Can’t Not Count: 40 days in country, 15 days in village
Greetings, and for those of you who sent all the dang haze/dust that is now covering my otherwise lovely starlit night sky, please come collect it. I need my waning days of nil-light pollution to be appreciated as best as possible. No more rains to knock it all earthward.
I think it was at about day T – 60 that ‘the count’ suddenly popped in my head. You can’t really avoid it; I wager it’s fairly normal to be struck by the fact that, in the not-to-distant-future, you will be warping across climates and cultures, and praying your old friendships are as solid and appreciated as you need them to be. Tack on the additional un-likelihood of returning to where you were – socially, linguistically, mentally – and you realize that another ‘epoch’ in the Life of Aaron (monty python needs to make this movie…) is coming to a close.
Of course time never stops, and all the things that’ve happened here will inform all the things that will happen in the future, and blahblahblah holistic universal comprehensive understanding stuff…. But for real, the past two years are un-recreatable. And while I said the same thing to myself at the end of a three-year stint spent living, working, and schmoozing in Cambridge MA, the comparison between a transformative international and a stabilizing domestic experience is, in the words of Mark Twain, ‘the difference between lightning and a lightning bug’.
I used a Mark Twain quote totally off the top of my head! That was freaking awesome, and clearly means I still have my crap together.
So as much as I maybe would like to make comparisons to previous life experiences in an attempt to gain perspective, I probably shouldn’t. In the end, there ain’t not much there to be compared to. Thus my remaining 40 days in the near-Sahel shall be taken one at a time, with ample time for percolating and all sorts of exciting self-discoveries to happen largely state-side (although the process certainly has started here).
In other news, I have a visitor named Jess/Zaliisa/Angel/Wendwaoga (we’ve worked hard to get her integrated into Sabce a.s.a.p, and part of that is getting enough names to satisfy the Muslims, the Christians, and the general Mossi population). Jess and I lived together in ‘Cambridge CAMBRIDGE Cambridge’ (imagine the monster-truck voice over) for a period of about a year, and she has made the eminently intelligent choice to take a month-long sojourn here in Burkina and make gratuitous use of having intimate access to a rural community in West Africa. (Many of you should follow suit.) I am attaching a rather fabulous missive she prepared for her friends and family back home, and which catches village life as seen through the eyes of a fresh traveler, especially as compared to my clearly jaded self.
One particularly lovely component of Jess’ work is a diagram of typical village dialogue. I believe I’ve touched on the idiosyncracies of language here, and the often-times ‘scripted’ conversation trees that I’ve come to love, revere, and roll my eyes at. Here now, grace a our friend Jess, you can join in on the linguistic/cultural fun, and have West-African village conversations in the comfort of your very own home. So grab some peanuts and enjoy a renewed look at Sabce village life. Also, pictures of doing laundry.
Cheers
Aa
