Home Again - Jiggety-Jig

All in all, I’m happy to be home, and have just been reflecting on a whole host of recent experiences.  My Egg Lady had seen me at the Rwandan border and was glad to have me back.  My young friend who’d wistfully asked if I’d date him if he were older recognised me as I was waiting at my gate one night, said he hadn’t seen me for a week, and wanted to know where I’d been. 

These welcomes, though slightly creepy, remind me that I’m really home.

Where else can you have a moto driver tell you seriously that he loves you and respond with a helpless, "Okay.  Have a nice day."


I’m also reminded of how how my teammates, coordinators, and church family can make me smile in the darkness of a power cut, in the heat of a car as we jostle and bump over the stones that make up a road, and as we learn how to serve together and to serve each other. 

For example, when Butters condemned the lack of ibuprofen as a human rights violation.  I giggled at the time, but that was before I discovered that contacts solution is also not available here. 

Ibuprofen, facewash, and conditioner bedarned – I cannot survive without contact lens solution.  I had already been rationing my use of contacts (as I came with only 1 year and 6 months-worth), but this unexpected absence of what I see as a basic human need (walk 14 years through elementary and high school in my nerdy, bespectacled shoes before judging me) has thrown a wrench in my plans to appear vaguely human for most of my time here.  

The only viable option seems to be to buy more in India on my vacation.  Heck, while I'm out, I might as well pick up some cheap cosmetics and conditioner in Korea...  

On the communication front, I’m still usually approached by strange men who want to ask stranger things; the sad thing is that I find it easier to talk to guys (even flirtatious foreign soldiers because I’ve discovered they’re all married with kids – making it less likely that they’re hitting on me and more likely that I can say a categorical No if they are), though I try to seek out women. 

I was once asked if I was a nun.  I can partially understand this confusion as I was wearing a beige top and a black skirt at the time, but you would think that the multiple earrings, nose ring, and off-shoulder blouse might have driven him in the opposite direction. 

Another man told me that I was ‘suffisamment belle.’  Just pretty enough for what? I wondered, but was too frightened to ask. 

Being able to read subtle body language helps – specifically to tell how long it’s been since a woman has had her hair done, and how soon she needs to get it redone.  I had a theory of a scale that goes from Light Tapping to Scratching to If I dig any further with any sharper implements, I will reach my brain, but I think it’s more of an individual preference.  Some women are tappers – they will tap their heads from beginning to end, though the taps may increase to tooth-jarring force.  Others are itchers – just continuous itchers – which makes it hard for me to continue a conversation with them; I tend to trail off and watch their determined expressions with worry.  Still others use pen lids, knives, small children, etc. to ease their suffering.  While males, as in every. single. darned. culture. get to take the easy way out and shave their entire heads every so often rather than going through the pain, heat, and expense of pinning black plastic threads to their heads every few weeks.  

Less successful body language is the kissy faces made by passing men on buses and motorbikes.  However, I will take responsibility for the one time I was licking possible lipstick off my teeth and a passenger on a motorbike thought I was making a kissy face at him and returned it; I feel like we were both pretty surprised and have tried to moderate my facial expressions since.

More measurable progress has been in Swahili – I can now tell the general subject under discussion, and this is a huge victory for me.  In fact, I wish I could spend more time in Swahili and less in French, whose creators deeply felt the need for a plus-que-parfait subjunctive tense purely to dissuade foreigners from learning it – I feel that this holds true to the French ethos, so Courage! my plus-que-parfait-subjunctive-using brethren.

Also, my French teacher regularly tells me that I’m murdering his language, or that Moliere or Voltaire would murder me, or some such sweet nothing.  My Swahili teacher, on the other hand, just tends to curl up in hysterical laughter.    

But all this has culminated in the fact that I can more comfortably take part in my church’s monthly missions to pray for the sick in different hospitals in the city.  On the way to Cadoutou this month [Edit:  The last trip I'd shared had been to Essence – not, as I’d said, Carrefour], my group was delighted by one man stopping us to tell me he loved me and wondering how many cows I wanted.  Another occasion for laughter was when a woman murmured that they (I don’t know if this meant her family or her neighbourhood) should have a pretty muzungu like me.  As I was in glasses and dressed like a blind octogenarian, I’m certain they weren’t seeing anything other than my ‘white’ skin and dollar signs floating about my person like in Looney Tunes cartoons. 

And when I actually draw attention to myself by, say, speaking in a vague approximation of French or Swahili, or maybe even smiling, I may get babies named after me. 

“There’s a newborn baby here!  And she will have your name!”

“Really?!  ...On second thought, this seems suspicious.”

“Don’t you want that?!”

“Well, but...  did you ask her mother?”

“Do you want that?!”

“I think you should ask the woman who gave birth to her!”

Okay, this only happened once, but as the only female in the group, I was invited into the birthing room containing two women – one throwing up (do you throw up in childbirth – Jesus, let this cup pass from me), and the other exhausted beside a tiny, rosy, sleeping gift that God had grown in her for nine months.

The doctor, naturally an older man who likely pressured the mother into naming her baby after me (though I prayed that she had a voice), was probably offended by my stubborn ingratitude, but how could I be enthusiastic about his gift to be a namesake for a baby unrelated to either of us?

It drove home to me again the casual disregard for women here, but as I’ve already covered that, I’ll praise Butters’ exemplary behaviour in contrast to this mindset. 

In the single month we’ve been sharing an apartment, he’s saved me from unwanted hugs by a handsy friend, offered to make meals, asked if I needed anything from stores/the market, and filled my water bucket.

It’s this last that really deserves a standing ovation (though I’m pathetically grateful for the rest too).  Despite believing me to be intensely irrational in my water conservation methods, he once went into my bathroom to fill up a water bucket because the pipes were open and I was out of the house.  I came back to discover my full bucket and received rationale that went something like this:

“Yeah, there was water, so I thought:  I’ll get her water.   Bitches  [Kermit] loves water.”

As I was wandering away with a rose-tinted buzz, he continued:  “But you’d left the tap open and water was gushing out, so...”

Reflecting that he should have quit while he was ahead, this incident nonetheless strengthened my resolve not to push him off our balcony and pretend it was an accident.

Even though he accosts me with inexplicably savage displays of emotion when I’m innocently eating in the living room: “Hey, have you seen the spatula?  Are you--  Are you eating an omelette out of a pan with a spatula?!  Oh my--  Give me that spatula!”

My earnest desire to wash less dishes and his weird spatula fetish notwithstanding, I do try to return his many favours.  Once I gently hinted that he’s paid too much for fish and that it should be washed, de-scaled, de-gilled, de-finned, eviscerated, and washed again before applying spices, frying, and ingesting.  

 Knowing  Under the blatantly false impression that I’m a bossy know-it-all, he tried to explain that his parents regularly served him Whole Fish with Scales and Guts as an entree in the States.  However, in standard Butters Procedure, he easily admitted (after accidentally eating some fish viscera in the dark, I assume) that he’d been wrong, that he'd enjoyed this learning experience, and that he'd spend some time in communion with Youtube before trying again.     

Please note that I share this incident with his permission.  Also, lest you suffer under the misapprehension that I am a highly capable sort of person, I’d like to remind you that I drove my entire team and assorted guests to literal tears of pain with the first meal I prepared here.  But this made me wonder how much my baby brother (younger even than Butters, who makes me feel like an aged crone) knows about food before it appears on a plate in front of him.  Does he believe there are packets of wild ramen noodles roaming the Serengeti?  Frolicking sandwich slices of piri-piri chicken in the tundra that hibernate in the winter? 

And here we all are in this beautiful mess of a world - trying our very best, failing miserably, and learning more of grace and wisdom as we go - and thank God for that.  

Caught between existential despair and laughter over a fish, I was pushed closer to the latter when Butters wandered back into the living room rhapsodizing about the fact that the chocolate Swiss roll he’d bought on sale was a whole roll (Like poop!) and not in little packages (Like in ‘Murrica!).  

How can I keep from grinning?