some of the things inside my head

I turn my feet right down the proverbial dark alley.  On my right hand is the abandoned brick hotel that drips water on my head every time.  To my left the rippled clouds mirror what they hover over.  The setting sun makes them drip cobalt orange and fade into a dusty brown.  The grumble of a trolley car behind me.  I pull down my hat.  Fear is spoken with the eyes.
I wasn’t headed where I was going yet.
But I knew that I was close.  And to tell you the truth I wasn’t here.  As I often am.   Not here.  I was charging across an African mountainside inside my head.  Land rover slapping us around like rag dolls.  I feel the pulling on my heart at the most unexpected times.  Its hard sometimes.  And its even harder to explain why.  I guess I know I don’t belong here.  People think its cool when I tell them where I’ve been.  What I’ve done.  Of course I only tell them the good things.  and I leave a lot of things out.  Because its really hard to explain what its like to feel the shockwave of a missile on your face or to offer water to man who knows he’s about to die.  Trying to hand medicine to a lady can be difficult when she’s lost her fingers to leprosy.  and there’s so much that I could never really make people understand.  Like what happens to a grown man with AIDS when he gets sick.  Or what it feels like to hold the hand of a lady as the doctors cut into her side.  No pain killers.  But sometimes in my mind I’m just charging across the countryside.  Road dust slowly caking to my hair.  And I’m pursuing something.  Let’s be honest.  Because that’s really what this is.  And what I’m chasing I will always find at the most unexpected moments.  I’ve found it buried in the white and black swirled sand in front of my house in Africa and sitting in the candle light of village chiefs and in the hands of children who don‘t own a thing.  It’s that moment when you know that you‘re where you‘re supposed to be.  I guess that’s why this is so hard.  To step away from that very thing and come to what many consider the easiest country to be.  But if it wasn’t what you were made for….
I turn my feet left.  But I wasn‘t headed where I was going yet.  As I pass brown concrete structures on dimly lit streets I wonder if this is really all worth it.  Education I mean.  Lots of people died today that could have been saved by a simple malaria medication.  One that I keep right behind my toothpaste.  You never know when it could decide to slip into your blood stream.  But you need an education even to give medicine away.
I turn my feet right again.  On the street where the drunk lady plowed into my roomates’ cars.  Yes.  Plural.  Coming to America was hard for me.  Like taking a soldier out of battle.  You feel at peace to be in such a safe place but not at peace to not be where you belong and guilty that you can’t be there to fight for the ones you think that you could save.  And guilty because you know that they DO die.  Its harder to accept their death when you know their names and their favorite shirt and their favorite song on your mp3 player.  And I don’t want to tell you how many of them I had to bury.  I wonder how much longer I must walk these streets in New Orleans.  My feet hurry.  As if by getting home from work faster and studying better and finishing stronger I will get back quicker and save more of them.  But I wasn’t headed where I was going yet.  I would have to make another turn.  And then another.  And then I would have to walk some more.  And I knew that it would feel like I would never get there.  But I also knew that like every time before…I would find my way to where I was trying to go.  And that someday again I would find myself charging across an African mountainside, knowing that I was made for this.

…. . …..there’s no name for this one

Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
At this particular moment in time I am chewing on a cockroach. Surely the biggest one I have every seen. Had ever seen.
And I am sitting on a couch. To my right a prostitute. To my left two prostitutes. Straight in front of me two more. I think the one to my left is named “Bee“…. but it hasn’t actually occurred to me yet what her name is.
So I suppose I have some explaining to do.
I probably owe you an explanation.
After all, how does a young guy finds himself sitting at “restaurant” with hourly rent rooms upstairs and five prostitutes around him and a cockroach inside his mouth.
Crunch
Crunch
Wince
Crunch
Only parts of the head and tail have meat. Once its all been squeezed out by the molars you spit the head and wings out. And legs. Not like the grasshoppers I just ate. They go down nice and smooth. ish.
And “bee” is putting her number in my phone.
You might be asking yourself how does a young guy who just ate grasshoppers and cockroaches sitting with a bunch of prostitutes at a bar that is actually a brothel find himself getting some prostitutes phone numbers.
Well I asked for them.
Anyone of a more wayward persuasion might think I am living the good life, minus cockroach head and wings. But for me, though completely at ease, what am doing will certainly go down as one of the more difficult moments in my life. In spite of finding myself sitting on a couch sipping on a coke.
This is not easy at all.
Asking them these questions….
How long have you been here?
7 years.
10 years.
4 years.…..
And I know that for these girls every one of those years marks another year of debt bondage to their pimps, a debt that can take decades to pay off.
Did you know other people in Bangkok?
My sister was a prostitute here.
My sisters and cousins are prostitutes here….
….
The surveys are in my backpack right now.
On my hotel bed.
Contaminating it with their truth.

As the girls started to talk in Esaan I saw on there faces how they felt about their lives. And I felt evil for even bringing it here. To their work. Forcing them to do anything that would remind them about how they got here. And why they can’t leave. “Bee” wanted to see her family again. In the North. As they were speaking in their first language, a language much like Lao…
It was then that it occurred to me.
One was “Bee.”
On the right was “C.”
Across from me was “Dee.”
“Your names are just letters from the English alphabet.” I told them.
“Yes.”
“But I want to know your real names.”
…
“Our real names?” they looked confused and scared.
And they didn’t know if they were allowed to tell me.
I had already broken some rules.
Asking how they got here.
Most of them were trafficked.
And they were afraid to answer that question.
So I told them to skip it.
Then one by one.
Opening up more to me then they probably have ever opened up to a foreigner man…
A
And B
And C
And D
Began to tell me their names their mothers gave them.
Before all this.
Before innocence was something that could bring a higher bid.
Chaiama
Lawan
Phan
Ramphoei*
Each one spoke there name regally.
As if it represented who they really were. As if all of this wasn’t really around us and they weren’t really in a bar full of inappropriate old American men and they were really loved.
It killed me…

Is there any job you would rather have?
The survey asked next….
I wish Chaiama’s English hadn’t sufficed in this moment.
I wish I didn’t understand what she was about to say.
Because it is haunting me.
Even right now.
Its so hard to type this right.
Because I’m crying sohard
“I…..want……to sell…..in market……face cream……to make girls beautiful…….”
I tried to smile.
And hold everything back.
It was so simple.
And so innocent.
And life isn’t fair.
I don’t care what you say.
There’s no way that it’s fair.
A crusty American old man steps over wondering what has made me such a big deal. Says a few inappropriate things. Slaps a girls butt. And walks away.

How do you start?
They were so confused by me.
There.
Meters from the lady boy cabaret.
Surrounded “massage parlors”
Encircled with “karaoke bars”
Just sitting.
I didn’t want sex. I just wanted to ask them questions and learn Thai. In truth I was doing research for a HIV prevention program through Tulane University. I was so limited in what I could say and ask. And I was being policed by the owner of the joint. But I knew someday and somehow I wanted Chaiama to be able to sell face cream to make girls beautiful. So I did one of the oddest things I’ve done in my life. Asked for prostitutes’ phone numbers. What else do you do? And right there. I did something I doubt they’ve experienced from a man before. I just enjoyed their presence. I ate what they ate. And I tried to speak what they spoke. And there in one of the many red light districts within these city’s borders I learned that I have so much in common with girls who have been enslaved by prostitution….
And with the lady sitting in the trash heap across the street.
And with the girl upstairs who has given up her innocence so many times she feels like she will never be able to go home.
They just need to feel love.
And I honestly don’t know if they ever will.
I don’t care what you say.
Life isn’t fair.

*names changed for their protection

new and improved

I like the color it makes when the sun shines on my closed eyes.  it’s the color of warmth.  it’s the color of safety.  I open my eyes to continents of clouds divided by oceans of deep blue.  And I wonder if the world is really upside down.  And gravity is really keeping me from falling into the endless deep.  I gasp and cold air like lightning bolts through my chest.  So I draw tighter the strings on my hoodie until only my nose and mouth are exposed to the cold world outside.  And I burrow as deeply as I can into the pool of people plunging into the countryside.  A single drop of white in an ocean of colors.  My chest tight with tension as it alone seems to absorb all the shock of each pothole.
But this  is where I belong.

I’m almost afraid to utter those words since last year.  No less than ten seconds after thinking those same thoughts I found myself swallowed by orange flames and black smoke.  Crumpled to the floor.  Trying to breathe.  “Is this really how it ends?”  I was asking myself.  Eyes searing with the smoke.  But that was a different day.  And today my eyes are closed so peacefully.  I force open one eye to glance to my left.  And I could recognize that look from a mile away.  The “I want to chew on your pants” look.  But how could I pass the blame.  It was quality America denim.  He was a goat.  The very same one that had rejected my hand an hour earlier and had become snuggle buddies with my left kneecap in the bone chilling wind.  The very same one the village had offered as thanks since they had no money.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.  All of this started at least a day before.

“This must be what a sea anemone feels like.”  I was thinking.  Arms outstretched.  When I was young I would sit in my grandpas living room and watch National Geographic documentaries…just wanting to plunge my hand into those things.  Around me suspended a cloud of dust so thick I was struggling to breathe.
And a million little fingers.
So soft and delicate.
Brushing through my hands.
For a few moments I think the sun must have stopped.  And time was waiting.  I thought of my how many lives and how many stories and how many names were brushing through my fingertips.  Time gives way in moments like this.  Thankfully.  And sometimes even lets us go back.  Even when we don’t want it to.
It started with a few handshakes.  But the crowd of children rushed me.  They wanted to feel for themselves if the white hands were real.   But it started even before this.  I was asking for it.  When I leapt from the truck into the crowd of dancing/singing/jumping/whistling/drumming Africans.  Some of them literally climbing trees to see me.  It seemed at that moment there was more dust in the air than there was on the ground.  Dotted around me 10 to 12 fires, each encircled by women cooking, men discussing, or children playing.  So many of them had come so far.  And it was far.  So far that we would soon kill a large snake just inches from the crowd and we would leave the generator running all night to keep the hyenas away.  And it was cold.  So cold that I would not sleep a wink tonight despite double layering my clothes and burying myself as deeply as I could in my sleeping bag.

But in spite of all this I guess I still wish you could be here with me sometimes.  I wish you could have seen how they cut down their own corn gardens to cover the sandy road so we wouldn’t get stuck.  I wish you could have seen the our motorcycle escort and the sea of excited children rushing behind us.  And I wish you could have been here last week when I met Fatima.  Then maybe you could have told me what to do when her mom told me she was burning.  Not from fire.  Not from boiling water.  Just burning.  Skin peeling off.  Body wasting away.  All of her one years.  How do you convince an entire nation that the witchcraft cords they tie around their babies won’t save their lives.  I wish you could have seen Manuel’s face as I was walking away.  A few minutes before he couldn’t move his arms for the pain.  Now his arms were completely fine.  And he wasn’t quite sure how to handle this.  I wish you could have been here last week to tell me what to think when there were gunshots behind our base, or to tell me how I was supposed to console a young lady who had already lost two children, a husband, and her health.  I wish you could have been here last night to help the town make sense of all this.  When they attacked the bank down the road.
They didn’t know how get through the front door.
But they knew how to be desperate.
And they knew how to kill.
An iron rod to the head.
He never drew his gun.
The only thing they succeeded in taking was a life as young as mine.
But most of all I guess I wish that you could be here for you.
Because outside your down comforters and secure walls and safe neighborhoods and well guarded borders and over the ocean are continents full of people desperate to find out if life is worth living.  I think it is.  and I hope someday they think so too.

[I wrote this sometime last week.  I'm actually in Thailand.  Update about that coming really flipping soon]

my name is chibamba

What was I supposed to do?
With the gurgle in his throat.
The sound of  life giving in.
In to the inevitable.
We are every one of us dying.
I hope we know what for.
The call was theirs we said.
The two men on a fake leather couch amidst the locust infestation and the buzz of a fluorescent tube on the last leg of its earthly journey.
But the call was really mine.
So I made the call.
And its calls like that that get me places like this.
Understand.
That as blinkers and fires and capulanas* streak by in an unorganized rainbow of color.
Underneath the Milky Way.
A Jackson Pollock of lights.
That I know we shouldn’t be here.
Out here where potholes are dug for the sake of robbing your car.
and after the sun goes down it’s a little more like the Wild West.
But what am I supposed to do?
There are people even here that don’t like the call I made.
Perhaps they, like me, have seen the barricades of men with machine guns at night.
Where actions are absconded by the absence of the sun.
Perhaps they understand on a deeper level than me the futility of our fight.
Against darkness.
We race over dirt roads.
And fly through bushes.
We drive so fast that just to glint against a tree or to brush over a bump as we slid over the sometimes 2 feet wide path would have sent us rolling.
Much like happened to the Land Rover just months ago.
But no one says slow down.
So we all hold on.
But this night is not our night to struggle against death.
And just like that we get to the river.  Almost skidding to the bank.  An oasis of peace a tranquility in a world of desperation.  In seconds I’m at the water rolling up my shorts.  But I can’t go they say.
Why?
Because you’re a missionary.
I don’t know what that means.
Maybe that there’s crocodiles like the ones downriver that claim a few lives a month.
Maybe there’s thieves.
The kind that don’t care whether you live.
The kind that chopped the lady up with machetes when she tried to stop them from robbing her phone.
Sometimes I feel so safe here.
None of my friends here have scars on their arms from thieves like in the North.
But sometimes I forget that here too are men.
Who call themselves men of peace.
Who have literally taken our pastors limb from limb for preaching the gospel.
But not before removing their tongue and their eyes and their hands.
It was only last year.
The very same city I tread on a weekly basis.
All I know is that the mechanic says if I leave him there alone he will drive back to the city and leave us.
So I sit.
As they are climbing the opposite bank of the river.
The Jackson Pollock sky is so bright it is almost heavy.
Like a blanket.
The stars seems closer than the moon could be if it were out tonight.
I almost think that I can touch them.
And there is literally no space without its drop of light.
The river trickles a tune and fish jump and frogs and crickets add in.
My mind runs wild with what might be waiting behind the 5 feet tall grass or the surface of the water.
Every now and then I hear a movement so distinct and sudden that I cannot help but shine my flashlight on the surface of the water.
I listen for voices.
Just a baby crying a dog barking.
I wonder if I know what I’m up against.
This one was so lucky.
He had a friend.  Who got a friend.  Who traveled to our town together.  And talked to a friend.  Who called a friend in the capital.  Who called me.  And told me where to find them.  And even though there was no money we squeezed it out of somewhere and even though one truck was falling apart and the other one was taken apart upon cement blocks the mechanic offered us his and even though everyone said no I said yes and then they said ok so off we sped into the darkness after the only gas station in town luckily had not closed yet.
But how many more of him are there out here in the dark?
They said to wait for daylight.
But we’d watched too many slip away from us while hoping for daylight.
And I wasn’t ready to have blood on my own hands.
this is why I made the call.
The call that got me sitting here.
For over an hour.
Being swallowed whole by night.
Wondering how far into the dark they could have wondered.
They said ten minutes.

When I at last hear voices nearing I reach below the steering wheel for the headlights.
And none of this makes sense.
-As I throw off my sandals and run into the black river to help the 12 men trying to keep him above water.
It doesn’t make sense that I should be here.
-As I grab onto the rough tree limb and relieve the one stumbling in the deep mud
That I should be here.
And him be there.
-As my feet sink in and I turn my face against the bright headlights
On a stretcher they had fashioned of tree limbs and grass all tied together with bark.
The reason they took so long.
-Men yelling in their tribal language.
What makes me special?
-As I hear the death gurgle coming from his throat.  His face winces when the flashlight in my mouth shines on his face.
And that I get to be the one holding him out of the water as the rasp coming from his throat tells me… he is trying to give up.
It’s a sound that would have been so peaceful to me, had I not know what it meant.  Juxtaposed against the sounds of life that congregate by the riverside at night.
What if this were me.
Being drug into the back seat of an old truck in the middle-of-nowhere Africa.
Side of my face swollen with God knows what.
And the driver driving so fast because he thinks I will die before we get there.
With black mud and tree leaves clinging to my toes I leap into the back.
Not wanting to have to listen to him go.
When we get to the hospital no ones helps us as we stumble through the door and carry him down the hallway to a bed.  No one cares when we tell the nurse what has happened.  No one even stops watching the news.  Commentary on Brazil vs. Italy.  The next day when I come back to visit the hospital.  I hope they know I’m  trying my best.  Their eyes so unmistakably full of fear.  Their lungs heaving so vehemently.  Their ribs protruding like birdcages from their chest.  And when I try to step away I and feel the faintest squeeze upon my fingers coming from their skeleton hands, and watch their crusty lips tremble as they try to muster forth a word… maybe their last one…  I hope they know I am not leaving them.  Its just that all of this is just a little too much for me to handle by myself.  and I hope someday all of this makes sense.  Because right now it only seems not fair.

*capulanas are the bright cloths women wear as skirts and headwraps

breaking into car fail

“and…for…me….I…..guess…things…..like…..this…..are…..especially…..hard…..”
It’s hard to talk when you’re trying not to cry.
I am so trying to keep the appearance of composure.
And from where he’s standing he can’t see what’s rolling down my left cheek.
I place sometimes as much as five seconds between a word.  Taking time to swallow the lump in my throat time and again.
Keeping my eyes straight down on the road.
I scoot over to let a cow drawn trailer by.
I let the driver stare at me.
I can’t blame him.
If I were him I wouldn’t expect to see a white guy here either.
I had seen some really hard things today.
And it was kind of killing me.

We rolled in around 9 last night.  Locking the keys in the truck out in the bush sure is inconvenient.  Not like the capital.  Where if you don’t pay someone to guard it they will break into it for you and drive it away.  It was here under the full moon with bent coat hanger in hand that I realized I would never be a successful car thief.  After a few hours someone got it open.  The truck left me at a bar in the center of the truck stop town.  I was the guest of honor.  So I got a hotel room at the bar.  A six by five concrete cell with a mattress as soft as granite.  The thin wood plank door had a triple locking mechanism–three small slats of wood loosely hinged on nails.  I felt like a traveler.  I drifted to sleep to the sound of truck drivers drinking and yelling and dancing and arguing, only a little bit worried about what would happen if they decided to team up and take my stuff.  Trying not to realize what this room was intended for.  In the morning before I left riding on the back of a bicycle, I decided to do a quick head count of the spiders in my room.
Forty four.

But I still did not know that before I fell asleep two church members had died.

One, a leader, was hit by a bus.
The other….

They had to cut the first leadership session short for the service.  The leadership teams had walked for up to 30 kilometers to be here.  At a funeral here part of the ceremony consists of building the coffin.  I sat there underneath the tree with all the men an hour or two.  But I didn’t want them to finish.  I didn’t want them to already have wrapped it in white linen.  I didn’t want to have to walk into the hut and see…
That as if on cue, as they placed the body inside of the coffin, the little candle at the head that had come undone until it was only a splotchy pool of off-white wax spilt upon the sand, would extinguish itself.
And that the coffin was so small.
For a reason.

I am trying not to think of all these things as we trudge down the road away from the tall trees.
He asks me with his thick Zimbabwean English if I could say a closing prayer.  I can barely say that I can’t.
But right now I can’t.
I had proof.
We had just lain it in the ground.
Underneath tall trees.
The only place they will allow a cemetery.
We had placed her clothes on top of her.
So small.
The proof was in the little hand knit winter hat that rolled out of the bag.
And the jean jacket beside it.
The proof was in the pang I felt as we stabbed our flower shoots into the dirt piled over her body.
The shoots that will take root inside her grave.
The proof was in the way they carried the young mother.  Almost too broken to walk.  She was her only child.
Proof that I wasn’t helping fast enough.
And that despite all our attempts to throw money and programs and economic policies at these countries there are still four year old girls named Katia that live in mud huts overlooking the river and despite being healthy they get sick but no one knows from what so they take them to the hospital where they don’t know what to do and for three months they waste away until their little selves give up inside and maybe they’re lucky enough to leave while they’re still young.  Maybe that’s what’s best for them.
The thought would haunt me.
And I would wonder  if I could have stopped it.
I would wonder what we could have done better for Katia.
I would wonder if they had told me last night, 50 meters from her house, wrestling with the truck door, if I could have done something.
Or at least given her pain meds.
But it shouldn’t have to be like this.
Its so easy to die here.
It happens so fast.
And there is hardly ever any pain killers.
We don’t know a thing about suffering.

I would keep it together for the most part until we went into her house for a closing prayer.  Head hunched over as the grass roof tickled the back of my neck.  The smell of dust and sweat.  We would be crammed so tight.  And I would be in the corner.  In the dark.
Losing it.
Hands over my eyes.
I don’t know if they would understand.
How much I want to make this stop.

The next morning as I sit with the local leadership underneath the morning sun shooting in sideways and dusting off the cold night, retired soldiers will tell me stories.  They will tell me what is underneath every banana tree from here to the intersection 15 k away.  They will tell me how their colonizers would have them dig their own graves,  place them inside, and put banana shoots on top of their head.  It would make me wonder about every banana I had ever eaten.  And then I would understand why, at the moment of their independence, they told every foreigner they had 24 hours to leave.
And then they started killing.
But that was a different life.
Now they are pastors.
And we will sit together sharing stories of African countries and neighboring provinces and miracles.
Of how a cobra had tried multiple times to bite his son.
But couldn’t pierce his skin.
And they will laugh as I try to read in Manyungwei.
And the  next afternoon as I pummel down the road in a rusty bus to the intersection I will witness through spider web glass a man getting beaten.
So badly.
And he will try to get up.
And get punched in the face.
And before he can stand again.
Kicked in the ribs.
Dirt flying everywhere.
Voices screaming.
I will see his face.
and I will wish I could squeeze through all the people fast enough to get to the door and jump out and make this stop.
Sometimes when I am traveling down the road someone will look up at me.  It always kills me.  I see a story that could trump any of Hollywood’s most depressing releases.  Sometimes they say to me, “I lost my father to war and my mother to disease my brothers to hunger and three of my children to an evil that I don’t even understand.  and I don’t know how to stop this.  So what have you lost?”  Sometimes a single glance can follow me for half an hour.  Last week as I was walking through the neighborhood we stopped to visit a house.  An empty and lifeless house.  The four and a half foot wood door was worn smooth by little hands and shut tight.  The oldest of its four inhabitants was no older than five.  First their parents had each died.  Then their aunt.  Then their grandma.  Now they live alone.  Sometimes the neighbors give them food.  Sometimes.  That morning as I was holding Imaculada on my lap she couldn’t even raise her head.  She wiped her cheek at least every thirty seconds.  Tears dripping from her eyes.  She’d had this infection for years.  Eternity for a six year old.  Sweat beaded down her forehead from the migraines that she suffered.  Medicine had not helped a bit.  I would have given her my  own eyes if I could.  Two days before that as I rode a bike back from Miguel’s house he told me his mom had 10 children.  Four were alive.  I was afraid to ask.  But I wanted to know.  The first died from cerebral malaria.  It had attacked her brain.  The second from standard over the counter malaria.  She started to get better.  Then she got worse.  The third just sort of died.  From something of course, but it was hard to know what.  Miguel’s voice trailed off as we neared the playground he played in as a child.  I didn’t ask him to go on.  I didn’t want him to…
Still flying down the road.  Racing the sun to bed.  Playing footsie with a huge bag of bananas.  Squished against the wall.  Curtain slapping me in the back of the head.  A few feet from plastic bags with roosters inside.  Holes cut in the  side to stick their head through.  I will have a few hours to get home.
And I will wonder the whole way there what we our doing with ourselves.
And if it is everything  we can.

travis returns to small continent called africa somewhere off the coast of florida

My left hand is trembling.
Thumb taughtly poised above the on/off button of my flashlight.
My legs are trembling.
Sweating underneath the cover that just minutes ago could not keep them warm.
My chest is trembling.  Heart smashing against my ribs with audible rhythm.
My right hand is trembling.
Death gripped to the handle of a multi-tool….knife blade drawn.
I am not trembling merely because of fear.  I am trembling because I am ready.  And yet I am afraid.  Quite afraid.  Outside it is so dark.  So dark only an African could see.
I am reminding myself how I got here.  A choice I made.  I try to hold myself responsible for where I find myself.  That is why whether flying off a ramp on suicide hill or sitting here death gripping my multi-tool wondering how this would end… I recognize this life as nothing more than the product of a series of choices I have made.  And I always seem to make the less safe ones.
I hear a voice in the tent next door.  It is quickly hushed by a curt “sh!”
Someone hears it too.
I wonder who else is awake.
But I dare not ask
It started at the bottom of the hill.  I heard it in my sleep.  In the recesses of my mind.  But it came nearer.  They came nearer.  I don’t remember waking up.  And I wish this was a nightmare.  But this is so real.  Its hard to know how best to be ready at times like this.  I turn my knifes blade to the tent wall.  But its so hard to prepare for what you have not seen.  Its so hard to be ready if you don’t know when its coming.
I remember when we arrived.  The villagers were singing and dancing.  Drums were playing.  I fell asleep just hours ago to the sound of laughter and the hum of our generator powering the only artificial light source for miles around us.  I woke up once to darkness but the crowd still milling about and talking…eyes well adjusted to dark African nights.  I fell quickly back to sleep.  But now….
My thoughts are interrupted.  I hear a dog barking.  A bark of fear and desperation. Within moments he is sent away yelping.  Now it is coming nearer.  It had taken every ounce of courage that I had to reach up and fumble through my backpack for my knife.  Every movement that I made brought a pause.  I would unzip my backpack.  A pause.  I hold my breath.   A pen would fall out of the pocket.   Another….longer pause.  Longer breath.  Why was I doing this?  What was my big plan?  This was the big one.  Undoing the Velcro pocket my knife was housed in.  Slowly.  Carefully.
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIPPPPPPP.
Really really long pause.
Running out of breath to hold.
No one makes a sound.
And I think its getting closer.
I lean away from the tent wall.
My blade at the bottom of my fist.
Somehow my tentmate is sleeping.
Do I wake him up?
I know the  people around us aren’t.  I also know that in the morning if everything is fine they will say they didn’t hear it or that it was just dogs.  But I know that anything that is allowed to tear through the open air kitchen knocking over pans and eating anything it can reach is not just a dog.   Not when food is so difficultly earned.
I think I hear its breath now.
But it was the growl that said the most.  It was so deep and long.  It almost gurgled.  And so angry that I could hear its teeth.  The long growls revved like an engine.  Sounding more like a large cat than anything else I could imagine.  But how could I know.  When I first heard them from the bottom of the hill.  There were several of them.  They seemed to attack several homesteads at the same time.  On other sides of the hill I could hear their growls.  Many of them also met by dogs quickly sent away yelping.  But at the moment I don’t care about the others so much as I care about the one nearing my tent.
Someone had said to me when we arrived, “There’s lions in this region.”  and motioned….pointing towards the trees.  I had raised my fists and responded “I’m ready for them,” thinking I was funny.   But a local quickly butted in and spent the next few minutes explaining that they had never even seen lion….I wondered if he was trying to convince me or himself.  I also wondered, considering our proximity to a reserve, how he could be telling the truth…
Sometimes it feels scarier when you can’t see its face.  The tip of my knife is absolutely shaking.  But I have decided that I am ready.  Every muscle is tense.  What if I got out of my tent.  What if I saw it face to face.  I look at the zipper.  So far away.  Every distance is huge and every moment an hour in these instances.  I reach across the ocean for the zipper.  Extracting my legs from the bottom of the sleeping bag where I hide my camera.  Sometimes at night they can knife your tent walls and take your belongings before you know it.  I can hear it in the kitchen.  I can hear my own heart.  I can hear myself reaching for the zipper.
ziiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip
Growl-pause
Hold-breath
My tentmate starts to wake.  In this moment I face another decision.  Waking up my tentmate and getting through the two zippers to get outside where I can’t see a thing because the moon isn’t out for another week and if I turn my flashlight on is sure to make a stir among whatever and however many of them there were … and a stir I don’t know if I’m ready to stir in the first place.  Not to mention I would have to walk around the mud hut and the tree-with-fruit-that-ferments-and-then-people-eat-to-get-drunk before I could get a clear view of the kitchen.
So I wait.
For a year or two.
The pacing and growls continue for at least a half an hour but gradually grow softer and softer.  My eyes grow heavier.  I rest my knife upon my lap.   My heartbeat is slowing as the growls grow softer.  In the morning they will tell me it was dogs.  They will be afraid that if I know what it was, I might not come back.  And that‘s not true.  I just might want to be inside a brick wall.  Or a mud one.  I lay my head down.  Growls growing softer.  I eventually close my knife.  Keeping it so readily close to my hands.  Eyes growing heavier.

3 hours later

The cold African morning makes the luke warm water steam off my skin exposed to the bright African sun.  I dump another cup-full over my head and rub at my blackened feet vigorously.  I’m still thinking about last night.  As soon as I awakened I had stumbled outside to scour the dirt for footprints hoping it wasn‘t too late.  They beat me to it.  The dirt around our tents had been neatly swept in typical Africa morning fashion.  The dirt around their houses is swept daily with bundles of reeds before they even eat breakfast.  Eyes not even adjusted to the light I stumbled over to a pastor.
“What was that last night.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“You didn’t hear the fighting and the growling?”
“Oh that!” (laughs) “That was just dogs.”
I walked to another pastor.   Eyes slightly more adjusted to the sun.
He said dogs.
Asked a lady.
Dogs.
I am running out of luke warm water which means I am running out of thinking time.  It had been a crazy first week in Africa.  The day after I arrived they brought me to a prison.  Just weeks ago I had read a report by the UN about the conditions in these prisons.  An obscene percentage of the prisoners never make it out alive.  Sometimes its due to cholera.  Sometimes its due to the baking soda they put in the food to give them diarrhea and keep them weak.  Sometimes its violence.  But they were a hungry people.  Three men approached us who had been praying and fasting for three days for their fellow prisoners.  We played drums and danced and made more noise in that place than you ever would have guessed could come from such a small room.  We preached and shared the good news of Jesus Christ and afterward more people accepted Jesus than the local pastors had ever seen.  And they had been coming here for nine years.   One of the pastors who was with us was saved while in prison eight years ago..  Now he is one of the key workers in our orphan food distribution projects, a pastor in the prison ministry, a great husband to his wife, a loving father to his three kids, and works as a barber to make money.
Where I am right now is quite remote.  No missionary or white person has ever been here before.  This is evidenced by the children’s fear of us.  Sometimes parents jokingly tell their kids if they don’t behave white people will come and eat them.  But it doesn’t take long to win them over.  We shared the gospel.  We played music for hours and prayed for the sick.  Many people were healed.  We ate goat and xima (a grits like substance) in a hut with the local church and government leadership.  It had been a good visit.  I don’t know it yet but in an hour or two they will rain on us more sugar cane, squash, corn, and other produce than I have ever seen  given as a way of thanking to us for coming.  Right now though, as the luke warm water comes to an end and I grab my towel off of the mud brick wall all I can think about is how good it will feel tonight to sleep at last.   I don’t know yet, however, that tonight when I am laying in my tent overlooking the mountain of Gorongosa with the stars piercing through the skies like ice pick holes revealing something brighter beyond the canvas that as I lay my head down…the drummers will start.  The pastor will have announced during the service that they will worship all night and I will have thought it was just a figure of speech.  yes.  They will play the largest drums I’ve ever seen in Africa, sing, and dance until 430 am within almost spitting distance of my tent.  Not that anyone would spit on it.  And in spite of my sleeplessness I won’t even want to stop them.  They will be so happy to have missionaries visiting them..  And I will be so happy to have made it back.

T
jer2913

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i’m starting a photo blog. im gonna try to update as often as possible.

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