May 7

She smelled like fish-but not like stank fish, like pale, water based fish fresh from the river. Its because she sat in the back crammed up against crates of old beer bottles, a basket of fish woven from plastic, rice sacks and palm branches, and my pack. I sat up in front in a car otherwise filled with grimy, boisterous men. Terrified.

There were other smells too. Cumin, perhaps, boiled cabbage. "All the colors of the" earth, the moist, fresh turned soil and smoke and body smell.

It reminds me of who-knows-what book where the white women smells that smell on her husband and is preoccupied by it until...it is the stench of a ------ woman!

But for me at this moment it is the sweetest smell-the smell of safety. I think I can go if there's a woman.

Driving out of the park at night-into safety-the lightening shrouded in the distance behind the mountain-the roads that flow over the hills like this-I could be in America-in Pennsylvania.

Natitangou-met two volunteers there-Melissa (Perry?) and Jim-their house is just like Peace Corps everywhere.

Beautiful beautiful beautiful city-streets lined with flamboyants and mountains in the distance-but not as beautiful as Kplamine.

Yesterday a drive that feels like a dream-6 am into the heavy mist on the road from Natitangou to Boukoumbe- with a scar faced gentleman-could not believe my eyes as we flew through the tata somba country. Little mansions-like castles from the Shire-in front of misted mountains-and sleek sweating blackened men hoeing mounds for yams in the foreground. Everything is a picture. Women, of course, lighting up the landscape with their reds and yellows.

This trip is overrided by fear-I am terrified of being by myself and f-ing up-I must have confidence. But as I have said, affairs that are important to me I cannot hear the difference between God's voice and my own-so I fear making a passionate mistake.

But this dream has been placed in my head since before-and since I could think of no other it must be the same. I am riding God's rush wave in a way that my dreams seem more that I can cling to than reality. There are themes, reoccurrences, and people I know. But here, thanks to many factors I don't know one minute from the next and the view flies by me on car, motorcycle, plain, or even walking.