brimming

been climbing trees with pockets full of peanuts and something to read. and ka te caman min is to drink lots of tea, or smoke lots of tea, if you like the beat term for mary j. sipping tea with cekorobas is educating. my cousin has resumed my responsibility, since my brother now rides bush buses bareback like a cowboy. he stops through our town once a day and seeks me out for a substantial embrace; he yells motherfucker from afar because that's the only english word he retained from our bicycling through fly infested cow pastures. i hate flies.

my cousin

to the fields and on missions with my new chauffeur I go. this is a better friend, a truer friend, who cares about the community's attitude towards me and is always willing to talk business after working all day in the fields. we listen to bob marley every night because it tastes good to him

in the meantime I try and stay close to the village when unaccompanied. during and after the rainy season when the grass is tall, bush people spy on villages - especially those with a live-in whitey (I'm white here, I can't help it. they think I'm playing a sick caste joke when I argue that I'm half mexican) - from deep cover. I would imagine them licking their chops but I don't expect myself to be very savory. I'll never see them says my cousin... he can, but I won't ever be able to. and it's hard right now, since the village is a ghost town during the day. peanut season means everyone pulls and I have no one to play with. in the middle of nowhere with no one around, except maybe the dugutiki. but he looks, and more frighteningly sounds, like jabba the hutt, so I don't hang round his place much.

but it was there I had another momentary manifestation of my levity. after a nighttime community meeting I got one of those hits, a sculpting of this extraordinary experience into the column of my being; the dim light reflected off the faces of my conversation-engaged counterparts in such a way that reminded me that we're doing something here. we're improving lives in a manner that seems relevant. development takes a lot of time and work, mine certainly will. right now and most of the time I can justify the PC cause. so my satisfaction gets bigger and better so fast that for a few seconds I'm suspended in delight with an almost all american taste.

ain't no rollercoaster, but the boat sure is rocking... I'm getting exactly what I wanted and everything I asked for. except maybe all the days of altered states, I'm getting too old for this shit. heading to sikasso, mali's land of plenty, for thanksgiving... turkeys and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. and really, who knows what else...

manantalloween

no details

I left my banking town for an adventure with a couple of guests and the manantali boys. our noon departure turned out to be a nasty four-hour, 150 km, packed bush bus trip. the heat smell and noise were well worth, not our arrival to the city, but a traversing descent upon what might resemble a small 70s texas town. I was already excited when we immediately proceeded to their regular spot and began unwinding ourselves. there we ordered beers and purchased a bottle of cheap scotch. just after a few hours, dusk, and realizing we had no flashlights, we shuttled seven people with three bikes. what a sight we were.

in between organizing high noon supply runs and hassling with the dam man, who delayed our lake float away, relax is all we did. we managed to have an excellent time despite being shorthanded; three girls were stuck with language lessons in kita and another was lost at site. we saw mali, which is the bambaran word for hippo, and chilled with a pet monkey that will eat your tea and smoke out of your hand. the bambaran word for smoke and drink is the same - min. after a few days of fires and river tubing and doing whatever whenever we pulled each other together to return for halloween in kita. we were able to catch AC’d PC transport because it seems like everything works in your favor with the peace corps. so we just chilled in the backseat reveling in the spoils of living like an american gangster. the party had commenced before our evening arrival, so we put on our costumes and game faces directly. I was some emasculating thing in a skirt, my date wore aviators and a well fitting racer jumpsuit from the dead tubab store, and most of everyone else was a clever spin on something malian.

the rest was a mess of wrestling, water balloons, and waking people up with our asinine late night talk. we were able to maintain an active dance floor and kill a fridge packed to the gills with beer and pocket shots. there were lost and found sandals jewelry beds and dignity. we hung out in kita an extra day, made cheese for pizza sandwiches, recovered... our vacation was coming to end.

but though we anticipated the return to our solitude at site, we couldn't resist the momentum that had been created. I followed my guests to bamako, where they had to stay the night before continuing on to site, and where I would have fixed the glasses I broke that morning. there we sought dinner on the way to a long awaited milkshake. we met a PCV couple for pizza and wine and sorted out the plans for our last night of debauchery. I arranged a visit to and nightstay at our favorite LCF's apartment, where we got to min rooftop with malians and learned the term of endearment for a woman who's a devil in the sack - juguni. it means hedgehog because it gets hot when you touch it.

after midnight we decided to look for the night's second bottle of whiskey at the same club from swear-in. it was closed so we went searching and found a bakery and gay bar. the bakery was going to be open all night, they were heavy cleaning and decided to keep business going, so we agreed to eat fourth meal there. everything works out in PC. the gay bar was a good time, we didn't have to hide our heterosexual affection (it's highly and culturally inappropriate to publicly display this in mali) and we got glimpses of the counterculture. we made it back and fell sleep under the stars just before dawn, every second of the night had been squeezed to our satisfaction

the next morning we had tea and croissants with diats the LCF and ran around bamako trying to get the others on their way home. at this point we were completely useless and could barely fix a direction. along the way was soft-serve, a surprising substitute for the milkshake I never got. while making our last niger river crossing, as it runs through the middle of the city, an accomplice took a picture of that pitiful waterbody, for a final good measure and nice fuck you to anyone hating on our game. it's dirty but works, the end. once they were fixed I walked bamako for a couple of hours and happened to meet a couple of the kita kaw girls at the bus station on their way back from a GAD gathering. we took transport together, I couldn't help my good spirits which contrasted their mood so drastically. we bulleted back to kita by night with sacked live goats on the roof and our seat completely surrounded by armed military personnel.

I'll be returning to manantali soon... for the stuff we left at the bottom of the lake.