesia. “But this difference,” she continued, putting a finger on her arm, then mine, then hers again, “I don’t see it.”

I have thought about this conversation many times over the years, thought about it as a crossing point for me, a moment in which it became possible for me to both be a white person and talk about them with the detached annoyance of familiarity. I looked no different. But my view was changed. Daisy had taught me something, and the lesson continued as we watched CNN’s report on perceptions of race. She began speaking of Takudzwa, our niece, who is turning five in August. Takudzwa knows me as Auntie Rachel; the first time we all spent time together in the village she was shy and hid behind her mother Aggie’s skirts most of the time, peeking at me – but beginning to do so playfully by the time we left. When I stayed with Aggie, her husband Gilbert, their son Tanaka, and of course, Takudzwa, in their tiny concrete house in the townships of Harare, Takudzwa would come running to me for sanctuary when she cried, if Tanaka was teasing her or refusing to hand over a toy. She sees me without fear or hesitation.

“You know, for Takudzwa, white people are not the same as they were for me,” Daisy said, turning away from the TV to look at me. “For her, she has grown up with you, seen you in the village, slept in the same room with you, washed in the same shower as you, peed in the same toilet as you. You are the same to her. When I was growing up, when we would go to Harare, we would see white people – but we could not even sit where they could sit, or eat, or go to the toilet where they did. Everything was apart.”

I have, in my office, the emblematic picture of a white woman doing fieldwork in rural Africa, squatting amongst adorable little African children in a schoolyard, dresses and t-shirts dirty, my gaze on the camera and theirs on me. I am often careful to talk about how this was hardly the first time any of them had seen a white person, as seems to be a claim to originality that whites like to make. In this light, then, perhaps it is not so much the experience of being around that matters – but the experience of being with.

This morning, after I typed up a program for this afternoon's party, Daisy thanked me in Afrikaans. "Dankie," she said, in that slightly teasing tone she reserves for facetious moments.

"You're just saying that because I'm white," I replied, straight-faced. Then she and I and the rest of our houseful of Zimbabweans burst out laughing.

forty giraffes walk into a bar, i mean, chobe national park...

let the beg-a-thon begin

This morning, like so many before it and so many more to come, was supposed to be simple. Gilbert was going to wash the car, then I’d drive it to the hospital and leave it with Grita so she could show it to the people interested in buying it and I’d walk back to the office. No problem. Oh, so little I have learned after all.

The phone rang at 8:30. “Rachel, when are you coming? This guy is here, I thought you should talk to him,” Janet said. Yeah, within an hour, I said, I’m coming. I knew the car wasn’t ready yet and I thought an hour was especially generous.

10:18, the phone rang again, Janet again. Yeah, I’m coming now, I promised. Twenty minutes later, I tried to start the engine. Nothing. Lights on, a little cough, nothing. I had said something to Oliver about the petrol light being on yesterday, but he assured me that he had ‘calculated’ everything and it was fine. In my defense, I did laugh at ‘calculated’ even then. But I’d made it home after dropping him at the bus, and after all, I only needed to get back to the hospital – not more than a mile away. Gilbert and Tonde tried the ‘push-to-start’ technique. Nothing. I suspect we are out of gas, I said.

Now, I’m pissed. I’m late, and my time is being eaten by something that could easily have been prevented. I only have five working days here, I thought, stomping angrily through the dust on my way to the office, and this shit is wasting my time. I couldn’t even find Janet’s phone number to call her to take her up on sending someone to pick me.

I passed Patricia on the way in, her back turned – and I didn’t greet her, committing a sin of sins. Janet saw the dark cloud over me when I walked into her office. “You are not ok!” she said. “Yes, I am, it’s fine, I’m just sorry that I’m so late, it’s rude, and I’m sorry,” I said. She brushed it off. Time is, after all, relative.

I suppose I was irritated already by more than my tardiness. See, I knew who she wanted me to meet, and I knew what it was about, and I knew I wasn’t going to have anything good to say. Some of the residents of one of the conservancy areas where I work have written a proposal to establish the Kingfisher Youth Center. They have identified 200 orphans (in an area with a population of 4100, mind you) and want to find ways to serve them, teach them sports, do HIV-AIDS education, and lots of other good things. So a small group of people got together and found the money for a building, which is nearing completion. I can’t tell you how remarkable this amount of initiative is, given the circumstances. They got land from the chief and have already built a structure.

“Janet, I’m happy to talk to him,” I said, trying not to let my frustration overwhelm my words, “but here’s the thing. He’s going to think I will get money for them. I know he won’t exactly ask, I know I won’t promise, but meeting with me, I’m a white American, and trust me, this is what always happens. He’s going to think that because I say I will try to help, that I will give them money. And I know that people think I must be rich, but I’m not. And then he will be disappointed if I don’t come up with something.”

I could hear the self-absorption seeping through my words, the pettiness, the whining of ‘why me,’ the loaded assumptions. And yet I said them all anyway. I do, and don’t, know better.

Brilliant, the man I was supposed to meet, came quietly down the hall shortly after my childish arrival. He smiled cautiously and held out his hand, extended from a lanky body which he seemed to be trying to make smaller in my presence. I can’t stand that kind of deference. Yesterday a man old enough to be my father asked me for something on his KNEES. First, get up, please, I said, taking his elbow and pulling. Then I gave it to him.

Brilliant was prepared. He gave me a copy of their proposal, an architect’s drawing of the building they are finishing, a list of 200 names (100 girls, 100 boys) of orphans in their area down to date of birth, and a letter asking for any kind of support. I told him I’d already emailed a friend of mine working in sports administration to see if she could help us get some equipment for them. And then I did the ‘lowering expectations’ dance:

“Now, Brilliant, I think what you are doing is wonderful, and very important, and I am going to TRY to help you. I can’t promise anything, but I am trying to find some sports equipment for you. Maybe we can also find a grant for you or something, I will ask around and see, and if you need something to be written I can help with that also. But please, I can’t say for sure, I can’t promise anything, so please know that I am trying but I don’t know if I can help you.”

He was very gracious and nodded, said he understood, and made sure I had his cell number and email address. Talking to Janet would be the same as him, he said, smiling. And then he left.

And frankly, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed by my attitude, by my approach to the whole situation, by displaying my flaws so openly. All of my egalitarian notions were just tossed onto the scrap heap. He came to me asking for help. And I treated him like someone who was begging, and needed to be reminded of the other’s superiority.

Because of course, I CAN help. I do in fact have the ability to do something. They have built a center out of nothing and are now going round to see if they can make it into something more. And I have the gall to sit here and say, I’m not rich, I can’t do anything. There is some measure of explanation in all my excuses, but in the end, they aren’t enough.

So, I now do something that I hate. I’m going to ask you all for money. If half of you reading this could help me chip in, we could finish the building and get some equipment and food for the kids. Everything will go straight into the project – no irritating overhead or organizational fees. I owe it to these guys. Not because I’m a jerk and need to make myself feel better (which are fair enough), but because being here has changed my view of the world and offered me lessons that may take the rest of my life to really learn properly. And that is something you can’t say every day.

If you can help even a little – send it on to my mom, and she will get it to me:Marcia DeMotts
185 Bear Lake Circle
Divide, CO 80814

Once I’m in Maun, I will have Brilliant’s documents scanned and post them so you can see how far they have already come. Kingfisher needs it more than NPR, I promise you.

back in the caprivi

I never really know what I’m getting into when I arrive in Katima. Which, I imagine, is one of the things I love about it. My sister is no longer here, so my 18 hour bus ride was full of something less than delicious anticipation. After several hours of delays in Windhoek – begun by a half hour drive that should have taken 5 minutes to get us back to the garage to fix the bus that should have been fully operational BEFORE departure – it was a long slow night on a two lane road frought with donkeys and goats and miscellaneous other creatures that don’t really belong on a tarred highway. But my other sister met me on arrival, and we cruised over to the house – which was of course already occupied by other Zimbabweans. I thought I was heading to some quiet time on my own, but as usual, I was wrong. It still makes me giggle, this constant screwing up of mine. In end, if we all relegated our expectations to the existential scrap heap, I suspect we’d manage to be much happier anyway.

At the house we found my sister’s sister-in-law, who returned from Zimbabwe today on her way back to Rundu (yes, Jen, think of Rundu and laugh…!). With her was a friend who had hitched a ride. So they hung out, ran some errands around town, and came back just as I caved and decided to have a nap. Unfortunately, since the house has been mostly empty for a week, we were a little low on supplies. This meant we were ‘reduced’ to sorghum porridge rather than sadza (corn porridge) for dinner. I’ll skip the culinary lecture for now, but suffice to say, this was not nearly so big a deal to me as to them. As we were preparing dinner, there was a crashing bounce of a noise on the tin roof. I looked up. We went outside. Turns out, having locked the gate, we were somewhat immune to hearing the truck that had pulled up outside with a delivery. So the driver chucked something which remains unidentified at the roof and managed to get our attention.

Now this is where it gets interesting. Two Zimbabwean guys who remain unnamed brought two burgeoning burlap sacks to the doorstep, deposited them, and buggered off. My sister-in-law was quite pleased. I thought perhaps they were mealies (corn). But as she grabbed a knife and sliced thru the twine cords holding the bags shut, I quickly realized my error.

See, Katima is a border town – full of Zambians and Zimbabweans both legal and illegal. This means that, well, there is a lot of legal and illegal more generally going on most of the time, and it is well-camouflaged. The lumpy bags held leather handbags, canvas shoes, safari shirts, khaki pants, tablecloths, pillowcases, and other things made in Zimbabwe to be sold here. But they were far from legal entry. Vehicles coming in from Zimbabwe are subject to exceptional levels of scrutiny to which I can attest, having been a passenger in overburdened cars in both directions more than once. So there is no way that customs in Botswana, and then in Namibia, would have let this much stuff through.

Of course, I couldn’t resist. “Come on, sisi, who am I going to tell?” I pleaded, several times, seeking for an explanation. But she would not tell me how these bags had made it to our doorstep. I don’t blame her. But perhaps the strangest part was, despite the fact that it was already getting late and we’d set out beds for the night – once the goods arrived, they were off. Jamming purses and shirts and shoes into the truck of a rumbly, fringe-dashboarded Toyota, they were off. Promising to text me on past-midnight arrival in Rundu, she backed the car up to the gate, I let her out, and they were gone. I poured another gin and tonic and sat outside with the Southern Cross far above me, listening to the pumping music of Saturday night just up and around the corner.

eight years and a long walk

The office seemed further from the center of town than I remembered, and I thought, I’ll be late – how very African of me. But I managed to arrive just barely on time. “Fifth,” the security guard replied to my question of which floor would lead me to WWF. I couldn’t remember that either. I rode up, and was buzzed in – from there, it was just the same. I sat for a few minutes while he finished his phone call and then his secretary beckoned, saying, “You can come.” Walking into Chris’ office was like a step back in time. He strode out from behind his desk, smiling, greeting me, “Rachel! How nice it is to see you!” and wrapped his arms around my shoulders in the warmth of familiar. “Come, sit, can we get you some coffee or tea?”

We pulled chairs up at his small round table set for chats just like this one. She brought tea. Rooibos, black, bush tea – just like I’d asked – with a flash of a conspiratorial grin that despite my skin I didn’t want coffee and sugar and milk. The panda on the mug seemed to appreciate me, as did Chris. We talked about things, my life in the US, my mortgage and ‘real job’, the latest transfrontier park here that is stalled, what he’s up to, what I am trying to be up to. We talked about collaborating on a human-wildlife conflict project, which is increasingly a focus for me and it turns out, for him as well. And the crinkling around his eyes radiated appreciation for me, and inside, I thought, this is where I want to be.

See, the thing about Chris is, he’s the one who got me started in this place. Eight years ago, when I first packed a backpack and flew over to Namibia to meander for the summer, he was here – in this same job, in the same office, even wearing a similar sweater. He’d agreed to see me and talk about what WWF was up to in the Caprivi, which was – via online reports – what I thought I was interested in. And it turns out I was right. But in seeing me even then – a budding idiot of a graduate student – so was he. I was worth his time. Two years later, when I was getting serious, he set me up with IRDNC, and I have been working with them ever since. And not only this, but IRDNC has given me my family here. My sister was working for them at the time, but I didn’t know it. Three months of glasses of wine and laughter later, I had a new home. And in many respects, I owe it to Chris.

A knock at his door brought another American, a man working for the Nature Conservancy in Denver who’d been passing through but was on his way back to the US. Chris introduced us, and we all chatted briefly. Making a few ironic comments about working in Namibia, Chris cued me, and I chimed in. “These are the thoughts of an old hand,” he said to Matt, grinning at me, giving me a bit of respect I was never so sure I’d have. “Rachel started coming here way back when, and now, hey, she’s a big fancy professor in Massachusetts, and she’s still coming back.” Time slowed around us, for me, and I realized, he’s proud of me. I get it. I get credit for getting it. And while I know this is problematic, while I know there are things I will never really ‘get’, I allowed myself a moment of pleasure. I have earned a measure of respect. There are places here in which I no longer have to introduce myself. And that means something. What, exactly, I suspect I will always struggle to define. But that is part of the process – and apparently, so am I.

Putting away my notebook and getting ready to leave, we reiterated the possibilities for collaboration in the years ahead. “Because, you know, I don’t just want to drop in and out looking at things I think are interesting,” I told Chris. “I want to be useful, to examine projects and information in ways that will contribute.” He smiled again, nodding. “I know you want to make things better here,” he replied.

Riding down the elevator, I thought, problems and all – maybe there is no higher compliment.

goin' up the country

Until this past week, I had not spent much time in the southern part of Namibia. Let me rephrase. Apart from driving thru it in the middle of the night on an insane non-stop drive from Maun to Cape Town, I have not spent ANY time in southern Namibia. So being on the road during the daytime was refreshing if for no other reason than the fact that I could see more than the tar ahead and the swishing of dry grass to either side.

Mariental and Keetmanshoop both still feel like Afrikaner havens from the rest of the world. Wandering around looking for a place to buy bread, I felt lost in a rural African version of an old Western just before showdown – everyone was clearing off the streets (slowly), or sitting around waiting for something to happen (slowly), or turning their heads to stare when I walked by (slowly). Mariental especially is bleached, pale under even the somewhat gentler winter sun, and dry, dusty-dry like dirt that has never known water. Keetmans features several rock-hewn churches with corrugated tin spires, from either German colonial days or possibly even built stone-by-stone by Afrikaners migrating north from the Cape years before. But both are steeped in a feeling of thick isolation that buffers a sense of slipping through a crack in the face of time.

What was I doing there? This would be the logical question. My sister has started a new job – overseeing a project of the Namibian National Farmers Union to reduce poverty in the south through teaching people how to grow hoodia. Hoodia is a succulent – it looks like a cactified octopus – that when eaten, suppresses the appetite. The Nama, one of the ethnic groups here that historically has lived in the desert – apparently discovered that they could eat some of the plant and go days without feeling hungry. This has recently been turned into a desire to create a market for the next herbal weight loss craze. The project’s ‘beneficiaries’ each receive 15 plants that are already 2-3 years old. They will put them in sand and leave them for about a year before harvesting and drying them.

There are a lot of things about this project, already, that feel like so many others I have seen before. Our interactions with one of the local staff members found him more interested in getting me to go out drinking with him than in seeing the plant nurseries. One of the local governors is trying to hijack the ‘beneficiary selection process’ from the traditional authorities so that he can place the plants with people he wants to benefit. And there is only about a year to find and develop a market so that the growers can continue to plant seedlings after harvest next year and sell their products. We also found out that you can’t even harvest the plant properly without a stainless steel blade that costs a small fortune. This, to me would seem to be a pretty big sticking point – you can plant it, but you can’t take it out of the ground without a special piece of equipment that you will never own? Hmmm…

Anyway, I’m headed out to the bush tonight – up to Katima, where I have been working for the past six years or so now. I’ll be there a week or so before heading back to Botswana…ah, Maun, to days at the research centre and nights at Audi or the Sports Bar…

enough already

all right, i get it, more than a few of you have given me a hard time about not keeping up the blog. i guess it hadn't occurred to me to write from lowell, though what with almost getting fired, having my windows shot at, and getting to know the new neighborhood's resident yay-hoos, i probably could have found enough material. BUT, i am back in afrikaaaa for a few months, so i will do my level best to keep all y'all apprised in this way. i am starting off in windhoek, the capital of namibia, where my zimbabwean sister has just started a new job. we aren't really sure what it's about yet, but it seems exciting. next week we'll be off to visit some farmers around mariental who are part of her project, so let's hope i have a better idea what i'm talking about after that. otherwise, the next three months look to be a whirlwind tour of my old haunts - katima, kasane, maun, joburg, and maputo, presumably with a few good stories along the way.

leaving

“Koko,” I thought I heard coming from outside. Huh? I looked at the clock. 6:42 am. Seriously?

Everything in the house has been sold, and the small voice outside was coming round to pick the last of it. The concrete walls echoed as I stumbled out of bed – not that I’d been asleep for some time, but lying in bed was an act of optimism seeking a few more minutes of rest.

I folded up my sleeping bag and she collected my bed, extracting it from piles of luggage and a few things yet to be wrapped and shipped. The truck left, and I finished pulling things together. I showered by draining a bottle over my head, as our water was out yet again. Appropriate for my last morning, somehow.

I don’t much care for the house I’ve lived in these past 14 months, but this morning it was hard to leave. I felt pulled back, longing for something that’s already gone. It’s the end of an era, my housemate said a few days ago. I suppose he’s right.

So in a few hours I get on a plane, flying to Zimbabwe for my sister’s wedding. It’s a perfect ending for my time here. But flying straight on to a new life in Boston next Wednesday is still a little daunting.

Finally moving towards the car, I stopped in the dust and called to the remaining cat. Crazy, we call him. Crazy was here before us and will be here for some time after we’re gone. Crazy doesn’t really get along well with other living creatures, but I called out anyway. Lying in the sun, he squinted at me. Meowed. I called again. And he turned his head away.

seronga

The ferry closed at six, we thought. So roaring along the narrow waves of aging asphalt was the logical solution for our already-a-day-behind departure. Unfortunately, a few of Botswana’s finest were also out…on the side of the road…in chairs with clipboards and a radar gun. I suppose I should have just kept driving; after all, a cop flailing his arms to make cars stop seems a bit embarrassing for all of us. But my Midwestern follow-the-rules upbringing reared its reliable head, and I pulled over.

107 in a 60kph zone! Though I honestly can’t recall seeing a sign, and the village in which we were stopped had apparently receded from the road. I was traveling with a colleague, who did his level best to weasel me out of the fine. I’ve never given a bribe in Botswana, he said later, and neither have I. But the process of paying up was painful too; multiple forms attested to my admission of guilt, I signed over THE ACCUSED, had to wait for a receipt. In the meantime, other trucks flashed by at 110, 120k’s. “Ah!” shouted the receipt-writing cop to his younger, grave-faced partner. “You didn’t even tell me that one was coming!” as he missed shooting another one with the radar gun. Nice, I thought. I feel kind of like I’m doing a public service, keeping them occupied while everyone else hurls towards their destinations. Maybe they’ll take up a collection for me in appreciation.

We climbed back up into the Land Rover, my colleague taking the keys away from me as we discussed whether to haul ass or give up on getting to Shakawe before the river crossing was closed for the night. I think we can make it, I said, though of course I had never been up this way and had no idea. Predictably, perhaps, we pulled up at the dock as the ferry slid out onto the river. But the sign – this time, there was one – said closing time was 6:30. So we lucked out, and shortly, watched the sun set over the water, and drove onto gravel on the other side. Now, I’m unwound, I thought, as the first breaths of relaxation swirled from my lungs through my fingers and toes.

We arrived in the village several hours later, driving through thick dark and low hum of the occasional generator. There’s no electricity on this side of the river, and winter evenings set early and cold. Fishtailing through the sand tracks from the heart of the village – anchored by a bar and a bakery – we arrived at the house of the local councilor and his wife.

At this point, it seems wise to say that there is no way I’m going to be able to do justice to this trip here. Between the characters I met, moments that I savored, and things that made me want to scream, there was a lot of, well, drama. And as I sort through everything that has happened this past year while getting ready to leave, I find myself less resilient than usual, much more likely to be happily buzzed or completely dragging with little in between. So Seronga inflamed this tendency, being out in the middle of nowhere, getting to know the local conservationist scene, exploring the landscape, trying to talk with expats, villagers, government officers, missionaries. In the end, there is nothing like walking on so much Kalahari sand to keep you off balance.

ready, not ready...

After another hectic month on the road, I arrived in Maun this past weekend. I hesitate to say that I got home, because, well, I am perpetually confused about where home is, and besides, that last time I called Maun home, my Zimbabwean sister yelled at me because my home is supposed to be where hers is.

Anyway, I stood in my room, staring into my closet, looking at the clothes hanging there, and I thought, I’m not ready to go. As crazy as I feel here a lot of the time, I love it. I love that I am never bored and that there is something to learn every day. I love being stretched and challenged and reminded that my view of the world is not the only one. I love the simplicity, the way in which a less complicated day to day existence helps clarify why I do the things I do. And I love the fact that looking in the mirror here becomes an act of honesty rather than an examination of which mask I’m wearing today.

But at the same time, I am definitely ready to go back. I have a fantastic job waiting for me, a brand new loft almost ready to be lived in, family and friends that I miss. And some of the things upon which I have to spend energy here are, well, a present stream of frustration that ebbs and flows depending on how much I need from university bureaucracy. Right now the flow is pretty high, and so my patience has been worn low. So I do look forward to some of the simplicities of modern life as well.

But I know that when I arrive, I’m going feel displaced. Chosen or not, wanted or not, I will be unsure of where my feet are planted. In Afrikaans, the word for this is soutpiel. It literally means, well, salty penis. But metaphorically, it refers to a man with one foot in the West (especially Europe) and the other in Africa – so something is left dangling in the ocean. It’s an insult, an indictment of a lack of commitment to one or the other. Apart from lacking the requisite anatomy to fit the description precisely, I think I understand how this feels. I haven’t been able to make the commitment to stay here, or in the US. I know that going back will be eased by the idea that I will be in and out of Africa for a long time, which seems like the best of both worlds. But I often think I should have decided to stay here, difficult or not, the other side of the world or not. I feel a bit like, as Peter Godwin says, I am leaving my post.

The problem is, as I’ve said before, I want to be a full participant. If I am really to be here, I want both feet on the ground. I want to be a member of the community in which I live, and not just the white expat community (eesh). But this is hard, if not impossible. There will always be barriers, things I don’t understand, cultural discourses which I may come to understand but never just sink into. And as a white foreigner, there is a lingering feeling that at any time, someone could pull the carpet out from under me.

I imagine I might say some of these same things about the US, but for slightly different reasons. There, I think I do get it – I just don’t agree with most of it. I feel marginal in a different way. Maybe the difference is making the choice for myself about where and in what ways I feel I can do the most good…and be healthy and happy while doing it. But as always, I reserve the right to change my mind. And there are few things more American than that.

breaking and entering

I got my first SMS with the word ‘burglars’ in it the other day. Unfortunately, it was used in reference to some folks who stopped by my house on Sunday night. Fortunately, no one was home at the time but the cat (and I think she’s still a little freaked out). One of the two wooden doors through which you can get into our place was hacked apart with a panga (not to be overly dramatic, but it’s a large machete-type knife) and an undetermined number of ‘burglars’ crawled in thru what was left of the door and started going through our stuff. They didn’t find much. This is of course because we don’t have much. They riffled through everything in the cabinet under the TV, and went thru my housemate’s closet, and made a mess. But it doesn’t appear that they managed to take a whole lot of anything. They left a laptop, for example, but took a pair of tennis shoes. I think what happened was that a friend of mine, who was staying in the house while my housemate and I were away, drove up not too long after they got in and the sight of her headlights scared them off.

The reason they got in, though, was because my friend didn’t lock the metal gate over the outside of the wooden door. This is both disturbing and reassuring – the latter because it indicates that the place is otherwise hard to get into, but the former because it makes it feel like someone was watching for an opportunity, and/or hanging around a lot. The house was broken into several times last year before I arrived, but not since. The weirdest part of this one was that my room was completely untouched. There was a camera on the shelf in my closet, jewelry in the drawer next to the bed, shoes, clothes, a few CDs. But it appears they never even went into my room. It looks like someone ripped a small hold in the cardboard that covers up the broken glass in one of my windows and pulled out a small blue nylon bag with a few CDs in it, but even that they left in my housemate’s room down the hall.

On finding the door hacked open, my friend called the local 911. This is where the story gets strange. The Maun police are not known for being terribly responsive or competent. So the local expat community – read, whites – have established their own little group of enforcers. To ‘subscribe’, you just get a walkie-talkie. To get help, you use it to say someone’s in your house. Et voila, the cavalry arrives. In this case, my friend says, within a minute or two three men showed up at our place, one screaming “YOU BASTARDS!!!!” and going through the house with a handgun tucked into the front of his pants and wielding a shotgun with a flashlight taped to it. This image makes me almost as uncomfortable as the idea of someone breaking in in the first place.

Maun used to be a village. Now it’s teeming with tourists, who have enabled walls to be built between the wealth they bring and the people who resided in the area ‘before.’ This breeds resentment. It feeds anger and frustration. White foreigners come in and set up businesses for other white foreigners, constructing turquoise pools under razor wire walls and driving air-conditioned Land Cruisers past mud-and thatch huts while hobbled donkeys limp and graze in the center of town. And yet, we are the ones who feel affronted. We are the ones who arm ourselves and express our rage that THEY would try to take something from us. The first time my housemate was robbed – before I arrived – the thief took milk from the pantry. Someone broke into the house and stole MILK. Not the laptop that was sitting on the sofa, but MILK.

Even though she left the gate unlocked, my friend says she doesn’t think it’s her fault that ‘they’ broke in. By this I think she means that she shouldn’t have to lock the door. Fair enough. In an ideal world, no one would ever have to lock anything. But I can’t sort out the logic that inflates the bubble of the white community in Maun. People come here, a friend of mine says, because they can do whatever they want. Hearing stories about pilots ramming around in the Delta and overturning boats in the middle of the night, I suspect there is a great deal of truth in his observation. But I want to go one step further. I think it’s because we think we have a RIGHT to do whatever we want, and with no responsibility to anyone but ourselves.

In the end, having someone break into your house is scary – regardless of whether you are there or not, and regardless of the larger political context in which it takes place. Stuff is just stuff. My friend can go out and buy a new pair of shoes. But I can’t just go out and pick up a new sense of security. The 911 subscribers say that crime has really been escalating of late, and I guess they would know. As for me, I think Maun is built on inequalities which have real consequences for everyone – whether they admit it or not. Maybe taking so freely isn’t free in the end, and maybe privilege can’t help you sleep at night. I guess I’ll be testing that one out in the days ahead.

bush school

I spent the last three weeks up in the Botswana-Namibia border area working with students, faculty, and locally-based conservation practitioners from Africa and the US. I’ve been working with other faculty members on setting up this programme for some time, so it was really nice to finally get everyone here and go out and do something. We’re trying to find ways to make sure that research done here is actually useful, rather than an abstract inquiry into what someone from across the ocean thinks is interesting. And we’re also trying to benefit people who live here with training and opportunities that are sometimes hard to come by. By conducting interdisciplinary research with a team of people ranging from conservation outreach workers to students and professors, we’re also hoping to socialize students from abroad in a way that will make it natural for them to go about their work in locally meaningful, respectful, participatory ways.

So, I had some teaching to do. I talked a lot about being sensitive to local culture and expectations about appropriate behavior. I told our female students they needed to wear skirts when they go to the village. I got really tired of the term ‘instrument’ being applied to research strategies, as if a questionnaire was going be used to slice a person open like a scalpel. And given the prevalence of HIV in the area where we were working, I told a group of students that I didn’t see any conceivable way for them to walk into the home of someone they didn’t know and ask, “Has anyone in your household died in the past year?” Stigmatization being what is it, I said, they will assume you mean AIDS. But that’s not what WE mean, one student argued. Doesn’t matter, I said. You won’t be the one interpreting your questions. You only get to ask them.

But I also did a lot of learning. I thought about how different my graduate education must have been in comparison to the one at the University of Florida from which most of the students were coming. I wondered where along the line the idea that living in another country and being, as my advisor told me, ‘interested in everything’, got lost in a sea of GPS measurements and survey forms. I was reminded that practicing what I preach about taking your time and getting to know another way of life is not something that’s ever easy, or finished. And while I thought that playing a soccer game with one of the nearby (all male) teams was a great community-building idea, I didn’t realize it could also stretch local ideas about who is an athlete. Several of our best players, you see, were women – and when the game was over, women from the village crowded around them with congratulations and excitement (even though we got waxed).

By the way, Michael (and other Badgers :-), if you’re out there reading this, one of the grad students made a comment the other day that I thought would make you laugh hysterically. We were arranging meeting times to talk about specifics of conducting fieldwork, and one of the students piped up, “If ‘Rachel’ is synonymous with ‘methods’, then we really need some more time with her before she goes.” Me, a methods expert. Imagine.

ants got my pizza

Here I sit, in my office, in Maun. I find myself wanting to post an update, but lacking the energy with which to write something intelligent. Perhaps I can instead just share some funny-ish-type thingys that have happened lately. Hopefully I am not so soaked in being here as to be the ONLY one who thinks they are (mostly) funny:

I have worn the same pants four out of five days this week.

I ordered something different at our usual restaurant the other night and the owner came over to confirm that I was serious.

I had a faculty meeting that lasted for a day and a half.

Someone in the US asked me if she could call my university here to help expedite receiving some documents.

My boss reviewed a paper for a journal in which he said the author was ignorant and arrogant, and that the analysis rested essentially on innuendo.

I was really excited to need a blanket at night.

Our booze fridge died. Ok, this is sad too, but the fact that we HAVE a booze fridge…

I had a moment in which I thought I understood what the cat said.

I watched a small cobra slide away from the door of the library and was unconcerned.

I bought baskets with goats on them.

Today, the ants in my office ate my leftover pizza before I could have it for lunch.

This list surely doesn’t say much about being here. But I did recently read an article that disparages the way people – read, white people – write about Africa. It was in itself a list of things to say and not say. Like, make SURE you talk about starving children and large mammals and vast landscapes. Be SURE to talk about the continent as a whole rather than its different countries and peoples and ecosystems. Sins of these kinds are many. Am I free of them? Of course not. Even white folks who grew up here tend to do these things. But I wonder, is it me – is this really the way I think about being here, or is it that I don’t give my audience enough credit for being able to engage with the subtleties that would do more justice to what I want to express?

tsitsi

A small knock rattled the door. Another visitor, I thought. Great. I hadn’t had a moment’s peace since arriving. I’m still something of a curiosity in my sister’s husband’s village in rural Zimbabwe, and I was staying in the newly built rondavel (round, hut-like house) across the dirt road from his family’s main complex. So I was a curiosity and fair game, especially for the teenage girls living in the area.

Sighing, I opened the door. I’d seen her before but we had not actually spoken. She was slight, sinewy, and radiated bashfulness. But there was something else, something hard about her, that made me realize she might not bend if pushed.

She greeted me. I greeted her. Then we waited. The wind blew cool under the graying, cloud-thick sky.

“Is there something you want?” I asked, playing, but also tired.

“Yes,” she stated. “Sweets.”

This was how I met Tsitsi. Tsitsi, whose mother died when she was just a baby. Whose father (my sis’ uncle-in-law) passed away a few months ago. Whose aunt found her in a nearby village, going from house to house looking for food, a place to sleep, a glint of affection or even just interest. Whose time was spent herding cattle – something girls generally don’t do – but wishing she was in school. And whose quiet, unassuming ways still allowed glimpses of the flint behind her eyes.

I didn’t know a thing about her when she first stood at my door. But over the next few days, I learned. And my sis told me that Tsitsi was in danger of not going to school, because those relatives who were looking out for her already had school fees to pay for others and little money with which to do it. Her uncle’s pension, for example, is 10,000 Zim dollars a month – but the bus fare to town to collect it is 40,000. One US dollar, by the way, gets about 15,000 Zim dollars on the black market. School fees are 600,000 a term, but they spiral all the time as money becomes more and more worthless.

So the night before we left, we called Tsitsi back to my little rondavel. My sis told her that from now on, she didn’t have to worry about school fees, because I was going to take care of her. She wouldn’t have to borrow old uniforms from schoolmates, because I would buy one for her. As long as she was in school and trying to do better, I would help her. The child sat between us on the bed, and when she spoke she seemed only able to look at her feet. “I’m confused. I don’t know if what I’m hearing is true. I don’t really know who Rachel is, where she comes from. But I just want to thank the God who made her.”

The next morning we took Tsitsi to town with us, and drove her to my sis’ brother’s house so that his wife could help her shop. Tsitsi’s small bag was in the back of our car; my sis had just given it to her the night before. But all it contained was a wet dress. It was the only other dress she had, so she had washed it the night before to bring it along. I had been trying all week not to be overly emotional about where I was and what I was seeing – the funerals, the living conditions, the cobra at the side of the footpath that nearly struck me, the hard labor of just getting by – because for me it was all tempered with the affection and welcome of people who didn’t know me at all. But the wet dress did me in. I went back out to the car, got my wallet, and took out the rest of the rands (South African currency) in it so they could also be exchanged and so that Tsitsi could also get some other clothes, a decent pair of shoes. My sis explained to her sister-in-law, who would take Tsitsi shopping after the holiday weekend, what she needed. “And if there is extra money, just…”

I cut her off. “No extra money,” I said. “Spend it all. If you get what she needs and there is still more, just let her choose some things. I don’t care what. I just don’t want it back.” I swallowed what felt like a swelling tumor in my throat. Tsitsi shyly hugged me in the driveway and my sis made her promise to study hard.

When the family was told that I would be taking responsibility for Tsitsi, they had all thanked me again and again. “It will be announced at school!” one of them declared.

“I don’t care about that,” I said, “Please don’t do anything that will embarrass her.”

“It will be called the Dr. Rachel DeMotts Scholarship for…” he continued.

“Really, please,” I said. “Don’t do that.”

He pushed. So I said, “If you must call it something, then name it for my grandmother, Mavis Johnson.”

So the money for Tsitsi because the Mavis Johnson Bursary. My grandmother passed away 20 years ago. We still call her the little hornet. I suppose I thought of her so quickly because there was something familiar in Tsitsi – a pinch of stubborn, but a sure and loyal warmth.

But when I came back and talked to a friend about Tsitsi, she told me I had better not get my hopes up for the girl, that she’d probably be pregnant within a year or two. Her pessimism (and the lurking views of Africans underneath it) was a bitter earful and I felt like she was warning me not to care, like I’d been foolish somehow, that I had better not really get invested or I’d be disappointed. But from my point of view, what I’d done wasn’t about me or my hopes or getting credit. I just thought that if I could make it possible for a 14-year-old girl to stop worrying about whether she would be able to go to school, then I should. It was simple. Like a wet dress, and having a dry one.

spatial politics

When ordering my business cards a while back (and I do mean a while), I found out that I was hired under a line for spatial policy under the governance unit. I didn’t really want ‘spatial policy’ on my business cards, so I changed it to simply ‘governance.’ But last week in Zimbabwe, I got an unexpected lesson about spatial politics anyway.

I went with my honorary older sister to visit her family. So I spent the better part of a week a couple of hours’ drive from anything that should really be considered a road. My sis’ family lives in a village with no electricity and only a few boreholes for water. I hadn’t really asked for details when she said we’d go visit for Easter. But somehow, even considering the places I’ve been, I wasn’t quite prepared.

See, besides the fact that I wanted to spend time with her mom especially, who has made gifts for me even though we’ve never met, I wanted insights. I wanted to understand how it is that Mugabe is still in power, how he can beat and arrest and release and abuse and arrest and release the leader of the MDC (the opposition party) time and again without people refusing to take it any more. It was bad when I was in Zim five years ago. Now, inflation is up to 1600% and food shortages are looming again. The back of every road sign we passed for hundred of kilometers had "MDC" spray-painted on it in shaky white letters. But what I really wanted to know was, how are people surviving in country that prints money with an expiration date on it?

I got several kinds of answers that apply to the space beyond the cities. One, Zimbabwe is fertile; if you have land, you have a decent shot at making something grow on it – even if it’s only enough to scrape by. So people out in the villages have multiple crops and hopefully some livestock or chickens to keep things going. But the second was more insidious. Sitting on the steps of the house at night in the quiet, there was no radio buzzing in the background. No blue glow of the TV. No version of last week’s newspaper on the table. Though to be fair, the only papers left in Zimbabwe are government propaganda anyway. But it was clear to me that apart from word of mouth, information was not available. And then we talked about elections.

Elections in Zimbabwe are a joke. Intimidation is rampant; people are told that there are cameras watching them and if they don’t vote ZANU-PF (Mugabe’s good squad) “we will KNOW…” But people are hungry. And just before the polls open, ZANU-PF tends to show up in villages with food. They hand it out, a gift from your government. But the thing is, the food comes from abroad – from USAID, from the UN’s World Food Programme – and it was meant to be delivered without political strings. So in the end, those ‘helping’ acts of donations are actually supporting the continued brutality of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, he of the goob-of-a-mustache and raging paranoid storm of an ego.

My sis’ husband’s father thinks the end is near. “You look over there and see death. Over there too, it’s death. So the end is coming.” I hope so. But I hope it’s a different kind of end.

it's for me

My office phone rang. This is almost notable in itself for several reasons: mostly because it doesn’t happen very often, but also because it’s been changed three times in the last month or so. Apparently we are ‘upgrading’ our ‘system’ here in the hopes it will be closer to possible to make phone calls like normal people. I picked up.

Me: Hello.
Her: Helloooo [crackling sound]
Me: Hello?
Her: Yes, hellooo [more crackling]

This is going to be good, I thought. I have no idea who this is so let’s commence with the niceties expected when answering the phone here. See, you don’t just identify yourself. You greet each other first and carry on a bit. It’s rude to just announce who it is without showing your interest in the other person’s wellbeing.

Me: How are you?
Her: Ah, I’m just fine, mma, how are you?
Me: I’m also fine, mma, thank you.
Her: This is Mma [garbled someone-or-other I couldn’t hear] calling from Main Campus.

Oh, crap. Maybe this isn’t going to be good. Someone actually initiating contact from Gabs is a bad sign. Bad. Now I’m nervous.

Her: And is this Dr. DeMotts?
Me: [oh well] Yes, mma, it is.
Her: Oh, good! How are you?
Me: I’m still fine, mma, thank you.
Her: Oh, good! And this is your extension, number 7239?
Me: Uhhh…yes, mma, it is. [you DID call ME, after all]
Her: Oh, good! Mma, I’m calling all the extensions in the book and checking to be sure they are right. See, we can call you from main campus now!

You have GOT to be kidding me. I choked back a powerful desire to laugh.

Me: Well, mma, yes, that’s pretty great. And good luck with all those phone calls.
Her: Yes, thank you! Thanks, mma.

And she hung up.

maun desperate housewives association

About a month ago I snuck into a very exclusive gathering here in Maun – the book club. My friend Monica, our librarian at the centre, had worked her way in and was hosting, so she invited me. Stupidly, I assumed that reading was involved. “What book are you all reading?” I queried. She laughed. “Oh, Rachel, it’s not really about that…”

It is about white expat women getting together, having a few drinks, and trading copies of books they’ve read. There is no discussion of anything that’s been read. It’s more like a traveling library with booze and snacks. And the library is mostly “chick lit” - books by ‘writers’ like Danielle Steele with flaming pink covers and drawings of skinny women in spiky heels who are always after a man. Or men.

I admit, I went out of a sense of something like arrogant curiosity. What do these mostly South African wives of safari guys talk about? They insulate themselves from life here in their big houses with razor wire, snarling Rhodesian ridgebacks (dogs bred to fight lions), and security systems, coming out to take the kids somewhere or shop at the Safari Spar. I couldn’t imagine.

I went early to help Monica cook and set out the books, which travel from hostess to hostess in a set of lopsided cardboard boxes. The more trashy paperbacks I pulled out, the more I wondered what I would have to say in conversation. Then again, if I were to play the voyeur, it didn’t really matter if I were at a loss for words.

It was a small gathering; apparently word had not made it all the way around to the usual suspects. But about half a dozen women pitched up, dressed in sparkly sandals, cropped pants, topped with carefully styled hair. One woman had brought her kids. But she left them in the car to sleep, with the whole vehicle draped in a mosquito net.

We served carrot salad, spicy chickpeas, basmati rice, pakoras, yogurt dip, and sliced cucumbers. It was more food than usually accompanied the evening’s non-bookish banter. As we settled in, talk revolved around three things.

Food. A lot of this was about weight loss. “It just makes sense not to eat carbs and protein together!” “I lost ten kilos on that diet!” “The gluten in wheat is just not good for you!” And on and on. I had another pakora. And another. They’re made with chickpea flour, after all.

Illness. Here I thought I could relate to the tales of malaria. But I couldn’t get a word in. Not that I tried very hard, mind you. But I felt a bit like I was looked through rather than at. I became quieter. Every time I got up my chair edged back from the circle a bit more, and a bit more. Then, we got onto the subject of HIV. The human resources director of a major local safari company – apparently they were not ALL desperate housewives – held court on the costs of caring for all their employees who are positive. “We have to fly them down here to get their medications, and pay for treatment, and we’re overstaffed by 25% to make up for when people are away or sick, it’s just a huge burden and it’s so expensive! It costs money to fly them down here, and you know they’re only making 700 pula a month anyway [about $115], so we have to pay for them to stay here, and the flights…” There were so many things I wanted to say, simmering quietly in my growing anger. ‘THEY’ are human beings, I thought. And what does it say about your profits if you can overstaff by 25% and still make a shitload of money doing it?

Travel. A truck-driving short-haired woman in boy’s sandals and cargo shorts talked about her upcoming trip to the family farm in South Africa. And a deeply tanned woman in a white miniskirt had just returned from three weeks in Argentina, after having spent the holidays in the Cape before that. Her flights were late getting in, so apparently she did the unthinkable. “I just got my bags and I WALKED OUT of the airport! I mean, you don’t DO that!” She and her husband stayed at a lodge set up mostly for people who wanted to come and hunt birds. They were surrounded by fields of sunflowers – planted, well, to attract birds. I wish she’d stuck to the birds, because her discourse on race relations in the former Spanish colony was even more sickening than the notion of growing gorgeous flowers so birds could be shot. “It’s so much more harmonious than here. I mean, they all speak the same language, it’s one culture, everyone’s white. Or at least not really black.” Silently choking, I pushed back even further. How does someone actually think like that, and then decide it’s ok to let it come out of her mouth? The obliteration and subjugation of indigenous cultures in Latin (case in point) America was no less brutal than it was here. And the idea that speaking Spanish was just naturally what everyone did, well, the parallels with Afrikaans must have utterly escaped her.

But the shopping in Buenos Aires is brilliant, apparently, and oh, it was delightful to hear about how much red meat and wine she consumed. I guess we were back to food after all.

march in the delta (clinic)

I absolutely thought it was malaria again – the fever, the aching muscles pulling on aching bones, my increasingly lack of ability to comprehend what was going on around me. Even as I sat on it, I felt like the couch got further and further away. The 104 degree thermometer in my armpit confirmed it. So I called a friend and she took me to the clinic. Malaria, I said, she said. A nurse called the doctor and the next thing I knew I had a handful of little bags – quinine for the malaria, paracetamol for pain and fever, some antibiotic for my guts that was not the loperamide the doctor wanted me to have (“we don’t seem to have any…”). After refusing to be admitted I went home to my friend’s guest room to sweat and hallucinate and shake with wrenching chills while ghostly paperwork flew around the room and my head…manila file folders, pink sheets of paper, envelopes, stacks of things I had done and not done over the previous week haunted me. I must be a nerd if the only things bubbling up when I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep are office supplies.

Anyway, the next day was worse. I threw up the water I was trying to drink, which meant the meds would not stay in my stomach. So back to the hospital we went, and I stayed – even though there was no IV quinine on which to put me, which was the whole point of going in. But then, it’s gastroenteritis, the doctor said, when for a second time they didn’t see malaria in my blood. I was infected with a raging unknown parasite, but he added: “It doesn’t really matter what it is as long as the fever’s coming down.” I was in no shape to argue. Having started the treatment for malaria, I had to finish it or risk developing resistance to it in the future. Quinine, by the way, makes your ears screech while the bitter yellow pills turn your stomach against you. It also wreaks more havoc with your liver than a month of nights at the Maun Sports Bar.

I SMS’d my brother and his wife. “So are you gonna die or what?” he yelled into his cell phone, standing in their kitchen in Italy. The nurses were lovely people but they did not really inspire confidence. Pushing burning antibiotics into my veins every four hours, they seemed to only enter the room when I was in just enough of a stupor to think I might be sleeping. Once I rolled over and my IV tube, hooked into a small bottle of liquid pharmaceutical fire, fell onto the floor. Medicine poured onto the floor. I grabbed for the bottle, twisting it upright while my other arm flailed at the nurse call button. After she stuck the tube back in, I pointed out that at least a third of the bottle was not coursing through me but pooled under the edge of the bed. “Oh, well, that’s too bad, because it’s the last one!” Next, a syringe full of one of the other kinds of antibiotics I was shot full of didn’t want to pour into the IV. So she leaned on the plunger. Hard. The back of my hand swelled with a germinating golf ball of penicillin, my distended vein making my eyes go wide with pain. “Let’s just take this out,” another nurse said softly, later, pulling out the IV needle. And shoving a new one into my inner wrist, so that I could not move my left hand without feeling the drag of the newly embedded needle against tendons and flesh.

I bled into the IV. My guts got me up every hour to go the bathroom. My bed and I slowly took on the smell of my gym bag. My head throbbed and my hips ached with the strain of trying to be absolutely still. I didn’t leave the little room with the indigo-swirled comforter (“It makes me think of water and bugs swimming in it,” said my friend) and pepto-pink door for three nights. I swung at mosquitoes with my dirty flipflop, figuring if I didn’t have malaria when I went in I might well have it by the time I got out.

The fever shrank, but the infection in my guts was unrelenting. Two days in, the doctor commented on my loperamide dosage while doing his morning rounds. “I’m not getting loperamide, you didn’t have any,” I said weakly. “How am I supposed to be taking it?”

“You take a double dose to start, then one more after every time you go to the bathroom,” he said. For the first time I felt despairing tears well up. “They gave me something once yesterday but that was it,” I said. I wasn’t taking the drugs I was supposed to have. No wonder. I have a friend in med school who thinks he wants to be a doctor in Africa. At some point, I remember thinking, maybe I should ask him if he really wants to work under these kinds of conditions. That is, what medication? You mean we should have quinine in stock during prime malaria season? And that there should be a close relationship between what gets written down on a chart and what happens to the patient?

The next day, after nine kinds of medications, half a dozen rotating nurses, three different doctors, the payment equivalent of about forty bucks, and my signature on 34 separate invoices, they let me go home from the Delta Clinic. Mostly I was tired – of more chemicals circulating inside me than blood, of the deafening ring in my ears, of not being able to sleep, of being poked at for what seemed like no reason. But I was also ok. Folks from work had come to visit, called, asked about me. Even the cleaning ladies gushed with relief to see me back in the office, eight days later. And I reminded myself, at least I wasn’t out in the bush. At least I didn’t have a major trip planned. At least my friends were around to look after me. At least I could afford to GO to the hospital. At least, at least. “What the hell were you doin’ in the hospital?” my boss cried over the phone from Gabs when he found out.

Maybe I should have said, I just needed a few days of air conditioning.

this one is much better

thanks, zapiro (check him out here).