Less Serious, Probably More Boring

The last two posts were serious, and had little to do with what I've actually been up to, so here are a few random, short, potentially funny stories and updates.

1: I recently survived a crocodile attack. True story. More or less. True, it was only a baby crocodile, only about ten inches long, and it 'attacked' me only when I picked it up: it twisted its head back around, hissing, to bite me on the back of the hand between my thumb and index finger, and held on for a good ninety seconds before finally giving up its grip. And true, it didn't actually really break the skin much, but there were definitely teeth marks, and it was bruised for a few days. And that's how I survived a crocodile attack. It's actually not quite as cool as another time when we went to see the baby crocodile (it's in this little concrete pit enclosure down the hill from a place we stay in Jinja; I don't know why, but it is) and a friend of mine picked it up, it bit him on the finger, and his first instinct was to get it out of his hand. By throwing it. Right into someone's chest. So he actually wins, I think, as the only person (probably) ever to throw a crocodile at someone else. (I also got a pretty gnarly spider bite recently, which was much worse than the crocodile bite, and is probably actually going to be a nice scar. Uganda is apparently trying to eat me.)

2: Here's a list of some of the things that I've eaten recently, between various things trying to eat me–

• Cow shin: I've had this several times now, though it made me a little bit nauseous the first time. I ate it first when I went to my counterpart's home and she assured me that 'the part that presses the ground is the sweetest part.' It's not. I ate it for a second time when I was at the ajon circle (the local-beer-drinking place) and they had started serving food now, and I was told I had the choice between goat and cow, and I chose cow, for some reason, as if either would actually be a decent cut of meat, and it turned out to be the 'part that presses the ground' again. I'm pretty used to it now, though, and actually just order it willingly – when the choices are limited, that is.
• Goat pancreas: I've had this a few times, too. And it's actually good. They serve it dried, so it's kind of like if you were to make jerky out of liver and salt it. That sounds like something you'd want to eat, right?
• Goat tongue: The last time I was at the ajon circle and ordered the cow shin, I ate all of the meat –read: skin and gristle and fat– off the bone. I thought. Because there's not much there, so it's hard not to eat it all. I thought. The next time, though, we ordered food and my friend Martin turned back from the lady who makes the food to me, and said 'She is wanting to know if you would like the tongue of the goat.' I wanted to make sure I had heard correctly, and pointed inside my mouth: 'The tongue?' The laughter died down, and Martin said, 'Yes.' And I said, '...Sure.' She went off to serve up the food –the meat, or 'meat', comes with katogo, which is bananas boiled in a savory broth, and is one of my favorite foods here– and Martin leaned it and said, 'She is fearing that you don't like the molokon [cow shin] because you did not eat all of it last time.' Apparently, cleaning a quarter-inch of skin and gristle and fat off the six-inch-long, inch-and-a-half-diameter bone is not enough. I must have left an eighth of an inch of fat on there. Silly me. So I ate the goat tongue instead. Which was fine – I've eaten the entire face of a goat before anyway, in South Africa. No big deal.

3: There are a handful of work things that could keep me relatively busy for the last six months of my service, which makes me happy–

• The HIV counselor project is continuing and we've had good success with that; I'm going to try to go out with some of the counselors and collect first-hand (well, translated-first-hand) some of the success stories, which I think will be cool to see and meet these people and hear and record their stories directly.
• One of the counselors has created a group of people living with HIV/AIDS in his community who want to start a turkey-keeping project as an IGA (Income-Generating Activity). This comes after the handful of turkeys he already owned were stolen in the middle of the night, and the seedlings for the citrus-growing project that was supposed to start in their community were also stolen. But they put together an outline with a significant community-contribution and sustainability plan, which is always a good sign that it's going to be taken seriously, and so I'm going to be working with them to try to make that happen.
• Another counselor has people in his community saving money or pooling money together to buy seeds for keyhole gardens. I had told all of the counselors to encourage keyhole gardens (the mound-of-dirt style garden I planted –there are pictures on the blog, somewhere– which is good for people with HIV/AIDS as it allows you to grow the same amount of produce without having to move up and down rows in the garden), and they did, which was great – except that they all came back and said people needed seeds. I told them that people could mobilize –a favorite word in development-project-speak– for seeds, and I would love to help construct and plant the gardens. This was six months ago. I'd heard nothing back, other than that people wanted keyhole gardens and needed seeds, until a week or two ago. Finally.
• I'm going to get the life-skills club up and going again at the secondary school.
• I'm also going to try and start a football –soccer– league for kids who aren't in school, with a life-skills component, and I'm looking forward to that, if we can make it happen.

4: I killed my first chicken a couple weekends ago, a milestone moment in any white-guy-in-Africa story, and the only time I've ever killed anything but insects and spiders. I had gone to church with Mr Olinga, the security guard from my organization, because they were doing a fundraising auction to raise money for an event celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Diocese. People brought in g-nuts, cassava, chickens, goats, flour, among other things, and everything was auctioned off. I bought about seven pounds of g-nuts, which is awesome, and should last me probably until the end of my service. I was also given a chicken to auction. I awkwardly stammered through my Ateso numbers and the word chicken and the phrases 'Who wants?' and 'Any more?' until finally the bidding ended. I went to give the winner their brownish-red new chicken, its feet tied together with string, when they told me they had actually bought it for me. Someone I'd never met, and actually didn't end up meeting at all, spent 10,000 shillings on a chicken for me. Really nice of them, and it led to, later, after the auction was finished and we were clearing out, a sentence I'd never thought I'd hear in church: 'Daniel,' someone called out. 'Where is your cock?' I assured them I knew exactly where it was. When we left the church, we stopped first for lunch at the primary school across from the church, and then Mr Olinga and I went on to his place, walking between and over giant boulders, thin threads of pathways through tall grass, hot and bright sun, through homesteads of huts built up against the walls of rock, nothing else in sight but more rocks and grass and brush, me with a chicken in one hand –holding it by its feet, it hung upside down with splayed wings and flitting eyes– and a black plastic bag full of g-nuts in the other, and Mr Olinga with three more chickens and his wooden folding chair that he'd brought with him to church, and it was possibly one of the most visually 'African' experiences I've had, and then we were at his place, four or five huts and a mango tree for shade, the last homestead before the swamp. He showed me how to kill the chicken, then, after sharpening the knife on a rock. I yanked out a handful of feathers from the throat and, standing on the feet, took the head in my left hand and drew the knife across and back and across, and I must have done something not quite right, because blood sprayed out and speckled my pants and feet, hands and arms, but I finished and ten or fifteen seconds later, the chicken was finished writhing around, too. We put it in a pot of hot water, which makes it easier to pull the feathers out, and easier to strip the skin off the legs and feet. Mr Olinga's son and granddaughter finished cleaning and gutting it, and I walked home through the village with a whole raw chicken in a black plastic sack, salmonella probably festering in the 95 degree heat. I boiled the entire thing with I got home, for about an hour, and was proud while I ate an animal that had been alive an hour earlier and that I'd killed with my own hands (and a knife).

5: We're supposed to be at the tail-end of dry season right now, but it feels like we're still just right in the middle of it. It's been unbearably hot the last week or two, mid-nineties during the day, and not a whole lot cooler at night. My tap ran dry a few weeks ago, and stayed dry for about a week. I'd recently gotten an accidental buzzcut, though, and it proved to be the best accidental haircut I've ever gotten. It's much harder to tell that I haven't bathed in six days when my hair is only half-an-inch long. The smell is probably still there, but, hey, you get used to that. They've also started load-shedding again, which means they shut off power for any seemingly-random number of hours. This means that, without the fan on at night, I've taken to sleeping on my concrete floor. It's the only way that I can get moderately cool enough to actually get some sleep. We've been teased with rain over and over again, but I don't think it's rained for more than three hours total so far this year. I can't wait, though. It's like this, actually:

Sweet summer night and I'm stripped to my sheets, my forehead is leaking, the [fan] squeaks. A voice from the clock says 'You're not gonna get tired,' my bed is a pool, and the wall's on fire. Soak my head in the [basin] for a while, chills on my neck and it makes me smile, but my bones have to move and my skin's gotta breathe. Slide down the stairs to the heated street and the sun has left us with slippery feet. Rip off your sleeves, and I'll ditch my socks. We'll dance to the songs from the cars as they pass, weave through the cardboard, smell that trash. Walking around in our summertime clothes, nowhere to go while our bodies glow. And we'll greet the dawn in its morning blues, with purple yawn we'll be sleeping soon. When the sun goes down, we'll go out again. When the sun goes down, we'll go out again … Let's leave the sound of the heat for the sound of the rain. It's easy to sleep when it wets my brain. It covers my rest with a saccharine sheen, kissing the wind through my window screen.

6: I also recently saw a baby monkey drink beer out of a guy's mouth. Africa!

Let's Do the Time Warp, Again

Have I talked about Africa Time yet? If I haven't:

Time moves in a different way here, it's thought of in a different way here, in the local languages it's even told in a different way (somehow, like, seven am on your watch is one o'clock in the local languages, the first hour of the day; I could be remembering that wrong, but either way I remember it being really confusing during our language training). I forget who told me this, maybe because they were quoting someone who was quoting someone who was quoting someone else, but they said that in Africa –maybe just for PCVs or Americans or Westerners in Africa? I can't remember; it's beside the point– the days are interminably long, the weeks unbelievably short. I think this is two-thirds true: There are definitely days that last for weeks, but –conversely and just as often– there are hours that last for seconds; I don't think I've ever had a week that's lasted for more than a couple days (and at the first of each month, I find myself saying, I can't believe it's [insert name of month] already, even though I know I said the same thing last month and the month before and every month before that one and I'm even consciously aware, as I'm saying about this month, that I say it at the beginning of every month, and, yes, I said it this month, too).

Having been here for fourteen months now, having been in Ngora for a year as of later this month, I've gotten used to it, more or less, but it's still … weird, I guess. It's a time warp. There've been a lot of days when, for one reason or another or no reason at all, I've been out in the village or somewhere and we're not really doing anything or we're waiting for something to happen or something that was supposed to happen has happened and now we're waiting for the next thing and we're just sitting around, usually in the shade of a mango tree, talking when there's talking to be talked, not talking when there's not, and it seems like I can actually see Time passing, walking west down the road, following the sun, kicking up rusty dust with each footstep, and without my noticing, three hours have passed. Or, just as often, the opposite happens, when Time comes lazily walking out of the tall grass, half-hidden in the shimmer of heat waves until he comes closer, until he gets to where we're sitting and then he just sits down next to us in mango-tree-shade, maybe letting out a little sigh as he lowers himself to the ground, he's tired, he's been walking all day and it's so hot out, Time just needs to rest for a bit and this looks like as good a place as any, and then I'll look at my watch thinking that three hours escaped without any realisation on my part and I'll find that it's only been ten minutes. (This happens during rainy season, too, naturally, but I can only picture Time's languid, lethargic walk happening when it's really hot out; if it were raining, he'd be running towards the nearest covered place like everyone else here does –sit under cover when it's sunny, sit under cover when it's raining being the general wisdom around here; when I sit out in the sun when it's not too warm, like these days, 75 in the afternoon sometimes when it's not a raging monsoon, everyone tells me to sit in the shade, aren't you hot, isn't that sun too much, and they laugh when I say that it feels good to sit in the sun sometimes, especially for a Seattlite, and then they say you'll be our colour soon if you sit out there [out there being in the sun, as opposed to in there, which is, of course, in the shade, a foot or two from where I am, out there], which is possible, my freckles being more than capable of merging together like the pieces of the T-1000 in Terminator 2 [though they are less capable of becoming a killer humanoid robot … probably]; though I do take full advantage of the sit under cover when it's raining philosophy, because sometimes it just really works out in your favour, Example A [for Awesome] being the day after St Patrick's Day when I still had a half-litre bottle of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout left over and it was about ten in the morning and I was putting off going into work when, praise the God of the Irish, I heard that unmistakable pop! pop-pop! pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! of rain on the tin roofs and I couldn't go to work then, couldn't go out in that, so I sat and popped open my half-litre of ten am Guinness and watched the rain … abruptly stop after about two sips; but then I couldn't go into work then either, because I was drinking, and you can't aren't supposed to go to work when you're drinking, even if you're drinking Guinness the morning after St Patrick's Day, so it still worked out in my favour– so maybe the metaphor should be that three hours pass without my noticing when Time's running to get to the nearest corrugated tin sheet of an awning while ten minutes feels like three hours when Time's sitting in mango-tree-shade, but I don't know, and you're probably just skimming ahead, looking for the closed-parenthesis that's the end of this little digression. It's right here.)

To put it a little less (pretentiously and annoyingly) wordy, or to let a real writer (Roberto Bolaño in The Savage Detectives) put it differently: Lately I've been noticing that time can expand or contract at will, and also: it's as if time had fractured and were running in several directions at once. Exactly. That's exactly how time –or Time, since he's apparently working of his own volition– works here.

As for how time is thought of here:

The best –or at least my personal favourite– example of how time is thought of here is in the different ways that you can say you're doing something now (and this is definitely not unique to Uganda, these phrases, I mean; I first heard them / was really confused by them in South Africa; it is Africa Time, after all):

• Now: This literally just means in the future. Seriously. Like, I'm coming there now really means I'm coming. At some point. Probably today. No guarantees though.
• Just Now: This means in an hour or two, or maybe four.
• Right Now: If something's going to happen right now then it's going to happen in, like, twenty or thirty minutes, or so.
• Now-Now: If you're doing something now-now then you're doing it, well, right now (I mean, the American version of right now).

Going back to the Bolaño-well: their perception of time had suddenly diverged from ours. Right.

So, things'll happen when they happen, they just might not be happening yet, even if they're happening right now. And when now means later, people show up to things, more often than not, later. And the funny thing is that everyone knows that people don't come to things on time –don't keep time in Ugandan English– that things take way longer to get done than they could, that things don't happen when they should; everyone knows that Africa Time is a real thing and, yep, they even call it Africa Time. And if that sort of thing frustrates you, well, don't live in Africa. (I, despite or due to being somehow simultaneously Type A and Type B when it comes to keeping time –if I'm ready to go or want to go or if this [gosh-darn] taxi would actually just keep moving, even at two kph, instead of stopping every thirty metres [which is the bane of my travelling existence], whatever, I don't want to wait, at all, and I hate being late, at least in places where it matters, ie: not here; at the same time, if there's not really anywhere to go, or not any particular time to be anywhere, or nothing really happening, I can happily kill time for hours, like it's my job; which I guess means that I want to either be going or staying, just don't want to be waiting– simultaneously love and hate Africa Time, the love being when I can say I'm coming into work just now and go in two hours later, the hate being when, well, really only when the taxi keeps stopping every thirty metres or sits in the Kampala traffic for days and days, though I guess that really has nothing to do with Africa Time, just me being impatient, and so I guess, on the whole, I'm pretty alright with Africa Time, there are certainly times when I end up getting stuck some place where I'm just waiting for hours for something to happen and I don't have a book with me and I would rather be somewhere or anywhere else, but chances are pretty good that no matter where I am, about half the time I'm probably spacing out and thinking about things that are absolutely in no way related to whatever's going on around me, and so when I end up getting stuck some place where I'm just waiting for hours for something to happen and I don't have a book with me, I just crank the spacing out up to eleven.)

(Way to Kill Time #73: Writing Super Long and Pointless Blog Posts. But hey, #74 is Reading Super Long and Pointless Blog Posts, so there ya go, you're catching on.)

So, the reason I bring up Africa Time now-now:

A few weeks ago, on a Friday, my friend Emma –Emma being a man's name here, short for Emmanuel– asked me to come to church –or to 'go for prayers' as they say here– on Sunday. Sure, I said, and he said it starts at seven and I said that's fine, because I usually get up around five am so that I can go to bed around nine or nine-thirty since there's nothing to do after it gets dark, and he said I'll call you when I'm coming to pick you, and I said ok. Sunday morning: my phone rang at six-fifteen and Emma said I'm coming to pick you and I said ok and I got up at got ready, and then my phone rang again two hours later, eight-fifteen, and Emma said ok I'm on my way and I said ok and got up off of the couch where I'd laid down, semi-napping, after seven o'clock had rolled around and he still wasn't here, and then my phone rang an hour later, nine-fifteen, and Emma said I'm here, let's go, and I said ok and went outside and said good morning, Emma, and he said good morning and we started to go for prayers and I asked when do prayers start, Emma? and he said at nine, so we were already fifteen minutes late, which was better than the two hours and fifteen minutes late that I thought we were and I said ok and Emma said we'll go to my place first and I laughed and said ok and we went to his place and sat for a bit and then went to church at ten-fifteen, or four hours after Emma had first called me and said he was coming to pick me, and we were right on time, we showed up just as church was starting. (And then we left church three hours later – and it wasn't even quite over yet. What if we had been 'on time'?)

And that's the best summary of Africa Time yet.

Church was … well, it's kind of hard to say. The sparse brick building, tin roof and wooden rafters and packed dirt floor, was filled with probably a hundred people –not jammed full, taxi-style, but it was full, the women and children sitting on scarves and mats on the floor to the left as you entered, the minister (priest?) at the front, the men sitting at wooden desks and benches on to the right (and the middle being a bit of a mixture, a no-man's land, partially of overflow from either side, partially taken over by Sunday School kids in matching tunic/shorts outfits of tan patterned cloth with explosions of neon-pink fist-sized roses; a very good look overall); it wasn't quite as strict a division as that, though kind of it was: there were a few women in the seats and benches on the right side, a few men (like Emma) holding their kids, but, of course, no men sitting on the left side, on the dirt floor, natch. Anyway. It opened, church-slash-prayers, with, well, prayers, then a few songs and poems from the Sunday Schoolers in their matching neon-pink-rose-explosion outfits, then the guests or newcomers or whatever –ie: me, among a few others– introduced ourselves to the congregation (and obviously I got the biggest round of applause for my Ateso introduction), and then a skit from the rose-explosion kids, prayers again, then the sermon from a pastor –I guess, I'm assuming anyway, that in the Pentecostal, um, sect (?) there's the minster/priest who's the big man, in black robes and a white scarf, old and tall and distinguished-looking, who ran the whole deal, led the prayers, baptised the babies, etc, like an MC, and then there was the pastor or preacher or whatever, a guest speaker from Nyero (a town between here and Kumi), though I'm not sure if it's a different preacher every week, but so he gave the sermon while the minister/priest sat and, I swear, fell asleep at one point (because don't act like your eyes were closed because you were praying or concentrating so hard on the sermon, Father; I know that trick and I'm onto you)– and then more prayers, I think it was at this point that every man on the right side bowed his head though remained seated while every single woman on the left side was up on her knees, not resting back on her heels, but up with ninety-degree legs and hands clasped at her chest and heads bowed and eyes closed and the minister/priest led a prayer for fifteen or twenty seconds, everyone reciting aloud along with him and then the communal prayer ended and everyone just took up their own, still going on out loud –not a whispered, murmured prayer either, but a full-voiced one– praying for different things at different speeds but all quickly until it became just a buzz, a thousand of the giant thumb-sized bees that live here droning on at once, a hundred people calmly speaking in tongues at once (though I'm ninety-nine percent sure it wasn't tongues, just Ateso), the dissociation of the communally-recited minster/priest-led prayer into the buzz and hum of a thousand insects was like listening to the linguistic explosion at the Tower of Babel and it went on for what felt like a long time, babbling buzzing praying repenting confessing beseeching speaking in tongues whatever, the sound rising up to the rafters and the corrugated metal and bouncing back down as it broke apart, spilling out open windows and doorways into painfully bright sunlight, for two or three minutes, long enough anyway for me to think about how long it was going on for and then it kept going for another minute after that until it petered out, most people offering up their final syllables at the same time –was it planned, then? a recitation?– but maybe ten people still going, a hundred bees still droning on, having more to pray for or maybe just wanting to be holier-than-thou –no, that's cynical and unnecessary and probably untrue– and then it was seven people then three then one person left –'Just one more thing, Lord,' I imagined them saying– and then silence, just the hollow echo of prayers and insects off the metal roof, and then people brought gifts up to the front, like tithing, I guess –and the next time I go to church in the States, I'm totally dropping a whole pumpkin in the offering basket– and then another neon-pink-rose song, and then baptising babies and then more prayers and then Emma said if you're tired, we can go, and I said amen, brother, I was barely keeping my eyes open at that point, which is especially bad when you have at least two or three people staring at you at any given moment (and which made me happy that there were so many lengthy prayers / power-naps), and so that was my first Ugandan church experience and I'm kind of ok with the fact that it took a year before I went to church here.

After church was over, or after we left anyway, we went back to Emma's place. It's just off one of the main roads that leads from Ngora to the highway that runs from Kumi to Soroti, just turn off at the primary school there, the church is just past the school, all of this on the right as you're going from Ngora to Kapir, to the highway, north. Three huts in a surprisingly concealed little clearing –surprising because it's not as though it's surrounded by trees or anything, one mango tree, maybe, but mostly just tall grass, fields of millet, sorghum, cowpeas; you can't see the road, really, though it's only maybe a few hundred feet away; there are a couple banana trees, too, some eggplant, um, plants; and it was quiet too, a few kids one woman walked by to or from the borehole between Emma's and the school, but other than that the only sounds were the staticky radio, the heavy droning of one of the massive bees that was in the process of burrowing into one of the tree branches that held up the thatch roof of the awning we sat under in the shade, sipping sodas and eating biscuits as a post-prayers pre-lunch snack, and it was a beautiful beautiful day, sunny and bright and warm and breezy, and Emma's two-year-old daughter, Miriam, was an adorable adorable child, bright-eyed and brighter-smiled and dressed in her Sunday Best, a little red dress, white trim, something not unlike what Mom might've dressed Caitlin in as a two-year-old on Easter, and she talked non-stop, happily babbling mostly nonsense, and she called me mamai –uncle– sitting on my lap, falling asleep and making me want to fall asleep, too –and making me, sappily, look forward to having a two-year-old of my own someday to nap with– and playing with my hands my armhair my beard, talking the whole time, while Emma and I chatted slowly about whatever, and then we moved inside for lunch, chicken rice posho atap, and Miriam followed us in before Emma sent her back out, causing her to do the classic, universal sad-little-kid walk: drag your feet as slowly as possible, shoulders slumped forward and arms dangling –maybe swing them side-to-side a bit, loosely, for effect– like all of the bones in your upper body have suddenly ceased to exist, loll your head back and then drop your chin to your chest, preferably whining, 'But I don't waaaanna go...' as you shuffle away, and so we ate lunch, joined halfway through by Emma's brother-in-law and then, full, went back out, took the chairs back under the awning and sat in the shade, picking our teeth with toothpicks and then, when the wood became soft and the tips dull, with our fingernails, and we were actually joining, in the shade, Emma's mother and an older man and his son, and we sat there for a while, me stifling yawns, hoping they'd go unnoticed, Miriam drinking the rest of her uncle's purple soda from a blue plastic mug, calling it ecai –tea– the whole time, saying how hot it was, her eyes and smile widened when her grandmother took the mug and held it to Miriam's ear and she could hear the bubbles, the next best thing to listening to the ocean in a seashell as you'll find in landlocked rural Africa, and then Emma came back from wherever he'd said let me come back from and said Danieli, let's go, and I said ok though I didn't know where we were going but we walked up the path past the borehole to the grass field at the primary school where ten or twelve cows were grazing, tended by Okello, Emma's youngest brother (maybe ten or twelve years old, maybe twelve or fourteen years Emma's junior), and the transaction went down right there on the field: two bulls, massive, healthy-looking animals, one an ashy grey colour mottled with light brown marks and spots, the other solid coloured, that same light brown, both with nine-or-twelve-inch horns, the humps at the bases of their necks like fattened, rounded shark fins, the brown one stood next to me, its ribcage three or more times as wide as mine, its breath snuffling out of a wide wet brown nose as it tore up the already-short grass, and Emma would raise his hand to smack it, would should 'Eh!' and step towards it whenever he thought it was getting too close to me, he obviously wasn't reading my thoughts, didn't know that all I really wanted was for it to nuzzle its wide wet brown nose into my chest while I petted its head, rubbing the fur between its horns, and they negotiated the price –Emma and the older man, mostly, but also the son, and random passers-by who stopped to check on the sale, to see what was up– and a wad of bills was handed over, then, after more negotiating, a few more red 20,000 shilling notes, then more negotiation, we sat down on the grass, stood up again, Okello brought over a young black-white-brown calf, added to the sale and then the older man said to me, his one eyelid shut permanently, the eye missing or blind, making him look like he was winking at you, constantly trying to bring you in on a joke or a bit of hilarious mischief that was about to happen, he said to me you are also a member of this, and he laughed lightly, and said so what are your thoughts? and I said me? laughing, making sure he actually thought I knew anything about bulls or cows or selling or buying them, and he said yes, though I'm sure he knew I knew nothing about bulls or cows or selling or buying them, and I wanted to tell him you should pay a lot, these bulls have testicles as big as my forearm, they'll breed for ages, but instead I just laughed and confirmed my ignorance, and then, after a few more bills were handed over, the stack of shillings, the shilling stack, was counted and recounted and confirmed by one of the passers-by and confirmed –1.8 million for the two bulls and the calf– and hands were shook and then the older man went winking down the road, herding his new cows in front of him, bringing everyone in on the joke as he passed, and Emma pocketed the cash –I asked him later how often he makes a sale like that, thinking that 1.8mil is a cool load of money, he must be doing pretty well if he makes a sale like that every other month or so, but he said just once a year and I said ok and I thought but still, not bad– and we walked back to his place, Miriam running across the compound when we got there, barely slowing down as she planted her face in my thigh and threw her arms around my leg and I picked her up and we sat back down under the awning for a while longer, passing daylight, buzzing bees, stifling yawns, and then an hour or two later Emma said let's go and we got up to go and Miriam's face dropped, eyes wide, mouth open in shock, and and and, oh you could see it coming, she started bawling, couldn't believe I was leaving already and her sobbing made everyone else laugh and made me smile and then Emma took me home and I thanked him for the day, a really nice day, and I laid back down on the couch and took a two hour nap, and I woke up, it was night.

And back to Africa Time:

(Because do you see what happened there? We started off in one direction –Africa Time– and then we got a little distracted –right around St Paddy's Day– then got back on track, back off track, and now, several hours or days later, back on track. Just like being in Africa.)

Spending days like that –long warm afternoons spent sitting in the shade; long lazy conversations that meander with no real direction, that fall acceptably silent, that fall just into long pauses, really, before picking up where they'd left off ten quiet, peaceful minutes earlier, or before taking off in an entirely new direction apropos of nothing but the fact that it's a long lazy conversation on a long warm afternoon and it's understood that the directions the conversation takes don't have to be apropos of anything– makes me think of old men, the ones sitting in rocking chairs on front porches or folding chairs on sidewalks in front of bodegas or on the stairs of stoops of apartment buildings in the city, in summertime heat, early fall warmth, watching time and people pass, they wipe a palm on the thigh of their pants, their hand wet from the sweat of a bottle of beer or a lemonade, they talk when there's something to be said and don't talk where there are just things to think about silently, because sometimes there's just time for that, when you're that age, when you've done enough things and been enough places that now it's time to rest for a bit, to sit and watch other people doing and going while you just talk about it or don't.

Spending days like that makes me feel like I'm in old-man-training.

And, like seventy percent of the time, I'm totally ok with that. Because I don't think I'd really ever do that at home or if I were just travelling or whatever –just sit on the porch or wherever for literally seven hours, just sitting and watching and talking and thinking and passing time or being passed by it. Maybe we do that, but it's different, I think –there's always tv or sports or we get bored and go out to eat or whatever; we wouldn't just sit and do nothing, at least not without feeling a little guilty about it, like we're wasting the day. But that's what it is, isn't it? And is that inherently bad? Maybe it's an American or Western (maybe?) cultural thing: wasting time and its negative connotations. Sometimes when I spend an afternoon, a whole beautiful day, in old-man-training, I do feel guilty, frustrated: let's do something! But usually I'm ok with it. I'm outside. With people. No pressure. Watch. Watch everything, watch the grass, the trees, the clouds, the people, watch the cows go out to graze and watch the boys bring them back in, watch clothes being washed and watch them flap in the breeze on the line, watch people fetch water, pump the handle at the borehole, balance jerrycans on their heads, watch chickens and goats, the grandmother shelling g-nuts, smoke from cooking fires and charcoal stoves, watch football played with a ball made of plastic bags, watch kids knocking mangoes down from trees, watch bicycles and boda bodas, watch the sun move, cross the sky, dip, go down, watch the sky change colours, the clouds gather and threaten rain and blow away before it comes, watch the moon come up, the stars come out, because when am I going to watch these things again? how much longer do I have? because even when time expands and contracts and runs in different divergent directions, even when days last for weeks and hours for days, there's still only so much time, and then what?