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Karibu kila mtu. |
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LOVINGLY
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Alli
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11 December
2007
7:15pm
10 December
2007
11:30pm
9 December
2007
8:30pm
6 December
2007
6:58pm
Later we traveled to their eco-preserve outside Kololi. We walked through dense brush as my aunt checked the status of the forest, always on the lookout for somebody who has chopped a tree or dug a hole. "Simon," she says. I look up and she is bending down to remove a tick from my leg. I check elsewhere but come up clean. Good thing. We keep walking and I asked what is 'over there'. She says that we don't walk over there because its for the baboons and colubus monkeys. Inside the preserve is a family my aunt cares for, and the mother has given birth two days ago. She is nursing the child so delicately, but her eyes are tired. Their simple house, ground mats, a fire tended in a metal firepot, its all not where you think a woman would care for a newborn. But this is her life and her place and her family. They are sitting around each other with her, talking to my aunt who has come by. I look at it and am so overwhelmed with awe for the strength of this woman. Two days after birth tending the food and feeding an infant while the men and boys are sitting. And its without blinking, because this is the reality of her and the silent mothers of this land, the way its always been. She is, as far as I see it, living to the fullest capacity possible for a human being. I am left looking at my arms while looking for ticks, and perceive each to barely contain a mote of such reserve.
5 December
2007
1:22pm
The ferry took us across the water to Banjul, its capital, and people found me with a piece of paper in their winshield that said ´Simon´ and had a winking smily face. I know this is from Claudette. My wonderful Aunt I´ve only seen every three to five years is speaking Wolof that evening, a common one in Senegal and the Gambia, to her employee who is mixing flowers in water to make wonjo, a delicious syrupy beverage of heavy purple. The girl answers back some sort of affirmation and continues her steady deliberate stir of the shallow wide bowl within the kitchen, potted with living ornaments like everywhere else. My aunt Claudette and uncle David´s house hooks and dips into brightly colored side rooms and wide sitting areas. Each doorframe is another color, each metal window security grill is painted in a sunset or in a gradient from light brilliant color to dark brilliant color. The place is covered in a blanket of bamboo leaves sprinkled with small pots of seedlings or cactus. Wind, when a strong gust comes, brings such a whisking of branches that it nearly interrupts speech. Ants are walking up the thicklime painted door frame. Two papaya trees are hanging green fruits for later. I sat talking with her and David late into the night, it wound down and I barely noticed because she shares such a commonality. Though I see her but twice a decade, we pick up quick, and talk and talk and all of a sudden I am all but asleep and the night is in full swing. The power has been out and the worker said he can´t get the generator to work, so David goes and starts it for him and we light candles and talk yet later. Oh the blessing of family and commonality, of relationship and family. I feel so sustained through this meeting, it gives me structure, foundation, reassurance of my person through contact of my history. And its all done so wonderfully with a tender Gambian uncle and a lively Dutch aunt serving purple flowered juice and talking over the light hum of a petrol generator.
4 December
2007
12:01am
3 December
2007
11:49am
Everywhere is ocean smell, heavy like Mombasa. The simple license plates are vivid blue and white lettered, start with DK. The roads were at times covered in sand, so much sand everywhere. The soccer field is sand. I watched a group of boys tussle furiously for the ball, sprouting arches of pale lifted sand with each motion of leg. Half of the roads we took last night were 'diversion'ed or road blocked for work, so it took awhile to go someplace near. The taxis and 'transport commun' buses we followed were painted with so much yellow and blue, stars and diamonds, faces, painted with letters, luggage racks on the roof, and so so old looking. 'Alhamdulilah', they say. I know that ones Arabic, but nothing else. We drove past the all concrete buildings, zig zagged concrete windows, so much construction. They were hanging clothes on the roof! "The street kids are from the villages, their parents send them here to learn the Qur'an," the girl said. "What is the hardest part of living here," I asked. She said it was the oppression. "From living in a walled churchy community," I asked? "No," she said, "The spiritual oppression. This is Satan's country." I tried to think which one is Gods. I am sitting in a room, tiny tiled, that has screened windows. The mosquitos come through anyways. I keep the glass slats open because the air feels so different from Nairobi, heavy like I've exercised, lulling the effort of movement and thought. Why am I sleeping so well I wonder? Last night the call to prayer droned on, though more intense than I had heard anywhere. Distant, but really wild. I went to bed at 11, and it was still warbling and pitching through the room, mixing the heavy air. I dropped to bed and tried and counted: un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq....
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