First entry on a weird dark night

Don’t jump over a razor. Wow now my keyboard skills have changed to French. Amazing adaptability. I am jumping in the shower to hang the ndiampe, a Senegalese fishnet for scrubbing the skin, essential to remove layers of dirt sweat oil and a motley of animal shit. The nail is too high, and my feet hovering over my exposed razor doesn’t alarm anything but the format left in my brain, like a desolate city in the Langoliers, for worrying. My hands are always dirty and I have become compliant with waking up in the night in the absolute darkness and searching through my clouded brain for where I am.
This has been a weird weekend. How to live a dual life? I feel infinitely far from Reb, from Stepping Stones and Crested Butte and Monica, so nonchalantly sure, Floridian tan walking in Coloradian wildflowers. My arms are black though my thighs are white as lait caille. Where is Ben if I even wanted to write to him? Has Nate not written back to my mom because he’s living in a tent like last summer? Alone in a padded room watching the Doors film, I would have never imagined this luxury, and why do we have these internal infinitely complicated dramas when all there is to do is togg cheb u jeen, gather sticks, go to the fields, laugh, dance and play? I am reading the River Why, and feel the coolness of the mountains rippling through my damp skin and stewing insides, how incredibly and wondrously beautiful. How can I resolved this dichotomy, my heart always in the mountains I have spent the whole weekend on the roof in the sun and in the breeze, while the others nestle in the dark den of the TV room. But the city obligates me, the terrorist attack stopped in JFK today, my cousins confused on why I went to Africa, the call to defend this life I love. In a city. In my hometown, where I spend my being in a child (bima nekkee xale) playing in polluted streams and gathering wood to make a grass hut.
My mind has been mostly with my family, though my body recoils at the thought of leaving this air conditioned haven to be harassed on the streets by marriage proposals and "toubab!" and kids "BONjour! Comment va tu?!", and I continue to eat hamburgers and cookies and stuff sent from the states, a ludicrous and wasteful amount of money, how many trips to the doctor for Jeneba Ba’s heart, how many prescriptions for Nogoye’s eye, how many half kilos of sugar I begrudged them. We become numb to this, with boxed wine and whisky that tastes about equivalent to the electric shock we get from out ungrounded refrigerator. Should we get a new one? A new TV? A ping pong table? We have the money, what can we spend it on? Right now my moms will be pulling out the mats to lay down in the well earned blissful breezes of evening. Scorpions may brush by their toes, goats run through the pavilion bleating insanely, they have one TV, black and white, attached to a car battery attached to a solar panel. My host dad unplugs Mariama’s phone to charge mine, she can wait to call her husband, working in a far away city. How can I rationalize the shame, the guilt I feel, for being always capable of getting what I want, for being weasly able to satisfy tertiary needs, linguistic self-stroking pleasure? This of course, is robbed from me in Wolof. And so I am at their mercy, and dance to make it better, to even out the scales, in a sense.
And yet at every moment I am asking, do I have what it takes, and this no cliché, what I need to survive? Can I survive mentally, physically? Can I beat stunned rats that climb through my cement floor? Can I wake from deep sleep to deal with possible scorpion nests in my bed? I feel moments of power, instantaneously overtaken by the fact of my actually present physical weakness, the need to drink, to rest, to close myself in my hut when my mothers can never sleep for the clamour of 25 odd children fighting and beating each other with sticks in my compound. Visions of the sheer muscle, somehow miraculously formed without our sophisticated dietary advice, from the staples of bread and rice and millet. Pulling and releasing to grind millet for hours every day, to haul buckets of clear water atop their heads, to grasp burning sticks and bare iron pots handles in a smoky hellish "kitchen." To wash to beat the band. Which then plays by night, and suddenly these women who by day could be mistaken with a donkeyish spirit, come alive, no, come possessed, with eyes alight, limbs flailing to keep the 2/4, the 3/6, the 4/8, or whatever, every undulence of that music is captured by the rapture of their bodies. Do you know that they do not drink during daylight during Ramadan? Your guilt is proven by your sweat.
I think of myself on that final run on Mt. Crested Butte, a cathartic moment in time, twisting my torso, hip high in the powdery plane of snow, losing my equilibrium in a white sky and earth, doing something I thought was impossible for my untrained legs, for my underconfident mind, the Headwall. With my heart taking up most of its pumping power with ecstatic beating.
I resolve this controversy by the tirelessness of their patience, of their "pays du taranga." Somehow the scales of the world are balanced by the fact that they need this awkward, helpless toubab in their village, because I, of infinite possibilities bestowed on me by none but Allah, who pays no heed to the fact that I don’t pray 5 times a day or give one third of my slaughtered goat to "the poor", can do something for them. I, a wet-behind-the ears, intentional, recent university graduate, who cant deseed olives or cut garlic to save her life, I, who doesn’t have 3 kids, and guleet ma gis, doesn’t have a jeker, can write to the ambassador to America, she whom they wait for days in line to see. So I pray for this pity, this somehow existent odd closure of the otherwise linear (thank God its not) circle, let them laugh, hope they keep laughing, hope I can make them, and hope I can find funding to buy them half of the shit I have consumed this weird, oasis like weekend.
PS for all of you who enjoy Little Country Giants, or for those who don’t, but enjoy me as their friend, daughter, etc. you should listen to The Be Good Tanyas, as they have also been the inspiration for this fine piece of literature. Which leads to another point, this regional house for PCV’s is overwhelmingly full of good music, books, and people.