Hardship is Relative

The following was published in the Albany Times Union on May 2, 2010:

The advertisements on the New York City subway enticing me to trade my morning coffee for a cup of tea made me smile. They were selling flights to London with the promise of unparalleled comfort and the ease of unburdened travel.

If the price was right, one could hop continents and barely notice. But with volcanic ash floating high above Europe for several days in April, a good portion of the world accustomed to the modern trimmings of travel was left wondering what to do.

I thought back to the molten days of April in West Africa, and about the two years I had spent there as a Peace Corps volunteer. The heat would last until the rains arrived in mid-June. Punishing afternoons with highs in the 120s burned the skies as farmers burned their fields in preparation for planting. I tried everything to escape. I swam in the river, but April found the river, too. The current flowed like a solid mass and felt as thick as bathwater. Even the cool well water in the small upcountry village where I lived didn't stand a chance. It broke the surface in a pumping rhythm, confident and full of optimism, and then fainted into my bucket, dejected and defeated. Like travelers to and from Europe those few days flights were cancelled, I felt the world had tipped and left me no options.

Then I stopped myself and simplified. My life was already comfortable in its iron-age simplicity: I lived in a mud hut with a thatched grass roof, and I slept on a bed made from palm boughs. Still, I simplified further. I took heed of the old adage and did as the Gambians did. I took apart my ceramic and steel water filter and traded it in for a giant jug. A jug made of clay.

I traded in my standards and expectations and found a little relief.

The jug or londe was simple. As water slowly seeped through the rough exterior, it moistened the outside and evaporated leaving the water inside the vessel crisp and cool-- a little oasis of temperature. It was enough to get me through the hottest part of the day, and since the jug was the size of a bass drum, it was enough water to pour over myself before attempting to fall asleep at night.

I bought the jug at a weekly market an hour outside of my village. Carrying it back was not a pleasant experience. It was fragile and so I couldn't store it on the roof of the ragged bush-taxi van that ran past my village.

I sat crammed next to 23 people in a space made for 15, and stared straight ahead over the heads of the people in front of me. The londe was searing hot in my lap, having sat all day in direct sun. All I could do was gaze out through the cracked windshield and wipe the sweat out of my eyes. I knew it would be worth it in the end.

My subway car rumbled along the tracks headed north between Rector and Chambers streets in New York City's Financial District and I sat looking over the heads of the people across from me. Splinters of light flashed through the temporary ceiling on the west side of the tunnel and I realized where I was. The Cortland Street Station used to sit here, beneath the steel and concrete of the World Trade Center. That was nearly nine years ago -- the last time so much airspace was silent.

Outside on the street in a light spring rain, a young woman jumped out of a cab and ran across the sidewalk to the shelter of an awning. Her friend who had been waiting there for her looked at her in shock.

"You took a cab? It was only 10 blocks!"

"Yeah, well I don't do rain," she said zipping her purse.

The price was right.

An Irishman in the Paddy

I don’t claim to be Irish. Rather, I’m an American with a genetic makeup engineered for optimal performance in a cloudy, damp and relatively cold environment. This is thanks to Irish ancestors who originally moved to New England – a place, in terms of climate, relatively similar to the original and its western insular neighbor. That leap across the Atlantic was huge, but still temperate. My descendant leap back across the pond was a little different. It landed me in the West African tropics.

Skin maladies and intestinal parasites trump all else here. I’ve had a good share of them – from strange rashes to maggots under the skin, from amoebic dysentery to mono. So it was with trepidation that I ventured out into my host’s rice field for an afternoon of standing in stagnant, tepid mud under and unconcerned searing sun.

I had managed to avoid the rice field for more than a year and a half. Last growing season I received a couple invitations to go, invitations I accepted with a smile but never showed up for. It wasn’t a problem or insulting. Part of the culture here is to accept things in theory but not actually accept them, or to invite someone to do something without really inviting them. This can be tricky, but sometimes it’s obvious. When a guy in a bush taxi offers his newly procured bean sandwich to you and the other 20 people around you, you say no. Obviously there’s not enough sandwich to go around. He’s being polite. But the rice field was a gray area.

In Gambian culture rice cultivation is strictly designated to women. Likewise, corn, millet and sorghum is strictly designated to men. There isn’t any mixing. It was with this in mind that I assumed the rice field invitations were simply niceties and a means of starting conversation. Thus I passed my first growing season here without ever stepping foot in a paddy.

Then the invitations began again. I had forgotten them. A year had passed. But these new invitations had a distinctly stronger undertone of authenticity. After the fifth or sixth invitation in two weeks I realized I was in trouble. I was actually going to have to go. Here’s where the ‘honorary’ card comes into play. As a foreigner I am always, to a degree, outside of the culture. Everyone understands and accepts this. It’s not a big deal, but it is a loophole. It’s a loophole that lets me be the only guy in the rice field and have it not be weird on a gender level to anyone in the community. I become an ‘honorary’ woman and am allowed to do women-only things just as an American woman can become an ‘honorary’ man. But the bottom line is I’m already the pasty white guy living in the traditional African village, and that’s weird enough.

On the first day of my authentic-rice-paddy-invitation-realization Cas, my girlfriend, came to visit me in my village. I was in the clear. Being a good host to a guest is immensely important in The Gambia. And so I was basically off the hook from having to do anything at all. Cas was my guest and I was expected to be a good host. The expectation of a host placing their entire attention on a guest is so strong in this culture that the Fulas actually have a proverb about it: A good host’s work suffers, but a bad host’s name suffers. Enough said.

Not mentioning the invitation and my need to comply to it, I waited until the next day to slip it into conversation.

“Well, I have to go back to site and get the rest of my garden planted.”

“Now? It’s almost noon. Way to hot. You should just stay until it cools down. You can still make it if you leave by five.”

“I know, but I really have to get that garden finished.”

“You’ll get it finished. Besides, you can come with me to the rice fields today. Ever been to the rice fields?”

She hadn’t. Her site was far from the river. And despite my best, yet futile, effort to make it sound like a great adventure she wasn’t convinced in the least that there was anything great about it. Instead, she was convinced of my one enormous apprehension about diving into the paddy: that I would come out covered in rashes and squirming with worms. If something could go wrong it would go wrong, and if there was something out there to catch, well, then I would catch it. Regardless, it had to be done. I drenched myself in sunscreen and set off.

Eventually, after bouncing through a jumble of other people’s rice fields, I found my host grandmother and two host moms. They looked surprised. I had come. After a year and a half I was there ready to see what it was all about. First line of business, though, was break-time. I had showed up at low tide. The river wasn’t high enough to fill the fields and so we waited. We brewed tea, I sweated and my host grandmother stuffed me full of peanuts like I was a baby bird. Then when it was time to work everyone asked me if I was headed home.

“No, I arrived to do ricings,” I said in the English equivalent of my less-than-stellar Pulaar.

“Ok, you’ll have to lose the sandals, though. The mud is pretty deep. We’ll go transplant from the nursery over there into the paddy itself.

“Yes.”

Everyone laughed a little when I took off my flip-flops and started walking down the clay barrier wall beside the field. It was a laugh that said, “Holy crap, look at this guy! He’s actually going out into the paddy! Ok, wait, what do we do with him? He might screw everything up.” I started transplanting with fury and zeal as I slipped around in the ankle-deep mud and calf-deep water. I managed not to make a fool of myself. “Thanks! That looks really great!” said grandma. And since she kept handing me more seedlings I knew she didn’t mean it in the sarcastic that’s-enough-you’re-ruining-everything kind of way. But after a couple of hours it became apparent there weren’t enough tools to go around and not enough open space to keep transplanting in. I walked to the riverside and washed all the clay off my legs and arms. Grandma smiled a big smile, her entire body covered in specks of clay like she had just been standing behind the rear wheel of a pick-up truck trying to free it from the mud. The rice fields had been a good time, but then my dread returned – what was I taking away from this besides a nice afternoon and a supersized dose of UV rays?

So far, nothing. A week has gone by and all is well. That could mean two things: 1) That all is well and that I survived intact and un-invaded, 2) That the invasion is of a scale to this point never experienced – that a worm as thick as a tree trunk is waiting in silence for the moment that it will explode out of my chest. Really, either seems possible at this point. Maybe it’ll be something in between. Either way I can’t be too upset. I’ve been a host to parasites before. And as long as I’m in The Gambia I’ll have to deal with it and smile. After all, being a bad host is bad form.

Leviticus 2009

It had become necessary to escape the heat by any means necessary. April was wrapping her molten fingers around everything: around myself, my clothes, my hut, my bed and my thoughts. The sun stood so high in the cloudless sky that a full 90 degree tilt of the head was necessary to locate it, and it blared a white light so intense that it burned the blue around it.

I tried swimming in the river to escape the heat, but April had found the river, too. Its lazy current flowed like a solid mass and felt like thick viscous bathwater; thick like the deep silty clay that lines its banks. It redeemed itself only by washing the sweat from your skin – at least momentarily. And when you dragged yourself to shore you started to sweat again just from the effort.

Even the cool well water in village didn’t stand a chance. It broke the surface in a pumping rhythm, full of optimism, and then fainted into my bucket defeated like an ice cube on hot tarmac. If it sat in the sun too long it could burn your fingers. It would scald the skin. And thus April kept its watch, May held the course and June made it all humid. The cool rains lingered on the horizon and all one could do was wait.

But cool water can be had using the most primitive of technologies. A clay water jug, or londe, can be found in almost every Gambian compound. As water slowly bleeds through the fire hardened clay it evaporates into the air leaving everything inside cool and crisp. A little oasis of temperature.

The idea is ancient. I had recently been browsing Leviticus after reading an essay by Paul Theroux where he had observed a diet based on Mosaic law. By chance I came to a passage on clay water jugs. The law said that if a lizard fell dead into your water jug then you must destroy it. Outside a lizard scrambled past my door and up the woven grass fence. Water jugs, I thought. Water jugs. Lizards. Leviticus. 2009. I was living in the iron age. Either that or the sun was hard boiling my brain. Downtrodden and disenchanted by the pounding sun, I set off to the weekly market thirty kilometers away in search of my own.

Before I left, my host family told me to bring towels and clothes with me. I could stuff them in a box and make a nest for my londe – something to protect the fragile clay against the bare angular roof racks on top of the bumpy bush taxis. When I got there they told me to look for Omar, my host brother, who would be selling bread. He could lead me where I needed to go and help me negotiate the sale.

When I arrived at the market in Wassu the main road was thick with people. Men were selling bicycle parts spread out on old rice bags that had been sewn into tarps. They had rows of old soda and beer bottles half filled with clear, golden glue. There were hammers and machetes. Shovels and palm frond hand brooms. The women sold little piles of peppers and pyramids of onions and sweet potatoes. There were buckets full of dried fish and mountains of handmade soap – white and round and stacked up like little cannonballs. Horse carts crawled by with boxes of green tea and cigarettes. It was loud and cramped and close to chaos.

I tripped out of the back of the old Mercedes bush-taxi van followed by twenty other passengers. We spilled out like clowns from a clown car and were absorbed into the crowd. Across the street, 15 yards away, I saw a line of water jugs. Not sure whether these were the ones I was looking for I went out in search of Omar.

Inside the market the stalls were shaded by thin tarps tied to crude bare branch posts. The tarps hung down to shoulder level and so I walked through half crouched with my head bent sideways to my left. Fabric merchants sold bolts of cloth hung from bare branch walls. Piles of cheap Chinese sandals stood in the pathways next to mounds of second-hand clothes from Europe and the United States. A table of radios blared static and overdubbed cassettes.

I pushed through a thin clogged passageway where women sold fake gold jewelry and bin-bins, strings of beads that women wear around their hips as a type of lingerie. I passed tailors and tables of cosmetics and mirrors with pictures of young Chinese women on the back. I squeezed past stalls selling t-shirts of Barack Obama and 50 Cent while merchants yelled at me “Toubab (white man) come look! Gambian price!”

The crowd thinned when I came to the butchers. Sweaty men with greasy hands hacked bits of meat and bone with machetes. A cow’s head sat sideways in the road. Sand covered an open eye and the tongue pushed out through the teeth. The smell of raw fat was thick in the dry heat. A small mud shack spewing black smoke out one window and up the wall was painted with pictures of goats, sheep, chickens and cows. Omar walked out of the door with an empty bread box.

“Momodou,” he said, calling me by my Gambian name.
“Omar, how are you?”

He picked up an armful of bread from under a tarp beside the hut.

“Momodou, give me one minute and I will come and help you.”

Omar was busy. The market was packed. And so I waited for him for about half an hour on the shady side of the hut.

We wore our way back through the mass of people to the main road. Back to the same line of water jugs where the taxi had dropped me.

“This is it? I was just here.”

Omar called the woman who owned the jugs over and he looked at me. I looked back at him. I had assumed Omar would help me negotiate in the sense that he knew something that I didn’t, or that he was friends with this woman. Neither was the case.

“How much is this one?” I asked in Pulaar.
“Three hundred,” she replied in English.

Her price was too high. I grimaced and made a noise as if this initial offer had physically assaulted me. I offered a price too low and she made the same contortion back at me. We settled at one hundred and twenty five.

“Jarama,” I said.
“Jarama.”

Omar stood next to me a moment looking at the londe and then at me.

“Ok Momodou, I’m going now.”
“Great.”

I left the jug where it was and went to look for a cardboard box to make my nest of towels and clothes. There were small shops along the road and so I stopped in each one. Nothing. Every box was accounted for – new and old. Even the battered and dirty ones were sewn back together with rice bag linings. I was out of luck.

The londe was big and an easy target. It might barely fit into a bass drum. I figured my lap might be the safest place. In the middle of the bush taxi van I sat crammed into the hard bench seat with my arms around my purchase. The van was nearly empty, and so I sat and waited another 45 minutes for it to fill up. The van was an oven and the windows were sealed shut.

Even worse, the clay londe had sat beside the black tarmac road all afternoon in full sun soaking up the 120 degree rays. Those rays were now soaking into me. My skin was red and dripping, my hair was matted to my forehead and my clothes were soaked. I looked at the woman sitting to my right. She smiled a painful smile and tapped the londe with her finger tips, her hand bent at the wrist.

“At least your water will be cold.”

Peace Corps and Glimpse.org Story Contest

Last month my essay A Little Bit of Knowledge was chosen by Peace Corps and Glimpse.org as the winning submission to their joint contest on how volunteers are dealing with the worldwide Food Crisis.

After editing and re-writing, the essay became a story entitled It Takes a Thorn Tree To Raise a Child. On May 5th the story was published on the Glimpse.org website.

http://glimpse.org/stories/view/it-takes-a-thorn-tree-to-raise-a-child/

The original essay submission is published below this post under its original title.

Thanks to everyone who follows this blog. This is my first official publication.

Cheers,
-Brian

A Little Bit of Knowledge

Inside Amadou’s grass-fenced compound I squat down on my heels in front of a communal food bowl and struggle to squeeze myself into the open space. There are ten of us sharing lunch together, and an entire village celebrating the birth of Amadou’s son: Abdoulie. We are wrapped around the giant stainless steel bowl and wrapped inside the billowing cloth of our kaftan robes. Elbows knock each other as we all reach for handfuls of scorching benachin (a mixture of oily rice, sweet potato, cassava and a trace of meat). Keeping my balance is as difficult as pulling my hand up to my mouth. Every movement next to me shifts my weight and threatens to knock me backwards. If I fall over I’ll probably take someone else along with me. We’re at the mercy of each other, a delicate balance. One ill-timed twitch, one spasm, and we might all end up on our backs.

The meal vanishes in minutes and people scatter to the shade of mud walls and mango trees. Respite from the relentless sun. They find comfort on the palm bough stools and in tired radios that strain to push music through thin static speakers. The celebration has ended with the last bits of the feast. Abdoulie’s few wispy curls of week-old hair have been shaved off and he has officially joined his community.

By the gate to the compound sit two hundred seedlings in black plastic-bag pots. Winter Thorn trees, Faidherbia albida, or what the Fula people of central Gambia call badansang. In the next few weeks Amadou and I will plant these trees throughout his millet and corn fields to improve the soil and strengthen his crops, a technique not practiced in this part of the country. With food prices steadily rising Amadou is open to suggestions, especially with another mouth to feed.

According to the World Food Program, production of cereals within The Gambia was down by 35% in 2005. The price of corn increased by about 21%, and rice by about 25%. Even millet, the staple of the Fula people, saw its production affected by the rising price of fertilizer. Most of this change can be attributed to the rising cost of oil. Global corn prices have been affected by the use of one quarter of the US harvest for ethanol production. Rice prices have increased because of the growing expense of exporting the crop from Asia. The story is the same across West Africa. And since the fertilizers used by subsistence farmers (the job title claimed by almost the entire population) are petroleum based, feeding the soil has become increasingly expensive, too.

After saying his goodbyes to Amadou and the rest of the family Yero Ketta, one of the village elders sees the trees and asks what they’re for. He does not like the answer, and he does not like the tree. The thorns fall off and are painful to step on. The branches give birds a place to perch as they endlessly raid the crops. These are bad things and he lets Amadou and I know as the bristled white hair on his chin seems to stand on end. After a brief pause Njie, the village tailor, leans over to me and says in perfect English to avoid being understood by the crowd, “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

But a little bit of knowledge might also improve life dramatically. Knowing that current fertilizers are petroleum-based and that they are shipped to this tiny river-country on giant oil consuming freighters is important. Knowing that the poisonous run-off from these fertilizers could significantly impact fishing along the river and the fishing industry along the coast is something that every Gambian should know. Most importantly, however, is knowing that something as simple as a tree could relieve some of this pressure. A solution in a seed. The technology is free, and the cost of production is measured only in time.

From an agricultural point-of-view the Winter Thorn is something close to perfection. Its deep roots fix nitrogen into the soil and leave the top layers undisturbed where crops are planted. During the growing season the tree drops its leaves adding nutrients and biomass to the soil while at the same time relieving all competition for sunlight. Even the leaves, shoots and seedpods are considered one of the most important types of animal fodder in the Sahel. The fallen seed pods and hot season shade attract foraging animals that leave behind manure. A perfect cycle.

Planting trees to improve food production not only fights hunger and dependence, but it also fights a quickly encroaching desert. The Gambia has seen its population explode over the past fifty years from 300,000 to 1.4 million. The accompanied strain on resources has been evident. The total deforestation in the past forty years is a frightening 80%, and the degradation of land quality in the Sahel has been just as negative. If this trend continues The Gambia, as it exists today, could be in trouble.

The rainfall was good this year, and so were the harvests. The best rains in over ten years, the people of Koli Kunda village say. There will be food in the hungriest season – the months when the rains finally come and a new crop can be planted. This next year won’t be desperate, but while the weather might be nice, the climate is still changing. It was a good year to be a farmer and almost everyone is a farmer, but there is work to be done. A bad harvest would be a disaster. The sound of pounding mortars and pestles crushing grains into powders and stripping their shells might cease. This rhythmic heartbeat pulsing through every compound of every village might dwindle to a murmur; an uncomfortable silence in the dusty Harmatan winds that blow south from the Sahara.

Yero Ketta has put his tools away and left his fields in his old age, but in less than ten years Abdoulie Nyang will pick his up for the first time; working in fields planted with Winter Thorn. A change of perspective is what is most important: A little bit of knowledge, but the right knowledge. Amadou brought his trees and his son into the world at the same time. How these two will interact will be the test of a father’s ideas; the test of a changing relationship between farmer and field.

Some strides for food security start long before their results are felt. Bala Musa Kolley, a local forester, reminded me of a Jola proverb, “When a bush pig is thirsty it is forever doomed to dig in the soil where it stands.” Since the bush pig never plans ahead it can never shape its future. It is doomed to repeat its work and never build upon it. A little preparation might make all the difference in the next generation’s food bowl. With a little work there might be a little more room.

The Dueling Buses

There is a uniformly defining characteristic to travel within The Gambia – misery. It isn’t necessarily that way, though. With money, misery could be upgraded to awfulness, but as a Peace Corps volunteer living on a paltry allowance the high rolling trappings of awfulness will have to wait. For now misery will remain. And as the old adage goes, there is nothing misery loves more than company.

For this reason it is always valuable to travel with a partner. Forget safety in numbers. The new rule is sanity in numbers. But then again don’t let the numbers grow too big or misery might get downgraded to hell – an easy move. It’s hot here.

In order to travel to the capital from my site I must spend about eight hours in transit. This begins with waking up early and taking advantage of the best transportation this country affords: the dueling buses. I have an advantage in this respect since I live 2 kilometers from where the capital-bound buses depart. They leave at almost the exact same times everyday, and because of these facts my hut has become a place of transit for many friends. This is extremely advantageous in recruiting miserable companions for my journeys, and for restoring my sanity and English language skills while spending long stretches upcountry.

The dueling buses include the government-owned Gambian Public Transport Company (GPTC) bus that we refer to as “the blue bus,” and the privately-owned Unique Transportation Services Company (UTSCO) bus that we refer to as both “the Africell bus” (because of it’s billboard size ads for the cell phone service provider) and “the magic bus.” The blue bus is a decommissioned Barcelona city bus complete with city map, warnings in both Catalan and Spanish that smoking is punishable by a 40 Euro fine, and all sorts of undecipherable graffiti. The contrast of riding in this bus past thatch-roofed mud villages and overloaded donkey carts is worth the journey alone – probably more so if you’re from Barcelona. The magic bus is one of a fleet of brand-new, offensively chartreuse, American-made Blue Bird school buses. Unlike the blue bus’s individual bucket seats, the magic bus has the cramped faux-leather benches that remind you of the horrors of middle school. There are pros and cons to both, and therefore they seem to be forever dueling. While blue leaves in the early morning and is more punctual, magic is faster and less prone to mechanical failures. While magic has cushioned bench seats, there is no sense of boundary and personal space within The Gambia and a passenger will, no doubt, become crushed between a ripe smelling old man and a fat woman whose baby will continuously kneed its dirty feet into your thigh like it was a lump of dough. While the bucket seats on blue won’t necessarily save you from aggressive baby feet or odor, they will grant you enough room to gain free function of your arms, and if you have a traveling partner you can claim a pair of seats and hold your breath as long as you can.

Lately, I’ve been a loyal customer of the blue bus, or “the man” as my host-father likes to refer to it – calling to mind images of beatniks and smoky bars. This is a problem. For the entirety of my adolescent and adult life I have functioned at the mercy of a metabolism in overdrive. However, at the same time, I do not always suffer from hunger pangs. The result: I get hungry and don’t always realize it. This results in a state called “hanger,” or alternately, I become “hangry.” I love this word and wish I had coined it myself. It is defined as a physical/emotional state of anger that occurs as the result of being hungry. I like to believe that it is among the earliest of human emotions. Our ancestors thought process might have gone something like this: “Hungry. Hungry make me angry. Angry make me kill deer.” Then one would eat the deer and all would be well with the world.

This state of hanger while combined with miserable travel is like vinegar on baking soda, one must bring snacks in order to prevent the two from mingling with each other. Another good measure is traveling with a woman. This too, I believe, has its roots in early human emotion. If I was hangry and miserable while traveling with a male, my chances of seeing him as a rival are greatly increased. This would almost inevitably result in a battle for alpha superiority. Two men and a beautiful woman might be an even bigger disaster.

Luckily, both buses stop around noon in the town of Farafenni where provisions can be acquired. The most alluring of provisions is the chicken sandwich. Not only are you given chicken and bread, but also potatoes, noodles, onions, spicy sauce and a topping the locals refer to as “mootard” that is identical to our familiar condiment: mustard. This all costs a dollar. However, the women selling the sandwiches are brutal and cutthroat and might find life more comfortable playing hockey toothless somewhere in Calgary. Their aggressive sales techniques only serve to aggravate the miserable and hangry traveler. In terms of video games like Mario Brothers, the Farafenni sandwich ladies are like the bosses at the end of the levels. Once they are defeated and a sandwich is secured you have won the level and may proceed to the next.

From this point forward your misery will hinge simply on every other possible disaster save acts of cannibalism. Again, this is where a traveling partner is of greatest value – especially a woman. If I become angry my traveling partner(s) might say, “Look, it’s the New York coming out in him.” This statement serves two purposes: 1) It undermines my anger as having no legitimacy by assigning it simply to my place of rearing. 2) It confuses me because it seems like a reference to a New York City stereotype, a place where I have never lived. If a male said this during a period of hanger it could be dangerously interpreted as a veiled threat that could result in horn locking.

Recently, my girlfriend took a decidedly unorthodox approach and had a travel juju made for me. A juju is a West African charm whose origins of use are ancient. In this case my travel juju consists of passages of prayers from the Koran written on a sheet of paper and bound inside a half-dollar sized leather pouch. I wear this on my upper left arm around my atrophied bicep, and still fail to look any more badass than I did before.

So far my travels have been exceptionally less miserable, but this could also be a result of the exceptionally better mood I have found myself in lately. Regardless, I’ll continue to wear the charm and convince myself of its mystic powers. If it keeps working, I might find myself in the market to add to my juju collection. Some of the more impressive options include protection from guns and knives, and invisibility. If there’s one that prevents hunger and anger from mingling, I might be all set.

One Size Fits All

Lying slightly crumpled and on its side, the van was empty. The doors didn’t close anymore. They were bulged out like a swollen corpse. It looked the way a donkey or horse did after it fell dead out in an empty field and had a week of sun to bloat it. Stiff legs spread far apart. Body ready to burst. The van was in the ditch on the side of the road – on the side opposite of where it had been traveling. It must have lost control, crossed the oncoming lane and collapsed onto its side.

The passengers were all standing around. Everyone looked alright. Maybe some cuts and bruises, but you couldn’t really tell. I was in the back of an identical van, or what they call a gele-gele here – the most common mode of public transportation. We stopped on the side of the road, just past the accident and the driver jumped out. I think he wanted to help. There wasn’t much commotion though, just a shocked stillness and low murmurs and a scattering of people on cell phones. I don’t know what the driver thought he was going to do, or why he rushed to do it so quickly. He left our van full of passengers, about 24 of us, and forgot to put on the brake.

When we started rolling backwards everyone inside started to panic. I looked up to the front and saw people standing and grabbing at their things and calling out to the distant driver rather than sliding over to the driver’s seat to put a foot on the brake. We were rolling backwards and starting to slide down into the same steep six foot ditch.

Somehow I didn’t care. Maybe I could tell we weren’t going to flip. We were just going to plow into the ground at ten miles-per-hour, bust the open back doors with the impact and be absolutely fine. I was in the middle of a trip back to my post, in the middle of a magazine and in the middle of an article. Really, I just didn’t want to be interrupted from all three. And so I sat there and kept reading.

I grabbed a hold of the seat next to me with my left hand as I turned a page with my right, and when we hit the ditch I didn’t budge. All around me people tumbled and groaned dramatic groans – an insincere symphony of competing soliloquies. They pushed each other out of the vehicle with flair and self-concern and I was alone. A moment later the driver climbed back in, backed up into the empty field next to the road and then found a path back onto the tarmac. The passengers climbed back in and we were headed out east and upcountry again.

No one yelled at the driver. No one was angry. Even though they were all convinced the driver had nearly killed them in a moment of blatant carelessness, they said nothing. It was absurd, and I just kept reading.

It reminded me of a Fula proverb that says, The heart is your enemy. A strange statement to a Western mind where the heart is always associated with love and wisdom and intuition – the seat of human instinct that holds more value in the eyes of so many than the mechanical logic of the mind. The idea that the heart was one’s enemy did not sit right the first time I heard it, but that’s because I was looking at it the wrong way.

The day I first heard this proverb I was working with Amadou in his riverside orchard. We were clearing the dry grass and weeds that had clogged the stretch of land during the rainy season. We were burning the grass in a patchwork – small sections to keep the flames under control – when I heard Samba, Amadou’s brother, let out a startled scream. There was a giant snake beneath a fallen tree among an unburned patch of grass. This was major news.

Gambians hate snakes – all Gambians and all snakes. I don’t think this is a misrepresentation even though it is so total and so final in its statement. The hatred comes from fear. They are hated because they are feared, and they are feared because they bite. But even though the vast majority of snakes in this country are harmless, almost all bites are fatal. People, it seems, are so good at working themselves up over a snake bite that it kills them.

It’s not the bite, but the person. Not the snake that is the enemy, but the heart. Some people even believe that touching a snake or touching the clothing of a snake bite victim can be fatal. The deadliness of a snake is a mind game here. One that can be felt in a pounding, adrenaline soaked heart.

Amadou and Samba were not about to lose this game and so they smoked the snake out and beat it to death with sticks. It was a puff adder, Bitis arientans, and could have actually been deadly.

Before the snake had been forced into the open, though, Amadou was covering a year-old mango tree with wet sheets to protect it from the fire he was about to set. He knocked into a branch of the dead tree that the snake was taking refuge under and dislodged a large chunk of shriveled bark. When the bark crashed to the ground Amadou leapt out of the way, his heart thrashing in his chest, as if his life depended on it. In a way it did. But really it was just bark, and nothing more.

On the gele-gele, as we rolled backwards into the ditch, we were rolling into a ditch and nothing more. We were not crashing, not flipping. We were not careening off the road and into a thick murky river. But those are all things that could happen to a person inside a gele-gele. You can’t treat all situations equally. If you stand up and thrash around as you roll slowly off the road, you can hurt yourself. If you sit calmly you’ll probably be fine. It’s the difference between the snake and the bite, and the danger of a deadly heart.