Life After College

Catch-up

2006-05-06T08:27:53Z

Horrendous Wisconsin winter has given way to rapturous spring, which in turn heralds a glorious summer. I'm moving downtown next week, to a sick flat six blocks from the Capitol. Can't wait.

2006 has been a great year so far. In May, I'm going back to Seattle; in June, I'm going to Denver and to Tennessee for Bonnaroo; and I'm hoping to make it to Montreal for the 4th of July (not very patriotic, but whatevs). The highlight of the year thus far was definitely my two-week trip to Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda in March, so I'll just transcribe some of my scribblings from that excursion.

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ON MONDAY I was shuttling frantically between conference calls and meetings for 11 hours. On Tuesday, I was on a plane winging back to East Africa. I took the familiar route, touching down amid the flat, plain countryside of the Benelux, crossing the snowy German heartland into the Alps, skirting the Italian peninsula and then overtaking the Technicolor collision of Sicily and the Mediterranean. Finally, the ceaseless dusty expanse of Sudan as the went down, then the lights of Nairobi, looking like a fire on the savannah.

The taxi driver from the airport told me about his family and the latest from the Kenyan political circus, and I crashed for the night at a campsite on Upper Hill where the Luo staff remembered me from 2004 as 'Jawuoth'. The next morning, I caught the first bus to Arusha to visit my friend Godfrey, who is studying at a forestry institute outside the town. On the bus, I sat next to a shoeless Maasai boy, who asked me at the border to fill out his immigration card. The form asked for occupation, so I asked him what he did, and he replied in English with a big Donald Trump smile, "Biz-e-ness." His goatherder's attire and illiteracy made me skeptical, until later during the ride he busted an insanely gigantic wad of Kenyan 1,000/= notes out of his robe and thumbed absently through them. I was reminded that in East Africa, nothing is what it seems.

I found Godfrey well in Arusha. The institute was located in the foothills of Mt. Meru, at the end of a long, shady dirt road lined with fragrant flowering trees. We toured the area, which is like a microcosm of the state of East African forests - rampant clear-cutting for cultivation and charcoal, serious erosion with gullies forming everywhere, unstoppable spreading of exotic species, commercial tree plantations supplanting wilderness. A few ancient fig trees remained, like sentinels abandoned by the landscape, sheltering garrulous flocks of ibises and hawks.

We had huge slabs of ugali in the institute's mess hall, and I met just about everyone there, including the headmaster, the professors, the cooks and an old drunk who often wandered onto the institute grounds from his neighboring shamba. Eventually, we had to say our goodbyes, but Godfrey was doing well. He has now bought a computer and is using it for his research. Many of the students at the institute were more interested in commercial forestry, and their research principally concerned the search for ever-higher yielding forestry products. Godfrey's interests lie more in ecosystem management and conservation, and when he finishes his studies, he'll go back to Amani, the gorgeous nature reserve adjacent to his village. I envy him.

After parting with Godfrey and his excellent schoolmates, I passed back through Nairobi and headed straight on to Kampala. I had made some arrangements on my first day in Nairobi to secure a gorilla-trekking permit, but in East Africa such things are better done face-to-face. When I called to ask about the availability of permits, the placidly surly bureaucrat on the Ugandan end of the line said that permits had to be purchased in person from the Ugandan Wildlife Authority offices on the outskirts of Kampala. I tried to explain that I didn't want to come to Kampala unless I was certain I'd get a permit, but I was told no promises could me made. Only 24 permits are sold per day, eight permits for each of three groups of gorillas that are sufficiently habituated to human contact as to be reasonably unlikely to kill intrusive tourists. The UGA bureaucrat told me she would do what she could, but I had better come to Kampala on the double. Taking a gamble, I boarded a night-bus to Kampala and arrived the next afternoon.

I love Kampala. Let me not create the impression that it's not filthy, chaotic, congested, polluted, crime-ridden, and crushingly poor. But at the same time, it feels like a giant, perpetually bumpin' neighborhood. Particularly compared to Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the city is lush. Pawpaw trees, banana trees, and - best of all - jackfruit trees abound everywhere, and paint the sevem hills over which the city spreads a rich green hue.

Walking through the periurban areas feels less like the Hieronymous Bosch masterpiece of the Nairobi slums, and more like a gigantic village. Like Mombasa, the city has grown into its outlying villages; rather than spawning them, it's just stitched them together into a jovial tumult of humanity. I got to speak a lot of Kiswahili in Uganda, mainly because the people I hung out with had a lot of family and friends from eastern Congo, where Kiswahili is apparently widely spoken. They had a gorgeous, free, French-fried way of speaking, and I miss it painfully.

Kampala is a mishmash of everything. It houses the administrative centre of the Luganda kingdom; it was the terminus of the British East African railway originating in Mombasa; it was home to a large and prosperous South Asian community until their expulsion by Idi Amin in the seventies; they've started to come back now, and the Hindu and Bahai structures that dot the town appear to be in better shape. Muammar Gaddafi is sponsoring the construction of a mammoth 'national mosque' atop one of the city's hills. It's now the push-off point from East Africa to Juba, the booming anchor town of southern Sudan.

My favorite person I met in Kampala was Francis, a woodcarver I met when I first came to town. I'm pretty sure he was gay - he had too many platonic girlfriends, was too touched by the sight of street kittens and baby goats, and was too fond of reminding me that he liked to wear women's pants because they "suited" him better. Being a Ugandan, though, means being gay is pretty much not an option -- although it looks like this is very slowly changing.

Like Godfrey, it wasn't the commercial aspects of his field that interested Francis. Ninety nine percent of the woodcarvings that you see in East Africa are generic schlock churned out for tourist mass consumption. But Francis used woodcarving as a way to comment on the challenges facing Ugandan society. Although the economy is booming and the country is politically stable (albeit under the 20-year reign of a former rebel commander), Uganda still has serious problems. Chief among them is a long-simmering civil war in the north, notorious even among African civil conflicts for the horrific atrocities committed against civilians. Missing limbs, missing ears, and missing noses are not an extraordinary sight in areas of Kampala peopled by migrant northerners. Young boys are kidnapped and forced to fights for the rebels; young girls are kidnapped and forced to serve as wives to older, more senior rebel 'officers.' Francis' carvings highlight the victims of this war, neglected by both prosperous southern Ugandans and by the international community. (The International Court of Justice's recent warrant for th arrest of the northern rebel leader, Joseph Kony, is all bark and no bite. Kony slips between eastern Congo, northern Uganda, and southern Sudan, ever beyond the reach of the meager UN presence in the region.)

Maybe Francis' most devastating piece was a Last Supper-style tableau of marabou storks (huge scavenger birds common in Kampala) and orphaned street children, sharing a dinner table of roadside garbage. Everywhere I went in East Africa, I continued to encounter children discarded by society, orphans of war and of AIDS treated like disposable life, left to beg on the streets and relieve their suffering by holding a bottle of glue in their mouths and continually inhaling all day. We took long walks in the evenings as the sun went down - to a mega-church recently built with donated funds from the USA, to the Kabaka's palace grounds and artificial lake, to the old Catholic basilica atop one of the nearby hills - and whenever we ran into street kids, Francis would pull the glue bottle out of those kids' mouths and plead and pray for them. They usually just shuffled on, their decimated minds incapable of recognizing and valuing sympathy, looking only for an escape from hunger. Their plight indicts us all.

I came to Kenya at a time of heated debated over proposed changes to the country's penal code, including a repeal of the section of which officially criminalizes homosexuality. Keya has extensive and lucrative contacts with conservative evangelical organizations from th US, and coincidentally, you hear the exact same rhetoric denouncing homosexuality that you hear in the US. I wish that organizations like the Kenyan Parents Caucus and their foreign donors would spend as much time, money and energy improving the lot of orphans as they do condemning homosexuality. Just a suggestion - don't invoke your sterling family values if you're willing to walk past scores of homeless glue-sniffing children and do nothing about their situation.

Anyway, when I remember Kampala, I remember people like Francis. He introduced me to his incredible family - his newly married brother Barnabas, who is an evangelical preacher; his strong, wise and hilarious sister, a single mother and a computer sales representative; his quick-to-laugh Congolese parents and fellow carvers. The main mode of transportation in Kampala is the motorcycle taxi, and I met dozens of Kampalans riding on the back of their motorcycles, making easy conversation as we ducked in and out of matatu traffic, breaking every traffic law on the Ugandan books and defying the better judgment of any half-sober observer but getting around quickly with all-natural air-conditioning and an incredible view of the city. I had no guile in Kampala, and I didn't really need it. Everyone was so friendly, so accommodating, and so curious, it was a breeze having a good time.

So I went to the UWA offices, got my permit, and took the 14-hour bus trip to southwestern Uganda, right by the Congolese and Rwandan borders. The next morning, I went to submit my papers to the main registration office at about 7AM as directed, then I went to a second registration banda. Then I waited. Around 9:30, I set out with a guide, an Australian couple, a German couple, and about a half-dozen piece-toting Ugandan troops into the mountainous Afromontane forest. We started by hiking through the banana farms that border the park, but soon we were negotiating the heavy foliage of the justly named Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. After about an hour, it was evident (mostly by smell) that we were following a path recently cleared by a large group of gorillas. As we got closer to them, we left everything but our cameras in a clearing with the guards, and proceeded further. I caught a glimpse of a silverback ambling through the foliage, and I don't think anything I've ever experienced rivals that sense of wonder. We kept tracking them into the forest and soon caught up with the whole group - gregarious youth playing in the trees, adolescents chewing on twigs and wild custard apples, and the huge, 250kg alpha male reclining majestically against a tree. Here, in this ecosystem largely wiped out by human activity, where senseless conflict has unnecessarily claimed so many lives, these peaceful and beautiful creatures with whom we share so much are still there, subsisting on the bounty of the earth, playing with their young, testifying to the fall of man.

But the gorillas' company was expensive. The management of the park is trying to strike a balance between harnessing the tourism potential of the forest to generate revenue, and minimizing the disruptions to the gorillas and their habitat. So they charge $360 per person for a gorilla trekking permit, which entitles you to one hour of contact with the gorillas once you've met up with them in the forest. I tried to justify the expense by reminding myself that the money goes back to conservation, but I've been around too long to think that giving money to an East African government agency is anything but a total wank.

The trip back to Kampala was truly a chapter from the devil's manuscript of ultimate torture. Almost immediately after returning from the gorilla trek, it began pouring rain. It rained so hard that the main road connecting Buhoma to Butogota, where I could catch a bus to Kampala, was washed out. The detour was about 30km longer, and the rocky, muddy, winding mountain road on the back of a motorcycle at dusk was one of my less relaxing vacation experiences.

I got to Butogota, which must mean hellhole in the local language, late in the evening, so I randomly picked one of the two guesthouses on the town's dusty main strip. Naturally, my pick turned out to be a brothel. I deadbolted my door, but that didn't keep the sound out. All night long, knock knock, door creaks open, animated discussion, door creaks closed, bam! bam! bam!, shudders, argument, heated argument, door creaks open, door creaks closed. Repeat all night.

The bus died the next morning, and there was no other vehicle leaving Botogota that morning except a truck. So I climbed into the truckbed with about twenty-five other passengers, and we all clung to each other for dear life as we bumped down those winding mountain roads. At several points in this journey I was certain that death was imminent, but somehow our squirming tangle of passengers managed to hold together, clinging to the truck. That truck took me about a tenth of the way back to Kampala, and from there it was an excruciating hop-job from matatu to bus to matutu to bus again. I got into Kampala around midnight and passed out immediately, and left for Kisumu the next morning.

To be continued --

Dusty pen

2006-04-19T00:50:59Z

I won't try to excuse my negligent behavior. In the last few months, I often considered blogging. I sometimes think in prose, and I itch to transcribe the pages turning in my head. But time passes, I get distracted, and those pages in my head turn yellow and musty, and they disintegrate, lost forever to the world. It's okay, though; they're usually pretty derivative.

I wanted to post some pictures from my trip to East Africa last month, and make a note that, like so many shameless twenty-somethings electronically clutching onto their fleeting youth, I have migrated to MySpace. I'll write more soon - so much has happened, and keeps happening, and the future holds a strange but exciting constellation of possibilities.

I get a shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather

2005-12-15T03:48:41Z

So this is life in the Snow Belt. I take the bus to and from work, and trudging to the bus stop has become an increasingly daunting task. About four inches of snow fell on Madison today. The fire alarm went off in my building at work this afternoon, and we all dutifully plodded outside into the snowstorm while the overworked firemen of our tiny hamlet wended their way through the snowpacked state highways to our remote corporate campus and determined that someone had burnt their popcorn in the microwave. While we milled outside, a snowball fight broke out and I raced after one of my co-workers and whitewashed him in retaliation for the snowballs he landed on the back of my neck. We're all overgrown kids at this company.

I'm going back to Kenya in March. I can't wait. Luckily I don't have to wait too long to get a taste of the tropics - I'm going to Hawaii for work in January. When I was a kid in Seattle, the slightest semblance of snow made me giddy with thoughts of snow forts and school cancellation. Now it's mid-December and I'm already sick of the white stuff. Unless it's on the peak of Kilimanjaro, I'm done with it. I can't wait to breathe in seasalt and listen to the wind in the palms. Carry me home, KLM.

Summer ended late, winter started early

2005-11-23T22:30:58Z

The trees are bare, the temperature has dropped dozens of degrees, and the sun disappears before 5pm. The sweet smell of rotting leaves is no more. I woke up this morning and saw snow on the ground, and now I finally must acknowledge that I live in Wisconsin. I guess I need to buy a coat after all. Some highlights from the fall:

Gay Street – it’s a one-way street.

Dignity is a small price to pay for holding the Statue of Liberty in your hand

My jack o’lantern, or an unreleased Megadeth album cover?

Back when there were still leaves

The Windy City

New York: I finally made it to the Big Apple. It felt like I’d been there before, because the place was so omnipresent in my imagination – in books, movies, and C-SPAN footage of sundry nebbishy festivalia. I stayed with a good friend who lives in Brooklyn, and rode the subway each day into Manhattan to take in the sights: the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, Ground Zero, the reservoir in Central Park named after Jackie O. I also went to the Guggenheim, which was holding one of the most incredible exhibits I’ve ever seen, Russia!. The highlight for me was a portrait of my personal Jesus, Fyodor Dostoevsky. The painter captured the burden he seemed to carry, the keen awareness he had of the human spirit’s fragile capacity for saintly good and omnipresent vulnerability to wickedness. To stand before a canvas that Dostoevsky must have keenly inspected himself was almost as thrilling as going to the So-Ho café where Brangelina had their first spat. Later, I went to Broadway and saw Avenue Q, a show that weaves together muppets, full-frontal nudity, Gary Coleman, and a meditation on the psychological phenomenon of schadenfraude to tell an inspiring story of triumphing over adversity. It rocked.

Madison: Halloween in Madison, sometimes referred to as the Mardi Gras of the Midwest, is the kind of event that brings joy to the hearts of destructive alcoholics. Basically, the downtown is deluged with drunken college students in outrageous costumes, and everyone has a good time, until riot police decide to break up the festivities around 2AM and State Street is enveloped in a cloud of tear gas. My costume was just a hollowed-out pumpkin that I wore on my head, with little eyeholes for to see with. It was fun, but I had no peripheral vision, and there were a lot of cops on horseback all around, so there were many close calls with the feet and the horse manure. Some calls were more than close. I knew that if things got too rowdy, somebody was certain to snatch my pumpkin off my head and hurl it at a storefront, so I ducked out around midnight, thereby evading the tear gas and the likely criminal charges. Good times.

Berkeley: Last month I returned to Berkeley for the first time since my graduation. I was on a business trip to Santa Rosa, which is about 60 miles north of San Francisco. I had a rental car, so each day after work I blazed down the 101 to revisit my old stomping grounds. The drive was beautiful, through the farmland and rolling hills of Sonoma to the flinty blood-red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. Driving in San Francisco was a little harrowing after all this time; I’d forgotten just how precipitously hilly the place is. Intersections resemble cliffs, dropping off into abysses in every direction.

The Cal campus was much the same, with grubby mendicants and Frisbees fluttering everywhere. It was fun seeing old friends, who had moved onto jobs, fellowships, law school, or prepping for Peace Corps. I subsisted for almost the entire trip on pizza from the Cheese Board, which stands as a lonely example of the successful application of radical left-wing ideas to the real world. This worker-owned collective produces pizza of a matchless caliber, and the line of customers always trails out the door. Ancient hippies jam away on drums, piano, and strings in the foyer, heads beating and gray dreadlocks swaying while the immaculate children of Merlot Democrats dance around and devour their dinner down to the artisinal crusts. The place is like a little Shangri-La, a hidden paradise tucked in a gritty, dysfunctional city where liberal good intentions have failed to make much of a dent in crime, poverty, racial division, and those fucking wrong boba drinks.

Chicago: I went to Chicago for the Foreign Service oral assessment. Chicago is about three hours from Madison, and I had to be at the interview site at 7AM; so I woke up that day at about 3AM, left at 3:30, and pulled into the city at about 6:45. I was riding high on ungodly amounts of coffee and adrenaline, and I was a little nervous. There were 11 of us interviewing that day, and the process included group exercises. I was afraid that the atmosphere would be tense – 11 type-A personalities all vying for the attention of the examiners, each trying to present themselves as the perfect cog in the State Department bureaucracy. But the group of applicants could not have been cooler. They all had interesting backgrounds – one was a lobbyist for a children’s health nonprofit in Denver; one was the head of information-sharing for a Houston cancer research institute; one was the director of an international disabled sports association, etc. In the interim between exercises, we talked about our experiences bumming around the neglected corners of the globe, bitched about the Bush administration, and even discussed K-Fed’s trashy new hairstyle. During our lunch break, we caught the White Sox’ tickertape victory parade, and saw Ozzie Guillen perched atop a streetcar, waving the V-sign at all those long-suffering fans and looking like a baseball messiah.

At the end of the day, we were each individually called in and informed of our results. I honestly expected most of us to pass, but in the end only one person had made the cut – and it wasn’t me. I was mystified, not so much by my own failure, but by the examiners’ willingness to let all these incredibly talented applicants go, especially since the Foreign Service Officers I’d met in Kenya and Tanzania didn’t measure up in my mind to my fellow non-passers. Later, we non-passers gathered at a sports bar downtown to get some drinks, release tension from the long day, and talk a little bit more. I had a great time, and when I finally got in the car for the drive back to Madison, I felt good about my day in Chi-Town. I left without a job offer, but with a memory of a strange, exciting and totally unique day.

Verona: My company relocated its offices from the west side of Madison to Verona, a tiny hamlet southwest of town with only one traffic light. We’ve built a huge new campus out in the middle of nowhere, and although I got a nice office with a nice view of some dairy farms, it kind of sucks commuting every day to peri-suburbia. Each building in the new campus has its own theme, and all the conference rooms are named and decorated in accordance with that theme. My building’s theme is Scandinavia, and I lobbied hard for an ABBA conference room. After weeks of uncertainty, I was finally vindicated when I noticed that the conference room just down the hall from my office had been outfitted with a new nameplate. My faith in this company was completely restored: not only was it ABBA, but the first ‘B’ had been engraved backwards. It’s the little things that make all the difference.

I once saw a statistic on Livejournal which grouped the site’s active users into age ranges. Unsurprisingly, there was a huge spike of users in the 16-20 age range, and then a precipitous drop-off among post-collegiate age groups. Those avid diarists who document their musings and aspirations during their youth tend to fall silent as they leave school, settle down, and confront the tedium and fiduciary burdens of adult life. This seems to have happened to me as well; I find that I have less and less inclination to write about my comings and goings and doings as my life settles ever more rigidly into a workaday routine. But I’m determined to keep scribbling. I resolve to continue to be overcome by irrational apprehensions of the sublime, violent visions of the imminent doom of mankind, flickerings of religiosity and fuzzy-headed hopes for a utopian future. And as long as I do so, my wonder-racked mind will find an outlet in the overwrought prose of this journal. Es muss sein!

Back to school

2005-09-18T05:49:54Z

Some pictures from the recent past.

In the woods at Devil's Lake, eating cheese curds (they squeak in your mouth)

Balancing Rock, Devil's Lake

Me, dwarfed by the Devil's Doorway at Devil's Lake

Surely the world's greatest log ride, the Flash Flood at Noah's Ark in Wisconsin Dells. This is a picture of the cloud of spray created when your log nosedives to ground-level.

Labor Day weekend in Seattle was sublime. I floated around Bumbershoot, Seattle's big annual music festival, and my cup didst runneth over with sonic pleasure. The terrible reality in New Orleans was still unfolding on the TV; the artists dedicated their sets to the hard-hit people of the Gulf, and their beautiful music opened people's wallets to the starving Red Cross barrels that abounded everywhere. The musical highlight was definitely Common, who works in overdrive to put on the best show possible even though he could probably dazzle the crowd while he's still half-asleep. Not only did he perform almost all the songs from Be, he also pulled out Talib Kweli to perform "Respiration" from the BlackStar album. John Butler was great, too; at one moment his guitar could produce a foaming river of sound, and the next moment each note was like a drop of holy water. Meanwhile, at a fundraiser for the new 826 Seattle youth writing center, Dave Eggers read a letter written by an Irish setter to the CEO of Texaco, and Sarah Vowell presented a treatise on the history of the Battle Hymn of the Republic with musical accompaniment by Death Cab for Cutie. The whole Bumbershoot experience concluded at twilight on Sunday with the obligatory reggae roots jam session, and everyone went home with peaceful hearts and a prosecutably odiferous second-hand weed buzz.

Bumbershoot merely whetted my appetite for exotic food carts and outdoor zydeco, so I was excited to check out the Madison World Music Festival this weekend. Unfortunately, most of the people I wanted to see had to cancel because they couldn't get visas. This situation irks me for several reasons. First, doesn't Homeland Security realize that world musicians are one of the wimpiest breeds of hippy-dippy liberals on the face of the earth? If you gave them a bomb, they'd probably turn it into a gourd and paint moons and dolphins on it, and then write a song about it. The only threat these people could pose is boring me to death with their interminable sitar solos, or maybe taking someone out with their swinging braids while they dance feverishly. Second, aren't world musicians really ambassadors, using their music to build bridges of understanding across disparate cultures? They seem to be much more deserving of diplomatic passports than the crooked bureaucrat who sits in a Washington embassy and negotiates how many helicopters his uncle will need in exchange for granting America the right to dump its radioactive waste on his country's pristine atolls. Michael Chertoff, hear my song of protest: let the dred-headed, the bongo-beating, and the flamenco-dancing artists enter our ports and share their passably entertaining talents. At least their music will soothe some of the liberal minds that have been horribly wracked with guilt and loathing by your administration's ceaseless blunders. Please. Thank you.

Anyway, I'm mega-psyched for my trip to New York City next weekend. As a liberal elitist aficionado of urban spaces who thinks Woody Allen was kind of hot as a young man, I am constantly puzzled by the fact that I've never actually been to NYC. But soon, I too will frolick among the world-weary poseurs of Manhattan and the surly Teamsters of Brooklyn, and I will fulfill my lifelong dream of being in a Broadway audience. And apparently I'll be going to Red Lobster. I'm guessing it will be awesome.

UW Madison, America's # 1 university ...

2005-08-23T16:36:58Z

... for drinking. Keep it up, Badgers!

My career as an overpaid, blue marlin-eating, Hilton Points-acquiring IT consultant is decidedly less satisfying than my career as a virtually unpaid, village-surfing grant-making intercultural raconteur was. When I first started this job, I regarded it as an inevitability - some day, I would have to settle down into an 8-7 pattern where you spend your few free moments searching for a microbrew that matches your personality, and where words like "granular" and "functionality" seep into your everyday lexicon. But I'm pretty convinced that such a settled life is not for me, at least not at age 23, hopefully never. I'm accumulating vacation days at an excruciatingly slow pace and I've already planned how I'll use all of them through about 2009. I'm currently considering a transition to one of the following careers:

- Travel columnist
- Fisherman
- Artisanal organic farmer
- Ice cream truck driver
- Interpreter
- Literary agent
- Ambassador to Moldova
- Muscle for hire
- Metropolitan beat reporter
- Cobbler
- Horse whisperer
- Hunter/gatherer
- Tae kwan do instructor
- Minibus driver
- Harbinger of the apocalypse
- TV chef

In the meantime, I bought a plane ticket back to Seattle for Labor Day weekend, and I'm looking forward to catching some sweet tunes and nice scenery. Unfortunately, the mechanics at Northwest Airlines decided to go on strike just a couple weeks before my flight. Sure, they want a fair collective bargaining agreement, but do they have to jeopardize my Labor Day vacation plans? Jerks.

A few weekends ago at the Ravinia Festival outside Chicago, I encountered my virtual namesake, a tornado of soul, a juggernaut of sound, and the epitome of sexy: Cccchhhhaaaaakchak ... Ccccchhhhakchakchak ... Chakakhan-chakakhan ... Chakchakchakakhan. That's right. Her ass was so big you could see it from the front, and she tore down the house. She was that last supernova before the summer burns out; now the nights are going to start getting cold.

Suitcase summer

2005-07-27T04:21:32Z

The summer flew by, probably because I tried too hard to savor it. June and July in Madison are too sweet for words. Sudden storms blacken the sky and turn day into night. Lightning strobes until dawn and turns night into day. The sticky heat lasts deep into the evening; it slaps me in the face when I get off work and persuades me to miss the bus, strolling lazily home, sweating contentedly, casting off my flip flops, toes in the grass. On weekends, there’s an embarrassment of riches: hypnotic reggae shows on the lake, thunderous opera in the park, the lilting symphony in Capitol Square. Picnic baskets laden with strange and delicious marbled cheeses; drunken Saturday afternoons on the bicycle; haggling over organic curds at the farmer’s market; loitering around State Street with ice cream smeared all over my face. All the feral children who monopolized the swimming pool at the beginning of the summer have now been grounded for one juvenile offense or another, so I typically have the pool to myself. Floating in the blue water, looking up at the blue sky, I can close my eyes and suddenly I’m back on Kenyatta Beach in Mombasa, chewing miraa, half-blinded by an iridescent sunrise.

At the beginning of the summer, I was more or less alone, having moved out to Madison on a whim, leaving everything in Seattle. But in mid-June, my boyfriend Arthur quit his job, packed up his stuff, and drove two thousand miles to join me on this little adventure. When he arrived in Madison just after midnight, his car spattered with the grime of a half-dozen states, I tried to understand how we’d ended up living together in Wisconsin less than five months after we met at a bar in Seattle, flirting half-jokingly. To say that things moved quickly would be an understatement. I used to defend myself desperately against commitments, trying to keep myself disconnected enough to fit my whole life into a backpack, holding onto the freedom to disappear. Now I’m living with my boyfriend, buying furniture, looking for a dog, contemplating marriage. This nomad has traded in his camel for a queen-size bed.

It’s the first time I’ve ever lived with a significant other, and it’s been a bit of a ride. He’s had a tough time adjusting to life in Madison; there aren’t enough skyscrapers, there aren’t enough coffee shops, there aren’t enough black people, gay people, or gay black people. But I think Madison’s slowly growing on him, working its irrepressible Midwestern charm on his gray Pacific Northwest disposition. He started work this week, at a travel agency similar to the one where he worked in Seattle; he’s getting involved in some writing groups, and we’re making some friends. I just received word that I passed the Foreign Service Written Exam, so we might not be here forever; in a year’s time, I might be working for Condoleeza in Kyrgyzstan. But for the time being, Madison is a damn fine place to call home. (I retain the right the revise my opinion in October when it will be fucking freezing.)

I could go on about Madison, but I’ve also traveled a lot this summer. I’ve been to the Twin Cities five times this summer, mostly for work; and I’ll be back at least three more times before September. Downtown Minneapolis is a bloodless assembly of glittering skyscrapers, linked by glittering skybridges; some of the outlying neighborhoods are interesting, but I can’t shake the sense that it’s just a flattened, decaffeinated version of Seattle. St. Paul is pleasant, but it just feels like a decaffeinated Portland after a bout of clear-cutting. I spent six days in Cleveland in mid-July, and that was more my cup of tea. Beneath layers of urban crud and derelict shells of buildings, Cleveland has an ancient core of opulence. The beautiful public library, neoclassical City Hall, and a majestic monument to Civil War soldiers and sailors suggest an elegant past that stands in sharp contrast to the poor, depopulated feel of much of the city today. But Cleveland also has some great, gritty neighborhoods that mix together history, beautiful old architecture, blue-collar culture and the seeds of economic revitalization into one bitter but delicious brew. I was there supporting the installation of our pharmacy software, and I’ll definitely be heading back later this year when they adopt some of our other clinical products.

Milwaukee was also a pleasant surprise. Arthur and I went for the Fourth of July fireworks, a pyrotechnic masterpiece unleashed over Lake Michigan which elicited the oohs and aahs and “Fuckin’ sweet!”’s of thousands of inebriated Milwaukeese. There’s an amazing art museum on the lakeshore. Most of the other touristy sites are affiliated with either Miller or Pabst, making it my kind of town. Had I not moved to Wisconsin, I never would have discovered that these Rust Belt metropoli are actually cool cities.

Last weekend, I went down to Chicago with Arthur to visit my dad’s side of the family. I hadn’t seen my Chicago cousins in almost ten years, when they were little more than dimples with limbs. Now they’ve become smart, mischievious, hilarious and beautiful human beings. One ten-year old cousin asked me, “Walker, do you like the jig?” We broke into the most exuberant jig we could muster, then he asked me, “Walker, do you like milkshakes?” and made me the most delicious chocolate peanut butter smoothie that could be prepared without using crack as a primary ingredient. It’s all genetic, isn’t it?

Domestic minutiae

2005-06-04T00:47:22Z

I've been reassigned to a hospital in the Twin Cities, and I'll be heading out there in just two weeks for the implementation kick-off. Yesssss! I mean, yaaaah! Minnesota here I come. I'm still sooooo unqualified for what I'm going to be doing, though. I've been studying harder for the last few weeks than I ever did at Berkeley, and I still feel pretty clueless. The real world is hard.

I got my first paycheck, and predictably went and blew it on consumer electronics. Some people might question the necessity of an IPod when I don't have chairs, or of a Playstation2 when I don't have forks. I scoff at them and dare them to match my sweet DDR skills.

I spent last weekend in Chicago with my boyfriend and had a rad time. It was great going back to Wrigley - I hadn't been there since 1987 - and the Cubs actually won! If they keep their current streak going for a little while longer, they'll have a good chance at the wild card, if not the pennant, and you'd better believe I'll sell myself to see some Wrigley post-season action. We also went down to the Navy Pier to see the International Male Leather competition, but they were charging like 40 bucks to get in, so we settled for being cruised by leather daddies in the foyer. Later, we went to the Art Institute, which on top of everything else had an excellent little collection of West African sculpture and masks. We also went to the top of the Sears Tower and discovered that Chicago is completely flat. Beautiful city, but it could use a hill or two.

Now it's Friday. Time to grease my bike chain, do my laundry, wash my dishes, and then go get wasted at one of Madison's two gay bars. This life is fun, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm like the tadpole version of a yuppie, still gestating in my amniotic sac of fax machines and meeting requests and metamorphosing into something gruesome, like a Republican. If my posts start sounding too complacent, somebody please slap me.

You know you're a yuppie when ...

2005-05-27T04:05:18Z

So last Thursday, I was sitting in a Corporate Philosophy seminar being led by our CEO, and she mentioned offhand that she would be chartering a plane to Portland over the weekend and had a few extra seats if anyone was interested in tagging along. I was a little intimidated, because this woman is so rich and brilliant that she could probably arrange my assassination and an unassailable coverup thereof during her lunchbreak if she found me unpleasant. But I told her after the seminar that I'd love to go, and so on Friday afternoon I was filing onto a private jet with her and six other passengers, en route to the west coast. The intimidation factor evaporated when I saw that she was wearing orange track pants and a red hoodie, and discovered that despite her awesome power she is a down-to-earth, friendly and awesome lady.

The jet itself was a complete novelty, festooned with DVD players, drawers full of free beverages, cupboards full of umbrellas, and an unobstructed view into the cockpit from my sofa in the cabin. Upon deplaning, I met up with my buddies and zoomed back up to Seattle for a quick but amazing weekend back home. The good times were interrupted only briefly by the impotent climax of the Star Wars trilogy. Yoda's lines were so bad that I was actually rooting for the Emperor to slice his little head off with a lightsaber. For shame, Mr. Lucas, for shame. Eventually Sunday rolled around, and it was back on the jet and back to Madison.

I have a certification test for work tomorrow morning, so I should really be studying right now. Or cleaning my apartment. My boyfriend is coming out to visit this weekend, to make sure he's making the right decision about leaving Seattle and moving out here to Madison. We'll be driving down to Chicago to recreate the Ferris Bueller's Day Off day, and maybe mix in some Adventures in Babysitting situations. I'm psyched.

Nine to five isn't as much fun without Dolly Parton

2005-05-15T21:52:37Z

Work is a pleasant routine. There are free vending machines all over the place, so I end up drinking about 14 cans of V-8 juice each day. Grandma would be proud (and jealous). Ninety percent of my time is still spent in training; I have to learn how to use all of the software before I can manage its installation. I got a little impromptu practicum on Saturday when I went to my urgent care clinic (I had a bitch of a sore throat) and discovered that the clinic was using our company's software. It was kind of surreal to see the receptionist, nurse, doctor, and pharmacist all using the software and doing the same stuff that I've been doing for the past week in training class. Except that they were actually entering real diagnoses, whereas I've mostly been entering stuff like "This patient smells" and "You smell too, Nurse" and "Shut up Dr. Stank". Anyway, they gave me some antibiotics and now the sore throat is gone. It's amazing how much easier it is to deal with health issues when you actually have health insurance. My old medical philosophy of slamming a bottle of Robitussen and waiting it out is quickly losing whatever credibility it retained after two near-death episodes in the tropics.

P.S. So I told my boss that I grew up in Seattle and went to school in the Bay Area, and she told me that the team would try to assign me to a client in one of those places. I received news this week that my first client is located in ... Oregon. Perhaps, in theory, sending me to a place which is equidistant from the two places I requested was a kind gesture. But who could be excited about spending the next year shuttling to Oregon, which is the homely middle child of the West Coast family. I'd almost rather be going to South Carolina or Texas or something. If it's not going to be a cool city, it might as well be a boring place that I've never been to before, so I can at least say that I've been there and I know it's boring. Oh well. Go Beavers.

Where's my stapler?

2005-05-07T00:28:29Z

On Monday morning, my first day of work, I stepped outside to discover that it was snowing. A lot. In May. This meteorological outrage occasioned a moment of reflection - what the fuck am I doing in Wisconsin? Fortunately, the next day it was sunny and beautiful, and today the air smells of barbeque and freshly cut grass. Long-neglected swimming pools are now being scraped clean and flooded, and eau de chlorine is wafting through my apartment complex from the pool in the central courtyard.

Work's been pleasant. I've spent most of the last week meeting people, decoding TLAs (three-letter acronyms), and being indoctrinated into the corporate philosophy of the company (there are people whose job title is Corporate Philosopher, and they take their indoctrination responsibilities seriously). Although rapid growth has forced them to employ normals, the company is still clearly dominated by geeks. Getting lost in the main building, I encountered cardboard likenesses of Data, Worf, and Captain Picard; and one guy was wearing a T-shirt with a Klingon translation of Shakespeare written in binary code. It seems to be unspoken company policy that sandals must be worn with socks.

I've been assigned to the team that works with the EpicRx software, which is used by doctors when they're prescribing medication and by pharmacists when they're filling prescriptions. I can only imagine how many medical errors are being prevented by having doctors write prescriptions electronically, rather than scrawling them in their incomprehensible chicken scratch. The team has clients in Hawaii, the Bay Area, Dallas, Boston, Seattle - you name it. My boss said that they'll try to assign me to a West Coast client, so hopefully I'll be heading back to either SF or Seattle in a few months.

I went out last weekend and met a girl who shares my Dance Dance Revolution addiction, and who has ingeniously mounted her dance pads onto sheets of plywood to ensure maximum pad responsiveness. I need to go to the hardware store.

The trip to Berlin has still been percolating in my head, so I picked up William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It's about 1100 pages, so I probably won't finish it before the outbreak of World War III; but it's a really interesting read. Hitler's father Alois was an illegitimate child and was given his mother's last name, Schicklgruber. But one day without any warning, Hitler's grandfather appeared, 84 years old, and attested that he was the father of the then-grown Alois. Shirer writes: "Had the 84-year old wandering miller not made his unexpected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his 39-year old son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolph Hitler would have been born Adolph Schicklgruber ... I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber. The name has a slightly comic sound as it rolls off the tongue of a South German. Can one imagine the frenzied German masses acclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous 'Heils'?" If that wandering Austrian miller had stayed away from the son he abandoned, would the Weimar Republic have survived, or would its collapse at least have taken a more benign form without the charisma and cruelty of Adolph Hitler? With no WWII, my grandparents wouldn't have married, my mother wouldn't have been born, and I wouldn't be writing this right now. It's frightening to imagine how much of history is just a butterfly effect.

Castration is too lenient

2005-04-29T15:35:43Z

Here's an interesting story from Kenya. It's good that MPs are finally talking about dealing with this issue, but I'm not sure how I feel about the measures that they're suggesting: MPs back tough new penalties for rapists

"Rapists should be castrated, stoned to death or face the firing squad, MPs were told yesterday. Chemical castration, through pills or injections to remove sexual desire, is one of a raft of new measures to combat sex crimes, contained in a new Bill by Ms Njoki Ndung'u. MPs agreed unanimously that Ms Ndung'u could present her Bill to Parliament for formal debate. But another MP – Mr Abdi Sasura – said chemical castration was too lenient and that rapists should be stoned, as they are in Ethiopia. Health minister Charity Ngilu suggested rapists should be physically castrated, in hospital."

And in honor of the passage of a FY2006 budget that cuts $10 billion out of Medicaid, here's Barbara Ehrenreich's article from the LA Times, A Society That Throws the Sick Away.

"When doctors notice a tissue growing nonstop — as U.S. medical costs are doing — and in the process draining nutrients from the body as a whole, they insist on prompt excision, i.e., cut the thing out before it kills. So too, one might think, economists should be calling for the immediate destruction of the American healthcare system."

My wandering days are over

2005-04-29T00:40:18Z

View over the Tiergarten from the roof of the Reichstag, Berlin

Sansoucci Palace, Potsdam

Sansoucci Palace, Potsdam

Some other palace, Potsdam

Neue Palais (sp? I don't speak these languages), Potsdam

Neue Palais, Potsdam

Prague. Sigh.

The most satanic chuch ever, Prague.

My future home, Prague.

Alfonse Mucha's stained glass in St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague.

Supposedly these are the biggest beagles in the world. The bigger one is also a bed and breakfast - $88 per night. Cottonwood, ID.

Upper Elk Creek Falls, Elk River, ID.

It looked like a flood to me, but there were a bunch of old guys nonchalantly fishing in this lake so I guess it's business as usual. Somewhere in Idaho.

The trip to Idaho was pretty exciting. In true Napoleon Dynamite style, our next-door neighbors were breeding llamas, which brayed at me every time I left the house. We were housesitting for this lady who'd run off to Hawaii to birth yet another child. She had these paintings all over her house of dolphins swimming through shimmering galaxyscapes; it was sort of Pink Floyd meets Barney. The centerpiece of her living room was a wooden pole on which she had impaled an entire menagerie of Beanie Babies; and just about every room in the house had a made-in-China plastic crucified Jesus hanging on the wall. The people in Lewiston were all incredibly friendly, if slightly off in an indescribable Idaho way. While my boyfriend was at work, I took some road trips out to Elk River, Hells Canyon, Moscow and Pullman, WA. Towards the end of my stay in the Gem State, I contracted a nasty flu that put one of my feet in the grave, but shortly after crossing back into a coastal state I staged a full recovery.

The trip to Prague and Berlin was somewhat more exciting (no doy). In Prague, we trolled the hernas (24-hour sleazoid bars stuffed with slot machines, where we were invariably the only customers) and harassed the palace guards at Prague Castle. The city felt a bit like Disneyland, it was so uniformly and absurdly beautiful. By contrast, Berlin felt like a real city, with a hodgepodge skyline of 19th century cathedrals, Communist radio towers, Prussian war monuments, and 21st century skyscrapers. We went to a gay bar where a lone drag queen played bad Top 40 and grinded solo under a disco globe that nearly engulfed her. We also went to Potsdam, a suburban complex of old imperial palaces; checked out what remained of the Berlin Wall; and smoked a joint in the Tiergarten at 4:20PM on my friend's birthday, 4/20. Considering what little time we had, I'd say it was a pretty awesome experience. My friends still have a few weeks left in Europe, but of course it will all be joyless in comparison to the brief period when I graced them with my company. Right, guys?

I'm now settling into my yuppie nest in Middleton, Wisconsin. As the name suggests, Middleton is a quilt of unassuming middle-class homes and crayola-green lawns, threaded with quiet tree-lined streets and jogging trails, splotched with ponds. It's like a flatter, older version of the Seattle suburbs I just fled. A few minutes away is Madison, which I've been exploring for the past few days. I can't help but feel that it's like Berkeley, except better in just about every quality-of-life way. The campus is more architecturally harmonious, the student body is more attractive, the sports teams are generally better, the restaurants are more hygienic, the city is safer, the buses are on time, the bus drivers are less sassy, the hobos are less rabid, the hippies are less putrid. When my lease in Middleton expires next year, I'm definitely moving downtown.

I start work on Monday, and I feel like I'm going to enjoy living here. The one issue is that my boyfriend is 1,000+ miles away in Seattle. I won't see him for another month, until Memorial Day weekend when he's coming out here to visit. In the meantime, I guess I'll be spending my nights with the good people of C-SPAN.

Speaking of which, I'm really concerned about this judicial nomination shit. I mean, the filibustered judges are obviously psychotic ideologues - one of them doesn't believe in the constitutionality of the FDA, for example - but Democratic threats to shut down the legislative process, if carried out, are not going to be helpful in 2006 or 2008. It seems to me like it would be better to goad the Republicans into breaking the rules and then use it as a campaign issue in 2006.

Going places

2005-04-01T03:04:49Z

It has recently come to my attention that I'll be going to Germany for one week in mid-April. My three coolest friends ever from high school are gallavanting around Europe, and I didn't want to wait until they get back to the States to hear their interminable stories and annoying inside jokes, so I'm intercepting them in Berlin. My boyfriend works in the travel industry, and he got us a pretty sweet deal on the airfare. We'll probably go to Dresden too, since we'll be in the neighborhood. I downloaded some David Hasselhoff songs today to put myself in the mood, and one contained the unforgettable lyric "Been workin' on a farm/Put some muscle in my arm." You can really understand his appeal. Now all I need to do is brush up on some German phrases so I can make friends and avoid pervs:

(1) I'm allergic to leather.
(2) Communist East Germany collapsed sixteen years ago, please cut off your skunk mullet.
(3) Is there anything on this menu that doesn't contain hog anus?
(4) I'm mainly here to learn about historical events that your society collectively denies.
(5) I too would like to clothesline Dick Cheney into a deep fryer.
(6) I'm not Canadian, but I'll learn.

Any help on these translations would be much appreciated. In slightly less exciting travel news, I'll be spending most of next week in Lewiston, Idaho. My boyfriend has to go out there for work, and I decided to accompany him and take full advantage of Idaho's proximity and natural beauty before I move away and Idaho becomes just another distant kingdom of white supremacists and WalMart shoppers.

I've been looking for apartments in Madison. I'd really prefer to have a cool-sounding address, like "High Oak Lane" or "Pheasant Ridge Trail" or "Sheboygan Boulevard." I'm really surprised by how many places have outdoor pools, since Madison basically has an eight-month winter, but I've decided anyway that a pool will be a prerequisite for my consideration of any apartment complex. Swimming regularly will be a good way to counteract my increased consumption of cheese, beer and brats (as in -wurst, not misbehaving children). I've also decided that I'll begin furnishing my apartment by purchasing a PlayStation, a copy of "Dance Dance Revolution" (a.k.a. 'DDR') and a DDR dancepad. Damn straight.

Disturbing news from the Guardian: apparently acute malnutrition among Iraqi children aged under five nearly doubled last year because of chaos caused by the US-led occupation. And the wrangling over the formation of a new government reminds me so much of what's happened in Kenya since the 2002 election. Many electoral democracies outside (and a few inside) the Western world have gotten stuck in a developmentally unhelpful and potentially violent rut of corruption and sectarian division. What are we doing to prevent Iraqi democracy from becoming a tug-of-war over oil rents between corrupt entrepreneurs of ethnicity? Even in countries where corruption-averse donors have a lot of political leverage or where elections have been held regularly for more than a decade, corruption and sectarianism are difficult problems. It's just another issue that Wolfowitz probably didn't think about during the nonexistent planning stages of the war, and that he'll be ill-suited to deal with when he's running the World Bank.

Collapsible life

2005-03-22T23:49:47Z

Oh yeah - I have a blog. Sorry for the extended absence, but truth be told there wasn't much to tell. The sun shone in Seattle all through the month of February and into March, foreshadowing the terrible droughts and fires that will surely come with summer. I rode my bike all over town, across empty fields of dug-up vineyards, across empty parking lots, suckling pensively at my CamelBak. I read some great books - the Seymour Hirsch book Chain of Command, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami and Demons by Dostoyevsky were the highlights. My best friends left for a two-month backpacking trip across Europe; I accompanied their moms to the airport to see those kids off, wondering if I'd still be in Seattle when they got back.

Caving into my nomadic impulses, I decided to take a Project Manager job with a medical software firm in Madison, Wisconsin. It pays much better than anyone who has an interdisciplinary degree in "__Insert Liberal Arts Term Here__" Studies should expect, and it sounds like very interesting and challenging work, and there's a lot of traveling involved, so I couldn't say no. And after three or four years, I can go to UW-Madison for my MA and then go back into development work. I start at the beginning of May, so I'll probably be moving out to Madison at the end of April. In the meantime, I have a few loose strings to tie up here in Seattle.

First is a relationship I've gotten into with a really cool guy. We've been dating for almost a month and a half now, which makes it one of my more long-term relationships; and I like the guy a whole lot. He has three framed portraits of Janet Jackson hanging on his walls, and on Valentine's Day we went to a karaoke bar and he sang "Sweet Thing" by Chaka Khan for me. (That's the most direct path to my heart.) I am horribly allergic to cats and am convinced that they all have wicked souls, but for some reason his cat and I have become good buddies. He's in a different place in his life than I am, but I feel like we understand each other, and we make each other laugh. But I know that things will end if I move away, and that sucks.

The other thing is that I've started mentoring a Somali refugee family in Tukwila, and it has been a huge blast. They all speak Kiswahili and listen to E-Sir and Mr. Nice, and going into their apartment feels like stepping back into Africa. They've been in the States for about three months, and the kids have just been dropped into the public schools with only about an hour a day of ESL classes. I feel like I can really help them out if I stick around, and I can help them reach a point where they see Seattle as home, where they can communicate with people, find jobs and get around, feeling comfortable and confident. I don't want to leave the area just as I'm developing a relationship with them and just as I'm seeing them start to see themselves as Americans.

Finally, I've just fallen back in love with the Seattle area. I think the most beautiful sight in the world is coming across the floating bridge around sunset, seeing the lights of the city across the lake, and beyond that the Olympic Mountains; and down to the south, snowcapped Mt. Rainier looking like a floating island of ice. I've gotten used to being able to drive 40 miles and being in the middle of a pristine alpine forest*, and then being able to drive 50 miles in the other direction and being in the heart of one of the most beautiful cities on earth. Madison seems like a great place to live, but I don't think it'll stack up favorably to Seatown. No place does.

But this seems to be my lot - to leave fragments of my life scattered all over the earth. Will I settle down in Madison, or will that just be another brief stopover en route to some other Blue State? Only future entries of this blog will tell.

To anyone who wants to come visit me in Seattle: call or write soon, because I'll only be here for another month! After that, I will be your gracious host should you wish to venture out to the Great Lakes.

Oh yeah, I forgot to bitch about all the B.S. that this goddamn new Republican Congress has been up to! That bankruptcy reform bill was the most egregious transgression, and I urge any conservative readers to go and read the bill and then explain to me how Christian values teach us to make it easier for the credit card industry to stick it to people who have suffered unaffordable medical emergencies. Please include in your missive an explanation of why the people who are so ready to shred state's rights and the rule of law over the life of Terry Schiavo are also the most trigger-happy proponents of the death penalty. An explanation of the diplomatic rationale behind the nominations of John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz would also be greatly appreciated, as would an explanation of why cutting Medicaid is a better way to trim the deficit than raising taxes. I need your help - I'm so confused!

*
e.g. Mailbox Peak, about 35 miles from Seattle, photographed circa March 15.

A few more pictures

2005-02-14T08:28:23Z

I met some painfully cute children in Chembe, on Lake Malawi. Their parents had taught them to yell "Give me money!" at white passerby. I always responded by holding out my hand and saying, "You give me money!" My hand invariably got high-fived. Some of the children then moved to Plan B and said "Give me sweet!" Others just laughed, not knowing the meaning of what they'd said or what I'd said but being immensely amused at the spectacle of us yelling at each other in the street.

Pretty nature in Hogsback, South Africa. I came here for a few days because I heard that it looked like Middle Earth, but the only real resemblance was the Shelob-size spiders.

In Maputo I visited an art studio where they make sculptures and furniture out of guns, landmines and hand grenades bought back from ex-RENAMO guerrillas. Someday my whole house will be furnished with this stuff.

This island in Lake Malawi was full of African fish eagles, and monitor lizards slid around the rocks on the beach.

Picture for mom from the bottom of Mt. Mulanje.

A parting shot of Lisa and Anna, my two favorite housemates from Dar es Salaam.

These adorable kids from Lushoto swarmed me when I tried to pitch my tent at their primary school.

A 10-month old elephant fetus from the Natural History Museum in Mozambique. That museum was really just a huge collection of stuffed African mammals which had been arranged in extremely unrealistic poses. Come on, lions do not ride on wildebeest, and hippos and elephants don't kiss.

Happy Zimba, my main man in Nkhata Bay, with his family. He was a cool guy and I credit him with introducing me to chibuku, the only moonshine that can safely be fed to a baby.

Very little has changed since my last update. I went to Vancouver, B.C. last week to visit a friend, and after getting a taste of the cheerful harmlessness of Canada it was difficult to return to American soil. I spent this whole weekend in Spokane, subsisting mainly on chicken-fried steak and watching countless episodes of the homosexual menace Spongebob Squarepants. I was catching up with my brother, my sister-in-law and my darling three year-old niece. Before going to bed each night, she said to me, "Goodnight Uncle Walker, you sweet little man." I almost choked on the cuteness. My dad also showed up, with my step-mom and their son, my baby brother from another mother. My step-mom is my age, and of course she had to spend like an hour talking about all her favorite movies from when she was a little kid. They were mostly movies that my dad had taken me to see when I was a little kid myself, and all I could think about was how he had married one of the other little children in the audience. But my half-brother is cute, so I guess she can stay.

I am still playing the waiting game; I got one job offer but turned it down because the people interviewing me seemed to loathe the place so much that they sounded guilty when they made me the offer. I don't think I'd last in a maritime law firm anyway, I'd become one of those guys polishing a shotgun behind his desk whispering, "I am the angel of death, the hour of judgement is at hand." I have some cool volunteer stuff coming up so hopefully that will keep me sane until I get a decision on one of the interesting jobs.

By the way, Tom Friedman, who spent most of the last two years being a tool, seems finally to have come around and has written a great column.

Jumbled rambling

2005-02-07T00:10:47Z

The day I came back into the country, one of my cousins passed away. Danny had Down's Syndrome, and he was 36; he had lived longer than any of us had the right to expect. I met him when I was six, when we first moved to the Seattle area. Our families usually spent Thanksgiving together, since we were the only two branches of the Dean family in the Northwest. They had remained good Mormons while we had strayed into some offshoot of Protestantism where the message of the Lord is revealed mainly through baseball analogies. But we all got on well, and Danny's meticulously organized collection of Star Wars action figures made me drool with envy. Also, he dealt me many humiliating defeats at the ping pong table. I was still at that age when kids tell jokes about retarded people without realizing that they'll burn in hell for it; but Danny quickly taught me that retards can kick ass and take names. He worked for Microsoft for 14 years, earning the nickname "Moneybags" from his friends; and he regularly flew down to watch the Mariners' spring training. The memorial service was yesterday, and it was goddamn touching, aside from a reading from the Book of Mormon whose message seemed to be that it was okay to cut your neighbor's head off if angels tell you to. Gary Locke was there, along with a grip of state legislators; Danny had led an entire life I didn't know about, making frequent trips to Olympia as an advocate for the rights of disabled citizens. He was a heroic guy, and reflecting on his life gave me a better picture of what I want to do with the time that I have left.

Last night, I went to Capitol Hill to be among my people. I met a great guy at Neighbours who had a beautiful apartment one block from Broadway and a CD collection that included the complete oeuvre of Chaka Khan AND Dusty Springfield. He called me today and we agreed to meet up again on Thursday. I don't know where it's going, but if nothing else it's nice to have a queer friend in the city.

Being back in the States, there is one thing I've really enjoyed - speaking English. For a long time, whenever I spoke English I had to take for granted that much of the meaning of what I was saying would be lost. Certain kinds of ideas were just incommunicable in English, because their vocabularies were beyond my listeners. I spoke and heard a shadow of the language I'd known and loved and played around with all my life. Being able to play around with the language again, to use strange words and unusual turns of phrase and figurative speech - and to actually be understood - that feels nice.

It's also nice not being a mzungu. Everybody will tell you that mzungu isn't a derogatory term, but I just don't buy it. To me, it's a reductive, dehumanizing label that crowds out so much of who and what you are. It carries a lot of baggage with it; a mzungu is probably a tourist; or a missionary; or a donor; certainly an ignorant outsider. As a mzungu you are always inside a fishbowl, always a center of attention and/or suspicion; always separated from strangers by their perception of your alienness. Being a mzungu means always having to prove your humanity. It's exhausting, and I'm glad it's over.

That's the cold comfort I take from being back here. Mostly I feel like I copped out. I'm thinking of K'Owuor, Peter and Amina and all the people I left behind over there, who are working so hard and dreaming so big, but whose lives will continue to be hindered by the dysfunctional society they live in. Their kids will go to underperforming schools, they'll have to worry about crime and insecurity. Corrupt politicians will suck their country's blood like the mosquitoes that infect their infants with malaria. Nobody will come to pick up the garbage in their neighborhoods, so their kids will play in it. Hospitals will have endless queues, money will always be tight, work will always be scarce, and orphaned nieces and nephews will keep showing up on the doorstep. Why did I even bother to enter that world and fight those battles if I was just going to retreat back into my amniotic sac of the modern existence, shampooing my hair every day with goo from a bottle that says "Guarantees your horoscope will read 'Every day will be a good hair day'"?

I should start hearing back from potential employers next week, and I really hope I can find a job in which I feel like I'm back on those ramparts, being a part of the solution.

P.S. Fuck a Superbowl. Romeo Dallaire is on BookTV on C-Span 2 tonight.

Los EEUU aburridisimos

2005-02-05T01:52:25Z

I've been back in the States for about a week, and I am bored to death. Most of my time has been divided between writing cover letters, walking our dogs, and watching the dance scene at the end of Napoleon Dynamite over and over again. Those moves will be mine by Valentine's Day. Oh, and there was also that very unfortunate State of the Union. Curious how a president whose prescription drug plan created an $8 trillion unfunded liability in Medicare is so concerned about a $3.7 trillion unfunded liability in Social Security. Hmmmmm ...

Here are a few pictures I've developed; more coming soon.

Bart's made it in South Africa.

Shipwreck on Robben Island.

Mandela's inauguration, rendered in the medium of diorama.

The old Dutch castle in Cape Town.

Carrying water in Shikokho.

The Lion's Head, Cape Town.

Amina back in Kilifi.

My friend Sara and I in frigid, frigid London during my eight-hour layover.

End = beginning

2005-01-25T12:41:07Z

Five weeks and five thousand kilometers since setting off from Dar es Salaam, I arrived in Cape Town. The city was as beautiful as I'd been told, with Table Mountain rising over it like a huge stone cloud, the natural sphinx of the Lion's Head curled at its side, gazing out to the technicolor marriage of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans at Cape Point.

It felt a bit strange marveling at a city whose opulence was accumulated over a 350-year history of slavery and apartheid; but I was relieved to see a new history being written. Robben Island, once the hole into which the apartheid government threw its enemies, is now a cheesy tourist attraction swamped by sunburnt Brits all attired in identical utility shorts and sunhats. The National Gallery now showcases protest art from the struggle for democracy; the lesser works of 17th century Dutch portraiture which once dominated the collection have been elbowed into the corner where they belong. The District Six Museum, which commemorates a multiracial neighborhood which was bulldozed when the authorities declared it a 'whites-only' area, was announcing that the city is redeveloping the neighborhood, and former residents will have priority when the new housing units are ready.

Green Point, the site of an enormous concentration camp during the Anglo-Boer War, is now the heart of a thriving gay community. The main dance club there, the Bronx, rivaled anything in the Castro and actually had a pretty good mix of gay men and lesbians, whites, blacks and Asians. After a few drinks I found myself on the streetcorner outside the club making out with a Tswana guy whose name I don't remember and don't think I ever actually knew. Where else on this whole continent could two boys kiss on the street without fear? Free at last, and it felt good.

As my time in South Africa comes to an end, and as I prepare to leave one beautiful city by the sea full of faggoty boys for another, Franz Kafka summarizes my feelings better than I ever could:

"If we knew we were on the right road, having to leave it would mean endless despair. But we are on a road that only leads to a second one, and then to a third one, and so forth. And the real highway might not be sighted for a long, long time, perhaps never. So we drift in doubt. But also in an unbelievably beautiful diversity. Thus the accomplishment of hopes remains an unexpected miracle. But in compensation, the miracle remains forever possible."

She's just missing

2005-01-08T09:48:52Z

The trip to Mulanje didn't quite go as planned. One of the Scots woke up with a touch of bilharzia, and the whole clan bailed in solidarity. It ended up just being me and two militant Israeli dykes. They were stern company, but it was funny traveling with them. Whenever they told people that they were from Israel, people were filled with wonder: "You're Israelites ... God's chosen people!" Or, "Oh, Israel, I read about it in the Bible."

We were told in Blantyre not to attempt to climb the mountain in heavy rain, and of course when we arrived at the base, it was pouring buckets. We asked the forest ranger if it was really safe to climb in such conditions. "Didn't a girl die here last year hiking in the rain?" The forest ranger told us, "She's not dead, she's just missing." For a year? Hmmm. He assigned us a guide, who was about sixteen, but a few hours into the hike the trail had transformed into a river and we were all slipping and sliding, covered in mud and drenched to the bone. We asked again, "Are you sure this is safe?" "Oh yes, very safe," he said, and about two minutes later he slipped and nearly cracked his head open. We decided we had to turn back, over the protests of the guide. In the US in such a situation, you can rely upon the expertise and judgement (and fear of being sued) of the guide to make the right decision; but when your guide is a sixteen year-old kid from the local village who won't have another chance to earn any cash in the foreseeable future, it's really up to you.

Back in Blantyre, relating the story to the security guards at my hostel, I learned that Mulanje is one of the most feared places in Malawi, believed to be haunted by female spirits who apparently do one of two things to you: (1) leave a big warm plate of nsima (ugali) by the trail for you to eat, or (2) kill you. In Zomba, I heard a different version of this story, where actually it's a cyborg who lives on the mountain, and some people from Germany were sent to hunt it down but it killed them. "A cyborg, like a Terminator?" I asked. "Yes, yes, like Terminator."

Malawi is an intensely superstitious place. People really believe in witchcraft, and it's no use arguing about it. The attitudes of people I met in Malawi towards HIV/AIDS were way, way behind Kenya and Tanzania, and there's actually a chain of roadside clinics, with the words "Healing the Nations HIV Healing Scheme" painted boldly on the walls, which charge money to cure AIDS using traditional medicine. In Kenya or Tanzania, a lot of witch doctors are making a killing proffering such services, but they have to do it in secret. The fact that the Malawian government allows these clinics to operate in broad daylight is very discouraging.

With superstition comes paranoia. On the stretch of highway between Mzuzu and Lilongwe, I crossed through at least a dozen police roadblocks where all of the passengers have to get out of the vehicle while the police use the barrels of their huge automatic weapons to push around luggage. Inevitably the only white guy on the vehicle, my luggage was given special scutiny, and I wished I hadn't put my dirty underwear at the top of my bag for every policeman in Malawi to look at. While my luggage was inspected I was asked an ever-changing series of irrelevant questions while guns were pointed at the space between my head and shoulder. When I finally got to Lilongwe, I ordered some coffee, and after waiting for about an hour I got up to ask if my coffee was almost ready. "The person making your coffee is under investigation now," I was told. Under investigation for what? "I cannot tell you." I just had some tea instead.

This country was a real, proper dictatorship back in the day. The first president, Hastings Banda, ruled for about thirty years and changed his title from "His Majesty the President" to "His Majesty the Life President." At one point everyone was required to purchase little cards with his picture on them, and to carry these cards at all times. When he was traveling around the country, party thugs would go to the villages and round up everyone, forcing them to stand by the side of the road so that the presidential motorcade could pass by crowds of chanting, clapping subjects. Rastafarians especially chafed under his autocratic rule. It was illegal for men to have long hair; so when Bob Marley finished his tour of Zimbabwe and came to Malawi to play some shows, he was stopped at the border and ordered to cut off his dreds. Naturally he declined and went back to Zimbabwe, depriving the rastas of an encounter with their prophet and earning their eternal (though gentle) emnity.

In rural areas of Malawi, the only public transport is the matola, which is just a truck with an open bed, into which are stuffed as many people and babies as possible, then a few more babies, then the people's luggage, then some chickens and goats. Everybody hangs on for dear life, mostly to each other, as the truck bounces along over swiss-cheese roads through torrential rain. The first time I took a matola, a guy actually fell out of the back. The vehicle stopped, and he just climbed back in, his face bleeding, positioned himself in the same spot, and off we went again. Another time, our matola was parked by the side of the road while the driver tried to stuff a few more pieces of luggage into the truckbed, and a huge truck came barreling past us. It was too tall for the power lines hanging low over the road, so as it passed us it ripped the power lines off of their spindly poles and sent them whirling in our direction. Time stopped as I watched the live wire swinging toward us, 20 or 25 bodies damp with rain and all stuffed together, no hope of escape. But the wire just swung by, landing on the road with a little sizzle. I let out a chain of relieved obscenities, looking around to express my amazement at our brush with death. But no one else seemed to have noticed, or to care.

I spent some time in Nkhata Bay, where my grandparents had done PeaceCorps in 1989-91, helping refugees from the Mozambican civil war start a new life across the lake. The war's over now, the refugees have mostly been repatriated, and it was a calm, peaceful place. The only strange thing that happened there was when I saw some guys carrying what looked like a dead body towards a fire. I asked what was going on, and someone told me that they were trying to determine whether or not the man was really dead, because apparently if he's alive, when they hold his feet over the fire, he'll start kicking. My grandpa must have left pulse-checking out of his hygiene and first-aid classes.

Now I'm in Maputo, in striking distance of South Africa. I've just been speaking Spanish hoping that people will get the idea, and to my amazement it actually kind of works.

Apologies for falling behind on email correspondence, my $ is getting very very thin and internet access here is a bit expensive, not to mention sporadic; but I will definitely get back to everyone by the end of the month, when I get back to the States.

Tchuthi Chabwino!

2004-12-22T16:45:06Z

That's happy holidays in Chichewa. I think.

I hope everybody has a safe, relaxing, thoughtful, yet still joyously fun holiday season, and that 2005 turns out be better than we could possibly imagine.

I'm in Blantyre right now; it looks like I'll be spending Christmas day on the top of Mt. Mulanje with a bunch of Scotsmen. There's no chance of snow, but there is a strong chance of monkeys.

All the best to one and all.

Sayonara

2004-12-16T16:53:11Z

My last day in Kenya was like a microcosm of my entire experience there. It was Jamhuri Day, the 41st anniversary of the declaration of the Kenyan republic, and all of the newspapers were running "What Went Wrong?"-style frontpage stories. 41 years since independence, and this is all we have to show for it? They recounted Kenya's glory days in the 1960s when South Korea sent its economic policymakers to Nairobi to learn from Kenya's success. They sang the praises of Lee Kwan Yew and wondered if laws against spitting in public would help Kenya jumpstart its economy.

That morning, I met with an American who had founded an NGO in Kenya. Amina thought this lady would be able to guide us through the tortuous registration process, which usually requires a contact or two in the National Council of NGOs. "So what does your organization do? Do you work with the community groups?" she asked, as though there were some clearly demarcated boundary between "community groups" and every other type of development organization. I explained that we work with some community-based organizations, but we also work with other types of organizations because CBOs often lack the organizational capacity to integrate and properly utilize our volunteers, and because the CBOs often lack the financial transparency that we demand of our grant recipients. She scoffed and told me in a familiar tone of voice, "Well, that's really against my principles," and went off on some speech about how community-based groups are the only actors capable of affecting real change and how her organization's work had proven that CBOs are always honest and transparent and can do anything "if you believe in them." I asked how long she had been in Kenya; two weeks. I asked where she came from; Half Moon Bay. I knew her tone of voice had sounded familiar - it was that wealthy liberal self-satisfaction that is nowhere so abundant as in the Bay Area. When I mentioned that I went to Cal, she told me that she had lived in the Berkeley Hills for such-and-such years, but the students were just too disruptive so we bought a house on the beach blah blah blah. I asked if she could give us any tips or insider contacts on the registration process, and she just said, "Well, if your work was community-based, I would have been glad to help you." After talking some more about Half Moon Bay she started off, but the Kenyan who ran her NGO's programs on the ground lingered behind and whispered to me in Kiswahili that I should call her that afternoon and she would be able to help me out. When I called her, she said that she would be willing to let our NGO use her NGO as legal shelter while we waited for our registration to clear, if we paid her a few hundred dollars. By now, that American lady is back in Half Moon Bay, totally oblivious of what her program director is doing, probably oblivious of how the funds she's doling out are being spent, too self-satisfied and convinced of the importance of her work to hang around for more than a few weeks, look around, listen, and find out what's really going on. This is the story of foreign aid - sketchy motives from the donors, corruption on the ground, no follow-through on either side.

In the afternoon, after visiting some organizations in Kilifi, I was waiting for a matatu back to Mombasa. There was one other man at the matatu stand, and he approached me with the question, "Have you ever heard of a man named Jesus?" I stared blankly. "Jesus Christ?" I shrugged my shoulders. He was determined to fill me in on this whole Jesus thing. This guy was like a jukebox of the greatest hits of Kenyan Christian fundamentalism. "AIDS is a curse, prophesied in Deuteronomy Chapter 28, which God puts upon those who dishonor him." "Our preacher can make the crippled walk, the blind see, the deaf hear and the HIV-positive turn to negative." "The Pope is the Anti-Christ because if you add up the Roman numerals on his hat, you get 666." "Osama bin Laden has supernatural powers like invisibility." "White people are more blessed than black people because you descended from the sons of Noah who brought him a blanket. We descended from the son who beheld Noah's nakedness." I tried my hardest to reason with this person, but I think the only argument of mine that stuck with him was that, if the human population had really been reduced to just Noah and his family by the flood, they would have become so inbred after a few generations that they'd probably have become sterile and died out.

He was firmly convinced that the apocalypse was coming soon - "maybe tonight." This is the one point on which we could agree, but not because I think the Four Horsemen's steeds are chomping at their bits. If the end of the world is nigh, it's because millions of people like this guy are being taught hateful lies, packaged as righteousness, and they're swallowing it. Even though rape victims, orphans and babies are dying of AIDS right in this guy's backyard, he still believes it's a curse put upon the wicked, because his church tells him so. Even though we're bombing and torturing innocent civilians in Iraq, Americans still think George Bush was the 'values' candidate, because Fox News tells them so.

When I finally got back to Mombasa, I got caught up in a huge political rally. The Kisauni by-election, the one that was stupidly declared the "mother of all battles", was just a few days away, and MPs from all over the country had swarmed into the constituency to campaign for their cronies. The high court had declared that the election could not be held until a corruption case against the candidate of the ruling NARC party was resolved. Among the people I talked to, it was common knowledge that this candidate, Ali Hassan Joho, had paid 500/- (about $7) for each vote he'd received during the NARC nominations. But the Electoral Commission just decided to ignore the court order and go ahead with the election (so much for the courts leading the war on corruption). It looked almost certain that Joho would win; he was supported by all of the Moi-kissing dinosaurs who had opportunistically infected the opposition just before the last elections, and they had deep pockets. At the rally, none of the MPs were talking about the innumerable problems in Kisauni - lack of running water, dilapidated infrastructure, no jobs, huge reeking piles of garbage lining the streets. They were all just slandering other MPs. The crowd was cheering. I went home.

It is Jamhuri Day tradition that the President pardon a few thousand petty offenders. On the news that night, they announced that Dr. Gachara, the lady who'd stolen about 30 million shillings from the National AIDS Control Council, had been pardoned and released from jail. She'd served just three months of a one-year term. In a press conference, she announced that her time in jail had helped her find a new calling, and now she was determined to start an NGO to help assist female prisoners. I could only laugh. If at first you don't succeed, dust yourself off and try again.

Walker vs. Tanzanian Immigration, Round 2: Technical Knockout

2004-11-25T13:43:09Z

The Tanzanian immigration authorities decided to reject my application for a renewed business visa. Maybe they had discovered my Livejournal and their feelings were hurt by all of the shit talking I've done about them in previous entries. More likely, they just wanted some palm grease. Either way, I got on a bus and now I'm back in Western Kenya, wrapping up the paperwork for our programs here. It will probably take me another month to finish everything, leaving me with about five weeks to reach Cape Town before my flight back to Seattle on January 25.

I know this shouldn't be a situation where one stage of my life - sweaty, unscripted, spiced with cardamom and Zairian gospel music - suddenly comes to an end, and is replaced by an air-conditioned 9-5 routine that is just barely interesting enough to prevent me from running back to Africa or joining some kind of cult. It should be a gradient-y, slow fade-in fade-out process where the continuity of the overall narrative doesn't get compromised. So I guess that means it's time for me to start slowly tuning out of life here, to stop learning dirty words in Kiswahili and to slowly start tuning into the following issues:
+ How long do applications for Canadian work permits take to be processed?
+ If my sister and I get an apartment together, how long will it take for us to kill each other?
+ Did all those drugs I took sophomore year permanently cripple my reasoning skills, thus rendering a decent LSAT score unattainable?
+ Does that albino in Berkeley still have my wok?
And so on. I'm not too thrilled to be turning toward this kind of drudgery after spending the last six months bumping around East Africa doing amazing things and meeting amazing people and never knowing what kind of insects I'll eat next. But on the other hand, I appreciate what a tremendous privilege it is to be able to go to the United States, having spoken to so many frustrated young men who've been entering the green card lottery for years with no luck. And it's even more of a privilege to have a loving family back there who, as they gather around the table in Spokane this weekend, will be thinking of me and wishing me a safe journey home. And in the meantime, I have the privilege of being with Mama Owindu, who makes me taste-test huge servings of her home-brewed pineapple wine, asking me if it's 'conk enough yet.' It's definitely conk enough, and for that and so much more, I give thanks.

Pictures

2004-11-09T15:38:25Z

That OFoto business was too complicated, so I'm cutting out the middle man. Enjoy!

Zanzibar red colobus monkey

Mangrove forest, Jozani, Ugunja

Omani ruins at Kaole

Giraffes near Arusha

My mom dances with chameleons

I'm not the only monkey in town

Flamingo migration near Mt. Meru

A big spider lives in there

This lady hiked way too fast for us to keep up

The trail gets a little wet

We came from behind those mountains

I wish people could have googly eyes too

They're cute until they learn how to scream, "Mzungu!"

Mom wonders, "WTF?"

Journey's end

Keep it up Caligula

2004-11-09T14:48:21Z

My mom went back to the States this morning. I cried in the taxi on the way back from the airport, and the taxi driver almost got into two accidents trying to comfort me. Being with my mom reminded me of all the stuff I'm missing out on back in Washington - family, friends, our dogs, Q-Tips ... I think I'll head back to Seattle in January, as soon as my work is finished.

On the morning of November 2, my mom and I set out on foot from Amani with two guides, Godfrey and Severin. Our destination: Lushoto, more than 100 kilometers away through rugged, mountainous terrain. At first, Godfrey told me that he'd hiked the route before with other tourists. Then he told me that he'd never done it himself, but Severin had, with other tourists. Severin later told us that he'd done the route once before, in August 2003, with one other guide, and they'd gotten lost. I was worried that I'd gotten my mom into more than she'd bargained for, but she took it all in stride. And off we went.

We climbed out of Amani Nature Reserve, a lush mountain jungle teeming with monkeys, snakes, frogs, chameleons, and hundreds of species of birds. We cut through overgrown tea plantations and dipped into farmland where everyone seemed to be busy brewing bamboo wine. At the end of the first day, we descended a steep 1500 meters out of the Eastern Usambaras, camping at the edge of the valley below on the soccer pitch of an elementary school. Muslims in the area played drums late into the night, gathering around midnight to drink coconut milk in celebration of Ramadhan.

The next day, we crossed the valley and climbed up, up, and up into the Western Usambaras. From there, our path wove between little farms, little forests, and little villages. The area presumably didn't receive many outside visitors, because just about everyone emptied out into the road as we passed and gawked at us like we had fallen from Mars. We passed by a traditional healing ceremony where an old woman was screaming Kisambaa incantations and a goat was being prepared for sacrifice; everyone seemed confused at the spiritual implications of the highly unusual passing of whities. When we pitched our tent that night in another village, just about the whole village surrounded us and watched, making excited commentary in Kisambaa. When we zipped up the cover on the tent door to try to go to bed, children shook the flap, screaming, "Fungua tuangalie!" Almost every time we passed through a village, a crowd of about thirty children would attach itself to us and follow us for a kilometer or two, until they realized that we were crusty, musty, and boring, and then they'd wander off. The kids Shikamoo'd us left and right, so I got plenty of practice doing my old-mama imitation in reply - "Marahabaaaaaaaaaaaa."

We ran out of food in the afternoon of the third day, in the middle of nowhere, and all we could find was a little hoteli run by a grubby old man who wanted us to call him Babu. When I first looked at him, I thought he only had one arm; later I realized that his other arm was just tucked inside his shirt and down his pants. His establishment wins the award in my book for Sketchiest Hoteli in East Africa. There were two things on the menu: chai and 'locketi', by which he meant rocket, by which he meant maandazi intended to be shaped like rockets but which actually looked more like malformed and diseased phalluses (phalli? I should know this), and were densely populated by ants. That night, all four of us had nightmares about Babu.

On the fourth day, tired, hungry, and unspeakably dirty, we finally trudged into Lushoto. It had been a grueling trip, but an amazing one too, and I think it gave my mom a great up-close look at life in rural Tanzania. Reaching our destination, we felt like true badasses, even though we had been getting left in the dust all along the way by barefoot old women carrying huge sacks of fruit on their heads.

That evening, Godfrey and Severin caught the bus back to Amani, and my mom and I got the news about the US election. Just as the exhaustion of our hike was lifting, a much worse kind of fatigue hit us.