The Elephant's Child

Miami I

I took a walk around my sister's neighbor hood last night, at dusk.  It's fun to see such huge variety of cars; where I live a foreign car is a Toyota Camry.  My town is populated by Ford, Chevy, Buick, Chrysler and Pontiac. 

There were lots of cats out.  In just twenty minutes or so of walking, I saw about five kitties lurking here and there in the shadows.  One pretty little dilute calico would run ahead of me, then hide in the bushes, apparently thinking I couldn't see her. 

The vegetation, trees and flowers nearly brings me to tears.  It's so like Monrovia.  Except, you know cleaner.

Outside of my sister's kitchen window is a climbing vine that looks familiar, although I can't remember the name. It has little yellow flowers.  Around a mailbox down the street is kalanchoe.  Tumbling over the top of a fence on the next bloxk was a variegated Monstera deliciosa so huge and stunning I stared with my jaw open.  No, really.  

Yes, I'm a nerd. Deal with it. 

 

The Sensitive Plant.

Sensitive ou Mimosa pudica from Fred C on Vimeo.

I remember this plant well from Liberia. It grew in lawns and other "grassy" areas, and along the side of roads. Pretty much equivalent to where chicory and crabgrass might grow in the Midwest.

Read more about it here.

How To Pray.

First, cover your face with both hands.  Bend at your waist and throw the top of your body down across your legs. Your covered face should be towards the floor. You are speaking with our Lord God, King of the universe, Savior of all mankind, after all. 

This is how many children (and older people, too) prayed when I was growing up in Liberia. I was remembering this in church recently, as I bowed my head for the Gloria Patri. I have noticed the American church doesn't like to move in certain ways.  We worship the Lord with our mouths and our presence, but all too often, not with our bodies. When the American church does move, it is for dance, it is for hands lifting up, it is for feeling moved by the music; it is not in ways that show submission, not in ways that that incovience us or make us uncomfortable. Not in ways that bring us low. 

Moses removed his shoes at the burning bush. Every person in the Bible who was visited by an angel of God fell on their face. We are missing something.

At a friend's church, people bow at the passing of the processional cross, bow at the Gloria Patri, bend a knee at the words of the Creed that mention the Incarnation of our Lord, kneel when petitioning God. Faces turn towards the floor when Christ becomes flesh and blood for us to eat and drink. Like the West African children I watched in church as a child, backs and necks and knees bend before the presence of our Holy God.   

Both ways of praying, that of the African church and that which I see at my friend's church, are appropriate to the culture in which they occur; both show obeisance, something that I sometimes think American church isn't always very good at. 

Beach Days.

It seemed like it must have been about a twenty minute drive, but when you're a little kid, time doesn't work the same way as it does when you're an adult.  

Mom packed snacks or lunch or both. We wore our swimming suits under our clothes.  We packed flip-flops and towels.  And then we headed out to Elwa for a day at the beach, usually with a few other families.  The moms got to sit and talk and us kids entertained ourselves. 

When the tide was low, you could walk out quite a way beyond "the rocks."  The Rocks was a pile of black rocks - perhaps basalt? No idea- just to the left of the main swimming area.  In high tide they could be quite dangerous to climb on, but usually, they were good for climbing as long as you watched your step; sometimes there was slippery green growth on the rocks. 

When the tide was low, we sometimes couldn't play in the lagoon, if it had been shut off from the cleaning action of the salt water for too long. Most of the time, there was a channel cut by the surf back into the sand which allowed the waves to wash into the lagoon.  Oh, so much fun to be had. We dug channels and little caves in the walls of the channel if it was deep enough. Sometimes we tried to dig a channel if there wasn't one.  We made slides and forts from the sand.  We laid in the warm water and let the surf sweep over us. 

It was heavenly. 

And when it was time to go, we got a bucket from the car to fill with water to carry up to the parking area. Then we'd each wash our feet and slip our flip-flops back on before climbing into the car to sit on towels for the ride home.  When there was known to be a lot of tar at the beach, my mom sometimes had a rag and a bottle of kerosene in the car for use to remove tar before we got it all over the inside of the car. 

After I left Africa in 1990, I didn't see a salt-water beach until the summer that Mad Musician and I made a road trip west to Oregon in 1999.  I ran down the sand beach in Seaside, OR, amazed to see the ocean, any ocean, again.  I did not see the Atlantic ocean again until about four years ago, when I visited my sister in Miami. 

Sometimes I can get to the shore of Lake Michigan, and stand in the sand in the wind and feel a little of that ocean feeling, but there is no salt in the air.  It's not the same. 

I miss the ocean very much. 

I Started This Book.

This one, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War.  

The author is about two years older than me.  She served as acolyte at St Peter's Lutheran Church, where my family attended a couple times a month.  Her sister sang in the church choir.  On any number of Sundays - maybe most of them, maybe all of them - that I was there, she was, too. 

And I was safe, home in the States that August, when the church was attacked, when she was across the street from the church, listening to the screams through the night. 

I don't know if I can finish reading it. 

I don't know if I should finish reading it.

 

 

Kerosene, Pinesol, Garbage, and Mold.

Kerosene and Pinesol are the smells of my childhood.  And garbage and mold.

The kerosene from the kerosene lanterns we had all over the house, one in each room, for the frequent power outages.  More power outages during the dry season, fewer during the rainy season. See, someone thought it'd be great to build a hydroelectric power station as an international aid project in a country that gets almost no rain six months of the year.   Yeah.  More politcal sense than brains, for sure.

My lantern was green, because my bedroom - which I later shared with my sister - was green and yellow.  The lantern in my brother's room was red.  They were both the smaller versions.  The big lantern for the dining room was blue.   I think.  I can't remember if we had a pressurized lantern, too. 

I did an awful lot of homework by kerosene lantern light.

Pinesol for the Dettol that we used for so many things.  Dettol is a topical antiseptic and it contains pine oil along with the chemical antiseptic chlorxylenol.  Our houseboy used it in the wash water for our floors.  And my mom put a capful in our bath water, which is, I think, one of the reasons our family never did get boils. All our vegetables and fruit were soaked in water with some Dettol in it before we at them.   Pinesol smells sort of like Dettol. Not quite the same, but almost.

Garbage.  There was no garbage collection in Monrovia.  Still isn't.  Garbage got hauled to your neighborhood garbage pile.  Which was open and unregulated. And smelled bad.  Really bad.   The one behind the mission's offices often encroached onto the road.  Sometimes, my dad and his friend would set it on fire to reduce its size a bit.  That also smelled bad.

Mold of various kinds was everywhere. The air was humid.  All the time.  Even in the dry season, the air was humid.  Gutters grew thick with moss and mold.  Mold grew on trees and on concrete walls.  Mold grew on shoes left unworn in the back of your closet and on the back of any carpet you left on the floor.  Mold grew on the mouthpiece of my recorder once when I put it away too quickly after playing it.  Mold grew on paper, on books, on computer disks.  Anything stored that wasn't carefully stored, sealed or in a closet with light bulb to keep it warm and thus more dry, got moldy.

Kerosene, antiseptic, open garbage, and copious mold.  Stay tuned for next time, when I'll discuss bugs and snakes.   Until then, steer clear of the rum raisin ice cream.

 

On Old Friends.

A package arrived on my doorstep this morning.  The return address was somewhere in Ohio, but I knew that prior to being shipped from a town in Ohio, it had been carried from Pretoria, South Africa.

Wrapped in brown paper, the package contained a large box of rooibos tea.  Tucked inside the cellophane wrapping on the box was a postcard from Zanzibar.  And on the back, some handwriting that certainly looked familiar but which I hadn't seen in over twenty years.

The box is sitting on my desk, here beside me.  The smell the tea rises from the box whenever the furnace kicks in and blows air this direction.  I never had rooibos while I lived in West Africa; it's more of a South African thing.  I encounted it first here in the United States.  Something about the smell of it, though, feels like Africa to me.  It smells and tastes like the sun setting over red dirt roads outside of Monrovia feels.  It's earthy and warm and dirty and lazy-afternoon and always-time-for-friends.

My usual grocery store no longer carries rooibos tea. It's hard to find as plain rooibos anywhere, really. It's usually doctored up with lots of other herbs and priced shockingly high to boot.  But luckily for me, my former partner-in-crime from my missionary boarding high school now lives in South Africa.  And she, bless her soul, arranged for a box of rooibos to be sent to me, hand-carried by her husband on his trip to the US this month.

I haven't seen my friend in over twenty years.  We've ended up on opposite sides of the political spectrum. She's had a life filled with travel all over the world, including a recent vacation with her husband and two sons to Zanzibar.  I haven't traveled internationally since I made a trip to Germany in 1992.   But I have no doubt, that when the day comes that she and I can sit down together over drinks, we'll talk for hours. 

Some friends are just like that.

 

Up Country. The Interior. The Bush. The Village.

Last week we had a day that eventually topped out around 65 degrees.  In the morning, though, the air was cool and damp.  I never did check the thermometer, but I think it must have been just a hair above 50 degrees.  The birds were making plenty of noise.  There was a hint of the smell of burning leaves in the air.

The feel of the air outside in the yard as I went to take the compost bucket back to the garden was exactly like early morning way up country.

Funny how a smell or a whiff of a feeling can bring back such a rush of memories. A day of wandering the village and the paths around the village with my friend Sara: Feeding her pet duiker, eating oranges or tangerines or whatever mutant citrus it was that grew all over the place.  Petting the rats that were kept in barrels; for food, I presume.  Years later, while reading about Lassa Fever, I'd shake my head in disbelief that we'd handled rats so causually.  Who knows how much our parents worried about us kids, but us kids felt safe.  Always and forever, amen. 

Outside of her Nimba county village, Sara and I walked along bush paths so narrow you needed to walk one foot exactly in front of another, hips swinging.  We waded in small running streams; we knew to leave standing or brackish water alone lest we catch schistosomiasis.

We showered with water warmed by in a tank mounted in the attic of their house.  Near the equator, simple radiant heat in the attic was more than sufficient to heat water year round.  Toilets were flushed with a bucket of grey water from the kitchen or from handwashing.  The family's refrigerator was kerosene, and lighting came from 12-volt flourescent lights run off a bank of car batteries charged each day by solar panels.  Additional electricity came from occasional use of a small generator.

At night, we slept under mosquito nets - not used by my own family Monrovia because our houses there had better screens and were higher off the ground.  Sara's little kitten would lick my toes while I slept, silly thing.

Plenty of free time, that precious cool morning air, the birds, the smell of wood fires and burning brush, the chatter of children and women.  My brief visits up in the village were very, very good.

 

 

(Note: Memory is fickle. I may have jumbled some things together or gotten some place names wrong.)

What I Know.

Richard Dowden knows this about Africa, and I know it, too:

. . .[W]hen outsiders do go they are often surprised by Africa's welcome, entranced rather than frightened. Visitors are welcome and cared for in Africa. If you go you will find most Africans friendly, gentle and infintely polite.  You will frequently be humbled by African generosity.  Africans have in abundance what we call social skills. [. . .] Africans meet, greet and talk, look you in the eye and empathize, hold hands and embrace, share and accept from others without twitchy self-conciousness.  All these things are as natural as music in Africa.

Westerners arriving in African for the first time are always struck by its beauty and size -- even the sky seems higher.  And they often find themselves suddenly cracked open.  They lose inhibitions, feel more alive, more themselves, and they begin to understand why, until then, they have only half lived.  In Africa, the essentials of existence -- light, earth, water, food, birth, family, love, sickness, death -- are more immediate, more intense.  Visitors sudently realise what life is for.  [...] It is the prize that African offers the rest of the world: humanity.

-Richard Dowden. Africa: Altered State, Ordinary Miracles.  (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 1-2.

Yes, That Was His Real Name.

There was a kid named Jihad in my sixth grade class.  He was loud, irrepressible, obnoxious and by any measure the clear ring leader of any shenangigans that went on when the teacher wasn't looking.

Lebanese, he had a shock of black hair and natural, playboy good looks. Wouldn't be surprised at all if I was to learn he went on to be an international businessman, made millions, and now lives in Dubai and drives a Ferrarri.

Jihad was the one who stole the test answers from the teacher's desk and passed them around the classroom.  Jihad was the one who instigated the rumour that the English word "bike" sounds just like the Arabic slang for dick.  Still don't know whether that's actually true.  I asked a Jordanian once, years later, when I was in college, and he just laughed his head off and then changed the subject. Am I that amusing?

Jihad was the one who propped his heels up on his school desk, declared, "It's so damn hot in here!" unzipped his fly and fanned his manhood with a school notebook.

I pretty much tried to stay out of his way and under his radar.  I did not have a crush on Jihad.  I was a more than a little bit scared of him.

I did, at one time, have a crush on Ali.  He was also Lebanese, but tall, lanky, graceful and a bit shy where Jihad was stocky and loud.  My very first slow dance ever was with Ali, to a Madonna song, at the only Official Party I attended while in Middle School.  I left the party at 10:00 pm, which is when my Dad had arranged to pick me up.  Good thing, too, since the pot smoke was just starting to drift from the back bathroom out into the hallways of the house!