Intergration My Ass

The central principle of the Peace Corps doctrine, our modus operandi of sorts, is 'cultural integration' - the idea that to institute lasting, sustainable (they frigging love that word) development, we have to integrate ourselves into the local communities in which we live so as to be more than your run-of-the-mill development worker - we have to be one with the community - we have to become one of those who we serve. And believe me, granola women line up around the corner for this tripe. It doesn't matter whether I believe in it, or even whether it works, the first thing I'm doing when I get back to the states is buying an industrial sized box of extra-large condoms (yeah, thats right) and flying straight to Seattle to hang out at vegan coffee shops -

"why, is that a cruelty-free fair-trade organic quoinoa-cocoa and wheat germ mochachino you have there? Well here are some pictures of me with African children. Well, yes, Destini with an 'i', I think we would make beautiful offspring."

Easy as shooting baby seals in a cage.

However, the truth of the matter is that I could live here for 1000 years wearing nothing but pagne while sucking down sodabi every morning between brisk bouts of beating my wife for not wanting to bear my 12th child and going to see the local voodoo wizard to inflict my enemies with AIDS, but I'll still just be the Yovo. How can I be so sure? Lets say the truth comes from the mouths of babes -

The true face of terror

Children will always be terrified of me here. Like, petrified-from-fear-can't-even-scream sort of terrified. Parents can't get enough of this - they actually carry their terrified infants to me just to watch them freak out. This is always a great reminder of how knee-deep in the community I am here.

Salone for the Holidays

Peace Corps Sierra Leone entered the country in 1962 and left with the onset of war in 1994. It has been 15 years since the last volunteer was active in the country and so it goes without saying that when the first person in the airport after my arrival asked me without provocation "Are you Peace Corps?" I was close to shocked. When the second person I ran into - the lady checking luggage for contraband asked the same question the moment she saw me, I began to feel like I was in the middle of a pre-meditated gag. But, no, I was to run into this same question time and time again during my two weeks in Salone and it never lost its shock-value. My first day in Freetown I ran into a 60 year old woman who wanted to show me her certificates from all of the "Peace and Reconciliation" trainings she had been to that had been put together by PC volunteers. She still had the flimsy paper certificates framed and hanging after 20 years. Still not making this up.

The Cotton Tree, Downtown Freetown. The building to the left of the tree was the PC office and the embassy many years ago.

I had just left the border of nowhere and was heading directly to the middle when we ran across a police checkpoint (just a man at a shack with a rope pulled across the road). They were being quite exacting, searching bags and checking IDs of the 2 other motos stopped with us. The cop approached me and, I swear on my mother's life this is no exagerration, he asked me 'are you Peace Corps?', I of course said yes, and he slapped me on the back and then gave me a huge smile and let me go on without as much as glancing at my papers.

I arrived at Shenge (go on, try to find it on a map) after another tortuous hour on a suicidal moto-driver's back seat down what appeared to be a dried stream-bed (that's called a road here).

At least I went in dry season

I had the number of a Reverend in Shenge, given to me by the head of the Moto station in border-of-nowhere Moyamba. When Reverend Moses (and come on, really what else should he be named?) asked what I did, I meekly posited 'Peace Corps', fearing a kiss on the lips or something, but all they did was give me the old PC house that the previous 15 or so volunteers lived at when they were posted there (honest, had no clue) and then asked me to beg PC Admin to put another volunteer there. Everyone in this village spoke beautiful english because they were all taught by American PC vols. And now that they were grown adults, their children spoke great english. I'll tell you, I've just avoided asking the question 'do we do any good here' as PC, because A) I didnt think the answer would justify our existence and B) I was having too much fun to care. But now, after setting foot in a country that hasn't seen us in over a decade and seeing the actual effect that we've had, I feel quite good.

I flew to Sierra alone, didn't know a soul or anything about the lay of the land and had the most fortuitous, serendipidous, pleasant vacation I've ever taken - Peace Corps is coming back to SL in June and I was able to meet up with the acting Admin officer who is putting the program together. He took me out for lunch and then handed me a key - it was the key to the country director's 3bdrm apartment overlooking greater freetown - since the country director has yet to arrive, the AO thought it would be nice to let me stay there - big screens, leather couches, a sauna - add to that the miles and miles of deserted beaches and accomodating Saloneans who wanted nothing more than for me to understand that their country was peaceful and that they love visitors, and I can assure you that I was living it up over the holidays - I hope everyone out there had just as great a time.

*I had to take all the photos from the net because my camera went walk-around with someone else as I was flying back from Sierra Leone - me and cameras aren't having much luck lately --

I Spy Something Red

I woke up this morning with a start - the heavy breathing, instantly cognizant type of start where you aren't going back to sleep for a long time, if ever, and something ridiculous is going on in your head. I ate Indian food last night. I didn't drink. I swam in the pool all day and was exhausted (living in paradise is taxing). Nothing done to keep me awake. But, in any case, I woke up thinking about minibottles. As a quick reminder, in 2005 SC was the last state in the nation to legalize 'free-pour' (SC is the only state in the nation that needs a technical term for pouring alcohol from a bottle - wow) - eschewing the airplane mini-bottles for the accepted set-up found in all 49 other states and a few territories.

A Bartender's worst nightmare

Now, I'm sure any of you from outside the Palmetto State are thinking this is a no-brainer, right? Well, actually, no, because you see, by changing the law that forced restaurants to serve alcohol in mini-bottles, you were hitting someone in the wallet - namely the makers of the bottles themselves. So, in true political fashion, the manufacturers (who didn't even live in the state) hired a couple of lobbyists who fought like mad to keep mini-bottles in. Their argument? That if we changed to free-pour, someone was going to get a weaker drink. Seriously, that was it. And you know what? It almost worked.

You see, mini-bottles have a regulated 1.7 ounces of alcohol per bottle. No fibbing possible. So, as the lobbyists logic goes, if, on the free-pour system and bartender likes you, you'll get more, if not, then less. This was their tactic. Scare the locals into paralysis on the logic that sometime, somewhere, someone was going to get an unfair deal. They, of course, never mentioned the fact that drink costs would drop, the huge reduction in waste, or the benefit to the bars and restaurants that would result due to the tax structure. Nor did anyone bring to mind the impossiblity of making, say, a Long Island Ice Tea with mini bottles - $15 dollars for a drink in rural South Carolina? Yeah, that pleased a lot of folks. I'm glad to report that today we drink out of big bottles like big boys and girls.

Not Scary

So, why exactly was I thinking about mini-bottles before dawn? Because it came to me that mini bottles are like privatized healthcare. I see a strong resemblance between the mini-bottle lobbyists and private insurance lobbyists - shove enough fear down the everyman's throat - spit enough hellfire and brimstone to the most demoralized American demographic, and there might be a shot at keeping things the way they are. And whats the #1 sure-fire way to make any mother-loving, hard-working American recoil in disgust? THE RED SCARE.

Hey, that looks like fun...

Now listen, I'm not much of a polictically charged person. I like low taxes and grilling on weekends like any other guy. But I am positive that healthcare can be done better in the states. I don't have any proof - I'm not an expert and I don't have an over-estimated sense of righteousness that comes from watching 24 hour news stations. I can't regurgitate facts or percentages. I just, in the most American of stereotypes, feel it. I don't trust a company whose only way of making money is either A) Raising Premiums or B) Denying Claims. And I sure as hell don't trust people whose best argument is based on fearmongering and paranoia. Listen to Matt, here, everyone - NO ONE on Capitol Hill has their thumb on a direct line to God or Allah, or the All-Being, or the Borg. No one is getting assimilated. They all are just as clueless as us, maybe with just one large difference - their health-care is free.

Not Real

But either way, I'm not worried - I've got my long-term plan figured out. When I get so old that I become a burden, I'll just kill somebody. At least then I'll get nationalized round-the-clock care with free health benefits. I guess only criminals deserve the dirty commie-run free health care.

Motorcycle Diaries

I can't say that it hurt all that much. In fact, pain hasn't really been a factor in all of this. It's been more time and inconvenience, and above all, money. The sheer amount of money that has been spent on me in the past few weeks is (at least to me, who's perspective is admittedly a bit skewed) staggering. In short, crossing the street in front of my quartier a week or so ago, a motorcycle hit me and sent me on an all expenses paid vacation to South Africa. I didn't even see him coming. Just one minute I was standing, and the next minute I wasn't. The law of mass tonnage in action, me on the receiving end. I got some pretty nice gashes and chipped my left tibia. While I made out lucky with a pretty minor set of wounds, PC was worried about a bone infection (which I didn't even know could happen), so a few days later I was in a hired car going straight to the airport in Accra. I was flown first class because, as I was told, I needed "room for my leg" and spent 8 hours gorging on wine and caviar (not an exaggeration - the ticket cost over $4000USD, you'd better believe I abused those stewardesses) (and, hey, since you're here, fun fact - 'stewardesses' is the longest word in English that you type solely with the left hand).

Yeah, well, you should see the other guy. Yes, that's a bath robe.

Fast forward a week later and I'm in the lap of luxury. In exchange for a couple hours of surgery I've got hot showers, tea and sherry in my room, A/C, personal drivers, heaps and heaps of bacon for breakfast, $20/day per diem (!!! more than double what I make in Togo), malls, restaurants, movie theaters, and great wine. I'm here with a few other invalids from across Africa and we are having a blast.

Pretoria, The City of Jacarandas. Known in PC circles as Paradise.

Pretoria is, seriously, as pretty as these photos (which I stole from the net.. the doc here dropped my camera on the first day and broke it. He doesn't know that, but what am I supposed to say - "thanks for saving my leg and all, but really, you're gonna need to replace that"?). There are a few euro-centric idiosycracies I've run into - driving on the other (read: wrong) side of the road, silly English (a local bakery was promoting "ass. butter danishes" the other day. Taxis here have signs that read "please don't bang the door". You know it's funny!), and hardly concealed racism. I'm going to go out on a tiny limb here and say this is probably the most racist place I've ever spent any time in. And I'm from Laurens, folks - that's saying a lot. The Boers (read: Whitey) all speak Afrikaans, which I've heard called a child's version of dutch, it's degrees of separation consisting of dropping all gender, most conjugations, using ridiculous vocabulary (foregoing all of the wonderfully colorful dutch cuss words), sounding even more disgusting than Dutch when spoken, and being even easier to make fun of than Flemish, Dutch's other bastard relative.

But, even being back in the 1st world gets old after a while. There's only so much you can eat, so many movies you can watch, only so low that the A/C can go before you get cold and want to go outside. So, it's been fun and hopefully I'll be back in Togo by Monday. I've got a bit of work and healing to do before I head out to Sierra Leone on the 14th :) So don't feel sorry for me, I've been recommending that all of my friends go play in traffic - the righteous scars I'll have are only the tip of the perk-iceberg.

English 101

During last week's visa-trip to Accra, a small bit of bile I had been carrying around in my inner monologue of hatred since I had arrived here was added to in copious amounts and is now, not without a certain relief, overflowing onto these only-so-recently angel white pages. The cible of my ire today is what seems so charming and provincial to the first time visitor to post-colonized West Africa – the version of language you hear here. In case you missed your pre-requisite 2 seconds of African history, it goes a little something like this – many years before the invention of olympic curling and dance-offs, the only way for a country to flex nuts was a good old-fashioned subjugation – thusly, bored white people (namely Brits and Frenchies*) banged their heads together and decided to go slaughter some folks who had the one thing they still lacked - melanin.

*but then, lets not forget the Germans, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, or the bastard-whipping-boy-of-Europe, The Belgians, who turned out to be the most sadistic fuckers on the continent. With their entire national identity based on chocolate, waffles, and regularly servicing both France and Holland orally, they instantly took a shine to the idea of being at the top of the food chain, even if only in asshole-of-the-asshole-of-the-world, The African Congo. They added an almost zealous fervor to their slaughtering and slave-herding that their big brothers in Europe never seemed to grasp.

Seriously, Belgium, where's the bad?

While theories differ on what drove lesser European nations to colonize the dark continent, it is commonly accepted that the English were trying to escape from their cuisine, while the French were trying to escape the French (“for God so loved the world, he created France. To prove his sense of humour, he created the French.”). When asked for comment on exactly why England was laying claim to vast swaths of the African coastline through bloody and dictatorial means, The King of England went on record by saying, “'cause hey, fuck 'em.” Fast-forward a few hundred years and a few imaginary lines drawn on a map irrespective of language, tribe or religion, and you have the celebrity-philanthropist-wet-dream-cluster-fuck that is today West Africa. And, just to make sure the ungrateful natives wouldn't forget who descended upon them like the hand of god and laid the five-finger bitch slap of colonization across their broad, black asses, the whites left them with decent roads, inferiority complexes and western languages. Europe: 1 Africa: 0.

That catches us up to just about last week, where my hatred for an as-till-now innocuous word boiled over and made me go get drunk. This word, one of my new scapegoats for all of my problems here is, drumroll please, – Somehow. Now, I know you were expecting something much more obvious, but this is the word that makes me grit my teeth every time I hear it. Understand that I'm not a linguist or a lexicographer or even a very good talker of the English language, so I can't exactly tell you how this word is used incorrectly, it's simply that every time I hear it, I know it shouldn't be used that way. Par exemple –

Q: So, I guess you're pretty excited about leaving for your big trip tonight, yeah?
A: (After considerable pause for epic effect) Yes, somehow.

Is this exactly wrong? Couldn't say. Here's another.

Q: Well, you don't speak English perfectly, but you do understand a bit, right?
A: (Again, pensive pause) Somehow.

And its not just the butchery of the word, its the pronounciation. It sounds like some type of Indian greeting with heavy accent on the end – sum-HOW.

While in Ghana, I noticed that ALL the volunteers there have picked up this most annoying of traits – to wit, a text I received from a friend who was late -

Hey, I'm sorry it's taken so long, we just left. I'm still coming, somehow.

...WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?????? (also, that's what she said)

Another annoying habit everyone does here (in French and English) is using the catch-all response, too much. Did you enjoy the party? Too much! Did you like the food? Too much! This can be used in an active sense as well – I like it too much! In French, this becomes the highly abused phrase trop meme – meaning something like 'too much, even' or to express a general 'too muchedness'. I'm not 100% if this is common, proper French, but my bullshit-o-meter doesn't believe it is, so just to be sure I NEVER say it. The word too here loses its connotation signifying an over-abundance and gets denigrated to doing the job that countless number of adjectives could take care of – Is he a good person? Oh, he's too good. How was the trip? Too fun! Would you like to shove a screwdriver through your temples now? Too much!

And one more point of contrition for me here – small. Meaning 'a little bit'. I have to go out small, I'll be right back. I want to play your guitar small. Can you give me small time, I have to make a call. Listen to me well, present and future travelers of Anglophone West Africa - if you come here and say small instead of 'a little bit', it doesn't make you integrated, it just makes you an asshole. You ever known someone who said “ciao” instead of bye or keeps their phone on military time in America just to show they've been to another country and 'oops, I still haven't gotten used to the American system after my trip'? Yeah, you're like that guy – go fall on something sharp.

Well that's it for me today. I gotta tell you, I think I've drained my hate for the day and I feel better....somehow.

Visas from Sierra Leone

ETA: December 2009

Just got back from 3 days in Accra and I am now convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Togo is in all actuality, quite a shit hole. Don't get offended, I still love my little Togo like an abusive father, and the folks here are as nice as they know to be, but the difference just 3 hours away is staggering. What gave me this epiphany? Salsa dancing. I went salsa dancing. True-to-life Latin Quarter salsa dancing. On a Wednesday night. Actually there is salsa dancing somewhere in the city every night of the week, I just happened across one of the best nights to go. Huddled around a glittering deepwater pool in a classy hotel atrium, we all danced to incredible music and ate great food until midnight. The best part was the fact that it was damn near 100% Ghanaian. The white people were the ones who didn't know what the fuck they were doing - and the locals were GOOD. Good like we think of homemade vanilla ice cream on a summer day and sex on a Sunday afternoon. I have been to quite a few salsa clubs in Latin America and these guys were WORLD CLASS. I went expecting something interesting at best, and ended up being completely shocked. I couldn't help but stand there, enthralled, the ebullient smile of a smitten teenager stuck to my face the entire night. Pictures of this exist, but not on my camera - I'll get them soon and put them up, because I really feel like even you in comfy yovo-land would be impressed.

So, it was then I conceded that, yes, Ghana wins. There is a tangible difference in the air when you are in Ghana - you read headlines in one of the 10 different daily newspapers (Togo has 2, who choose their words carefully) of rapists tried and convicted beside restaurant reviews. Sure, the city is ugly as hell and almost as hot, but Ghanaians are proud of their country and think in a worldly fasion, and I can't help but see it through rose-colored shades. I mean, come on, they actually speak a proper language there - here, look at this handy visual aid -

Exhibit A: Countries where French is useful

Exhibit B: Countries where English is useful - HUZZAH!

In other news, work is going well, with my projects starting to wind down - Prosper, my zoo guy is opening a bakery in Kpalime and a Mushroom farm in Lome, and Charles is hawking gadgets across Lome like a true hustler. People are making money, and I feel a bit accomplished. So, all is well there.

This is a normal work-day for Prosper.

After the new year, I'll pretty much be out of here, with only 4 months before our COS (close of service) conference and then just a few after that before I get lost in some other forgotten corner of the globe. Yippee. Heres a random photo to send you home with.

Claude, my favorite kid on my street

Exclusivity

Welcome to the club, bitches

So, yes, I did finally bend to the will of the mighty US Government. Turns out, I'm a coward. So now every time you need your fix of cynicism you're going to have to log in. Cry me a river. This was, logically, simply the next step in my dominance of the blog-o-sphere, where, just as any great restauranteur will tell you, the more popular you get, the more exclusive you become. If you are reading this, you're a part of the club. You're in. You get it. You understand what the hell I mean when I italicize haphazardly.

Exclusivity brings with it a great advantage. I can now say whatever the hell I want. Watch this - to prove my point, my favorite joke--

Q: What's the difference between your mom and a typewriter?
A: Your mom's a whore.

ZING!

Now, I will be posting some work progress here in a few days, but I want to hold off until I gather some really nice photos for everyone, so in lieu of that, I would like to address something that has been brought to my attention recently and ask everyone in the states to kindly SIT THE FUCK DOWN! What the hell is going on over there? I really try to avoid news over here, but Jesus, its made to sound like the US is ripping itself apart - let me tell you, that time you are alluding to where everything was better never existed, no one has any idea what they are talking about, no president gets it right all the time, and you are all still the fattest, richest, most privileged people on the planet! Yes, Obama won the Nobel prize, no, the world is not ending, yes, I do have to buy my homologue a steak dinner now because I didn't believe him when he told me and I made a stupid bet. Now would everyone please just go open a bottle of wine, jump into the sheets with someone nice and calm the fuck down? I swear, I leave you guys for a year or so and it all goes to shit...

So in that vein, here's to a new, unleashed Determined to Tan - now with more fucks per sentence (fps) than any other reputable news source on the planet.