Zeinab

Zeinab gets up in the morning while it’s still dark. Her mother is sleeping, young twins curved into her body. She is hungry; she eats what is left from last nights dinner, whatever sits in covered bowls. Zeinab sweeps the courtyard, careful not to wake her family. She piles the dust and trash into a large basin, and carries it across the road, jumping carefully to avoid gutters. She starts the fire, blowing on coals black as the night, and her mother stirs, half asleep, holding first one twin then another to her swollen breasts. Zeinab grabs her machete and leaves for the bush. She walks, barefoot, not noticing the unyielding ground below hardened callouses. She finds a small neem tree, leaves at the top reddened, slowly yellowing and turning green as the trunk thickens to roots. At the base she hits it with her machete, careful to hit the same space each time. The tree falls, and like a hunter skinning prey, she removes the branches until just the trunk is left. Finding a second tree is easy; neems litter the bush like trash. She piles the trunks on her head and returns home. The cool water makes her shiver, so she baths quickly; one twin is crying. One twin is always crying. Pulling on her school uniform, orange and brown, she plays with the baby until it coos with happiness. The other becomes jealous, begins to cry. Zeinabs mother sighs and ties her tightly to her back, letting the pressure of her body soothe the baby. Zeinab can hear the boy pounding a tin can in the distance, her call to get to school. She kisses the babies and dodges a swat from her mother. “Hurry up!” her mother yells, but Zeinab is already out the gate, tree trunks balanced on her head. “Run!” the teachers yell from their compound when they see her “fast! Yomyomo!” One hand to steady the trunks, trying not to trip on old shoes, she runs. She works hard, she learns fast. For four hours a day, Zeinab is a star. 

Fulani Rain

When the rains come, they don’t mess around. They are dust in skin and goats hiding from the wind. At the Fulani house, they’re preparing for the end of the world. The women hide under their tin roof, peeking out and finding excuses to brave the water, my smile mirrored in a dozen faces. The only one who truly hides is the man made real only by the frail bones holding on his loose clothing; otherwise he would slip from this world, leaving only silence where there had been the fluttering of the heavy pages of his Koran.

I knew all I had to do was get here. I knew once I got here I’d be welcomed. I knew they’d give me a seat out of the storm, an umbrella, nervous reverence, undeserved. I could be in any century. Should the world cease tomorrow and leave just this small village, they may only notice the new quiet of market. 

Ramadan

The teachers are playing football, running and kicking their new red and white ball. They haven’t eaten since four in the morning, have refused water; have even refused to swallow their own saliva, sending streams of liquid between parched lips. It’s Ramadan, and all but the smallest children spend the sunlit hours abstaining.

Jeff observed Ramadan. He was a college football player, and would pride himself on returning to his playing weight. He could still work, and well, running after angry kids despite occasionally going pale with the effort. It’s good to remember that all over the world, this community is tied into a greater community of Muslims fasting for their faith.

Still, children with arms thin as sticks and hanging from shirts that are always too big, regardless the size, they make me pause, just a little. So, when an old mother tells me she doesn’t fast because she is breastfeeding, well, I could kiss her.

I walk a fine line. Being an unmarried lesbian without a recognizable faith, a lot of what I do is smoothing out my rough edges with small white lies, which have the cumbersome habit of growing and turning grey.

Choosing not to fast is something I know I have to do, both for my physical and mental health. Explaining that not drinking water will make me sick lengthens the distance between me and the community, which wasn’t initially small.

Telling nursing mothers and small children its ok to eat may have consequences. Maybe next year. Maybe after they stop asking why I have no photos of my husband. Maybe when I’ve established praying in the mosque as a nice gesture, and not a sign of coming conversion.

The men on the field have muscles lit with sweat in the dripping sun. Their veins protrude, their lips are dry, but I hear no complaining; even children have lined up to chase the ball, kicking shoes from hard feet. There are cries of “mani! Mani!” on the field, each player vying for the ball, with thrilled laughter at each success and rambunctiousness and each missed kick. The women are pounding corn, cooking the meal they will end their fast on, and gossiping sweetly from house to house over short walls.

Rain is moving in quickly from the south. If I look left, the sky is an endless sweltering blue, but to the right are thunder clouds, dark as night with rain. The wind kicks up, pressing fear and excitement into my pores, drying the sweat I’ve spent the day accruing. Tonight I don’t want to sleep. I want to sit up while the teachers cook and eat the meal they’ve planned all day, and let the whole world melt away in a storm, rebirth disguised as annihilation.

Shia

I am just getting used to the village life. I’ve learned to keep my cell phone off, drew each hut in the village so I know the layout, and spend hours a day walking from hut to hut, bent at the waist like a movie maitre’d, greeting. From what I’ve seen, there is one English speaker. Her name is Karima, the same as the word for reading. Her hair is cut short for school, covered in what seems to be a winter scarf, transplanted from some chilly elsewhere. She ignores the boys who court her, telling me she must finish school before she marries. She adds that she hopes she gets an educated man so he won’t beat her. She is from bustling Tamale, and says she hates the village. She only comes back to visit Zeinab, her closest friend. When Zeinab tells me she will be a nurse, Karima nods so quickly her veil falls to the side “me too, I will be a nurse” she says. Zeinab seems pleased. She tells me that the Fulani, a nomadic tribe currently living outside of Tunaayili, have had a baby. We decide to visit. Fulani children tend to have bright eyes, set in beautiful triangular faces. They are lighter than their dagomba neighbors, with hair that curls long. Outside of the village sits a Baobab tree, flanked on all sides by neem trees. It seems to touch the sky, and the neems are so thick that the ground is always in shadow. It hums like a living being. I’m drawn, but Karima stops me. “Our ancestors live in that tree” She says. “The humming?” I ask “Shia” she says softly, like a prayer, “bees.” As drawn as I am to the brilliant baobab, I never feel quite right crossing the trunks of the neem trees that protect its roots. But I walk just on the other side, letting the hum pull me in as far as I dare. 

American letters and Dagomba charm

Inside the day seems too hot, sun baked like concrete courtyard. Outside is cool and undemanding. Azara and Drissa come over for alphabet lessons. Drissa wasn’t initially included, but his big love-me eyes and boney elbows tug my heart, and so I pass him a pen. He is behind his sister already. He can sing the alphabet-he loves the tune and I’ve caught him humming it while milking cows. But he can’t write the letters like she can, pen moving, fearlessly crooked Cs sweeping across her page; the lines are ignored. I let them. I remember the lines once feeling confining. He combines the letters he remembers, forming something like a complicated 8. I hold his small hand and trace, over and over, the shapes that I want to give him, the power of language I want him to feel. When I think of the letters left to teach them I am overwhelmed. I want nothing more than to give up. But when I trace an F on Azara’s hand, a reminder of the letter for after I’ve left, she impatiently takes the pen and, flawlessly, quickly, she draws it on the paper. Then I know I can’t stop yet. I grab her shoulders, squeal and babble pride at her, all Dagbani and American ebullience, and she smiles at me shyly, American letters and Dagomba charm.

Moto

Sometimes the sky seems too big, and sometimes a football pitch seems useless, like when there’s no ball, or shoes. Today I ran the pitch, marveling at the clouds rolling in and out like the high packed lorries on the main road. At some point, I don’t know when, we became motorbikes, bumping and vrooming and beeping into one another: a tall pale seliminga among small dark dagombas. At some point, I don’t know when, it stopped seeming so foreign here. Maybe it was when I gleefully held two watermelons like breasts in market and dagomba women smirked at batted my hands down. Perhaps when my first sentence became, not a greeting, but rather a request to eat the children, making yum yum noises as I tickle sweet soft bellies. People are the same everywhere, just as hope is, or hatred, or love. I love this place like fighting, with a ferocity borne of knowing I’ll leave, one day. Long after I stop pretending I came here to save them realize it was I that was saved. 

Simpa

He’s a normal guy in the village, a farmer. Usually he is dirty, covered in old clothes marred by his father’s farms dirt. But when the village dances a boisterous simpa, glowing yellow under the solar powered light in a village untouched by electricity, he is a hero. The children pull him from his home, ten children tugging each of his fingers, more pulling his sweat and dirt stained pants while he laughs and complies. Set up under the yellow light, modernity barely touching, glowing the crowns of their heads a halo hue, the drums begin centuries old rhythms. Light heartbeats in the night. “Salaam Salaam” he sings, and the children, in voices sweet with innocence reply “Salaam Alaikum”

Seliminga

When I first see my home, I am relieved, then immediately disappointed. Driving north, I watched the land become sparse, the manic rainforest greens of the south becoming subdued yellows in the dry north. The houses change, too. From concrete blocks with tin roofs come structures so basic the ground itself may have grown them. Round huts, orange red as the dirt, set low in to the ground and then topped with intricately woven thatch. It’s the Africa of magazines, of safaris and elephants, though I’m told that any big game has been hunted out of the open spaces.

My home is south Ghanaian excellence, out of place in the north; a reflective tin roof, concrete walls (four, not circular) and windows bearing smudged glass. I’ve seen rougher apartments in Denver. My home has a bathroom, complete with porcelain fixtures, and I stand in it, turning the faucet on and off in awe; running water.

My home is the only square one in my village, the only one made with concrete and not clay, the only one with doors that face east and west, instead of a careful north and south, to discourage the sun. It is also the only one to contain a seliminga, a white person. It’s the only one whose walls protect not just a person but a laptop, an iphone. It is the only one where shea butter is kept fresh in a Maxwell house coffee tin, the only one where a hand-thrown pot contains pens and stickers I initially bought to give as gifts, but now can’t bring myself to lose their hopefully bright colors, their American efficiency.

I recall my uncle scoffing at people who requested a village without electricity, in order to have a real peace corps experience. If you are in the Peace Corps, he’d said, then it’s the real experience.

Remembering that tempers my disappointment. I’d hoped to blend, I think, forgetting that I wear my differences on every inch of my skin. I think my community forgets, too. When people excitedly shout “Seliminga!” I am not the only one to look around, confused, to see who they’re talking about. “O ka seliminga” I’ve heard them explain “O nyela dagbang paga” She’s not a seliminga, she’s a dagoma woman. They paint my face with tribal markings, long liquid eyeliner lines down my cheeks, dots between my eyes. They ask to trade my American pants for their ankle length cloths. I can dress up and pretend, will speak the language and curse the children, because at night I come home to my four walls, my window and curtains, and watch the sun set while I hug my differences close.

The Baobab

There’s a tree, a powerful baobab. It’s over one hill next to the village. It is far enough away that you can pretend you are alone, but if you close your eyes and listen you can still hear the soft village noises; corn winnowed into open calabashes, the mimicked mechanical sounds of children playing motorbike and laughter, always laughter.

The bark is warmed by the sun, and soft, and touching it you can almost feel it breathing. You spend stolen moments there, pressed against it and feeling like a hug. One day, you find white cloth wrapped around the trunk, midway between two branches. Fearing that it’s marked for removal, you go to the community. You tell them that they cannot cut down the tree. They listen politely as you explain desertification, fragile eco system, any half remembered science to justify your concern.

A woman waits until you have finished and then places a hand gently on your arm. “The tree is a woman, and every night she comes out to dance. It’s getting cold; we've given her cloth to keep her warm.”

That night you dream of a woman, old and scarred and wrapped in a white cloth. In movements agile for her age she is dancing, eyes closed like she doesn't care who is watching, and smiling.