Charcoal

I want to write about charcoal. Little sooty pieces of magic. This is my second time writing of them, here's the first:

Today I met with Luke. I told him his name reminded me of Star Wars but he didn't get the reference. He saw my bicycling to my school, twice, and decided to meet me at my home, to see this white man in the middle of the African landscape. Luke is a charcoal dealer, he works on pieces of land converting the forest into dark pieces of energy and drives them, bundled, to Lusaka. He invited me to see the process and offered me a bag of charcoal, as I was beginning to question the nature of deforestation and burning fresh logs in my cooking shelter, splayed to resemble an asterisks, with bricks situated to hold up cooking pots.

Whether I am doing the forest justice, romantically reducing my distance to nature, or saving myself the inconvenience of locating a dealer with charcoal and carrying the load on my bicycle, I do not know. But I do know, and am discovering, that if you reduce daily life to its essentials - water, food, energy, cohabitation - you find both a phenomenon and a story.

Schedule

So how do I spend my day? This is a question no one has asked me that I will attempt to answer so that no one can read it. So I offer, on a whim, my daily schedule. Although my life looks good as a poster (or maybe a t-shirt), it is actually fairly routine, often droll, and replete with empty space. I don't often measure time with a clock, I have instead adopted the culture of reading the sun, and right now it is cresting the hills, soon to leave to shower its more favored side of the globe, only to return grudgingly and lazy in the morning. Thus I will not use conventional time references to describe my day.

The Universal

The Universal was a buckler, a disinfectant, a religion, a hope, an act of supreme poetry. The Universal created order. In those days, the blue-eyed Gaul with hair as yellow as wheat was everyone's ancestor. In those days, Europeans were the founders of History. The world, once shrouded in darkness, began with them.

 - Patrick Chamoiseau, "School Days"

Elections

Sunday.

Elections are on Tuesday. As of now the town, and parts of the village easily accessible are postered with blue, the ruling party, MMD (Movement for MultiParty Democracy), and green, the major opposition, PF (Patriotic Front). Politics are on the wall, in the air, and passing us by in vehicles with mounted loudspeakers.

First of all, let me explain why I can't talk about politics. Peace Corps, as a collaborator with the host national government of Zambia, and as an extension of the U.S. State Department, has as one of its conditions for existence a policy of non-participation in politics. We are diplomats with none of the privileges but all of the responsibilities. The Presidential election of Zambia, however, is to present not to be spoken on, as the campaigns have monopolized much of the periphery of my daily life. This picture I will paint will be as neutrally drawn as possible, it will be a pleasant landscape rather than a political call to arms, a Goya.