Written July 15
Pandemonium!!
It’s a like a Wall St. fire drill. Shoving, shouting, and a powerful tide of people running and brushing past from every direction. Peace Corps had warned us not to come here. I’m constantly rubbernecking to keep track of the other volunteers and scanning the crowd as we try to cut across the undertow, but Peace Corps’s advice is kept far from my mind. I’m too busy looking for what everyone is after– a cool drink of water.
It’s halftime at the Mali-Ghana soccer match, and we’re circling the concourse outside the stadium. The sun went down around the twenthy-fifth minute, but the pre-game hours of line standing and seat saving has left me - and 30,000 of my closest friends - a bit parched.
I can say with some confidence that these entirely non-threatening skirmishes were not what PC had in mind when they questioned the wisdom of going to a World Cup qualifier in West Africa, especially when the visitors are heavily favored to win. In fact, just last year a number people got trampled at this very same stadium - and that was just an Alpha Blondy concert!
But here, all has been law and order. The pre-game traffic wasn’t any heavier than you might expect in the States, but the fast and (literally) loose passenger safety regulations meant hundreds of pick-up trucks and vans with dozens of people overflowing from every door, window roof and bumper, each one clutching on to ‘post-market’ and ‘user-installed’ oh-shit bars. Impressive, too, was the line outside the stadium. Lacking any snaking corrals to keep the line compact and single file, a tight line coiled around the stadium. Strangers stood chest to back for easily a kilometer. Police enforced no-go zones on either side of the line by blindly swinging clubs like General Grievous as they paced up and down either side of the line. Those who thought they were too good to conga with the rest of us were quickly corrected. One-and, two-and, one, kick!
And even the current brouhaha isn’t all tooth-and-claw greed. My friends wave me to the outside wall of the concourse overlooking the property behind the stadium. Then I see them – thousands of men, shoeless and prostrate in prayer. Whatever residual tension I'm harboring downshifts two gears. In Madagascar, my friends and I would have had to Houdini out of potentially thousands of handshake manacles and suffocating vapor clouds of ethanol. But not here - every Muslim in sight is sober. The most we'd have to worry about was staying out of the way as they race into the bathrooms, roll up their pant legs and crowd the sinks for the ablutions. After all, Allah waits for no conga line.
As I'm taking in the view, man brushes past, his arms full of the coveted polyethylene pouches of water. The American in me immediately thinks scalper! and I chase after him. When I ask him if he’s selling, he smiles, shakes his head. In an archetype of Malian patience, tries to push one into my hand.
In Mali, it’s impolite to refuse a gift, something that I tend to forget. For example, one morning in Koulikoro, the capital of my region, I’d walked downtown to get breakfast from possibly the best meat & egg sandwich stand in Mali. The woman makes this onion sauce that is at once an aphrodisiac in the short term and a guarantor of abstinence in the long.
On the way, I practiced an obligatory gesture I learned in Madagascar but perfected in Mali – greeting. It usually goes something like this:
Good morning! How’d you sleep? How are you? How’s your family? My name? Madou Coulibaly.
From here, it can go one of two ways. If they, like me, are a Coulibaly, we wish each other a nice day and I’m on my way. If they go by any other last name, I’m told in the warmest tones and with the heartiest of handshakes that I am an uncircumcised slave donkey who farts a lot, or some permutation thereof. It’s a complicated relationship.
I'd finally made it to the sandwich stand and had begun the trip back home. I'm cradling the warm sandwich like a football to keep any onion sauce from escaping the baguette. One of the not-Coulibalys I identified earlier hollered from across the street. Where are you going with that? Coulibalys are too poor for anything but beans! Give it here. Feeling a little insult fatigue, I decided to call her bluff. I crossed the street, marched up the steps and I was halfway into my play-action pass before I realized it wasn't what either of us had intended. But it's too late. So inexorably, with my confusion mirrored in her face, she took the sandwich.
Likewise, back at the soccer game, with a well-practiced smile of resigned gratitude, I take the water.
****************
Mali eventually lost, 2-0, so thankfully halftime was as lively as things got for us. Granted, we left after the second goal, and even then we had to battle our way through congested streets with no public transport in sight. We had the good fortune of being picked up by a Malian couple driving a luxury SUV paid for in diamonds. “It's nothing,” the woman said. “Somewhere in America, I’m sure someone is doing the same for a Malian.” My mind ran through the particulars of a wealthy American couple picking up five West Africans from the streets of DC in the dark of night, and I briefly considered contending her assertion. Once again, good fortune intervened and a combination of inadequate Bambara and nearly adequate judgment kept my tongue in check. It’s easier to pay it forward from here.
But why did it have to be the sandwich!?
Thursday, August 20, 2009
De-Consolidation Homesick Blues
Written March 2, 2009
I’ll admit, I flipped the switch too early. Sometime during that bumpy, dusty, overnight truck ride, my imagination betrayed me.
Under normal conditions, it takes 11 hours to get from Fianar from Ikongo. That night it took 16, so I had plenty of time to explore all the implications of the inevitable hypothesis of what if this is goodbye? By the time we got to Fianar, I’d worked out so many contingencies, wrapped my head so tightly around the idea of evacuation that I forgot to leave room for any other eventuality.
And who can blame me? Who doesn’t want that narrative? I, a worker for peace, had to be dragged across a tarmac and into a plane while the country self-destructed around me! Who doesn’t want to step out of Reagan National Airport in the middle of February shod in flip flops, unshaven and jacketless because… well, dammit, that’s all the time there was!
So, you understand, during those three weeks of excruciating uncertainty and mind-rattling ambiguity, my stomach tweaked itself a notch tighter every time it looked like my life might not be as exciting as I had imagined. Going back to my village of Ambolomadinika became inconceivable.
I was afraid it’d be weird. That things would be intrinsicially different now that the fragile nature of the relationships I’d built had been laid bare. Afraid that they’d resent me for being a needle drop away (get it? Because Andry is a former disc j—ah, forget it) from writing the whole thing off as an aborted vacation. Afraid that all my half-baked projects would fall apart. They probably will anyhow, but this at least would have given me a scapegoat.
But here’s the punchline, O Patient Reader: Nothing has changed. If anything, things have gotten better. I feel much less obligated to put up with people who only see me as a walking sack of money. Mind you, there are still annoyances. The madness caused by too much time in your head, the stark differences in expectations, the day to day cultural subtleties I’m sure to never truly grasp. They’re all still there. But these annoyances are part of a routine deep enough to swim in and solid enough to stand on. They are family.
Like too many of us, I’ve been to the edge of life-altering moments before and experienced the pre-emptive (perhaps artificial?) hindsight that refocuses and revitalizes the old reality. It’s happened often enough that I reluctantly acknowledge that this new frame of reference will relax into the old. The head time, expectations and culture will likely prevail, and soon enough I’ll be back to staining the pages of my journal blue with ball-point fury. At least until experience and time bring genuine hindsight. The principle behind every Peace Corps service is the hope that this happens before you become an RPCV.
I found this in one of the notebooks I packed out of Madagascar. I wrote it the interim between consolidation and evacuation. I'd intended to upload it during my next trip to Fianar.
I’ll admit, I flipped the switch too early. Sometime during that bumpy, dusty, overnight truck ride, my imagination betrayed me.
Under normal conditions, it takes 11 hours to get from Fianar from Ikongo. That night it took 16, so I had plenty of time to explore all the implications of the inevitable hypothesis of what if this is goodbye? By the time we got to Fianar, I’d worked out so many contingencies, wrapped my head so tightly around the idea of evacuation that I forgot to leave room for any other eventuality.
And who can blame me? Who doesn’t want that narrative? I, a worker for peace, had to be dragged across a tarmac and into a plane while the country self-destructed around me! Who doesn’t want to step out of Reagan National Airport in the middle of February shod in flip flops, unshaven and jacketless because… well, dammit, that’s all the time there was!
So, you understand, during those three weeks of excruciating uncertainty and mind-rattling ambiguity, my stomach tweaked itself a notch tighter every time it looked like my life might not be as exciting as I had imagined. Going back to my village of Ambolomadinika became inconceivable.
I was afraid it’d be weird. That things would be intrinsicially different now that the fragile nature of the relationships I’d built had been laid bare. Afraid that they’d resent me for being a needle drop away (get it? Because Andry is a former disc j—ah, forget it) from writing the whole thing off as an aborted vacation. Afraid that all my half-baked projects would fall apart. They probably will anyhow, but this at least would have given me a scapegoat.
But here’s the punchline, O Patient Reader: Nothing has changed. If anything, things have gotten better. I feel much less obligated to put up with people who only see me as a walking sack of money. Mind you, there are still annoyances. The madness caused by too much time in your head, the stark differences in expectations, the day to day cultural subtleties I’m sure to never truly grasp. They’re all still there. But these annoyances are part of a routine deep enough to swim in and solid enough to stand on. They are family.
Like too many of us, I’ve been to the edge of life-altering moments before and experienced the pre-emptive (perhaps artificial?) hindsight that refocuses and revitalizes the old reality. It’s happened often enough that I reluctantly acknowledge that this new frame of reference will relax into the old. The head time, expectations and culture will likely prevail, and soon enough I’ll be back to staining the pages of my journal blue with ball-point fury. At least until experience and time bring genuine hindsight. The principle behind every Peace Corps service is the hope that this happens before you become an RPCV.
I found this in one of the notebooks I packed out of Madagascar. I wrote it the interim between consolidation and evacuation. I'd intended to upload it during my next trip to Fianar.
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