What's scary is that on this day I've realized what makes me think it will be any better to go back? Of course it will be delicious, snow and rain and all things cold -the things I was running away from before, my own kitchen. But the thought of finally being free from this two year bondage -from these necessary functions, it does not give me the same feeling of a healed bird released and flying back to its familiar perch. Up in the lush, swaying breeze.
*Peace Corps is weird. How would things be different if I was not in its grasp?
I am a changed person. Like a smoker -Senegal will leave its residue in my cells. Perhaps not like a smoker. Like one who's eating cheb-do I want this greasy heavy residue in my body?
Not when I'm walking in the 2:00 afternoon sun. The feeling that everything is dead -the opposite of freeze-dried --held, momentarily, in the bleaching, blinding, sterilizing sun. Strong enough that I don't mind brushing my eating hand against my douche.
Mangoes are a miracle in this environment. From these trees they survive as alien pod Gumbies against incredible odds -their green fruits appearing and growing bigger as waxy drops at the tips of branches -suddenly they're ripe and every blueblack kid in which all blinding light is absorbed is clutching an equally blazing soft mass of wet, swirling, deep orange. They don't look real. And they nourish you, sweet and juicy, like magic.
How I am changed is now I am sitting in a well ventilated (breeze) brightly painted (turquois with gently flowing curtains) room with an oldish man -grizzled grey hairs on a protruding jawbone, and legs and arms deep-blue sacks with the juice sucked out -and a bulging, tumerous stomach, looks like an uneven sack of mangoes -is gurgling and talking something furious. So is he -through gasps -we exchange profundities about human life -his eyes deux fois rolling back into his head as he visits his pain, deux fois jutting out in exuberance for his jolliness and the enpowering of our talk. A mouse darts in and out to investigate us -my hands and feet, my backpack -his head unawares and the bowl of dried out fish bones that his two year old grandson comes in to chew -I wash out without a second thought in which he puts 3 sections of pineapple from a jagged can at the side of the bed. The kid picks each piece apart and gums it, feeling it all around -then drooling as a response.
Farbara Bopp can't eat cheb anymore. All he eats are pineapples, oranges, apples. I split the cheb with his wife -thick and oily. Which is why I have a stomachache now.
We have talked about everything with alhumdulilahi's and maangi niro now and old man that has been a Muslim forever.
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