Normalizing

It had been a bad week. I’d just recovered from another bout of diarrhea. This one even made the Peace Corps doctor say ‘ew’ when I described my symptoms to her over the phone. Maybe the poor woman was eating breakfast or something; I never think of these things in time.

After dinner, Bafing, Na, Bablé and I were sitting around the after dinner fire. I was feeling pretty spiffy, first for the renewed control of my bowels (I can poop and fart… separately?! Great!) and second because I was sporting the new shuka wrap that Tara had given to me in Tanzania. The season had turned colder, but it was still a fur piece from being cold. The plaid blanket wrap gained a lot of attention – not for it’s clever pattern, exotic origin, or culturally accurate drape, but for the simple fact that I was wearing it. “Madou,” they’d ask, each in turn, “are you…cold?”

Now, as a native of Michigan – an Arborigine goddammit! – and a part-time Yooper, it’s my birthright to deny, or at least impugn the existence of cold anywhere else on the planet, particularly in the bloody tropics. I’d already gone to great lengths to explicate my standards for cold:

Little pieces of ice fall from the sky and pile up on the ground until people get lost in it! We put metal ropes on our car tires that bite the ice so we can go places. Some people don’t have houses and burn garbage to stay warm. And, when the river freezes, some crazy people build small houses on the ice, drill holes in it and wait for stupid fish to jump out of the cold water below!

So, “No,” Madou lies, “I already told you, cold doesn’t exist in Mali. I just like my blanket.”

This precipitates a conversation that reveals one of the most perplexing misconceptions about America I’ve yet had to face. Are you ready?

Mali’s cold is bad.

America's cold is good.

By this point I’ve already talked down ridiculous claims like "America is rich is that she prints all of the world’s money," and "Mali can’t manufacture airplanes because America won’t teach her" and "Michael Jackson took medicine to turn white because he didn’t like being black" and even "George W. Bush personally executed Saddam Hussein." But this one left me speechless. So I asked Bafing what he means. He said that no matter how bad it is outside, the cold doesn’t get in our houses. He said that we don’t have dust storms that make people sick. He said that if we do get sick there's cheap and unexpired medication we can take that lets us do our work anyway. By the time he's done, I’ve privately admitted to myself that even our friends in the economically challenged Upper Peninsula have it pretty good. But I’ve made little to no headway conveying the hardships faced by snowbound Americans. Part of this is due to my linguistic shortcomings, but I have a tendency to make this harder for myself than it needs to be. My anecdote about Hugo Chavez's donations of heating oil to the snowbound northeast was especially confused.

But through these conversations I also begin to see an upside to the ridiculous barriers our government puts in place to limit immigration to the educated elite. Sometime you should ask someone from a less developed country what they had to do to get their visa, you'll be astounded by the barriers they have to overcome. But in some ways, it serves a purpose. By the time someone has money, computer skills, and contacts in the United States, their dreams of America tend to be fairly grounded in reality. Yes, it's a place where opportunities exist, but they’re not distributed evenly. Yes, there is wealth, but there is also poverty, disease, xenophobia and even racism. Even the ones who eventually make it over still have a hard go of it. But every time I try to explain this to the proponents of the Candyland vision of America, they flatly deny it. This kind of reaction has the power to still even the most vivacious and fluent tongues. It’s like if you told a group of children that the Easter Bunny isn’t real, only to have them snap back in unison, “Don’t be silly. You’ll find out one day.”

You start to ask yourself, what is it they know???

Speaking of the Easter Bunny, this spring I’ll get my 3^rd chance to explain the American Easter tradition. Given that “pretend” or “make-believe” aren’t in my Bambara vocabulary, what do you suppose it will do to their vision of Paradise? I can see it now. Years down the road they'll be telling each other Madou said that in America they have giant bunnies. And that every year, they sneak into your house and hide colorful chocolate-filled eggs in every corner because… what did Madou say? Jesus died for us sinners? Amen and hallelujah! I guess we Americans are capable of some pretty stunning self-deception, too.

Bafing and I were neck deep in the Chavez fiasco when it happened. Out of the darkness, a man rolled up on a bicycle. At first glance he was a dead ringer for a WWI pilot, except his bomber jacket was nylon and his aviator’s cap was actually a disembodied hood from some other jacket, the drawstring fastened under his chin. The rest was pretty spot-on – everything from the scarf foppishly tossed over one shoulder, right down to his knickers that were ballooning out of pointed leather boots. For extra flair, he’s got an 8-inch knife sheathed at his waist, a shotgun on his back and what appears to be a headlight stripped from a car and strapped around his forehead with an old bicycle inner tube. (Handy tip: These inner tubes, cut into strips, are used and reused for purposes as sundry as our uses of duct tape.) After the perfunctory greetings, he asked if anyone had an axe. Without a word, Bablé fetched one from inside the house. The pilot held the axe in front of him, looking at it approvingly - yes, this will do. Then he un-mounted the blade, returned the handle, and disappeared into the night.

What struck me as odd about this is that nothing at all about this struck me as odd.

My point being, whether it’s the hot (not cold!) weather, the improbable loads carried on the backs of bicycles or on the heads of women, or the perfectly bizarre creature that is The Donkey, I’m getting used to life here. I guess it’s a good sign that I'm comfortable with my environment.But at the same time, it makes it harder to recognize the "unrelatable" moments, and sharing the things I’ve made sense of seems less urgent. So sorry for that. And sorry again for when I come back to the States and laugh at all the wonderfully absurd things we do.

Birdbaths… bwaaa ha ha ha ha!