fast arriving at where i might have been if it weren’t for inept echolocation or the lure of cheap, shiny, barbed things or falling into that Ziguinchor brook and almost drowning.
it is not known why whales get stranded 5
Posted by Kari
on March 31, 2009
Going home, where the NYC winters aren’t bleeding me 13
Posted by Kari
on March 28, 2009
I truly believe investing in small, locally run businesses is the best thing individuals can do for my country. In fact, I would like to partner with some friends here and start just such an enterprise in my home village of Chobo.
A missionary couple who has been in their village for over 20 years asked me how I would handle the jealousy and strife this enterprise would cause. I was incredulous when they gave me this example.
‘We have several boxes of clothing to give away that have been in storage for several months now. We haven’t given the clothes away to the villagers because doing so will only invoke jealousy and quarrelling between those who received something and those who haven’t. You know how these people are. In fact, we have pretty much decided that we will just burn the boxes of clothes.’
How would you respond to such a question? Is burning clothing in a poor country sending a message of love?
Paradise or sacrifice? 4
Posted by Kari
on March 24, 2009
People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Away with the word in such a view and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. I never made a sacrifice.
–Speech by David Livingstone to students at Cambridge University (4 December 1857)
Friendships and tea are best made slowly 8
Posted by Kari
on March 14, 2009
Don’t come to Africa if you think you have nothing to learn here. Take the west with all its time saving gadgets and falsely modest claims of the workaholic and see that it is yet unsatisfied, as empty as a vacuum.
One day in my life 8
Posted by Kari
on March 12, 2009
It is pre-dawn on a chilly January morning, and the mosque speakers come alive with a hiss and crackle and the stirring call of the muezzin singing the first call to prayer.
Allaaaaah hu Akbar. (Allah is great.)
Hayya ‘ala-l-falah, hayya ‘ala-l-falah. (Hasten to real success. Come to prayer.)
Five times a day across the arm of Dakar and throughout Senegal, Muslims take down their holy beads and unroll their prayer mats toward Mecca. I awake to start my day more leisurely, getting up to heat water on the kerosene burner and sitting on the balcony with my devotional. Senegal is 94 percent Islamic and is tolerant of the remaining 6 percent, comprised mostly of tribal animists and various missionary groups. After being shocked awake by a cold shower (water heaters are an ill-afforded luxury here), I eat. Breakfast is water and powdered milk, boiled and mixed into tea, a baguette with chocolate hazelnut spread or Kiri cheese and some fruit, usually guava or oranges.
This is Saturday and my to-do list has only two errands, but in Senegal, it will take me most of the day to complete. The list reads 1) fish market 2) laundry. It’s a pace I’ve missed during my time living in Austin. Now, after more than 20 years, I’m back in Senegal, and it feels as though I’ve never left.
The street awakens in a rush of noise as the vendors set up their wares. Sheep baaa for home, sharing the road with the first of the traffic. At the port of Soumbédioune, fishing boats start to come in with the dawn, their crews tiredly triumphant, for today the market will have fish. I jostle with the crowds for a place in line as restaurant owners write up their lunch special and the days catch is made into Ceebu Jën, a delicious platter of fried rice, fish and olives, cabbage, carrots and manioc, perfected in Senegal. Ceebu Jën is served best with bissap, the red, cold national tea made from hibiscus petals and sugar.
This is the dry season 6
Posted by Kari
on March 01, 2009
When the watering holes dry up and the plains begin to look Martian.
