Food (a blog from training)

I know someone who starts every meal with a prayer of appreciation for the hands that have touched her food before she did. Beginning at the farmer, the truck drivers and purchasers, the preparers and chefs, she makes her way through the chain of produce commerce before ending, neatly, with gratitude for the food in her hands. While I would never openly say it, except now because the internet is the great anonymizer, I found it rather silly. It was dozens of hands that had picked her food, miles that it had traveled, by the time it was something edible, it was incomprehensible to picture its beginning.

Yesterday I ate an egg while looking at a chicken. It was a well cooked egg, and I was extremely grateful for it. But I also know, looking at that chicken, that it was most likely her egg I was eating. Having that sensation is so rare in America (unless you are a farmer), but oddly gratifying. The egg had moved from the chicken to my host mother, from my host mother to my sandwich, and then to provide nourishment for my body.

Sometimes I go with my host brother to the fields where they grow sugarcane. He cuts it down and gives it to me. I’ve become adept at removing the green outside to chew the sweet center. I’ve drank sugar cane juices in America, but never sat and chewed on one that was grown feet from me.  I watched pineapple grow out of long bushes; I’d had no idea where they come from. Besides a vaguely formed idea of a pineapple tree, I assumed they appeared magically at the grocery store.

I don’t know the effect of becoming so separated from our food. Tellingly, our distance from our food is neither just physical or just emotional, but like all good conundrums, both. I feel a duality and connectedness I hadn’t known before; rain is both beautiful and life giving, the earth is both a stable landscape and a ceaseless provider, and my village is kind men and women, who have bent to the ground to provide the food that I receive.

Perhaps it is acceptable that we are so distanced from our food. I know nothing of the latrines the workers on farms in America use; I am unconcerned about whether they wash their hands. But the gratitude and connectedness that I am able to experience here is so different. Lately I’ve been sure, before meals, to bow my head and picture the path my food took to come to me, and be thankful.

The Small-Girl

I'm losing my ability to make light of ending. Death here is closer, like the sun, and just as indiscriminate and unforgiving. A girl with a face youthful and round grows a belly to match. I watched her expand from my safe distance. Last week I went to see her and found her belly sunken, and her eyes empty. They call you a small girl here until you've had your first baby. I wonder if you're still a small girl if your baby dies. I've never seen eyes grow so old so fast.
There are a thousand ways this place could kill. I won't let it. I promised my mom I'd come home. Being adventurous strikes me as the best way to survive. I'll climb trees, race down bush paths on bicycles and sit in the front of trotros. Make it a staring contest; I won't blink first, and my lorry always makes it home safely. Please come back, the letter from my nephew says. I will.
I want to relearn small children without heavy burdens. Sometimes I tire of babies with leathered feet and ancient eyes. Sometimes I think my soul is growing old. Sometimes I miss home.

Sometimes nothing feels more welcoming than riding the red dirt sand road home. Sometimes the sight of my village growing out of the bush is a symphony. Sometimes the only hard thing is being away from loved ones. Sometimes the hardest thing is falling desperately in love with sweat on my chest, dirt under my nails living know that one day, not even so far from now, I'll put down the mild mannered infant that sits in my arms like home and walk, knowingly, back down that red road out of this village forever. 

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.