MWAGUSI

Arriving in Tanzania, we went straight to the Ruaha game reserve, the country’s second largest, in the less-traveled southwest of the country, a magical landscape festooned with baobab trees and woven with sand rivers. 

At Mwagusi Safari camp, where we stayed, we meet Adrian. He is in his mid-twenties, my daughter’s age. He is a second generation Tanzanian, born, like his father, in Dar es Salaam. Adrian has a gift for tracking animals. Every morning before dawn as we head out on safari, we see him with the local guides bending over fresh tracks in fierce concentration. He is gentle and soft spoken: a clipped British accent, swarthy good looks and impeccable manners. He is descended from Syrian slave traders, a family secret so shameful that no one will speak of it. He wants to know the stories so he can know what to do with this part of himself but his parents and grandparents refuse to tell him.

Mwagusi camp consists of ten thatched-roof tents perched at the edge of the Mwagusi sand river in the Ruaha reserve south and west of the Serengeti. Each room is unique. Each has a sturdy wooden bed and two solar reading lamps, a writing desk, a hammock, and a small sunken lounge with a sand floor and huge pillows where you can sit and peer over the curved ledge and watch the animals without being noticed. 

In the bathroom of my banda, the bones of a giraffe’s spine are embedded along a low, curving wall of river stones, and there are two giraffe skulls next to the shower. In the patio overlooking the sand river, tiny birds alight on the trunk of a fallen tree then hop over to drink from the hollow stone that is lovingly refilled with fresh water each day. It is so quiet I can hear their wings and tiny feet as they arrive and flit away. Listen. You could sit in that silence for the rest of your days, just murmuring the name of this place, Mwagusi, rolling it around on your tongue. To be able to say it, you have to purse your lips tight then open them wide to get your mouth around it, like a giraffe wrapping its lips around the thorny branch of a fever tree.



Back home, I sit on the bluff above a beach that held my children and me for so many years. Sand castles and pirate ships, dog walks and tears, dolphins, sea lions and whales. In summer there is soft, gray-white sand. In winter the sand washes away, exposing jagged slabs of rock stacked like the scales and spine of the dinosaur earth-mother herself. There are boulders with cross-sections of ancient bones that are likely dolphin vertebrae, or spines and fins of small, prehistoric whales. There is a man who sometimes drives a tractor along the beach and steals the fossil stones for his garden.

I watch the reflection of the late summer, late afternoon light. Listen: the gulls are calling below the cliff. The patterns of wind and currents on the ocean are pulling towards the shore and away, up the coast and down, below the surface and on it at the same time. The late afternoon light of Africa can’t help but be golden, but here in California, at the same time of day, the low sun backlighting the leaves of that rock rose over there is soft and chalky white. Even the red terracotta urn glows white. It is from West Africa. It is round as a globe, and covered with pointy bumps (antennae, actually) like raised spirals except the handle, which is a knob shaped like a man’s head. He has fine features and a steady gaze. He stares out over the ocean as if looking towards home, seeing nothing, seeing everything. Soon it will be dark. The sun is sinking and the wind is about to change.

ACCOUNTS

Exhaustion, sorrow… Released from numbness, I fall into sorrow’s arms, fall through her into a canyon wider than I can see. It is not freefall. I am held aloft and protected from the rocky sides of ruin by the soft and limitless sky in which all sadness, in all its beauty, floats. I am carried by currents of sorrow - columns of warmth and cold, thermals of grief between bluffs and sea. It is with me always, and it must be contagious because when I speak it, when the stories walk out of my mouth into casual conversation people tear up and sometimes want to hear more, and to keep from being rote, or bored, to keep from having to wind myself up and click across the conversation until I can stop, to keep from having to push until the words squeeze out of me like air through an accordion, I am learning to pause, inhale, and let the sadness sigh out, pulling the rest of me with it in a careful story that I can offer from the heart if someone asks to hear.

I drive with Sorrow down the street, heading for home after three hours of conversation with my accountant. I have gone in to ask how to write up next year’s budget for everyday gandhis. She wants to know what our objectives are, what results we expect and by when, who will do what, where the receipts are, the depreciation schedule for vehicles and camera equipment long since beyond repair and rotting in the humid heat, she asks for the lost deeds to the land we have bought, asks why we are making documentaries, who our audience is and why, all the endless legitimate questions that compress everything that takes so long to live. I thank her and answer as I know how to answer, by telling stories. I ask her to think with me how to respond to the dilemmas we are facing, help her understand (and myself, too) how a series of recent ‘mistakes’ could have happened, why they had to happen, so we can see what is being asked of us now.

And so I tell her: Of wanting to see a Leopard and meeting an ex-combatant named General Leopard who changed his name to Bethelson. Of how he received weapons training and anti-terrorist training in Israel, Romania, Jordan and Lebanon, paid for with US government dollars. Of how he ‘woke up’ beneath a Mango Tree and decided to become a peacemaker. Of how he ate human hearts, has three children of his own, is a traditional man who was raised Muslim and turned born again Christian at the insistence of his wife. Of how he says he wants to become ‘African Jewish’ and when he calls, greets me by saying, “Shalom, Mama!” Of child soldiers still being bribed and conscripted, massing at the border of Cote d’Ivoire. The accountant and I weep.

I speak of being stranded in a village and how we were welcomed and handed twin infants; Of seeing the women demonstrating for peace along the road the next morning; Of the 80% illiteracy rate; the unspeakable conditions at the Firestone rubber plantation and the unspeakable pollution of the sacred forest and river and coast beyond it - and of the elephants who have come to the towns we are working in after we make offerings to the elephants and the animals. I tell of riding along for hours on end and wondering why the hell I had come all this way and for what? How I had inconvenienced my family and spent all this money and got stuck in all this fucking mud, thinking next time I would just send a check and thank my friends and colleagues and tell them to carry on with the work as they saw fit, of how I couldn’t speak any of this out loud, but just then my Liberian friend, STV, sitting across from me, wakes up and exclaims, ‘What greater love is there?’ and I say, “What love?” And he says, “After all, you left your family to come all this way just to be with us. You could have just sent money but you came to be with us.” The accountant weeps some more and says, “You must tell your story. This is an important part of the story. Help us understand.”

I tell her how the NGO’s come to a place with their plans already made, shaped by political and economic agendas, and tell people, “We are going to drill you a well”, and the people tell us that they feel they cannot tell the NGO’s “We don’t want a well”, or “We don’t want a well there because it’s sacred ground”, or “It would be impossible for us to get to that well because we would have to cross disputed land”, because then they would get nothing at all. This way, the NGO’s can say to their funders and write in their year end reports, “We drilled x many wells to serve x many people in x many villages at x cost and in x time frame”, and be lauded and get continued funding.

And yes, of course we are accountable and rightly so, and we make mistakes we probably shouldn’t have made, and we must make plans and produce results. And we must do this in such a way that we can be grateful for the mistakes because they are our best teachers because they keep us humble and searching. We must do this in such a way that we find new language that lives and breathes ‘outside the box’ of predictable results, that enlivens the work by paying attention to what we can’t know in advance, and that will produce tangible results that are invisible in a cause-and-effect universe, in ways that give us new eyes that do not yet know how to see or what they are actually looking at.

I am an outsider who understands little of Liberian culture, knows nothing firsthand of this war or any war, who has never lost someone to violence and has never had to forgive someone for such a thing, or admit to being someone in need of such forgiveness. And I must speak of how our work soars when guided by dreams and reverence to the ancestors, and flounders when shaped by the linear thinking of people, and how we must decide, let Spirit decide, whether we are to apologize and cut loose, send money and thanks, mediate, create programs, dedicate staff, document or otherwise remain on the ground when all we’re mandated to do is find the story and tell it, but which story, exactly, and to whom and in what form and how to know if we’re getting it right, not putting people in danger, not leaving anything out, not still blind? And so the story is one story and several; the film multiplies and becomes many; the images grow until we have over ten thousand. One story - One with Everything? Ha. Now you see it, now you don’t.

And now she can see it and it only took three hours for this glimpse which she will forget until she remembers, as I have forgotten and am remembering, and which will live with her for the rest of her days because she wept. She will still wonder why I can’t get it right and do this in the way that can be expressed in checkable figures and maybe I will learn to do this without being swallowed by the mind that demands such a world and knows how to live in it. How to write something that can bridge the forms that created the world that made the war happen, in a way that shows how Einstein was right that we can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it, but in this case we don’t yet know, we are just learning how to think differently, sometimes, as best we can, and this is my new job. What is the budget for that?

BEARING WITNESS: SNAKES 1

Shortly after Voinjama’s first Mourning Feast, in November of 2004, the ancestors instructed the diviner we were working with to begin the process of restoring the land and the water by performing certain blessing ceremonies. Specific offerings were to be made to call to the animals and the birds and reassure them that the humans were returning to the land in peace and felt truly remorseful for the bloodshed they had committed. This was a very difficult ceremony. She and her entourage were to go deep into the bush and stay for 7 days without food, sleeping on the ground, making offerings, calling the animals and communicating with them. They were to capture 7 white birds and tie a thread to the leg of each one so they would take the message of peace and show it to all the other animals.

During our visit, the first of several preliminary water ceremonies was called for. We were to buy a special gourd in the market and fill it with specially ground rice flour, a favorite food of the forest animals’ spirits. The diviner gathered the other items needed – kola nuts, more gourds, some money in small bills and coins, and other sacred objects. We drove for about 40 minutes and hiked through the forest down to the Lofa River, a tributary of the St. Paul, where, during the war, many people had been shot or bound and tossed into the water to drown, and many dead bodies had been disposed of. The diviner and her husband, a powerful herbalist, made offerings and prayers to all the creatures of the forest, the land and the trees. The diviner went into trance, as she often does, as it is the primary mode of receiving messages from the ancestors. Eyes closed, she runs through the forest at full speed, and always returns without a scratch, never trips or bumps into a tree or bush. A small group of women – acolytes and relatives – run after her so they can be there when she wakes up and guide her home. They must exert a terrific effort to keep up, dodging fallen trees, brambles, and mud holes that she doesn’t even notice.

On that day, three different snakes appeared in the forest, birds called in obvious conversation, and we saw butterflies and brightly colored millipedes making their way to the offering site. The diviner later told us that the appearance of these beings in such profusion was a sign that the animals were grateful and so showed themselves by way of greeting. One of the snakes was poisonous and came to the edge of where they were running, and sat, calmly watching without attacking or running away. When they returned about half an hour later, they found that chalk had appeared on a large termite mound near their first offering site, a sign of protection and of Spirit’s presence and acceptance of the offerings on behalf of all living things.

Catfish and crocodiles, two of the diviner’s totems, appeared during the water ceremony and told her to return with larger quantities of rice flour, as they were very hungry and the amount she/we had brought was insufficient. Afterwards, she was told that the ancestors would be waiting for her at thirteen towns, in a particular sequence, that she was to visit one by one to work for peace and to continue ceremonies of cleansing and reconciliation with the water and the land. (She did.)

That night when we returned to the UN compound where we were staying, we had a scrumptious Pakistani feast with the officers in their dining room, about 100 men, attended decorously by the soldiers on serving duty and by Col. Raza and then Major Shahid, the commanders of the UN Pakistan Battalion II stationed in Voinjama. Before and after the meal we gathered in an anteroom where the men had a chance to relax, smoking and watching the latest Bollywood hits on TV. Gifts were always exchanged, theirs always more lavish than ours. We were free to ask questions and just get to know each other. Col. Raza told us, “Outside of Pakistan, this is our favorite place in the world. This is the place we would live if we couldn’t be at home. We love Liberia and we love Voinjama.” Wherever Col. Raza went in Voinjama, he drew crowds, and was greeted with shouts and cheers, “Col. Raza! Col. Raza!” A career military man, young, perhaps 40, he embodies the highest ideals of the warrior as a guardian of peace. Once people felt safe to return to Voinjama, and did so with great jubilation, he and his men could not help but fall in love with Liberia and Voinjama, the people and the place, and it immediately blossomed under his care.

The Pak Batt grounds are dotted with signs: “No White Man is superior to a Black Man. No Black Man is superior to any White Man.” and “If you kill one human being you kill the human race entire.” Because the people of Voinjama were hungry, the officers voluntarily fasted one day each week and donated their rations to the community. At their clinic, the doctor saw over 150 local patients a day without charge (although technically he was assigned only to the 600 men in the battalion).

While we were there, the men took turns standing guard along the perimeter and at their checkpoints. An off-duty soldier, in his white tunic and trousers, stood outside the guest house, which was in Col. Raza’s bungalow, and brought us thick, sweet Pakistani tea with canned milk every morning. At night a sentry stood guard outside our bungalow, armed with a long iron staff, like a Pakistani Maasaii with his spear.

On the night of the water ceremony, we stayed up late listening to our young Liberian camera woman tell a frightening dream she had had in which she was pursued by a large snake. When we finished our conversation, she stepped outside to go to her lodgings and suddenly came running back to the door shouting, “Come outside, quick! There are snakes right here!” We ran outside just in time to see two snakes streaking away into the bush between our bungalow and the little zoo that Col. Raza has created to protect feral animals when they find them. One of the snakes was about 5 feet long, thin, dark, and very fast, possibly a black mamba. There was a second snake moving beside it that was thicker and shorter, maybe three feet, and nearly as fast. A third, even smaller snake, about 2 feet long, lay dead by the footpath, victim of the night watchman’s quick reflexes and prowess with the iron staff. He said the snake was a dangerous one. Although I felt sad and horrified that our presence had caused the snake’s death, I thanked the watchman for protecting us.

Three different species of snakes, moving together, in swift parallel formation from the bush to our doorstep in the center of town, on the day of the Lofa River forest ceremony. In over a dozen trips I have only seen one other live snake. Perhaps a herpetologist will one day prove me wrong, but for now, I choose to think that their exuberant and daring appearance confirms that they risked their lives to come and greet us, perhaps to thank us for the offerings that were made.

RATS & FENCES

[Note: In late 2012 I bought a beautiful piece of land along the 10 Mile River, walking distance to the ocean. My friends who are permaculture trainers created a blueprint for restoring degraded areas, for growing food and protecting the streams, meadow, forests and river. I am restless, on edge, in over my head.]

Not sleeping. What is it that is keeping my mind so busy? The land, the fencing, the lizard killed by the brush clearing, the orchard, the garden, my work, my mother, my body, my dog, the rats, the next earthquake (The Big One?), and haven’t seen any whales since New Year’s Day.

Caught a rat in the live trap at the new house. Fed him marshmallows and poured water onto a split reed pushed through the wires of his cage. His translucent pink ears, round and alert like Mickey Mouse in miniature. His dark, brindled, minky soft fur rippling with wild health. We make eye contact. His gaze valiantly holds mine the whole time I speak, which grows longer as I do so. Funny to find I have so much to say to a rat. He stops what he was doing (looking for food, water, a way out of the cage) and listens, motionless. I tell him, Thank You for allowing yourself to be caught. You are beautiful. We will not kill you or hurt you. We do not wish to frighten you. You are welcome to live at a respectful distance, to eat well and be warm, but you cannot be here. Please let the others know. We will take you somewhere far that we hope is safe. You cannot stay here. No rats can be here, in this house.
I am wondering: How can we build a fence like a skin? The boundary between me and not me, the world and each of us. In this case, between human-centered activity and deer activity, which is also tick activity, mountain lion, fox, bobcat and bear activity, and eating-vegetable-gardens activity. What rightfully belongs to one or the other? Are there places on the land we are willing not to go? What is the correct and proper dance of reciprocity based on intimacy and respect? Or is it a dance of intimacy and respect based on reciprocity? How to fence so that it’s the skin of my body? How to fence so that it’s safe and sustaining on both sides of it?

BITS AND PIECES #1

It is significant, startling, that animals, plants, stones, water, birds and even micro-organisms remain friendly, neutral, even overtly benign and inviting of (re)relationship in spite of our unrelenting brutality. This inexplicable open-ness is less a charming quirk than a simple fact of character: it is in the nature of most beings (humans included) to seek relationship, to express love and receive it. Remarkably, this has not evolved out of the non-humans. One wonders whether Nature is curious to see whether humans will remember or even recognize this connectedness and choose it.