Contagion movie oddly less scary than real global health situation. Director graciously kills off Gwyneth Paltrow early enough for movie to still be enjoyable, if not great.

Fight with hair-club victim at center fundraiser narrowly averted when he followed his "Education is a wicked easy doctorate to get..." comment with a small charitable purchase of a book that he probably can't read."Hot Dog" creative theme for craft night event fails to manifest to full potential: further mediums will be explored soon.Somehow recipes online are more interesting when cussing is involved.Genealogy investigation reveals that Grandpa purchased his high school diploma, far ahead of the current for profit university trend.Another failed cell-phone exorcism attempted, long after return from Ghana, where spirits are suspected of possessing phone and randomly disabling various features for inconvenient but impermanent lengths of time. That it might be the ghost of Steve Jobs' career tempting me to buy an i-phone a possible theory. More likely it's mold from the Global South.Once again, I'm doing anything I can to avoid my schoolwork.

(Cow on the beach at Beyin, June 2011)

"Where are you going?"

"Accra, Ghana."

"Oh, is that in South America?"

"No, Africa."

"Oh yeah. So that's... Is that it's own country?"

"Yes, it's a country."

"Well what bags are you checking in?"

"Just this one."

"You know you can have two, right? You can have up to fifty pounds. Unless you were going to Brazil. They're the only ones that allow sixty pounds. It used to be more but now it's fifty...

I just have one...

Primed for agitation, the possibility of my bag arriving in Gabon, Guyana, Guinea, Gambia, Greece... Georgia or Akron Ohio suddenly seeming more realistic a fear, I am not surprised when she informs me that I cannot fly today.

"You need to present the credit card that was used to purchase the ticket."

"I didn't buy the ticket. Some guy in Ohio did. That's not going to happen."

"I'm sorry then you can't fly."

I am disappointed that this woman, who can't figure out which one is Ghana Visa (there was no snarkless way, I'm sorry, to inform her that it was the one that said "Ghana" on it) will be the one to prevent my travel. I want my foes to be worthy obstacles, fleets of rifle-toting militants, rabid hyenas, a boat with a hole in it in a lightning storm, not some middle-aged woman who slept through sixth grade social studies.

Somehow I'm sitting in the New Haven hotel in Asylum Down in Accra anyway, watching my laundry dry while the Beautiful Gateway Ministry next door makes a Sunday out of loud and live marathon worship. Somehow I got on that plane after all, the battle less dramatic than it could have been and driven by what I hope was a routine common sense intervention.

"No, she's all set. They showed the card already."

Frankly, Ghana, which is a country, has been nice. We've had helpful encounters at travel junctures (like local airports, which one moves through like a hot blade through fufu) and slow but effective exchanges with the genuinely simplified travel process here. Despite a reputation to the contrary, things work here at face value. While I might wish my students could be spared the solicitations of 30something police officers at checkpoints, at least this is a harmless if inappropriate gesture, and we'll be moving along without a hitch in a moment. Perhaps even a "farewell" or "enjoy!" When the lights go off, they go off, and when the coffee takes an hour, it takes an hour, but you get the coffee eventually, even if it is the chewable kind. And if you have to sip it in the dark, at least you can rest assured that someone will still find a way to heat up the water, which is a lot more TLC and problem solving than you can expect at a certain Delta kiosk at Bradley airport on a certain day.

I have, at many times I'll admit, bemoaned the lack of quality education that Education for All has brought to this region, and I'm not about to drop all concern for the masses of children who bide their time in classrooms without teachers or spend their days chanting and copying things in a language they barely comprehend.

But I won't go bragging about the purportedly superior system in the US either. After all, in my country, you can get a job sending people all over the world if you know how to click through a menu.

(Heather, releasing some tension at the tail end of the 2011 Mardi-Gras extravaganza in the Episcopal church of Salem. And yeah, she pretty much fed 80 people in one manic swoop.)

First of all, I want to apologize to my blog for a record-breaking period of neglect I've inflicted upon it. Not since my home in Gambia was broken into and my computer stolen while I was sleeping next to it have I gone so long without posting. Shit, I posted more often when a computer was a 20k bike ride and a bribe away with a 50/50 shot of actual connectivity. When I look through the past six years of blog action, I see a few gaps, usually during the times of intense transitions. These usually fall in the fall for some reason- Peace Corps training in 2005, the homelessness/computerlessness period of 2009, not to mention a certain Ramadan ('07 I believe) where riding my bike to the ferry crossing and taking the dusty road to Ferrafenni to beg some guy to spark up the generator for a an hour of internet that mostly consisted of my trying to log in while six guys stood behind me felt like a bit too much trouble to bother with when a perfectly good nap on a concrete slab felt like creative expression enough.

The thing with transition (transformation?) is that we can't really see ourselves. We are just kind of selfing our selves around like we what know that is, but I don't think we do. That's the problem with being ourselves. If we are truly great, it's hard to see (and what a spoiler if we do.) And if we suck, well, it's hard to know. Seeking self consciousness also seems a little arrogant, no? Isn't there something on Hulu instead? People tend to bounce certain notions off of us (you seem to get along with Patrick, I like the way you handled that catfight, you make killer dumplings, etc. ) but that's no mirror, really. It does weird us a little, and feedback probably keeps us in line to an extent, especially those of us who've inherited even a molecule of the McHugh people-pleasing gene. You want dumplings? I'll give you dumplings. But it doesn't change an innate thing about us, not that we'd be able to tell anyway.

Before I get to the "lesson" portion of this dispatch, I share with you two possible rules for self-consciousness, really the only consistent ones I've heard. Unfortunately, they are generally not applicable, as you'll see. I can thank my friend Blair via her dad for this first nugget:

1. There is a Michael Scott in every work environment. If you don't know who it is, you should probably be worried.

2. If you really, really, really have a strong urge to run for public office, don't.

So yes, I must be done pupating for the moment. A lot has gone on this year. I'm halfway through a master's, off to Ghana for the summer, excited about a bunch of things that I never actually share in this format as my 3-8 dedicated readers well know, and I am stressed with the good stress of, you know, learning.

As usual, as per my experience several times in the past, as I wiggle out of my crusty old chrysalis with the anticipation of whatever me six months in a bivouac of my own spiritual goo might have produced, and as I hustle to the mirror, (the metaphorical Wonderland/Narnia/Never Ending Story, Harry-freakin-Potter kind of mirror) I am kind of shocked to discover that I am still a stumpy green caterpillar. Same yellow spots, same undulating love-handles, same little suction-cup feet. Obviously this could piss me off. I could kick up a really tiny bit of dust, get mad, get drunk, demand a refund.

But, if you know anything about me at all, you know my narrative form. I tend to reject the Hungry Caterpillar/Ugly Duckling/Cinderella/Karate Kid plotline in general. I don't get to become exceptional just because it's a story and that's how story characters learn to love themselves. And I don't have to. I suspect, even though I can't see myself, that being a stumpy green caterpillar is possibly great, and at the very least, innocuous. I mean, whatamIgonnado? Eat a leaf? It becomes a comfort, a relief even. I suspect I'm a slightly improved caterpillar, a little more sensible, more apt to listen, etc. Maybe. Can't really spend much more time reflecting on this, because I'm hungry, and the leaves are way up high, and I've got stuff to do.

(Heather, releasing some tension at the tail end of the 2011 Mardi-Gras extravaganza in the Episcopal church of Salem. And yeah, she pretty much fed 80 people in one manic swoop.)

First of all, I want to apologize to my blog for a record-breaking period of neglect I've inflicted upon it. Not since my home in Gambia was broken into and my computer stolen while I was sleeping next to it have I gone so long without posting. Shit, I posted more often when a computer was a 20k bike ride and a bribe away with a 50/50 shot of actual connectivity. When I look through the past six years of blog action, I see a few gaps, usually during the times of intense transitions. These usually fall in the fall for some reason- Peace Corps training in 2005, the homelessness/computerlessness period of 2009, not to mention a certain Ramadan ('07 I believe) where riding my bike to the ferry crossing and taking the dusty road to Ferrafenni to beg some guy to spark up the generator for a an hour of internet that mostly consisted of my trying to log in while six guys stood behind me felt like a bit too much trouble to bother with when a perfectly good nap on a concrete slab felt like creative expression enough.

The thing with transition (transformation?) is that we can't really see ourselves. We are just kind of selfing our selves around like we what know that is, but I don't think we do. That's the general problem with being ourselves in general. If we are truly great, it's hard to see (and what a spoiler if we do.) And if we suck, well, it's hard to know. Seeking self consciousness also seems a little arrogant, no? Isn't there something on Hulu instead? People tend to bounce certain notions off of us (you seem to get along with Patrick, I like the way you handled that catfight, you make killer dumplings, etc. ) but that's no mirror, really. It does weird us a little, and feedback probably keeps us in line to an extent, especially those of us who've inherited even a molecule of the McHugh people-pleasing gene. You want dumplings? I'll give you dumplings. But it doesn't change an innate thing about us, not that we'd be able to tell anyway.

Before I get to the "lesson" portion of this dispatch, I share with you two possible rules for self-consciousness, really the only consistent ones I've heard. Unfortunately, they are generally not applicable, as you'll see. I can thank my friend Blair via her dad for this first nugget:

1. There is a Michael Scott in every work environment. If you don't know who it is, you should probably be worried.

2. If you really, really, really have a strong urge to run for public office, don't.

So yes, I must be done pupating for the moment. A lot has gone on this year. I'm halfway through a master's, off to Ghana for the summer, excited about a bunch of things that I never actually share in this format as my 3-8 dedicated readers well know, and I am stressed with the good stress of, you know, learning.

As usual, as per my experience several times in the past, as I wiggle out of my crusty old chrysalis with the anticipation of whatever me sixth months in a bivouac of my own spiritual goo might have produced, and as I hustle to the mirror, (the metaphorical Wonderland/Narnia/Never Ending Story, Harry-freakin-Potter kind of mirror) I am kind of shocked to discover that I am still a stumpy green caterpillar. Same yellow spots, same undulating love-handles, same little suction-cup feet. Obviously this could piss me off. I could kick up a really tiny bit of dust, get mad, get drunk, demand a refund.

But, if you know anything about me at all, you know my narrative form. I tend to reject the Hungry Caterpillar/Ugly Duckling/Cinderella/Karate Kid plotline in general. I don't get to become exceptional just because it's a story and that's how story characters learn to love themselves. And I don't have to. I suspect, even though I can't see myself, that being a stumpy green caterpillar is possibly great, and at the very least, innocuous. I mean, whatamIgonnado? Eat a leaf? It becomes a comfort, a relief even. I suspect I'm a slightly improved caterpillar, a little more sensible, more apt to listen, etc. Maybe. Can't really spend much more time reflecting on this, because I'm hungry, and the leaves are way up high, and I've got stuff to do.

(Ducks in a row, New Orleans 2011)

"I just wanted to know if there's something I did wrong," the employee asks. A carrot, previously dangled, has been removed suddenly, and she wants a reason. Your face tenses, you are calculating which smile and which tone to respond with. You choose confusion and empathy, the kind of empathy they train you in once the stress of ill-fitting management necessarily wear away your attachment to the humans on the other end. You are willing to bet that she won't go much more direct than this- because most of the people who work for you should be grateful they have a job and you'll remind them of this every time they bring up an issue with their contract, or their benefits gone missing. Eat your peas because there are children starving in Africa. When I was doing your job, we had no benefits. You remember that it's time to write encouraging notes of positive reinforcement that sandwich a small criticism to foster improvement. Your day is like round two of Ms. Pacman, there's a ghost around every corner and you can't relax, but you can outpace them all by a bit, and you can pause the game for a covert mission in your office. You've done great things, the numbers are up, people need to see this and you need to promote yourself because no one's going to do that for you in life. Philosophy of practice is not in the past so much as an unrealistic side issue, and they can't see that because they don't know all the things you have to deal with. You became the mom who swore she'd never put her kid on a tether at the county fair. Kid doesn't think so now as he pines in vain for curiosities just beyond the cord's reach- but he's better off.

(Photo of Heather at the Wagon Wheel, fall 2010.)

Uncle Roger has a New Yorker with a cartoon of "The Last Thanksgiving" where everyone at the table has a prohibitive and incompatible dietary restriction- a joke you're already tired of and living out in the land of gastro-provisos. Thankfully our meal has no tofurkey glutardenous raw and superior feeling substitutes and the stuffing has organs and the gravy has lumps. It's a bachelor's turkey- roasted in a wok and safety-pinned together, but this more than works. I feel a genetic bond surrounding this turkey, a totally Macgyver'd endeavor with an endemic logic that pairs nicely with the bat pie and brussels' sprouts. We are here for the wine, the scrabble, and the jokes about how fat all our heads are. Yes, there is something otherish about our handling of Thanksgiving, at odds with the Martha Stewart ideal and seasoned with our own perplexed awe that we are even doing this, and yet the ritual surrounding this bondaged bird is still done in earnest. We are each of us holiday hacks, skillfully faking our way into the big time with a dash of salt and a safety pin.

(Arieh's Cat: How best to anthropomorphise her expression, forlorn?)

Up to five blankets and counting; pondering possibility of being crushed by weight of bedding simply trying to keep warm.Receive an inquiry over whether time in Africa impedes blood-donation on second party's part- not flattered but better able to relate to lepers.Hoping to be indoctrinated by the "ideology of hedonism" purportedly brought on by colonialism as referred to in student's paper.

Also in related news, discover that the reading of student papers is best left to the latter part of the caffeine-alcohol rotation.

Thankful to conservative talk radio for continuing to bridge the literacy gap.Anxious to see the enlightened math and economic principal that will magically create 33,000 jobs by cutting sales tax in half.While unimpressed with recent fashion developments, am happy that the men continuing to wear their girlfriends' pants have opted to balance their looks with beards.Search continues for a culturally relevant Halloween costume that isn't Snookie or Lady Gaga.

(Deren's Show and Tell chick Photo courtesy Gillian Sohna 2010)

I am in love. He is beside the tarp we've covered in books, panting from the heat inside his deep mass of white fur. I can barely accept the realness of this dog, his wistful black eyes, feather-duster tail and fuzzed-over ears - but since I'm not a pet-crazed seven year old, I didn't know about Samoyed dogs until today. I am politely extracting intelligence from his owners while I plot how I'm going to steal this lovable polar bear and make him the cuddly solution to surviving winter, loneliness and in fact any other tragedy that life devises. He'll have to outlive me of course, but science has come a long way since I've been gone.

I was recently told, as a sort of compliment, that I am "way too selfish to have even half a child," a reflection, no doubt on lifestyle choices that have hindered any advancement towards fulfilling my biological destiny (which I'm assured by many I will fulfill.) While I might have, at one point, rejected a certain paradigm (the one where I marryandbuyahouseandhavesomebabiesandstuff) that is only the accidental result of chances, some of them quite tiny at their time if not their timing in history.

But longing for a huge fuzzilicious friend conjures other possible outcomes, and the thinking of where the slightest nurturing of other possibilities might have led. I cannot have a Samoyed, at least at no point soon, achingly adorable though he was. Is this regret, dissatisfaction? More, it's the pondering, how many degrees separate me from my alter outcomes, wherein I decide to buy that house in Ecuador, marry that guy with the crispy hair, focus on making money, build upon the material rather than the ethereal. But what I'm wondering is if other outcomes die. Were they ever? Would I feel this kind of longing, this love, for things that aren't, if they in fact, were? Or would I rest my head on Koda's snowy side with the bored assumption that something else could have been more meaningful and complete? Would the rise and fall of his sighs underneath my ear be the comfort of a warmer, more familiar life chosen, or a sad disappointment of possibilities never considered?

"The problems from the North are showing up," she tells me, this freckled preceptor, "but they are manifesting in the South." Despite the obvious clues, shape-shifting, chairs with a grainy texture like gumdrops, I think I am awake and already look for geographical interpretation. Anything external in fact will do, because I am still fearful of the other possibility.

This message is how she interrupts her own song- which she sings through her smile- right into my face. We're sitting only one foot apart, this is a known and stated fact of this world, it is one foot exactly, as measurable from tire to curb by the driving tester. Somehow her banjo still fits between us, and the observer by my side still holds my hand without having to crank his arm in a shoulder-popping position to do this. Dreamspace is slightly more defiant that way, refusing to give up on what is rightly possible just because of simple matters of matter and mass.

By the way, I am pleased to see her even if she scares me, but the message is muddled by the medium or the fact that I want more song, more lulling, want both hands impossibly held. I can sing along to her silly song, it repeats "You can't cut the grass in the wintertime."

I guess I need to sleep faster, because someone needs the pillows. Waking this time feels like a pop.

"Is the chai sweetened?" I ask the girl behind the counter.

She is puzzled for a second, not like now, as she adjusts her spiky pink ponytail and betrays her roommate's reality TV addiction while the guy with red dreadlocks and an officer's cap outdoes hers with an even more shameful tale of someone else's affection for "Flava' of Love" repeats.

I think she wants to give me the right answer, which brews inside her for a bit until she comes out with this:

"No, it's not sweetened. I mean, we don't add any sweetener to it, but it has a natural sweetness. It's not very sweet." So I order it.

It tastes like ice cream.

He still has the citrus peeler, this little plastic doodad that mom bought in like 1985. It's like a crochet hook you pull around the edge of your orange. He said it was from a Tupperware party. You can vaguely recall the sensation that was Tupperware, just as you can imagine a time when this kitchen wasn't built yet, that where you stand now was a bunch of air in the air. One thing you didn't like about that orange crocheting tool was the way it tended to send these little micro-mists of orange peel oil, the most stingy sort, straight into your eye. Now you realized, today in fact, during your awkward stop at that giant country store on 5&10, that they still make those things. But now you put them on your finger like a ring and sort of fondle the orange while ripping around it's skin ala Christopher Soprano on collection day. It's an 89 cent pleasure you'll forgo for now. The 80's version was a lot less intimate, but maybe 80's people were a lot less desperate to commune with their fruit and a lot more anxious to store it in plastic. Perhaps some of these memories will come like psychotropic flashbacks, but now that stingy oil taste is in your mouth as you recall biting directly into the orange, ripping off a section and pressing the whole damn thing into your face while sucking it dry. You left a lot of violated fruit out there on dusty roads, while here in this kitchen, a little waxy coil curls politely on itself next to the compost bucket.

Photo from 2005, Lower Basic School WFP feeding program. At least a few of these kids got food before their headmaster sold 80 bags of the donated rice and beans in the open market.

Let's call her Marcia. She has graciously offered me a ride to the other apartment I'm looking at today despite her being a tenant here. At this point I'll be late and I can't figure out how to start the car I've borrowed. (It turns out it was the other key.)

On the way Marcia wants to discuss how to feel good by donating to some organization in Africa. She's heard a lot about corruption and NGO dollars being wasted on overhead and doesn't want her bucks to get eaten before they have a chance to help some weaver woman get a head start, or a school-aged child have a chance at an education. There is limited time on my part, one ride across town and she wants a website I'm sure. I'm wading through the swamp of acronyms I've encountered or worked with, CCF, CRF, UNICEF, WFP, FAO, BESPOR. There is humanitarian aid, microfinance, she could donate a goat, a bednet, a bicycle, her own luxurious hair even. She, meanwhile, announces her disgust over organizations with religious affiliation, because who are they to push their values and agenda on people from other cultures.

Memory one comes into focus. I am holding Sibo's hand (almost 5 years ago) as she tugs me along to her nursery school at the Korean Christian Mission. From what I can see, it's a relatively engaging day of coloring, singing and eating snacks. The children are kept busy and not beaten, a distinction I cannot make about many nurseries I've seen. The education is not particularly deep, but neither is the religious indoctrination. Sibo's parents regard her singing of incomprehensible Jesus songs with the same indifference as her rendition of Turn Me On, which she's heard playing on a neighbor's tape deck and which she executes with frighteningly perfect pitch and timing. She will continue to go to Koranic school after this, no beats skipped. The one offending point of the mission might have to be the annual giving out of random donated crap from the sister church in California, but Sibo surely prizes her one-legged blonde Barbie and her Stitch Toy and ties them both to her back like babies as she wanders through her day.

Memory two is Mr. Ceesay. He has just been promoted to Deputy Headmaster, he says. He was just a mere teacher the last time I came by. He is holding a piece of rubber tubing, which seems to be edging out the traditional stick for classroom discipline tool of choice. Technology is amazing. Suddenly a bell rings (is being rung by a little boy standing in the schoolyard) and Mr. Ceesay announces that the kids receiving food may go eat. Four of the thirty seven students leave the room and the rest continue to be ignored by Mr. Ceesay who's intent on describing his instructional methodology rather than demonstrating it. I question why all the students are not receiving food and he assures me it's only for the ones who pay. I am then invited to partake with the teachers, for whom this food was never intended. The World Food Program likes to take credit for the correlation in increased attendance with their school feeding program which is offered to every lower basic school student, regardless of whether they are able to make a small contribution towards additional condiments or not. Schools exploit this donation on every front, with headmasters inflating their enrollment (on which donated portioning is based) and often feeding only the few who pay. At one school, the headmaster had 35 first graders listed in his roll, but the teacher's log contained only 8. WFP supplied enough food to the school to feed those 35 each supposed day of the school year, which is severely shortened by the epidemic of extended holidays. In a school where 4 out of 37 in Mr. Ceesay's class got fed, the same headmaster had his storage inspected one week after receiving a supply of 96 bags, where suddenly only 16 remained. The beans were also mostly gone, along with the oil. WFP food is a powerful currency, and communities fight over it with headmasters taking the lead in deciding how it's used. Mr. Ceesay thinks I'm stupid, and I am for even saying anything, because a volunteer some years back tried to blow the whistle on abusing donations and got moved to another site by angry administrators accusing her of not understanding what was going on.

I tell Marcia that Jenna Bush had her name on these reusable bags you could buy at Whole Foods that would contribute to WFP donations. She likes Trader Joe's and is excited to show it to me, even though I tell her I've been there many times and that I love those peanut butter filled pretzels. There's another memory tucked inside, of one of the regional education officers complaining that WFP no longer supplies fish and other foods to Gambia, only unpalatable rice, beans and oil. I try to gently explain that there are countries of greater need and limited donations but he remembers fondly his school days of eating sardines on the WFP dole. Of course now the program is so successful that the majority of children are in school, and sardines would break the bank. That is memory 2.5.

Memory three is me, standing in front of some fifth graders after their teacher moves to the back of the room. He's attended a workshop we recently ran on making teaching aids, and he wants to show off the fancy poster he's made of healthy preventative habits and it correlates to their social studies unit on endemic diseases, namely malaria. He has a grasp of participatory methods and asks the class how to prevent malaria and they cite bed nets as an example. "Yes," he encourages them, "and you all received bed nets from UNICEF this year, right?" Most of them nod their heads in agreement. UNICEF had given mosquito nets to school kids in the region and talked to the kids about the importance of sleeping under a net.

"How many of you sleep under a net?" he asks, once in English and then in Mandinka when he sees no hands go up. 2 tentative hands go up and then come back down. They are not using the nets.

It is still me but now I am jogging out in the rice fields and it is early morning. I spot three women pulling up crabs and small fish from the muddy banks beside the path and I greet them with a typical joke about where my breakfast is. One of them pulls up her net, it's a bed net, and shows me the small fish she's caught in there. "It is not enough for you," she says and laughs.

Marcia has waited too long for me at this other apartment. I've had a beer, appreciated the potential housemate's enthusiasm and her bacon tape, ached a little for my home in Gambia. When I get back in the car I am sorry I have made her wait, and any errand she wants to run while we're close to town is fine by me. We go to Trader Joe's, but they don't have those pretzals any more. On the way home we talk about how cheap it is compared to Whole Foods.

I was recently informed that etiquette dictates a lady never boast more than thirteen pieces of flair at the dinner table, lest she be considered some sort of Bohemian Gypsy outcast. Even this total seems a little conspicuous- two earrings, two rings, two bracelets, a watch. Save a row of silver buttons pinning me into my blouse, I cannot think of six more embellishments I'd want on my person, unless I was attempting to attract raccoons. What's left is the question of the minimum. If she doesn't sparkle from each angle of the table, is there something of her ladyhood lost or muted? Is there, attached to this rule, an unspoken ideal number we are too polite to mention? Tell me, is this number set a little high to accommodate some distinguished queen with her dozen diamond necklace? Or purposely low, like a dare. Caroline, my darling, in the many books you've read on such subjects, are you the one to tell me how to ice myself appropriately should an invitation of significance come my way?

1. Ms. King, can newspapers be fiction? 2. Ms. King, cat eat rabbit? And also dog? 3. Are chimpanzees friendly? 4. What feeling is white? 5. Where does toilet water go? 6. Ms. King are you bigger than a lion? 7. Why is your name Ms. King? It should be Mrs. Queen. 8. Have you been to a nightclub where people are fighting? 9. Why don’t you have a boyfriend? (It’s time for you to look for one.) 10. Ms. King, when you laugh too much you will cry. Why? 11. Ms. King, you were a baby? 12. Ms. King, when I am old I will like girls? I will marry? 13. Ms. King, when I am 18 I will go to aniversity? 14. Can I take this (penny, scrap of paper, random fleck of lint, popsicle stick, etc.) home? 15. Do mosquitoes fart? 16. Do you go on facebook? (My mom’s on it all the time) 17. Ms. King, lions eat polar bears? 18. Was your dad a King? 19. Why didn’t you try to look nice today? (Ms. Leen did) 20. Can you give us homework with balloons? 21. Can I take this stick home to feed my termites? 22. Feeding my termites, that is good? 23. Are you a Christian? 24. Do you miss us? 25. After dismissal are you sad?

Recess was so fun

Swinging in the atmosphere

No one disturbing

Deep, deep nail polish

Please I want to put it on

Please mom I want to

Terrible car crash

almost had a heart attack

bad taxi, bad car

Crocodile pool

It seemed like 2 years ago

but it was last week

Playing with my doll

I made her hair so pretty

Where are her hair clips?

(Sierra Leone photos courtesy Blair Cochran on holiday 09 excursion)

A friend of mine recently joined a well-known social networking website and while it was nice to see her face, I had reserved hope that girls who shave their heads and catch fish with their bare hands from glacial mountain lakes don't need that sort of thing. But like everyone else, I probably asked her at one time or another if she had an account- we don't want her tree to fall without being around to hear it. We must have worn down her defenses eventually. "For a while," she justified the conversion this way- "Not being on it was what defined me." There is harm, there is no harm, it doesn't really matter- we are either on it or defying it and either way it is affecting us.

There's the old joking advice that to carve an elephant you cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. The streams of daily status updates feeding into the facebook river remind me of this piece of anti-wisdom. When you have something to say, cut away everything that isn't what you want to say, including the responsibility to your listener. Somehow this should make our sharing better, concise, direct. We stop the stuttering and the padding and the circuitous avoidance and simply say. We are here, we are hungry, we want you to know we've been to the gym, our baby walked, we got into school, we are bored, we like sushi, we had sushi, we wish we had sushi, we bit a lot of chumps. This might appear to be a criticism. It is not. I rather enjoy scrolling the reams and reams of posts. I like the easy voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of nearly everyone I've ever met. I feel uneasy when you choose this format to confess a serious matter, but isn't a sign that we should be listening to each other? It might be the wrong place, but maybe you don't have another place. As I write this I am periodically flipping through your photo album of a party you failed to edit. I am seeing if you've updated your relationship status. I am thinking about what you include, what you don't include, how it all puts the me in medium. I don't think it's so harmful, and if my awesome shorn rockstar friend is on here, then we're safe to assume it's not a complete waste of time. But as for the elephant? I see nothing but a pile of shavings.

(Rams on wheels Photo courtesy Abigail Dejnak, from 2009 visit to Banjul)

Mr.Cheap knows you because you bring everyone you know to this place. You inhabit one little sphere, however exotic; you imbibe its novelties for the benefits of those who still find them novel. You dominate, you big fish, you. This isn't the worst niche imaginable. New people find themselves caught up here,at least for moments in time. They sort of disappoint, or is it just your imagination, when they wrestle free with a batchful of stories and memories in only a short time, like a week or a year. Why do you feel the need to explore every wrinkle in the land anyway. Some questions don't require question marks do they. So, at the risk of no longer getting to answer another rhetorical question ("You must really like it there, no?") you'll soon pack up your donkey cart and mosey on out. It's time to stock up on Mr.Cheap's dried seed pods and painted whatsits, perfect the tan, suck the dregs from the wonjo bag and get out before you become a fifth wife or sad old beach hag with rastafarian arm candy. You'll be so anonymous and cold where you next go, but it looks silly to keep swimming laps in this little crocodile pool.

Last night I dreamt that I checked my blog, and all the posts I thought about but never wrote were somehow published on it. The ins and outs of life, the occassional realizations, the struggles, the successes and the musings which are all too deeply archived to ever really access again were all there for me to see, in story book format (my medium of deepest recognition.) The dream presented itself in amazing detail, it was like mining all those fleeting thoughts that you regretfully forget when pen meets paper (when pads press keys) and the best part (I dreamt) was the realization that NOW I HAVE THEM BACK. I became excited by the possibilities; I could be my own therapist and know why I am where I am. I could read these thoughts to recall my journey as it felt inside the most honest part of me, rather than my blogging voice or the feedback of those around me. There was so much tingling potential.

Then I woke up of course.

"That's the most surprising thing of all!" says Mohamed, observing our half-cut carrot bought in rough form, days from its harvest, bruised, nearly limp, shoved into the dirt and now sprouting. "It's blushing green," says Josh.

The last few months I haven't blogged. Would snapshots do? Arriving to a power cut, someone's spicy chicken crawling with maggots in my fridge, sending emails to a black hole, giant shoes holding my door open, the lobotomized pizza man serving my overtrusting heart the first piece of humiliation, a prescription bottle discovered emptied by a disappearing lover, an empty bed where my laptop had sat paused on a documentary, texts from the police, could I drive the suspect to the courthouse? A new home full of boxes, a man passing my windowsill, not bothering to speed up when I scream at him, my purse- a few embarrassing contents- spread out in my yard while 2 militants paw through, my own keychain dangling in the door, the sinister glance of the stray cat the day my first (last???) pet went missing, a falling lime waking me, the shadows of banana leaves waving, running everyday, the endless tallying of touting to join me, a collection of "champion ladies," and other zombie-bumster one-liners, a thrice broken fridge, so much loss back home, life-saving smoothies, pitch-perfect little voices, wine in swimming pools, bathing under a papaya tree, anticipating breaking heat.

I've always chronicled small. I assume you see in it the reflection of things bigger, if not then why would bigger matter anyway? Other people's lives contain momentous events, the ones I try to show up for when I'm not distracted, like a child, by a vegetable in some dirt, the ones cuing others on how to handle you. I don't have that construct to tell me if there's good to come, if I've learned, if I'm better for any of it. I just know you can cut apart a carrot, you'd be surprised because if you stick it in the soil, it'll grow.

A brief scanning of the decade past is all it really takes to locate my infidelities in the face of prior convictions. Don't eat meat, don't shave for somebody else, coffee addiction is tragic, don't enable or live with smokers, mouse traps are mean, vengeance is petty, sausage smells, get out of poor countries, don't jump through trivial hoops for academic or career advancement, perfume is suspect (like in Batman), gambling is for people who are either losers or bad at math, if you're not blissfully happy you're doing something wrong, pets are usually a bad idea... I've (historically) experienced this noise that gives rise to these rules that inevitably contradict my mellow and probably eclipse my forming identity. (That's right, in America, you get to develop your identity at any old age.) I recognize that having no rules creates monsters that no one wants to be around, but so does robotically following the plethora you've populated your already complex life with. I wasn't intentionally squirming my way out of previous trappings, but it sure feels good to crawl around in a new space with bigger, more meaningful rules, and nibbling the occasional chorizo with my breakfast dark roast. My latest infraction involves trusting a beautiful smoker's taste in animals and somehow landing a cuddly little cat. Now because my previous rule was "No cats, like, ever" I've needed to seriously rewire the directions of my affection, and though I'm no Lennie, my awkward attempts at feline paw reflexology have resulted in the occassional superficial scratch. I assume this is just a little retribution for selling out to something resembling happiness, for breaking a few rules here and there.

Nothing can compete with big cities when it comes to mobilizing people at the slightest excuse. Not to say that a festival dedicated to food is slight- it no doubt weighs itself heavily upon a city, clogging its streets, its arteries, its trash receptacles. Still, wading through thousands of people for the simple attraction of purchasing an overpriced polish sausage, and eating it while walking in a sea of sweaty, moving humanity in the sun is testament to the power of large cities. Could it possibly hold this allure if not for its impressive scale? Would you try to make tacos for ten thousand? It seems intriguingly communal, a mite nostalgic even (think Coney, or for us Mass folk, Riverside.) It's strange, this need to invent a reason to come out and look at each other again. As an event, I would say it's a fail- the elevated risk of botulism, the trash factor, the asshole who made me get buffalo sauce on my pants- these lead to an overall crummy review. But despite the total headache of navigating this rowdy rabble, (why do I always put a positive spin on my rants???) there was something perversely appealing about it, otherwise, why were we all there? It wasn't for the quality of the food or because we love elbowing our way to the next booth with the (empty, Sorry Todd) promise of a German pretzel. Perhaps it's the lure of the crowd and the pleasure of knowing that everyone else, like you, will line up for the same slice of pizza they could get down the street, just for the idea that in collusion something is suddenly happening.

You are definitely roasting your last chicken of the season, escaping the sweltering kitchen for the porch. It was a totally genius move, putting this mattress out here, affording the laziest twilight possible, like Roxy Carmichael lying in bed with her TV tipped to its side. The dirt-spackled mango tree curbs the potentially nauseating romanticism of this scene: potted hibiscus, porch, glass of water. The flies also help.

It took the whole year to figure out how to enjoy ex-pat 101, and oh, the excuses you’re going to have to make when you don’t really feel like reentering whatever it is that is awaiting you in the fabulous toubabudu, (aka Babylon). “I like hassles,” you once told Cousin Jay, who, of all people, needed no explanation for why you wanted to keep living in Africa, as if the notion of restaurants with monkey sticks* at the tables made poetic sense enough to justify the exile. There’s a restlessness you associate with Awesome America, a constant wall of red tape and telemarketers between you and simple peace. You can get thrilled, taught, fed, entertained, excited, but you can’t ever take a break. But repose in Gambia is inherent, automatic, assumed. If it all seems frighteningly catatonic, the karmic equivalent of an oxycodone habit, then it’s probably not your cup of ataya. All-night mosques and abrasive touts will no doubt stymie your mellow, however, and you might discover a sense of relief in the concreteness of your limitations and a sweetness in the lifestyle you’ve cobbled together despite your finite facilities.

Your little intercontinental tug-of-heartsting-war isn’t an exciting story. It’s probably mainly the result of perceived inabilities in one land and surprising aptitude in another. (Yes, anyone can learn to take naps in the afternoon, consider it confessed.) Goats will eat the entire weeks’ garbage outside your gate in the time it takes your electricity and water to come back on so you can take a shower, but in the meantime you are gloriously gooey from your second attempt at banana cake ala chez Colleen’s overproductive fruit farm. And here come the mangos by the way. So this is your home, for whatever lucky reason, though the blistering June heat makes you glad for the holiday to your past, for the friends/sushi/family/theaters/intellectual community/roads/bandwidth, but you’ll still be pining for the fruit from the dirty mango tree you missed the chance to gobble down while you were gone.

*These are sticks for scaring away, not necessarily beating, gate-crashing primates at up-country rustic dining establishments.

Any time someone newish enters your space, a certain amount of tailoring must occur, if not to eclipse any assumptions that your life is not “together” enough, then at least to afford them some comfort. It is not difficult when England comes your way to pull something holidayish out of the sandy surf and to make like (fake like?) your every day consists of reaching for a banana right from the tree*. Easy enough, I suppose, to sweep the lizard turds under the stove for those few days that guests stop by. In the end though, a closer friend comes with a certain amount of abusability reserved normally for family and particular electronics, and all bets for preserving the image of that sunkissed life are off. Underwear finds its way once again strewn on the floor, you condescend (embarrassingly) to your gardener, let produce rot in the fridge. It’s undoubtedly the less enjoyable experience for this visitor, who differs from the others only in his ability to maintain some space in your life long enough to wear down your defenses and expose his own Tesco-working warts as well. Somehow, though, you like to think that showing your slightly more sustainable side, a middling okayness with your existence, could, if he were able to stretch that far, be seen as a compliment to the evolved state of your friendship.

*Though often very stately and tree-like, the banana and its fruit are, in fact, delicious mutations of an otherwise seedy, inedible herbaceous plant and not actually a tree.

A pity not to recognize your power at the very moment when exercising it could elevate not only the outcome of an uncomfortable situation but the way in which that situation is interpreted by others. Positioning your ego around an argument only proves it untrue on either side and creates a tremendous barrier against listening at all. It does, however, become a way to temporarily borrow power out of fear, out of desperation to control things. Responding to this tendency is difficult and I hope I improve at it rather than degenerate into it, which I suspect is to avoid apathy.

Think of who you truly admire on this rock. Did they get to that position in your heart by escaping dilemmas? I can't find a role-model over 50 in my life who isn't someone completely dedicated to the continuation of their own learning, or who doesn't rise to occasions. I can't imagine being any more bored and unimpressed with so many of the elders in my life, as if my own maturity were at stake in the simple act of looking up in their direction. If there's anything I hope to outgrow, it's my petty, knee-jerk personalization of problems in life. Will you please lead me in this regard?

It's own little microcosmo, my class buzzes with the random ("Ms. King, I had MARMITE yesterday") energy of 13 kids preparing for the production of the year. I've asked them a completely self-defeating-and-I-know-it request, to sit down with a book while I help individuals get ready. Their bodies respond accordingly (like popcorn) and no known technique could will them into a state of calm. Parents are already on benches outside as I discover the cheap Chinese face paint doesn't work and bees, snakes, mice will need to retain their people features and maybe Ms. King loses a couple of points this time. Sometimes children are like this: heartaches with feet. Somebody's lip got split at recess time, another one needs to vomit. But they march on anyway. I sometimes talk about this sense I think I have, that I can see your inner child tour-guiding you around, waving at me while you fancy yourself some kind of adult. This works in reverse today as little faces show purpose, fear, anxiety, pride. The face of one of my second grade boys looks up from the row of parents, hosted by a bigger body and set about with stubble. It's disconcerting how easy it would be to pat this grown man on the head, how easily my confusion could set in at such a moment. The same dimples even. Do they all think I'm nuts? A fraud? Is something going to get knocked over? Will there be tears or fighting? Will it matter? It happens in a blur, me in the background conducting and prompting, hoping for the allignment of all possible fortunes that this becomes a source of pride for them, that they feel they've made the sun rise. The resolution lingers, we've written more, and my 3 foot tall narrator triumphantly shushes the premature applause and, like the rightly misprinted sign at the Standard Chartered bank, in a flash "we close," and everything is fine.

It's the British approximation of those E-network style countdown programs, the ultimate time-vacuum when you're stuck on a Jet Blue flight, but the likes of which you'd rather not admit you'd sat through at any other time in your life. Instead of one-hit wonders or admirable celebrity body parts, this one is trying to sort out the 100 most embarrassing people of 2008. You realize it's not your country when Sarah Palin comes in at a disappointing 52nd, but there's a familiar discomfort in watching this style of television- programmed to come at you quickly and go away even quicker and there's as much time spent telling you what's coming as there is content to come. Before we can find out who the other 51 failures of public popularity were this year, it's time for the Hogmany madness to commence. Night could imitate TV on a day like New Year's, with the drunk girls puking on the sidewalks, or inadequately dressed and clopping precariously through cobblestones and the boys shouting from rooftops and grabbing each other in new and exciting ways that only a night of strong liquid courage could liberate them to do. But instead nothing done or said this evening will register the kind of spite that the fishbowl critique show does- because no one is any position to judge. You're either puking on the sidewalk yourself, or you're holding up someone's ponytail so they can.

Just to give you an idea of the mood over here:

Wednesday morning, the vendors all had their radios blasting with vote counts. They would look up at me, and instead of greeting, would say simply "Obama." Some nodded at me or gave me the thumbs' up, one commented "Africa dingo be white house le saaying" (there's a son of Africa in the white house.) Today is Friday and it continues. Without lifting a finger, Obama has already caused a shift in attitude. They check me for loyalty first, "Mariama, who were you supporting?" If I say Obama, then they give me- and I don't know how anyone knows about this- the victory fist pump. I've met people who don't believe that snow is real, or vending machines, but a black man as president of toubabudu? That's news.

This morning Mr. Jallow got up from his bench to hand me a slip of paper. In three different colors of ink were his name and number and where he works (the bank.)

I said thankyou but kept on walking.

"I'll be waiting for your call."

"Yes, you will."

It is my blessed luck that I get to pass by both the fire station and military barracks on my way to school each day. At 7 am, a half dozen men in blue stand around another, who is slowly sweeping the ground under the tree outside the fire station. They watch as he stoops over with his little bundle of twigs and brushes the night's collection of natural refuse away from the premises.

"Hello boss lady."

"Good morning champion lady."

"Ooh white angel."

I shape the politest dismissive smile I can muster and move a bit faster, pushing my earbuds in deeper. Cat Power will never drown them out completely, but I can always shrug and say, "sorry, can't hear you." I will one day make fun of them in Mandinka, but I'm saving it up, I have 150 more days of school to pass by them after all. I will say something in the tone of an old man telling an important proverb, "How many firemen does it take to sweep up a leaf?"

They will be shocked. They will regret all the times they talked about me as I walked by, assuming I didn't understand it. I will keep walking and add my last bit, "Seven. One to hold the broom and the rest to make sure the leaf doesn't get away." But for now, I'll let them put more lewd comments about my lopey into the karmic bank. For now I'll walk by.

My passing the barracks is normally a bit less charming. "SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Hey. Can I talk to you?"

"Accuse me, one moment please."

They actually want me to stop. Guns and uniforms make it tempting in order to avoid problems, and were this one of my first 1,000 encounters with such, I might actually fall for it. They are really just boys when I look closer, and despite the unwanted attention, I'm glad I'm a woman because they will never turn viscious on me. They stand outside these fake painted tanks at the gates of the barracks, always at attention and looking like protectors of a nation. But up close they are just bored young men hoping for some digits. They could be anywhere.

Before I ever get to them, I first pass Mr. Jallow. He's a big deal, or dressed like one, and sits on a little bench in front of his vehicle in the morning in his suit and tie holding the paper. I'm not sure where the bench comes from, because I never see it when I come back through in the afternoon. For a week I smiled and said hi, and he was nice and cute enough to look a little longer than I probably should have. Then one morning he introduced himself and asked my name. The following week he pulled out his phone and asked for my number. I smiled and asked if he remembered my name. He had forgotten it. "Sorry, not today then." Now Mr. Jallow informs me each day that he knows I'll give him my number now. His confidence is impressive to be sure. I don't see diplomatic plates on the car, so I'm trying to figure out where on earth that SUV goes each day. Strangely though, it hasn't ocurred to him to ask my name again.

So goes my commute. On the way home, the second shift of hecklers are usually out and around the taxi park. Some just want to give me a ride. "Taski! How far you going? I'll give you cheap price. 50 to Cape Point."

"It's ok, I don't need a TAXI."

"Ok, 25."

There's a guy who works the shrimp market by latching onto you as you pass, only he's not a shrimp seller but some sort of bumster broker who speaks on behalf of the shrimp sellers, trying to drag you in to a particular bucket of shrimp, as if it somehow differed. He must get a cut or something, but it's perplexing to think that he could actually improve shrimp sales. He makes me want chicken for dinner.

After passing the three boys who sleep in wheel barrows all day, and sometimes call me "Angel" or "sweetie" or ask if they can help me, I enter the most peaceful part of my walk home.

I escape into the airconditioned Rite Choice mini-mart and am greeted by Maneesh, the young Indian man who runs the place. He looks outside rather than at me.

"It's raining,"he notices.

"Yeah, it is."

"You should wait in here until it stops."

I drink a cold perrier from his cooler and he wraps my bag in plastic. We both miss home, we are both strangers here, but we like it too. He redeems his gender for the time being, and I head home.

I pass the craft market and the old Fula man who weaves. "Hello, Mariama. Are you tired?" These guys remember my name from a year and a half ago, buying trinkets with my father. They used to annoy me, but now they remind me of up-country, where people greet just to greet. They all want me to learn their respective langauges and have a sort of competition going to see which one I can manage best. They talk about me as I pass, not like firemen or the taxi guys, who see white skin. I even hear Nene, the Batik lady say "Mariama is one of us." I cash in a thousand boss lady's for that one kind statement.

The most common thing people say to me about returning to Africa is "you must really like it there." When I lack an enthusiastic expository response, that is, for those times when I don't generically mention the beach and the sun and the cash savings, I'm sure they wonder why I'd go back. America has a lot of nice stuff, to be sure. Little Gambia shares a scandalously small line with Senegal for their snail's pace internet, hosts a glut of over-eager Rasta beach bums, and lacks a convenient source of high-quality coffee. But there's something else feeding me there, something I'm unable to define at the moment I'm asked. So, now I'm off to the airport (after disconnecting my phone) for the journey in reverse. If any dear reader needs a DVD copy of Banjul Cops or some birth-control fabric, you know who you are and you can let me know. I'll happily brave the horribly crooked post office to send a piece of love your way.

At some point along the way I began to start picturing the child you once were while you were talking to me. Years in classrooms caused me to idly picture- but never to design or destine- the adult each little person in there would perhaps become. I remember my sister describing this feeling- and I remember it too after a season of chopping my own wood- a way of looking at the world with an ax in tow- measuring everything around by how hard it would be to chop through. It made me believe, briefly, that I started seeing people alongside their former and future selves the same time I started teaching, but then memories of my own former me come flooding back- a walk along rocky beaches in Halibut Point, angry at the adults around me for something, vowing to never be like "that" when I was a grown up. At four, I was going to get spanked for something so I dashed out the door, certain I could outrun my parents, confusing my little legs with some version of me yet to come. I remember myself annoyed at those big hairy parents for not stalking the foods I wanted, for tickling me too hard. I made solemn promises to the future me to fill my refrigerator with berries and gingerbread cake and to leave the hopelessly ticklish alone. I was going to know just what to say if my child was crying, and I would never say "don't cry." And she does, that little me, feel like another person kicking up the rocks next to me, giving me the stink-eye when I suck like an adult. Perhaps I'll get arrested for tampering with this well-circulated family photo, but it was begging for an update that only got to happen in my imagination.

In college I had a professor who had previously taught middle schoolers and still hadn't forfeited her condescension towards those she taught -ironically given that her subject was Child Development with all its emphasis on teaching strategies that are 'developmentally appropriate'. But who am I to say we are ever too old to be talked to like children? It's only that I want to spare children themselves of this humiliation while they still have the chance to avoid the possibility that their schooling might be a game designed by men who sat around deciding the average age at which they should be able to know the sameness in containment between a tall skinny glass and a fat short one. Despite her own inability to meet us in a place where we weren't being handed diapers to hold our poopy factoids, this professor did manage to pare her subject down to one take-away nugget, which is always the mark of a class I should have CLEP'd out of. It's the nature of the nurture, kids, and it doesn't have to stop. Therefore, I won't be roofie'ing Christian Bale just to propagate some higher-grade being, because the extra edge would soon be worn down by inadvertently allowing my child to watch Spongebob marathons and snack on paint chips. On the other hand, and even my professor would agree, it seems there's a lot of wasted energy going into trying to over-nurture children, with gourmet pre-schools and in-utero Mozart, when the most meaningful development comes from allowing the brain to begin negotiating its environment with increasing capability. I'm glad our parents didn't get in our way when we were little beasts exploring our domain. And like my professor, I still see us as children, pouring the water back and forth between the two glasses in wonder.

A woman and her male friend are sitting on a bench outside the Sunshine Market, all three of us minding their own business.

"She thinks she's so progressive because she hates Bush and she's from the Midwest where that's apparently a big deal."

"Yeah, and she goes to McDonald's! It's like hello, are you really that enlightened if you support THEM???"

"Right? I could show her some really progressive literature that would blow her mind. I just finished this... nerble nerble nerble nerble nerble...."

They get up and walk off, and I can't follow them to hear the rest because I'm still eating slippery papaya chunks, thinking about the warmest smiles I've received today, all from Mexicans.

I haven't had an idea in a while, so I try to come up with a reliable test for the order in which we would blow up cities and towns in the future if we had to destroy some, but I sort of need Jay for this. Last night when Deb was lamenting the many dental-related routines she was going to need to go through in order to go to bed, Jay assured us of a future invention that would free us from all the mouthcare hassles, a plaque-eating bacteria of some sort that excretes a minty-flavored byproduct as it removes harmful tooth-decaying gunk. My teeth ache for this innovation, and from the Beard Papa cream-puff earlier, a lesser idea of Jay's, but still, an idea in a land of men yelling at their lovers for something the dog did wrong.

I'm not sure when the delusion of entitlement and titling of overly-available and nearly daily treats will finally end, when the need-chart is re-calibrated for an America that will still be able to see her toes in a decade, but in the mean-time I wander to the bakery where I'm nibbling my way across the case in case St. Helena and its heavenly bakery are chosen to be obliterated before I come back here. Just as strange as the promoting to "specialness" of daily excesses, is the odd presentation of literal treats as daily entitlements through Salumerias, cheese mongers, fuckin' caviar bars. I, for one, feel myself believing the imagery of hanging meats as something I'm to come and get my regular slice of, as something I'm to want and consistently pursue in my life, that someone (the me I want to be) is already doing this affordably, sustainably, as an after thought.

Jay is less afraid than me. "It's lifestyle, man," he imitates the local, lazy permissiveness. It's just enough to make me snarf my pinot grigio to stifle a laugh.

As Wookie and the Baby (the Singstar Evangelists, also known as us) fly through the country in the Millennium Dolphin, the tootsie roll trucks, discount cheese curds, idiotically proprietary wi-fi parking lots, .50 diapers on the Mississippi, towns with names like Kickapoo and Colona, Stations of the Cross motor parks, futile searches for palatable coffee, spontaneous games like “How would you sexually harass each state?” (For Nebraska- I don’t care that you’re flat), bottom-feeding spackle and sprawl that incite thoughts of ending it all, kind and unhealthy citizens of Normal, Illinois who don’t know how to park their minivan, bricks of eventless meatloaf and the antidotal bag of Broccoli from Shnucks Supermarket, anti-meth billboards (No one thinks they will try to tear off their own skin. Meth with change that.), natural variation and synthetic sameness, Cheyanne’s sea of Port-o-potty’s (decommissioned? A sort of modular toilet retirement community?) the winding stretches of Utah and thinking about friendships we’ll continue to tend to like an inherited garden we didn’t ask for, truck stops with bottles of urine in their trash cans and nothing smaller than a 20 ounce cup, the shift from cardinals to cowboys, silos to windmills, the shwagtastic restaurants where we get that nervous feeling that they won’t understand us, and the embarrassment of America exposing itself to us one bobble-headed James Brown at a time all feed us a bit more than we can earnestly digest in this sitting. And it’s a lot of sitting. Is it possible to have your GPS and your Iphone and your road signs and your measured exits and not be lost and still have no clue where on earth you are?

Jay and I made a pact to eat at each awful poison-mongering fast food joint only once on this trip. Unfortunately we knocked the big guys out early.

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life, that we give to the question of what to do with two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

- Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I manage to get a passport photo that doesn't suck.Mom calls to let me know that the skateboarding bulldog will be appearing on Oprah this Wednesday.Coffee shop employees discover my "alternate establishments" tactic to not seem like a complete loafer, which may lead to developing a hobby.A mustachioed debauchee follows me in his van and offers me a date midday. Could Greenfield actually be a safer town at night?

I am visited by the "Ghost of birthdays past" including photographic evidence of a mutual and decidedly amateur lap-dance, as well as a half-eaten cake, on which I am nonetheless blowing the candles out for a second go at my wish.My 20's end much the way the 20's did, with extreme deflation. Dirty 30's to commence this weekend. A recent acquaintance eases the potential fear with this statement: "Turning 30 is no big deal. I've done it a few times."

The male Blue-footed Booby initiates romance with a measured stomping of his feet and wing display. The ritual attracts a female who will lead him to reproductive victory if all goes well, if he doesn't, say, trip over one of his smurfy toes or overestimate his stock's appeal to the potential leading lady. It's not as though a discerning female booby has a lot to distinguish one mate from another, so she most likely sorts them on technicalities, vigor, foot shade, wing symmetry. And if she's not interested, she just walks away, doesn't awkwardly apologize or say they should be friends. She doesn't have to worry whether accepting a drink is a promise of something more, as there's a clear line in the volcanic sand between her and the world of slightly smaller, slightly beadier-eyed males. The dance is an explicitly balls-out statement of interest on the part of the male, a limb he's just going to have to climb out on if he wants to pass his illustrious genes along. I'm sure it takes an exceptional amount of confidence to know what you want and go for it via a goofy riverdance reenactment, but that's what gets the play in the Galapagos.

Poll Shows U.S. views of Christians.

Findings from a 2004, nationwide poll conducted by Cornell University.

44% of Americans favor the restriction of at least some civil liberties of Christians.27% of respondents say that Christian-Americans should register where they live with the federal government.29% supported the idea of undercover agents infiltrating Christian civic and volunteer organizations to keep tabs on their activities and fund-raising.22% favor racial profiling (of white Christians) to identify potential terrorist threats.

Home and slightly underwhelmed, I must resort back to the American pastime of ranting, if only for a moment.

For holding the title of "land of convenience," the U.S. is falling alarmingly short through the eyes of a recent re-pat. Here are my top 3 picks for ways we are actually behind itty-bitty Gambia, which is no less ranked 155th out of 177 countries on the UN Human Development Index .

1. Public transport is not up to par in Western Mass, and most of non-urban USA. I don't care if it's a donkey cart or pulling myself across the river on a rickety ferry, I could get around in The Gambia. It was pretty bad at times, but I assure you it was better than here. I realize some strides have been made, and I'm going to try to support the bus system, but this culture of "auto entitlement" has definitely handicapped the availability of any real system of getting around. Maybe as we start to pay the same prices for fuel as the rest of the world it'll improve. (Gas is still about $2 cheaper per gallon than in the Gambia but horse-food is more reasonable.)

2. Pre-paid cellular service SUCKS here. (As does all cellular service) In The Gambia, I bought my credit in nearly any place, in any increment. Here you can't get pre-paid service without a background check, and the only convenient way to upload credit is to provide your credit card number and wade through annoying automated menus. In TG, I only paid for calling, not receiving calls or checking my voicemail. Why should that cost me money? Well if The Gambia is any indication, it doesn't have to. When my "Gamcel" or "Africel" account ran out of money, nothing dire happened, I just couldn't make calls until I uploaded it, which I did by entering in a number from a scratch card and pressing "send." Here you have to quickly pay into the account or you're slapped with a 35 dollar "reactivation fee." And to top it off, the advertisements in all the major "prepaid" services (At&t, Verizon, etc.) boast that they allow you to "keep" the credit you already paid for when you reload. (Wow, you don't steal from me, thanks.) It's such a crock I want to scream!

3. The last of my rants includes the annoying way that stores dangle credit cards in your face by offering a huge savings on your purchase. Nobody wants to allow you to just buy something and then move on. They always want your zipcode for marketing purposes, or to thrust a pair of discount socks in your face. How is The Gambia ahead of us with its decided lack of shoppertunities? I may not have the level of choice, but if I want to save money on a purchase, I just bargain. 80 you say? How about 30? No? 50? Great. If you don't want to sell it to me, there are 20 other people selling the same thing right next to you. I've just saved more than any Macy's card would, and won't receive any junk mail. And if I don't have cash on hand, I can just apply "bush credit" by saying "I will pay for this very soon," and making sure I do so, which in turn improves my rapport and credit rating. I never find out six months later that my movie gallery card got stolen and I owe 95 dollars for never returning White Chicks on DVD. It may be annoying to wrestle a vendor into the ground for the right price on a pair of black-market G-Unit jeans, but I believe it still edges out the frighteningly exploitative mall culture that leaves me feeling annoyed rather than satisfied. At least in The Gambia, I emerge from a shopping experience feeling like a gladiator.

I have some additional criteria for the UN to recalibrate their index including the following: How well do available commodities in the country reflect actual need? How well are actual needs met by available services? What level of frustration should be subtracted from the purported conveniences available? These might level the playing field a bit.

I've often heard it said that parents and friends of peace corps volunteers enjoy reading blogs that clarify and explain life in the country being served. I would also enjoy a blog of that nature, something that approaches the peace corps goal of creating understanding on the part of Americans of the countries being served. It would certainly cut back on the crazy questions, maybe build a bridge between one place and another. These days we certainly have the tools to make the world feel markedly smaller than the era where volunteers went months between letters and drove dusty stretches of road just to reach a phone. Now some volunteers are able to bring an understanding of their lives here to those at home through the blog and similar mediums on a consistent basis. Looking back at all my posts, I realize that mine has never been that type of blog. I open tiny windows and hope that someone feels like looking in, but explanations have never been my modus operandi. Part of me hopes you'll have the same feeling I did when leaf-boy jumped around the village, and I don't want to spoil the confusion with the facts. I'm not assuming that people do or don't understand, or won't be left with questions. After all, being home again following nearly 3 years living in Africa, questions are all I'm left with, so those are what I feel like sharing.

Actual Words:

For The Gambia our homeland,

we strive and work and pray,

that all may live in unity,

freedom and peace each day.

Let justice guide our actions,

towards the common good,

and join our diverse people

to prove man’s brotherhood.

We pledge our firm allegiance,

our promise, we renew,

Keep us, great God of nations,

to The Gambia, ever true.

I found a way to set the notebook on top of the pile so that the wind, page by page, pulls the paper up to catch on fire, like Lucifer speed-reading. It’s amazing what will burn, old bras, (not for any statement save the unreliability of today’s underwire) broken shoes, infested pasta. The neighbors are probably wondering what the acrid smoke that’s angrily pouring over my fence is all about. Or they don’t care, because they light their own fires with baggies or spent hair extensions. Either way, there is no other “away” for all this crap I never thought I’d accumulate by living in a hut.

As for the “low battery” graphic on my phone, I purposefully let the thing run down just to see the little Atari-quality picture pop up of a battery with what looks like some kind of fluid sloshing back and forth inside it impatiently. It’s a graphic that makes me nervous and happy at the same time. I wait for it, and it comes with a little sound, a sort of digital moan whining charge me.

The last Sibo moment is her sitting on a tiny stool in her underwear, brushing her teeth. The toothbrush seems disproportionately enormous, a prop from Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Children in America use child -sized toothbrushes, don't they? This is decidedly more badass, and when I gave it to her, she went around bragging to the other kids in the village and waving it in their faces. Now she’s approximating Animal from The Muppets with her brushing style, certainly not the product of those dental hygiene filmstrips from grade school, but, you know, up and down and all around. It’s not a science after all, and doing it politely is most likely less effective regardless.

This is the kind of stuff I try to distract myself with. Sarjo is able to stand up now and walk around by clinging to things. It's painfully cute to watch. She stood up and there was a spoon stuck to her butt and she didn't notice and everyone started laughing, and she just smiled, too young to feel ashamed. She says "icee" too, for the frozen juice she gets to suck on daily. It's an appropriate first word in this compound, where Betembo exhuasts every afternoon filling little baggies with juice she's mixed in a bucket, or washing out the brake fluid bottles she uses for wonjo drinks. I take my last icee, at least for a while. I've had to wrap up my life here in less than a week, and these are the things I want to make sure I do, see that Sibo keeps brushing, taste wonjo once more, burn the evidence of three years of living, squeeze it all into 2 bags. I could be, should be, taking responsibility for work obligations, making sure I take my leave responsibly, but I just want, selfishly perhaps, to top off my collection of little memories that matter instead. I want to know I haven't been dreaming this whole thing up.

Sibo is walking along the path from the Arabic school, her tablet tucked under her arm. Her skirt drags on the ground, keeping her slow and clumsy, but then she spots us sitting outside so she starts to run. She crashes through the corrugate gate, whips off her veil and jumps up onto the bantaba. The only teeth left at the moment are on the sides, and she knows this makes her look like a monster, so she grins and growls and grabs her sister who screams and smacks her. Sibo’s hair is clumped and unbraided and she’s feeling the urge to dance in a way that makes her head move side to side, opposite her eyes, which look at everything and nothing while she keeps a beat by smacking her tongue. Then she drops herself heavily onto my lap, pawing at my book with a surprising sense of entitlement, gets bored with it and looks to me for more inspiration, which I’m stunned I could possibly provide. I just laugh a little. “You came?” I ask.

“I’m back,” she says.

Bampha the crazy boy is heading to Soma. He’s got a rope tied around his waist that bunches up his oversized, grimy t-shirt, and this weird little bottle hanging around his neck. He looks like he might be auditioning for a part in Robinhood, Prince of Lower River Region. We see this boy everywhere. We don’t know where he lives, but everyone talks to him and everyone knows him. He has a charm that people revere, even as they make fun of him for being unwell. The last time I saw Bampha, someone had asked him to prove that he knew how to count. I found him walking alone on the road; he was up to 85. Today I’m with my host mother, she asks him why he’s going to Soma, he says to visit someone. She’s pleased because he says it like it’s official business. Far behind us is the truly crazy guy, the one who sleeps in an abandoned colonial building in a pile of glass and guano. Even he is the harmless kind of madman, but his zombie walk is disconcerting and people keep away except the occasional person who will light his cigarette for him. Two pretty girls are in the road, and they want to talk to Bampha, so he stops to flirt as we continue. I hear their little chatter but then Bampha shoots past us. “What’s wrong?” my mother asks him.

“A crazy man is coming!”

The girls are breathless from laughter, and even Bampha seems to get the joke, because he smiles the next time he looks back at the lumbering man behind us. But he keeps on running and I think I see him shrug as if to say, “Well, this is my role here. I don’t want to disappoint,” as he charges along towards Soma.

Get dragged to the police in the middle of the night by an old Guinean meat seller for failure to comply to his random post-prep price change. Decline eating the meat after the police help pay for it because it tastes like sweat. Forward your ‘love texts’ to a friend so that he may use them on the girl he’s courting. Wake up the caretaker who is sleeping under your desk and throw his cigarettes out the door (for added emphasis). Inform impertinent schoolboys that you left some pens and bottles ‘over that hill’ and watch them run in vain under the blazing sun. Notice bits of your garbage popping up as useful items throughout the village. Fear that people know the dish soap bottle they are drinking from was your castoff and are eyeing your backyard for more treasures. Allow your ceiling to disintegrate into termite dust, despite the loving paint job it received from your site-mates. Tally the appearances of a certain president’s image on local television in a given hour. (23) Enlist small children to run your errands with the coveted reward of liking them.Explain in Mandinka why you can never see the people on the laugh track while watching "Keeping up Appearances" on an old black and white.

I don't know what's better, the story of making the clip, or the story of trying to upload it to share. There's always more I'd like to share, and people are often asking for more concreteness in what I do share. I guess, like everything, I like to leave some inference up to you. But on the other hand, who doesn't want to see cute babies? So, here she is, Sarjo the wonder child, taking it like a pro.

It’s the night before the big holiday and Fatou invites me to help her break her fast with what tastes like last year’s meat. The evening before I'd made homemade minestrone with a close friend, now I have a subtle inclination to cry. Instead I poke this grey matter into my mouth and go from there. Let this go down, I will my gag reflex. I remember this feeling from childhood, the feeling of taking bad food personally, like when dad stir-fried poultry gizzards and livers, or that stew my sister referred to as “beef barfy,” and we’d assumed it was given to us to build character. Now I realize it’s what he liked to eat. I suddenly feel ashamed that Fatou has been up since sunrise without eating but she’s pushing the choice bits in my direction.

“Mariama, what does ‘don’t flat-tah me’ mean?” Hoja is following the Nigerian film Total Disgrace, frame by salacious frame. The leading lady flicks her bangled wrist playfully, “don’t flatter me,” she says. The boss’s son has fallen hard for this sexy secretary and she soon gets sacked for what seems like no good reason…Shockingly, the father himself has had relations with this vixen, both of them having (oddly) waited until his son married her before informing the boy. The movie continues to live up to its title, but I go to bed.

Grandma Kaddy wakes me in the middle of the night to help her break open a kola nut with my teeth. Kola nut = old lady pacifier. She wakes me up again later just to pray for me, cementing her unshakable resemblance to Yoda as her hands hover over me in the dark. It’s something about God granting me a husband and babies, the usual prayer for an aging bachelorette, but oddly timed. May the procreative force be with me I guess, thanks Gram.

Our holiday involves the customary ram slaughter, which the kids watch with indifference ora disconcerting touch of glee. Ebi proudly waves his bloody hands around for the camera. He has dunked them into the ram’s gushing body. I’m horrified but these kids are so comfortable with it all. As my friend Dan put it, “Why couldn’t Abraham have been asked to sacrifice some broccoli instead?”

Baby Sarjo, who has filled roughly the same niche as our Atari did when I was seven, has been wrapped up in special cloth. We literally wait for turns to play with her, and campaign for her first word like those obsessive parents prepping their kids for spelling bees. Say Baba Baabaa..My host mother doesn't recognize herself in the photograph I give her from last year’s feast. “Naa, that’s you,” Hoja assures her, and everyone else moves on but I catch her still puzzling over it later, touching the face on the picture. The expression “all dressed up and no place to go” must have been invented this day long ago. Heels sink into sand, babies have been enhanced with eyeliner,we all bring each other meat. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t trust a photograph if I were my host mother, it isn’t a medium she relies on for her memories. But for me, at this point, draped in iridescent fabric, clutching a boiled ram’s foot, I might not believe anything but.