January 11, 2010
My mindset when I ride my bike has definitely evolved in the last six months. I remember at first having a healthy fear of riding my bike alongside the main road, whether it was at homestay, or when I originally got to site. I had seen a few accidents already in my short stint in Mali on the roads, so I knew it only took a moment for the road kill to be me.
After a few weeks at site, I had established a few great routes through the corn fields for my morning ride, and could kind of clear my head from the fear that had daunted it in previous weeks. I could predict the slopes in the road, where water would pool from the night’s rain, where the dried nyegen waste to avoid was, and had a new keen eye for donkey carts, goats, and naked children darting across the dirt streets.
One morning in early November, I climbed on my bike and rode out from my house, greeting everyone I could along the way, including my neighbor, Brahma. He was riding on the back of a rickety old moto (this thing had old bike pedals to start it and had parts falling off as it bounced uncontrollably along the dirt road to Baroeli). I was having one of those moments where I really appreciated Africa, its greeting customs and how everyone is so friendly and welcoming. I had just slipped into the groove of the ride, and was anticipating a turn into a large cornfield.
In a second that now replays over and over in my mind like a nightmare in slow motion, I glance up to see less than ten meters ahead of me as Brahma and the man on the moto turn quickly in front of a boche and get run over. I will never forget the sounds of metal and bones crunching, followed by a deafening silence, seeing the bodies in a pile of mess and scraps in the middle of the road, motionless. The boche had pulled off to the side of the road, but the people in it stayed inside, maybe delaying the inevitable because they knew there was no life there in the wreckage. I struggled with shock and confusion as I ran through my mind what exactly it was that I could do. I’m not a doctor, there were other able bodied large men there that could lift the men from the scene of the accident, but all protocol that we have in the states just doesn’t exist here. Is there an ambulance? Would Brahma go to the hospital in Bamako or Segou? Where could he get relatively better care? Here at the CSCOM the extent of their stock room is gauze pads and penicillin. I figured I would alert my family and Brahma’s neighbors so that they could make those decisions for me because I had no where near the language, cultural, or medical where with all to help these two men, who I wasn’t even sure were still alive.
I peddled back to my house in a daze of shock, afraid of how cowardly I looked, fleeing the scene like I did, but I didn’t see an alternative. After a mess of trying to explain the accident to my host brothers, Dada and Brahma, I hid in my house…for three days.
This past fall was a definite test of my emotional strength. It’s a struggle to properly process the terrible things that happen here. One foot in front of the other I guess. I easily locked myself in my room, watched movies, and wrote in my diary, pretending maybe that it didn’t happen... I went to the clinic to visit my neighbor, the older man had died at the scene of the accident, but my neighbor survived for a few more days, while my host dad cared for him with the doctor, without much response. I visited him one day and will never get that image of him out of my head; wrapped in bandages, lifeless on the disintegrating foam mat on the floor, blood speckled on the dirty tile.
Before the accident, I had a hard time connecting with the suffering that Malians and Africans go through on a daily basis. Sure I knew it was sad and horrible and “3rd world,” but there was and always will be too many differences in my upbringing and privileges to identify with them. It wasn’t until the conversations with my host dad in the following week that I began to really connect with a Malian. My host dad was caring for Brahma in much the same ways that I’m familiar with: changing bandages, lifting him to bath, and hurting his back as a caretaker. My biggest frustration when the accident happened was that because of my language barrier, I couldn’t properly grieve with the people in my community. I spoke with my English speaking friend, Brahma (I know, everyone is named Brahma, just bear with me), but it still wasn’t enough to say how I felt. When someone dies, Malians say a number of benedictions to one another, but I couldn’t get them memorized with enough sympathy and frankly, my brain was too full of Bambara and post traumatic stress.
It was in my conversations with my host dad, sitting with him outside on the street every night as his back and heart ached from taking care of his neighbor tirelessly all day that I had the most satisfying cultural breakthrough. We compared stories about me and my dad, motorcycles, careless driving and all while laughing at his children and looking up at the remarkable night sky. We were transcending the language barrier because in the moments between talking, in those moments of silence, I felt a connection closer to him than I had ever thought I could get to a Malian. God was there, helping us both get through this horrible event in our lives that I now see as a landmark in adjusting to life in Africa.
January 18th, 2010
I have owned a copy of Jan de Hartog’s, Peaceable Kingdom for almost ten years. It’s been on my, “next to read” list since then because its 900 pages and the absurdly small text print are a little daunting for someone who pretty much hates reading. I acquired it in my first years at George School, because it’s a novel about the beginning of the Quaker movement and the love story between George Fox and Margaret Fells. My grandmother, Big Mama, knowing that I was not much of a reader, read it for me and gave me some cliff’s notes as she “trudged” through it every night before she went to bed in Beach Haven one summer. I have always promised myself I would read it, and it is the only book I brought with me to Africa because with my track record, I figured a two year stint would be sufficient time to read one novel. I often think about that summer with Biggie, in her bed in Beach Haven, her little reading glasses on the tip of her nose, I’m standing in the doorway to say good night on my way upstairs to bed and she says, “Oh Jessica! This book is truly remarkable, but it’s a lot to get through!” As I read it now, with all of life’s events unfolding as they did, I am comforted knowing that she flipped through these same pages for me, so that she could tell me what it was all about knowing I never would get around to reading it before her. But now I sit here, finally in Africa, trudging through it as she did, and finding that the story would not have impacted me as it has, had I read it before coming here. Its parallel to my emotional quest, search for truth, or at least a reason for why I’m here has been surprisingly poignant.
The protagonist’s spiritual struggle reminds me of my first few months here, being thrown into a home stay family in a village covered in trash and stench, the streets filled with wild, foreign children all screaming in fear and excitement and crying at the sight of us. Those months were definitely the hardest part so far and I am comforted knowing that the worst is over.
“Now the idea that she would have to lie down in the straw to sleep with the children while there might be rats burrowing all around her was petrifying. The voice of fear was much stronger; anything was stronger than the pitiful whisper that pleaded with her to go to those children. Why should she? What were they to her? She had tried her best, hadn’t she? Was there any hope she would ever get through to them? They were beyond human reach… Then the still small voice rose up inside of her, ‘All He has is thee’
That first step turned out to be the most difficult; once she had discovered the candle flame would survive as long as she went slowly, she took heart. She found that if she concentrated on going down those steps to the exclusion of everything else, the whole thing became possible.
She had never quite realized before how horrendous this place was, how futile her effort to relieve some of its horror. It was not fear that would defeat her, it was hopelessness, the conviction that she would never be able to change this place, that nothing could, that the one thing likely to happen was that it would change her.
As she sat there, in the darkness, with the child on her lap, she felt moved to go into meeting quite alone. She relaxed her body, emptied her head of thoughts, even the small babbling ones, until she sat there blank and passive, waiting for that of God to rise within her.
What rose was a thought. A cold thought, almost angry: ‘What is so godly about sharing in their filth?’
It startled her; she had expected something noble, soothing. Looked at coolly and without religious rapture, there was indeed nothing godly about her sitting there waiting to feel the first lice on her scalp. Rather than sharing their filth, she should make them share her cleanliness.
That of God within her manifested itself to clean out this pigsty first thing in the morning.
She suddenly was sure that Christ, had He been a woman, would have done the same.”
