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Hey folks,
Travels since the last update – many, and exciting. Most recently I went to Tchibanga for the 17 Aout, and got to see our exalted ruler Bongo descend from his aircraft and pass in front of us, shaking the veteren’s hands. We had been invited to the fete at his place (the Presidence – can you beat that?) but hadn’t gotten our invitations, so we decided to crash it. Unfortunately, the volunteer with the car decided to go on ahead without us – why, none of are sure. Cheree, especially, had been looking forward to this event for months, and leaving her in the lurch like that is pretty much an act of unforgivable thoughtlessness. We were all pretty pissed – and then she tells us that not only did they get in, but they got to dance with Bongo.
I mean, really.
So, yeah, I’m an adult, I’m over it, you win some you lose some, life isn’t fair, etc. BUT THEY DANCED WITH BONGO!! AND DIDN’T COME GET US!! Some friends.
The airport was fun though, and with the camera my folks brought i got some good stuff on film – dancing women and tripping healers and the parade. We had a fete at Cheree’s house – sweet and sour chicken, grilled bar (tuna?) and lobster. From Mayumba – home of the volunteers who danced with Son Excellence. Some people have all the luck.
I left the next day in time to catch the dancing mask on stilts for the Ndende fete, then hightailed it outta town the following morning to get to Moukabou, the village where my neighbors are from. I was a little nervous, not having spent any time in a village before, but they went above and beyond....I was really moved. Normally they have mosquito nets and real beds and stuff, so that wasn’t a problem, and the outhouse I’m used to. But they hadn’t eaten meat since they’d gotten there in June, and because I came to visit they paid for shells and had the boys go out and shoot stuff. Pigeon, touraco (neon green head, dark turquoise body, red tail and wings), hookbilled something, squirrel. They paid for sardines, which I gathered they don’t do regularly either. "Beaucoup de disette ici!" said Obierge, my sister. "Beaucoup que le tubercule. Beaucoup que le legume. Pas de viande." We went en brousse to get manioc tubercule and squash seeds and leaves and bark for medicines. Papa cut open a palm tree and trimmed off the outer bark – and voila! heart of palm! "You can eat this if you’re stuck en brousse for two or three days. You don’t have to cook it but it’s good with sardines and a little onion." They also showed me the vine that stores water, and back in the old days they used to give babies their first drink of water from that vine, because "c’est pure, c’est bien filtré, y a pas de microbes." Mama did all the work – digging tubercules, cutting squash, humping everything back in the baskets (you wear them like backpacks; they have straps). Papa tied a few banana trees to some felled trees so they wouldn’t get blown over in the rainy season tornades. I just sat, but eventually they let me carry a basket full of tubercules back home. I felt bad about not helping (‘a real volunteer would be there digging tubercules alongside her mama!’) and said so later, to Obierge. "La brousse, ca etait?" "Oui, mais je suis une mauvaise fille – je n’ai rien fait." They laughed. Later Mama came out with a plucked touraco and said listen, honey, here, l’etranger ne fait rien. She sits there all day doing nothing. You’re not supposed to help – we’re supposed to host you, cook, work, everything. We took you en brousse because you wanted to see the brousse – you’re not expected to help out. You’re expected to sit there and eat and drink palm wine. Got it?
Got it.
The first day i drank palm wine. They do it two ways – you can tap the tree from en haut – up top, by climbing up with a vine harness and placing your gourds for a few days. This gives wine that is really sweet and not so strong, a lot like plain juice. Or, more commonly, you cut the tree down, and cut its branches off, placing them around the tree to keep people out. You chop out the middle of the tree in stages, and put a bamboo tube in the bottom so the juice runs down into your gourd or bottle or what have you. you need some kind of bark that attracts bugs so the bugs don’t get into the wine and make it bitter. In your bottle you put bitter bark, which ferments the juice. You can get 1-3 liters a day, chopping out a little more of the tree each day.
The second day I went en brousse withe mamas who collect medicinal bark and plants. There was a woman from Libreville who sells them to pharmacopies, but she doesn’t really know what she’s selling. The mamas who collected everything left their flip flops at the entrance of the forest (behind the house) and we went on up the mountain a ways. The forest is thick but not inpenetrable: there are vines all over, and tall trees, and shorter younger trees, and palms of various types, and shorter leafy plants, and ferns. As we got to the first tree one mama blew on her whistle, then took out some powder from a medicine bottle and spat it onto the tree. After she was done cutting the bark she rubbed dirt and leaves on the scar. As we left the area to go home, she blew again on the whistle. They wouldn’t tell me why.
The third day I went en brousse with mama and papa, like I said, and the next day we were going to go out to the old village, which is where everyone lived before 1963, when the government made everyone move into villages on the roadside to facilitate development. But that night an old papa died, so no one went en brousse the next day. Instead, we sat and I explained the cycle to the women, and we shelled peanuts and hung out. Most of the women were working on weaving baskets. A few were dressed up in red white and black – bwiti colors – and painted their foreheads with chalk – white with red and black dots. They demonstrated a bwiti dance for me, and the kids ran and got the drums and it became a whole affair. I filmed it, and showed it to them afterward, which was excellent. Mama told me I should give them money for a beer each, and I did, and they were psyched.
It was funny – I didn’t feel at all awkard filming there, and I think it’s because no other whiteys were around. Mama was encouraging me to film everything and take photos of everyone, especially the old mamas and papas, because who knows if they’ll have their picture taken before they die. It’s popular here to make tshirts with a deceased loved one’s photo on it, generally something like "Regrets eternel, Selestin Mboumba 1945-2001".
That evening there was a mask dance for the funeral. Everyone ran down to the bwiti area (the chef’s courtyard, where the temple is located) and women and children scuttled to their assigned area. "Quick! Before he gets here!"
The men were shaking grasses and little broom things, then a couple guys ran up and down the courtyard with fronds, preparing for the arrival of the mask. He showed up crawling, and falling over, and I thought jeez, he’s drunk. Mama made that Oo-oh sound she makes when she’s displeased. Then the mask got up – but he only had one stilt! Where’s his other stilt? His quoi? The other stick, why does he only have one? He doesn’t have stilts – one of his legs is longer than the other. he’s a cripple. Oh. He had a mask on that had eyes, and a nose, and a mouth open in an O. His forehead was red on one side and white on the other, and the back of the mask was all raffia. His arms were covered in raffia and tied so they weren’t too bulky, ditto his torso and legs. Then Mama said Don’t look! Look over there at the banana trees. So I did, even though no one else was looking there. I figured it was to do with me being white. Nope – all the women were not supposed to watch the mask go into the bwiti temple. But they did anyway.
That was it for that night – the men danced all night and the women got up early and we ran down to the same place. This time there was a raffia haystack man with a machete – he had a little skull cap on, but the rest was layered raffia, over his face, and arms, torso, legs, so he got wider as you went down. He went into the temple right away and the women and children dispersed around the backs of the houses. We crossed the street, across from the courtyard, and waited – another mask came out, this one a leaf-man, covered in vines and whirling pieces of white cloth as he danced in a kind of circular fashion. Everyone laughed. Then he went in and another one came out – this guy dressed up in white, with padding, and a round white mask, so he looked to me like a parody of a potbellied white guy. The way he danced was even vaguely goofy, like the way we dance. People laughed at him too. The white guy and the leaf man alternated for a little while and then the haystack guy came back and the kids and the women started screaming. Run!!! We practically crushed people trying to get inside the nearest house, and when everone was in we shut the door. He banged on it with the machete and people screamed. "The window!" someone cried, and we only barely shut it before he got there. Bap bap bap! Bapbap! "If he catches you outside, he hits you," said Mama. "Once a woman was washing clothes down in the river, she was pregnant, and he caught her." She sliced her arm through the air. "Dead. Comme ca. With the baby."
We came out when he was down at the carrefour, and Mama dragged me, running, the opposite direction, towards their house. Later that morning Valentine came by the house and immediately after going in the kitchen (a seperate building, next to the house) I heard these hysterical cries – Hee hee hee ho ho ho ha ha ha, he he he ha ha ha ha ha – like a woman in labor. Not any sort of sound of grief that I’m used to. Obierge got the bell and the whistle and some of the medicine and went in to calm her, and get the spirit causing her hysterics to leave her alone.
People would show up during my visit, and they would always get palm wine, or beer, or boxed wine (Baron de Madrid is ass, FYI), and some food. Mama’s brothers would come over for breakfast – the previous night’s leftovers. Some Libreville people came by, all cityfied and disdainful, spent five minutes with us and demanded one of the touraco that Moule had shot for dinner. Of course they had to give it to her, even though that was going to be their first real meal of meat since June (me and Papa and Mama got the meat, with a select rotating few getting the extra bits). Gimme gimme gimme. I was pissed. I guess it’s always like that, it’s supposed to be like that, you show up and it’s expected that you get the best of everything from your hosts, but it still made me mad. They could have been kind about it at least. That group gave me a ride to Mimongo, where I spent the night in Crystal’s house, as her cat hunted rats in the ceiling. I was sick and didn’t sleep – Crystal’s house is up on a ten meter cliff, and at 5:30am I couldn’t carry my bags down the steep stairs cut into the hill, so I rolled them down instead. The bush taxi ride was painful and nauseating. There were two little 15 lb pigs with us, hog tied and squealing. We put them under the benches. A couple hunters got in, with their rifles, and some women with baskets and bags of manioc. They all got off at Yeno, a large village with roads to Mouila, Mimongo, and Lebamba. That left me and the two boy-chauffeurs and the pigs. We got in at 8:30 and Tonton Alson, the chauffeur, was great and drove me right up to the case door. I had to go to the bank, so I sat for a while, got the news from Mike (a TEFL stagiaire ETd, the one from Lebamba – that makes 3 so far from the group of 40) and showered. At the bank I put in my slip but forgot to sign the back, so they put me at the back of the list – I waited two hours, sleeping part of the time. By the time I got my money it was too late to get my package from the post office. Bummer!
I’m here till Monday morning, time to recover from this fever/giardia(?) thing, and get my package before going to Lambarene to help with training. There’s internet there now, so feel free to write, even if it’s not quite as exotic as dancing masks and presidents!
righto. more later, of course. take care, and be good to eachother.
hannah
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