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...