You wake up under the green haze of a mosquito net that has become almost an extension of your own body; in the morning, your feet press outwards, tugging the protective layer away from the mattress, explaining those mysterious bug bites on your stomach, underarms... Outside, the tropical air waits to soak you in its uncomfortable humidity, but the rainy season's clouds hold back the sun for now. Over this morning's breakfast- some beans and spicy piment, you sit on a fragile wooden bench covered by a tin roof held up by a skeleton of wood or perhaps bamboo. Children sit close by watching, smiling, waiting for you to do something interesting- or is it simply that you ARE interesting in your African clothes that do little to hide that American blood shining through your eyes, gestures, accent?
And then, down the street, three girls approach all in white, doused in baby powder, stopping before old women and men sitting under trees. They kneel, murmur prayers, move to the next person. They are Christian Celestes- a sect of "Christians" who succeeded in superficially adopting the coloniser's religion while continuing their own practices, which involve magic, animal sacrifices, evil spirits that live in the sea (the spirits of slaves?) They move away from each person after accepting a small price for their prayers, and they almost walk by you until you wave them over. After a year in Africa, you accept all prayers- and even sometimes believe them. The three girls circle in wearing their white robes, white head scarves, white powder, and whisper small prayers that are all the more beautiful for your lack of understanding. They hover just above the ground and look ahead into the air there, lips murmering words that hang precariously between mystery and cognition. Long strands of beads, glass, wood, green, blue, red against white against brown. A coin, a bill, your offerings laid on the sand before them, the youngest among them collects money for the prayers. Before the blessing has settled into the air, its messengers disappear like apparitions into a village that seems all the more unreal due to their presence.
A week earlier in the north of the country, you were at a Peulh camp, the only ethnic group in the country who seems to have fully resisted outside influence. You had to hike through the bush, take off you shoes to wade through flooded corn fields to find them. Underneath that sky that goes in every direction forever, the horizon stretched so far it seemed it should break, but instead it was the movie screen for clouds that raced past like ungraspable thoughts or dreams or both.
There, you learned how communication is gesture. In their throwing up of hands to show disbelief, wiggling of fingers to show rain, waving arms to show the reaping of the fields, the seasons take form. Why would you ever need a watch in this world where time is palpable, touchable? You see how much is mutually incomprehensible, how little your 'superior' culture is because in the faces of these people, you read: this corner of the world IS the world. And, they are right. In the eyes of the Peulh children, in the prayers of animists, in these small moments of meaning that sneak out from behind the long hours of hardship in Africa, you see that this, indeed,is the world, and you can't turn away from it now, not even in the dreams that pass over like clouds bringing the rains of home.
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