(no subject)
*****
This might’ve passed without worldwide recognition, but today was, in fact, Murphy’s Law Day. I celebrated by having gone wrong anything that could’ve possible gone wrong.
I ended up leaving the sub-office too late (after an insanely productive thirty-six hours - I was proud, possibly too proud, as luck would have it) and, by the time I reached my station, all of the lorries had left (and I was drenched in sweat - sun’s been up for three and a half hours and it’s already 100F). Keep in mind, this is around ten in the morning and my village is about seventy kilometers from town. In the rainy season, the vehicles willing to traverse my road drop significantly to two, one, sometimes none depending on how good of an island impersonation my area is putting on that day.
I had a meeting scheduled with my rabbit breeders - the original group and the new group - this afternoon, so I had to get back home somehow. I hopped into a cab going to a village up the main road and dropped at the junction, hoping that I’d been able to beat the lorry to my road. The women selling beans said that I had, so I bought forty cents worth and sat down to eat.
And then one of the ladies said that my earring was missing. She was not telling lies - it had fallen off, most likely inside the taxi. It was particularly saddening as it was a pair of bottle cap earrings in a shade of blue that I A) love and B) have a great difficulty finding. In short, it was a rare pair and I’d lost one.
I shrugged my feeling of nakedness off, pocketed the single earring and sat down once more to eat. And promptly chipped a tooth on a rock in the beans. I forgot to chew slowly, I was so hungry, and gave myself the most common Peace Corps injury. I am anything, if a statistic.
About five minutes later, a bus rolls up that I don’t recognize. It’s white, about the size of a fifteen-passenger van. But more importantly, there’s only five people inside. Normally, a van like that would hit my junction with no less than twenty two people inside so I was slightly shocked when I climbed in to all of that room.
Of course, I was ushered to the front, sitting in the seat of honor right behind the driver. Only this honor happened to come in the form of a blazing inferno beneath my toes. The engine block is between the driver and passenger seats making any seat in the front row incredibly uncomfortable. I lasted about twenty minutes before I spoke up, mostly because I thought the engine was on fire (heat aside, there was also smoke billowing up from between my ankles).
I had an observation, though, in the midst of my athlete’s foot from hell. The lady next to me was, after asking her, just as hot as I was, but neither of us said anything about the driver stopping so we could move. There were no less than ten other seats available for us to sit in, but neither of us said anything after it became apparent that the rest of the ride - another two hours - would entail our toe-flesh blistering atop its phalanges.
The culture here is very…deferential. No one really says anything negative to your face, because they don’t want to upset you - especially if you’re in a position of authority over them. It’s not true of everyone, especially the more educated (although, I’ve also had experiences that say otherwise), but I see it a lot amongst the villagers. So this lady, even though she was a little older than the driver, was not about to say anything to the man behind the wheel about her discomfort.
My observance, though, was the fact that I had waited twenty minutes to say anything. I’m not a Dagomba woman and shouldn’t have had any problems speaking up for myself.
The ride started out with excruciating heat - it didn’t build up to a point. The whole time in my head, I was thinking, “I should say something, I really should…but then he’ll have to stop and it’s going to be a hassle for me to move to the back and the rest of the people just want to get where they’re going and I hate to be an inconvenience, they’ll just think that because I’m foreign I’m assuming that they have to cater to all my needs, and oh, man, this is really…I’m gonna vomit.”
So I leaned over to the woman next to me, sweat pouring down both of our dirty faces, and said, “Are you hot?”
Almost before I could get the words out of my mouth, she was saying, “YES! I’m very hot.”
I looked to the lady on the other side of her and she was nodding very quickly, face also drenched.
It occurred to me that maybe they were waiting for me to say something to the driver because, well, I could. So I told the driver that the engine was very hot, that there was possibly fire and he stopped, no problem. He checked under the hood and below the carriage while we climbed into the back.
Luckily there was no fire, it was just hot enough to melt my shoes to the floor. Again, let me say that - my shoes were melted to the floor.
Once all of us rearranged ourselves (me in the backseat with an one-eyed old man with leopard print pants [yes, I was very envious]), we were off again, and this time it felt like we were flying. I found that my window actually worked, unlike the front seat window, so I opened it as wide as I could and stuck my head out and sucked in a lungful of cool air…
Only to find that this van has had the exhaust rerouted so that it blows out a pipe above the rear fender (what?? WHY?? why would you do that?!) and right into my face.
Needless to say, I closed the window and resumed sweating while chuckling to myself. I had accepted, by this point, that it was just going to be one of those days.
Subsequently, I was in a Leonard Cohen sort of mood, so I put on my iPod and closed my eyes, trying to doze a little on the remaining 25K home. I figured, at the rate we were moving, I’d get back with almost an hour to spare before my meeting.
Because we were going so fast and the car was very light without many people or any cargo, we were hitting bumps and the tires were leaving the ground. And when that happens, I go flying around in the van. I don’t know how they do it, but I wish I had this skill. The tiny grandmother in the seat in front of me couldn’t weight half as much as I do, but she somehow manages to say glued to the bench while I go flying bodily about the back of the car. I hit my head against the ceiling so hard, I knew I’d cut it (I was wrong) and Who by Fire had never seemed so appropriate in my ears.
There was a lady in the front who’s one of our sub-chief’s wives, so she has some status in the community. She was shouting at the driver to slow down and, just about the time that he did, we hit this huge lake of a puddle that’s right in the middle of my tiny Fra-Fra village that I also work in. As soon as we hit the dip, the engine died, hissing wildly as water splashed against the red-hot metal.
In the middle of the water, there’s not much foothold, but the men got out (even One Eye With The Pants) and pushed us backwards about a hundred feet. They push-started the van and it gave a valiant effort at passing through the water, but it died at about the same point.
Push. Repeat.
Seven times.
There were still five or so of us in the car and I suggested that maybe we also get out so the car would, you know, be lighter for when the men were pushing it. The chief’s wife, Sanatu, said it didn’t matter - the engine couldn’t pull a donkey cart. It would either make it, or it wouldn’t.
I thought she had a point and also secretly added that maybe this is one of their passive ways of resistance and sticking it to the male population.
Good for them.
I put my headphones back in.
The eighth time was a charm - it got us far enough out of the water so that, when the engine quit again, we could all get out (Tiny G-Ma stayed inside) and push-start it relatively easily (and I say relatively because, how easy is it to push-start a vehicle on an incline? the answer is ‘not very’). I was cracking myself up as I ran along the rolling van, reciting lines in my head from Little Miss Sunshine like, “Excellent work, soldier! No one gets left behind! No one gets left behind! Have I mentioned that I am the world’s foremost Proust scholar?”
Leonard had turned into Leona Lewis and Lenny Kravitz and by the time I got back into the car, I had the live version of Kashmir going. Led Zeppelin is sort of Zen traveling music - not that I was feeling anywhere near Zen at that moment.
During one of Jimmy Page’s breakdowns, we’d stopped again - abruptly this time as the van went headlong into another puddle and the front wheel lodged in the mud. We were sort of tipping over to the side and Cyclops ordered everyone to get out - quickly. I don’t think it would’ve done much damage had it slowly flipped, but our weigh was making it sink into the mud faster. I hopped out the side window in the back and moved far enough away to not get pelted by rocks when the driver started spinning his wheels.
The women groaned and loaded up their luggage on their heads, preparing to walk, but the driver persuaded everyone to stay. We pushed and pulled and stuffed rocks and branches and grass under the wheels, but after half an hour, it became apparent that this car wasn’t actually going anywhere.
I gave the driver a cedi and a prayer and took off after the caravan of women that seemed unfazed at the thought of walking ten miles in the noon sun.
I, on the other hand, looked down at my remaining six ounces of water and my signal-less cell phone and groaned. One headphone in, one out, I brought up the rear of the line, grinning as the women ganged up on the driver now that he was no longer within earshot.
“Stupid boy.”
“Foolish. Foolish. Ah-bah!”
“He doesn’t fear the road so it beat him.”
“Someone’s going to pick him on a moto while we’re left to walk - I’ll throw rocks as he passes.”
“Poor Balima [me], having to walk like this. The sun will eat her body. [It did.] My husband will beat him for her.”
It seemed like I’d wasted away the entire afternoon, but at that point, it had only been an hour since I last checked my watch. I still had an hour to go before my meeting started. I kept checking my cell, but there were never enough bars to actually hold a call and I was the only one out of us with a phone.
So, we kept walking.
In the middle of nowhere, it’s very easy to hear a noise that’s out of place. The birds’ chirps and the Fulani cattle’s cries fell away as the sound of an engine lumbering along became apparent. Our motley convoy turned in unison, hands shielding our eyes from the blazing afternoon sun - and there, on the horizon, puttering over the steepest incline on our relatively flat road, was Tamale Bi Waa (Tamale Is Not Far - how great is that name? if only it were true…).
The women started cheering and I squatted, unshouldered my pack and breathed a sigh of relief. Kasajan and his blue 207 bus were on the way.
Sanatu boldly proclaimed that, “The road fears Kasajan. It fears him,” and we watched as he expertly maneuvered around puddles and potholes that would’ve taken out the last driver.
By the time the bus reached us, it was apparent that they were well past overloaded and I thought that he might not have even stopped. But he did (Kasajan is a stand-up guy like that) and the women crammed inside, six across on rows that should hold four, while I scrambled up to the roof (this country has done nothing for my claustrophobia). Not the safest mode of travel, but I didn’t really have any options at that point.
They were hauling wood on the roof, which made for relatively clean seats (unlike the actual metal rooftop that has about ten years worth of oil and grime resting on its surface). I lay back against some two-by-sixes and pulled my sunglasses over my eyes, ignoring the way my head hit the wood with every hole we drove through. A guy next to me was like, “You should sit up, the sun will get you.”
I didn’t move.
I did, however, ask him if there was anywhere I could actually sit, on top of this vehicle, where the one-thirty sun on a road without trees wouldn’t get me. Cyclops found amusement in that and let the young guy know it.
The rest of my trip was uneventful - thank God - and I arrived home with about ten minutes to spare before my meeting. I rushed home, threw a bucket of water over my head, changed clothes and ran to the school where we were supposed to have the meeting.
I waited an hour before anyone showed up, but I did get five chapters into A Walk in the Woods (witty fellow, that Bryson). When it became apparent that people weren’t just late, but in fact, not coming at all, I told the ones that actually were there to go to specific people and tell them that the meeting was tomorrow at four. It seems as though people knew there was a meeting, but not the time. I’d told my chairman before I went into town to let everyone know, but there was probably some miscommunication error there as he doesn’t speak English and my Dagbani is…well.
No harm, no foul. I was actually glad I didn’t have to think beyond letting my eyes pass over words at that point.
The rabbit program is going well, but we’ve had a recent bout of deaths with some of the young. Everything is pointing toward them eating greens too early, though, because the ones who’ve kept the babies away from vegetation until now have survived. I didn’t want to have to think about trying to explain why some get diarrhea and some don’t, why greens will make them sick, but the corn chaff won’t. It was a blessing in disguise that that meeting was cancelled.
In the end, even though everything that could’ve gone wrong did, I learned some very important lessons.
• The more you need something the happen, the less likely it is to occur.
• Don’t ride in vehicles unless you know them (although, that begs the question, how do you ever actually know a car unless you ride in it…?).
• And sometimes people failing to do what you need them to do actually works out in your favor.
ETA: Forgot that I took this video while we got stuck. Enjoy.
This might’ve passed without worldwide recognition, but today was, in fact, Murphy’s Law Day. I celebrated by having gone wrong anything that could’ve possible gone wrong.
I ended up leaving the sub-office too late (after an insanely productive thirty-six hours - I was proud, possibly too proud, as luck would have it) and, by the time I reached my station, all of the lorries had left (and I was drenched in sweat - sun’s been up for three and a half hours and it’s already 100F). Keep in mind, this is around ten in the morning and my village is about seventy kilometers from town. In the rainy season, the vehicles willing to traverse my road drop significantly to two, one, sometimes none depending on how good of an island impersonation my area is putting on that day.
I had a meeting scheduled with my rabbit breeders - the original group and the new group - this afternoon, so I had to get back home somehow. I hopped into a cab going to a village up the main road and dropped at the junction, hoping that I’d been able to beat the lorry to my road. The women selling beans said that I had, so I bought forty cents worth and sat down to eat.
And then one of the ladies said that my earring was missing. She was not telling lies - it had fallen off, most likely inside the taxi. It was particularly saddening as it was a pair of bottle cap earrings in a shade of blue that I A) love and B) have a great difficulty finding. In short, it was a rare pair and I’d lost one.
I shrugged my feeling of nakedness off, pocketed the single earring and sat down once more to eat. And promptly chipped a tooth on a rock in the beans. I forgot to chew slowly, I was so hungry, and gave myself the most common Peace Corps injury. I am anything, if a statistic.
About five minutes later, a bus rolls up that I don’t recognize. It’s white, about the size of a fifteen-passenger van. But more importantly, there’s only five people inside. Normally, a van like that would hit my junction with no less than twenty two people inside so I was slightly shocked when I climbed in to all of that room.
Of course, I was ushered to the front, sitting in the seat of honor right behind the driver. Only this honor happened to come in the form of a blazing inferno beneath my toes. The engine block is between the driver and passenger seats making any seat in the front row incredibly uncomfortable. I lasted about twenty minutes before I spoke up, mostly because I thought the engine was on fire (heat aside, there was also smoke billowing up from between my ankles).
I had an observation, though, in the midst of my athlete’s foot from hell. The lady next to me was, after asking her, just as hot as I was, but neither of us said anything about the driver stopping so we could move. There were no less than ten other seats available for us to sit in, but neither of us said anything after it became apparent that the rest of the ride - another two hours - would entail our toe-flesh blistering atop its phalanges.
The culture here is very…deferential. No one really says anything negative to your face, because they don’t want to upset you - especially if you’re in a position of authority over them. It’s not true of everyone, especially the more educated (although, I’ve also had experiences that say otherwise), but I see it a lot amongst the villagers. So this lady, even though she was a little older than the driver, was not about to say anything to the man behind the wheel about her discomfort.
My observance, though, was the fact that I had waited twenty minutes to say anything. I’m not a Dagomba woman and shouldn’t have had any problems speaking up for myself.
The ride started out with excruciating heat - it didn’t build up to a point. The whole time in my head, I was thinking, “I should say something, I really should…but then he’ll have to stop and it’s going to be a hassle for me to move to the back and the rest of the people just want to get where they’re going and I hate to be an inconvenience, they’ll just think that because I’m foreign I’m assuming that they have to cater to all my needs, and oh, man, this is really…I’m gonna vomit.”
So I leaned over to the woman next to me, sweat pouring down both of our dirty faces, and said, “Are you hot?”
Almost before I could get the words out of my mouth, she was saying, “YES! I’m very hot.”
I looked to the lady on the other side of her and she was nodding very quickly, face also drenched.
It occurred to me that maybe they were waiting for me to say something to the driver because, well, I could. So I told the driver that the engine was very hot, that there was possibly fire and he stopped, no problem. He checked under the hood and below the carriage while we climbed into the back.
Luckily there was no fire, it was just hot enough to melt my shoes to the floor. Again, let me say that - my shoes were melted to the floor.
Once all of us rearranged ourselves (me in the backseat with an one-eyed old man with leopard print pants [yes, I was very envious]), we were off again, and this time it felt like we were flying. I found that my window actually worked, unlike the front seat window, so I opened it as wide as I could and stuck my head out and sucked in a lungful of cool air…
Only to find that this van has had the exhaust rerouted so that it blows out a pipe above the rear fender (what?? WHY?? why would you do that?!) and right into my face.
Needless to say, I closed the window and resumed sweating while chuckling to myself. I had accepted, by this point, that it was just going to be one of those days.
Subsequently, I was in a Leonard Cohen sort of mood, so I put on my iPod and closed my eyes, trying to doze a little on the remaining 25K home. I figured, at the rate we were moving, I’d get back with almost an hour to spare before my meeting.
Because we were going so fast and the car was very light without many people or any cargo, we were hitting bumps and the tires were leaving the ground. And when that happens, I go flying around in the van. I don’t know how they do it, but I wish I had this skill. The tiny grandmother in the seat in front of me couldn’t weight half as much as I do, but she somehow manages to say glued to the bench while I go flying bodily about the back of the car. I hit my head against the ceiling so hard, I knew I’d cut it (I was wrong) and Who by Fire had never seemed so appropriate in my ears.
There was a lady in the front who’s one of our sub-chief’s wives, so she has some status in the community. She was shouting at the driver to slow down and, just about the time that he did, we hit this huge lake of a puddle that’s right in the middle of my tiny Fra-Fra village that I also work in. As soon as we hit the dip, the engine died, hissing wildly as water splashed against the red-hot metal.
In the middle of the water, there’s not much foothold, but the men got out (even One Eye With The Pants) and pushed us backwards about a hundred feet. They push-started the van and it gave a valiant effort at passing through the water, but it died at about the same point.
Push. Repeat.
Seven times.
There were still five or so of us in the car and I suggested that maybe we also get out so the car would, you know, be lighter for when the men were pushing it. The chief’s wife, Sanatu, said it didn’t matter - the engine couldn’t pull a donkey cart. It would either make it, or it wouldn’t.
I thought she had a point and also secretly added that maybe this is one of their passive ways of resistance and sticking it to the male population.
Good for them.
I put my headphones back in.
The eighth time was a charm - it got us far enough out of the water so that, when the engine quit again, we could all get out (Tiny G-Ma stayed inside) and push-start it relatively easily (and I say relatively because, how easy is it to push-start a vehicle on an incline? the answer is ‘not very’). I was cracking myself up as I ran along the rolling van, reciting lines in my head from Little Miss Sunshine like, “Excellent work, soldier! No one gets left behind! No one gets left behind! Have I mentioned that I am the world’s foremost Proust scholar?”
Leonard had turned into Leona Lewis and Lenny Kravitz and by the time I got back into the car, I had the live version of Kashmir going. Led Zeppelin is sort of Zen traveling music - not that I was feeling anywhere near Zen at that moment.
During one of Jimmy Page’s breakdowns, we’d stopped again - abruptly this time as the van went headlong into another puddle and the front wheel lodged in the mud. We were sort of tipping over to the side and Cyclops ordered everyone to get out - quickly. I don’t think it would’ve done much damage had it slowly flipped, but our weigh was making it sink into the mud faster. I hopped out the side window in the back and moved far enough away to not get pelted by rocks when the driver started spinning his wheels.
The women groaned and loaded up their luggage on their heads, preparing to walk, but the driver persuaded everyone to stay. We pushed and pulled and stuffed rocks and branches and grass under the wheels, but after half an hour, it became apparent that this car wasn’t actually going anywhere.
I gave the driver a cedi and a prayer and took off after the caravan of women that seemed unfazed at the thought of walking ten miles in the noon sun.
I, on the other hand, looked down at my remaining six ounces of water and my signal-less cell phone and groaned. One headphone in, one out, I brought up the rear of the line, grinning as the women ganged up on the driver now that he was no longer within earshot.
“Stupid boy.”
“Foolish. Foolish. Ah-bah!”
“He doesn’t fear the road so it beat him.”
“Someone’s going to pick him on a moto while we’re left to walk - I’ll throw rocks as he passes.”
“Poor Balima [me], having to walk like this. The sun will eat her body. [It did.] My husband will beat him for her.”
It seemed like I’d wasted away the entire afternoon, but at that point, it had only been an hour since I last checked my watch. I still had an hour to go before my meeting started. I kept checking my cell, but there were never enough bars to actually hold a call and I was the only one out of us with a phone.
So, we kept walking.
In the middle of nowhere, it’s very easy to hear a noise that’s out of place. The birds’ chirps and the Fulani cattle’s cries fell away as the sound of an engine lumbering along became apparent. Our motley convoy turned in unison, hands shielding our eyes from the blazing afternoon sun - and there, on the horizon, puttering over the steepest incline on our relatively flat road, was Tamale Bi Waa (Tamale Is Not Far - how great is that name? if only it were true…).
The women started cheering and I squatted, unshouldered my pack and breathed a sigh of relief. Kasajan and his blue 207 bus were on the way.
Sanatu boldly proclaimed that, “The road fears Kasajan. It fears him,” and we watched as he expertly maneuvered around puddles and potholes that would’ve taken out the last driver.
By the time the bus reached us, it was apparent that they were well past overloaded and I thought that he might not have even stopped. But he did (Kasajan is a stand-up guy like that) and the women crammed inside, six across on rows that should hold four, while I scrambled up to the roof (this country has done nothing for my claustrophobia). Not the safest mode of travel, but I didn’t really have any options at that point.
They were hauling wood on the roof, which made for relatively clean seats (unlike the actual metal rooftop that has about ten years worth of oil and grime resting on its surface). I lay back against some two-by-sixes and pulled my sunglasses over my eyes, ignoring the way my head hit the wood with every hole we drove through. A guy next to me was like, “You should sit up, the sun will get you.”
I didn’t move.
I did, however, ask him if there was anywhere I could actually sit, on top of this vehicle, where the one-thirty sun on a road without trees wouldn’t get me. Cyclops found amusement in that and let the young guy know it.
The rest of my trip was uneventful - thank God - and I arrived home with about ten minutes to spare before my meeting. I rushed home, threw a bucket of water over my head, changed clothes and ran to the school where we were supposed to have the meeting.
I waited an hour before anyone showed up, but I did get five chapters into A Walk in the Woods (witty fellow, that Bryson). When it became apparent that people weren’t just late, but in fact, not coming at all, I told the ones that actually were there to go to specific people and tell them that the meeting was tomorrow at four. It seems as though people knew there was a meeting, but not the time. I’d told my chairman before I went into town to let everyone know, but there was probably some miscommunication error there as he doesn’t speak English and my Dagbani is…well.
No harm, no foul. I was actually glad I didn’t have to think beyond letting my eyes pass over words at that point.
The rabbit program is going well, but we’ve had a recent bout of deaths with some of the young. Everything is pointing toward them eating greens too early, though, because the ones who’ve kept the babies away from vegetation until now have survived. I didn’t want to have to think about trying to explain why some get diarrhea and some don’t, why greens will make them sick, but the corn chaff won’t. It was a blessing in disguise that that meeting was cancelled.
In the end, even though everything that could’ve gone wrong did, I learned some very important lessons.
• The more you need something the happen, the less likely it is to occur.
• Don’t ride in vehicles unless you know them (although, that begs the question, how do you ever actually know a car unless you ride in it…?).
• And sometimes people failing to do what you need them to do actually works out in your favor.
ETA: Forgot that I took this video while we got stuck. Enjoy.
Click to view