by Lisa McKay
I stare at it and want to cry with rage and shame. And fear. What modern blind spots or willful, apathetic ignorance of ours will goad future generations into similar paroxysms?
I don’t cry, though. I am not very good at crying. Outwardly, anyway.
1 p.m. More than one hundred feet up, standing on planks and holding on to ropes, I look down into the treetops of Kakum national park and watch butterflies waft through the rain-forest canopy. There is a tiny, brilliant gecko by my sneaker – an emerald on legs.
4 p.m., Tetteh Quashi market. I buy an oil painting on rice-sack canvas that I do not need because I see the talent of the artist, and his pride mixed with anger, and I wonder what I would sell if my lot were a market stall on a dusty corner.
11 p.m., Kotoka Airport, in Accra. The blank, endured space of the crowded gate lounge on a hot African night. On the plane I resent the roundness of the man beside me, the touch this compels, but refuse to relinquish the armrest completely.
When I was twenty-one I spent three weeks traveling around New Zealand and there’s a moment from that trip I sometimes think of in the midst of all the moments of these trips. I was in an inflatable raft, shivering in a wet suit, about to plunge over the highest commercially raftable waterfall in the world. We got snagged for a moment at the top of the fall and there was a deliciously terrifying, wonderfully focusing pause before we teetered on the very edge of that 21-foot drop. Then the raft went completely vertical and folded in on itself. Mashed against the others, blind, I opened my mouth to scream and was invaded by the ocean of water that had followed us over. The pressure was unbearable. Then, suddenly, it was over. We popped out the bottom, the raft unfolded the right way up in the calm of the eddy and most of us were even still in it – torn between shrieks of fear, laughter, and a silent awe that we were still alive.
We navigated seventeen sets of rapids that day in New Zealand, and that’s what these work trips sometimes feel like. To adapt a metaphor from Anais Nin – like living for weeks in the rapids where novels are born but not written.
Today. Friday. London. As I step out of the plane it’s suddenly freezing and I am adrift, caught in this enforced eddy.
I look around in the sudden stillness and realize.
The raft is still the right way up.
There are blue icicles hanging from the ceiling in Heathrow.
And Christmas is coming.
Washington, D.C., USA
I spent most of the next week in the basement of my sister’s house, dressed in her flannel pajamas and working on a big report on staff care for humanitarian workers in Sudan and Chad. It was a good place to be buried in a huge project, for on those occasions when I did come up for air there was Thanksgiving with family, my young niece to smile at, the fanciest automatic coffee maker I’d ever seen, and Michelle to chat with.
“Wow,” Michelle said one night when I ventured up to the kitchen in search of ice cream. “You do have to work hard for your job sometimes.”
“What do you mean?” I said, digging through her freezer. “Do you have any chocolate mint?”
“There are already four different types in there,” Michelle said. “You’ll just have to make do with one of those.”
“I work hard,” I said, returning to her previous comment and resigning myself to plain old chocolate.
“It’s just that most times we chat on the phone,” Michelle said, “it’s just after five in L.A. and you’ve already left the office.”
“That is not called ‘not working’,” I said. “That is called good work-life balance.”
I looked down. It was after eight at night. I had not changed out of pajamas that day, or showered. I had two more sections to write before I could go to bed.
“That balance sometimes vanishes when I’m on the road,” I said. “This project is a disaster and we’ll be lucky to get it finished before I have to leave to run the Baltimore symposium.”
“Oh, so you are still working now. I thought maybe you were down there writing emails to that guy. … What’s his name?”
“Oh, uh, Mike, you mean,” I said.
“How’s that going?” Michelle asked when I didn’t supply any more details.
“First,” I said, pointing a recently emptied spoon at her, “there is no ‘that.’ We are just getting to know one another as friends. Second, I don’t know. He’s on some island somewhere and has been for more than two weeks. I won’t hear from him until he returns to civilization.”
Michelle didn’t push me any harder that night and I was grateful, for the truth of the matter was that I was interested on some level. As careful as I had been to lay down boundaries in those first emails to Mike and to never allow myself to indulge in that naughty art of e-flirtation in any of my letters since, I had already caught myself wondering more than once whether maybe, just maybe, Mike and I might have a real shot at something more than friendship. I didn’t want to try to explain that even to Michelle, for Michelle had had a front-row seat the last time I’d tried long-distance love and that show had been anything but pretty. I doubted that she would bring the past up and lecture me, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I didn’t need to, I told myself. I’d learned my lessons well with regard to long-distance relationships. These lessons were, in fact, remarkably similar to the rules that lifeguards at public pools used to drill into us over and over on steamy summer days.
Danger!
Walk, don’t run, because the ground here is slippery.
And no diving in headfirst, even if the water looks like it might be deep enough.
Baltimore, USA
Inquiries into my love life were, it seemed, once again the flavor of the month. The next conversation on this topic came just three days later, in Baltimore.
It had finally stopped raining, although the pavement was still wet and the streets steaming in protest against the November chill. I was in my own little world, juggling my laptop and bag, when I stepped onto the curb near my hotel and he spoke to me.
“Did you get your coffee?” he asked. “Oy vay, you look tired.”
“I am tired,” I said, recognizing the smiling, bowler-hatted limousine driver who had introduced himself as Gideon and pointed out the coffee shop to me that morning. “I’ve been thinking for five hours. My brain hurts.”
“It’s cold, ey?” he said. “Where I’m from in Africa it isn’t this cold.”
“No,” I said, remembering the heat that had chased me onto the plane ten days earlier. “I know, I was in Africa last week.”
“Where?”
“Kenya and Ghana.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed. “Not Nigeria? You should go to Nigeria. It is the best place. Why have you not married an African man?”
I did a double take. Nope, we were definitely standing on a street corner in Baltimore. And, yes, I was discussing this topic with a total stranger for the second time in three weeks.
About three weeks earlier I had been in a taxi in Nairobi. It was a Jatco taxi, Jatco being one of the handful of taxi companies in Nairobi where you can be reasonably sure you won’t be robbed mid-journey – not by the taxi driver, anyway. This safe-service guarantee apparently doesn’t, however, extend to protection from being propositioned.
I was staring out the window, exhausted after a long day of facilitating, when the taxi driver, who was blessed with the unlikely name of Bunny, spoke into the silence.
“Are you married?”
I sighed. I knew we still had about forty minutes of traffic on Muta Gisau Way to contend with. It was going to be a long trip back to the hotel.
“No.”
“Ah, I think you must marry an African man,” Bunny said.
“Why?”
“Ahhhh. African man is very good. Very hard-working. But I think maybe you best should pick an African man with no money. That is very good.”
At this I was curious beyond all restraint.
“Why?”
“When man have no money and wom
an have a little money, then they come together,” Bunny brought both hands together to illustrate this important point, thereby taking them off the wheel and almost running us into the back of a minivan in the process. “Then they work together to make lots of money.”
“Plus,” Bunny added as the coup de grace, “man with no money will be more faithful than man with lots of money.”
“Huh.”
“How old are you?” Bunny asked.
“Thirty one,” I said.
Bunny clearly knew something about Western women. Usually when I gave this answer, I got a look that hovered between shock and concern and sometimes an interrogation into how and why I had managed to reach this age unwed. Was my father negligent? How high, exactly, was my bride price?
But Bunny shot me a winsome smile. “Ahhh! You are very young. You are too young! Do you like African men?”
“I like Africa. I like coming to Kenya.”
“That is good. I myself am in the marriage process. Yes,” he said.
Temporarily relieved, thinking there was a girlfriend on the scene, I ventured actively into the conversation.
“Oh, are you engaged?” I asked.
“Not yet. But soon.”
“Oh, do you have a girlfriend?”
“Oh, no. Not yet. But soon. I am liking the white woman.”
By this stage I figured that all hope of a graceful and reserved exit from this taxi had completely disappeared and I might as well ask the question on my mind.
“What is so good about white women?”
“Ahhh … They are very good at the love.”
This was more of an answer than I had bargained for. Thankfully I stayed quiet long enough for Bunny to speak again. “They are very good at the relationship. They have lots of understanding.”
“Understanding of what?” I asked, confused. “Politics?”
Bunny laughed at me. “They are very social.”
It was a long trip back to my hotel, albeit a rather entertaining one. By the end of it, Bunny had figured out that I probably wasn’t keen on marrying him. That didn’t stop him from handing me his phone number and email address as I got out.
“Do you think it’s possible,” he asked, “that we could meet?”
At least I think he said meet. It might have been mate—the way his accent, with its beautiful round cadence, smoothed out the words made it hard for me to tell, but I chose to give him the benefit of the doubt. The answer was the same in any case.
“I don’t think it is possible,” I said.
At this Bunny gave me one last grin. “Ahhh, but with God all things are possible.”
Bunny definitely had the last word in that conversation. I had to agree that, yes, with God all things are possible, but I still wasn’t going to meet, or mate.
But between Bunny in Kenya and now Gideon in Baltimore, I was beginning to wonder if I just might be missing something. After all, I sometimes thought, I’d made several other major life decisions on the basis of reasoning that more than one small nudge in the direction of an open door was irrefutable proof, quite possibly divine guidance, that I should walk through that door. Many of those decisions had worked out all right. Perhaps I was making a mistake by continuing to turn down these types of offers, offers that never seemed to come from remotely sensible options who actually lived anywhere near L.A.
As we shook farewell, Gideon held my hand a shade longer than necessary.
“If you have spent time in Africa, then you know me, here,” Gideon said, placing his hand over his heart. “And since I have lived here for almost ten years now, there is not so much I don’t know about you, I think. That makes love not so hard, I think.”
I smiled, thinking that I seemed to learn more about love every time I talked to a taxi driver.
“Give me a call at your convenience,” Gideon said, handing me his card. “I’ll take you to Nigeria.”
Itonga, Vanuatu
While I was eating chocolate ice cream out of the carton and chatting to taxi drivers on street corners, it seemed that Mike had been very far from both ice cream and street corners. When a flurry of emails from him hit my inbox after three weeks of silence, I smiled and immediately settled in to read the first of these, a mass email to friends and family about his time in Vanuatu.
Monday, November 26
From: Mike Wolfe
To: Friends
Subject: White skin and other tales from the bush
“If our blood is the same color, why is my skin black and your skin white?” the village chief asked me. It was my second day in Itonga village on Tanna Island. Relative to the nearest skyscraper, Itonga is a four-hour flight, then a one-hour hop in an eight-seater biplane, then an hour drive down rutted dirt roads, then a thirty-minute walk down into a tropical ravine on a steep path crowded by dense foliage. No cars, no computers, no mobile phones, no light bulbs, no Coca-Cola (gasp).
There’s a beautiful simplicity to life in the bush. The taro roots (breakfast, lunch, dinner) come straight from the rich dark volcanic soil of hillside gardens. Coconuts grow all around. The meat is slaughtered just hours or minutes before we eat it, the muscles still twitching as three men pick up an entire side of the cow and carry it to the roasting pit. The water comes from the creek, which is nourished in turn by the downpours and the gentle, steady rains that drip down thousands of verdant green leaves.
In the evenings, men sit under the magnificent banyan tree drinking kava and telling stories while the women finish up the day’s work, sometimes with a chorus of voices singing thanks to God. Sunrise, sunset. Simple. Sitting in Itonga on my last day of three weeks of the bush, as the gentle rains massaged the bamboo hut, I felt an amazing sense of connectedness. It was a beautiful moment. Pity that it took me three weeks to arrive at that moment. For up until my last day in the bush, I had been mostly counting the days until I got to leave.
I’ve been doing this humanitarian aid and development work for a few years now. I still struggle with my white skin. Most of the time it’s a liability, I think. When I show up in a village people think “Father Christmas,” which is in direct opposition to what we’re aiming to do. We’re trying to help the community see ways that they can improve their sanitation and hygiene practices themselves instead of just waiting for handouts from others, which is essentially what they’ve been conditioned to expect from centuries of village strongmen, colonialists, missionaries, and consultants. I loathe the extra attention I get in these villages and I go out of my way to keep a low profile. During our sessions with the community, longing to go completely unnoticed, I try to sit at the back of the meeting place. But alas, despite my best efforts, there are rarely other white people in these villages and I can’t just blend in. Goodbye anonymity, hello foreign zoo animal on display for all curious onlookers.
So during the past few weeks a lot of the thoughts that have sprung to mind have had something to do with looking forward to getting back to “civilization.” Cold beer, red wine, chocolate, hot shower, comfortable bed, food that makes my taste buds dance (taro three times a day gets old pretty quickly). Not having to watch people sit around picking lice out of each other’s hair. Yep.
And clattering around in my head have also been anxious thoughts about what I’m going to do next, and whether I can actually go on much longer in this exciting/ exhausting line of work. My first contract here finishes in three months. I feel pulled to leave the field and settle down in America, where certainly things would be more normal and where my white skin wouldn’t stand out. But I also I feel drawn to living in the field closer to the communities where there are real needs. And I’d like to actually live and work in the same place for more than one year.
And so early in the mornings while I’m walking down the well-trodden path to the river to bathe, these thoughts bombard me. Certainly it must be better living back in America. Certainly I’d be able to find a normal job, and I’d be able to surround myself with good friends, and I could adjust to l
iving in a world with broadband. And I’d be anonymous. I could just be a normal person again.
And of course there would be no rush-hour traffic, no moments of loneliness, no information overload from having to select one of 45 different calling plans from mobile phone providers, and no frustrations with insurance companies, and no strain from 24-hour news updates. Yes, life back in America would certainly be bliss.
So walking back from the river after bathing, or in between planning sessions with the communities, the question that has continued to surface in my mind during the past three weeks: Why do I continue to choose to live and work in places where I’m always an outsider to some extent, where isolation and loneliness are reliable companions?
Well, after three weeks in the bush, here it is: despite all the painful and uncomfortable moments, I still feel drawn to do it. I still have desire to use my abilities to help others. I still believe that people are valuable. And occasionally, just occasionally, I get to catch a glimpse of the difference that my work can make in the lives of people who are living in some pretty difficult circumstances. There’s still great purpose in this work, and at least for now I still believe the most effective role I can play in it all is to be the engineer who spends three weeks in the bush training national staff how to conduct sessions on community planning and design effective water and sanitation systems.
So I vacillate between wanting to pack up all my stuff and get on the next plane home and wanting to get on the back of a pickup truck heading out to the bush. But right now, despite the restlessness, the continual pondering opportunity cost, the complexities of being a foreigner, the power dynamics of development work, and the yearning for the normal, it’s worth it.
“Your skin is black and my skin is white,” I told the chief in my best broken Bislama, “because in America the sun is cold. In Vanuatu the sun is very hot.”
He was satisfied with my answer. So am I.
P.S. As I was leaving Itonga, the chief gave me a traditional bow and arrow and a woven basket. Gender roles being what they are in the Pacific, the chief explained to me that the man hunts and the woman follows with the basket tied across her head to gather what the man kills. So now I have my bow and arrow, and a basket. Which is going to be more difficult: successfully killing the prey or finding the woman to follow after me and pick up the kill? In my first try with the bow, I managed to miss a target that was only five meters away.