peregrine by nature

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…”

The ocean feeds without prejudice on the corrupt and the blameless and spits out bones and shells and sea glass.

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.

african dust is kicked up and blown west on the trade winds where it freezes in midair and falls on your tongue and mittens.

Ten minutes after I took this the dust rolled over us and the sky went nearly black.
In this post: Wiki about the harmattan. How snowflakes are formed.

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.

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.

all is well in your comfortable life and you cannot sleep most nights. so you move closer to the equator where the sun and the struggle knocks you flat on your back like a fallen goliath and your alarm clock is the bustle of the street waking up and an occasional early dawn riot.