[dispatches to other volunteers and folks at home]

18 April 1995, Matam

Dear Lacey,

Got your letter and yes, I imagine that too much solitary time can begin to devour you. Solitary confinement, a punishment. You spend all morning worrying about who put the "bop" in the bop-shoo-wop-shoo-wop and then all afternoon in a fit because you should have been worrying about who put the "ram" in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong. I'm not there yet, fortunately. All the Americans in Matam are in Dakar, except the Norlanders, of course, and although I haven't seen them for two weeks I can sense the intense cloud of their failure and clinical depression when I get within a block of their house. Just shopping at the boutique nearby gives me nosebleeds.

It's summer here! At three o'clock, everything you think is creaky, arthritic bicycles. Skinny kids in baked streets. My brain goes numb and thoughts loll around with their tongues hanging out of their mouths. You know this feeling: I imagine it is summer there too. Coming to Senegal has been a little like living perpetually in those first few days of summer, with school out, too much time on our hands, and looking for a job. But I digress. I have reason to believe that parts of the outside world have survived the plague and that we are not trapped in the only remaining island of humanity. Life, maybe, will go on outside these borders. Speaking of life, I saved one the other day. Okay, that's a lie. What I really did was pull someone out of a wrecked car. It wasn't even on fire at the time, but to my credit (I guess), the engine was fizzling and spitting up fluid as the car lay on its side, and the man inside was trapped under a seat that had torn free when it rolled over. I cannot begin to describe the cosmic Holy Shit sensation I experienced when I slowed my moto to take a look at the wreck and suddenly saw the man's feet sprawled through the windshield.

Then this strange thought -- Oh No, not this again -- as I went tripping down the slope the car had driven off of. No ambulance, no equipment, no nothing. No rubber gloves and this guy is bleeding from a head wound. This is the third time in my life that I've been the first person to happen upon an accident; does this happen to everyone? Anyway, the short story is that another man and I got the guy out of the car and I went to Matam to bring the ambulance. He was banged up but essentially fine. I got home at nightfall and thought, God help me, I liked that. Everything after that moment of shock and dismay: taking charge when a life has just splintered into chaos, being granted the ability to touch and soothe someone when their world is confusing and painful, bringing them somehow back into the fold of humanity and out of the nerveless dark. I love it. It's not the medicine of machines and prescription, but responding with one's own body. That's strange because I have a hard time dealing with other people in normal life and I'm not the kind to quiet a crying baby. But in a crisis, I deal. So look, if we go to Tanzania and you fall and crackle an ankle, you'll be as glad as you can be under the circumstances. I doubt I'll go in July, but I couldn't go in November, I think, because it's within 3 months of my COS date. I was thinking end of December. Might you still be willing to do a trip then? Honestly, I was home for Christmas last year and it was no great shakes. Krist-awful kommercialism. I'm a lousy traveling companion but you seem like you'd be all right. It would be a shame to waste all that paper xeroxing your book. P.S. I won't be southward, if allah jabbis, until the week after FOT, when I'll be in Thies for a week and probably hitting the VAC. Paths cross? Du courage. Du doo ron ron.

Your sans frontiers,

Adama

[Historical note: we did not go to Tanzania together, and she did not fall in love with me as I had intended.]

17 April 1995, Matam

Dear Julie,

Incredible that the sandstorms haven't started yet, don't you think? There was a weekend quite a while back in which the heat was an oppressive, thickening yellow cotton-wall at the horizon and I was filled with a sort of instinctive dread, the sensation of waking up from a bad dream and not remembering it. Knowing, still, that something terrible just happened to your mind when you were pinned down and helpless. I felt it even before I got out of bed, a telepathic Uh-Oh coming from the earth itself. Like that feeling right before the amoebas hit, when you know you've got them, and only time will show you how bad. I imagine all around the world it was like that, or at least all around Senegal, which is easy to mistake for the world sometimes.

Time is the usual flies and cloudless skies. Alleviated, greatly, by the pleasure of having a house to dig gardens around (for the sheer love of digging -- isn't digging marvelous?) and walking about in my sunflower underwear. All the Americans in Matam are gone south for another week or so, except the family of Baptist missionaries, who keep to themselves for the most part. I think they are depressed, perhaps clinically. Wouldn't you be? I like them, but I'm perpetually stymied by the father's near-pathological inability to carry on a conversation. He's worse than me, for God's sake. Their daughter is about ten and she looks like she starts fires with her mind. Budding Carrie. The kind that even blindfolded doesn't have to take two swings at the piŅata. Creepy. I like her best, I think.

Apart Įa, I'm teaching everyone at the dispensaire how to use Microsoft Flight Simulator II on their Macintosh. It's quite impressive on the color screen. I feel like some sort of a comic foil to our old hard workin friend Andy: I go to the dispensaire to teach everyone how to goof off more effectively. The structuring of leisure time is a uniquely developed-world idiosyncrasy, I believe. It ranks up there with commuting (why the hell can't people just decide where they want to be and stay put?) as a defining American trait. But enough cross-cultural holier-than-thouedness!

The river is frighteningly low. Still perhaps 100 meters across, but there are places where you can walk along the rippled-sand bottom to Mauritania, and the slow water only reaches up to your chin. Cool as a prayer in a dark church, quiet as light. Color of sky and the insides of limes. Brimming with more diseases than the Labratoire De Souza. Lay down in and let it carry you away.

I'm still planning to come down with the gang post-FOT to assist in detox and accompany jittery ETs to Dakar. The VAC is that Friday morning so I'll be out of reach that day and whenever the coordinators' meeting is. Otherwise I'm in. PS Is there a counterpart workshop? Yes, my memory is telling me, but my chefs de poste(s) haven't yet been notified. They need a lot of advance notice lest I unwittingly schedule my "Tetris stage" on the same days. I'll jaw this factoid to Eli as well. Sweaty kisses my friend! Du courage. Du doo ron ron.

Yours sans frontiers,

Adama

10 October 1995, Matam

Dear Gardners,

I don't get too many letters these days, the shine of writing me having long ago worn off with most of my family and friends. It seems to have reached pit-bottom around the time I decided to come back for another year. The letters dried up, my post-office box occluded with dust like a fatty artery, and what little news filtered through to me always seemed to be about which friend has her masters now and who among my ex-girlfriends is getting married to someone that everyone agrees is way nicer than I ever was. Nil desperandum. The rains raised the river up to its capacity and flooded the lowlands, leaving Matam on a bluff just above vast stretches of flood plain with the odd tree or bush sticking out of the water. The road to town is elevated above the surrounding land, so driving home is like going out a one-lane causeway through an inland sea, to my hot island home.

With the rains came cooler weather and swarms of mosquitoes. Entire mud-street neighborhoods were flooded. The evening hummed with bugs. At times it seemed like everyone I knew had malaria. The medical center where I work saw up to sixty cases a day in a town of 12,000 people. Now the waters are rolling back, the mud drying in retinal crack-patterns everywhere, the ruts from car and cart-wheels cementing into semi-permanent obstacles.

Still, there are seasonal rivers threading through the landscape. I recently went on a trip with another health volunteer down the river, delivering vaccines to the health posts. After the first seven kilometers we had to load the motorcycles on to a large dugout canoe to cross the first tributary. We had been assured, by our coworkers, that this would really work, but were fairly resigned to the possibility that we would go over and the Suzukis would sink to the bottom. We figured this would probably get us into some trouble and certainly call off the trip, but would also make a real whopper of a story if we didn't drown in the bargain.

There is just nothing like attempting, in Senegal, to get from point A to, well, anywhere. It is an act of faith in an utterly mysterious but ultimately sustaining God. I left Matam that morning with a Coleman cooler full of ice bottles and glass vials of Yellow Fever and Measles and the like all wrapped up in my extra clothing, strapped on the seat behind me. We carried a tire pump and some tools and we weren't sure how far we would get that day. Wherever it was, we knew people would put us up, and feed us, and suffer gracefully our sketchy pulaar skills, and ask about people we know in Matam, and probably give us the best bed in the compound.

Merely getting a 200-lb motorcycle down a steep slope and into a canoe is, actually, impossible. But life distracts us from attending to matters of possibility, and faith (based on wisdom or ignorance, which in matters of faith are rarely distinguishable) is meant to be used, not tucked away for hard times. We crossed the river by boat and got to three health posts that day, over a dirt track that followed the slow meander of the river, arriving in a village at dusk. There we sat out talking to members of Doug's extended family (relatives of his family in Matam) as the light went down and all the village cows came in from foraging, raising a reddish, glowing dust around us. The next morning as we were leaving they presented us with a chicken.

Now, OK. I'm not currently a vegetarian, but this seemed like some kind of a violation of the animal's civil rights; the kind of thing that will come back to haunt me if I someday seek public office. I can't refuse the chicken. In fact, I want the chicken, which is a fat rooster with gorgeous feathers that is currently hanging upside-down from the father's hands. I point out that the chicken will be difficult to carry, but the chicken is soon trussed up and strapped on the motorcycle behind the Coleman cooler, looking extremely alert, as if he knows his life is about to change forever. He cackles once in a while and tries to flap, resisting his new karma, which for reasons inexplicable has become intertwined with mine. He screams when I kick start the bike; this is going to be a long day. Everyone waves good-bye. Doug is now carrying a lump of peanut butter almost the size of his head, that a woman asked him to take to her son who lives in Matam while he goes to school.

Later, the chicken attempted to resist fate by struggling free and ejecting from the back at a good 50 km/hour, where he hit the ground running and hid out in a millet field. We flushed him out and trussed him up again. Most of my squeamishness regarding animal brutality was by this time gone. This bird was lucky, by God. He was getting to ride a motorcycle. He was spending his last couple days with me; no anonymity in our relationship. He had a name (Harley), he was seeing the countryside, traveling at speeds that other chickens only touched in wing-twitching chicken-dreams. He was going to die, yes, and we were going to eat him when (if, God willing) we got back to Matam, but I would tell the story of our unlikely pairing for the rest of my life and he would not be forgotten.

Chickens appear to lack faith. Watching them wander around dirt courtyard snatching up bugs and picking fastidiously at spilled rice grains, I'm tempted to believe they are idiot savants: immensely gifted at single-minded food-gathering for hours on end. But then, the chickens in Matam fight endlessly and most have lost all their neck feathers in the melee. Seeing them, with their Lyle Lovett mop-tops and pale necks, I want to ask what is possibly so important to chickens that it's worth yanking out tufts of someone else's feathers over. There are enough insects, there is enough rice. But chickens lack faith. Put them on a motorcycle and they can't cope. They're going to die anyway, but they can't enjoy the ride.

I'm being hard on them, I know. Harley did choose his moment well, and I was impressed with his gutsy escape attempt. Maybe it was just his un-Zen demeanor that I found tiresome. It seems the essence of good faith is knowing that faith has its limits; sometimes it's plain spotlit-deer dumb. All life seems to hang between these two extremes:

"Let go. Let the feelings... let the changes."
-Gail Sheahy (not sure I spelled that correctly)

"Why do you think I'm taking a chance like this? To lose? Get out there and crack 'em. Crack 'em! Crack 'em! Fight to win! Fight to live! Fight to win!"
-Knute Rockne

I hope winter is wintrous, the weather outside is frightful but the fire is so delightful. I should be home in late February or early March. I'll look in then. Hello to all.

Adam