theme songs for the road

i've always been really good at losing things. i've lost homework, car keys, the left shoe from a pair of red flats. i've always been waiting to grow out of it. surely someday i'll be organized enough to keep a pair of shoes together! but i guess i'm still waiting. since being here i've lost a cell phone, a pillow case, 5,000 shillings, and about 9 pounds. maybe i could have anticipated losing those things. but what i never did anticipate was feeling lost.

i've amassed alot of road maps in my time. moving state to state. driving place to place. florida. illinois. oklahoma. tennesse and everything in between. all of the above and maybe more are in folds and wrinkles in the back seat of my car. i've used them all. i've read them in the rain. i've held them open over the stearing wheel. i've torn them in the open-window wind. they have gotten me from place to place to place and back again. little red and blue lines telling which way to turn and what to stay away from. this being the case, there can't possibly be any man out there more suited for me than mister rand mcnally. my knight's armor shines with tail lights and turn signals and he saves his damsel from culdesacs and cops with bad attitudes.

road maps are great. but i have to ask, where are the maps for getting around life? what about those potholes and police officers? rand darling, how could you have failed me?

i feel like i've gotten lost somehow. or at least i've gotten stuck. i'm sitting at the most unexpected intersection of all. there are no red lights here. nothing has stopped me. instead, i've come to a crossroads of all green lights, all go signs, all endless options. where do you want to go? what do you want to do? who do you want to be? go. Go. GO!

but maybe i don't want to go any further. maybe i'm too tired to turn the engine over. maybe i'm done starting again. maybe dave matthews said it best when he said, 'turns out it's not where but who you're with that really matters.' in which case... where don't i go?

more green lights. more people in more places. all of us dissolving like sugar cubes in warm water. slowly separating away in this direction and that, sweetening our surroundings but doing it with one less grain of sugar at our side. sugar cubes. how despairing. wouldn't we rather be like licorice? all twisted together, all sweet and all insoluble.

insoluble. maybe that's what i want my super power to be.

in the mean time i'll just cut all my hair off and get a pedicure...

when my khaki pants used to fit

i moved to africa in the month of july
i was eating bowls of rice by 7:00 am
and got used to it real quick

rice and beans
water to drink
lunch at 2 pm

i started walking to get around town
my shoes got covered in red dirt
my thighs got a good work out

up the hill
down the hill
back and forth through town

i do my laundry on the weekends
scrubbing by hand in a bucket
hanging them out to dry

pull and stretch
wring them out again
leave them on the line

i used to be meticulous about style
before i left home in july
that was when my khaki pants still fit

stone soup and other recipes

i found ants in my sugar bowl and a gecko in my t-shirt. i swept them both away and went about my business. i'm not often thrown by the little african quirks of the day around here. i eat rice three times a day, go without dairy, do my laundry in a bucket, and wake up the next day and do it all again. no big thing. but today i had a craving. today i looked at the clock, saw that it was nearly one, and had a vision. i saw a sandwich. i saw a sandwich of honey wheat whole grain bread. it was spread with trader joe's red pepper humus and stacked with green peppers, alfalfa sprouts, tomato, snow peas and avocado. it sat on a little ceramic plate with a cold clausen pickle next to it and a tall glass of 2% milk. when i woke from my vision i was sitting in the office with a bread roll and an empty coffee mug. i was real sad.

question: how does someone keep eating rice and pumpkin over and over everyday without their taste buds and tummy atrophying?
answer: because on certain mondays in october, they get a letter in the mail full of love and fruit snacks that taste like heaven going down and make all the rest of it worth swallowing.

i'm a lucky girl. with love and fruit snacks and sleep overs and skype dates and good morning coffee and even better emails that together make all the rest of it worth swallowing.

yum yum.

i hoped it would be easy to build

if you were the kind of person who wore a seat belt, you wouldn't be living in Africa in the first place.

deborah scroggins said that in her book 'emma's war.' when i first read it, i laughed. i laughed like a person who feels like they have a right to laugh at that. yeah, i know what you mean. and then i re-read the quote. i read how it began:

for whites, it's part of the mind-set: if you were the kind of person who wore a seat belt, you wouldn't be living in Africa in the first place.

for whites. which i am. and no, i don't wear my seat belt. but maybe i should. and tell me, what about Africa makes it more necessary to wear a seat belt than the next place? if a car crashes on a dirt road it would kill me just as surely as on a paved one. a gun would go off just as well in a banana field as it would in an unlit parking lot. and do just as much damage. the moon over me is the same moon over you. even though i could swear it's 10 times bigger here. but it's not. it's the same moon. in the same sky. over the same planet. all 6,602,224,175 of us are standing on the same round planet. it's not so big after all. we're not so different. people are people wherever you go. for better or worse, we all have failings. but bigger than all of it, we also all have feats.

the mountain we scaled in colorado. the piano we learned to master. the foreign language we fluently speak. the sport we dominate. the paintbrush between our fingers. our voice that gets a standing ovation. or maybe it's the courage to paint our toenails pink. the decision to shave our head. the joke that made our boss laugh. for some of us, it's feat enough that we got out of bed this morning.

today i wore navy pants with a black shirt. maybe that's the kind of person it takes to live in Africa. a person who puts on whatever's clean. or maybe that's just what it takes to make it through the day sometimes, wherever you are. mismatched clothes. spilled coffee. unexplainable headaches. the smell of honeysuckle outside your window. all those human things. all those people things. they happen to all people. in all places. which Africa is. just another place. where i live. where i work. and as it turns out, it's chock full of people i love.

i just realized i don't know where to go with this now. most of my entries these days have had a common thread. life. living it. this time i tried to think of something funny to write. like the dragon fly that floated into the office and spent all afternoon on the picture of my parents. or the day that i was greeted with, good morning, ann. you look exhausted. even wearing yellow. good times. but i think i'll just tell those stories later. today i'd rather tell this story:

little girl: the shop across the street is where my uncle sells. we sell from shops here.
marsha: i see! and what's that big pile?
little girl: that's where they make bricks. we make our own bricks here.
marsha: i know. i like that they're working by lamp light.
little girl: yes. we use paraffin here.
marsha: look! look at the stars. aren't they beautiful?!
little girl: yes. we have stars here. do they have stars in your world?

we have stars. we have stripes. we have banks and buses and brick layers. we have what they have. we even have seat belts. and some of us even wear them.