10 Things I Know
...that I didn't know before moving from New England to Central Africa
Time, when the sun rises and sets at nearly the same hour every day and the sun moves around the sky in an even loop, is less terrorizing at the equator. A philodendron leaf that was tightly furled at breakfast will be open after lunch. Otherwise, the pace of the days here feels steady and even and little seems to change, externally, day after day.
The lack of distinct seasons contributes to this sense of timelessness. There’s a rainy season and a dry season and a slightly rainier season and a slightly drier season, but mostly it’s just different gradations of hot and humid. Combined with the consistent day-length, it all makes clocks and calendars seem…somewhat irrelevant, imposed on this place by a system developed elsewhere.
Related: Living in Libreville, Gabon, a city, though a very small one relative to others in Africa, reminds me of the Alaskan village I grew up in: despite the dramatic difference in latitude, people experience time in similar ways (“Gabonese” time is very much like “village” time in that schedules are suggestions and things start when they start); you make do with what’s available; getting out is expensive and takes time and effort. Also related: a bad experience with heat exhaustion last April is still, ten months later, making it hard for me to be outside during the day here, which suggests it might actually have been heat stroke. If I’m outside anywhere near midday for longer than about ten minutes, I start to sweat and feel nauseous. I tend to my plants in the early morning, when it’s still relatively cool, and we sit out at night sometimes, with a stick of okoume wood burning to keep the mosquitoes away. Also related: I used to lie, all bundled up, in snowbanks when I was a child. For fun.
I thought I understood what it means that poverty exists in the world. It’s one thing to read books, watch documentaries, hear about it on the news. It’s something else entirely to have enough to eat and a safe place to sleep alongside people who do not. If I ever complain about anything anymore, it will be about corruption and injustice rather than delayed flights or heavy traffic or, God forbid, the weather, even when it’s hot.
Honestly, I knew this one already: indifference to poverty is required to maintain the status quo, as is the attitude that leads people to say things like “well it’s a lot worse in (name any other “underdeveloped” country).” The two are firmly in place here and elsewhere in the “developed” world.
That roaches could be the size of small, and not-so-small, mice. I don’t generally become unhinged at the sight of large bugs and fortunately, these sightings have been rare. But I saw one in the shower once. Recall the image of Janet Leigh screaming in the Psycho shower scene and you’ll be close.
Photo by Onno Blaauw on Unsplash Growing food in a garden here is harder than you might think. The passion fruit seedlings have climbed the bamboo hedge I planted them under a year ago and have been fruiting for a couple months now though, and I have herbs on our front steps. Produce is abundant in the markets, so my “garden,” after failed attempts at growing tomatoes and cucumbers, is a collection of potted plants on the patio.
I, at 54, am treated like an old lady, by both locals and some of the people in the embassy community. I’m amused, and try to see what I can get away with because of it.
That the more often you leave situations that make you feel like shit, the easier it gets. It’s a privilege to be able to walk away, so if you can, I strongly encourage you to do it. If you want to change a situation that you can’t accept, leave and come back on your own terms. Life here, like life in Alaska, has a way of stripping you down to the essentials, if you let it. It has helped me see my friendships and relationships, and myself, more clearly.
That the privilege of traveling widely and living in different parts of the world doesn’t always have the impact on people you might expect it to, or hope it does. Some of the most caring, open-minded souls I’ve met have rarely left their communities. Some of the most remedial humans I’ve ever encountered have been all over the world.
I believe completely, despite the challenges, that this was the right thing for us to do given where we were in our lives. I didn’t have doubts exactly, but when you quite literally pack up your life and leave for something almost entirely unlike anything you’ve done before, you really never know what the outcome might be. My heart will always ache for the children we are far away from, but that longing, that long goodbye, is existential, began the moment they were born, will never end, and manifests in ways we can never imagine when we hold them for the first time.
You can listen to me read this post here:
Though I think I arrived with a few of these lessons under my belt already, I will admit the new ones have been sharp and the reminders powerfully relevant. I do hope that Malawi will reward me in the garden where Gabon has not, but I do think that poverty, privilege and the raw contrasts of lived and learned experiences will still awe and humble me. Thanks for your post, Bess.
I'm sure you had heat stroke. It's common that the impacts can last a long time.
I think it's hard to understand the kind of poverty you are seeing every day. We have poverty in the US, but we have resources as well. To see poverty without resources and in a large population is hard. The problem is so large, that I think the empathy shut-down has to be fought against. So, so hard.