up high

*written on August 16th, but for whatever hesitancies that pass themselves off as justifications for delay, it wasn't posted. now, it is.

I’ve been walking around lately feeling like hot stretched glass, hoping for a breath of air to mold me fast. There is so much happening each and every day, in each and every way, and I feel myself getting quiet because of it. Does that make any sense? It feels sometimes like I’m sinking back into a corner because the only things left with any ability to handle the overwhelming absorption are my eyes.

I’m feeling uptight, and it isn’t right, because so much of what surrounds me is the essence of loosey goosey and free nights.

Our friend Anna made a brilliant and casual observation the other day: it is strange to be in a place without clouds, because we’re so used to relying on them to remind us the earth is moving and time is moving and life is moving. What do I look to now? Up above is just a blue, blank, endless expanse – how do I know that the days pass by at all? Do I count the number of red peppers that enter and disappear from my refrigerator? The number of cockroach babies that are born? The number of times I say ‘Dumela?’

I forget sometimes how much I crave a little order, a little pattern. The same breakfast every morning would suit me fine – just to remind me that although I can’t pat the doumbek, I can make some rhythm. This inaugural launch of classes has left my mind feeling a little helter-skelter, and I can’t hold onto minutes let alone hours. Wasn’t I just craving some excitement though? The winter was winding down and all I could think of was the New and the Good. It is funny how contradictory my subconscious can be.

Pots and Pans: I can honestly say that my newly forged relationship with my pots and pans and cutlery and plates and cups, is nothing short of sacred. Never before in my life have I truly valued such non-toy, non-gadget, non-novelty possessions. They are plain. They are not non-stick. They burn and they gunk and they chip. However, they allow me to function independently here, and that seems a miracle. Each morning, as I put a pot of water up to boil (to which will later be added the choke-inducing granules of coffee/chickory instant Ricoffy) I am flushed with a funny “grown-up” feeling, like I’m in fifth-grade again, playing mommy, puttering around and humming tunes. I turn twenty-one in about two months, so this make-believe seems a bit outdated, but I can’t help feeling the same things anyways.

Which brings me to the larger picture: I still can’t believe I’m here. Nothing and everything about my presence seems to link to my past, and I can’t seem to blend the images of childhood with what surrounds me now. If the world’s most aggressively cheek-pinching grandmother were to extend a long arm here, snabbing a thick piece of arm flesh betwixt her crushing fingers, I don’t think that even that reality check would snap me out of this stupor of incredulity. And it’s not just about the distance – it’s who I’m with and what I’m doing and how my days roll by. It’s the jam sessions and hospice visits and children’s names engraved in my mind. It’s the moon-like dam and travel plans and the impossible feel of a steady hand and sometimes I worry that on the far-off plane ride back home, I still won’t be able to tell you if it all really happened.

But that’s okay – what’s left in the imagination is better that way.

Keabetswe: Last Saturday, around one pm, Daniel, Seb, Pat, and I hopped into a cab driven by a man named Abdullah, and sped off out of GC. We were headed to Kumakwane, a village outside of Gabs, where a young man named Keabetswe lives. Keabetswe, whose age can’t be far off from my twenty years, has spent his entire life prostrate on a thinly padded mattress. From birth, his back has been frozen into curves and twists that render him paralyzed, and he can’t speak. Pat had met him earlier through his social work (and general life mission of making music and spreading a thick sweet jam of love) and learned from his family that he too, loves music. Thus, the impetus for our journey.

Scrunched into the back seat between Dan and Seb, a warm breeze blowing through the cracked windows, sent down from up in the strangely clear skies, I felt an elusive sense of calm. The route we took passed through Mogoditshane, and as I watched the normal turn to Kamogelo flick by, I marveled a little bit on this new trespass into uncharted territory (or course, this is a personal map of discoveries and demarcations). It is this strange feeling I keep having – as if my physicality is larger than myself, as if some part of me extends above Gabs, a little hovering presence over the spaces and places I’ve touched, and I can feel this air just pop when I hit a new section. I guess I could pinpoint it as the hyper-awareness of presence and absence, but I’ve talked about that already. What it really comes down to is this getting-to-know-you business of me and the city, because I can’t very well ask it out for coffee.

When we reached Kumakwane, the trip didn’t quite end. Nikola, a german woman who works with the Flying Mission, had given Pat directions to Keabetswe’s house. However, Kumakwane, like many other towns, is a place without road signs. The dirt roads and turns surround everything, and what looks like a perfectly proper route may just trail off into bush. For example, a landmark in the handwritten indications was “the new house with no roof,” and let me tell you, there are plenty of uncapped abodes.

After about forty-five minutes of Pat and Abdullah stopping locals to ask for directions (and also a few strange character encounters), we finally found a kind woman who hopped in the car and directed us there. She disappeared just as quickly as she arrived, and we were left at the stick fenced entrance to Keabetswe’s family’s compound. A woman greeted us in Setswana (the only language she spoke) and quickly began to move some plastic chairs into a dim, cool hut where Keabetswe lay.

We entered the structure and moved quietly around his form, his large eyes gazing up at us, his jaw hanging open in a huge, earth encompassing smile. I found it a little disconcerting at first to interact with someone who couldn’t respond, but I quickly reminded myself that there are many people in this world that I can’t speak with for various reasons. Seb and Pat pulled out their instruments, and as Pat tuned up, small children began to trickle into the hut. They stationed themselves, quietly, along the far wall, and sat with legs pulled up in silence. Their smiles were shy, and every now and then a new boy or girl would peek his or her head through the doorway, to be beckoned in by another little one. As the music began to play, I had to remind myself to breathe. Everything felt so still and constant and present, and the peace on Seb and Pat’s faces only reinforced it. They played a medley of Pat’s pieces (the soundtrack to our past few weeks) and the familiar tunes were once again infused with more memories and meanings. The look of pure enjoyment on Keabetswe’s face, delicious, delectable savouring of the moment and the sound – it was heart breaking and heart mending and heart making. If a plant seed cracks and new life is born with every true expression of happiness, then a field in this arid land turned green that afternoon.

keabetswe and family

daniel, pat, and seb - making their music

Pat and Seb played for about an hour, occasionally joined by Daniel on his harmonica, and it was brilliant. The children warmed up a little bit after I showed them my camera, and let them play around with picture taking (a sure fire trick for giggle inducing that I learned at Kamogelo,) and they eventually began to dance and clap. I tried playing hand games with two little girls, and we ended up with a kind of rhythmic musical patty-cake.


By the time we left, I felt both out of breath and full of it, and it was hard to tear away from the kids. Everyone thanked everyone with soft movements and low tones, and it was a humble bunch that piled back into Abdullah’s waiting car.


To do this event (and all to come) better justice, I highly recommend that you visit Daniel and Seb’s blogs (incredible, both.) They, with their own magical minds, capture much more than I could hope to present.

Daniel’s: http://reportswana.blogspot.com
Seb’s: http://sebswana.blogspot.com

Seb, Daniel and I just returned from an early afternoon trip to the Gaborone Sun, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything more surreal here. A ten minute walk from UB, (almost visible from the campus grounds,) is GC’s nicest luxury hotel, casino, and restaurant complex. I had never been before, but heard that the food was excellent and pricey, and that the pool was a little oasis. Strolling through the lobby in our swim trunks and bikini (singular), trying to look as nonchalant as possible (we didn’t think you had to pay for pool access, but we didn’t think you didn’t have to either), we were taken aback by the incongruity of the Gab Sun’s presence in Gaborone. It is clean, sparkling, lush, private, ritzy, smoothly efficient and so utterly normal that I almost choked. I was suddenly so bizarrely uncomfortable to be back in a setting that I wouldn’t have blinked an eye at three months ago, and I couldn’t help but fidget.

Thanks to the swimmer in Daniel, we sniffed out water and wound our way through softly carpeted corridors and out into the sunshine of a protectorate leftover. The grass was green and the palm trees swayed in the breeze, as glasses clinked and South African accents wound around the ears. Everything was pristine and white or beige and the water was a placid blue, if frigid. We shuffled around and settled into a few poolside chairs, whipping out the reading material and basking in the shifting sunlight (the great irony – a pool on a rare cloud-ish day). It was splendid beyond belief to just read in the open air for a bit, in part because I haven’t ever really sat outside here before without the constant bug in the back of my mind reminding me to be alert for approaching men. (A digression for later, but never before coming here have I felt so vulnerable or reliant on others because of my gender. It makes me angry.)

daniel, poolside, 'neath the african sun

We only stayed for a couple of hours, and then packed up and headed back through a breeze to UB. I am now sitting in my room typing, listening to the mingled sounds of a whistler’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” that wafts through my window, and the giggles, screams, and cries of one of my new suitemate’s visiting daughters. These are not unpleasant sounds.



and now, for a miscellaneous picture montage:

UB courtyard jam session

more fun at the gabs dam - lunar landscape

D and Pat the Great

Pat

lovey-dovey

international exchange student crew
(with our powers combined, we know a lot about beer)