as i sit here at the CBW internet cafe on camp, i've come to realize that i genuinely smell today. its mildly embarassing. less so because it prooves that ive had a big couple of days. i'll try and describe the smell right now... then i'll explain why. id have to say its a combo of baby pee, garbage, sewage, sweat, chalk and general camp dirt. its probably lucky that i have no computers on either side of me, people might not appriciate me much right now. i'm going to go home andtake the bucket shower right after i finish this, i promise.
i'd have to say the stench started early saturday morning (6am!!) on the CBW bike trip (yes, i biked) out behind camp through hilly farm lands on bikes with no breaks and a seat that didnt stay on. this trip started with a two hour leg out to this little village where we got palm wine. its wine that is tapped like maple syrup from a palm tree and is distilled until its got all boozey and stuff. the CBW staff loaded us up with that at about 1030 am and then sent us on our way home. i kept having visions of a repeat of last summer where i went home with a third degree burn on my foot, buti think i handled the path quite beautifully and came home all in one piece.
on monday, after a jam-packed weekend in cape coast again, four of us came down with different renditions of food poisoning. it was glorious. i think i was lucky in what i caught, because i just slept all day and dealt with a stellar fever and an achy body. i was convinced most of the day i had malaria, but managed to recover by tuesday thankfully. the others had variations of 'the scurge' (explosions on both ends... sorry thats so graphic) and my fever which really sucks when you're working with a shared bucket toilet. we're surviving though, and should probably live to see another day. i have never appriciated tylenol and pepto bismol more though. i have also never hated the barack obama song more (its a song made by somebody in west africa and plays on repeat here).
i'm going to skip over tuesday so that i dont start rambling too long. it poured rain yesterday morning which is the universal sign not to work (unless youre a teacher because then you still have to at least show up, even if you only have 3 students). because i had no kids, we pretty much just let them read while bobby and i talked about a bunch of different things that are probably more interesting to me than you guys.
today is the day that really explains my stench... this morningwe got up at 6 (well, it was supposed to be 6 but we were clearly running on african time this morning) to shovel shit. the path out to the CBW football field is essentially over a garbage dump so this morning we made a new one through bush that was taller than me. the first wave of people went through with machetes and chopped downthe big stuff. the next group, which i was apart of, was the raking group and went through pulling away the fallen weeds and then attacking the mountains of garbage underneath. among the treasures i found out there were a purse, an old syringe, a few things that were once t-shirts, and a million poo bags. there is this awful habit of putting poo in black pastic bags that do not decompose ever. they just make mountains. its so frustrating because there could be such an easy solution to this problem. just use newspaper, brown bag or ANYTHING that breaks down. the third group went through after us with shovels pulling out the roots of plants nd what not, and shovelling away the most stubborn garbage. after about an hour of this, the teachers left to go to school, smelling like garbage and totally exhausted. bocolo (the head of recreation at CBW) brought donughts for us halfway through the day which made it all the more worthwhile.
teaching itself has been pretty uneventful this week. monday i obviously didn't go and tuesday we didn't teach. today i spent math class teaching kids how to tell time on a clock. it was apparently the most boring lesson ever, so we ended up just making a human clock which worked suprisingly well. it was hilarious too.
after school i got home and had one of my most intense afternoons yet. i met this guy on camp through a friend who is my age and who a friend of mine was sponsoring through computer school. he's always been really friendly with the volunteers and had been after me to go on a walk around camp with him for awhile now... i was just always busy with other things and never got around to it. today, i found myself iwht a spare hour and finally took him up on it. i find that i have a hard time reading people here, and figuring out who is genuinely wanting to be your friend and who just wants money. i try to give everybody a fair chance, but more often than not things don't pan out. this guy generally talks our ears off about his plans for moving back to liberia and his dreams of starting some kind of agricultural business or gold mine. he's got a really good head on his shoulders and really understands what is gonig on in liberia, but we've all been hesitant to give him money because we know he's already being generously sponsored.
anyway, our talk today started out with him telling me more about his dreams for liberia. his ideas of creating a society that is peaceful, autonomous and self-sustaining are really intresting, especially beacuse he was one of the few people that made me feel like what i was studying in school was moderately relevant to the real world. normally, i feel like i'm wasting a good chunk of my time in those desks. the talk got more mind blowing though when he started talking about his experience in liberia. i don't want to go to far into the details because it is his very personal story that is kept relatively secret on camp. boiled down though, he basically told me about his experiences as a child soldier under Taylor. his story, compared to others i've heard through people, was relatively lucky. him and his brother (15 and 17 at the time) managed to escape onto a boat travelling to takoradi, ghana months after being captured. what shook me was that he was born 2 months after me. while i was probably inside in january, 2003 complaining about not wanting to go skiing, he was watching his parents be chopped apart in frontof him because they didnt have enough minerals to pay off the rebels (mineral accumulation was a huge component to the taylor regime). while i was at school complaining mme. sandor's lessons on civics and careers, he was running for his life while his friends dropped dead on either side. hows that for a lesson in perspective? minutes after this talk, we entered the director of his school's house and sat down to watch a really weird indian movie on the guys DSTV while eating cookies and drinking pop. my friend hardly seemed phased by it all, while i sat there slightly bewildered.
i got further put in my place on a trip with a sierra leonean refuge out to his sister's orphanage. his sister lives in a small home, no bigger than my dining room andkitchen combined, with about 30 kids of all ages. she lives there full time, and works with the help of an 8-month pregnant woman, the guy fro sierra leone (who i constantly see wandering camp so i dont think he's here that much), one other guy, and sporadic volunteers. she said at one point this afternoon that "you probably wouldn't believe me if i told you i only ever sleep two hours a night". she was right. i didn't. somehow, she was still not only functioning but smiling at the kids. i couldn't help but think of my reaction to somebody asking me to do something remotely strenuous after only having had 2 hours of sleep. i'm going to try and spend free time out there.. its a 24 hour job for her and she said that any free time we had she'd totally appriciate. despite the pee and poo, they're really cute. one 3 year old boy named lucky boy (the second kid named lucky boy that i've met here) spent a third of his time beating the crap out of me, another third wailing with his head tipped way back (then opening his eyes to make sure we were still looking) and the final third, doing this hilarious but dance where he looked like he was an 80 year old man in a walker dancing to nigerian hip hop. he was priceless.
anyway. that brings me to now, and my current smell. its been a pretty incredible day (topped off with speedy internet) and i am now in desperate need of a shower.
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