Because the situation security-wise was so fragile, and
Peace Corps monitors our blog postings, facebook statuses, and so on checking
for any content they deem “inappropriate,” I am about to give you a hopefully
somewhat honest account of events, my thoughts, and my worries, after leaving
Mali and feeling like I can say more than I would be able to, had we still been
there now, during the aftermath of the coup.
So, to begin, I was
in Bamako on Sunday, March 18 to be the nerd you all know I am capable of being
and getting my upper retainer repaired after 10 successful years of
partnership. Because Peace Corps
covers my medical like no one’s business, I could get that work done free of
charge over three appointments, and could have gone back to Sikassoville (my
regional capitol) on Wednesday morning.
But, being sloppy when I’m out of site-rat mode (I spent a little too
much time in site, and a little too much time out when I was out), I figured
I’d leave after lunch and not hurry.
At 2:05pm, when I was going to leave the Peace Corps Bureau to catch
that afternoon bus, the shooting in Kati, a suburb of Bamako, had started.
Why was there shooting?
This is the thing. I started
rereading my favourite Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, during the coup,
which was a horrible idea because it started to make me feel really hopeless
and angry at war, and a beautiful idea because it started to make me feel
really hopeless and angry at war.
So, welcome to my mind:
Listen: Akinyi Shapiro has come unstuck in time.
It’s late March.
People are talking about the military wives. The womyn are yelling at government ministers saying their
husbands were murdered, so many more were murdered than the news said.
The government says it didn’t know and it’s sorry. So it goes.
***
There were a bunch of soldiers that died in late January in
the North. They had no ammunition
left and they were fighting the same fight they’d been fighting in the North
for decades, and the people they were fighting had all these weapons from
Qaddafi, who had died and left a bunch of them weapons as twisted reminders of
being apart of some country they seemed wanted in. The people the soldiers were fighting were rebels, who felt
like they didn’t belong in Mali any more, because all of the people they loved
had either left for Niger or were dead.
So it goes.
***
The rebels aren’t just rebels: they’re people with feelings
and backgrounds and more than their weapons. But they walked into the military barricade where the
soldiers had run out of ammunition and they executed them.
Correction: people thought they were just shot dead in front
of something like a firing squad.
But then they released a video in March cataloguing how they decapitated
and castrated and killed them sometimes but other times just left them
mutilated to suffer.
So it goes.
***
In late March, the defense minister comes to the military
training base to talk to the soldiers left after the massacre that no one calls
a massacre about how much he cares.
The soldiers get angry and stone his car.
***
“Should I go in a taxi to get to the bus?”
“Maybe you should wait until traffic gets better. People are trying to flee.”
“Am I safe?”
“You’re more than safe here. But you’ll have to cross the bridges to get to the CMT
station, and too many people are there.”
“Why are they fleeing?”
“There’s been shooting.”
“You were talking about that? Just now?”
We don’t give enough time to ourselves to talk about
bullets.
***
The media hasn’t been reporting anything. It’s February. They haven’t been reporting anything
for awhile. More soldiers died,
and you learn it from the military wives.
They’re angry, and yell at people in the government. Now we know that the media doesn’t tell
the truth. But they’re the only
people not dieing to talk about people who do.
So we’re losing Malians and we don’t know how many. So it goes.
***
I walk into the Peace Corps volunteer house to stay the
night as a ‘precaution.’ No one
says anything more than that. We
can’t walk outside of our neighbourhood in Bamako. I get shitty white wine with a friend from a local street
shop.
We come back to grow old with our friend the Internet. The Internet becomes a constant source
of too much news copy-and-pasted from too few papers: mutineers, there’s been a
mutiny. People walk outside that
night and say they hear so many gunshots.
You see them in the sky sometimes.
We do an Internet dictionary scrawl for the word ‘mutiny’:
an open rebellion against the proper authorities, esp. by
soldiers or sailors against their officers : a mutiny by those manning the
weapons could trigger a global war | mutiny at sea.
Is that like a coup d’etat? And when will they stop shooting? Why are they shooting?
***
It’s 7am Thursday, March 22. I wake up to shouting that I should get up. I run down stairs. The guards give us rules: no walking
outside. We stay here, we don’t
know how long, and we hope that it stops soon. The shots are so loud, you can hear them through the walls
during breakfast. Just sitting
like that, all peaceful, like background music at a hotel. Boom, boom, who knows where it’s from,
who knows who it’s hit, so it goes.
***
“You know, I don’t wanna sound sadistic, but it’d be kind of
fun to be evacuated.” I’m sitting
in a forest on the side of my home-stay village. It’s November, 2011.
Three people look surprised.
“Akinyi, are you serious?”
“Like, just up and have a coup d’etat?”
“I mean, you gotta admit, it’d be like a field trip. Just a bunch of twenty-somethings at Tubani
So (our training site).”
“Yeah, except for the coup part.”
And then we laugh, we all laugh.
***
The Internet tells us there’s been a coup d’etat on Thursday
morning. The media says
nothing.
“Shit,” we all say.
Boom, boom.
***
“You know, they’re not targeting us,” my friend says.
“Well, I mean, maybe us, you know.”
She’s black. So
am I. We laugh, oh we laugh.
***
Who’s ever a safe observer in a coup? From the house balcony, we can see the
gunshots like real time in a Schwarzenegger movie. It’s like the most random action movie you’ve ever seen:
when will they shoot because they’re happy? What if they’re angry?
Shots don’t sound different.
***
They tell us they’re shooting in celebration. It’s a victory: the government has
officially been told it’s been failing us.
One of our nurses comes to the house in a taxi from her own
home. Personal business.
She says that there are tanks outside and children next to
men with guns and they’re shooting and the kids are cheering and she told the
kids to go home, and what’s the matter with you, and scolded them because she’s
a good mom.
Most of us aren’t surprised. That’s what Malian womyn do: they take care of everyone.
***
She changes some wounds some of us had had from infections
before. Then she leaves, and comes
back with a sack of bread and pates. She throws them in the house, and she
leaves. She slams the door. Now, we have food for awhile.
And we yell thank you, but she’s gone.
***
There’s this big feeling like you need to say that you didn’t
see something coming when it’s bad and it shocks you. That was me the first days and last week of the coup. And people would say things like:
We knew things were bad.
We knew they were dieing.
We knew they had weapons.
We knew that the government wasn’t all too great.
This makes sense.
And so we came to a hardened consensus of two things:
- People should be angry.
- No one can fix it.
***
It’s Saturday.
Someone’s moving chairs upstairs.
Five of us think they’re bombs. I’ve never thought that something was a bomb before. And then I’m upset, I’m upset because I
don’t know why I’m so scared about my safety when I’m not a civil agent being
mutinied against. If the US says I
move, I move. There’s nothing to
really be nervous about, unless you’re Malian.
***
Someone else comes every day to give us food. We make a list and they come with the
things on the list. We eat like
kings in the middle of a coup.
So it is that I get angry that they don’t bring pain
chocolat one day as the rebels take
Timbuktu. So it goes.
***
One morning the week before all the pain chocolat and all the croissants, an administrator tells us
he’s angry.
“You’re angry?”
“I would be in the demonstrations.”
“Really?
Why? I never pegged you as
the demonstrations type!”
“Because these people, they’re ruining my country.”
Mali’s dieing, so it goes.
***
One, two, three, cities falling one by one like culturally
significant dominoes.
We joke about them moving fast.
Then we start to hear about “the Islamists” on the Internet.
One of the only moderate Muslim states in the world!, people
say.
And they’re angry, and they’re scared, and we wait for the
news to tell us nothing.
***
New flash: Sanogo, the leader of the coup, can’t speak
French!
We joke that they picked him after they stormed the media
station, just like one potato two potato TAG, you’re the leader of the coup!
But oh G-d, somebody shouldn’t run a country like that.
***
He comes on the television bearing AK-47s slung about him
and on the floor, and slurring his French. Soldiers, who you might think were just regular people
outside of their uniforms, are now running the country from what I can only
guess from repeat broadcasts is a media station covered with AK-47s.
What might make you angry is that you’re hearing the fate of
your country from the news, which isn’t free. Imagine what a privilege you have being American: to only
talk about the concept of freedom of the press in the abstract idea of a
“freedom”!
Staff have family members in the North, each of them. They might be dieing. We don’t know, not because the press
has a politically-influenced “slant,” but because the press is not free to
say what it wants.
It’s been taken over by a group of people with AK-47s. So we don’t hear the death count, and
hope a reporter from somewhere else watches them die so that they can tell us
about it on the Internet.
We wait for confirmations of deaths for weeks.
***
Have you ever seen a gun flare, a flare that traces where a
bullet will land?
It looks beautiful.
I think about it when I cry for the second time talking to
my dad on the phone. It’s one and
a half weeks into the coup. It’s
the second time and last time I’ve cried talking to anyone outside of
volunteers in Mali about the coup.
He asks me what I want to do, and I think about all the
guilt I have in my pockets left to dribble on my last memories in my
village. I was too antisocial; I
think to myself, I didn’t talk to Salifo the last night I was there because I
was so fixated with the scant schedule I had; I never met more people because
it was easier to read alone with my puppy. And I was so—this is a new source of guilt—I was so
safe! And if any one of them was
ever held up by a soldier, by the new leaders of their country, new to power,
young, and unaware with guns in their hands, would I defend them?
Who is your community?
Who do you defend?
From brute, physical violence?
They would have defended me, surely. I know that.
But, if Peace Corps stays in Mali, would I be willing to
defend them? Am I apart of my
community enough to put my life on the line for them and their country?
***
I wouldn’t.
I’m a coward.
And I think about the flare I saw flying toward the media
station. It was pink and almost
quiet, there’s just a hiss and it’s gone, painting itself against the sky, a
perfect arch, followed by the bang that needed it for guidance. Pastels flying through the air. Quiet enough that you’d have to be
looking for it, like a shooting star.
I don’t talk about it like that.
I tell my dad that I’m scared, but I’m ashamed that I’m
scared and that I want to leave if everyone else leaves. Not an exception. Just a mass acknowledgement that the US
waited too long this time. That my
fear is legitimate. That people
shouldn’t think about guns this much.
So I cry when I tell him that I’m scared. It’s the first time I admit it to
anyone. And that I have to go back
to my village to get my valuables: my travelers’ cheques, my passport, my
important things. I don’t even
mention saying goodbye to my village.
Because I might be coming back, even if I don’t think I deserve to, the
coward I have become.
He tells me not to lose my head. And he begrudgingly tells his daughter that she should go to
the village only to come back less than a day later, alone, to pack her things
and tell people they matter to her.
***
I cry for the third time when he tells me my avocado plant
is dead.
So it goes. The
first death of someone I know during the coup. I have to hang up because I don’t want him to hear me
crying.
Silly, isn’t it?
Crying for a plant and not for a people.
But one is abstract, and one is not.
How many people makes a people? The population?
The borders? What dividing
lines would you use to count a “people” vs. the entire US?
Because technically, the North is dieing, and the South is
just confused, and I haven’t met the vast majority of any of them.
It’s hard to imagine a city in the US ‘falling,’ vs. my
friend dieing.
So I focus on avocado plants.
***
The Talmud is a book that has written out all of the
opinions of rabbis regarding their interpretation of the “spoken Torah,” or the
Mishnah. The Mishnah is supposed
to answer questions about the contradictions that lie in the Torah, or Old
Testament. So the Talmud is
special because it’s a whole bunch of opinions about the Mishnah that don’t use
Aristotelian reasoning. That would
go something like this:
A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, so A must be
bigger than C.
Or:
Mali is being run by soldiers, and these soldiers don’t know
what they’re doing, so Mali is being run by people who don’t know what they’re
doing.
But the Talmud would use logic like this:
Black is associated with white, but black is also associated
with houses, so the colour white and houses must have something in common.
It is in my most religious moment, sitting in my bedroom in
my host-family’s house during training for my new post in Kanye, Botswana, that
I realize:
Coups are based on principles.
People in the north are having their dignity taken away.
Principles and dignity are synonymous. To have one, you deserve the
undisturbed possession of the other.
Coups and being taken from are similar.
No one has created anything. And so you feel helpless: everything is being destroyed, and
nothing is under your control.
***
This is me talking to the medicine man in my village my last
night before we get evacuated:
“Eh, mun kera yen fe?”
(Eh, what happened over there?)
“Ah, sanji bena na.
I tun hakilila a tun be mun?” (Ah,
rain will come. You were thinking
it was what?)
“Tinnena, matarafa. tinnena! Barisa n tun be Bamako waatimin fen bee kera, n hakilila n
be matarafa men yoro bee.” (Honestly, guns,
honestly! Because I was in Bamako
when everything happened, I think I hear guns everywhere.)
We all laugh.
And I walk away to get the call.
And it’s telling me that it’s time to leave the
country. I have to be in Bamako on
Thursday. It’s Tuesday night.
And now I’m crying, and I shouldn’t be, so I make myself
stop. And I walk back over.
“Eh, sanji be.” (Eh,
it’s raining.)
***
I hold my puppy.
I think saying goodbye to my village will be easy, but saying goodbye to
Mariam will be one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
We’ve watched my friend, her sister, give birth together
now.
She’s seen me cry.
She’s slept beside me.
And so I wipe my eyes before I walk to her house.
She feeds me, and we’re watching a football game.
She says everyone is fine, that it’s been a long time since
I’ve been outside at night, that I should come out more often and we’d be able
to have all these great conversations without me worrying to get home to cook
dinner.
There’s silence.
I look at her with tears in my eyes and tell her I have to
leave, to jamana were (another
country). I tell her I don’t know
when I’ll be back, that it might be a month, or a year, or many years, but that
I’ll be back. And I tell her
husband that when I get back, we’ll go to his school together, and he’ll cook
for me again.
She says that’s good, that we have to go. A momentary sad glance at me, and she’s
fine, composed, no tears. Always
the strong one.
She walks me home that night. I hold my puppy and cry. It’s worse than saying goodbye—it’s feeling like you’ve been
said ‘goodbye’ to.
***
It’s the morning I go to Bamako for my retainer appointments
before the coup starts, and Mariam’s maid Awa is pointing me into her husband’s
front room.
Mariam’s husband, a week before, said that I couldn’t marry
two to four husbands like men marry wives here. When I tell him he’ll see, he says that men are the dugutikis (village chiefs) of their families. I say they aren’t, and that both womyn and their husbands are the ‘village chiefs’ of families,
and that that’s the only way development can happen in Mali: if men and womyn
work together, as equals.
He agrees. And
I’m shocked.
He says, in fact, that womyn do more work than men, that most men don’t acknowledge that,
and that he knows how to cook, since his mother died when he was young and he
was the oldest, and therefore needed to cook for all his brothers and
sisters. He says he’ll cook for me
one day, when I look surprised at the idea of him cooking.
He says he’ll cook me beans. It’s a fart joke.
I tell him I’ll eat whatever he cooks, even if it’s beans.
So the morning I’m going to Bamako, I walk into his room,
and he’s sitting on a stool, in front of a large covered tasa (metal bowl), a smaller one, a mug with a plate over
it to keep it warm, and a plastic bag with a long baguette from the baker. He uncovers them all like he’s
unveiling a mural: a vat of beans, guacamole, bread, and sweet coffee. And he says, “An ka dumunike” (Let’s eat).
I’m so shocked, I tell him I can’t say anything. After two minutes of eating in silence,
he says, “You know what the trick is?
You cook them for 5-6 hours, and only put in a little oil. That’s what makes them so soft. See, most people cook them for 3-4
hours and put in too much oil, and it’s
not good, like this. You have to
let them cook for awhile to taste this good. I learned that a while ago.”
So a man gives me cooking advice in Mali. The most meaningful interaction I’ve
had in months. I eat too much too
fast and then I leave for Bamako.
***
More news, more news!
Two days after it’s occupied, Womyn and girls are getting raped in Gao!
Silly some of us for thinking that good, G-d-fearing people
were heading shenanigans in the North: they’ve destroyed the hospital!
A man died in the street, a womyn gave birth in the street,
and they’re raping womyn, womyn stuck there, womyn who can’t leave like the
Christians who fled Timbuktu.
So it goes.
***
Tonight’s the first nightmare I’ve had in over a year. It’s the night after I hear about
Gao. An infusion of my own
experiences and biggest fears:
I’m being held down by a man in my bed. And I have no control.
The Talmud would say that rape is a lot like a coup. There’s no control in either.
You can’t drink away a coup, you can’t smoke away a coup,
you can’t eat away a coup, you can’t apples-to-apples away a coup, you can’t
collage away a coup, you can’t talk away a coup. Time is at a stand still, and you just have to wait.
***
You see, unlike every other time you feel powerless and it
might be something within you, something you’re somewhat responsible for, and
you can make it better, you can’t make a coup better.
I wake up from the dream and I wasn’t breathing. I don’t sleep much during the
coup. You sleep in 5-hour shifts,
and take naps that feel like whispers.
I sleep in hour-long spurts for the rest of the night and
try working out in the morning.
There’s still a coup.
***
It’s two weeks into the coup. I’m still staying in the same damn house, with the same damn
people.
Our reserves of nice are wearing down. Uncontrollable situations bring out the
worst in people.
You can count peoples’ vices: this one drinks, this one
binges, this one cries in private for hours when they think we don’t notice
they’re gone.
But you walk into the bureau and all the staff is
resolute. Our training manager
says, “See you guys at the IST!”
IST stands for In-Service Training. It’s supposed to happen one and a half
weeks after we end up evacuating.
A friend of mine and I look at each other. “I’m not sure that’ll happen,” we say.
The training manager is always smiling. He’s such a nice guy.
Some of the staff are literally not sleeping for days while
they decide with the State Department whether we should stay or go. Others are in complete denial.
Us volunteers are all losing our minds, and some of the
staff are planning a training fit for peaceful nations.
***
Later that night, I tell my friend Danielle about the dream
I had. I tell her because I’m
worried. I feel out of control,
and I suddenly realize that that’s my biggest fear, like it is for many womyn
who feel like they need to always be on.
She asks me if I feel bad about just feeling pain. If I feel it’s unproductive, or selfish.
I pause.
Yes, I say thoughtfully, I have thought it was weak and
pointless, inefficient, to experience pain. I explain that I treat my panic and down points like dust
under couches: I’m embarrassed they’re there, but I clean often, so I acknowledge
it’s there long enough to make it disappear. We call it ‘emotional maturity.’
Danielle calls it sad.
If you don’t feel the pain of what happens and skip to just making the
bad feelings go away, what have you really accomplished? Have you really processed
anything?
So I cry. And I
cry, and I cry, and I cry. And I
cry for the womyn of Gao, and I cry for a G-d that does nothing to help them,
and I cry for the countless people who’ll die in the North, and I cry for me,
and for still dreaming about being pinned down on beds and for still being held
in a house in Mali, and waiting for men to stop and waiting for the US to help
me, whoever might be able to, whoever sees what’s happening.
And I accept that I eat my feelings. And I accept that I don’t sleep at
night, and that we all might have PTSD, that we’re all a little messed up now,
but most importantly, that it’s okay that I’m in pain.
From my house balcony, over a city that hasn’t stopped
running. Cars still go by, and
street vendors still sell bread and beans in the mornings. And things look fine, even days after
the coup they look just fine, but I’ve announced to the world from every fibre
in my body that I’m in pain.
***
Two days before we evacuate, it’s Passover Seder in the
house. We’ve made matzoh ball
soup, and have loads of matzah—even chocolate-covered—and dried figs and
jellies, and horseradish, and macaroons, and vegetable/laughing cow cheese/fat
dip, and parseley and salt water and latkes (who follows traditions to the tee
anymore?), all from three packages sent lovingly from some of our parents to us
in Mali.
Nine of us are Jewish.
About ten of us aren’t. And
we read the whole Seder in English, and sing Dayainu, and some of us scamper off to find the afikoman.
And we eat until we think we’ll die. It’s all very Jewish.
A Jewish guy mentions that it’s very fitting that we’re
talking about making exodus, when we all know we’re about to evacuate and make
an exodus of our own from the problems of Mali. We all have to think about that for a profoundly disturbing
moment of silence.
***
I get angry.
Enlivened. I can’t stand
the comparison:
1. Is a coup
over us in any way like slavery?
2. Why should we be the ones to leave?
3. Why are we
feasting in honour of a preemptive exodus from a place we’d all settled into as
home?
I give my own note at the Seder:
“You know, every year, Pessach, like all Jewish holidays, is supposed to be an opportunity for us not
only to remember our history as Jews, but to make connections to what’s still
happening in our world today that hasn’t changed. A chance to meditate on and commemorate those still
struggling. And people in the
North are being held against their will under laws that aren’t theirs’. When we say, ‘Next year in Israel!’, we
mean to say ‘Next year in peace.’
So, let’s all try and channel some of this energy for peace in
everyone’s situation in the North, and may we have peace soon.”
Everyone nods.
It’s a solemn moment. And
then we eat like kings in our own house, no longer slaves, while others become
them, a seamless historical switch-off where we win and think about it and they
lose. So it goes.
***
Ladies and Gentlemen, today is evacuation day! There are four buses loaded with the
last of the Americans, and they all rush by anyone who might be press, past
their staff, into the airport.
They get given tickets, and, grasping their WHO yellow cards, walk
through four check-points, saying nothing, people they’ve never seen before
instructed on exactly what to do with their futures.
Some staff board the special chartered flight with the
Americans, most stay behind, in the airport, saying goodbye on repeat, broken
discs in a broken country.
Each American has two bags—one luggage-size and one on their
backs—and maybe a purse. Almost
each American is either laughing hysterically at most points, drunk and saying
goodbye, or depressed and self-loathing.
Each American is getting flown out of the formerly-strongest democracy
in all of West Africa.
The Americans go marching one-by-one after a one-hour flight
into the Accra airport, and give their Peace Corps passports to a trio of
airport staff, and walk into more buses with their luggage that was just
sitting at the airport check-out, all ready and nice. And they get off the new buses into a big resort, at night,
without any idea where they are, and they’re given money and new cellphone sim
cards with credit all ready on them and hotel keys and told where to walk to
for dinner at 10pm sharp.
And they eat like they’ve forgotten about ripped-up democracies. Like they’ve had their great exodus,
forty years in the desert, and look at them now!
New Americans!
***
It’s over a month since I’ve been in Botswana. My youngest host-sister has a fixation
bordering on obsession with Jesus and the ministry television channel. She’s chanting, silently screaming back
and forth with the overly-dressed Pentecostal preacher performing an
exorcism. She’s screaming over and
over again until she gets quieted by our older sister, “Come out, come out,
COME OUT IN THE MIGHTY NAME OF JESUS!”
I’ve started playing a game: each time she chants, I think
about how much worse the coup has gotten.
“Come out!” – And the rebels crossed the invisible line into
the South and the military can’t fight them back.
“Come out!” – And they set fire to one of the tombs in
Timbuktu just to desecrate something holy.
“Come out!” – And the counter-coup by elite Malian soldiers
failed.
“Come out!” – And the junta won’t hold elections for a year.
“Come out!” – And one of the groups the rebels teamed up
with is trying to implement Sharia law in all of Mali whenever it gets the
chance.
“Come out!” – And 200,000 people have fled from the North,
made exodus, thank G-d, oh thank G-d, but their homes and lives are empty.
“Come out!” – And so many people became refugees that other
countries need to “make their minds up about” so fast.
“Come out!” – And a volunteer knows a Tuareg whose house was
broken into looking for his blood weeks after he left.
“COME OUT IN THE MIGHTY NAME OF JESUS!”
***
One drink, two drinks, three drinks, ten! Three hours of rum in my Accra
post-evac hotel room turns into an all-night pool ordeal that feels like a high
school-party dream. All the girls are wearing pretty
swimsuits and big dumb smiles, and all the boys are a little too eager to talk
to them and smoking cigarettes and playing chicken.
Except that none of us are really there.
***
This is the night I find out I’m going to Botswana. I’m not there.
Physically, I’m in my hotel room with my friend
Danielle. Emotionally, I’m
‘tired.’ Really, I have no energy
anymore. The nurses are given out
Zanax like candy: no one’s sleeping, everybody’s anxious, we all can’t tell
what we’re running on anymore. All
anyone wants is to get on with their lives, and no one’s sure what their life
really is any more. One minute
Mali, next minute nowhere. So it
goes.
They post where we’re going in the main conference room,
names, positions and all. We’d
picked our first, second, and third choices from poster paper stuck up on
conference room walls, position descriptions scattered on random tables,
interviews charmed through in 15-minute slots, and medical exams conducted with
professional efficiency I’ve never really witnessed before. They told us we had all the time in the
world: you can pick where you want to go on Monday, or by Wednesday. Some people pick going home, to either
go at an application and start all over again or to just simply start all over
again. I pick a country by
Tuesday.
I’m going to be a ‘Community Capacity Builder’ in
Botswana. An HIV/AIDS volunteer
working in a clinic or social work office in a country with a 25% adult HIV
prevalence rate.
It’s a dream job for me. Really.
I still don’t sleep well. Womyn in Gao don’t either. Nor do the four teenagers that will be beheaded soon for
vandalizing public property in Kidal.
So it goes.
***
It’s early March.
This is one of my favourite memories from Mali.
It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and the mango rains have
started. They come randomly, in
quick, heavy falls, ten minutes max, and the air sighs after they come. It really is like the sky is being allowed to breath. Everything feels beautiful after it
rains during hot season in Mali.
And I’m in Sikasso.
This is where rain happens here.
And I’m in the Peace Corps house in Sikassoville, and four of us are
just talking on the roof. It’s
sunny, and the floor is tiled, reflecting that light, and we’re sitting on a
mattress, and it starts raining.
It’s only rained once so far this season, but it’s raining,
and it’s raining right now, and it’s so spectacular, and it feels so good.
And we all walk out from under the awning, and I feel the
rain, all barefoot. And I’m so
happy, we’re all so happy, it’s raining, oh my G-d, it’s raining.
And we wonder if it’s raining in our villages. And we wonder how long it’ll rain for
this time. And in our own ways, we
just thank G-d for rain.
I don’t know if this tells what happened accurately, or if
it’s even the best way to tell it at all.
But it’s my goodbye to Mali.
I don’t know how I feel about Botswana—I haven’t been able to sleep well
or read for very long or write home to people in weeks. I also don’t know when I’ll go back to
Mali, if ever. I don’t know when
or how I’d go. My Bambara is
fading, I find that I’m quickly forgetting names of people I loved and foods I
devoured. People like to call
Botswana my ‘cosmic reward,’ for such a hard Peace Corps post, set of
experiences, or both, I can never tell.
There’s one thing that Vonnegut says in Slaughterhouse-Five
that sums up my experience fairly kindly.
Before I swore in as a volunteer, my friend Michael once said that he
loved how Vonnegut just felt like he could start off a book talking about how
he’s writing it with a glass of wine in his hand, make that apart of the very
first chapter, not even a prelude.
So he writes:
Seymore Lawrence gave me a three-book contract, and I said…
‘Sam—here’s the book.’
***
It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there
is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or
want anything ever again.
Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always
is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”
***
…I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for
tales of great destruction. The
sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read.
Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone
and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all
the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the
ground.
So it goes.
Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well
known. The world was better off
without them.
And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where
all those people and their homes had been. But she did
look back, and I love her for that, because it was so humyn.
So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.
***
People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it
anymore.
I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.
This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written
by a pillar of salt. It begins
like this:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
It ends like this:
Poo-tee-weet?
