Panting chickens, constipation, and sparkly things
Trip Start
Unknown
1
4
Trip End
Ongoing
Caia, Mozambique
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
I just returned from Caia, where the temperature rarely drops below 40 degrees Centigrade (104 F), and this week was, by all accounts, a hot one. It felt like my own little piece of hell and it sure was for all the Mozambicans living in makeshift refugee encampments (an advertising circle jerk for the heavy weights of international aid-UNICEF, FAO, Red Cross, World Food Program, Medecins Sans Frontiers, Oxfam, etc, etc), displaced by the recent floods along the Zambezi River and left with fields upon fields of drowned corn and sorghum and other myriad staples that keep them alive from one season to the next. The town was swarming with aid workers and their ubiquitous white Land Cruisers, each one costing more than the average Mozambican will make in a decade. Helicopters made endless sorties, loaded full of the white 50-pound sacks of corn and rice-"from the American people" and other subsidized Big Agriculture outputs that are denied farmers in the developing world (another big round of applause to economic interests and regulations!).
Work this week was standard fare-lots of driving out into the villages to interview patients about their food intakes and nutritional status. Oh, wait, that's not entirely true. I got hoodwinked-tricked, as it were, through some blatant manipulation-to participate in a PTV (again, HIV-positive Vertical Transmission Program) discussion. And by "participate," I mean that I stood up in front of about 60 women, all cradling squalling and/or escaping babies, and presented-in Portuguese! This was embarrassing and awful and stressful because if ever there were a language I'm not meant to speak, it's Portuguese, with all its soft j's and "sh" sounds. (Of all life's cruel ironies, that my name is one I am almost physically unable to pronounce strikes me as one of the cruelest I can imagine... I get around this by looking at people who can't understand me as if they're a retarded flea and I guess I am very, very good at making people feel like they are being judged inadequate because they normally go red-redder than me, even!-and mumble something about having an ear infection and bad hearing.) Anyway, this whole process is made worse because the one question that I keep getting thrown at me is "Why isn't there a cure yet?" This question makes me cock my head sideways and look at the interrogator askew: Do I really look like a biochemist? (Are biochemists even the people who do this kind of research? I don't know.) In the end, I feel more bewildered, sad, and awful than when I started but then again, as aforementioned, I spend a lot of time in a state of complete and extreme bafflement, so it's no real change.
Aid work drivers tend to barrel down the pot-holed roads like possessed and deranged psychopaths but our driver is a genius behind the wheel and navigates our-yes, you guessed-white aid truck along the narrowest of paths, between chickens and corn patches, up hills, around trees. I am impressed and think that my father missed his calling as an international aid driver. If ever there was a man meant to take cars where they don't belong, it was my dad. (His list of bizarre vehicular conquests includes driving a match-box car to an Alaskan island, up the side of a Costa Rican volcano, down a steep and narrow dirt trail on a motorcycle with four kids piled on, and so on...)
In any case, traveling around the country was awesome, in spite of the heat. We were up in the mountains, which rolled out into the distance, a fading series of forested bumps rising up from the narrow red dirt track we were bumping along on. If I squinted a little and blurred out the distinctive feathery flat lines of the Acacia trees and ignored the occasional fatness of the incredible Baobab tree, I could almost imagine I was in the Smokey mountains, or the Bershires in mid-summer. What the hell am I talking about? That's a crock of bullshit-you're never going to see grass-thatched round mud huts in the bed-and-breakfast-canned-jam middle-aged yuppiness of the Bershires. This is Africa, my loves, and it's hot, and the toilets are nasty, waterless affairs. Well, the "nice ones," that is; for some reason, I am not allowed to use the pit latrines (why, please?!) and am redirected to the porcelain relics of colonization. These are unsanitary and mystifying affairs (more on the ensuing constipation later...) and I would prefer-and anyone who knows me well will know that this statement does not come easily out of my mouth-the hygienic disaster of a port-a-potty to a seatless flush toilet full of poo and no water.
The most memorable event, in a very traumatic sort of way, of the week-aside from seeing monkeys scurrying across the road near the tiny village of Mongolai (I've almost made it to Mongolia!) and the ensuing discussion about the choicest cuts of monkey meat-was stepping on (in?) a dead puppy in Caia. Winston (give it a number; they're all the same dog here) is even more adorable as a puppy but I'm drawing the line at a freshly-deaded puppy with its guts spilling out in a mess of twists and other disgusting sliminess, especially as it's squishing up around my sandaled foot. At first I think it's a giant pile of shit and I'm annoyed but then I look down and realize what's going on... it takes all I have in me not to screech and start crying.
But still, I was traveling with Obede and he cracks himself up, and people who crack themselves up are among my favorite things in life (coming in after dogs and kids but before geckos and river otters). Molly and I crack ourselves-and each other-up, too, which makes traveling her another Highly Enjoyable Endeavor (acronym: HEE). Last weekend, before my decent (ascent?) into aid work hell, Molly, Bruno, and I headed up the coast to a little island barely separated from the mainland by a tangle of mangroves and a probably crocodile-free river (we don't know for sure but I am typing this with all limbs intact, so I'm making assumptions here). This brings me around to my next point: St. Patrick's Day in Mozambique!
I'm going to have a hard time doing it justice but suffice to say, I passed this most holy of days in my usual style: naked, naming inanimate objects (Montgomery the Coconut, Tallulah the Pineapple, Michael the Massive Slab of Steak-more on that later), dancing the jig (poorly and somewhat clumsily, with Molly and I both listening to my iPod, our heads knocking together, as Bruno watched, bemused and somewhat concerned by our maniacal antics), losing my clothes (through no fault of my own, thank you), and swimming! I guess that last bit's a small lie because I normally don't get to go swimming in mid-March in the Pacific North West... even I, of the hard nipples, have some difficulty being impervious to the cold waters of the Puget Sound that early in the year. And as it is, no one can ever be persuaded to join me in my aquatic adventures, so frolicking in the gentle warm waters of the Indian Ocean for St. Patrick's Day this year made for a fantastic departure from my usual course of debauchery.
I want to rant here about constipation (not too much, I promise!) because more than anything, my St. Paddy's Day was characterized by the consumption of a giant chunk of meat that proceeded, post-mastication, to wedge itself sideways in my colon, bringing back painful memories of the time I ate a pound of Swedish Fish (gummy candies, for those of you not in the know) and then devoured a pound of rib eye in an indecent amount of time. I couldn't shit for three days, and no amount of coffee, laxatives, or prune juice could persuade the gelatinous lump of meat candy to hurry it up. In between broadcasting all the unpleasant details of the goings-on in my guts, I was begging for someone to massage my belly (á la Tim Marshall!). Justin finally acquiesced and massaged the shit-quite literally-out of me. Justin's a pal like that; he even burps Shiv like a baby when he eats too much and starts whining like a Frenchman. (Shiv, who is French and will thus not take offense to the previous statement, and I are not good eating companions; we get excited by vast quantities of food, eat excessively, and turn into grumpy fuckers, wallowing in our indigestive misery.) In any case, I was feeling ferocious that night and made a good showing of my animalistic nature, resulting in a "Sector Four Meat Explosion" that had me groaning the next morning.
We were meant to have a real mick along for the ride but in the vein of poo-related issues (it's standard conversation fare here), he was floored by a case of diarrhea-we don't use euphemisms here like "traveler's gut," IDIs (Interesting Digestive Issues, per Jessica's childhood in Tanzania), "not feeling well," etc-and we were thus deprived of Mícheál (no relation to Michael the Massive Slab of Steak) and his Pot of Gold. (Being the only Irish person present with a funny accent, he was decreed our official leprechaun, meaning that he would pee in a jar and we would place it in a central location for the duration of our worshipping celebrations. I did have my green undies on, though, so the night wasn't entirely without patriotic spirit.)
On the subject of pee, I would like to make a very quick detour to detail Molly's strange obsession with urinary enterprises. Molly is of the mind that any frustrating, annoying, or perplexing situation can be solved-or at least the associated emotional taxation ameliorated-by squatting down and pissing somewhere unusual. These locations include on the airport floor, on your supervisor's head, on pumpkins, out the window, et cetera, et cetera. "Just piss on it" has become a stock phrase of ours and never fails to set us off into worrisome screeches of laughter, and has recently culminated in the development of a brilliant business plan to bottle our leakages to use for random cases of sheer bureaucratic madness (tranquilizers!) and the occasional jellyfish sting (cheaper and less greasy than your standard anti-itch crème).
And since we're talking about skin ailments (bet you didn't realize that we actually were talking about skin ailments... ha ha, tricked you!), I can officially add excessive heat to the short list of things my body can't deal with (peanuts, cats, Melfoquine, latex, and pollens, though I'm not sure what kinds). I was blessed with a magnificent eruption of rashes up and down each arm, and at first I thought I was dieing but Mícheál assured me I was just allergic to the sun, and pulls up his sleeves to display a suspiciously similar blooming of redness. Ew. We make a joke about our respective odds of getting laid (I'm not really that worried; I'm not that interested in getting laid here, and besides, I once puked in a garbage can and still managed to hook up) and then, realizing that my rashes are kind of pet-like, I promptly name them-Sylvester on the left arm, Penelope on the right-and distract myself by stroking their bumpy itchiness. (They have since been shamed into hiding, so I don't look so leprous anymore. Sweet.)
Savane, the mini-island, is wonderful. We sleep in a primitive hut on the beach, under an incredible arrangement of stars, some of which are constellations familiar to the Northern Hemisphere star gazer (Pleiades, Orion, the Swan and Eagle, etc) but in the wrong place in the night sky, and others weird configurations I don't begin to recognize. I imagine I'm seeing distillations of great Greek myths-skeletal imaginings of bestiality, massacres, and vomitoriums (wait, no, that was the Romans, wasn't it? Eh, well, I'm pretty sure I picked out the distinct shape of a vomit receptacle in the stars here.)
Later, skinny dipping under this spectacular palette, I am mystified by an echoed sparkling in the water until I realize that my movements through the warm water were agitating the bioluminescence, so all around me there were pointillist splashes of light. I ducked my head under water and swam with my eyes open, watching trails of silver follow my arm strokes through the clear waters. And later, I peed in the ocean, an explosion of light between my legs (if that isn't a metaphor for an orgasm, I don't know what is) and laughed aloud with joy. This was fantastic! (Less fantastic was staggering back to the beach, thoroughly waterlogged and salt stinging my eyes, to discover that my clothes had been stolen... WTF?! Oh, well, this is the first time I've ever been robbed while traveling and in the end, it was pretty funny.)
And fireflies! Oh, yeah, how can I forget about these other sparkly things in the night? I love them, which is weird because I am not a great lover of anything insect, but much like a crow, I am attracted to bright shiny things. (I do, however, manage to refrain from picking at the innards of dead things on the road.) I am far less taken with the armies of mosquitoes that do their very best to give me malaria. Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out where the heat rash ends and the mosquito bites start but in the end, it's all just a mass of itchy red bumps. More than once, Bruno jokes that he should share some of his melatonin with us and I wish he could because black skin just makes so much more sense.
And finally, "a scholarly and systematic exposition of a topic"-that topic being geckos and the noises they make, with a short non-sequitur homily on the dead animals one stumbles across in strange locations. Maybe this paragraph could more accurately be entitled "My Theory on Lizards in Toilets," though, as Molly wisely pointed out, that's really not a topic that lends itself to the development of theories but in any case, I went into the bathroom in Savane-a real one, with water!-and discovered, to my great dismay and sadness, a gecko floating serenely in the toilet bowl. At first I thought that maybe he was just taking a cooling dip and I didn't want to traumatize him with a torrent of hot urine, so I did a quick test squirt, which catapulted the poor little guy upside down. He was totally dead, so I peed on him (and felt terrible about it) and then flushed him down the toilet. But I stood there for a few minutes wondering how he ended up in the toilet (developing my theory, as it were, so scoff at that Molly!), which was happy luck, because I was distracted out of my deep brain concentration by a rapid dry scuttling sound. I looked up and saw two geckos chasing each other madly across the ceiling and made two rapid-fire discoveries: 1) I love the sound running geckos make; and 2) the little dude in the toilet was playing just a bit too hard (don't worry, gecko spirit, I know what that's like!).
Either way, if I ever do write a book or dissertation, it will be called "A Theoretical Dissemination on Lizards in Toilets" and it will explore the nuances of buffalo hunting in Montana and maybe something about Irish beer. My experience with dead animals here has mainly centered on constipation and eating with my hands (an activity I adore) but waiting for the dhao (crude wood boat-craft) to Savane, I wandered over to a dirt mound. The top had been dug out to create a shallow crater of sorts. Inside were three dead mice winsomely and peacefully arranged. They must have been put there by someone because it didn't make sense that all three would spontaneously die sleeping like that but I suppose weirder things have happened. I took a couple pictures and showed them to Molly. We stood there considering Three Dead Mice and then, almost simultaneously, we sang "Three Dead Mice..." to the tune of "Three Blind Mice," before realizing that we don't actually know any of the words to this song. The experience fulfilled a tiny bit of my Bill Bryson-induced obsession with finding animal carcasses (goat preferably) laid to rest in unexpected locales.
That's it. I'm coming home soon and already dreading the airplane ride. Who sits still for that long?!!! (The American Heritage Dictionary has no fewer than 26 vomit-related entries! What joys one finds hidden inside dictionaries!)
