peregrine by nature

I blog about Africa because I was raised by one of her tribes. And because here things that are ragged are patched and cherished. Because sub Saharan thunderstorms are so deafening you have to believe in heaven. And mostly I blog about Africa because I want you to come, and fall in love.

Thanks awfully to whiteafrican for tagging me. You inspire me. Go read about all that he does for Africa.
I hereby tag Szavanna from South Africa and Esther Garvi aka Ishtar from Niger.

in the south of senegal standing up for a promised future gets you a complimentary headshot in the local paper. sugar, fertilizer and TNT make an explosive cocktail in the middle east. as for me this foam mattress is cheap and there is no honey for my tea and i’m counting these as blessings.
Read the rest of this entry »

by night you twist and turn and try not to dream and by day you haunt a house you can’t breathe in, can’t eat. but you’re changing.

you avowed young that with suspiciously guarded land borders and territorial waters you could prove John Donne wrong. but you never anticipated pursuit from above.

and so it begins…

From this post:
John Donne

you fall into bed nearly broken, the sorrows and victories of the day bittersweet on your tongue. but joy comes in the morning.

Brew coffee and heat canned evaporated milk. Pour simultaneously into teacup. Add wild honey to taste.

Slice and toast baguette and slather on organic butter and marmalade, guava jam or hibiscus jelly. Or all three.

This is the matrix. Wake up.

Attaya, or gunpowder tea is strong, sweet tea served in tiny glassfuls in a 3 round ritual. Water is boiled on a fuurnu with a small packet of tea leaves and a full kas of sugar, each round with added sugar to symbolize the growing sweetness of friendship. Or, alternatively, the first bitter round is for life, the second for friendship and the third is the sweetest, for love. The tea is poured impossibly high from kas to kas, up to a two foot arc without spilling a drop. This creates delicious foam. Return warga to fuurnu and bring back to a boil. Serve scalding hot. Second and third rounds add mint.

When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then – that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.
–CS Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

he ran to me and asked for my Kirene bottle, one quarter full. they passed it around in a circle, taking careful mouthfuls until the water is gone and i’m no longer my own. some days you cry so hard your ribs might break.

West Africa has a joie de vivre that trancends circumstance. If only I could learn as much. Senegal, you have a beautiful smile. Alhamdulilaay.

Threads crisscross the planet binding portico to rooftop, my Dakar stoop to your Chicago flat. This is where underdeveloped meets tech; two women are grinding grain, one is taken, and the other takes a call on her Samsung.

After one month it’s become clear that I’ve been subconsciously hoping that I was, at soul, fluent. That after a few weeks of verbal stumbling along one day I’d open my mouth and all this forgotten language would gush out with perfect accent, perfect pitch and I’d be witty and interesting in Wolof and French. It didn’t happen exactly that way so, onward language lessons ahoy. I am finding them adventurous somewhat and I do enjoy learning but I’m impatient because there is so much to do, and more easily done if I could communicate better, or at all. I long for the future of cyberpunk when I can lie back, plug in and upload a language program directly into my brain, a la the Matrix, or have a memory chip inserted like Hiro Protagonist. But I begrudgingly guess the reward is in the struggle and muddle and study until you finally have that aha moment, that epiphany, the world opening before you in all its pearly glory.

And this is why I came here, to be out of my element. To live in a place where it would take real commitment to be complacent. The frustrations pale next to the payoffs, when things I agonized over in my last life, things I tossed and turned and petitioned, some of those thank God are but shadows of dreams.

Years later I still remember eyes that met mine on city streets and in museums, on car rapides and in the village. We’re only souls poured into skin, I could have been anyone.