Embedded in Africa

Back to sitting behind my drums and banging out the super fast tempo to a punk rock song. Tonight my band, The Blisterz, is rocking the house at a downtown club called Bogies. According to the big wall-mounted banner, it’s local radio-sponsored "Stripper Night," which promises to be a real crowd pleaser, not to mention good for liquor sales.

On stage in front of me, two scantily clad young women are kissing one another. Under normal circumstances, I might be enthralled with their open display of affection. But these are not normal circumstances anymore. Not after returning from impoverished Africa. And because these are not normal circumstances, I'm not seeing them. I'm looking right through their sunlamp-tanned flesh, right through their transparent play acting.

I'm playing the drums and I'm in New York, but in my mind, I'm still walking on the red clay soil of Africa. I'm seeing the fishermen in their sail and pole-powered longboats. I'm smelling the rich gamey scent of fish just netted and I'm feeling the heat from the campfires that burn along the concrete and gravel sidewalks of Cotonou at night. I'm seeing a mother laying her baby on a bare mattress set on a dirt floor inside a wood-scrap and tin shack, and I’m reliving the wide-eyed anxiety on the faces of the people who still take refuge in the water-based stilt village of Ganvie. Even while drumming, I'm seeing the people and the places I have been writing about for a month now. But I am also seeing the many images I have yet to write about:

-The small belly-bloated boy of no more than three, washing himself with the rainwater collected in a pothole in the street.
-The uniformed solider sitting in the back of the open camouflaged Jeep, his right hand gripped on the tripod-mounted machine gun, his left resting on his sidearm, his eyes hidden by wraparound sunglasses.
-The long line of crippled, blind and tumor-afflicted Beninois waiting in 100-degree heat to be examined by Mercy Ships medical staff.
-The roadblocks that appear from out of nowhere on the bush road, the sunglass-wearing, machine-toting soldiers eyeing us with suspicion but allowing us to pass.
-The two bare-chested teenage fishermen who balance themselves in a narrow longboat in heavy swells, trying in vain to pull up nets caught on debris at the bottom of the harbor.
-The piercing screams of the child whose teeth were being pulled inside a dental clinic.
-Speeding along narrow city streets through the throngs of people while seated on the back of a smoke-spewing motorbike.
-A man laying in the middle of the road, begging for money with a bright grin planted on his narrow, dark face, his crippled legs shaped like pretzels.
-Sharing a beachside dinner of rice, grilled fish and “local” beer with my Mercy Ships friend and fixer, Marie, on a brilliant moonlit evening, the hardship of Africa seemingly a million miles away.

These are the images I have wanted to write about, but have not. Yet these are the images I dream about when I fall to sleep at night.

Now, while the crowd of drunken patrons tosses dollar bills at the strippers, I realize how difficult it will be readjusting to life in the land of plenty. Long before I left for Africa, I had already become disenchanted with the old life I had been expected to lead -- the impossible to attain “domestic tranquility,” the storybook marriage, the cookie-cutter McMansion, the mortgage, the country club, the idle gossip, the never-ending debt, the heated arguments, the loneliness and the despair for something far more meaningful than two weeks paid vacation and a new car every year.

In 21st century Africa, poverty, disease, hunger, war and corruption are business as usual. But in the USA, the once promising American Dream is decaying. It is becoming as corrupt and disease-ridden as any third-world country. America is now a place where the wealthy can become distrustful of their own children and where buying your way into heaven is somehow more palatable than doing some real charitable good.

In the words of Ernest Hemingway, fear of death increases in direct proportion to an increase in wealth. Listen, any American who fears mortality or worse, sudden economic insolvency, ought to switch up the Disney tickets for a flight bound for Benin, where one out of five children survive past the age of 7 and the average life expectancy is 52 years old.

I miss the fellow travelers I’ve met not only in Africa, but also in Asia, Europe and elsewhere. Men and women, young and old, that I met in airports, bars, beaches, trains, hotels, cafes, marketplaces… I miss their stories, their smiles, their sharing of advice. I miss laughing, drinking, eating with them; running away with them. I miss talking about future destinations unexplored — the Amazon jungle, Nepal, Vietnam, Tibet, Russia, South Africa... The list of destinations is endless. But then life is long.

But is it long enough?

I gaze at the Africa photos laid out before me. The Nissan 4X4 buried in the swamp; the red-shirted man obsessed with my bracelet and its voodoo power; Joseph the boatman carting me upstream to the Ganvie Stilt Village; a blind woman seeing for the first time in decades; the Mercy Ship doctors volunteering to perform nonstop eye surgeries onboard the Africa Mercy when they could be earning thousands elsewhere.

I see them in my head and realize how much I miss these people. These selfless individuals call the world their home. They give of themselves unsparingly to help the sick and the impoverished, not by writing a check to their church, but by actually laying their hands on human flesh and bone. I have come to know these adventurers as people who are uncomfortable with being comfortable and secure. I now consider them my friends.

Author's Note:

24 hours prior to my departure for Africa, an Air France Airbus A330-200 bound for Paris from Brazil plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people aboard. Miraculously, a young Italian woman who was scheduled to be aboard the flight missed its departure when she ran late. Little more than a week later, she was killed in an automobile accident along with her fiancé in Austria.

Only days prior to my homecoming in the United States, a second Air France Airbus, originating in Paris and bound for Comoros off the Indian Ocean, crashed into the sea. While it was initially believed all aboard perished in the accident, it was soon discovered that a 14-year-old French girl somehow managed to survive by hanging on to floating aircraft debris. The girl, who survived in the seas for more than 13 hours until she was rescued by a passing ship, didn't know how to swim. She was the sole survivor.

Some of these mini-residences sport little front porches that don’t look all that different from the ones you’ll find attached to a farmhouse in the middle of the North Dakota farm country. In Ganvie, like North Dakota, the inhabitants use the porches for relaxing and taking a shady respite from the sun. But they also use them as vantage points for suspiciously eyeing the strange explorers who have been coming to this world on water for several decades now.

The story of Ganvie’s origin was never taught to me in my high school American history course. It is also one that Jesse Jackson might prefer to sweep under the historical carpet. Several centuries ago, the water community was created out of desperation by a Tofinu people on the run from the FON warriors who, under orders from their own African kings, were snatching innocent people up and selling them to western slave traders. According to legend, the Dan-Homey religion prevented the warriors from entering the water. This made the water a safe haven for not only the Tofinu, but for other tribes who might be captured and sold off to white European and New World slave traders by their own people.

The Beninois, despite their poverty, are a delightful, eager to please people. But not the people living inside the Ganvie stilt village. The people who pass us by in their canoes and longboats not only refuse to be photographed, but many sneer at me. While a steadfast belief in voodoo might cause some to shy away from my camera, gut instinct tells me they don’t want me here. This place was built as a safe haven and a refuge from evil intentions. Its very nature is to be distrustful to outsiders—even 21st century outsiders. I am no exception.

The eyes that peer out at me from the many buildings and fishing skiffs are as distrustful as the eyes of a deer caught in your headlights. And I can’t blame them. Generally speaking, Benin is not known as a tourist destination, but Ganvie just happens to be unlucky enough to be located along the western banks of one of its mighty lakes. Even with men like Joseph and the stocky man trying hard to turn the tide of distrust into profitable tourism, it’s evident that the occupants of this peaceful fishing and fish farming community want only one thing: to be left alone.

When Joseph pulls into another docking area, I sense another shopping setup. But like I did the first time, I disembark, politely but sternly ignore the children who beg for CIFAs and proceed to browse the gift shop/hotel and bar. As far as I can tell, no one occupies the hotel or the bar. The gift shop, which contains wood sculptures and more voodoo talismans and jewelry, is also empty. Feeling something churning in my stomach, I decide that perhaps this is a good time to ask Joseph about the availability of a bathroom.

Asking to use a bathroom in Ganvie is a little like asking for crushed ice in the North Pole. With water surrounding them 24 hours a day, the use of a western style bathroom is foreign to these people, if not filthy. Still, I am directed by Joseph to a small building that adjoins the two-level hotel. I enter into the building, which is comprised of two side-by-side rooms and a common empty vestibule. I find a door with a sign nailed to it. The wood sign bears the shape of a man’s facial silhouette. I enter the room, close the door.

But there’s no overhead light, so I have no choice but to leave the door slightly ajar. Looking down at a white porcelain toilet that drains directly into the water below, I reach down and lift the lid. The unattached lid and the seat drop off onto the wood slat floor. Perched inside the dry toilet is a black spider. The spider is about as wide as my palm. Its body is black and furry, its abdomen bloated, its legs long and bony. It is also fast. Suddenly exposed to the sun, the spider scurries across a web it spun inside a toilet that never sees any use. Until now. I jump back against the wall, pull up my pants, make for the exit.

Maybe Conrad’s Marlow wasn’t afraid of spiders during his journey into the “heart of darkness,” but I’m terrified of them. Especially the giant ones they grow on this continent. And I shudder to imagine what might have happened to my bare posterior if I’d decided to sit down on that toilet without looking first. It’s a lesson we can all live by: look before you squat.

Back on board the longboat, Joseph silently steers us again through the village and out towards the open water. I snap as many pictures as I can, knowing that this will be my last vision of this place, perhaps for a long time; perhaps forever. I catch a Christian cross in my viewfinder and snap. I also catch people dressed all in white who are attending Sunday services. I continually snap away, attempting to capture in the lens a series of moments never to be seen or experienced again.

Just off the bow is a longboat occupied by a single family. Both mother and father protect their heads from the searing sun, with wide-brimmed straw hats more suitable to Vietnam than Africa. While the two adults hide their faces from my camera, the little boy seated in-between them sneaks his head around and issues me the briefest of smiles. My camera poised on him, I somehow manage to catch the once-in-a-lifetime shot.

Back out on the lake, I watch the many birds that use the fish farms and shrimp traps for sanctuary. I’m told birds of many known and unknown species migrate here from all over Africa. Evidence that Africa is not only the birthplace of life on earth, it remains its cradle.

Later, as we leave the lake and enter back into the river, the smell in the air changes back to city smog and stale pollution. Once more we pass by the riverbank shanty villages and the people who mingle about them. A dog barks and searches for food scraps among the garbage. A little boy with his pants pulled down relieves himself along an oyster shell-covered bank. The boy is oblivious to the men, women and children going about their desperate lives all around him, and they are oblivious to him.

I think about the stilt village and the people who live there. I think that, perhaps, they are the lucky ones. The people live in an enclosed community that, for centuries, has warded off trespassers along with time and development. I’m thankful for having experienced it. But more than likely, I will never go back. Given the choice, I’m sure that’s exactly the way many of the peaceful inhabitants of Ganvie would want it.

Next Blog: The Final Dispatch: Closing Observations/Photos on Africa, Mercy Ships, and how the experience has changed my life.

Joseph is a tall thin man of maybe 50. Clean shaven and bare footed, he wears a short sleeve shirt, light pants and a baseball cap -- clothing that appears to afford him cool comfort in the already

oppressive African heat and humidity. I load myself into the narrow wood, canvas-covered, flat-bottom longboat, and seat myself on a bench that extends the length of the starboard side. Untying the dock ropes, Joseph pulls the chord on the outboard. The motor explodes in a fit of spitting oil and gaseous fumes. Breaking out in song, while keeping time by tapping his feet on the boat floor, we pull away from the dock and enter into the cloudy midst.

Slowly moving upriver, the gentle trickling noise of the river being broken by the boat’s bow, we pass by settlements comprised of shacks made of scrap wood and tin. Freshly awake children with bloated stomachs play along a riverbank littered with refuse, scrap piles and, in some cases, mounds of white oyster shells. Campfires burn along the shoreline. Food cooks in empty coffee cans. Men and boys toss nets into the murky water from off the riverbank or from inside impossibly narrow boats carved out of long tree trunks brought down from the jungle. When they pull the nets in, small collections of trembling fish are suspended in the net’s bottom and added to the daily catch.

Up ahead, as the river begins to widen into what will become Lac du Nokoue, several longboats are packed with native Beninois who are being ferried to different waterfront villages for work and trade. How the narrow boats manage to hold all those people without capsizing is anyone’s guess. Not powered by outboard motor, the boats are propelled along the still waters with long poles, much like the gondolas of Venice, Italy. It’s no wonder Ganvie and its surrounding water-based communities are often referred to as Africa’s Venice.

As the mouth of the river gives way to the wide open lake, I can’t help but feel like Joseph Conrad’s Marlow being transported upriver in search of the mythical Kurtz, an ivory trader turned demonic jungle ruler. As the acrid smell of the city leaves us for good, it is replaced with fresh air accented with the scent of fish, brine and gas fumes generated by the outboard motor.

Not far in the distance, long jagged branches hacked from trees form a circular fence that looks completely foreign, set as it is in the middle of a lake. From what I manage to interpret from Joseph, these circular vegetation-filled constructions are fish farms tended to by local fisherman. Fish farming, along with traditional fishing, is the new industry on the lake. It strikes me as ironic that the Beninois, despite their primitive work conditions and tools, are savvy to modern fish population-management methods.
Not far up the lake from the fish farms, I discover another long fence-like structure that supports woven baskets that resemble the lobster traps you might find sunken along American’s New England Atlantic coastal waters. There are so many baskets and poles perched in the shallow water that Joseph shuts down the outboard motor rather than risk sheering a blade, and instead we move forward manually.

The trip across the lake goes on for more than an hour until we come to wide stands of grass that rise up enormously from out of the water. It’s not quite marshland, but it’s not quite open lake anymore either, while just beyond the stands of tall grass, I get my first glimpse of a Beninois house built on stilts. Poling themselves along the corridors formed naturally in between the sections of tall grass are fishermen looking for places to toss their nets. Joseph is respectful of these people, slowing the longboat to a crawl, minimizing the wake.

As we approach the village entrance, Joseph steers the boat in the direction of a newly built construction. The wooden single-story, stilt-supported structure is far more solid looking than the sun-baked buildings that make up the village behind it. As he tosses a rope to another man waiting for us on the small dock, I get the feeling I’ve arrived at what passes for the village visitor center.

I disembark from the boat onto the dock. There to greet me are two small children. They are shirtless and seemingly genderless. They hold out their hands, and beg for CIFAs (Benin currency). I was warned about the children by other Ganvie visitors who’ve come before me, and I know enough to ignore their pleas, despite the urge to fill their hands with whatever coins I have stored in my pockets.

The man on the dock is a short, stocky, middle-aged Beninois. He’s smiling the ear-to-ear smile of a village leader greeting a long-lost explorer. Cheerfully he greets Joseph with a bear hug. The two men are so happy to see one another I can’t help but wonder if they are blood brothers. The stocky man peers at me with wide open eyes, chanting, “Come, come, come…”

As I climb the short flight of wood steps up to the wood building, I can already make out the shirts hung on racks, the colorful watercolor paintings leaning up against the interior walls, the home-crafted jewelry hanging down from wall-mounted hooks, the carved masks, wooden sculptures and voodoo talismans galore.

It’s all a setup of course -- a far less than subtle trap designed to get me to spend money. While it’s possible the stocky man might be the stilt village mayor, one thing is certain: he’s out for a quick buck, which means affording tourists and explorers no choice but to show up at his visitor center doorstep where he expects you to pump CIFAs into the local economy.

He and Joseph immediately go to work on me. The stocky man grabs an African style tunic from the rack, proceeds to throw it over my head and push it down over my shoulders. It’s such a tight fit I feel like he’s trying to restrain me with a straight jacket. Agitated, I back away. I pull the tunic off, toss it back on the rack. Searching for a way to appease the men, I grab hold of two voodoo bead-shell-and-bone necklaces and purchase them for a few CIFAs.

“No more,” I say, shaking my head. “No more purchase.”

The shopping ended, the stocky man no longer extols that friendly diplomatic air. I follow Joseph back to the longboat, hoping that my first trip to the Ganvie shopping mall, such as it is, will be my last. I didn’t come to Africa to shop for souvenirs. I came to learn something about the land and, just as importantly, something about myself. And I’m determined to see the mission through.

The longboat now cleared of the dock, we enter into a mysterious world built on water.

Next Dispatch: Part II, World Built on Water