solitaire

Found out today that we will be getting a VSat. Satellite internet connection. Don't know exactly when but eventually.

I don't know how I feel about this, oddly enough. When I first got here, it was hard to be without an instant answer to any trivial question I might have, hard to be away from instant contact with friends, family, acquaintances.

When I heard the news tonight this thought popped into my head - one of the only things that makes the isolation here bearable is...the isolation. I don't have the entire world taunting me with its existence all day long. We are just here and that's how it is and we deal with it. Don't know the answer? Make a decision anyway. Want to do more research? Can't. Just do it.
Is more information going to put more drugs on the shelves? Is more communication going to speed up the bridge repairs? Is more access to the world going to organize the stock room?

And then more questions for after work. Will the town be bigger if I can see what everyone is doing today on Facebook? As much time as we spend together as a team, nothing else for us to do after it gets dark at 6pm other than talk to each other, have a nice long dinner, curse at the ever begging cats, or talk about how the little chicks have gotten all adolescent ugly, wonder where the eggs get laid, watch the bats wake up, listen to the tam tams and the children singing outside the yard we're not allowed to leave after dark. And if we were, there's nothing to see until you get close enough to touch or within 5 feet of the fire.

These things are all we have after work - the team, the cats, the chickens. Only a little privacy. What will happen if that little precious alone time is spent communicating with more people? Adding such a powerful tool might just be adding one more thing to support, to manage.

Another project asked me the other day if I had a carpenter to lend, they needed to build some shelves for a new warehouse. Proceeding cautiously, I asked about the scope of work for the guy. Somewhere in the explanation were the words "electric saw." No flipping way am I going to give you this guy I have integrated into my team, who knows how and is willing to saw by hand every plank. I don't care if it goes faster for you, when I get him back, surely he's not going to want to saw planks by hand anymore. Not for me at least. And even if I get him an electric saw, what good is it going to do him when we leave, or his contract is up and there's not a power outlet capable of supporting an electric saw for 100 miles in any direction - leaving him discouraged with the tedium of the hand saw. No, he's happy now, he works hard, we pay him well and he builds fine enough quality fast enough.

I feel kind of like a puritan grump recounting a story like that but I can't help but remember it when I think about getting internet here. That we have to base our work and our lives on a solid foundation. We're already in a quicksand field. Adding more weight to the building, hoping that it will reinforce that foundation by making our lives more comfortable and communication easier and cheaper, knowledge more available, neglects the possibility that it also makes the structure heavier and maybe more prone to sinking.

See you on Facebook in about 6-8 weeks...

beep beep part 2

And I forgot to mention about the constant whine of the HF radio. Hissing
and beeping, with voices from Starwars mumbling in the static.

I woke up in the middle of the night because my earplugs had fallen out (or
I tore them out in my sleep). These are the new ones the Head of Mission
gave me as a gift. My old ones had diminished to a mismatched pair because
of similar losses. These new ones work almost too well. Luckily, I found
them in my sheets, in the dark. Put them back in and then it's quiet again.
More than quiet. When awoken in the morning, kind of surprised (I've put a
bed outside where I sleep when it's too hot - doesn't help with the noise),
the only words I could use to describe what wearing the earplugs is like
-"It's like black."

Anyhow. Back to work. Logistics report due yesterday . . .

beep beep

Is that a car alarm? No. There aren't any cars here, just a small handful of Toyota Landcruisers. At 10pm, half past midnight, Markounda time.  I never needed earplugs to sleep until I came here. Unbelievable, the sounds that can come from a (almost) completely isolated village, in the very middle Africa - The children sing and the drums play until 10 or 11, 4-5 nights a week, I haven't figured out the schedule.

The roosters start crowing at about 2am, unreasonably eager for the sun to rise. No one ever said, and I've little reason to believe that chickens are particularly reasonable. There's argument among the team as to whether they say "kokoriko" or "kikiriki," and I'm the only one who thinks they say "cock-a-doodle-doo" which everyone thinks is hysterical - and wrong.  Cows are usually quiet but when they decide to say something, everyone hears it.

Crickets and birds, songs unmuffled by the hum of traffic or computer fans or refrigerators.

If tension is high, or my imagination get's the better of me, sometimes a door or something banging in the wind starts to sound a little like gun shots in the distance. Or mortar fire. Once or twice there was a gunshot and you can tell the difference, but still - that damned imagination. The other night, I heard a jet flying over. Like, regular commercial jet, 30,000ft. Perfectly normal at home. Here, I got out of bed and went and looked.

The guards talk all night, which is good because if not it means they're sleeping.

And once in a while something unexpected, like a car alarm. But turns out it's not. Just some dude, laying on and off the horn on his motorbike. No drums tonight, must be Wednesday. Put in my earplugs anyhow, the roosters will be up sooner than me.

tune in tokyo

The TV has sat entirely unused since we moved into the new house some 7
weeks ago. Up until this week, it was just sitting on a huge stack of NaCl
0.9% in the living room. Our new house was the old house that had been
converted into a warehouse but now back. We only just found a new home for
the 500 cases of sodium chloride that is no longer used for the trypano
program because they changed treatments. I don't think anyone has missed
the TV and it's not like we have anything to hook it up to other than the
DVD player, there's no AM radio here let alone VHF or UHF. But I don't
think we really have any DVDs anyhow. It must have been a priority for a
previous team.

So occasionally, to get a live action reminder that the world is still out
there, I occasionally listen to the shortwave radio that the last doctor us
with. If you want mindless entertainment, shortwave might not be the thing
for you. it's kind of a tiresome activity, turning the dial in
imperceptibly small increments, just in the hopes that you'll run into a
familiar language. But if you just want to know that the world is still out
there, it's perfect.

I've never listened to shortwave before, don't know a lot about it, but from
what I think I know, the signals can transmit almost all over the world,
depending on various meteorological conditions, etc. Lots of Chinese.
Arabic, English, French are all fairly common. But what's been more
pleasant for me is to play the game of just identifying languages and then
moving on. I've heard Russian, Swedish (or at least some Scandinavian
language I'm pretty sure), Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Afrikaans
(confirmed by a Dutch speaker), Portuguese, Japanese, a handful of African
languages I can only identify as African, Hindi (or maybe Urdu).

My little list of languages I totally would not have expected: Romainian
(that one took a minute to figure out but then was confirmed when they
switched to their English language service, which was almost more
surprising); Greek (Greek? Wouldn't have believed it if I didn't speak it);
and most awesome, unexpected language on the shortwave . . . Esperanto!
Who'da thunk that my brief foray into Esperanto a couple of years ago would
have paid off in such a trivial way (playing my own little games). Not that
studying Esperanto often pays off in a non-trivial way, and I'm sure rarely
pays off at all. First there was the news, it was at the time of the Berlin
Film Festival, but then they switched programs and started giving Chinese
lessons. In Esperanto. If you know me, you can surely imagine the big
stupid grin I had on my face, listening to Chinese lessons in Esperanto
while in the Central African Republic.

And that's how I know that you're all still out there. Sitting in the yard
in the dark surfing the hissing crackle of the shortwave frequencies,
listening for the ghostly whispers of the outside world.

sweet and sour

What a place. I can't even get into it, it's almost too much.

I was walking to the market today, noticing how the mangoes hang from the
trees like monochromatic Christmas ornaments - perfectly distributed. The
branches sighing from the ever growing weight as they get closer to ripe.

People passing by, everyone says hello, whether it's in French or Sango or
Kaba or Arabic - or at least they respond when I say hello, as I try to
guess which language would solicit the best response. I like it that often,
usually the women, reply "thank you" when you say hello. I don't know why
but I think the exchange sounds nice - "Bon soir," "Merci!" I hear that it
doesn't really make sense in French French but I think it's nice.

The kids are constructing ever longer contraptions to reach higher into the
mango branches in vain hopes of loosing a ripe mango. The bigger kids,
perhaps the less engineering ones, just throw sticks and rocks into the
canopy for the same purpose. Mangoes with one or two bites taken out of
them litter the ground under the trees. They're not ripe yet but they still
try. Are they hungry or are they bored? Both?

There's the dynamics of the hospital and our program here. Constant
questions about what constitutes and emergency and what our role here should
be. We could build a project like ours in every village from here to Bangui
and all the beds would be full all the time. We give care and food to
anyone who comes but I don't know if that's the right thing to do, at least
not in the long term.

There's the trash that litters the streets in a way that no one even thinks
about. Fires of all things burning all the time - grass to clean the yard
or a field, cooking bricks, cooking food, burning trash.

At the outpatient clinic, when I went to lay out a new waste zone this
morning, one of the drivers went into the bush and came back with a small
bird (they called it a pigeon but it was only kind of like any pigeon I
know). I asked him how he caught it, and he showed me the trap he'd set up.
He's got a little time on his hands, hanging around waiting for somewhere to
drive. He handed the bird to another guy who promptly broke both wings to
cripple the bird but not kill it so it'd stay fresh 'til lunch, I guess.

Or the chickens hanging from the handle bars of bicycles, no longer clucking
- as horribly stupid as chickens are as animals, they are smart enough to
know when the game is up.

Or the other morning when I pointed out to my medical store keeper a bat
that had landed on the ground and had been trying to take off again.
Apparently, and I'd never thought of this, bats don't do so well taking off
from flat ground, once they're down they're kind of stuck - that's why they
hang in the trees, it's more of a take-off convenience than anything else.
Rather than share my curiosity about this helpless bat, he stomped on it and
kicked it away from the warehouse door. When it didn't go far enough and we
could still hear it squeaking, he followed after it and kicked it farther
again, stomp, repeat, until it wasn't bothering anyone. Except me of course
who had had no intention to have the poor little bat get stomped on - wasn't
even in the range of possibilities when I first saw it there. Funny enough,
Ferdinand is a fairly quiet, gentle seeming guy. So's the guy who snapped
the wings of that pretty little bird.

I've got a hundred more stories of the beauty and the cruelty that are
constant here. Constant questions about relativity and perspective. The
days are full things to watch and stories to tell, some small, some big, but
trying to weave them together into some kind of constant - it's just
impossibly overwhelming. So instead, I just work.

rocks on fire

I totally just had a full on discussion with the night office guard about
meteorites, like, what they are and what causes them. Well, that was the
beginning of the conversation as he came up to me while I was just standing
there in the dark, staring at the sky. It's beautifully clear tonight,
often there is a lot of haze. Couple that with the fact that there is
literally zero light pollution, most nights the stars are just kind of
normal. Tonight, no haze, no clouds, the waning moon is not up yet - the
stars are just so detailed you can't help but stare. Or at least I can't.

So guy comes up to me (one of our guards, he's the second shortest and
second oldest - am I horrible that I don't yet know all the guard's names?
Up until a couple of weeks ago we had 22 guards who all changed positions
every day and night so I didn't put too much effort into learning the names
of the more non descript guards. Now, for a long list of only
semi-interesting reasons, we have reduced the number to 14, a slightly more
memorizeable number, but I still don't have all of the names down and I have
been here long enough that I am embarrassed to ask now) - so guy comes up to
me, stands next to me and sticks his chin up in the air to have a look at
what I am looking at. "Eh, just the stars. Just thinking about the stars."
He stays there for a minute and then says that he likes it when the stars
move. "Move like how?" Well, like sometimes they just move real fast across
the sky just a little ways, other times they move slow and steady almost
across the whole sky. Then he asks if they're satellites. Holy crap, did he
ask the wrong guy if he didn't really want a detailed answer.

But apparently he kinda did want a detailed answer. Or at least he acted
curious as I told him about meteorites and satellites. I figure because then
he started telling me about other things that he noticed about the sky, how
in the rainy season, those three stars are further south and sometimes the
Milky Way (very well visible tonight) looks like it's going another
direction. Frankly, I have no idea if the Milky Way changes apparent
direction depending on the time of year (I think it doesn't but I never
asked or noticed). The interesting point in all of this for me whas trying
to figure out quite where to start with the story telling. Here's this man,
at least 10 if not 20 years my senior but I have no idea what he knows about
astronomy, even at the most basic level. Shadows, distance, geometry,
rotations . . . I am pretty sure that he doesn't have much beyond a 1880s
7th grade education and comes from a community where he is doing probably
relatively quite well because what education he does have got him a job with
us (meaning that he can at least read and write French at a basic level).
Am I just making myself sound like an idiot talking about how rocks from
space catch fire when they hit the atmosphere of our planet? An atmosphere
which seems soft and easy from our point of view but when you hit it wrong
or too fast it can be hard - I make an analogy to a fish in water vs a belly
flop? He looks at me like I'M from space. Or is it genuine intrigue and
curiosity?

I don't know what to do with these kind of stories. Not really worth making
a big deal about, I'm not going to write a story each time something little
like this happens, if only for the fact that the whole incident above took
but 5 minutes to happen but 20 minutes to write. It's not like it could
only happen here in Central Africa. But it's the kind of thing that it's
really hard to bring home with you, hard to share with other people. It
happens at home once in a while but here this kind of interaction happens
every day it seems. Well, I guess only if you let it, huh? Like you just
stand there in public, looking into the sky like an idiot, long enough for
someone to ask you what you are doing... And then you tell them.

mercury blues

I hope this doesn't become a pattern. 2am again. Awake.

Some jerk went and got us a thermometer to put outside. A big one with
Celsius and Fahrenheit. Up until now, the only thermometers we've had have
been either in a fridge or broken. I'm fine with kilograms and kilometers.
I've even gotten used to writing the date backwards but Celsius hasn't ever
meant much to me, relative to my own comfort. I know that 20 is "room
temperature" and that 0 is freezing. We keep the vaccines between 2 and 8
(hard to do lately - the kerosene fridge keeps getting to cold and the solar
fridges can't keep up - if only I had some kind of heat exchange tube
between the 3 of them...)

But viscerally, what is 5 degrees? Is that cold? Is 30 hot? Well, regardless
of conversions, we got the big stupid thermometer that tells me what I
didn't want to know. Today was not as hot as others lately. 102F in the
shade. I totally didn't want to know that. I was OK just knowing that it
was hot and hearing the rest of the expats mumbling about how it's gotta be
40C or 45C, whatever the hell that means. But 102 in the shade - that means
something to me.

Funny, up until a couple of weeks ago, we didn't really talk about the
weather . . .

And that happened . . .

Oh man. It's 2am and I can't sleep. My body is aching from some
undiagnosable ailment that paracetamol seems to work ok against. I'm a
little upset at this fact since tonight is the first night in a couple of
weeks where it's not too hot to sleep. A ferocious wind came through
yesterday afternoon, smelled like rain but then didn't, but at least cooled
things down. People were saying that there might be some mango rain - just
learned about it today - a kind of pre-rainy season rain that helps the
mangos ripen. Go figure, until today, everyone said that there would be 0
rain until end of April. Another example of me listening to people here
turning out to be the wrong thing to do.

Sorry I disappeared. I don't even know who I am apologizing to more, me or
the people who asked me to keep updated. That last post - well, I was
actually a little upset at myself for failing to get deeper. I never really
wanted to come here and write about curious cultural observations. At least
not exclusively. I also didn't want to write about things I would change my
mind about later. Turns out, that is all there is to write about here.
First impressions are happening non-stop and, frustratingly, I end up
interpreting most wrong. Since finishing my first month here I try every
morning to remind myself that whatever my assumptions for the day are, they
are probably wrong. For such a simple place, it's a little hard to get an
accurate reading.

So, now. I don't want to be vague anymore or bite my tongue afraid of
mentioning specifics. Amazing things are happening here. Everything that I
put down in this blog will probably turn out to be wrong in some way, from
some point of view at least, if not entirely. What I wanted to write about
instead of the stupid Christmas Pig story was the emergency patient transfer
to our referral hospital, 76km and 2.5 hours away. Rushing all the way to
get this young girl, not more than eighteen, who had a baby with no signs of
life in her belly, obstructed labor. Found out a week later that she was
actually 40, this was her 12th child and it ended up being born normally.
What a flipping ride.

Or about the woman who fell in the market while I was there with a team
fixing the well. Face first in the dirt with a baby on her back as the
whole market looked on, for just a second to confirm that she was having
some kind of seizure and then went back to their business. I went and took
the baby off her back, turned her on her side so she could breath and
radioed the doctor. We took her back to the inpatient clinic (IPD), she
recovered quickly, there's not really much we can do if everything is normal
after the fact, if the seizure isn't related to some other treatable
disease. Sent her on her way later that day. I thought I was saving her
life, but apparently this kind of thing happens to her often and she's still
around. I wasn't there to roll her over last time, and I won't be there
next time.

And a hundred other little stories, some about local economics - ask me one
day about Crepin's shoes - to farming practices, to water shortages. Oh,
yeah, that's a good one that I'll probably elaborate on later - we now have
one working well that produces about 10 liters/minute which, if pumped for
12 hours straight, would be about 1.8 liters/person/day in town. People are
drinking from the river. Funny thing is, it's apparently not a huge deal.
Just something to talk about, like the weather.

That's just been it. Figuring out what is a big deal. You can only make so
much of a big deal out of so much - everything is relative. When the
Chadian army was on the other side of the river wanting to escort some of
their people to retrieve the bodies of their kin who'd been massacred on our
side of the river, down the road some 25km . . . who were massacred in
retaliation for their ties to banditry on said road. And the CAR army didn't
want them to come in but they did anyhow? Was that a big deal? Yeah, I
suppose - I mean I spent 3 days with my jam bag packed trying to mentally
prepare to find myself in the middle of an international conflict. How
often have I found myself in the position of worrying about a foreign
military invading the town where I live? Funny thing is, a couple of weeks
later, it doesn't seem like a big deal. Eh, everything turned out fine.
Whatever the hell fine is here.

So. I'm sorry I haven't been posting. I've been more timid than I want to
be in life. I am finding my voice though, learning how to speak up in a way
that I feel doesn't cut short my openness to experience. In the past,
travelling for me has been about listening, observing. There's still plenty
of that to be done but to go the whole 9 months here without processing,
it's too much - I'll just crash when I'm done, throw away all the
experiences I put on my plate unable to digest them all at the same time.

Oh, and by the way, that Chadian army business is exactly the kind of stuff
that shouldn't get posted much farther than this invite only blog, ok? At
least for now.