9 to 5 (actually it's more like 07h30 to 19h30)

I'm still here.  Back from vacation 3 weeks and time is slipping through my fingers.  All my talk about life in Markounda, I don't think I have written much about work here.  It's really all we do.  I sometimes have my doubts about it.  All the regular office politics magnified by the fact that we all live together, too.

 

I spent the first half of today processing orders and receptions, clearing my desk and the warehouse for a stock count and a 4 Month reporting cycle.  A little break here and there to check on the always problematic refrigeration systems, talk movement and vehicle planning with the head driver.  It was only 105°F at lunch today which was a nice little break from the heat we've been having lately.  Laying down for a couple minutes after eating, I was pleasantly surprised that it took a whole 12 minutes for my eye sockets to well up with sweat rather than the usual 7 minutes.  Then back to work.  Trying to track down what medicines went where when we split our child project off on its own too late for our own good. 

 

Anyhow.  Just wanted to check in but lately I haven’t been writing much because I feel like I spend all day behind the computer.  I miss my ergonomic keyboard.  So much for romancing about the mangoes and the drummers and the chickens… 

 

Monday afternoon

Images from this afternoon:

 

The wind is whipping - wonderfully cooling down the 110F° afternoon.  A blitzkrieg of mangoes rains down from the tree in our yard, dropping 1lb fruits from as high as 100ft in the air.  55ft/second², right? That's a dangerous projectile. Seriously, a sticky haired concussion waiting to happen. I wait out the wind under the overhang of the roof of the house, eating peanuts with the Head of Mission.  Watching the ants who’ve invaded our eating area and plotting how most efficiently put a permanent stop to them, we marvel at their speed and strength. In a conversation that’s probably been had many times among like minded people, we start to do the math and figure that for an ant, one end of the table to the other is like 2km for a human.  More calculations, we figure that they are running at about 180km/hour.  When they climb to investigate the state of the cap closing the lemon syrup bottle, it’s like climbing to the top of the Eiffel Tower - in 4 seconds.  Something in physics makes these comparisons not valid exactly, I don’t remember exactly what the rule is but it’s fun to imagine.  Elizabeth sits down and catches the end of our conversation, looking at us like we are complete morons for wasting our time like this.

 

Work is over, for today. At least the daytime employees have gone home.  There’s still a ton to do, but I’m done for the day, too, I think.  Only an hour until the sun sets. No dusk, just night. In every book about Africa they talk about it, how when night comes it’s almost instant.  Silly books about Africa, it just has to do with being near the equator but anyhow, I only have an hour of natural light left. I sit and read a book about Africa…

 

I wake up from a jetlag inspired nap on the wicker sofa in the peyote. I am completely drenched in my own sweat.  The wind has calmed a little but there is still enough to cool me down as I stand up. The yard is littered with mangoes, and it’s still not super safe to just stand about under the tree. The smell of broken fruit on the ground inspires me to take an appetizer before dinner.  I grab a knife and peel a mango, citrus hinted sweetness, fibers making a home between my teeth for the next few days. My eating brings interest to the dinner table, we set it together, the four of us.  Left over couscous, left over rice. Left over ratatouille-ish stuff, left over sausage and sauerkraut. Some mushrooms and carrots and meat(?) in a coconut milk sauce. Mango cake that Stella made in the “oven” (a pan full of hot rocks over a burner on the stove) for desert.  There is some discussion about the Indian vs. Chinese economies.  Jelle and I get off on another tangent debating the best way to make mango juice in our current situation.  He goes off into the dark of the kitchen, comes back with an armful of mangoes, a Tupperware bowl and a cheese grater(?). What the hell are you going to do with the cheese grater? More pseudoscientific hypothesizing, another trip to Dresden (under the mango tree) to get more mangoes, some Swedish Chef impersonations, an aluminum foil funnel and some very sticky hands, we have mango juice.  We decide that it will be better to try it cold and in the morning so he throws the bottle in the (newly jet fuel powered) fridge (another story you should ask me about one day). 12 mangoes = 2 small glasses of juice, we need to work on our efficiency.

 

The conversation drifts back to work. And gossip.  Apparently guy who works for us threatened to kill other guy who works for other NGO. Something about someone’s wife but it turned out there was a little misunderstanding and it was the other guy’s girlfriend instead. Not before there was a barricade in the road and some inter-NGO negotiations. Eh, death threats… All happened the day after I left the project a couple of weeks ago, I just hadn’t gotten the story yet. Also got the skinny on how the wrong cat got killed the other day. Was there a right cat to have killed? Who is killing cats? Talk about a cross cultural miscommunication with our house staff and the guards.

 

I step away from it all for a second, go stand in the dark, looking at the sky for the stars but there’s none.  I go to the office across the street. Maybe there’s an email for me. Maybe I’ll update my blog… Definitely sleeping outside again tonight. Man it’s hot. I am full of mangoes.

 

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.