Rounding the Corners

There are two significant corners in my life, though it is only just now that I have come to appreciate the second (actually the first if we are talking proximity.)

The farthest away, but most noticeable, involves food. (Hence the most noticeable. It is taking me longer to notice the subtle, I admit. Over aged or over stressed, not sure which.) I have noticed this corner since we moved in. It sports a healthy outgrowth of rocky rubble. All the other roads and corners in our neighborhood are dirt packed except this one. When I come to the corner each morning on my way to work I step gingerly from rock to rock  and imagine myself crossing a raging river filled with crocodiles. I suppose the rubble pile is left over from some construction or demolition job long past. The house just in front of it is in some state of repair- or disrepair- and has a wonderful set of outside steps leading to nowhere. They appear stone worn and ancient and I imagine, if I make it across the river alive, I will rise to safety by following their path to the nonexistent rooftop.

When I come home, I find this same corner but in reverse. The change in perspective brings a whole new story. Or maybe it is the smell of plantains. Just a few steps away a woman has set up her umbrella, her chair and her outside frying vat. She has plantains bubbling away and a plateful drying on some cardboard next her. It is a sweet smell and I always wonder how many days of this I need to accumulate before the memory of that smell and arriving home are deeply associated and strongly implanted.

The second, first corner is the one right by my house. I love this corner because of the encounters it creates. The sheer volume of people walking down my road is slightly perplexing because my road doesn't actually appear to go anywhere. Despite this, I run into- sometimes quite literally- a variety of people, all at different stages within their day. In the early morning there are men in suits talking on phones, women in patterned dresses off to sell their baked goods and young kids with freshly baked baguettes for breakfast. In the afternoon there are gossiping teenage girls, young guys with earphones singing out their favorite tunes and rascally children calling out and chasing after each other. In the evening the adults are back, sharing news of their day or speculating on the latest actions of their bosses or neighbors or husbands. The children arrive home for the last time from school and the road becomes alive with soccer skirmishes and screams. The telephone cabine/one-stop-odds-n-ends shop begins to fill with happy hour patrons. The air sings with loud discussions and laughter. It's a lot for a street that appears to go nowhere. A small corner with big spirit.

The other end of my road- houses in one stage or another of
construction. The amount of foot traffic suggests the
 'road to nowhere' is a deceiving description

Earlier in the day I'd crossed paths with a young guy who came dancing around the corner. He was skipping and bouncing and feeling the joy of life. His energy made me smile. I might have caught him by surprise because he paused - only for a second, the same second I was wondering if he mistook my laugh for mockery rather than admiration- before continuing in stride and uttering a deep, "Hello, my sistah." Which of course made me immediately think of Ousmane (my echoic memory in effect, no doubt.) Which led me to just enjoy being called sistah for a minute. Which immediately led to memory retrieval of an article I'd read about the effects of calling everyone by family names. I can't find that exact article but I did find this one. Both seem to lament the practice of turning every stranger into someone familiar, every casual acquaintance into an obligation and every potential date into an incestuous affair. I spent mere seconds contemplating this before I returned to simpler thoughts.

This is how I have been spending my weekend. Contemplating people I run into while rounding the corners and trying to keep my thoughts simple and sweet. It takes a lot of energy which is exactly the point. Yesterday afternoon I rounded the corner, again caught up in the cavalcade of my own personal thoughts, engaged in a sort of mental boxing.

Two small boys were peering through the cutouts in a wooden gate near one of the lettuce gardens. I smiled at them and was deciding whether or not to pose a friendly question in passing when one of them turned my way. He tore himself from his peeking and ran at me with gusto, grabbing my legs in a bear hug. I think I know this guy. He's done this before; not often enough to be expected, just random enough to always be completely surprising.

The second little guy attempted to follow suit but I could tell he was just as perplexed about the actions of his friend as I. "You mean I'm supposed to hug her?" he seemed to be asking. "And this is fun?" He moved in slow motion and his leg hug was limp. I patted his back and sent him off to follow his friend. The boys went skipping down the road, their interests caught by other things. When I came back from the store I found them slapping the tail end of a black jeep as though they expected it to respond somehow.

This wooden gate with interesting cutouts appeared just after
Cote d'Ivoire won the CAN. Patriotic car flags lined the top of it for days.

But it's only in these last weeks that I've come to realize the gift this is. Children like me. It's always been just a thing, a given. I like kids and they like me. Just like I have blue eyes and blond hair. Qualities I can't change and don't think about very often. But just lately, as I am searching and questioning and doubting, I hear a little voice piping up. Not often enough but present nonetheless. And it's telling me that receiving the love and trust of children is a gift and I better start being grateful for it. Start paying attention to it and treating it as the valuable thing that it is. Message received. I am working on the acceptance part. Sometimes the things we envision for ourselves seem bigger and more glamorous than the things we actually have. But for one mysterious minute, rounding that corner, I was as enchanting and lovely as movie star. What could be richer than that?

From South Korea, with Love

I can't remember how long it's been there. It is gnarled and dark and appears to have been forged with the first dawn of time. I drive by it several times a day and marvel at its ugliness. Apparently it was a gift. I had to stop the other day and actually walk up to read the plaque to believe this. Who would give such a thing and even worse, how do you receive something so monstrous?

To be fair, I mentioned my thoughts to a friend and she didn't exactly agree. While she didn't go so far as to proclaim beauty, she did state that she never thought of it as ugly. "Looks like a wrestling statue....or something." I snapped a few (bad) photos with my phone, which can't really do justice to the artwork. But it's a dark sculpture and I am not even sure I could capture it with my regular camera.

The general outline is apparent, that's really all you can see driving by as well

The round nodules are faces contorted in pain

  There are a few leg like structures that melt into each other. Faces jut out at odd angles and all seem in agony. The sculpture is coarse and rough and forged with darkness.  It stands just across from the grounds of Camp Tshatshi, a military camp that surrounds our school. It is near the entrance to the old "zoo" which, legend has it, used to boast wild animals like zebras and elephants. Apparently in tough times, the zoo was loosed and all the big game were eaten. The community registration building of Ngaliema rests just behind the statue. People come here for any number of legal documents and weddings can be viewed on most weekends.  It's an odd juxtaposition.

The plaque declares this a 50-years-of-independence gift to the Congolese people, who have endured terrible hardships and wishes them solidarity in the face of a radiant future. Grand words for such a bleak statue.  I have read recently about the phenomenon of "dark tourism" - sites of mass death that draw in visitors. Congo certainly has a history of its own holocaust and could join its peers in erecting some kind of memorial to honor the tragedies of history that have taken place here. The statue seems to kind of fit in with this theory. It's the only one I can come up with that really makes any sense. Of course, I guess any site in DRC would be more of a living, breathing work of art-  as the tragedies haven't quite ended yet.