I am standing in Cairn and Bill’s kitchen, chopping vegetables. Cairn is there too. Bill comes in with Rahul, they had been buying beer. Cairn is mildly irritated with Bill for some reason, it turns out he had been teaching Hugo how to pee off their roof. We laugh. The kids turn up at the back door, inexplicably covered in dirt. “Wash your hands” I tell them “we are about to eat.”
I climb to the roof of the building and open the door. Everyone is already there, drinking and laughing. “You made it!” they cry “we didn’t know if you would. We’ve saved you a place.” Someone hands me an icy glass, Sandra resumes the story she was gaily telling at the other end of the table. Kayla leans over to me “what a week.” I nod, sipping, and look out across the dusty rooftops.
I am coming back for a visit. Adji and Valerie are expecting me. They drop everything when I knock, and pull me into quick smooth hugs. They want to see photos of the boys, my boys, their boys. They exclaim and coo over long legs and short hair. Adji laughs at my French.
Every time I wake up feeling a little breathless, disoriented, with an intense longing in my chest. The dreams are strange because they are so ordinary - not bizzare and dream-like, but true. Exact replicas of our life there. There is Chez Fatou, now I am jogging on a sunbaked road behind the airport wall, I’m dropping Enzo off to play with Sebastian and Auggie.
I left pieces of my heart all over that place - tucked into the corners of my classroom, buried in the sand at Yoff beach, ground into the dust of Ebbets field, flung into the Sine Saloum delta, swept up into the ocean breezes and carried into the night sky. I will never get them back.
Instead I have to grow new pieces. It is hard work. The soil is fertile here, everything grows lush and verdant, and I know my heart will grow here too. I can already feel tiny shoots pushing to the surface. I walk in the rain up the hill and stand at the edge of the water and breath in the mountains. Or I run the other way, to the next hill and peer down at the shimmering lake. It is so beautiful here. I bundle up in fleece and gortex and fly down the snowy hill. I sit in front of my fire and read. I open my door to the neighbor kids. I visit with an old friend. I am reminded of my childhood, I grew up here, I have roots in all this rain. But my heart still feels waterlogged, unmoored, floating.
Last week Mateo asked if we would find his missing toy when we go back to “Adji’s house.” “Oh, sweetie, we aren’t going back.” I replied. Mateo looked startled. He didn’t understand. He thought this was temporary, that any minute we would go home. He wasn’t upset, just surprised. He had to recalibrate. I understood, completely. My recalibration mechanisms seem to be jammed.
This morning I got an email from a former colleague, attached was a music file from last year’s musical. A beautiful young voice came soaring out - her song carrying a piece of my heart out over the amphitheatre and into the stars.
“The future’s full of mystery, please let this be mine. My one perfect moment, in time.”
The apartment is empty and we are at La Demure, the sweet little boutique hotel where we spent a long month when we first arrived. We sold our car, so we are back to ridiing around in taxis. Its a fitting way to bookend our time here in Dakar.
Except, of course, everything is different. When we checked into our room here the woman who let us into our suite said “oh, I recognize you! You were here before.“ I replied “yes, we were here! more than three years ago.” “are you going back home?” “Yes,” I replied. “Oh!” she said. “the time has gone so fast.”
Tell me about it, sister.
The time has gone so fast. Now, that entire conversation happened in French. Now, when we get into a taxi I know exactly where we are going and how much it will cost and I don’t even hesitate to climb into whatever weird and slightly damp interior awaits us.
Today we went to a birthday party at Ebbets field. i was so grateful for the invitation, the understanding between one mama and another that I was going to need some help getting my kids through the day. We ate pizza and played on the playground and laid back in the hammocks and let the cool breeze play with out hair.
Today I spent two hours with Adji and Valerie as they divvied up the remains of our kitchen - the bags of rice and half eaten sauces, a dozen eggs, and boxes of opened ziploc bags. I marveled at how frugal they were, how hesitant to throw anything away. We laughed, and baked cookies I found in the freezer, and they playfully scolded me when I tried to throw out the remains of a jar of jalepeno peppers. They use everything The whole buffalo. It is humbling and makes me long to be a better steward of my resources. It also made me miss them already.
Tonight we went to dinner with Adam and Kayla. We went to Maison de Celine, Enzo’s favorite restaurant. He made friends with some other kids and spent the whole evening running around between bites of pizza. We ate an chatted and laughed and enjoyed a long evening with friends. Then we said goodby with tight hugs and promises that this wasn’t goodbye and that ribbon of grief that hooked itself around my heart a few days ago pulled a little tighter.
Tomorrow morning we leave for Morocco. Then its home to Seattle. We will fly away from this place that has found its way, stealthily under my skin and into my heart. Its time.
On the first day of 2017 two of the people I love most in the world had a baby boy. He was a “surprise” an unplanned arrival, years after they had finished having kids. 2016 is was a rough year for the world, but it was a particularly difficult one for their extended family so the arrival of this beautiful, healthy, baby boy was a joyful and auspicious start to 2017. I did what people do when they are thousands of miles away, i cooed over his sweet, slightly stunned, red faced newborn photo his proud parents posted to facebook and then I wrote a message on his mama’s wall: Welcome to the world!
Welcome to the world.
Its a phrase we bandy about so cavalierly when babies are born, but this time it caught in my throat a bit. Its a big deal, the biggest deal there is, to welcome someone to life as a human being on this planet, and all that entails. All the joy and pain and disappointment and challenge and delight and frustration and complexity and simple pleasure of life as a human on this planet. And only slightly less of a big deal is to be a parent of one of those newly formed humans who is responsible for guiding them through the first 20 or so odd years of life on that planet, hoping somehow that you will keep them in basically one piece and teach them to be polite and to tie their shoes and pee in the toilet and also respect their fellow human beings and love unconditionally and eat a balanced diet and meet their potential and not write on the furniture.
Parenting is impossible.
I know that people who are not parents get really sick of people who are parents being all dramatic and precious about their job of raising sticky little people and how hard it is and how exhausting and yet so Worth. It. Non-parents, I assume, want to take all of us parents by the shoulders and say “first of all, you are NOT the first people to ever be parents, humans all over the planet have been doing this literally since the dawn of human existence and, secondly, you CHOSE this path so stop whining about it and let me get back to my kid-free brunch and quiet reading time.”
I really don’t blame them for feeling that way. Even I get sick of the constant blather about parenting - but what non-parents have to understand is that, for most of us, parenting is overwhelming and bewildering in ways that were totally unexpected, but due to the exhaustion and extreme distraction we don’t get much time to reflect on this notion and thus fall back on comparing eating habits and fretting about potty training and debating endlessly about the best way to get our kid to sleep better at night. (parents are obsessed with sleep. All of us are certain that most of our problems would be solved if we could just get a friggin night’s sleep)
To make things even worse, parenting has become something of a competitive sport in America, especially among east-coast educated progressives who are all nauseating know-it-alls and hell bent do-gooders. Armed with statistics and advice from parenting blogs, moms and dads volley healthy snacks and perfectly timed naps at each other with lightening speed, one upping with references to “restorative justice” or NYT articles about the pros and cons of co-sleeping DC is an especially competitive parenting league, as it is chock full of (mostly) women who are professionals and would prefer to be working, but are being dragged to DC with their spouses for a relatively temporary assignment, and decide to be a SAHP for a while until their kids are in school. These (mostly, but not entirely) moms pour the same level of professionalism and expertise into their children as they did into their high-powered careers, and the result is dizzying.
In the months before we moved to Dakar I didn’t work and got to play quite a bit of rec league “parentball”, and like most sports, discovered out I wasn’t very good at it. I was at once awed and shamed and morbidly fascinated by these perfectly turned out moms with their snacks and sunscreen. Whereas my diaper bag was mostly a repository for used kleenex, melted crayons and mysterious food bits, the professional moms at the parks in my neighborhood had handbags that seemed to be made from the same material as Harry Potter’s tent - no matter what the situation called for - a fresh pair of pants, a parka, a towel, a thermos of soup - it was pulled at once from the depths of the bag. While Enzo roamed around the splash pad in just a swimming suit (and maybe a swim diaper if I was having a good, day) the other kids had sunproof swim shirts and zinc on their noses and sturdy water shoes. I would inwardly sigh and put a mental check in the “crappy mom” column in my brain.
I have to admit, I rarely felt overtly judged by the moms around me. Occasionally i would catch a side eye, some shade thrown from across the swing set, but it began to dawn on me that most moms were just desperately trying to prove that THEY were good moms, not that I was a bad one. I wanted to say “you’re doing great! This is hard! If I pick your kid up after she falls off the slide, its not a referendum on you as a person, I was just handy and I am a teacher and it is second nature to me.” I had the urge to start conversations with “Hey, my kid sleeps on his stomach and started drinking chocolate milk when he was 18 months old” just to clear the air. But I was too insecure, there were too many check marks accumulating in my crappy mom column, and a particularly nasty inner voice was beginning to wonder aloud if perhaps I wasn’t cut out for this mommy business.
And then we moved overseas.
When we arrived in Dakar we had one adorably precocious two year old and vague plans to have another one in a year or two. We didn’t know that I was already pregnant with what would eventually become our sweet little rascal, Mateo. When I found out I was pregnant I was not immediately overjoyed, i was in despair - we were still living out of suitcases, I was tired and grieving the loss of the life I knew and bewildered about how to help Enzo manage the transition to this strange new world. I was mentally exhausted from spending all day trying to speak French, and physically exhausted from the heat and mosquitoes cutting into our sleep, and emotionally exhausted from the impossible task of making a home in this dusty place, and I was in no shape to bring another person into our family. After a couple days I unpacked my big girl panties and pulled myself together and got busy finding a home and working at the school and slowly began to embrace the idea of another tiny person in our lives. But I couldn’t shake those check marks, the tally that added up to me being insufficient, and I wondered how I was going to parent another child when I was so far behind the learning curve.
Allow me to take a little detour from my story here.
I have always been aware that I am not a great driver. I have never gotten into a catastrophic accident, but still, my wandering mind, poor hand eye coordination and slow reflexes mean that I am a mediocre driver at best. Or at least that is what I used to think. The truth is, I am not a bad driver, I was just born to drive in Africa. Your mind can’t wander when there are horse drawn carts, goats, aggressive taxis, giant busses, potholes, reckless pedestrians and the occasional industrial dump truck to contend with. And because the lanes are narrow and packed no one is going very fast, so my reflexes have ample time to fire up before I am going to go skidding into the car in front of me. Traffic rules are optional, you can park your car anywhere you feel like stopping, lanes are just suggestions, and when backing out of a parking spot into oncoming traffic there is always a parking attendant ready to stand in your blind spot and wave you out into the street. I love it. (I am pretty sure my passengers aren’t nearly as enamored with my driving as I am)
This is basically how I feel about parenting too. I am not a bad parent at all, in fact I am a totally kick-ass mom. As long as I am parenting in Dakar where the rules are flexible, you can take your kids anywhere, and there are always people ready to help you out of a jam. Maybe its because living overseas you learn to take things in stride and reorganize your priorities, or perhaps its the fact that people who choose to live their lives abroad are generally a bunch of freewheeling bohemians, but whatever the reason, parents here are an incredibly relaxed, supportive and non-judgemental group of people. I love it.
For example: I regularly leave my boys in the car when I run into the bakery or to the ATM or hop out at the vegetable stand. I leave the doors locked and the windows open and I can always see them from the store and its never for more than a 5 minutes, but dragging two kids out of the car and through the sidewalk traffic just so I can buy a loaf of bread is insane. The first time I did it because both kids were asleep, and I HAD to get water. But now I do it as a matter of routine.
In the US this could get me arrested.
Which is dumb, because it is objectively safer to leave your kids IN the car than drag them across a busy parking lot. And the chances of someone breaking into your car and stealing them is infinitesimally small. And all of us spent hours and hours sitting in the car on weekend mornings while our parent’s ran errands - a few minutes at the store and then at the bank and then at the post office-most of the time we were happy not to go in and stand in line. I much preferred to wait in the car with my book. My parents were not worried that a stranger would come by, see me in the car, assume my parents were negligent and abusive and then call the cops. But now, it is a genuine fear - I don’t trust my neighbors to be on my side, they have become the enemy in my quest to raise my kids. My generation has found other means of supporting each other - online communities and MOPS groups and structured playdates - but there is not a sense that we can rely on our neighbors and community members to have our backs. it is a lonely and terrifying feeling.
The phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” has long been bandied about as an “African proverb” - which is kind of a silly notion considering there are upwards of 1500 languages spoken on this massive continent. But regardless of the origins of the phrase, it is a truism about how children are viewed here. It is a common understanding that everyone within earshot is tacitly responsible for any kids nearby - on the street, in a store, in a restaurant. And our community of teachers who live on this street are neighbors in the best way - sharing food and kitchen appliances and a helping hand at a moments notice.
And in this year where I have been alone so much of the time, I have leaned on this village of understanding and generous people many many times. There was the time at Halloween when I was trying to wrangle two overstimulated and exhausted kids out of Ebbets Field and into the busy night time streets when Mateo suddenly dropped to the ground, in a complete meltdown and I lost Enzo in the rush of people leaving. A colleague who happened to be behind me scooped up Mateo, a different friend stopped Enzo before he got to the street and a THIRD person, who had just pulled his car up to the gate, offered to drive him so I only had to lug one kid through the heat to my car. Once, when I ran out of water I called my friend, Torie, who lives across the street to ask her if she would be willing to come sit in my house while one kid was asleep and the other was watching TV so I could run out and buy water. She readily agreed, and when I got home (30 minutes later, because of course I had to go to two stores) she was washing my dishes. Adam and Kayla, who live across the street, host Enzo for a few minutes every week when he chugs over to their house to pick up our weekly yogurt delivery. He plays with their dogs and helps himself to their food and they are incredibly kind and good humored about it. One day, when it was raining cats and dogs, he was there for more than an hour - I finally dashed over to collect him only to discover that he had nearly talked Kayla into making him lunch.
This weekend our friends Bill and Cairn (two of our favorite members of the parenting village) asked what we were going to miss the most in Dakar, what we were most worried about moving back to the US. The number one top of my list item is returning to the world of competitive parenting, of being afraid to ask my neighbors to help, of getting caught up in the madness of shutting kids to “activities” and forgetting to just let them be, of constantly failing to live up to this invisible standard and letting that nasty voice back into my head, the one that tells me that I am not enough. Instead I need embrace that notion, of course I am not enough, no one is, and the important thing is to find the people who will help you fill in the gaps, and whose gaps you can help to fill as well. To find the village.
I’ve been working on a new post for the past few months, chipping away at it here and there. its about parenting overseas, and I wanted to publish it on Mother’s Day, but then the internet went out and I lost what I had written and I gave up. I tried again a couple nights ago and….same thing.
I will not miss my Tigo router, thats for darn sure.
But, in the meantime, heres a filler. Rahul had the car today so i was going to take a taxi home from school. But I couldn’t get one, so I walked. I’ve never walked home from school, and now I wish I had done it more often. I shared the road with joggers out for an afternoon run, and ladies walking home from the mosque. I tried to snap a shot of an elusive lizard, and avoided taking one of the dog carcass, stiff and rotting in the heat. Here are a few pictures of my way home.
The grand mosque
Fishing boats lined up ready
A car wash
A news broadcast
Taxis at a relatively quiet rondpont
A peek at the monument, and a taxi finally stops and offers me a ride.
Home.
When I arrived home the boys were headed up to the roof with their scooters. So I joined them and we ran around on the dusty terrace, racing and playing tag. Then I stopped at the edge for a moment to peer down at my neighborhood: A woman walking down the road with a container of gas on her head, a mason steadily building a new house, one cinderblock at a time, the guards preparing and then partaking in their daily attaya ritual, the foaming tea poured back and forth from cup to cup. Its a beautiful evening, the breeze is cool and the ocean is silver in the distance. A bird swoops by, so close I could almost reach out and touch it, carried on the wind, A car is speeding and bumping down the road, the guards wave for it to slow down. Rahul’s former colleagues from IFPRI trickle out of the office building across the street, my colleague pulls his car into the garage under the apartment building. From my vantage point I can see the garden terraces, neighbors who have tried to carve out a beautiful spot in all this dust and concrete. The rooftop next door is the most beautiful - with a lovely mosaic table and an abundance of bougainvilla.
I love this view.
Mateo interrupts my thoughts - he wants a small square of cream cheese to snack on and wonders why there aren’t any apple trees in dakar because we have apples in the fridge and isn’t it time for dinner yet. I turn and go back inside. After all, we have packing to do.
Last week I had my last class with my seniors. It was a flurry of activity as students were finalizing their last papers and frantically trying to upload videos and before I knew it they were out the door and I wanted to shout “no, wait!” I wanted to pull each of them into a tight embrace, to grip them by their shoulders and look them in the eyes and remind them to be well and do good work and keep in touch. I wanted to admonish them to use their considerable powers for good. And I wanted to thank them for illuminating my path towards becoming the kind of teacher I want to be. But of course I did none of these things. I simply stood at the door and waved them away, one hand pressed to the pinpricks of loss in my chest. Then I turned my attention to the roomful of juniors who were already bounding through the door.
This is the great joy and heartache of being a teacher. The students that you inexorably come to love will inevitably leave, and new students will slide in behind them, and you will love them just as much.
My juniors already know they are my secret favorites. They know I stayed an extra year at ISD in large part because I wanted to be their IB theatre teacher. The junior class is a notoriously irascible bunch - headstrong and rebellious and prone to bad decisions. More than one set of rules has had to be entirely rewritten because of this junior class. But these same characteristics make them interesting and open minded risk takers, which I love. I taught all of them in biology in both 9th and 10th grade so I know every single one of them. I know which ones will try to thwart authority at every turn, and which ones will respond to every request with the question “but, why?” and which ones will go toe-to-toe with me on snarky comebacks. I can identify most of them by their handwriting. The thought of passing them off to take IB theatre from someone else was unthinkable.
But, of course, the problem with staying one more year is that it left space for more kids to climb into my affections and make themselves at home. So, rolling in behind the juniors are the sophomores, who have been a bright spot in my day since I had them all in biology as freshmen. The 10th graders are very different from the juniors - case in point, only a handful signed up to take acting, and most of those were practically frogmarched to my class by the counselor. On the other hand, nearly half the class signed up for tech theater - give them a problem to solve or a task to accomplish and they are ON IT. As smart and hardworking as the 10th graders are, what I love best about them is how kind they are to each other, every single one of them a genuine and loyal friend. I’ve had them all again in bio this year too, so of course, now they are all “my kids” too.
Mercifully, I didn’t teach 9th grade bio this year. I only got to know a handful of the kids in the class, but somehow I scored all the best ones. 16 of them signed up for the musical and refused to leave, even when I tried to scare them away with promises of long hours and extra rehearsals. They stayed and proved to be one of the most talented group of kids I have ever had in a show.
Tonight is closing night of my last show at ISD. I have been aware that this most poignant of lasts was coming for a long time, but I know it will still hit me like a punch in the face about halfway through Act 2. I am astounded at how good this show is. It was an ambitious undertaking - a huge, hip hop musical that requires no less than 10 good singers and a team of dancers is a lot to ask of a class of entirely 9th and 10th graders, most of whom have never been in a show before. But even though this is easily the best production I have ever directed, in many ways I felt that it had almost nothing to do with me, that I just cleared some space for it to exist and the kids did the rest. I am like a proud parent sitting there in the audience, beaming at the 40 cast and crew members working seamlessly together on stage. I have to fight the urge to lean over to the person next to me and whisper “ see those kids up there? Those are mine.”
Except, of course, they are not mine. Or they are only a little bit mine. its a complicated thing, the affection a teacher has for her students. I am just a temporary steward of their time, a weigh station on their path to adulthood, one of many people who will loom large in their life for a short period of time, and then recede into the background to be forgotten. And as hard as it is to imagine now, I will forget them too, or at least the sharp details of them. I will remember them in a fuzzy and fragmented way. I will no longer be able to identify them by their handwriting. But all the same, the affection I have for my students comes from the same place in my heart as the love I have for my own kids. Of course, I love my children much more fiercely than any of my student, but if Enzo and Mateo are the twin suns around which my world spins, then my students are the stars in the firmament. Each one is still there, twinkling in the night, and it is my hearts desire to be worthy of their light.
I don’t want to brag or anything, but I got to play baseball on Ebbets Field.
Okay, fine, fine, I got to play SOFTBALL on Ebbets Field.
Okay, fine (geez, you people) I got to play Co-ed, SLOW PITCH softball on Ebbets Field.
Oh, sorry, no. Not THAT Ebbets field. Ah, yes, I see how that would be confusing. No, the one in Brooklyn was torn down 20 years before I was born. No I am talking about THIS Ebbets field:
This is the sports field and playground that the US Embassy in Dakar owns and operates and where I got to play softball every Saturday from October to February for the last two year. Its green and grassy and right on the ocean, and though it may seem a bit bold for the embassy to name its ball field after one of the most iconic fields in baseball history, I would argue that in many ways this Ebbets is far superior to the original.
For one, it has the #1 playground in the whole of Dakar, probably all of Senegal, but I can’t be certain. (yes I can). Shipped straight from the good’ole US of A this bad boy is 3 stories high with two (2!) twisty slides.
Just for reference, here are photos of the third and fourth best playgrounds in Dakar. #3 is at Sao Brasil, a pizza restaurant where your kids can try to die on the slide while they wait for their food. The other is at Cabane du Surfeur, a casual beachside restaurant that is always packed on the weekends because of this tiny slide and swing combo that passes for high entertainment around here.(photo reference: TripAdvisor). We’ve been to both. Many many times.
If you are not yet convinced of the superiority of Ebbets Dakar to Ebbets Brooklyn, let me direct your attention to another attribute, the exterior wall. About a year after we moved the boring white exterior of Ebbets field was replaced with a resplendent mural depicting iconic American sports heroes. Here we see the former US ambassador to Senegal posing in front of… I am guessing… a Williams sister? Who needs a shave? (photo courtesy the US Embassy Flickr stream)
See Michael Phelps there? There is also Muhammad Ali, Tim Howard (who was super famous at the moment when it was painted) and Vince Lombardi (I think. Maybe. Some famous coach or other). It screams America, leaving some of us to wonder if it was such a great idea, from a purely security standpoint.
I have lots of good memories at Ebbets, but the best will always be my time as catcher/right fielder/occasional 2nd basewoman for the ISD Swingers. Last fall Rahul convinced me to join up, so I pulled out the mitt I got in about 5th grade from storage and joined the team. In 2016 we were undefeated in league play, a dominating force in the social softball world, I am sure largely because that one time I got an RBI. This year we had a much more mixed season, the nadir of which was when we lost by a least 7 runs to a team that had come dressed up in costume. Its tough to lose, but even tougher to lose to a woman in a snorkle mask and a man in an ewok costume. (he claims it was a dog. I’m skeptical).
But the league play is only half the story. The Dakar softball season culminates in February in the WAIST - West African Invitational Softball Tournament - which is comprised of several peace corps teams, a couple Embassy teams from around the region, and a dozen or so teams from Dakar, including teams from Senegal, Europe, Canada, South Korea and Japan. Watching Brakasse, a Senegalese team with little knowledge of the game, but who are all incredible athletes, play against Far East, a team of mostly Japanese and S. Koreans who play surgically smart ball and all bat like Ichiro, all while a cool atlantic breeze wafts over the field - there is literally nothing else like it. Its a blast, and this year the Swingers dominated at WAIST and won the whole thing.
Ryan came out to Dakar for a visit and to play in WAIST. He joined the Street Dogs, the aforementioned costume team that was comprised mostly of Europeans plus our friends Bill and Cairn. They were arguably one of the worst teams in the league, but hands down the most fun group of people to hang out with. And that is, of course, what really makes Ebbets fun, the people who come and gather and play and form a community. Every week most of my friends showed up there, we would come early to watch the ISD student team play, and stay late because Enzo’s best friends had come for their dad’s game. The kids run wild between the playground and the ball field, their safety guaranteed by the reinforced perimeter that the US embassy security protocol demands, and the community within where everyone knows everyone else. Ebbets is not my favorite place in Dakar, but it is one that reminds me of all the reasons that I have loved living here - the clash of cultures, the beautiful surroundings, and the warm embrace of a loving and tight-knit community.
After the Swingers won the championship game, and after we had all stayed to watch the ISD students win theirs, it was time to go. We finished off our beers, and rounded up the boys and found everyone’s shoes and said our goodbyes. Just before we stepped through the gates and out into the street I took one long glance behind, tried to burn the memory of this place in my mind, to tuck it away for future reference - my last visit to the worlds greatest Ebbets Field.
I am so excited. I can’t wait for her to come see the boys and our life and spend some time with just her. I would also love if my dad and my brothers could come too, don’t get me wrong, but its not possible. So I am grateful for Melanie’s willingness to come by herself and to the guys for sharing her with us for a whole week.
I created the following guide for her visit to Dakar - a primer of sorts on the ins and outs of the Dakar airport. I thought it might be a good thing to share here, just in case any of you want to schedule a last-minute trip.
How to navigate the Dakar airport:
When you first arrive your plane will park as far away from the terminal as possible. A metal staircase will be rolled up to the airplane doors, which, when opened, releases a surging crowd of passengers into the warm air. Your fellow travelers will have unlatched their seatbelts the very instant the aircraft’s wheels touched down, regardless of the status of the seatbelt light, so don’t try to be the first one off. Its impossible.
A quick heads up before you disembark. Go to the bathroom now. I know there must be a toilet somewhere in the arrivals hall of Dakar airport, but I have yet to find it.
When you reach the top of the stairs a warm breeze will tickle your face carrying with it an exotic scent. What is that robust and spicy aroma? Is it the faint scent of an ocean tide? The harmattan dust? Rotting garbage? Sweat? Yes. It is all of these. Get used to it.
At the base of the stairs a bus awaits you to drive you the terminal - that sloping building you see in the distance there. It will seem like you need to hurry because the bus is rapidly filling up. You are wrong. That bus is only half full.
As you clank down the staircase you will pause for a second and wonder “what about disabled passengers, how do they get out of the airplane.” It’s a good question, a fair question, and one I have not been able to satisfactorily answer. As you will soon see, disembarking the aircraft is only the first in a series of hurdles that a physically handicapped person will face upon arrival in Dakar.
The bus takes you a short distance across the tarmac, and then the doors open, and this is where the fun really starts. Everyone leaps off the bus and rushes, in a rather unseemly fashion, up the stairs and into the airport, eager to be the first in line at immigration. You will not be first in line, don’t bother trying. Just follow the crowd, it will lead you to the singular delight that is the Senegalese immigration authority.
(to be fair, this immigration process has improved dramatically in our time here, and its really not that bad. But still, to the uninitiated it can be a little confusing.)
During your brief immigration interview the following things will happen, in no particular order:
They will ask you where you are staying. They may say “restez vous ou?” or simply “address” but they will keep repeating until you say something. Just say “Almadies” (all-mah-dee).
You will be asked to look into the camera so they can take a pictures. Usually this is done by grunting and gesturing the vicinity of the camera
You will be asked to to place your index finger on the small grey pad in front of you, first left (a gauche) then right (a droite).
Finally you may be asked why you are visiting, but probably not.
They will stamp your passport and hand it to you, but don’t put it away. You will need it again in 12 seconds.
Exit the immigration area and head to the left. You will almost immediately encounter a man who will ask you for your passport. He is not joking. Yes, you just had it checked at immigration, but this last check is very important for border security. He will give your passport only the barest of glances, and hand it back and you are free to go. I don’t get it either.
Now you are in baggage claim. There are only two belts and, as far as I have been able to tell, no way of really knowing which one your stuff is on. Just follow the crowd. If there are crowds at both, well, good luck.
A this point a young man is certain to approach you and offer to help you with your baggage. If you have more than one bag I would encourage you to just say yes to the first guy who asks and then go along for the ride. He will grab a cart and jockey for position next to the belt. You point to the bags, he will pull them off, then escort you out. I will pay him on the other side, it will cost almost nothing. But if you arent comfortable with that feel free to just keep repeating “no Merci’ in a friendly and firm voice. It will feel a little aggressive and crazy, but these guys are always super helpful and aren’t shady or trying to steal your stuff. It just feels like it because they are all competing for your attention.
Once you have your bags you have only one more step: you have to have your bag x-rayed before you leave. See that massive line of people there (I use the word “line” very very loosely) - get in with them. If you have a porter on retainer at this point he will know what to do. Wait. Wait some more. People will come out of nowhere and appear in the line in front of you. You can try to fight it, or you can wait for one of the Belgian retirees to take up the cause for you. After the Senegalese authorities have made certain you aren’t carrying weapons (I have no idea what they are actually looking for) you can now leave the airport. You will go out the door into a kind of long tunnel. There are people lining the tunnel, some with signs indicating they are there to pick someone up, some are taxi drivers who will offer you a ride, still others are looking for spare change.. I will try to be along that tunnel. If not I will be at the very end waiting for you in the “parking lot.” It will be kind of loud and visually overwhelming, but don’t worry, I will see you.
The Spectacle du Noel at the boys’ school was predictably adorable and filled with what can only be described as traditional West African Christmas pageantry. The Tous Petite section sat on the stage and stared at the audience in rapt surprise while their teachers gamely tried to lead them in a song about a rabbit outside the window. It might have been a christmas rabbit, it was hard to tell. Not a single kid sang, though occasionally several of them would start doing hand motions, as if they woke from a collective trance at the same moment. It didn’t really matter, though, because they all wore reindeer antlers and their noses were painted red, which was adorable. 25 tiny, silent, and terrified Rudolphs - all of us parents were wild with the cuteness. Then the song was over and 75% of them burst into tears (Mateo was one of the stoic ones) and it took a full 10 minutes to regain some semblance of order.
The Petite section came out wearing fabric tied haphazardly around their waists and did a rather complicated guinean dance that involved a lot of scarf waving. Or it may have been a very simple dance, but when 30 or so 3 year olds are let loose on anything it becomes total chaos in a matter of minutes.
The Moyenne section was the highlight of the show, first with their song (Pere Noel knocks on the door, knock knock knock. I think they let him, but not before throwing in some mild insults about his nose being like jelly and his beard like ice) At least 80% of the class was both singing AND doing the hand motions, it was really quite impressive. It was clear the moyenne section had been practicing at home.
Enzo’s class was next, the Grande section, and they sang a song called “Jamaican Christmas” the gist of which was that you don’t need the trappings of Christmas to celebrate, you just need friends and reggae music. Apparently the song was hilarious, but the subtleties were lost on me.
Then the curtain closed (thanks to two dads who had been roped into being kid wranglers and curtain operators ) and when it opened the Moyenne section was back on stage, this time with various percussion instruments - the boys had djembes and the girls some kind of drum made from a massive gourd. And they brought down the house.
The parents were singing along, people got up and started waving their arms and swaying to the music, it was a near riot. At one point two of the teacher’s aides got into a bit of a dance off- this last part I didn’t on film because I was too busy being amazing and comparing the scene before me to the rather staid christmas concerts of my childhood.
Grande section came back to do a dance, that I assume was supposed to be a the big finale, but after the rhythmic stylings of the Moyenne section, it was a bit underwhelming. I loved it, because Enzo was on stage and this time appeared to have at least a passing awareness of what he was supposed to do. (I posted the full video at the end of the blog for the grandparents’ enjoyment).
Then we had the traditional christmas magic show, where a man came onstage and terrified all his volunteer helpers by randomly pulling birds or rabbits out of his vest or a cardboard box. Then, finally, it was the crown jewel of the event, Pere Noel himself! Or, rather, a skinny white guy in a felt beard, who gave every kid a wrapped book and a bag of candy. Kids mobbed the stage, the teachers tried to sort it out, there was lots of pushing and lifting, and the grande section was enlisted to help maintain order. Mateo was the very first kid to get his gift, and for a full five minutes he stood at the edge of the stage staring, bewildered, at the plastic bag in his hands, clearly trying to figure out if he could eat it.
After the gifts were distributed the kids sat down to a magnificent feast of cookies, cake, crepes, muffins, and tangerines. This was where Mateo really found his stride. When he saw the table laden with goodies he literally gasped, and ran to a chair. While Enzo flitted around playing and chatting with his friends, Mateo got to business. He piled his tiny paper plate high with baked goods and plowed in, stopping only to shake his head when offered some juice and to demand “wawa” instead. I made a halfhearted attempt to intervene, but Adji was already handing him another beignet, and after all, what’s the point in having a school Christmas pageant if you can’t stuff yourself with sugar cookies afterwards?
I almost skipped the spectacle this year. I had to take a half day of personal leave to make it to the whole thing, and I was wavering about whether or not it was worth it - personal days are precious and with Rahul absent I never know when an emergency is going to come up. But when I started to explain this to Enzo I realized what an idiot I was being: This was Enzo’s last year at this sweet little school down the street, it was his last Spectacle du Noel. And it was Mateo’s first spectacle ever, the first time he would appear on stage with his friends and perform something just so I could coo over it. Both a first and a last and I couldn’t miss it. And silly and strange as it was I am so glad I went, because no matter how many christmas concerts I attend in the future, I will never have this particular experience again: the makeshift stage with the battered red curtain, the guinean scarf dance and West African drum ensemble, and the sweaty magician who would most certainly raise the ire of an animal rights group with his questionable use of squashed doves.
We are on the downward swing here. Next week marks the end of first semester, and then it is just a series of lasts: last softball tournament, last spring break, last show, last IB showcase, last marking period, last day. Yesterday we took the ornaments off our little potted Christmas tree for the last time. A friend of mine suggested that I should write a blog post every month marking all the things I was doing for the last time. Which sounds impossible and sad to me. Impossibly sad. Its not the benchmarks that I dread, its the lasts that I don’t realize are last. For Rahul’s birthday I arranged a surprise dinner party at one of our favorite restaurants - it may be the last time we eat there, may be the last time we hang out with some of the people that were there that night. But we won’t know until it has already passed. When will be the last time I spontaneously take the kids to the beach, or we play soccer in the dusty streets? I am very excited about this year’s musical, and I know it will be my last show at ISD. But when will be the last time a student pops into my room to each lunch with me, on the pretext that she has a question, but really just because she needs an advocate, someone to be on her team and tell her how great she is. Maybe that has already happened for the last time. That is what I find unbearable.
This week we had to tell Adji that we were leaving. I sincerely hope that is the first and last time I ever have to have that conversation. She took the news relatively well, we asked her about finding her a new family to work with and we explained our timeline. But then she counted the months on her hands, and said “it is very soon, they boys will be leaving very soon.” “Mateo,” she said “he is like my son.” And then she wept.
We love so much about our life here. We love our friends and colleagues. I love my students, and saying goodbye to each of them will be like a tiny dagger of grief. But none of our goodbyes will be as hard as leaving Adji - she is a second mother to my children, and though I think she spoils Mateo terribly, she also loves him fiercely, which makes me fiercely grateful. (She loves Enzo too, but they have had a rockier relationship and have a much more typical nanny/child bond).
I am worried that I will spend the last full week of our time here in a fog of tears. Maybe my friend is right, maybe if I experience each last seperately I can process them all better. So I will try to document the denouement, to catalogue the lasts, but I will also relish the firsts, the new experiences that I am certain are still ahead of us.
I don’t post a lot of political stuff on Facebook because it is counterproductive and because most issues are nuanced and the internet is terrible at nuance. I try not to respond to people who post things that leave me angry or upset or confused because I love them and I don’t want to say something in a way that makes them think I don’t love them anymore.
On the other hand I, like many people I know, am spending a lot of time thinking about this election, stewing and analyzing and hashing and rehashing. Not that I am undecided, I am firmly in Camp Clinton, but because I am dismayed at how distant I feel from so many people who share my home. The internet is a great tool for communication across vast distances, but it also presses us uncomfortably close to people whose ideologies we may find dismaying. And I am deeply dismayed by the ideology of people in the far right, of people who think guns are the answer to everything - including gun violence - of people who think “immigrant” and “feminist” are bad words, who are so afraid of the “other” that they have taught themselves to hate to avoid trying to understand. But I am also frustrated by the people on the far left who accuse everyone who disagrees with them of being racist and stupid. It leaves me feeling sick and gasping.
As I relentlessly perused facebook and watched the news and sighed over the headlines this week, my mom said “don’t worry, he’s not going to win, stop stressing about it.” And she is probably right. But it made me realize that what I am most worried about is not that DT will win, but that no matter what he does or who he devalues or what laws he breaks, 40% of the population still want him to win because he is their guy. And those 40% can not wrap their brains around why I want Clinton to win, they are equally dismayed and baffled and angered by me. And everyone is accusing everyone of being cattle, of following blindly, of being fooled by the media and putting the nation at risk. We are not drawing lines in the sand, we are digging trenches.
We lob hateful memes at each other like internet IED’s - loaded up with incendiary images and unsupported arguments and left to explode in someone’s facebook post to do as much damage as possible. We arm ourselves with dubious statistics pulled from our favorite publication, or the mouths of a pundit, or from our own intuition. We are hunkered down in the trenches we dug for ourselves waging a war of words without ever really talking about anything.
Its exhausting. And ultimately, I think it has gotten us nowhere.
I know the internet doesn’t need another think piece on this election, and I am hardly qualified to share my opinion, but I have to get this off my chest. I want so badly to explain why I am not just voting for Hillary Clinton because I don’t like the other guy, but because I think she’ll do a good job as president. I want to say something people will listen to, and say “hmm, she makes a good point.” But I feel like that is impossible, because Trump supporters will have stopped reading two paragraphs ago and decided I was a libtard who loves “Killary”, a woman who is both ill and on her death bed and also, paradoxically, an evil force bent on taking over the world.
There is so much misinformation swirling around, much of it deliberate misleading by groups at the fringe who will do anything to make sure their candidate wins. But somehow we have gotten to a place where facts and evidence don’t matter, where conspiracy rules the day, and in that environment I feel helpless. (This American Life takes a really interesting look at this in their recent epidsode: Seriously. I think there recent series on This American Election has been really interesting and fair minded) Lets take that “Killary” thing. This stems from the Benghazi episode, and is helped along by a steaming heap of lies and distortions. So lets talk about Benghazi….does it need to be mentioned again that a months-long investigation by a republican congress found nothing to charge her with? That the deaths of those four men, though tragic, was not a result of wrong doing on Secretary Clinton’s part, it was at worst a tactical error.
“But those men cried out for help and she denied it.” They say. As if Hillary was there, checking her obsolete blackberry, and ordered the hit herself. Another possibility, that is less evil and thus less dramatic, is that this was strategic military decision made by the DOD to keep our soldiers off the ground. You may disagree with that decision, and we can talk about that. Maybe we should have gone in, perhaps in the long run that would have saved more lives. Maybe going in with “boots” would have ultimately resulted in more American deaths as we embroiled ourselves in yet another conflict. I don’t know, neither do you, but at least that is something we can discuss calmly. Starting with “Killary” gets us nowhere.
I also hate this meme going around liberal sites that shows a happy Obama family and talks about how healthy and scandal-free they have been and then also implies they are hated by all white christians just for being black. That is of course totally untrue, yes there are some people who hate them for being black, but there are lots of white christians who love the Obamas. And there are also a lot of white christians who are not Obama fans for reasons completely apart from their race - by calling all Obama detractors racists you shut down the opportunity to discuss actual policy issues that may underlie the reasons people are not happy with President Obama. And I am a giant Obama fan, but I still have quite a few issues with his presidency, because he is human and the world is complicated and I will never be 100% happy with any president, ever.
Recently I read these twoarticles, back to back, and the contrast was stunning. One article is about the group of men in Kansas plotting to blow up a Somali housing center and mosque in order to “wake people up” and ignite a religious war.
In the other, a group of college students discovers that their new friend is secretly a leading white supremacist, and instead of ostracising him, they invite him to Shabbat dinner. He accepts and slowly begins to see how wrong and dangerous the white nationalist movement is, and walks away from the ideology he was raised in.
Two different approaches to bringing people over to your way of thinking, and I think we can all agree that one is better than the other. But learning to love your enemy is hard and slow and not nearly as gratifying in the short term as just blowing things up. It feels like in some ways many of us, myself included, are those men in Kansas - blowing up others to make us feel less impotent. Leaving little word bombs in order to “wake people up”. But of course that never ever ever works. I am fairly certain that Trump supporters who are told they are “racists assholes” don’t come to a moment of self realization and then sign themselves up for diversity training. Because they aren’t all racist assholes, they are people who have developed unhealthy biases about groups of people that they don’t understand and are following the example of a lonely and broken man who will do whatever it takes to get people to chant his name.
And liberals aren’t veteran hating unpatriotic jerks. They are generally people whose jobs and futures weren’t stolen away by globalization and thus can’t understand the desperation of seeing your way of life disappear. They are people who have developed unhealthy biases about groups of people that they don’t understand and are following the lead of snarky pundits who insinuate that anyone who isn’t as well traveled and educated as them are inherently stupid and their opinions don’t count.
So, we have misinformation and we have outright lies and we have conspiracy and we have whole swaths of people on both sides who have hunkered down into their trenches with earplugs on and refuse to listen or hear or try to understand.
I am a passionate moderate who is dismayed by the slow dissolution of the republican party, not because I am a republican, but because I think it is imperative that we have two strong political parties in this country to maintain balance. We need the hippy dippy liberals who want house all the homeless and make college free and throw open the doors to all refugees, and we need the responsible republicans who say “sure, but we’re gonna have to raise taxes and stop paving the roads and the retirement age is going to be 106, are you okay with that?” We need the yin AND the yang, we all know this. In a family we need one parent who makes sure everyone eats their vegetables and one who thinks cookies are part of a balanced breakfast (I’ll leave you to guess who is who in our family.) But this new republican party doesn’t look like the one my dad describes when he talks about the party he came of age in. The new GOP is the political equivalent of a dad who beats his son and calls him a pussy for crying in a soccer game. Who disowns his daughter when she goes to prom with a black kid. The kind of dad who rules his family by scaring the shit out of them.
(Some would argue that the democrats have strolled way down the path of the permissive parent too: the kind of mom who buys their kids pot and condoms, who enrolls them in djembe and bunraku classes and is insufferable at parties because she goes on and on about veganism and meditation. Neither are particularly good parents, but I’d still take this lady over the asshat above. )
I have lots of reasons to vote for Hillary Clinton: She has a lot of relevant experience, has a proven track record of looking out for marginalized populations, and because I think having a woman as president has the potential to be a positive game changer for this country. She has a brilliant mind for policy and politics that she has used to both good and bad ends. She is at turns ferocious, compassionate, vindictive, thoughtful, machiavellian, kind, determined, careless, secretive, unflagging, loyal, untrustworthy and pedantic. She is, in a word, human. Clinton is highly qualified and will seek to change the system from within by making tweaks and nudges to the ideas that are already there. She is ultimately competent and pragmatic, if also boring and a bit shady. And more than anything, she embraces the diverse group of people that I know and love. Under a Clinton administration I don’t have to worry if my husband can get a visa to live in the United States, or if my students- who are primarily muslim - can attend the colleges they dream of attending.
Donald Trump has no relevant experience (that’s my opinion. I don’t think real estate development, reality television, and personal brand management count as relevant experience). He has a proven track record of devaluing marginalized populations, and especially for treating women like they are objects to be earned or taken. I don’t think having a wealthy, white man who has incited the passions of self-avowed white supremacists has the potential to be a positive game changer for this country. He is at turns incoherent, proud, angry, boastful, frank, mocking, disingenuous, humorless, impassioned, disloyal, inarticulate, pathetic and bewildering. In a word, he is human. Trump is a megalomaniac whose entire existence up to this point has been about his own success and survival, even his charitable giving has been entirely as a vehicle to make himself look good. (As David Farenthold put it; Trump wants to appear philanthropic, but he doesn’t want to actually be philanthropic). I think if he were to indulge in a rare moment of introspection he would discover that this campaign has been life changing for him because he actually had to see what life is like in rural, downtrodden parts of this country. I worry that Trump’s uneven temperament and self absorption would make him a disastrous leader, but if I were a betting woman I would say Trump would get tired of being president within the first 100 days and just give up and go back to putting his name on golf courses.
I am a fence sitter. A moderate. Someone who is unwilling to jump into a single camp. Some people probably think I am weak and cowardly. I like to think I am fair minded and open to discussion. Maybe I am both. I tend to lean left (I can’t believe we are still having conversations about gay marriage and contraception, and I am 89% anti gun, but see, even there I have 11% of wiggle room for people who want to hunt pheasant or re-inact civil war battles.) I have opinions about abortion and legalizing pot and prison reform and sex education and they are all leftish with information from the right. I would make a terrible president, but a great person to hire for your bipartisan PTO committee. But this time around, I have fallen off the fence. I have been trying, even recently, to see both sides, to find a way to humanize and defend Trump supporters, until Rahul looked up at me and said ‘but Melissa, so many of them hate brown people.” And I had to say “you’re right babe, and that is incomprehensible and indefensible.”
A few months ago I heard Trump give an angry and fearful speech about the “flood of immigrants” and how dangerous they were, and I wrote this
“Today I listened to parts of Trumps speech in which he suggested that all immigrants to America, legal or illegal, are not to be trusted and as evidence pointed to a number of legal immigrants who had committed terrible crimes. (FWIW: for every Dzhokhar Tsarnaev I give you 50 Dylan Roofs, we don’t import hatred, it is born and bred here every day) In his speech Trump seemed to suggest that, after we have deported every muslim living within our borders, regardless of whether or not they are a citizen, America should seal off from the world and not let anyone else come in because God knows what they would bring with them. It hit me like a punch in the stomach. I am not just repeating some cliche when I say “some of my best friends are immigrants” - my best friend for the past 15 years, my husband, the father of my children, was here on a student visa when I met him. Immigration hasn’t brought fear and danger into my life, it has brought me this:
A recent episode of This American LIfe (I swear I am not being paid by them. I find Ira Glass calming) offered me a peek into another narrative about immigrants. If you live in rural relatively homogenous community and a large and bewildering population of refugee immigrants seems to move in overnight, I can see how that would be disconcerting. And it is valid to say “I feel like my home is changing and I am not certain I like change” and it is valid to ask questions about how this population might be affecting the local economy. But to hurl hate and epitaphs at a stranger for speaking their native language, for ostracizing a whole people and telling them to go home just because they aren’t assimilating fast enough for you, that is abhorrent, or as one nasty lady put it, deplorable. And any man or woman who is running for office who encourages that notion, who foments fear for the “other” does not deserve your vote.
So here is my plea. I want back on the fence. i want a world where I can see two sides to an issue. I want people to challenge me with relevant information that exposes my biases to me. I want a debate. I want vegetables and oreos.
I’ll hold my breath for the next time around. But this time around - I’m with her.
I’ve been working on a post for a while. Its a real doozy. I have to keep rewriting it because the world is moving faster than I can keep up with and the things I am aghast about one week are quickly replaced by newer more ghastly things. So, I am setting that one aside for a quick second to bring you these micromoments from my life.
- On Friday afternoon I went into the finance office to pick up my “mid-month cash”. We can get a portion of our paycheck in the middle of the month in cash if we want because, as we have discussed in the past, Senegal has a cash based economy and it can be a giant pain in the tooktooks to get all the cash you need for the end of the month. So, I ask the cashier if I can pick up my money and he says sure, then turns to what appears to be a mini-fridge behind his desk, but I assume is a safe (or perhaps one of those new-fangled safe/mini-fridge combos) and extracts a plastic grocery bag that is knotted shut He carefully picks the knot open, revealing a heap of envelopes filled with money, rifles through them, and hands me mine. Then he knots the bag again and returns it to the mini-fridge. I count my money, sign the receipt and go, but as I am leaving the office it occurs to me - it is weird to keep that much money tied up in a plastic grocery bag.
- Later that afternoon I went to the American Food Store in search of ingredients for the dish I was preparing for our Redneck BBQ themed dinner party on Saturday. They were low on tortilla chips, so I grabbed a bag in case they ran out. I noticed they were “sesame flavored” tortilla chips, but I bought them anyway. Imagine living in a world where the only bag of tortilla chips within driving distance from your house is sesame flavored, and you snap them up because next week there probably won’t be any chips at all. Next time you buy a bag of Tostidos please pause and have a moment of silence for all your American compatriots around the world who life a sad, tortilla chip-less existence.
- We are having a water problem in Dakar. Or more accurately, a water pressure problem. We might have a decent flow in the morning, but by 9am all the pipes are down to a trickle. So we plug our sinks and put buckets in all the showers and leave the taps on all over the house to collect as much as we can so we can wash dishes and bodies and cook noodles later in the day. Sometimes the taps don’t run at all, but often they all dribble along for hours. Its like living inside a toilet tank.
- I had to buy drinking water again. Water is heavy. I can barely lug the jug from the car into the apartment building. Think about that when you hear about people who have to walk miles to a watering hole every day - its not the miles but the burden that is unbearable
- I had hang and focus last night. That is when you hang up the lights for a show and point them in the right places and program the light board for the different looks you need. We have to do it at night because our theater is outside. At night, at this time of the year, lights draw a lot of attention from insects. I discovered several new species of horrifying beetles last night. (I also had a terrifying run-in with a cat that turned out to be a rat. I am still trying to recouperate)
- Speaking of horrifying insects - cockroaches are a disgusting reality of life in Dakar. But I rarely see one at school, occasionally one scuttles out from under a box in a storage closet, but it’s a rare occurrence. Until recently. Twice this week I had to stop in the middle of my biology class, squeal like an infant and throw my shoe recklessly and without much aim at a giant cockroach scurrying across my classroom floor. Why the sudden change? Because my colleague whose room I share has decided to keep two cockroaches as pets. He thinks their egg cases are cool. I think he’s a wackjob who has to be stopped. The kids are with me.
- We have a pool at our apartment. I love it. My kids love it. Enzo is learning how to play water polo. Occasionally we find a frog in our pool, swimming around like he owns the place. We fish him out with the net and move on, its like swimming in a pond, but without all the icky gunk at the bottom. But I am now relatively certain that whatever it is the pool guy is putting in the water is not chlorine.
It is late now, and I am exhausted after a very long couple of days. The AC unit in my room is on the fritz, so I have to sleep with the window open and the fan on, and the soft chirping of crickets and the low murmurs of the guards will lull me to sleep.
