Another brief update

Welcome, November. The year has progressed exceptionally fast, and I have found myself in the midst of a variety of projects. As much as this blog has become a gallery of journal entries, a behind the scenes and in between the lines of the pleasures and vulgarities of Peace Corps service, this is more of an update of what takes place on the main stage, what occupies my day. So more lucidity, less metaphor.

Creatures

This is an ode to creatures I am learning to share my life with. It is a fragile balance. Some of them come into my house, and others I encounter outside. I rode a bicycle yesterday to town after a day of rains, countless centipedes were making their way across the Great Northern Road, begging to have a dumb joke written about them. Why did the centipede cross the road? Insert clever punchline here. Part of living in rural Africa is coming to terms with these sporadic yet frequent encounters, and, to borrow a term from Zambian English, I am getting used. Here is my poem, a tribute to them.

To the cockroaches with paper thin bodies that hover across a tabletop

To the spiders that sit in groups in the top corners of rooms sharing arachnid gossip

To the rats that scamp across my roof and to the mice too

To mosquitoes that have so much to take and only malaria to give

To worms with a thousand legs crossing my path after the rains stop

To snakes that convince me every twig and stick is a manifestation of their arrival

To the dead chameleon in my roof stuck forever on its last hue

To caterpillars that fall from trees like a light green rain

To grasshoppers and all else that scatter with every footstep

To the butterflies that orbit me, convincing me that nature has no intrusive beasts

except for perhaps me

Science Fiction

It's hard to tell my African friends about America without feeling like I'm describing the plot of a science fiction movie. Maybe my memories of the United States are tainted with nostalgia, or perhaps the gulf of living standards between Los Angeles and the village of Chimupati are this vast, that to view one from the other only the lens of fiction is appropriate. So this is my view of home, ripped from the pages of comic books.

The Park

Posing with animals I'm sure at one point I've eaten

A man with a rifle stood in between me and the hippo, a thin layer of reeds unable to mask the heaving breathing of an oversized mammal.The Germans, when they came to Africa, called this animal Wasserpferd, water horse, attempting to place an existing name onto a mysterious new creature.

We are at Kasanka Park, a small national reserve noted for being the destination for a massive bat migration from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Fruit bats arriving to feast on mangos and anything else sweet hanging from trees. At dusk they awake and swarm, a tornado of flying rats, fit for any comic book hero. We made the bat signal out of wood and set it aflame, a tribute to the migration and our pop culture upbringing.

I shot a video and this is it: