peregrine by nature

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.

Investing in small, locally run businesses is the best thing individuals can do for my country. I would like to partner with some friends here and start 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 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.’

wow

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)

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 of the Rats of Nimh on the short story, The Rat Race

“It was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop. But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town- so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.

The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running. In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever. Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones ever bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place.

…the reason I had read it so eagerly was that it was called “The Rat Race”- which, I learned, means a race where, no matter how fast you run, you don’t get anywhere. But there was nothing in the book about rats, and I felt bad about the title because, I thought, it wasn’t a rat race at all, it was a People Race…”

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.

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When the watering holes dry up and the plains begin to look Martian.

‘The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.’ -nietzsche

when it leaves it tries to take something

the fishing ships come in laden with buckets of fruits de mer and mermaid tails

Sometimes you scan the horizon for your vanishing point and just dream.

i saw muslims worrying their prayer beads, lips moving soundlessly. I saw talibés with their tomato cans, mostly empty. i saw a porter carrying flats of eggs balanced impossibly atop his head. i saw women carrying babies; cats, chicken bones and i saw seagulls with silver flashing fish. and i saw a man with nothing, his arms were outstretched and empty but he carried the weight of the whole world.

It is pre-dawn on a chill blue ocean and the mosque speakers come alive with a hiss and crackle and haunting song of 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.