Submissions

Here's to the women with babies slung on their backs, pounding shells off of rice for hours at a time, everyday since they could hold a stick.  Here's to hitching a ride in the backseat of a wrecker truck for (what was supposed to e 2 hrs) FIVE hours to see the diamond mines of Kono that financed the rebel's side of the civil war.  FIVE hours that was the bumpiest, dirt, puddle-filled, fractured road I've ever been on that had my butt hating me for days.  Here's to the wrecker truck breaking down, the driver fixing it, & us stopping to give tools to a different truck that was broken down.  Here's to waiting an hour for a poda poda to fill up with travelers to go back to Makeni, it breaking down from too many bumpes & swerves & fractures.  Here's to sitting on the side of the road waiting, hopelessly, with poor old women who looked like African queens, a random stranger offering to take 4 passengers in his car for free as he drove like a bat out of ****!  Here's to seeing young mothers with babies slung on their backs & them carrying huge buckets on their heads.  Here's to seeing a boy's dead body on the road, contorted from being hit by a car, lifeless, with "flares" surrounding him made of chunks of grass.  Here's to the men, women, & children we passed that had to walk miles to get fresh water from a stream.  Here's to the taxi driver we had getting arrested & me praying to be able to get where we needed to go.  Here's to the little organisms in the ocean that light up like sparks of lightning bugs on a moonless sky.  Here's to local villagers beating their African drums to old African beats around a fire on a beach with the rising ocean waves as their back-ground chorus.  Here's to seeing a HUGE snake in the jungle & my guide kind of nonchalantly saying, "We call dis...cobra."  Here's to walking on an old Portuguese slave trading path with a guide who had dreds, bloodshot eyes, and inverted kneeds.  Here's to the sound of boulders falling from the sky on the metal roof--morning, day, and night.  Here's to the rain washing away gutters full of trash.  To children yelling, "Awpawtoe!" (white person) and refusing to stop until we smiled and waved.  Here's to 2 chickens riding in the backseat on the way to a monkey-filled Tiwai Island.  Here's to me eating those chickens the next 6 days.  Here's a goat riding back to Freetown with me to be a sacrifice in the next month.  Here's to a seemingly meaningless sound of tree tops rustling in the breeze & it turning out to be monkeys (b/w collubus, red collubus, & Diane) hopping to their next breakfast site.  Here's to monkeys eating behind my tent, my guide catching a bat for me (following by a proposal the next day--an unsuccessful proposal I might add), my first snorkeling experience where I saw b/w fish, sting rays, blue & orange fish, where I thought I was going to bust my head open on a rock & where I got to see a secret underwater world of the push &pull of the ocean tide, of ripples made in the sand & then smoothed out the very next second, leaving me wondering what the push & pull, the ripples & the smoothing of of the ripples is in the surface world that I live inside of.  Here's to not showering for days at a time & it not mattering.  Here's to dirty feet & oily hair & malaria medicine that made my skin sensitive to the already brutal West African sun.  Here's to the eco-village bungalows I stayed in, the managers making food for 150+ foreigners who just ran in a marathon fundraiser for the street children.  Here's to these foreigners eating 1/2 of the food on their plates, throwing the rest away, the local villagers digging them out of the trash & taking them to their families in the corner of the community center that housed everyone (w/ a huge hold in the roof & puddles of water everywhere in the one-room cement building) & them eating everything on the foreigners 1/2 eating plates because foreigners are vaccinated & we don't carry diseases like them.  Here's to being stuck on a street corner & not seeing an opening to cross in the capital city until a local Salone woman grabs my arm & says, "Come on!" Here's to the people in wooden wheelchairs, polio-ridden, amputees.  Here's to watching amputees for hours on a trash-filled (complete w/ syringes & shoes & plastic & beer bottles) beach in the capital city as they practiced soccer for hours like they weren't missing a foot, a leg, a hand, an arm.  Here's to story after story of women being raped, children murdered, villages plundered, bodies hung & splattered all over the place.  Here's to children playing w/ old bicycle tubes & laughing like there wasn't a care in the world.  Here's to all of this & an infinite amount more, on my 2013 summer African Adventure.