For lack of a cleverer title, Chase in Cape Verde

Sex on the beach

2010-07-08T22:30:00.003-01:00

We were driving down the coast with two girls who had never seen the island before. It was late in the day and we had to get back to town soon to catch connecting rides, but all the same, we asked our driver to stop at Praia Frances (French Beach) so the girls could get out and look.

Praia Frances is an odd beach. You can't see it until you're right next to it because, at the last minute, just before you hit the water's edge, the rocky coast drops out a meter or two below you, forming a minor cliff. Only in the small space below and beyond the cliff do you encounter fine black sand, reaching out a short distance and then disappearing again under the waves.

The cliff overhangs the rear of the beach and juts out into mini-peninsulas every 10 to 20 meters, creating a series of horseshoe-shaped semi-self-contained coves. This is important.

As we walked out onto one of those peninsulas, I looked down into the adjacent cove. In the back, nestled under the lip of the cliff, I discerned a pair of feet in flip flops. And then another foot wearing a different flip flop. And then movement — slow, rhythmic, circular movement.

At first I didn't believe what I thought I was seeing. Where'd they come from? Hadn't they certainly heard us, or at least felt our car rumbling to a halt on the ground above them? If so, shouldn't they be scrambling to put clothes on? As I turned to one of my friends, my eyes answered my own first question: there was a car parked right next to ours. I just hadn't noticed it.

I asked my friend: "Are they having sex down there?"

He walked out towards the sea for a better view and looked where I had looked. Then we both turned, incredulous, to a Cape Verdean who was with us. He didn't understand our English, but he knew what we were saying, because he just gave a wry smile and nodded in confirmation.

Snuffing my voyeuristic impulse to get a better view myself, I turned my attention to the rest of our group, who had ventured much further out on the peninsula (where they could potentially see deeper into the cove) but were — like normal people — still focused more on the ocean than on the coast.

Then it happened.

One of the girls — the one that has only been in Cape Verde for a week — turned to face the flip-flopped feet. Except from where she stood, she must have been able to see not just the feet, but everything from head to toe (and everything in between). Immediately, her eyes lit up, she gasped, she covered her mouth with her hand, and then she struggled to stifle her giggling as she walked briskly out of the line of sight.

Of course, after that, everyone else had to look too. But M—'s reaction was the best. The sight of sex made her feel the way I think sex should: she laughed like a child, and then she felt happy, knowing, perhaps, that life is a pretty sweet gift even if we only get one.

I'm doing laundry today

2010-07-03T12:59:00.000-01:00

I'm doing laundry today

2010-04-18T13:04:00.000-01:00

Thief

2010-03-25T19:05:00.003-01:00

A dog with a smooth golden coat just walked out of a building with a piece of buttered bread in its mouth. A man and a woman stood by and laughed at the dog while I watched silently from a balcony. As it passed by me, I noticed rows of swollen nipples drooping from its underbelly. My eyes followed it about a hundred feet, until it disappeared into a gap in the wall on the far side of the road.

I looked elsewhere, but then in my periphery, the dog returned to view. Bread still locked in its teeth, it jumped atop the wall and trotted back in my direction. When it came to a gate, it paused for a tic and then jumped to the other side. From there the dog descended into a field of sugar cane across the street from where I stood.

Propped up against the wall in the corner of the field were about twenty tall bundles of sugar cane leaves. As the dog arrived, two small puppies with exactly the same golden coat emerged from the dark, protected gaps between these bundles. They followed their mother to the middle of the field, jumping at her teats and — when she threw it on the ground for them — pouncing on the piece of bread. As puppies do, they took opposite ends and nibbled at it. One would occassionally try to tug the bread away from the other, but lacking any real strength or determination to do so, they ended up dividing it pretty much equally and then laid down at their mother's side.

Love (again)

2010-03-17T11:35:00.003-01:00

I just rode back to my town in the bed of a pickup truck. There weren't many passengers; one ancient man with glassy eyes sat on the bench across from me, and inside the cab there was a woman.

Even these few companions disembarked by the time we crested over the mountain. And so, I thought, it was just the driver and I for the ride down the hill to Fajã. But when I peered into the cab more carefully, I saw another passenger I'd missed.

The driver was an old man, no less than 60, and next to him was a young girl, no more than two. She was curled up on her side, feet toward me, head toward the engine, face toward the passenger door, and eyes shut.

The weather was cool, but the sun was bright. We drove slowly, and yet the wind still blew the hair out of my eyes, so that as we rounded each curve I could see the shift in the angle of light that filtered through the windows of the cab. Chunks of shadow and brightness rocked back and forth in lockstep across the seat, one moment shading the sleeping girl's face and then making it brilliant again.

What I loved was this: Every time the road straightened for a stretch, the old driver looked down at the little girl. If the sun was on her face, he took a hand off the wheel and held it over her eyes. Not that her eyes weren't closed — they were, and I'm sure that in her dreaming mind the blackness was total. But out of concern that she might be burned, or that she might waken too soon, or perhaps merely on the principle that a person shouldn't have sun in their eyes, he protected her.

And to think: she'll never know she was loved today.

Something I couldn't handle

2010-03-01T11:05:00.000-01:00

It's nearly 10 in the morning when I go to the bakery to buy bread. I'm almost sure that I'm too late, but I decide to go anyway on the off chance that it may be a slow day.

I go the back way, which requires me to pass briefly through the yard of an old woman and her young son (grandson?) Helder. Sometimes the yard is empty, but when I approach, they are both standing outside. I greet them with the usual "bom dia."

Helder, being the friendly, amicable fellow that he is, asks me why he didn't see me at Carnaval in Estância Brás on Sunday. I say that, yes, I did go, but on Saturday, not Sunday. I ask him if it started earlier on Sunday. We're cool.

I walk by him and then come to face the old lady. "Tudo bom?" I offer with a smile. I stop and lean against the wall to give her a moment to respond. She doesn't... at least not to my greeting. Instead, seeing the bag in my hand, she tells me, "There's no more bread, you've come too late again."

She speaks as if I were haplessly convinced that I could still buy bread at this hour, and it's clearly clear to her that the reason I didn't come earlier is because I'm lazy.

Insulted and annoyed and angry as I am at that moment, Helder defuses the situation with his relentless positivity. "Now is the perfect time to get cookies, though," he says. "They'll be hot out of the oven."

Unfortunately, I'm still posted up against the wall, facing the old lady, who begins to inspect my long, flowy hair. I took extreme care to pull it away from my eyes before she saw me, but all the same she can't help herself. She tells Helder and I that it needs to be cut, and says I need to let her cut it.

I often get crap from her about my hair or about coming late for bread, but usually not at the same time.

Disgusted, I do something I've never done in Cape Verde: I spin around silently and walk away without looking back or saying another word. The entrance to the bakery is only 10 meters from this woman's house, but I walk past it without even checking for bread. Thrilled as I would be to buy the last three rolls just so I could throw them at her, I am indeed likely not to find any bread, and I don't dare risk that I might give her the satisfaction of seeing me walk out empty-handed.

Love

2010-02-20T18:47:00.000-01:00

It's 4:55. I'm sitting down and all I'm doing is watching TV, but she asks, "Where are you going?"
"Fajã," I reply.
"What time?"
"Pretty soon."
"Later? What hour?" She points to the 7 on the wall clock. "This hour?"
I shake my head no.
She points to the 6. "This hour?"
I point to the 5. "This hour."
"Oh," she says, and walks away.

Friendship

2010-02-20T18:42:00.000-01:00

On the wall at Félix's house, sewn into a cloth, protected behind glass in a picture frame, verbatim:

FRIEND

BE A FRIEND IS

THE MOST IMPORT

-ANT THING

IN THE WORLD

The Post Office

2010-01-24T16:38:00.000-01:00

At 1pm, I go to the post office in central Mindelo, near the harbour.

The mob I'd seen earlier is gone. In fact, no one is there at all except for several attendants. I walk up to the first one and present a Whole Foods paper bag containing four brownie mixes, a can of pumpkin pureé, a bag of brown sugar, a bag of chocolate chips, a chocolate bar, 60 tablets of lactaid, a bottle each of barbecue sauce and Tabasco, and a box of chocolates.

"Good afternoon," I say in Creole. "All good?"

"All good."

"Good. I need to ship everything in this bag. Do you sell a big enough box?"

"How much stuff is it?"

"It's all the stuff in this bag." Realizing that she can't tell how full the bag is, I swing it around to a low side counter and try to support it from the bottom so I can tilt it toward her. When I do that, though, the top crumples in where my hand is supporting it, blocking her view anyway. Of course, she could have just stood up to look inside, but maybe that's asking too much. Maybe she's paraplegic. Maybe she thinks I have rotten eggs in there. I've never shipped a package in this country before, so I certainly don't know the routine.

I cut to the chase. "The bag is mostly full," I explain. "And it's pretty heavy. I probably need your biggest box." She still seems interested in knowing what I'm going to ship, so I start removing items from the bag and stacking them on the counter. She shakes her head — not to me, but to herself, in dissatisfaction — when I pull out the third and fourth box of brownie mix. I get a much livelier reaction with the barbecue sauce.

"No, no, no, no, no," she says as she grabs the bottle to inspect it. "This can't go. No, no, no," she continues, now shaking her head in my direction.

"But it's plastic!" I protest. "It's completely sealed, it's durable," and heck, it probably bounces. I start thinking of the posters in U.S. Post Offices that list all the items you can't send: firearms, pressurized gas containers, chemist-grade acids, and so on. I start to appreciate what a reasonably limited list it is.

"If it breaks," she explains, "it will leak all over the letters and get them dirty." She sways her head lazily from side to side while she says this, as if still saying no. She looks like she's going to rock herself to sleep. I hope so. I like the idea that she would respond to reason if only someone gave her a good, hard pinch.

I keep trying anyway. "But how would it break?" I ask. "Look," I implore as I drop the bottle of barbecue sauce on the counter from a short height (it does bounce a little). "You'd have to smash the box with huge mallet to crack this bottle open. If you're so worried about it, how in the world do you handle your packages anyway? What do you do to them??!!" It's no use. She tells me flatly that I can't send it, reiterating her total lack of interest in hickory-smoked letter correspondence.

"Okay," I concede, "let's just see what fits in these boxes of yours."

Proving herself less than totally sedentary, she gets up and walks to the back of the service area, returning with what appear to be two shoeboxes emblazoned in the red and white of the Cape Verdian correios.

"You can see what fits," she says flatly. "The maximum is two kilos."

"Two kilos?!" I ask incredulously.

"Two kilos per box," she replies. The blow is not softened by this, considering that my pumpkin pureé is a kilo all by itself.

I take the last of my items out of the paper bag, including a large glass bottle of Tabasco. I try to sneak it into one of the boxes, but alas, she notices.

"No, no, no, this really can't go. No. No." She says it so automatically. For a moment she reminds of a young teenager in the face of temptation, who trusts her own judgment so little that she bludgeons her impulses with flat, unthinking denial. Her "no" comes from somewhere deep in her gut. It's like she has the hiccups.

We talk a little bit more, and I start placing items in one of the shoeboxes. To my delight, it's a perfect container for the brownie mixes. It easily fits three of them with room left over for chocolate chips and brown sugar. When it hits the scale, though, she throws out half of it. She continues our discussion of liquids.

"Maybe if you put that one [gesturing at the barbecue sauce] in a plastic bag, it'd be okay, but this one [the Tabasco], absolutely not." Meanwhile, she's taking items out of the shoebox and putting others back in as she searches for the perfect two kilos without going over. It's like a backwards version of The Price is Right in which you already know the value of the showcase but you have to figure out which items it includes. It's kind of fun, honestly. And she includes the barbecue sauce, which means she's decided that she has bigger fish to fry. I begin to doubt that any items are officially prohibited in the correios. I could probably send a chainsaw if it were under two kilos.

"Okay, here's what I'll do," I announce. My gestures are totally exaggerated by this point. I'm at the post office, but I could be telling a story around a campfire. I sort of feel like a mobster making a deal with the police. Here's what I'll do: "I'll put the Tabasco bottle in a nice, thick plastic bag. I'll seal it shut, we'll cover it in cardboard" — she's shaking her head again — "and we'll wrap the whole thing in a nice, big, fluffy sweater, and all that will go in the box, and nothing will ever happen to it."

She repeats her stump speech about the poor, defenseless letters getting stained by my devil-package, but then she says something very interesting: "Now, if you were to use that box [gesturing at a wine-bottle-shaped box behind her], no problem! You just can't send it in this one."

I have to pause for a moment to take this in.

Why didn't you tell me that before???!!!, I hear my brain shout. The lady can't hear it, but I feel fairly certain that if she looked me straight in the eyes she'd see the incredulity reverberating somewhere behind my pupils.

Tempted as I am to see for myself what marvels of cardboard engineering have been incorporated into the bottle box to allow it to withstand the sadistic abuse of local mail handlers, I merely grab the glass Tabasco bottle and set it aside. After all, I'm on a 30-minute lunch break. I only have so much time to argue.

"Okay," I say. "Glass goes separately. What about the rest of this?"

She resumes her puppeteering. My chocolates, sugars, and other foods dangle from her fingers, each one briefly taking center stage on the scale. They shuffle from box to box as she searches for the right set, but none of them seem to play well together, and one by one she casts them aside.

When at last she finagles one box under the two-kilo limit, she tilts it toward me and announces it: "You can ship this."

I look down at one brownie mix, the sugar, the chocolate bar, the lactaid, and a whole lot of empty space. I can't help but think that it seems so lonely in there.

"Isn't there some way I could ship all this stuff together?" I ask. I have an urge to point out how much more likely it is that stuff will break if the package has extra room and its contents are allowed to slide around, but by this point I realize that my powers of reason are no match for her steely adherence to postal dogma.

"No, the limit's the limit. You just have to use more boxes. Shall I get you some?" she offers. I ask her about the price, and it turns out to be somewhere around 700 escudos per box. Since I'd need at least four boxes, that comes out to about $36 for sending 12 lbs. of stuff less than a hundred miles at standard speed. High seas robbery.

For a moment I just stand there, flustered and unsure what to do. Then the clouds part, and she says something that is beautiful to my ears. "Maybe you should try sending via encomendas."

Actually, at first I don't know what she's talking about. "Encomendas?"

"Yes, it's next door, at CVTelecom. I don't know what kind of condition this stuff will arrive in, but you can send everything in one box."

I pause for a moment to take this in.

Why didn't you tell me that before???!!!, I hear my brain echo. But at the same time I'm happy to learn that I might not need to swarm my recipients with multiple care packages, so I ask her where to go. She points me in the right direction and repeats something about CVTelecom, the national phone monopoly.

Perplexed, I ask for confirmation. "Encomendas is part of CVTelecom? I can ship large packages at the phone company?" She seems to respond in the affirmative. "All of this can go in one package? Even this?" I ask, pointing at the Tabasco bottle.

Her eyebrows peak. "Well, I don't know about that."

Good enough. I throw all my items back in the bag and turn to leave. More out of instinct than out of genuine sentiment, I thank her for her help. Unexpectedly, her gruffy, disinterested air vanishes in an instant and she says something along the lines of, "I'm sorry we couldn't help you here, but it was a pleasure talking to you. Have a great day!" It's as if we haven't been arguing for ten minutes. As if she hadn't, in fact, felt that I was interrupting an otherwise quiet lull in the flow of postal customers. As if I weren't the letter-correspondence saboteur that my liquid-mailing ambitions clearly prove me to be. The moment we stop doing business, she starts acting like my best friend.

Baffled, I walk out.

After a few steps in the right direction, I come to a little storefront. Inside is a little desk, and behind it, a hallway that leads back to the bowels of the post office. I still don't entirely understand what the lady meant by encomendas, but if it's the large-package department of the post office, it makes sense that it would be in the same building. Plus, there's a CVMovel logo on the large glass window.

I go inside, but no one's there. I stand expectantly for a minute or two, ogling the computer and all the other expensive stuff lying around that I could easily steal. I reason that nobody would leave this space unattended for too long, and I expect somebody to pop out from the hallway any second. I know people are back there — I hear them talking, and I even see one or two rushing past. But my bag of stuff and I get ignored.

Doubt creeps in. I wonder if I'm in the right place. I walk outside again and circle around to the back of the building, where a third door opens up to rows of post office boxes. I call out through a small slit. An attendant appears, and I hold up my bag to show him what I need to ship. I've forgotten the word encomendas, so I struggle to ask for what I need without knowing its name.

"I want to ship all this stuff in one box," I explain.

"Go to the post office, it's around the other side."

"I was just there. They told me to go somewhere else." What's the word? I think to myself. Amendoas? No, no, those are almonds.

"I don't know," he says. "Go back there."

Not quite ready to go crawling back there, I return to the storefront and muster up the courage to call out for help. It still takes me a minute or two before I'm loud enough to get anyone's attention, but eventually a young girl emerges. I have the same conversation with her as I did with the P.O. box clerk, but because she's not speaking to me through a slit, it somehow goes better. She's not any less confused about what I'm asking for, but she's helpful enough that she's willing to work through it. She walks me back to the post office and talks to the two-kilo evangelist while I stand back at a suitably sheepish distance. The lady says encomendas, the girl understands immediately, and we walk out again together.

As we pass the unattended storefront, I marvel again that the computer in there somehow manages not to be stolen. I also marvel that this girl is abandoning her job for several minutes just so she can guide some lost foreigner around town. My projected sense of professional duty and my continuing sheepishness both make me wish that she'd just give me better directions and leave me to find the place myself, but she seems intent on walking me all the way there.

We go towards the giant CVTelecom building across the street. Once we're alongside it, she points through the light-blue wrought-iron fence and I see a small sign that says "Encomendas" beside a ratty, non-descript side door. I feel even more sheepish when I realize that the postal clerk probably thinks I couldn't find this giant building, when in fact I knew perfectly well where it was and simply never had occasion before to take inventory of its contents. No part of it looks like a public entrance, and the whole thing is surrounded by that fence. The girl leaves me at the gate, where I walk past a guard to get inside.

But hey, this is how you ship packages in Mindelo.

The encomendas office is on the bottom floor of the CVTelecom building — it might even be considered the basement level, since the building is on a slope, but the office itself is wholly above ground. When I walk inside, I immediately feel better. The service counter is made of unpainted wood, and so are the desks in the narrow service area behind it. All the posters on the wall are at least 15 years old, and most of the equipment lying around looks older. The space is lit by sun streaming in through the windows. You can tell by the posture of the clerks that they're never very busy. There are no rigid high stools. Everyone leans against walls, or sits in low lime-green office chairs with worn-out padding and small tears in the seams.

The lady who comes to serve me is in her fifties, and though she is clearly Cape Verdian, she carries herself like a Brazilian. She is bigger, but not plump. She ambles slowly and wears only slightly too much makeup. She looks like she thoroughly enjoyed the privilege of raising every one of her children.

We start with the same niceties as in the post office and I go through the same ritual of laying out everything on the counter. While I do, she leaves to look for shipping boxes. Her and a male clerk come back a few minutes later with several boxes, all of which — they happily share with me — they swiped from CVTelecom's trash pile. We pick the largest one. The man expresses doubt that we can fit everything in there, but then he walks away and leaves us to it.

The lady grabs the brownie mixes and starts carefully packing the box. When I reveal the Tabasco bottle, I hear a familiar refrain.

"No, no, no, no, no."

"It's okay," I defer, "don't worry about it. Let's focus on the other stuff."

"You know, if this breaks, it'll make a real mess."

I'm about to repeat that we should ignore the Tabasco for the moment, but then it occurs to me that it won't be in my interest for everything else to fit nicely in the box while the Tabasco stands by the wayside. It needs to be included, and I need to defend its inclusion.

"I just got back from America," I tell her. "I had four of these glass bottles in my duffel bag, and you know how baggage handlers are. They pick up bags and launch them against the ground. These bottles had no special protection, but they all survived without a scratch. They're strong bottles. Are you sure I can't send it in a box if I protect it well?" I start repeating my sweater idea.

"No, probably not," she repeats, but clearly — miraculously — she's actually thinking about how to solve the problem. She retreats to the back of the office and returns a moment latter with some air-filled plastic packaging, which she wraps around and tapes to the bottle. I can hardly believe what I'm seeing. Then, huzzah!, she puts it in the box.

She proceeds to put everything else in the box, too. Everything. It's quite a delicate ballet. For a moment I'm certain that the box of chocolates aren't going to fit, which I'm almost happy about because it means I'd get to keep them for myself. But she takes out several items again, finds space for the chocolates below, and at the end of five minutes she is taping shut what is perhaps the densest cube of food that the Cape Verdian postal service has ever seen.

When her magic is done, she presents me with the address/customs forms, which I fill out in quadruplicate using carbon paper. She watches me until I'm about half-done, then walks off for a moment. Suddenly she comes back and admits a mistake: they actually need five copies.

No problem, I say. I finish up the quadruplicates and begin manually filling out a fifth copy. As I do, though, the lady walks away and sits down at the desk in the back of the service area. She opens up the top drawer, shuffles through it for a tic, and pulls out something I can't quite see. Looking up periodically from my papers to watch, I see her swivel her chair around to face a mirror near the window. The item from the drawer is then revealed: it's a small makeup brush. She lifts it to her face, focuses her gaze intently in the mirror, and begins shaping her eyebrows.

While I'm filling out address forms.

I have to stop for a second because I find it so difficult to write and, at the same time, refrain from bursting out in laughter. I try to imagine a postal clerk in the states dolling herself up while I write the address on a Priority Mail box, and it seems inconceivable, which only makes me happier to find myself in a place like Cape Verde where such outstandingly absurd things happen all the time.

We chat a little more as I write a note and stuff it under one of the taped flaps. I mention that I live in Fajã on São Nicolau (a different island), and we find out that she's the sister of one of my neighbors.

I write down her name. As she tightens some twine around the box, I promise to tell her sister that she says hello. I've missed lunch, but my package is on its way, and my love for Cape Verde is renewed.

Happy new year

2010-01-03T15:15:00.000-01:00

I walked, and when I stopped I chose a place that I already seemed to know. When the wind blew, it sounded not like the hearty, deep thrush of Eastern oaks, spruces, and maples, nor quite like the sweeping rustle of grasses on an open plain. I was surrounded by the canopies of eucalyptuses (I was at the top of a hill, and their trunks reached up from its side), and their sound was freer, lighter, higher. As each drooping cluster of leaves crackled, the vibrations were cast out into open space and bounced off of hundreds of other clusters before reaching my ears. The shadows they cast, too, were full of gaps that shifted around in the wind, allowing the sun to pass through and warm parts of my skin, but then shading those spots again just before they started to burn.

I did know this place. I had grown up with forests like these. Even the smell was exactly the same. Of course, to realize the connection was to admit that no amount of pretty description could ever clarify whether I liked the place because of what it is, or because of what it made me remember. I believed it to be beautiful, I really did, and it saddened me not to be able to know that I was right.

Happy 2009

2010-01-03T15:09:00.000-01:00

I sat down to watch the soccer game, but what I ended up watching was the soccer ball. I saw it in full relief, with every acceleration, every shift in angular momentum, every hard stop precisely articulated. No feet, no sweat, no passing. Just a black-and-white sphere thrashing about chaotically in its wakefulness.

I stood up silently when it was clear the game had ended, and with the players, I shuffled out through the main gate. Except I wasn't with them. I wasn't shaking hands or saying hello to anybody. We just happened to occupy the same space. I started to walk downhill, but then so did they, so the farce of togetherness trailed on a while longer. Nobody could tell. It was night. The only light was from the soccer field. As we walked away from it, we cast tall, gently bobbing shadows that criss-crossed each other on the pavement ahead of us. This, too, transfixed me. I recognized a friend behind me by his lanky amble — everything came in so clearly. I felt the way I do when I stare at somebody's reflection in a window because it's easier not to get caught eye-to-eye. It felt like cheating. But I liked this view better anyway; it seemed truer. Nobody can lie about their shadows.

A song by St. Vincent

2010-01-03T14:59:00.001-01:00

Paint the black hole, black-ER
Paint the black hole bla-A-cker

Ode to OSHA

2009-12-07T15:18:00.000-01:00

Today the electricity for my oven was connected by a man who is not only an electrician, but also a plumber, a guard for my building, my best source for sex vocabulary, a father to several of my local friends, and an inspirational drinker. You can see him from half a kilometer away because he's about 6-foot-5 and always wears anime-print club shirts.

After the connections were done, I helped him lift the oven back into its spot. Then he began to demonstrate how to use it.

"This knob is the timer."

"Mmmm-hmmm," I responded flatly (the clock icon gave it away).

"This knob is the gas if you turn it this way. 155 degrees here. If you turn it the other way, it's the grill." He did, in fact, turn the knob, and the oven light came on. He opened the door to point at the electric element. I put my hand under it, waiting for the heat to radiate. "Let me show you," he said as he, too, reached inside the oven.

I retracted my hand to get out of his way, but he motioned for me to put it back in. "Let me show you," he repeated. I think I also heard him say the word kema.

At this point my brain chimed in, saying Look, you idiot, he's about to burn your hand on that thing! Despite all the immediate evidence that this was true, a deep-seated rational part of me maintained that he must be joking, and that I should play along.

So I put my hand back in. With the utmost grace and gentleness, his fingers clapsed my wrist and guided my pinky straight upward, where — yes — it touched the element.

My oh-shit-I'm-on-fire reflex kicked in, and I jumped back from the oven. "You just burned my pinky!" I shouted. Communication is the foundation of any good relationship. I wanted to keep him in the loop.

"Hahahaha," his smile said.

"That's gonna leave a mark," I added, gawking at my finger and its band of rapidly congealing skin cells.

"Ah, yes, you're white," he agreed, "you burn differently than we do."

Before he left, we reviewed the day's new vocabulary.

Carving out a Little America

2009-12-01T14:49:00.000-01:00

Thanks to:

the U.S. Embassy for the turkey
PCV Steve and his neighbor Arlinda for roasting the turkey
me for the gravy and the pies
PCV Brett Beach for twice-baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, biscuits, fine wine, and hosting!!
PCV Brett Slezak for the pasta salad, expert apple-cutting, and all of the following amazing photos

some preparation

then, you know, a trip to the beach

the feast!
clockwise: pasta salad, twice-baked potatoes covered in
cheese, mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey, biscuits, a hand

clockwise: Cristiano, Nelson, B. Slezak, B. Beach, Chase

PCV Brendan waiting for pie

feast means festa! (PCV Steve seated at left)

it was dark outside, so we put on sunglasses to match

The Rains Came: Time-Delay Live-Blogging to you Direct from Inside a Flooding Building

2009-08-26T14:11:00.000-01:00

I was in the city, in an office at the Ministry of Agriculture, when I overheard someone mention it. "Txuba forte na Fajã!", they said. Phooey, I thought. I piped in, mentioning that I live in Fajã and desperately want to see a downpour there, but that it never seems to happen unless I'm somewhere else. I joked that maybe if stayed in the city for a whole two weeks, we'd actually get a decent rainy season.

As if to prove me peripheral, it started downpouring outside the Ministry that very minute. Across the street, wind whipped white curtains out into the wetness, until rushed hands reached through the windows to pull the shutters shut and fidget with the bolts until they locked. People ran for cover. The air lost its stickiness as raindrops taxied all the heat to the ground.

Satisfied, I went back to work, or whatever it was that I was doing.

In the afternoon I returned to Fajã. The earth was damp, but you couldn't tell how much water had passed through it. Puddles weren't any larger than I'd ever seen them after other rains, though. When I got home I sat for a few minutes, then began to read magazines and other things lying in piles around me. I searched for a graph of supply-and-demand. I looked up a recipe for Sweet 'n' Sour Chicken. Not finding the graph, I sketched my own version, and not having chicken, I started defrosting some pork.

I would have left the house to buy the pineapple juice that I evidently need for the sauce, but it started raining again. By the time it stopped again I was somehow in the middle of frying sweet potatoes, so I couldn't go out. As I finished off the last few crispy, greasy, coma-inducing morsels, the rain picked up once more, this time matching the force that I had seen in the city in the morning.

On my windowsill the BBC was discussing why Africa is poor. The window was closed, but the shutters were open, affording a wonderful view of the weather. And yet, somehow, I missed two strikes of lightning — a rude disappointment, considering that before today I had begun to wonder if thunderstorms ever happen here. Each strike was accompanied by a pop in the radio transmission and a flash in the periphery of my vision. After the first flash, I went straight back to reading, thinking that I'd missed my only chance. After the second, I stared intently into the sky, waiting for the third. But the third never came.

What I saw instead were drops of water beading on the underside of my windows. That probably shouldn't be happening, I thought to myself. Minutes later the rain got even stronger — the strongest I've ever seen here — and the pitter-patter on my windowpanes gave way to sheets of water sloshing down.

     |        |        |         |
man  |        |        |         |  nature
     | window | ###### | shutter |
     |________| ###### |_________|
    ###############################

As you can see, if everything had been closed, the shutter would have protected my kitchen. But let's zoom in and see what happens with the shutter open:

     |            |
     |            |+-- crazy raindrops
     |            |+-- crazy raindrops! 
man  |            ||
     |   window   ||  ############            OMG!!! no
     |            ||  ############           shutter here!!
     |____________||  ############
                   |  ############
  <----------------+  ############
      OMG!!! no       ############
   weather stripping  ############
         here!!       ############
    ##########################################################

It's kind of like those cop movies where the S.W.A.T. team rappels down the side of a building, kicks in the glass, and gracefully arcs their way inside onto the 5th story. That's how the rain surged under my window and started flooding my windowsill.

I began to mop it up with a rag, but there was too much water, so I added a small towel. Two small beetles who had been living in an old 10-kilo margarine tub drowned to death as I wrung out water there, flooding their home to keep mine dry.

I was still losing headway on the windowsill, so I opened the window and reached through the rain to pull the shutters closed. That did the trick, and a minute later, I was at rest.

Oh, I then remembered. The conference room is probably a lake by now.

Let me step back a bit, to a boring but important part of the story: I live in a two-floor building owned by the Ministry. On the second floor are my apartment and a conference room; on the first floor are offices and a classroom. It was gutted and totally renovated last year. Generally this means it's all shiny, bright, new, and up to western standards. Generally.

The conference room floods because … well, we're not entirely sure yet, but it probably has something to do with the fact that they only put one coat of sealant on that half of the [flat] roof. For the last few weeks [of dryness, between the last rain and this one] I've been waiting for the contractor to apply a second coat. But the rain beat him here. Sure enough, when I checked, there was a huge, deep puddle in that room.

I don't own a mop, so I decided there was nothing I could do. But the sight inspired me to check for problems elsewhere. Good thing too, because my bedroom looked more or less the same. Practically the whole floor, under the bed and all, was covered in water. I beamed at my good fortune for having cleared every inch of that space a few weeks back. Had this happened any time between February and July, I would've ended up with a lot of very soppy, smelly clothes and blurry-inked papers.

So I put the rag and the towel on tag-team duty. One went down for the soak while the other got wrung out over the tub. Then they switched. It worked, but eventually I got tired of the rag's measly absorptive powers and I retired it. After a while the towel got smug about its efficacy, so to punish it, I stood on top of it and sashayed my way across the tile while singing MGMT's "Kids".

The problem in my bedroom, by the way, was conceptually the same as in my kitchen. Instead of normal windows I have these door-height shutters that, like doors, go all the way to the floor. The bottom half of the "shutter" can't actually move, so it should be sealed to the floor with something like caulking. But it's not — there's just a gap. So raindrops are free to slide down the outside of the shutter and slingshot theirselves onto my floor.

Anyway, all the hand-mopping put me in the mood to write, so I headed downstairs toward the office. But on my way, I noticed water coming in under the balcony door in the hall. It being the balcony door, I decided I could just sweep the water back outside. So I went to the broom closet, picked the rattier of two available brooms, and started whisking the water back to nature.

Except then the broom snapped in half. Or nearly so — one end now dangles from the other by a thread. (The pole is evidently a hollow tube of the thinnest possible aluminum, made to be bought cheaply and used briefly. I don't have much patience for such products, but all the same, I wish I could post a picture of the way I have it stored now. It's kind of post-modern. It's in a closet leaning against a chair, except the chair has a dark rag draped over it, which hides the break in the pole. So glancing up from the ground you see a perfectly normal broom getting lost in a rag, but then the top half is sticking out sideways at an angle that makes no sense. When the housekeeper sees her broken broom, will she find it as funny as I do? No, sadly, but I can still dream of a universe in which she would.)

Thankfully, the other broom had a solid-wood handle — yeeessss! — and I used that to finish the job. Then I scurried back to the computer and wrote a bit (I jokingly call this "live-blogging" because I'm writing as it happens, but without Internet I can't actually post anything today, so maybe it doesn't really count).

Then I went to check on my bedroom, which turned out to be soaked again. Banishing from my thoughts a certain sense of futility, I hand-mopped it again. Then I had the insight that stuffing paper towels in the gaps under the shutters might convince the water to stay outside (hallelujah, it did!).

Then I noticed water dripping in a new place: the stairway. Turned out to be coming from the rooftop landing, which was flooded edge to edge because of — you guessed it — water ninjas sliding down the outside of the door to the roofstop and throwing themselves inside through the gap at the bottom. I brought the good broom, opened the door, and started casting the water out onto the roof. But I had to ask myself if the roof, wet as it already was, deserved more of a burden. The roof is supposed to drain itself — it has pipes for that — but the slopes are all so meager and sloppy that huge lakes still form before the pipes start doing any good.

I decided to speed up the process. So with bare feet, white shorts, a brown dress shirt, and a broom, I marched out into the rain and the night and started sweeping water towards the drainpipes. Without a proper push-broom, I really couldn't do much, but I enjoyed myself just the same. By the time I stopped skipping around and singing ("Singin' in the Rain", Gene Kelly), I was soaked.

From up there, incidentally, I could see a river of muddy water rushing across my front gate. No exit. And by extension, no Sweet 'n' Sour pork that night.

O, curse ye, flawed house!

Most of the time, mind you, I believe that my housing situation spoils me, but then I remember all these nagging half-measures, and they totally cancel out the benefits. I can accept western comforts and conveniences, but then they should work like western comforts and conveniences. For example, I enjoy having nice clean tile floors instead of the dirt or straw I might've ended up with in mainland Africa. But in the U.S., houses are hermetically sealed, so the only thing that gets tile floors dirty there are spills and footprints. Having to worry about the elements is not part of the gameplan. If I have to worry about the elements, I don't want tile floors. I don't want that responsibility.

A friend of mine named Ryan has embraced the tiny-living (small-living, maybe?) movement. The idea is to have only exactly as much stuff and space as you need. The houses these people build cover less ground than most master bedrooms, but everything is contained in that space — a place to sleep, a place to cook, a place to work, a place to live. And a place for all your stuff.

I kind of like the idea, and I think it's what I found so romantic about the old [tin-roof, concrete-floor] farm house that I once expected to be my home. It wasn't fancy, but I loved that there was nothing to take care of. Nothing to diagnose! If an electrical wire fried (few as there were), I'd see the smoke. A roach could run, but there was nowhere for it to hide, no closets, no cracks. Perhaps today there would have been a leak in the roof there, but if so, I would have seen it and put a bucket under it. None of this seeping-through-the-plaster mysticism. Who knows, maybe the whole house is flooded right now! But who cares? It's just cement, and under that, just earth. If I lived there, I would have just picked up my clothes and papers and feet for the night, and waited to sweep away the water at sunrise.

* * *

A few days have passed in which hardly a soul greeted any other soul without mentioning rain. The shiny new paved road here is, in many parts, still shiny, but in other parts coated with mud, or covered with rocks, or both. In several spots there is so much mud and so many rocks that it looks as if the mountain has reclaimed the notch that was cut out of it. But men don't like their roads to be impassable, so they came with their machines the next morning and started excavating the notches anew.

In other news, the air has been washed, every color on the hills is vibrant, and the corn is about to grow.

Life Raft

2009-08-15T19:08:00.000-01:00

Behind my house there is a small road, and at the end of the road is reservoir #4. I like reservoir #4. I sit on its outer wall and dangle my feet over the water, staring at one grove of banana palms as the fronds of another rustle behind me in the breeze. Few other spots here are so green and so calm.

The reservoir is always being filled and always being emptied, so although I never see the same water twice, its height never changes. That's too bad, because its height is measly; it stands more than a meter below the top of the wall. Frogs can't jump that high from water, so when they manage to get themselves inside the reservoir, they usually tire of swimming and die before they get out.

Today it was all interrupted — the green, the calm, and the judgement of frogs — because there were two large pieces of styrofoam floating in the water. From a distance I thought to myself, Silly people, what made you think that styrofoam is biodegradable? I was being facetious, of course. Whoever put it there surely didn't think about it at all. Trash, after all, is something that just disappears.

The careless trash culture doesn't totally explain this one, though. If you drop a wrapper on the ground, maybe you believe that it'll just blow away to the sea and nobody will ever notice. Or maybe you drop it at a soccer field knowing that somebody is paid to pick up trash there. But large pieces of styrofoam in a water tank? What you know is that somebody else will have to deal with it. Maybe even your cousin. But you drop it anyway.

And lo and behold, the frogs thank you! To them, the styrofoam is a precious, life-saving lily pad. When I got there, one adult frog was perched atop the larger piece. After I sat down, another crawled up to beach himself. And across both pieces were dozens of baby frogs no larger than a fingernail, perhaps freshly graduated from tadpolehood and totally unaware that solid ground could be anything but white, slick, crumbly.

Appreciating the frogs' predicament but still bemoaning the litter, I searched for an alternative. Specifically, I searched for something plank-like that the frogs could use as a ramp to get up and out. But the best I found on the ground were gangly, unstable twigs, and I didn't want to start ripping fronds off of trees that weren't mine, so I made peace with the status quo. I read one chapter of my book atop the wall, then one chapter at its base with my back against the stone and the banana palms now looming above me. From there I could see neither the styrofoam nor the farmers passing by with the busyness of work, so my green and my calm returned. Sadly, though, the frogs were out of sight, and I missed them.

Like marching band, but … different

2009-06-13T10:32:00.000-01:00

The annual Festa de Santo Antonio comes to my town, Fajã de Baixo. Kids jump through fire, the Bob Marley crowd pounds drums, and everyone else pumps their hips. It's Cape Verdian tradition, you know.

Bohemian zen quests

2009-04-09T00:03:00.000-01:00

Yesterday I talked to a friend here in Cape Verde who is having some troubles with her boyfriend. As usual, I played the proxy homewrecker. I told her that it's all his fault and that she should find someone better.

That's how my personal philosophy goes. Sure, if you sometimes run into snags with a part of your life (work, romance), don't wig out... fix it. But if you continually run into snags with a part of your life, you need to drop it and move on. Immediately. The moment you know that your lover or job isn't going to make you happy anymore, they're not worth another day of your time. Yeah, change is scary, but the comfort of the familiar is not worth the cost of watching your life whoosh by.

Evidently, though, this depends on you having options.

Not many young men in Cape Verde are more responsible, mature, or motivated than my friend's boyfriend. Dropping him wouldn't mean finding somebody better; it would probably mean having nobody. She doesn't really like her job, either, but because jobs are so scarce here it's a miracle just to have one. That's what you do here: you go to school, you apply yourself, and if you're lucky, you end up doing something that brings home the bacon. If you do that, you've succeeded. Passion for what you do? Pah! That's like winning the lottery. That's God's gift to the few, and you'd be arrogant to expect it for yourself.

It was thus that I found myself confronted by my own privilege. I never realized it before, but the "pursuit of happiness" isn't just utopian fluff; it wasn't written just to sound good. There really is an American dream, and moreover, it is quintessentially American. Our whole society is so meticulously calibrated for it that in the rest of the world, we are synonymous with it. It's an amazing achievement, really.

But in the developing world — even here in Cape Verde, where the people lead decent lives — happiness is something you'd be crazy to pursue. You try for money and companionship instead. If you aimed any higher, you'd have too far to fall.

This troubles me. I want bohemian zen quests for everyone.

Carnaval sta sabe!

2009-03-02T20:53:00.000-01:00

I may look like a snarling hound, but still, Carnaval sta sabe.

a boring little entry about going out

2009-03-01T20:03:00.000-01:00

I moved recently (more on that later, in another entry), and the community where I live now is probably the smallest I have ever called home. It being small, there's not much to do. They blast music and play soccer on the handball court most nights, and many people go to church on Sundays, but "restaurant" here refers to a bar that serves french fries with fried eggs (notice how I used the word "fry" twice to describe one meal? that's a recurring theme with my diet here), and crowds congregate when somebody fills up a water jug. It kind of reminds me of Minnesota sometimes. Nobody has much business, so everybody is a little bit into everybody else's business, and that's the way everybody likes it.

In practice, this means that when I venture outside my house I am usually making a commitment to hours of conversation in a foreign language and — depending on which way I walk — possibly lists of new names to remember. On top of that, I can't even get outside without the keys for deadbolts on two separate doors. So you can imagine that I sometimes shy away from the effort.

But when I don't, the rewards can be stupendous. Yesterday was the day I had agreed to visit my coworker in the neighboring town of Estancia Bras to see their Carnaval parade. I was supposed to head down at about 3pm, but it was nearly 5pm before I got my act together, and when I did I only made it about 50 feet beyond my gate. There I met my neighbor, who (through the misty veil of Creole) seemed to be asking me for advice on vegetables. I deftly eschewed the subject and concealed my ignorance by telling him how beautiful his vegetables look, after which I was invited inside for a beer. More than an hour later, I knew a lot more about the intricacies of local politics and had secured the right to use his stove or borrow his spare gas tank. We parted, but I ran into him again on the main road and he introduced me to a car of other guys who happened to be right there and going my way. I rode with them, and it turned out that they were the party crew: they brought me to the dance floor in Estancia Bras and I got to see them setting up the bar, gassing up the generator, etc. From there we went downhill, to the starting point of the Carnaval parade. People were already gathered and celebrating; a minute later I had my arms around people I'd never met and was singing fragments of a song I'd never heard into a megaphone.

Later, after hearing it sung over and over again by everyone from mothers to pre-teens, I figured out the words. For a big public ballad, I think it's funny.

oji é dia do Carnaval (today is the day of Carnaval)
e grogue é nos pa bebe (and grogue is ours to drink)
oji é dia do Carnaval
e nos ta bai fusca (and we're going to get drunk)

To be fair, there was a longer version with gentler themes on the lips of the dancing children's chorus. But this one, about getting hammered, is what the guy with the microphone sang on the loudspeakers during the parade.

Before the parade, though, I finally made it to my coworker's house. There, I watched a soccer game on TV, ate a delicious dinner, and exchanged drawings of Mickey Mouse with his 7-year-old daughter. My drawing, amazingly, was better than hers (although her brother clearly upstaged me). At some point she snuck under the table and wrote her name on the top of my shoe. I felt the pen scratching there and thought for a moment about trying to stop it, but something about the idea of having my apparel vandalized while I was still wearing it seemed so improbable that I had to see whether it would actually happen.

It did.

Now I'm back in my house, and I just listened to Car Talk for the first time since last May, and I won't deny that it feels really good to rediscover things like NPR that were once such a familiar fixture of my life. I was alone last year, and solitude felt less solitary with a voice telling me stories. But it's slowly occurring to me that those stories are merely prepackaged versions of real life, and if I spend enough time around other people, I can make it my privilege to tell stories of my own. I can see all the colors and subtle details around me, deciding for myself which details are most deserving and which colors are most beautiful.

51 things

2009-02-05T18:59:00.000-01:00

Here's how it works as written by the person who tagged me… I'm not sure where this original project started but I got tagged and decided to continue it by tagging those of you whom I consider to be great friends or I haven't heard from you in a while and would love to hear what you have to say. Hope you'll play along because it would/will be fun hearing from you.

Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

As you might guess from the title, I'm actually going to do two lists: one for Cape Verde (because it's so deserving) and one for me (because I'm supposed to).

1. Last Sunday, I visited a coworker in his town. Had no particular plans, but we hiked for several hours, I nimbly danced my way out of a nasty fall while jumping across rocks, his 7-year-old daughter fell in love with me, I got fed four times (once for cake, which was so delicious even without frosting that I scribbled down the recipe on the back of a receipt), I attended the meeting of the local community association, and I spent quite a bit of time lounging around in his house, where his bottomless baby son [predictably] peed on my lap.

Not wanting to outstay my welcome, I mentioned twice that I should get going. The first time, they said it was too early to leave; "ka bai" (don't go), his daughter told me. The second time, they said it was too late to leave and convinced me to sleep there (his daughter was overjoyed). I woke up the next morning in my slightly pee-caked jeans, used my finger and a little bit of toothpaste to brush my teeth outside, and got fed a fifth time before catching a ride to work in the back of a pickup truck. This is Cape Verde.

2. Cape Verdians wear sandals and flip flops (usually flip flops, and usually cheap plastic ones) in many situations where lesser people would surely perish without boots. Hiking? Flip flops. Hiking down a steep, uneven cobblestone road in the rain with 20 kg of sugar cane balanced on your head? Flips flops. Tilling the field with a sharp pickaxe-like instrument that you pretty much aim at your feet? Consistently flip flops.

3. Flip flops are also a beacon of civilization. Because they're cheap and plastic, they break. Because they break when they're being walked on, and because broken things are trash, and because trash usually becomes litters, you find broken sandals in the places where Cape Verdians walk. And that usually means you're close to the place where they live. Which is awesome news if you've been hiking in nowhereland for two days (ahem) and would really like a bite to eat.

4. Booty-shaking is a science here. Women of all shapes and sizes move their butts in ways that are not physically possible.

5. Cape Verde is poor, but not remotely as poor as mainland Africa. Some people here are hungry some of the time. No one starves. No one goes thirsty; even when it gets really dry, they still sell water for about a penny per gallon… less if you have running water, which is common in larger towns. People here wear nice clothes, hats, jewelry. Youth compete in soccer leagues. Whole families are addicted to a Brazilian soap opera about vampires. Of course, it's unsustainable because it's all built of remittances, but at least for now it's comfortable.

6. That said, nobody in Cape Verde has water heaters. And after six months here, I almost find it hard to believe that everybody in America does. Coming back to hot showers will be eerie and glorious.

7. Recently, it came up in conversation that I like classical music. The 50-year-old man I was talking to nodded, telling me enthusiastically that he also likes classical music and offering to lend me a DVD of one performance that he particularly loved. I agreed, and a moment later his daughter returned with his collection. Flipping past Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, and at least a few Steven Seagal movies dubbed in Portuguese, we came to the piece d'resistance: Shania Twain: Up! Close and Personal (to be fair, Shania was backed up on violin by Alison Krauss).

8. The shortage of resources here extends to names. Across nine islands, there are at least three towns called Tarrafal, and on our island we know about 15 people called João or Bia.

9. We call São Nicolau the "Isle of Man" because no female Volunteers currently serve here, but if you look at it on a map you may notice another way in which it is quite manly.

10. During the day, jobless men play games in the streets — usually a type of mancala without end buckets, but sometimes a card game. I have watched the card game and am convinced that it has no rules. Or at least, no sense of suit, number, or trump. After a while, it actually comes as sort of surprise that they take tricks and play clockwise.

11. On São Nicolau, there are three old ladies who buy fish in Tarrafal, load it into the back of a Hilux (a public-transport pickup truck with benches on either side of the bed), and ride with it to Ribeira Brava to be sold. The road between the two towns is 26 kilometers, and it passes through several smaller towns where these fish ladies have customers. I caught a ride with them one day and saw how they makes their deliveries. About 50 meters before the target house, they take their pipe out of their mouths and start screaming the customer's name: "DILMA! DIIILLLLMAAAAAAAAAA!!" When they get closer, they add, "PEXI NA STRADA!" (fish in the street). Then, with the truck still going full clip, they drop the fish onto the pavement (sometimes in a bag, but it tends to break). The fish, still fresh and slimy, race forward for a bit as if going for one last swim before being cleaned, cooked, and eaten. The fish lady replaces her pipe and takes a puff.

12. Cape Verdians have a meal called "lanche" that happens about the same time as brunch. It consists of coffee, juice, and normally a small assortment of bite-size foods like pizza squares and baked, breaded tuna balls. On a normal day, most people in most jobs seem to do perfectly fine without lanche. But if you're working in the field, or are traveling for business, or are attending a formação (training session), then lanche is for some reason required, and the hours of 10am to 1pm are useless without it.

13. "Packing light" is not part of the lingo here. Travel of even a few days requires a full-size suitcase, and if you're going on a plane or boat, you'll take two. If that plane is headed out of the country, you probably also have a few boxes, and maybe a guitar case or one of those huge old-fashioned trunks that Americans prefer to leave in one place for decades at a time. Again, the fact that Cape Verdians can move all this stuff seems not physically possible.

14. Especially on my island, hospitality here puts midwesterners to shame. If they're eating, some of the food is for you (I just had lanche because it was brought into the room where I had been reading online news, and before I could finish sheepishly shutting down the computer, they were urging me to dig in). If they're going somewhere, you can hitchhike. If you're stuck, then of course you can spend the night. And while you're at it, why don't you come back next Saturday for the baptism/wedding/birthday party?

15. The living room decor here is not unlike what you'd expect to see at a 6-year-old girl's tea party, which adds a strange ambiance to my meetings with male coworkers in such rooms.

16. Sixty-two degrees is considered serious jacket weather, especially in beach towns that are normally much hotter. To my surprise, I'm starting to agree.

17. Cape Verdian folklore, as once passed down through storytelling and now immortalized in printed comic books, centers around a mischievous wolf called Lobu (wolf) Xibinhu. I find the choice of animal strange, since there have never been wolves here. Wouldn't it seem strange to you if Smokey the Bear were actually a giraffe?

18. Native to São Nicolau (and very few other places) is the dragoeiro, or dragon tree. They call it that because its bark takes the form of spindly, slithery, dragon-skin-like tendrils, and because you can extract from it a "dragon blood" (some sort of sap, I suppose) that tastes great when mixed with local liquor. It grows for hundreds of years and is rare enough that you're not allowed to cut them down, which is pretty cool.

19. ~~Soccer~~ Futebol is serious. We have two stadiums with FIFA-size fields on this island alone, and only 16,000 people live here.

20. Everyone here is happy when it rains.

21. Pork is something you reserve, like people used to reserve hams during the holidays. When enough reservations are made, somebody goes and slaughters a pig, and then a kid shows up at your doorstep with a still-warm chunk of leg in a grocery bag.

22. The biggest party of the year is carnival. It lasts for four days but gets talked about for two months in advance, partly because it takes that long to make all the costumes.

23. I've never met anybody here that lives alone.

24. Based on what they know (which is not always representative, but that's another issue), Cape Verdians think America is great. Especially now that we have Obama.

25. Time moves more slowly here. Few events are expected to start until hours after the announced time. New Year's parties, for example, didn't even let people in until 2am. And the sort of man-on-the-street interviews that American national news would cut off after 15 seconds go on for minutes here. And when they have nothing to say, people are content to sit with each other in silence. Again, they'd rather do it together than alone.

27. My favourite number is 27.

25. My favourite way to spell favourite is with a U, wavy red line be damned.

24. I love writing stories, especially when I can weave in a lot of tangential details that relate back to the main thread in obscure ways. Unfortunately, I only write stories that are true. I don't have practice with the other kind. Now that I mention it, actually, I wonder if I ever made up things when I was a kid. I'll have to ask mom.

23. In real life, I never lie. I used to invade people's privacy sometimes, but I didn't like that, so now I don't do that either.

22. Most things that I do are at least tangentially about love, the goal being to increase both the world's capacity for love and the amount of love in it. Peace Corps, for example, has three official purposes, two of which are about finding love for other cultures. The other is about development, and I try to accomplish that in a way that's good for the earth, knowing that we can't share love with others in this life if we have to compete for the resources to keep living.

21. My haircut has never changed. People have tried, but I always end up with what my mother used to call "a little boy's haircut." I think that's the way we actually used to order it at the barber shop in San Diego (which was next to the mediocre but wonderfully-named Royberto's Mexican Food). I'm not sure you'd call it a haircut anymore, though, or even a hairstyle. After seven scissorless months, it's just hair. Some day it will become clear to me that people take me less seriously when I look like this, and in the interest of professionalism, I will shave it down to scalp fuzz. Until then, the mop stays on top.

20. I dearly miss my cat, Sophie.

19. I don't like clubs, or disco dancing in general. In fact, unless it's a Flaming Lips concert, I'm not in favor of much that hurts my ears.

18. I dearly miss my friends and family. Which is exactly what a person in my position is supposed to say, but I wouldn't have expected it from me. I've never been in the habit of reaching out to people. Yet now, when reaching out is harder than ever before, I suddenly see how much I have to gain from it. (You and I need some face time, and we're getting it when I get back.)

17. What I wore to 8th-grade graduation fits me better now than it did then. What a misproportioned young boy I once was.

16. I tend to bake on vacations if the opportunity presents itself.

15. Crushes keep me alive. I may try to give the impression that I have some choice in the matter, but girl, if I like you, I'll actually do anything for you. And I'll be happy about it. Being romantic is the most fun thing I do.

14. I can put a good portion of my foot in my mouth. A friend took a picture once. It looks awful.

13. Fellow Peace Corps volunteers think that I usually wear pants and a short-sleeve button-down, since that's all they ever saw on me during training. U.S. friends know my uniform to be shorts and a T-shirt. Both groups seem to find it hard to imagine me the other way, which I find funny.

12. The silliest song ever sung about me is called "Either Chase," by Sam Spencer.

11. I probably have a bit of an Internet addiction, but I attribute it to the fact that I love learning. In an earlier, age, I probably would have haunted libraries (in fact, at an earlier age, I did — I had a rack installed on my bike specifically so I could strap down books with a bungee cord and schlep them home). Now everything in libraries seems so dated. But they could still teach me something I've wanted to understand for a while: advanced physics, especially relativity and string theory. It'll probably go right over my head, since I was too lazy to take basic physics courses in college… but that, of course, doesn't mean it's not worth trying.

10. I am occasionally interested in teaching, but mostly as an exercise in learning and logic and writing. I like the idea of working hard to understand something complex, then manipulating it into something that sounds simple (if you keep up with my blog, you may remember an old post about this). I believe that most bad teaching is a shortfall in explanation or enthusiasm, and it excites me that both can be remedied.

9. The tallest tale I ever told was about 7'4".

8. I never went to summer camp; when I was a kid, I never asked (even though I watched "Salute Your Shorts"), and my parents never thought to offer. But now I wish I had. Last week, I listened to an episode of This American Life about camp, and it made me outstandingly sad because it reminded me how complete a world you can invent in the company of others, and how much fun it can be to live there, and how much you can care about it. I don't like knowing that inconsequential things are inconsequential. I wanna feel them.

7. I rarely get up later than 8:30, even on weekends. Actually, especially on weekends. It gets so quiet, and I hate to miss that.

6. I'm no good at drawing or dancing, but I enjoy both on occasion (though usually not at the same time).

5. Good food gives me more pleasure than most things. I think about food all the time, and am constantly searching for ways to improve my culinary finesse. This makes me a bit of a food snob, which I find distasteful; but I can't change who I am, so I just try to be nice about it. Besides, we all have our vices. Sometimes dipping your Big Mac in microwaved Velveeta is exactly where it's at.

4. It's a bit early to worry about this, but I don't know where I'll live when I'm back in the states in 2010. Thoughts are on DC, SF Bay area, NYC. Any ideas? I kind of like the people in Missouri, but I don't know what I'd do there.

3. When I was a kid, I believed I could fly. I had memories of doing it.

2. Because computers and Internet are scarce in Cape Verde, almost everything I write here starts out on paper. Item #18 on this list is still true, but on paper you can see that it was originally about a specific person whose name is now scratched out.

1. Of all the wonderful things my mother sent me for Christmas, I love my Oxford dictionary and my new blanket the most.

Unflattering photographs from Christmas and New Year's

2009-01-26T17:30:00.000-01:00

[view larger versions, as a slideshow]

I had the hiccups today

2008-12-12T15:19:00.000-01:00

How funny that a thing like that even exists.

A Short Interim Summary of Where I Am

2008-12-05T10:47:00.000-01:00

More than two months have now passed since I arrived in São Nicolau, and I'm still not living in my permanent house in Fajã. Fortunately, I know where it is — I've visited it many times — and I expect to move in next week.

Of course, if you knew that I've been saying that for the last eight weeks, you might take it with a grain of salt. You might not believe me. Heck, I don't always believe me. But it's true: I'm moving in next week.

The reason, simply, is that I've rested quite enough by this point, and I'm excited enough by the ideas in my head that spending two years on their realization is exactly what I want to do.

Key word: want. When I want something, I make it happen. I wanted to visit my friend in Beijing, so I did. I wanted to ride my bicycle to San Diego, so I did. I wanted to live abroad, and now I do. But for a while I didn't know why; I didn't know what I wanted here. Problem of my life, if you ask me. Don't want enough. Unambitious? Maybe. I remember the words of quiz kid Donnie Smith:

"I have so much love to give … I just don't know where to put it!"

I have enough brains and gusto to achieve nearly anything, but that's the kicker, that nebulous anything. It's too big. Hard to find a part of it that I like. That I want.

So for these last two months — months of trails hiked, books read, meals cooked, and meetings gingerly scheduled but not attended — I've been stuck in my house in Tarrafal largely because I didn't want Fajã badly enough. Agriculture work sounded like fun, but only in the way that it would have been fun to take agriculture courses in college: as a diversion, a sweet first sip from an entirely unfamiliar font of knowledge. As for what I could actually do in the realm of agriculture (besides something hopelessly vague like "improve peoples' lives"), I didn't know. My various quasi-bosses gave me some direction: we had a week of training on post-harvest management, and I just completed another week of training on drip irrigation. Give this knowledge to farmers, they said. Okay, I said, taking responsibility but not ownership. Not wanting.

But slowly, and by now completely, something has changed. I am invested. It's like some extra layer of vision has been switched on: now I can see the problems, and from what I've been taught in the last two months, I can quickly come up with some possible solutions. And most of these solutions are easy. Most of them don't require any appreciable amount of extra money or effort; farmers just have to do things a little differently. Quite often, they don't need technology or new equipment or handouts … they just need knowledge.

Which is exactly why I'm so excited.

I came to Cape Verde (and later, to Tarrafal) to teach basic computer skills. It wasn't what I picked. I asked for environmental work, imagining that I could teach myself about cheap ways to harness renewable energy and then re-teach it to local people. (You know — help save the earth by ensuring that developing nations make progress without walking in the developed world's oily century-old footsteps.) Peace Corps, being the rationalists that they are, decided to put me in a field where I actually already knew something (IT). That made me hesitate. After all, I had applied to Peace Corps largely to get out from behind a computer screen. But I took the job anyway because it involved teaching, which was something I wanted to try, and which might eventually qualify me for totally non-computer work.

I wanted to try teaching, by the way, because I like to play god with ideas. I don't get to do it very often, but I like understanding something so well that I can pull it apart and reconstruct it and even mash it together with something completely different. I love [finding] metaphors. Simplicity arising out of complexity, that's good too.

So when I still thought I would be doing computer classes, I got really excited about teaching the idea of the Internet. I came up with the metaphor of a network of couriers and planned an activity where students would be tied together in a web of strings; they would pass messages to each other and see, simple as shoelaces, how the whole thing works.

I never taught that class. I never solved that knowledge problem; I never finishing playing with that idea. Instead, I got a new job in agriculture. But what I figured out in the last few weeks is that my "new" job is actually my old job in a new field. I'm still teaching. I'm still here to play with ideas. But there are three important differences:

1) The novelty. IT was something I knew well but cared about very little. Agriculture is totally new to me and I care tremendously about learning it because we can't understand humans' relationship to Earth without understanding food supply.

2) The [immediate] impact. Computers could transform the way Cape Verde operates, but since most households here don't have a computer (let alone an Internet connection), that future is probably way more than two years off. I will probably still work on some IT projects in my spare time, but I doubt I'll still be here when the fruits of my labour ripen (assuming I even have success convincing Cape Verdians that the benefits of IT are worth the costs). Agriculture is infinitely more concrete. Change the way you water, and in 3 months you have bigger tomatoes. Change the way you transport those tomatoes, and 50% more of them are intact and salable by the time you get to the market. Instead of throwing them something totally new that they might reject, I get to play around in the realm of what they already know. Feels more like incremental improvement and less like imperialism.

3) Flexibility. I would have taught computers in a classroom. Agriculture, however, entitles me to teach in any way I see fit.

Let me expound on that last difference by giving you a little more background about what I've learned and what I'll be teaching. The first training, in Praia, was on post-harvest management — basically, everything you can do to ensure that agricultural products get from the farm to the consumer in the best condition. This stuff is routine for farmers in the U.S. and other developed nations: rapid cooling after harvest, cold storage, cold transport, humidity control, careful packaging and handling, sorting, grading, etc. Cape Verdians tend to have some understanding of all this stuff, but it is only sporadically reflected in the way they actually do agriculture. They complain about diseased plants, but fail to cull them from their fields to prevent further infections/infestations. They constantly pour tomatoes like liquid from one oversize bin to another, seeing that the tomatoes look fine immediately afterward but not realizing that bruises will appear a day or two later. Addressing oversights like these would allow them to sell much more of their produce at the market (instead of throwing it away because it's bad) without ANY extra water, land, or labor … if only they knew.

Of course, there are some variables nobody knows for sure: how much water and what kind of soil, for example, are best for a 3-month-old papaya tree? Hard to say. Fortunately, a government-sponsored organization called INIDA has research-based Cape Verde-specific guidelines for questions like these on nearly every plant that's grown here. The information is published in the local print language (Portuguese). I've seen the book. Unfortunately, not many farmers know it exists, even fewer have it, and even if they had it I'm not sure they'd get the information out of it very easily.

So my job, as I see it, is to make this existent information accessible. That means teaching, which is cool, but it also means advocacy. This is where the flexibility part comes in: to make sure that all these best practices get into the minds and fields of farmers who would otherwise keep committing the same oversights again and again automatically, I have to get their attention. Maybe that means creating and handing out easy-to-read info brochures. Maybe that means putting ideal fruit storage temperatures on posters. Maybe that means inviting everyone in Fajã to a demonstration farm and serving them free food. I don't know yet, but I get to play around with it. I get to pull apart, reconstruct, and recombine these ideas with my own ideas until I find something that actually does achieve that mercilessly vague goal of "improving peoples' lives."

And that's exciting. I want that.

Soft Cranberries

2008-12-05T10:19:00.000-01:00

Just about an hour ago, I was waiting for a van next to the Shell station. A red one came towards me, but stopped about 10 meters short. That's not unusual — van drivers often wait around for people or things. What was unusual was that this driver didn't look at anybody, or call out to anybody, or honk, or leave his van. He just sat there. I looked away, and when I looked back again he was yawning in a huge, goofy sort of way. His eyes were moving in directions I didn't think possible. Not wanting to stare, I turned away for another 10 seconds or so. When I looked back, he had started shaking violently. It ramped up and he went rigid, toes to the floor and head to the ceiling, positively quaking across the front seat. I started edging toward him at that point, not knowing what to do. Thankfully, another man and a woman noticed. As the epilectic was going limp and sliding sideways onto the passenger's seat, the male onlooker opened the driver's door and started to move the driver's body. The van slid forward a bit, which was when I opened the passenger's door to jump in and set the parking brake. The other onlooker got to it before I did, then asked me to help pull the driver around to face upward. There was a puddle of frothy spit and a bit of blood on the seat next to his mouth. The onlooker started pulling his legs and I started lifting his shoulders; I navigated my way over the shifter and then feared for a moment that I would drop this man headfirst onto the street. Thankfully, someone from the Shell station came over and gave us a hand. We carried the body — which had ceased its tremors — across the street and almost set it down in the dirt, but then somebody gave us the better idea (which, in retrospect, should have occurred to all of us) of laying him across the back seat. So we did, and as we did, another van stopped behind us. Its driver got out, helped us close the sliding door with the unconscious man's legs inside, and took the wheel. The onlooker rode along in the back.

They went away to the hospital, and I stood there, waiting for a van next to the Shell station.

The Summit of São Nicolau

2008-11-10T13:25:00.000-01:00

Mid-morning yesterday, two Bretts and I — stomachs full-to-bursting with hash browns — set out from Brett's sea-level home toward Monte Gordo (Mount Fat, as I translate it). Five short hours and many cows/splinters later, our surprisingly-manly selves reached its breathtaking 1,312 m (4,304 ft) peak.

I know that may not sound very high if you're from Colorado or Nepal, but you have to remember that we're on an island. So from 1,312 m we actually saw Fogo (Cape Verde's active volcano, part of the distant southern archipelago), and the visible ocean stretched more than a hundred miles in every direction around us.

(Ok, so it was cloudy in the north, but that was cool too.)

On my side

2008-11-04T14:32:00.000-01:00

Drunk people will come up and ramble to you just about anywhere, and Cape Verde is no exception. I've had my fair share of encounters here, and most were fairly uneventful experiences. Today was different.

I was at the beach, sitting under a little grass shelter not unlike the one at Wind 'N Sea in San Diego. I was reading Everything is Illuminated, a beautiful book. The shelter, which covers some pull-up bars and cement blocks that serve as exercise equipment, was being used by one of the local youth when a lanky man in his middle years walked up to me and greeted me ebulliently.

Over the course of the next hour, he identified himself alternately as Ranealson or Richard, explained that he has abnormally sharp front teeth either because he is a lion or a vampire, and mentioned several times that he wishes he had a time machine so he could travel back to the year of his birth (1973) and change some things. When he realized that I look like Harry Potter (air-ee potta!), he pointed out that I could use magic to power his time machine. I told him that he should seek help from the church, but he was pretty sure that they don't want his kind. We debated at length the differences between Zeus, God, and love, eventually settling at the conclusion that they are all the same thing. Several times, while pointing either at his heart or the spotted bend in his left arm and repeating the name "Ra," he knelt down on the sand to draw the Eye of Providence. Most of his sentences were built from some combination of Creole, Spanish, and English, as if he'd learned some of each but not enough of any particular one.

I could tell that the exercising youth was watching us (and trying to hold in his laughter), but he left before it was entirely clear that Mr. 1973 wasn't asking me for money, so it's possible that he was laughing at me for being naïve.

Thankfully, another witness — this time a young boy — joined us before the conversation was over; he came to sit with us under the grass roof, watching us and smiling.

I finally decided to cut things off by walking away; Mr. 1973 walked a few feet with me, shook my hand one last time, and asked one last time for English classes (he promised to bring his own pen). I cheerfully said "no" and then bid him farewell. We started walking in opposite directions. After a few seconds, I turned back to face the young kid and shrugged with my palms toward the sky — as if to say, "I have no idea what just happened." He smiled and shook his head in agreement.

This kid didn't think I was a hapless branco. We enjoyed Mr. 1973 together. Today, at least for a minute or two, I fit in here.

When to stop trading up

2008-10-29T11:47:00.000-01:00

Just a handful of weeks before I left for the Peace Corps, my mom helped me move everything out of my Philadelphia apartment. We made it a two-day trip, the middle of which was a hotel in a random Virginia freeway-town. The girl at the front desk was about my age, with dirty blond hair and bright eyes. Or maybe a little younger, and to be clear, only the eyes themselves were bright. The skin around them looked tired.

When mom asked her where we should park the truck, she walked outside with us to point out the best place. On the way, mom explained that I was moving home because I was about to leave the country to serve in the Peace Corps.

I don't think the girl said anything at first, but I'll never forget what she said a minute later, out of the blue, while my mom was moving the truck:

"You're doing what most people can only dream about doing."

And then she left — back into the hotel, maybe for the rest of her life.

Oh, how I wanted to take her with me just then.

And now I'm here, and ironically, practically everyone I meet would trade practically everything for a life like hers. Don't get me wrong — I appreciate modern civilization. There's fun in all this possibility. But it leaves too much room for aspiration. With all these choices, you assume there must be a better way to live your life. Which can make it impossible to appreciate the good in what you already have … to consider that it might actually be good enough. That a more ignorant version of you would be satisfied.

Sure, some people really do have it bad. Hundreds of millions of them do. And it's okay for them to look upward. But the top few billion of us could stand to have a slightly less infinite set of opportunities. (By the way, I am in no way an exception. In fact, I'm worst-of-breed, because I voluntarily left a good American lifestyle to come over here and work for pennies … I'm so overwhelmed by choice that I can't even tell which ones are improvements! If I had any sense, of course, I would have simply married the girl at the hotel, moved to California, and called it quits.)

The art of not paying $200 for tea

2008-10-18T14:40:00.000-01:00

Today I once again negotiated the price down to zero.

Well, sort of.

Sometime after waking up, I found myself in the main prasa of Ribeira Brava, where all the vans congregate to pick up pasengers for destinations across the São Nicolau-ian landscape. Not knowing which van was which, I asked the first dirver I saw where I could find something headed for the aiport. He promptly offered to take me there himself for 500 escudos — in other words, he gave me the opportunity to fork over an entire day's food allowance so that me and my backpack could have a 16-passenger space to ourselves. I kindly explained to him that there would be other passengers on the plane with me, and that since Ribeira Brava is the town closest to the aiport, there would surely be a van of them with a spare seat for me. I'm not sure what words he said in response, but his body language seemed to suggest that everyone else would actually be teleporting to the airport and I'd be wise to accept his charity van while I still could.

The next dudes I talked to were also drivers, but they were honest enough to a) acknowledge the existence of airport shuttles, and b) point me to the road where I could find them. On my way there I ran into a teacher I knew who confirmed both the road and the righteousness of my indignation at the 500-escudo price. Unfortunately, I'm still a little timid abotu flagging down vehicles taht may or may not be the right one, so I think I missed a few that I could have used... and the teacher, although still nearby, was not helping.

When the 500-escudo driver passed by in his still-empty van and offered to take me to the airport for the same silly price, I told him I'd keep waiting. He didn't say more, but as he drove off his body language seemed to suggest that he was pretty sure he could milk me for even more money later when I got desperate.

I started to worry that he might actually be right, but just then a father of the church (who was the spitting image of a Californian padre... nearly bald, brown robes, the whole nine yards) stopped by to talk to me and pointed to the right van when he saw it.

So I hopped on and went to the airport. On the way tehre, I asked teh merrily-dressed man next to me how much it would cost. He didn't know. So I waited to see what everyone else paid when they got off... but then nobody did. "Was this pre-arranged?" I asked myself. Was the driver doing them a favor? Was this his family? Before the answers to any of those questions became clear, he drove away. And there I was, at the airport, on time, for free.

If the price-gouging bozo driver had been there just then, my body language might have been something along the lines of, "Awwwwwwwwwww, snap!"

As American as…

2008-09-30T09:47:00.000-01:00

Brett and I live next door to an old lady named Olivia. Whenever we leave the house, she sees us, because for most of the day she sits on a stoop across the street. She beckons us to come over. Sometimes it's just to say hello, but usually she also wants to know:

Have we eaten breakfast/lunch/dinner (depending on the time of day)?
Are we about to go dancing to find pequenas (girlfriends)? If not, why not?
Are we interested in buying this lovely eggplant/lettuce/whatever?

Yesterday it was #3 — her friend had a bunch of fresh apples from the orchard. Except I'm not exactly sure they came from the orchard, since they look just like the apples I used to buy on Santiago (the main island). Probably they're from Spain or something like that. But I bought a bag of them anyway, because I wanted to make a pie.

Not too bad, eh? Especially for my first time making crust. That said, the taste was only about 80% as good as the gold standard (my mother's pie crust). It was flaky, but not flaky enough. Pie experts, do I need more butter or flour or something else?

Shamless solicitation for care packages

2008-09-27T14:17:00.000-01:00

Some of you have asked about sending me care packages. Specifically, you've asked what I want. Well, there are two things I clearly lack here:

real, grade A dark amber maple syrup
spices

I will always be happy to receive either of those things, except if you buy spices in a supermarket. Supermarket spices are way too expensive. Don't buy me supermarket spices. Unfortunately, I can't easily tell you a good place to buy good spices at a good price, but I know they exist. For example, I think there's a store called "World Cost Plus Markets" or something like that exists in certain cities and sells many exotic foods cheaply… you can, for example, buy half a pound of curry powder for 88 cents or something ridiculous like that. And Costco might have some good offerings. And Emmanuelle (or anyone else living in a city), I know you can go to an outdoor farmer's market and get spices cheaply there.

I don't think [dark] chocolate will survive the trip, but somebody should probably try just to make sure ;-). And things like gummy candy travel just fine. Or if you have a book you think I should read or a movie you think I'd like, sure, send it on over! I also have way too few photos, especially of family. Beyond that… I dunno. Make something up. Write "hello" on the back of a receipt. I'll still smile. :-D

Transition to Service

2008-09-27T14:12:00.000-01:00

A lot has changed in the past week: my status, my job, and in more ways than one, my location.

For one thing, I got sworn in last Saturday. I am no longer a trainee — I am officially a Peace Corps Volunteer. Huzzah! There was a nice ceremony with speeches by the U.S. Ambassador and local political notables. All of us spruced up real nicely — dresses, long-sleeved shirts, ties, a few suits — and then proceeded to drench ourselves in sweat. I was one of four people chosen by my peers to talk to the press (in Creole), and despite my gross state, I had every intention of fulfilling my obligation… but evidently I left the auditorium too quickly and missed the microphones. Oops! It's just as well, though, because I was able to save half a [moist, delicious, perfect] chocolate-chip cookie for one of the other [more responsible] interviewees.

After that we went to Praia, and I spent the next two nights in a hotel waiting for a Monday flight to São Nicolau. And what a glorious two nights they were! Air conditioning! CNN! My first hot shower since I left Boston! Best of all, we had nothing to do. Nothing to learn, no forms to fill out, no people to meet. I woke up late, went to a cafe, and ate a huge piece of chocolate cake as I watched chairs flying across the patio outside (a very windy rainstorm was just rolling in). During the day, we swam in the pool at the U.S. Embassy. At night, we had schwarma, which is something like a cross between gyros and California burritos. All in all, a delightfully lazy Sunday with me and my swear-in buddies.

The next morning, Brett S, Nelson, Brett B, and I (the São Nicolau crew) woke up at 5:30 to catch an 8am flight on TACV, Cape Verde's national airline. TACV is interesting. Here are some reasons why:

they cancel/delay flights if there aren't enough passengers. This happens in the U.S. too, but evidently it's pretty routine here (several of our peers got pushed back a day).
this isn't exactly a TACV issue, but airports on various islands can be closed for weeks at a time. The one on Fogo was closed for a while and reopened just a day before swear-in, depriving several new volunteers of what would have otherwise been a very memorable 7-hour boat ride (and possibly a much longer wait for the boat to actually leave).
the checked baggage weight limit is 20 kilograms, or about 45 pounds. Not that different from the U.S., except that it is only a weight limit (not a bag-count limit), and you pay for each extra kilo. In other words, if you had five bags and they were all 3kg, you'd be fine (which is kind of nice). But most of us were closer to 55kg — in other words, 35kg over limit, which costs 7,000 escudos (about a hundred bucks). We gave them a bit of sob story about being poor volunteers, and we got our overage knocked down to 20kg per capita (4,600 escudos). Still double our PC allowance for excess baggage charges, but not bad! Unfortunately…
We couldn't pay the charges (or, in turn, get our boarding passes) before our 8:00 departure time, because you can only make payments in the ticketing office, and that doesn't open until 8:00. Thankfully, our flight ran late, so we had time. In fact, I think TACV is the kind of airline that just keeps waiting until all the passengers show up on the runway. So, possibly, it ran late because we had to pay for our baggage. Now distill that down to a principle: a passenger can guarantee that an 8:00 flight will be delayed merely by showing up with overweight baggage. Crazy, huh? Unless, of course, TACV just decides not to charge you, which is also possible. We think that one of our friends on a 6:30 flight got away free for that very reason, and we subsequently talked about scheduling future flights in a way designed specifically to avoid baggage fees…

Anyway, that's TACV. The lovable rascal.

At least they got us to São Nicolau, and I couldn't be happier. This island is gorgeous. We saw absolutely no sign of human habitation before the plane crossed over the airport fence. There wasn't much to be fenced in, either: a landing strip on a high, grassy plain nestled between two mountain ranges, with a terminal building smaller than most train stations. A long, lonely road led over rolling green hills into the quaint alpine-esque villa of Ribeira Brava. We continued along the island's one main road, hugging the coast as we made our way around the cloud-steeped peak of Monte Gordo. On the far side, we climbed it, cruising through the fertile valley of Fajã and then wending back and forth on ivy-lined switchback roads to get to the top.

On the other side, it was a different world again: drier, browner, rockier. By the time I got to Tarrafal — the beach-town that is currently my home — I could hardly believe that we were on the same island. But that's how it is: the moisture rises up from the ocean on the north side, and it is trapped there by the peak of Monte Gordo. Here in the southwest, it's like a desert. The houses in town are painted in bright colors, and the cobblestone streets are scantily shaded by palms or the occasional acacia tree. It gets hot, and in the heat of the day, the only thing moving is the breeze (or me, if I'm rushing around trying to get our water turned on). Which, to be fair, has a certain charm. I like this lazy, slow feeling. I like that people are relaxed here. Everyone is happy to talk to us (me and my roommate, Brett Beach), even if only to ask whether we have girlfriends yet. And the youth center where I'm supposed to work is nice and new; the people on the staff seem full of energy and understanding. From what they told me, it sounds like I'd be free to pursue my own projects and do what I feel is important, when I feel like doing it.

But I'm not working there, and I won't be living here.

Much as it breaks my heart to leave Brett (who has so far been an amazingly good roommate), there is an even better opportunity for me elsewhere on São Nicolau. Just a few days before swear-in, Aguido (the man who's kind of, sort of, a little bit like my boss… he runs the PC/Cape Verde small business program, of which I am a part) told me that a community group in Fajã had been asking for a PC volunteer for a while and had only just recently found suitable housing. Obviously, he said, it was too late to move straight there, but he asked me to check it out and see whether I liked it. Fajã, as I mentioned, is a lush green fertile valley… through the use of drip irrigation and other improved agricultural techniques, they're trying to turn it into the breadbasket of São Nicolau. To do that, however, they need to convince farmers that drip irrigation is worth the startup costs, and then they need to help those farmers secure financing. Jobless youth in the community also need guidance: they need AIDS/HIV education, English lessons… they need a place to congregate, and something fruitful to do there. And who better to lead the way to all that good stuff than a savvy Westerner like me? (so they think, anyway)

I met the Association (the community group that requested me) and walked around Fajã on Wednesday. And as it so happens, I love it. Beyond being beautiful, it's also a smaller community than Tarrafal, so it should be easier to meet everyone and feel like I've been integrated… to make close friends. That, in turn, should make it easier to accomplish stuff, and what I'm accomplishing will be more interesting anyway (In Tarrafal, I would have been primarily teaching computer classes, which gives my students access to skilled jobs, which eventually increases wealth and therefore increases the ability of local people to buy the [imported] things they need. In Fajã, I'll be helping to increase agricultural output, which increases wealth now — within a matter of months, anyway —— and decreases dependency on imported food.)

The best part, however, might be the house. Here in Tarrafal, our house is on a street corner. It's connected to another house, across from another house, etc. We have access to a huge, very nice rooftop space, but from where we actually spend most of our time (i.e., inside the house) there are no good views: it's either the street or the cement "kintal" that is our back yard.

The house in Fajã… well, it needs some work. It's what travel brochures might call "classic" or "rustic" Cape Verdian living. No insulation (you look up and see roof tiles), no sinks, no shower. Surprisingly, it does have electric lights, a fridge, and a gas stove… but the house is otherwise little more than shelter. That's what makes it so great: it's simple. And the setting is unbelievable: it's by itself on acres and acres of farmland, all of which is currently occupied by corn but which will be mine to use as I see fit. In the middle of a sloping valley with the peak of Monte Gordo rising up behind me and a gleaming swath of ocean visible below, I will be able to grow my own food and [possibly] raise my own chickens. Henry David Thoreau would be proud. Oh, and the air there! It feels so good just to breathe it!

So in two weeks-ish, I'm going there. I have to wait because the Association is going to spruce it up (new/added doors, windows, screens, sinks, showerhead, toilet, flooring). After that — after all this interminable waiting — the next two years of my life finally really truly begin.

ET and other unexplained Peace Corps phenomena

2008-09-21T10:21:00.001-01:00

Hey, friend.

You haven't been asking questions, but all the same, I feel like I haven't explained this whole Peace Corps thing too well. You know that it's an agency of the U.S. government. You know that they've sent me abroad to Cape Verde, which is in AFRICA (for some reason it really amuses me a lot that you write that in all-caps when you address letters to me). You know that I'm a Volunteer… that I'm here to help people.

But what, you wonder, am I actually doing?

Some background: for most of my life I knew nothing about the Peace Corps. Subconsciously, I think I assumed that it was part of the military. When I found out —oh so long ago — that my friend Gwen was considering the Peace Corps, I actually looked it up on the Internet and found out that it's an independent government agency dedicated to community service. Much better! So I attended an info session at my college, where — coincidence of coincidences, in retrospect — I met a returned Volunteer who had served in Cape Verde. After procrastinating for about a year, I submitted my application online. A few months later, they interviewed me in New York City. I said I wanted to work with youth. They said I was good with computers. I said I wanted to help the environment. They said I was good with computers.

A month later, they nominated me to teach computers to youth "somewhere in Africa." Fair enough. I can still do environment stuff on the side. So I jumped through medical clearance hoops for the next three months (thank goodness I had health insurance). Despite some dire concerns about my very mild cat allergies, they passed me and invited me to Cape Verde. My initial reaction was "sweeeet! paradise!" After that, "but will I really feel like I'm doing Peace Corps if I live right next to the ocean?"

After that, "sweeeet! paradise!" one more time.

I quit my wonderful job with RecycleBank in Philadelphia, moved home to North Carolina for six weeks, and then — on July 14, 2008 — began the Peace Corps.

It's a two -year commitment. Except that it's not exactly two years, and it's not exactly a commitment. The initial 2-3 month training period (called Pre-Service Training, or PST) is in addition to two years of service, so you actually stay abroad for closer to 27 months. And since this isn't the military, you aren't legally bound to stay if you change your mind. They'll even pay for your plane ticket home. But of course, they do everything they can to convince you to stay, because it's their money and their reputation on the line.

It may or may not be intentional, but part of the pressure to stay lies in the fact that they talk about Early Termination (ET) as if it were some sort of disease or social malady. Consider the following:

Let me tell you a little story: there once was a girl named Suzie who always treated her mother nicely, always did her homework, and always took a bath at the end of the day after her soccer games. But when Suzie moved to a new school, she decided to quit soccer. Without healthy friends to guide her way, she began to hang out with the wrong sort of people — girls that liked to park in cars with boys, and girls that smoked. They said school was a waste of time. Pretty soon, Suzie listened to them and dropped out. Now Suzie lives in her parents' basement.

Sounds like a public service announcement from 1956, right? Well, just change a few key words and phrases, and you'll hear the way our trainers talk about ET:

Let me tell you a little story: there once was a Volunteer named Chase who always cooperated with his counterpart, always did what he was asked, and always took a bath at the end of the day after his soccer games. But midway through his service, a new Volunteer named Mau moved in with Chase. Mau was the wrong sort of person — the kind that joins Peace Corps just to party, and complains that grassroots development is a waste of time. Pretty soon, Chase became so disillusioned that he ETed. Now Chase lives in his mom's lakefront basement.

Okay, so it's not exactly like that (my mom's still working on the lakefront basement). But ET is definitely one of the biggest elephants in the room. It doesn't help that for the past few years, the ET rate among Volunteers in Cape Verde has been a little higher than the global average. People get scared. People make guesses. Heck, I made guesses. But we were all wrong! We've lost just two people (an amazing, wonderful married couple with — sadly — a medical issue). Everybody else not only stayed but — as of today — graduated from training. All of us will swear in as Volunteers on Saturday. From what I hear, 100% is kind of rare, so I'm proud of us. Hopefully everyone will take this as a sign that they have the strength to persevere and we'll buck the trend of our predecessors. For all I care, that ET elephant can just go back to the savannah where he belongs. We're here to stay. For [to do] good.

But I'm getting ahead of myself! Back to the beginning…

It all starts with something called "Staging," which lasts for two days and happens in a U.S. city (usually Washington, D.C., but it can vary for logistical reasons; Boston has direct flights to Cape Verde, so my Staging was in Boston). Peace Corps flies you to Staging and puts you in a hotel room there. It is at Staging that you meet your training group — the people who will be your peers, your allies, and your best friends during Pre-Service Training (PST). My training group had 29 (now 27) people, and Peace Corps/Cape Verde does a PST every summer, which creates a staggered rotation (about half the Volunteers leave/get replaced every year). Other countries do it differently depending on their needs; because Cape Verde is so small, we have the fewest Volunteers of any country in Africa. Training groups at other posts usually have closer to 50 Trainees and "intakes" (as they're called) can happen more than once a year.

Anyway, after Staging (which touches on safety, cultural sensitivity, and logistics), you fly to your country. That's when PST officially begins.

Again, this varies by country ("post," in PC lingo), but we spent our first three days doing orientation in a dormitory in the capital city of Praia. It was mostly medical/culture/safety training, but it also gave us the first fragments of the local language. Which was important, because after that we moved straight to home-stay families in an array of communities surrounding a smaller city called Assomada. This is what Peace Corps calls Community-Based Training (CBT); you come to a central point (in our case, Assomada) once a week for technical sessions on health/teaching/whatever, and you spend the rest of the time learning the language by living with a local family in a smaller town. They place 2-6 trainees and one Language-Culture Facilitator (LCF) in each town. The LCF gives formal language lessons all day long, four days a week. You are always learning. And it is exhausting.

But like I said, it's over. I'm going to my site on Monday — to my new home on São Nicolau.

The first three months there will be, in some ways, the opposite of PST. Not only will I not go to any classes, but I probably won't really go to work regularly or start any projects. According to the Peace Corps, the only thing I'm supposed to do with that time is go outside and meet people.

For three months.

That probably seems like a long time to you. It seems like a very long time to most Volunteers, too. After all, most of us joined the Peace Corps because we're starry-eyed and idealistic and want to make the world a better place; it hurts us to just sit around not do anything. Even if we weren't so antsy, we're still Americans — we're used to meeting people on day one and starting work on day two. And yet Peace Corps expects us to continue twiddling our thumbs months after any other program would have let us do our work and go home.

But this is deep, deep PC philosophy, and it's what makes Peace Corps so different from just about every other international volunteer organization. We are here to help people help themselves. In fact, it's probably kind of misleading to say that I won't be doing much work for just the first three months. If I'm successful, I won't be doing much real work for the entire two years! My role is to convince Cape Verdians that the work is important, and that they can do it. If they need help, I can answer their questions — that's why I came here with technical skills. But I can't do it for them.

Well, okay, I could. But that's what other organizations do. Other organizations come to Africa to drop off food and water. Other organizations donate money to build a school, or send a consultant out for a week to set up a computer lab. But then the food gets eaten, the school's roof starts to rot, and the computers die prematurely because the locals don't know how to take care of them. And then what? Another helicopter of food? Another crate of computers?

In some minds, the answer is yes. They're poor, we're rich. They can't provide for themselves, so we provide for them. As long as there's a gap, we keep passing stuff over it.

But there are a few problems with that. First of all, it creates dependency. The poor come to expect that the rich will always give, and they stop trying to fend for themselves. Subsistence farmers, for example, stop farming. In time, the poor may cease to believe that they can fend for themselves; they become disempowered. That is especially unfortunate because most of these "needy" communities actually have immense untapped resources, either in terms of physical assets (arable land, tourist-attracting natural beauty, etc.) or human capital (i.e., people with skills — or free time to learn a skill — that aren't currently contributing). Other organizations tend to ignore these resources.

Peace Corps Volunteers find those resources. That's what the first three months are about. After that, we spend the other 21 months mobilizing those resources … in other words, getting the community to take advantage of itself. Occasionally, yes, this involves aid from outside sources. For example, maybe my community can only pay for half of that new computer lab and the UN has to pitch in for the rest. Okay. But if locals write the grant proposal, then they'll be able to do it again after I leave. And if locals set up the lab (perhaps after I've told them how to do it), they'll take ownership. They'll maintain it properly, it will last longer, and the Western dollars that other organizations toss around so freely will stretch that much further.

More importantly, by making the local people work to improve their own quality of life, we empower them. They come to understand that the dichotomy between haves and have-nots is pliable; even in areas where we haven't given them direct training or guidance, they begin to take action. At that point, the change is sustainable. It will continue, even after we leave and even if we never come back.

And boy, doesn't it make you feel so warm and fuzzy inside? :-)

By the way, I don't mean to sound self-righteous or evangelical. The Peace Corps is just one (unfortunately small) fish in a vast sea of humanitarian crusaders, all of whom have good intentions and most of whom actually do significant good. I acknowledge that. But Peace Corps is what I'm doing, so I have to understand it … and because its philosophy is so unusual, it has taken me a while to pull it apart. Any tinge of evangelism in what I've written here is merely a side effect of the fact that I like what I am finding.

And that's good!

Flashlight Assassin

2008-09-19T18:04:00.000-01:00

If you’ve seen Wall•E, you probably remember that Wall•E’s only friend on Earth was a cockroach —the implication being that everything else died out after mountains of trash turned the planet into a toxic wasteland.

Wall•E’s second-to-last friend: quite likely, a mosquito.

Despite the fact that I’m on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that receives mere inches of rain every year, the anopheles mosquito manages to breed and thrive here. During the rainy season (July to September), the mosquitoes go to town on anyone not wearing long pants and a sweater. If that’s you and you’re white, you end up looking like you have chicken pox. And you don’t have to wonder whether other people notice: you know they do, because everyone and their sister stops in their tracks to recommend remedies or repellents.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the rainy season is also the hot season, so you can’t just close your window to keep the mosquitoes out (because then you can’t sleep). So you open your window, and they stream in, and you wake up all poxy in the morning.

When I was in Canada, I at least had the satisfaction of killing the mosquitoes that bit me. I’d start to feel the prick about halfway through their feast, and my hand would lurch forward to snuff them out — to my delight, just a little bit faster than they could skedaddle. But here in Cape Verde, the mosquitoes are either too small or too subtle to be detected by touch. If you feel something, it’s the red bump that shows up 10 long minutes after the culprit is gone.

During the night, I at least manage to protect myself pretty well with my big green Peace Corps mosquito net. But as I learned early on, it does me no good if any of the bloodsuckers have already managed to sneak their way in. So when I go to bed at night (or go to the bathroom to take a shower), I perform an inspection. I am always interested in the same two things:

Mosquitoes?
Where??!!

The best way to answer #1 is by listening. Even a single relatively small mosquito makes a distinct buzzing sound when it flies. Assuming I hear something, I whip out my trusty Mag-Lite and lie in wait for the kill.

The flashlight, however, is a problem.

Don’t get me wrong: I love my flashlight. It’s a lot brighter than the ceiling light, I can turn it on easily in bed, I can direct the beam … and it’s the only option in the bathroom in the mornings, since the electricity doesn’t come on until about 10am. But since I have no way of strapping it to my head, it uses up a hand. And how in the world am I supposed to kill a mosquito with just one free hand?

As it turns out: like a ninja!

It begins like a prison breakout. My flashlight beam scans side to side and up and down, scouring every inch of my surroundings to the find the culprit behind the buzz. It may take 5 seconds or 5 minutes, but sooner or later, the mosquito careens into view. Immediately, I lock on, following it with light wherever it goes. Silently, expectantly, my left hand reaches out. As I wait for the mosquito to wander haplessly into range, I flex my fingers into a claw. The tension makes my palm sweat; smelling that warmth — that meal — the greedy mosquito falls for my trap. And all of a sudden, it’s quiet: I’ve pounced, I’ve clenched my fist, I’ve opened it again, and I’ve smirked in satisfaction at the bloody, mangled little pile of twig-legs inside.

Take that, P. falciparum!

How do I turn this thing on?

2008-09-07T12:54:00.000-01:00

So, I haven't been posting stuff here. Mostly it's because I don't have time or Internet access. That will change in two weeks, when I go to my site on the island of São Nicolau.

But it's also because I didn't know what this blog was for. That first [very long] post was a roundabout decompression of everything I was thinking and feeling during the first few weeks. Writing that kind of stuff is important for me personally, but for a blog, it's kind of long and tedious and hard to digest. Also, I have a better idea.

The very reason I joined the Peace Corps, I'm realizing, is that I wanted to explore who I am. That mostly means trying out a lot of new things: working with kids, teaching, cooking by instinct (instead of by measuring cup), swimming frequently, playing an instrument, etc. There's a lot of cool stuff I want to do. And I think you should know about it.

So, coming up shortly: my meeting with the President of the Camara (the Camara is the basic unit of local government here, sort of like a county), my hiking trip to a waterfall, and my thoughts on teaching computers without using computers (it's actually easier!).

As for all my thoughts and opinions and feelings... well, I'll still be happy to share some of that, but there'll be less of it on the blog. The best place for that is in letters, which I've already started exchanging with some of you. I love letters! You should see me (or any other Peace Corps Volunteer) when I get a letter. I basically jump up and down giggling like a little girl. And don't even me started on care packages... those things are worth their weight in dark chocolate.

(hint, hint ;-)

That said, I don't have an address right now while I'm waiting to go to island, but I'll announce when I do have one and will make it available to anyone who wants it. And keep sending me yours! I can always be reached (eventually, anyway) at carchase at gmail dot com.

Some pictures for all those words

2008-08-07T17:52:00.001-01:00

I found a USB cable in a chinese loja for about $5. Therefore, pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/carchase/CapeVerdePreServiceTraining

Enjoy! (I'll add more there as I take them and have time to post them)

The Wedding

2008-08-06T18:38:00.000-01:00

whooooooooooooooossh...

I've never studied abroad, but my friends tell me that you know you're really getting the hang of the language when you start dreaming in it. Considering that I've only been immersed for a week, I feel pretty good about Cape Verdian Creole (Kriolu), but I'm still dreaming about home. Last night my friends Sam, Adrian, and I went to the Concord Mills mall and were reprimanded by loudspeaker for shoplifting costumes (thus spoke the Ma Bell voice: "Please note that while you are encouraged to try on costumes, you may only do so to check the fit. Playing in costumes, especially outside the store, is strictly prohibited."). Alas, we were having too much fun to care what Ma thought of us. I remember being dressed as Captain Kirk and Sam made a rather sporting NASCAR driver. Random, I know. But isn't it marvelous to see the creativity of an idle mind? Two nights ago, in another dream, my mother handed me a giant, translucent Fedex envelope that contained a Fedex box that contained a returned return from Amazon.com. Evidently, they refused the return because I failed to send back one of the advertisements that they had included in the original shipment -- those jerks! Later that night, I was watched by the secret service as I left the wedding of some bigshot political celebrity. I managed to escape their hawk-like (eagle-like?) surveillance long enough to rendezvous (underground-revolutionary-style) with some other wedding guests who, like me, were trying to get to the after-party somewhere near exit 5 in Charlotte but didn't quite know the way.

BANG!

It had not occurred to me that I should cover my ears. I know the distinctive whoosh of a rocket racing skyward, but I'm not used to hearing it more than a week outside of July 4th, and with a few [quite memorable] exceptions they have always been launched far away from where I stood. This one was different. The whoosh was a detailed, swirly sound; you could almost hear the rocket curving before it exploded against the hillside a few hundred feet away and echoed back and forth across the narrow valley. It left no visible trace.

"What was that?" we asked.

Samira, our language-culture facilitator (or LCF -- the Peace Corps loves acronyms), explained to Jackie, Tiffani, and I that in small towns like Ribeira da Barca they use fireworks to signal that there will be a wedding. As we had just attended the civil ceremony in the town's telecentro, we already knew about it. In fact, because people here love to talk, it's probable that everyone in town already knew about it... but I still think it's nice to set off fireworks (which they do throughout the day for 3 days), both as a celebration and as a reminder that the party is for everyone.

And let me tell you: Cape Verdians know how to party.

The wedding was on Saturday, but food preparation (and the first few rounds of eating) began in earnest on Friday. Jackie, Tiffani, and I went to the bride Dilma's house that night to witness the bustle. We came too late and kind of missed it -- they were really cleaning plates more than cooking dishes when we got there -- but Samira gave us some background info that helped us fill in the gaps to understand what we saw. There were huge 20-gallon kettles propped up on the ashes of wood and coal and lined up along the edge of the narrow cobblestone street, across from the bride's house. Each kettle had been filled with a different stew: perhaps masa ku carne (balls of cornmeal with beef or lamb), katxupa (KA-CHU-PAH, a very traditional soup that features garbanzo beans), or feijão (a bean/vegetable medley). As soon as we were noticed (which, between us being white and Samira being popular, was pretty much immediately), they insisted that we eat. None of us wanted to (we’d had dinner), but evidently it’s extremely rude to visit without eating… even if everyone involved knows in advance that the visitors aren’t hungry (more on that later).

So we ate, we drank, and in our limited Kriolu, we spoke. Of we three, I think I’ve been producing the most complete sentences, but Jackie is definitely the best at getting the gist of what people say. While we were eating, one of the ladies who had offered me food started asking me about my age, girlfriends, and children. When it was established that I am almost 23 and have neither children nor “pequenas” neither here nor in the United States, she evidently asked if I wanted to have children with her. Her subtlety escaped me at the time – Jackie had to explain it to me afterward – but I nevertheless managed to blurt out some excuse about needing more than a week to get that sort of thing squared away.

Like many third-world countries, it is common here to have children (and hopefully get married) at a young age. There is also widespread idolization of the United States (“Merka e fixi,” they say – “America is good”), due in part to glamorous depictions of American life in the media and due in part to stories from relatives (the [slight] majority of Cape Verdians actually live near Boston). For both of these reasons, it’s hard for a young white male like myself not to get a lot of offers… I’m both a) different, and b) potentially a ticket to a “better life.” So if I ever get back into a dating mentality while I’m here, well… I just need to be especially diligent about finding a girl who wants me because c) we have something in common. Not to mention the fact that while AIDS is somewhat less common in Cape Verde than in the rest of Africa, the incidence of STDs in general for Peace Corps volunteers is higher here than in any other country in the world. I’m convinced that it’s a Law of Numbers thing (people here party a lot; there are at least 20 important national holidays). Ask me again in a year.

Speaking of a “better life,” though, reminds me of how swanky it is here. I’ve spoken with a lot of current volunteers since arriving here, and phrases like “Posh Core” and “Club Verde” get tossed around. Don’t get me wrong – this is still Africa. There’s still Malaria (though only on Santiago, the largest island), I still have pigs and chickens and goats and cows running around the yard, the population is growing unsustainably while resources dwindle (which is especially troubling for an island-nation), the unemployment rate is about 24%, pretty theft is on the rise, and though I haven’t experienced it firsthand, the government probably doesn’t work.

But transportation does – you can get all the way across the island for about 350 escudos (about $5.50) in zippy little Toyota Hiace vans (called “Yace” around here) that have distinct seats for 14 people (but actually tend to hold closer to 20). In principle they’re probably really unsafe, but in practice most of the drivers have been on these roads for years and can make their way around everything from curbs to goats with scientific precision.

The water’s not potable as-is for foreigners, but it’s also not that bad. Because of the whole arid-desert-island thing, Cape Verde pays more attention to water than the average developing nation. And because there isn’t must heavy industry, there are fewer pollutants to worry about anyway. I brushed and rinsed my teeth with tap water for the first three days (I had forgotten the whole water-safety thing) without event. And the food, though somewhat monotonous after a while (lunch and dinner always involve rice), at least tastes good. Another big win is the western-style toilets; though toilet paper goes in a trash can that eventually stinks and “flushing” usually means pouring a bucket of water down the bowl, you can at least sit down while you do your business.

And it’s laid back here. I noticed that the moment I got on the plane in Boston. It was operated by TACV (the government-owned airline), and everyone on board acted like they were old friends. In fact, I think many of them were. The flight attendants chatted and laughed freely – on their cell phones, with each other, and with the passengers. They obviously waited for the last passenger (he ran in 20 minutes late) before closing the cabin door. Hearty food (by airline standards) came fast. Unfortunately, despite the fact that I was in the exit row and had unlimited leg room, I failed to sleep (I was too cold).

But excitement and wonder kept me going through my fatigue. Just outside Boston, the full moon illuminated the scattered clouds and the ocean below in such a way that they appeared to be touching – that the clouds were merely a silky sheath sliding over the tops of the waves to make them glimmer a little more. The next morning, like a sailor, I cried “land ho!” as the soaring peaks of Santiago first emerged through my window.

Twenty minutes later we were on the ground and in baggage claim, grabbing any bag with the light blue yarn that identified its owner as a Peace Corps trainee. When most of us had our bags, we began to filter out of the airport one by one… and one by one we were greeted with thunderous cheering. At first you could only hear it happening past closed doors, and I wondered if it might be a local airport tradition like the awarding of leis in Hawaii or the live music in the customs area in Bermuda. But as it turns out, the cheer squad was actually a contingent of current Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) in Cape Verde. Many of them hung out with us over the next several days, which was precious because it allayed some of our worries about what we were experiencing (mainly, they confirmed that it’s entirely normal to start out as a clueless, jittery puddle of mush).

Except I wasn’t worried. I still felt great when I crawled into a Hiace van for the first time. I still felt great when -- like an army of pale hamsters -- we unloaded the truck that was carrying our bags and lugged them up three flights of stairs to the dormitory where we would be sleeping during orientation. Even throughout the rest of the day, through session after session of boring policy mumbo-jumbo (and a tiny bit of batuku dancing for good measure), my sleep-deprived head was all ears.

But then it stopped.

The sleeping and eating and meeting and learning and moving that has consumed us entirely since our arrival in Boston was now resolved. We were free for the evening. So we went back to our rooms and…

…well, some people probably just talked more. Unfortunately, I didn’t know my roommate that well (and I think he was gone at the time anyway), so I ended up just looking out the window and watching the quiet street below.

And I was reminded of a few things. To explain them, let me rewind a bit.

If you talked to me just before I left for Boston, I might have told you that I was really excited about meeting the other volunteers. In retrospect, I wasn’t excited enough (Sam, in you’re listening, I should have been stoked instead of jazzed). This is an awesome bunch of people. The first full night in Boston, I took a shuttle to Target with Jackie (who I already mentioned) and another new friend called Judy. We joked our way through our last glorious bout of American consumerism, playing with/debating all the suitcases and suggesting silly presents for each other’s host families. Judy convinced me to buy scissors with a plastic-moulded woodpecker for a handle; she bought the matching vegetable peeler and a nice collection of frivolous stickers. Jackie got a new suitcase with wheels (but tried to offer it to Judy, as it was the last one – how kind). Silly stuff, I know, but to me it seemed oddly beautiful that I was doing something so routine with people I’d only known for eight hours.

Later that night, we met up with Rochelle (unless I say otherwise, assume that all names are fellow PC trainees) to go to Chicago Uno for dinner. We had chosen that particular restaurant in part because Judy had a hankering for clam chowder and we knew that they served it. I piggybacked on her hankering (it sounded like a good idea once I’d heard it), but alas, after Judy and I placed our orders the waitress returned to tell us that they only had enough left for one bowl. In retrospect, I should have been a gentleman and let her have it (sorry, Judy), but instead I instinctively threw up my fist for a game of rock, paper, scissors (or as she calls it, “stone, paper, scissors”). She took the hint and tugged up her fist in response. Rock, paper, scissors, SHOOT!

Rock and stone. While the waitress waits, rock, paper, scissors, shoot again. I’m still rock. She’s paper. I switched to French onion soup. The four of us shared our recent romantic histories. Good times were had by all.

From what some of you have told me about your experiences with Girl Scouts and other similar organizations, this kind of intense bonding is fairly common when you’re relentlessly surrounded by a particular set of recent strangers. Perhaps I could have had just as much fun with entirely different people. But that doesn’t change the fact that bonding happened, and specifically, it happened with these people.

So on that first night in Cape Verde, suddenly alone, I was reminded that I had not come here to hang out with my newfound American bosom buddies. In fact, I knew perfectly well that after our three-day orientation in Praia, we would split up. Except for Jackie and Tiffani (who live in my town and join me for lessons with Samira), I only see other trainees once or twice a week. And after we complete pre-service training (PST – they use that one a lot), there’s a good chance that some of them I will never see again.

So as it turns out, I really am in Africa and I really am going to have to make friends with Africans if I want to avoid feeling totally alone. Obvious, yes, I know. But especially for someone like me who sees so much of his own identity in the way he writes English, it’s daunting to think about building any sort of deep relationship across a language barrier.

But that night I slept, and as always, I felt a little better in the morning. I’ve been working each day since then to come to terms with the fact that Cape Verde is now home. Of course, “home” is a loaded word – I’ll probably write a full post about that later – but for now, my success with the language is helping. Language instruction really began in earnest on the Sunday after our arrival, when we drove to the mountain city of Assomada to meet our host families from surrounding villages. I was more or less mute at first, but they are nice to me and they give me much more privacy than the Peace Corps had led me to expect. They are also extremely helpful and patient with the language; in particular, my host father Apolinu (Pui) is very diligent about repeating himself and gesturing until I understand what he means. It’s exhausting, but in concert with the formal instruction I get during the day, also powerful: by the fourth night I was actually relaxed while speaking. I no longer worried that missing grammar would stop me dead in my speaking tracks; instead I was confident that through gesturing or speech or otherwise, I could get my point across. Which, of course, makes me feel much better about the prospect of someday making real friends out of the people here.

It also doesn’t hurt that Cape Verdians are so darn friendly. Especially in rural towns like Ribeira da Barca (where I am living during PST), many people greet you and try to learn your name when they first see you. Often they’ll repeat, “txiga, txiga!”, urging you to come into their house and sit down. If you do, then – like I said before – you’re expected to eat. We trainees find this a little strange, since in America we think of it as more or less a biological fact that an unexpected guest may or may not happen to be hungry. But perhaps there’s a cultural explanation: although nobody really starves in Cape Verde these days, it definitely used to be a problem (during colonial times, Portugal was a little stingy about sending food reserves when crops failed here), so perhaps it used to be the case that you could depend on your visitors being hungry.

Not so anymore. Saturday began with the church wedding, which finishes what the civil ceremony started and which was held in Assomada. Samira, Jackie, Tiffani and I were supposed to leave around 8am on a Yace, but I didn’t get there until 8:20 and Samira was a no-show until well past 9. No matter – from what we heard, the bride was still getting ready, which gave everyone else free license to take their time. Everything starts late here. (Which is fine, actually, because it’s a byproduct of everything happening slowly, which is a huge part of my motivation for being here anyway.)

When we arrived at the church in Assomada, we were excited to see others trainees sitting on the steps (at least while we’re still adjusting to the language and culture, it is always a relief to find someone else who speaks English). Sadly, they didn’t join us inside for the ceremony.

Or ceremonies, I should say. Seated in the front row were five brides in white dresses and five grooms in suits who – after five vows in a mix of Portuguese and Kriolu – became five married couples. I’ve actually wanted to go to a wedding for quite a while, but I can’t say that this is how I imagined it. In America, weddings are such enormous events; some couples could buy a small house for what they spend on their nuptial. And it’s rare that you’re just going to a wedding. You go to the wedding of Jordan and Kathryn, the celebration not of love itself but of the couple’s success with finding love in each other. Jordan and Kathryn get to be superstars. Idols. And boy, do they work for it.

Here in Cape Verde, a wedding is a routine. Couples don’t hire planners or sift through books looking for cool ways to entertain their guests – nobody tries to be unique or special. Couples are expected only to hang out and visit, which means that all the real work of cooking, cleaning, and organizing is handled by neighbors. It’s ultimately not that different from any other Cape Verdian party. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. On one [frugal] hand, it’s really nice to save money by sharing costs. It’s not that different from the way friends take turns buying dinner in America; you cook for other peoples’ weddings knowing that they would cook (or already have cooked) for yours. On the other hand, I can’t deny the egotistical core in my soul that says my wedding should be something transcendent.

(An aside: cost-sharing weddings also remind me of money clubs, which are fairly common in Africa. If you haven’t heard of them, the basic idea is that all members contribute an equal amount to a pot that is then given to one member on a rotating basis. So if the monthly contribution is $100 and there are 11 members, the first member gets $1000 (i.e., (11-1) × $100) in August, the second member gets $1000 in September, etc. I know it sounds strange, but it allows members to make large purchases that might otherwise never be possible. You may suggest that each member should just stash $100 on their own each month (that’s my instinct too), but that’s easier said than done, especially when you have a macho husband who likes to spend (money clubs are frequently all-female). I bet we’d have money clubs in the US, too, if we didn’t have credit cards instead).

Anyway, mom, do you remember reading what the Peace Corps packing list said about dress clothes? That I might need them for weddings? I think your words were, “I hope you won’t be going to too many weddings!” Well, technically, I went to 5 of them before the end of the second week. Incidentally, my dress shirt was back home in my suitcase (where it belongs).

Thank goodness, too, because I don’t think I would have survived the rest of that day in a dress shirt. We hopped on a Yace to Txada Len, a small town that was hosting a festa to commemorate the anniversary of their local church’s founding (most towns in Cape Verde do this, and for most of them, it’s the biggest festa of the year; everybody saves up to go no-holds-barred with everything from food to clothes to decorations). Samira was still with us, so we basically party-hopped between the houses of people she knows and the houses of people we know (Txada Len, like Ribeira da Barca, is home to several PC trainees). But again, the catch is that you have to eat whenever you walk indoors. On account of the heat, we weren’t hungry to begin with. After 3 or 4 consecutive dinners and a few more stops where I got away with just eating cake… well, let’s just say that “n sta fartu” (I’m full) took on a whole new dimension.

Are you really still reading this? If so, I could probably sucker you into reading another 10 pages, even if I double the amount of rambling. But then I’d lose precious time for sleep and homework (the PC makes trainees put together a portfolio…ugh), so instead I’m going to summarize everything else in a series of brief vignettes:

FOGO: last night I dreamt that I was in the kitchen of my mom’s house back in North Carolina, and in the middle of the countertop between the sink and the stove (in the corner, for those of you who know it well), there were four sizzling pieces of toast. And by sizzling, I mean they looked like they were in the broiler. As it turns out, there was a fire in the crawl space under the house. But boy, did that toast look yummy.

TAKSI: I was able to send out a decent mass-email update last week because Samira showed up to the Internet café very late (thus giving me extra time). Unfortunately, all this lateness also made us miss the last Yace, so we had to take a taxi home (and 25km in a taxi ain’t cheap). Aside from Samira feeling terrible about putting us in that position, it was pitch dark and terribly foggy, and none of the cars here have seat belts. About halfway through the trip, the driver got off his cell phone long enough to stop at a mini-mart to pick up something. That something turned out to be a beer, which he swigged a little before taking off again. Once we had safely arrived in Ribeira da Barca, the driver surreptitiously underestimated Samira’s age (she’s 30) by a margin of 12 years.

MATADU: basically everyone in town seems to be my host father’s cousin. One of those cousins is named Alex. Alex invited me into his living room last week. Over the din of the telenovela, he complimented me on my Kriolu and showed me pictures of friends from China and continental Africa who had come to Cape Verde in the past and learned Kriolu quite successfully. My gaze wandering, I noticed some Russian VHS tapes next to the TV. Do you know Russian?, I asked. He doesn’t, but he explained that he has a friend in town that had to flee Russia because he killed too many people and the Russian police were after him. Evidently, he has spent the last 10 years in Cape Verde without event. Good to know.

N KRE KELI: during the past week, we began technical training, which introduced us to societal problems that exist in Cape Verde and gave us some basic tools for community development. I went home excited. In fact, I went home wanting to join the Peace Corps. Which was the first solid sign that I’m going to last here. Huzzah!

DIXIE WORLD: about 30 minutes ago, I heard the General Lee’s distinctive horn blaring from a truck on the other side of the valley. God bless America.

SICKO: most people have been more or less healthy so far, myself included. A lot of them have experienced fleeting diarrhea or nausea, which I have thankfully managed to avoid. But my head has been kind of messed up since I got here. My lips swelled up and felt raw after the first week. I kind of thought that I was getting impetigo, but the doctor told me to just use chapstick. A week later, it was worse (I’d also had a terrible sunburn on my face in that interim, which didn’t help). I wanted to talk to the doctor again when we had an all-hands in Assomada that Wednesday, but they skipped out early. I called the next day and never got a call back. I called the next day, talked to the other doctor, and didn’t get a call back. That Saturday, when I was supposed to go with all the other volunteers on a field trip to the beach town of Tarrafal, I got four calls from two different PC medical people. They asked me how I was, told me they were sending medicine (to Assomada, which is 40 minutes away), and advised me not to go on the field trip. My reaction: thanks, guys, for waiting until my chin and lymph nodes are swollen and until it’s time to hit the sand before you decide to help me. I planned to go anyway and pick up my medicine later, but with that fourth call, the doctor nixed my designs: he said that he would accompany the medicine to Assomada and I could meet him there to be examined. I half-believe that he was doing that just to keep me away from Tarrafal, but I appreciated his effort (it’s an hour ride from Praia), so I met him there. On the way, I passed a few crowds of fellow PC trainees who were waiting along the roadside to be picked up in the other direction (toward Tarrafal). We chatted. “Oh you’re going to the beach? That’s nice. Yeah, I wanted to, but I’m getting this skin infection checked out. Yep, catch you later!” Fortunately, when I met the doctor, the swelling turned out to be much less severe than he had expected, and he toned down his recommendation to stay home (he also gave me a gigantic tube of the goop, which is great, because I can save it… I get impetigo once or twice a year and it’s much better if you cut it off early). So, naturally, I took the next Yace to Tarrafal. It was impeccably beautiful, I found my friends, I had a wonderful day, and my head is almost back to normal.

ANGRA: this was on Sunday. Angra is a beach just up the coast that is only accessible by foot or by boat, and for no particular reason, they have a huge party there once a year. You pay about 65 cents to ride over along the coast in a glorified wooden dinghy (I kind of want to buy one – they build them right here on the other side of the valley). The largest dinghies only hold about 10 or 15 people, but by 3pm they’d managed to get nearly 1,000 people on this beach with live music, a stage, a barbecue, and a captain’s stockpile of the local favorite: a beer called Super Bock. People danced on the black sand, jumped from the rocks, and frolicked all day long. Oh, it was nice.