Africa

This isn't Africa-- Africa is where the wild things are. Africa is full of jungles, thatch-roofed huts, stretched-out earlobes and prides of lions basking in savanna grasses.

Surely Africa isn't home to half-modern towns where internet cafes hide behind the walls of dingy street side buildings, where the woman in the teleboutique covered from head to toe in old bedsheets can disassemble and repair your cellphone, where teenagers prowl in leather jackets and denim like 50's style greasers while old men sit curbside smirking between sips from shot glass sized teacups.

A two foot tall hookah rests next to the TV (blaring dubbed Bollywood movies), on top of which sits a vase of fabric flowers and a pair of ceramic dolphins. Lightbulbs hang from single strands of wire in each room and the kids look through piles of scratched DVDs as my host mother cooks dinner for ten on a small wood stove on the floor in the corner of the room. Donkeys and mules clomp down worn trails from the mountains carrying loads of cedar logs; the carpenter up the road generously fashions me a pair of ping pong paddles with his sabre saw and belt sander. Families inside mud huts flick on light switches. Prayer calls crackle from loudspeakers atop the mosque.

I translate summaries of The Old Man and the Sea, the sections I've read the night before in the minutes before sleep, in the evenings for my host sister. I've told her I will mail her a copy of the book as soon as I can find one for her. She says she wants to be a pilot; I think that's probably what she'll do.

The power is out on a rainy evening; I walk home through what resembles a war-torn city-- cracked buildings, muddy streets, a lack of warmth in the color of everything. Rain drips in through the ceiling in my room, down the electric wire and off the darkened bulb. I listen to Wilco on my iPod, lying under the blankets in bed wearing layers of clothes and long johns while the candle on my nightstand made from scraps of wax burns its last. Such a strange mix of ancient and modern, of romanticized vs reality...