The other day, Roger and I went to the corner store just down from our hotel. We needed some water for the week and were checking this place out – the GlassCenter. We live in a section of the city called Glass – hence the name of the store. As we entered, we noticed a bit of commotion down one of the few aisles. Being the nosy one, I went down one aisle to come back up the next where I saw the security guard (who was maybe 6’-5”, 230 lbs) lifting this guy off the ground who was maybe half his size. A couple of other guys were around him and they were all yelling at the guy whose toes were barely touching the ground.
The security guard was holding the guy by his shirt collar twisted a couple of turns in his fist. They were all asking the guys questions and getting madder as he could answer. The guy could hardly breathe and started making a husking sound as a dog does when it’s pulling too hard against its leash. It got to a point where the guy couldn't breathe, his eyes were popping out and the others were getting louder with their yelling. It was not a comfortable situation (and talk about letting culture do its thing versus knowing when to step in). Just as things were getting worse for this guy, the owner, a small Chinese man, came over, said something to the big security guard who then carried and pushed the guy through a door and into a back room. It didn’t take much French to know the guy was about to receive the beating of his life, and all for an apple.
It must be tough being poor and hungry in a place like Libreville where even the judicial system doesn’t see you or hear you crying.
Yesterday, Pierre, Mohammad and I wanted to go up the coast – where we heard good beaches were – to Cap Santa Clara and Cap Esterias. (Pierre, from France, and Moe, from Lebanon, are recent additions to the table). We asked the receptionist about getting a taxi – Pierre has a great guide book on Gabon that says we should have been able to get there and back for about 4,000 CFA each (about $8). The taxi’s here are great for getting around the city, but many of them are little more than metal cages on wheels that would have a tough time on the bumpy dirt roads to the Cap, that is, if we could convince someone to take us, let alone find someone to get us back. Hilda, the receptionist, told us about cars and drivers the hotel rents for about 5,000 CFA an hour.
We went out front, talked to a greeter and in a couple of minutes this black Toyota Camry pulls up. We go to the driver and start talking about our options – he said Cap Santa Clara was maybe an hour away and Cap Esterias was about 2 hours away. He said his car couldn’t go on the road to Santa Clara and that the round trip to Cap Esterias would cost us 40,000 CFA. It was already noon and the time and money was much more than we had planned on. Then came the first piece of wisdom from the driver when he said, “Guys, this is Gabon. There is no time here. We can go, you can be there, and then we can come back.” As for the money, he was firm and looking back there’s no way a cab would have gotten us there and back for 12,000 CFA. We almost backed out, but decided what the hell. It was that or sit around the hotel and we do that enough. Plus, we each agreed that we have one life to live so we decided to live it yesterday.
Papa Sam told us about how he had worked as a driver and translator for Survivor Gabon for three months a few years ago when they filmed here. He made enough money to buy his Camry which has been his livelihood since. Like many drivers here, he’s not a native Gabonese. Papa Sam is an Igbo, originally born in the Biafra region of Nigeria. He came here for work and without knowing how to speak French. He said he learned to speak on the streets, out of survival. He said language is the first key to getting through life – if you can communicate, you can make friends and make money. He said, “If I’m in school, I’m too scared to make a mistake. But on the job I have to push and fight to speak. My job is my exam and it gives me reason to work hard at communicating. Because I speak English and French I am able to buy this car, not because I went to university and have some piece of paper.”
The drive ended up taking us about an hour and half and while it was another slow, bumpy ride, it was great to get out of the city again, into the trees and the fresh air. The beach was great and the trip was well worth the money. As we were getting back into the car to head home, Papa Sam asked we enjoyed ourselves and joked that we almost got in the way of ourselves and didn’t go. He’s right, so often, we keep ourselves from trying new things, but once we do, we can’t imagine a life not having that experience be a part of our story. Pierre then asked if he could throw his bag into the trunk, to which Papa Sam replied his thick Nigerian accent, “Sure, man, you’re as free as air.”
Thanks to you Papa Sam, I am a little bit more free.
Once again, I found myself way behind on posts – I actually have several in the queue, its just a matter of making the time to write, find pictures, and post them. So, accept my apologies as I’m sure you’ve been waiting on the edge of your seat to find out what happened on our safari…
After a beautiful, but bone jarring eight hour journey, we finally arrived in Lopé and to a lodge where we would spend the night. We had pre-arranged a package deal that included our rooms and one excursion (a walk the next morning through a forest deep inside the park). We wanted to take a boat ride along the OgoouéRiver, but the “captain” was sick. Too bad for that guy, and to be selfish, too bad for us because the river there is almost majestic, no, it is majestic. It runs a very eratic path through the valley of high, treeless hills - very fast, dark water churning past, and through, and over black outcroppings of rock resembling old lava flow, but some kind of geologic formation I’d never seen before. And, so we decided to jump on a driving safari tour. It was almost cheesy how cliché it was – the lodge had fitted out an old Toyota pick-up truck with several rows of bench seats and a canvas cover with rolled-up side flaps. Its was actually pretty cool as we journeyed to the park. If this blog is called The Table in part because that’s where my life is being played out right now, then this weekend I could have changed the title to The SUV because in the end we spent about 20 hours total bouncing in one 4x4 or another.
Mozza livin' the dream!
We passed through the small village of Lopé and into the park. Besides us, our 4x4, and the road upon which we drove, there was no sign of human existence for as far as we could see – no cell towers, no houses, no farms or fields or orchards, or airplanes, or trains, no sounds of humans. We were out in the middle of somewhere grand. We saw elephants, buffalos, monkeys, listened to the forest come to life as the sun set – frogs and birds and chimps. It was actually more driving around to find animals than actually seeing them. But my favorite part of the evening was standing a bald hill overlooking a stream meandering through as narrow valley along which a family of elephants were walking, drinking, eating. There was such a peace, a simplicity, as the cool air came in through the valley, as the sunset painted the huge sky in hues of oranges and pinks and then purples, and all along we watched the family end its day. Parks sometimes have a plastic, false atmosphere – its too bad that we need fences to keep the animals in and the people out. But the reality is we need them, to protect land and animals from ourselves. And I’m so grateful we have them, otherwise I wonder if my kids will ever get to experience the same thing.
We woke the next morning for a trek through one of the park’s forests. Yesterday, we had been hesitant about the driving safari, but I’m so glad we did it. Unfortunately, the walk did not prove so exciting in terms of animals. Don’t get me wrong, it was great to be walking in a new place and the piles of elephant dung gave us hope that we would come upon a group of elephants. But no. A couple of the guys did, maybe, see a spider monkey. Towards the end we asked our guide to tell us about the forest – the trees, the fruit, and flowers. The experience got me thinking…
The forest was not unlike one you might find in the Blue Ridge, even the mountains and valley reminded me of the Shenandoah. Mossa and the Grande Fromage said the hills reminded them of Scotland, and CBS suggested that the Ogooué reminded him of parts of south east Asia. There is a fair amount of habitat diversity around the world, but one can travel to various places and be reminded of somewhere else. In a way, the world is more homogeneous than I think it is – flora and fauna and terrain changes; the Himalaya is drastically different than Kauai which is nothing like the Saudi deserts – but again, one terrain looks like another. However, as I travel around or even see pictures or movies, it doesn’t feel so homogeneous.
To start, you can see a postcard of a Greek island and one of a Spanish village in the Mediterranean. The land is very similar, but the architecture, the boats, the colors are dead giveaways as to which place is which. We have structural differences – rich and poor, sick and healthy; we have language differences, food differences; differences in music, art, manners, ethics, laws, religions, believes, entertainments, sports, history, and culture. Landscapes may look similar around the world, but the vibe and atmosphere and smells and experiences can be so different because of the people and the way they have adapted to their environment in different ways and the ways in which they have adapted or rejected other peoples’ way of dealing with what’s around them and expressing themselves. And, yet, Globalization is making its best efforts to homogenize us.
There are some good things that come with the blending and merging of cultures. I do believe in certain universal rights and truths and the power in unity to fight for them when someone weak cannot do it on their own. It is good to know when something bad happens in the world, and those with the ability to help and respond can – we are connected and that’s a good thing. Our ability to witness evil and calamity in our world increases our responsibility to do something about it. Similarly, I think it’s a cop-out not to do something to stop an evil because of some deference to culture - its easy to blame hate and violence and racism and genocide on culture (too often we suggest that its their issue to sort out, we should stay out of it). No, globalism gives us the power of observation, we are connected, no longer do we have the excuse of “We didn’t know how bad it was until it was too late”.
But I really do hope that we can maintain some of our differences. It makes our world so much more interesting and special and unique. Our differences do matter – its means that our culture matters, our history matters, each one of us matters. I think there’s a tendency to mimic our animal friends, we tend to hide and camouflage ourselves, coupled with globalism’s ploys to make us all the same in order to make and sell more of the same products. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite dialogues from The Incredibles. Dash has been using his super speed powers in school when he’s not supposed to and his Mom (Helen aka Elasta Girl) is telling him how he can’t do that:
Helen: Right now, honey, the world just wants us to fit in, we gotta be like everyone else.
Dash: But Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of, our powers made us special.
Helen: Everyone’s special, Dash.
Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.
So, yes, I want a place for everyone at the table, but if we lose our cultural identities in the process, we’re in for one boring dinner party.
Sorry that it’s been so long since I’ve posted. It’s been a busy couple of weeks and I fell out of the habit of writing. And while sometimes I feel blogging is a bit “oh, look at me” and I’d rather stay in my shell, I’m gonna try to keep this going. So I’ll start with a couple of posts about my first safari.
Last weekend, four of my colleagues (Chris, aka Mossa, Roger, aka Rogey Baby, Thierry, aka Cool Bitch Supreme, and Bill, aka Le Grand Fromage) and I went to LopéNational Park. It’s near the geographic center of the country, about 180 km east of Libreville. It took us about 8 hours to get there. The roads are either asphalt – mixed with potholes and stretches of various levels of deterioration – or single lane red dirt. Mind you, this is National Highway 1. To give this some perspective, Libreville and Lopé are about the same distance apart as Washington, D.C. to Roanoke, VA(about a 3 hour drive). People we talked with after thought we were crazy driving there. But I’m so glad we did.
The scenery was amazing and we were able to see how people outside of the Libreville live. We drove out of the city as the landscape transitioned into dense jungle, through the occasional roadside village (really nothing more than a 5 or 10 houses, maybe a school, and always a football pitch). We passed many random tables where people left various things for sale – mainly produce (citrus, tomatoes, yams, bananas, and avocados), but also dried fish and bush meat (we saw several monkeys hanging up and a small crocodile). We also drove through huge rubber plantations, through cut forests, and by several huge saw mills.
Housing was very similar to those found in Haiti – mixes between thatch houses people have probably made for thousands of years, wood frame houses with corrugated metal roofs, and every now and then a concrete and block house. Some painted in reds, and, blues, and greens. Lots of the green, yellow, and blue Gabonese flags. Children carrying water cans to or from the local hand pump well or playing in red dirt yards. We came into the lively town of Ndjolé (pronounced similar to En-julie), that with its old Catholic Church on the hill, for a second reminded me a town you’d find in northern New Mexico. We stopped to fill-up right in the middle of the town next to the market full of what I can only describe as African Reggae music blasting from some ancient box speakers across the street. It was here where we left asphalt for dirt and began climbing into hills, covered in even thicker, now virgin, rain forests.
I saw some of the most incredible bamboo I’ve ever seen – bamboo here grows in large clumps and the stalks splay out in all directions. Clumps are spaced out randomly say 30 or 40 feet apart so that they create a maze into the hills or down into valleys leading to streams. As we crested the hills and crossed the OgoouéRiver, we entered the plateau and into savannah region. We continued following the river all the way to Lopé where I kept thinking to myself that this is the Africa I dreamt about when I was a little boy.
there's a haitian saying kenbe fem that when translated to english means "stay strong". coming from a culture of hardship, its a saying of hope and encouragement in the face of some pretty tough odds. as eve and i ended our conversation the other night, i said to him, "kenbe fem". he looked at me strangely at first - while haitian creole has a foundation in french, it also mixes in tens, perhaps hundreds of african languages. to someone who speaks only french, creole is not understood. but eve said that in his mother tongue (bantu-fang) he knows the word fem as a strong person. so it was pretty cool to see the linguistic connection between gabon and haiti. but that's not what i want to write about today, i want to write about what it means to stay strong.
sometimes we need that kind of encouragement - we go through times in our life when we can't see the light, but we know if we keep walking, one step at a time, taking on life from one moment or day to the next, we can make it through to the other side. but there's a price with that way of living. we're surviving, getting through the day. we might shut out other possibilities, other leadings. so what if instead of staying strong, we stay weak? kenbe feb? we don't like the idea of being weak, it leaves us vulnerable and living in fear. however, perhaps by being weak, we can admit that we need help, that we need to reach out and rely on others because none of us can do this alone. and it might also mean that we stay humble and open to something more than survival. this is what i was thinking about under the tree this morning and saw a similar analogy out in front of me.
this tension between strong and weak is similar to that between going with the flow and taking things into your own hands. you can stay in the water and go with the flow. again, sometimes we feel the need to just let go, stop forcing things, and move along with the water, where ever it may take us. but then when we do that, its not guaranteed that we'll make it to shore and we have to accept where and when we land if we do make it.
or we can take a surf board, choose a wave and take control of where we go. the outcome will likely be very different (the journey certainly will be) and we take the responsibility for where and when we land. now that does not guarantee that we won't fall off or be saved from getting caught under a wave, tossed around and held under not knowing which way is up. but when we resurface, we can try again and again.
so which is it? do we stay strong? or do we stay weak? do we go with the flow? or do we paddle out into the swell and surf? i think we need to do all four. the art of living a good life, though, is having the wisdom to know when.
this is my second weekend here. starting yesterday afternoon, i've been able to get out a bit. my first journey was to a couple of project sites with my new boss (we were still on the clock, so maybe it doesn't count for weekend time, but its worth talking about).
we visited two of the 15 can 2012 sites - a practice field and a hostel complex for teams. they are well underway and should be ready by early next year. here's a picture of the site manager standing along side the newly installed pitch and another view of the field:
the sites are located on the eastern part of town, so i was finally able to get beyond the bord du mer. in many ways, the neighborhoods were not unlike those in port au prince. small block houses stacked on top of each other and up slopes of hills. but there is definitely a higher level of well-being here with really nice houses sprinkled about:
more on that in bit...last night we went to dinner at a place called l'odeka - it specializes in african game food and definitely caters to the expat community, so doing the touristy thing we had to try it. we each ordered a plate and shared it family style - so now i can say that i've eaten antelope, crocodile, python, and porcupine! i wish i had pictures of scary snake heads, horns, croc teeth, and quills, but the plates were actually really boring, which i guess is good because we really shouldn't make a spectacle of such things (i can hear my vegan friends cussing me now - sorry y'all!). anyway, we had big chunks in sauce - so it looked more like beef stew rather than anything else. the python was the most interesting - really bony, but good (you had to suck on it like you might do eating a chicken wing), the antelope was a lot like venison,the crocodile was excellent - better than a good piece of chicken, but the porcupine was just nasty. those things don't need quills. certainly an experience, but i'm not sure i'll go back!
earlier today (now saturday), we went out to the libreville golf club. this is where the stomach tightened up and the guilty feelings came swooping in. i'm not a golfer, but two of the guys are, so we went to hit some balls at the driving range and have lunch. it is one of the greatest symbols of power here and ironically we had to drive about 20 minutes through some of the poorest shanty towns to get there. the guys were certainly humbled and said how grateful we are to be in our position. we talked about how most of the world lives like this - young girls gathered around the only water pipe collecting water for their house, carrying what they can manage on their head. boys playing soccer with an old and flat ball barefoot in the broken street full of rocks and broken glass. open drainage trenches full of trash and standing water in a malaria endemic area. its easy to fall into the trap that poverty is not systemic, that as this country develops their infrastructure, diversifies its economy, and educates its people, that its just a matter of time before they life themselves up and reap the benefits of modernity. i know i get preachy and judgmental, but until poverty is exposed as a consequence of this type of development, a development that i fear will maintain the current structures of power and violence, the people who have "made it" here will keep speeding through the shanties on the way to catch their tee time. i need not mention that lunch didn't taste very good.
trying to close on a positive note...after wards, we stopped off at a couple of markets.
we don't get many fruits and vegetables, especially at the hotel. we're told that gabon doesn't grow anything and must import so much of their food. well, it was a great relief to find masses of fresh fruit and veggies! bananas, pineapples, avocados, carrots, greens, onions, peppers, yams, okra, limes and some i tried learning the name of but can't remember! here's what i walked away with for less than $2.
i even found some local honey. it has a strange taste between the honey i'm used to and molasses. i look forward to eating this stuff and getting to know a bit more about life away from the table. until then, i'm heading out to sit in the thinking tree for a while.
this is the story off eve. he is the night receptionist at our hotel. he's maybe 23. we got to talking last night about what my company is doing here and the need for infrastructure and how most of the people here in gabon live. we started talking about how people like me, from the us or europe, come here for business and never see the poverty here. we live in a nice hotel in the north end of the city, right on the beach. our driver picks us up, we drive south down the bord du mer, following the coast and into downtown. we pass high rise hotels, apartments, ministry office buildings. we get out, work all day (around the table of course!), get picked up, maybe go to a restaurant or back to the hotel for dinner...i told eve that its so nice here, and then asked, knowing the answer, if everyone else lived like this because i don't see the poverty i expected. he said the government is ashamed of it, so they keep people like me away from it. he said "vous devez vous ourvrir au peuple" - very roughly translated into english as "you must open up to the people" - you have to go see them because they live just a few blocks east of the bord du mer. so i asked him if he was familiar with the term social justice: “of course, la justice egalité.”
he said many gabonese are frustrated. parents make so many sacrifices to get their kids into school. and when they graduate, there's nothing for them to do. there are lots of major companies working here for oil, natural gas, timber, various ores - but these trades hire few locals. eve left his family and village when he was 16 to go to school in port gentil. his parents worked in markets to make enough money to pay for his education. his goal was to graduate in the top 3 of his class because companies recruit there but only hire the top 3. after his first year he was in the top 10, after his 2nd he made it into the top 5. he spent his last two years top of his class. but when he graduated with his baccalauréat, he found that he didn't get hired because he didn't come from a "known family". he says he discovered that only the students with a "real" family name, someone connected to the political elite, get hired. most likely the handful of families connected to the original french colonial powers and still clinging to the invisible hand of the french. he finally found a term job at a bank. when president omar bongo died, people from all over the world came to pay their respects and hotels needed people. eve found a job here and has worked here ever since and has now been promoted to an evening receptionist. his parents are disappointed - all of his education and he's only a receptionist. but he's proud of his job and glad he has work - most of his friends don't. we talked a bit more about life beyond the bord and he went to tell a story about bongo just before he died.
he was frail, knowing his time here was coming to end. he did one final address to the nation on live television. he was reading from a script and it was riddled with mistakes. so he stops mid-sentence and asked "who wrote this? what do you people do?" he went on speaking from his heart saying that he would be in heaven soon and would have to account for what he's done - being part of creating a country where 80% of the people are poor and only 20% have access to resources (that ratio is better than many resource-poor countries). he went on and called out many of his political peers for taking advantage of the system. that political leaders wasted the potential of gabon and that the people deserved more, that they needed water, food, education, jobs. he went on to say "dieu n'est pas content, parce que il y a une solution" - god is not happy because there is a solution. eve believes that the new president, ali bongo (omar's son) understands this and is trying to find help. that's why he's asked my company to be here and is making changes to diversify the nation's economy to enable more local jobs.
we talked a bit more about life in gabon for the average person, about eve's girlfriend, his dreams for a family, his faith. he said, "my parents made so much sacrifice just so that i have this job. there's nothing else for me to do. i have faith in god that things will get better. when you trust in god, you let everything else go because you have to believe that god has something big for you."
well, eve, i hope so. for you and your future wife and your children and for the million and half people that live on the other side of the bord du mer.
i want to revisit the hospital. the one in mirebalais, haiti. the one pih is building in conjunction with the haitian ministry of health (mspp). and i want to talk about it in the context of a jack johnson song. i’ll wait for something a bit less heavy to talk about my jack johnson pandora theory…the song going through my head is you and your heart. it’s a catchy pop song from his latest album, but could be from the other ones (surprise – no offense jack). anyway, he sings: you and your heart, shouldn’t feel so far apart, you can chose what you take, why you gotta break and make it feel so hard…
well, right now, me and my heart feel so very far apart. for lots of reasons. but mostly because a big chunk of my heart is in that hospital, in the dirt that’s being transformed into a world class facility, a beacon of what is possible when we set the bar high and are willing to do whatever it takes to get over it. but also for so much more. for me it represents rising up, out of the rubble. you see, zanmi lasante and its sister organization partners in health, was asked to support mspp at the general hospital in port au prince after it was essentially destroyed by the earthquake. it was the place where people brought their dead – to the morgue that reached capacity in mere hours after the quake and so bodies were stacked so deep and so wide you couldn’t pass. it was also the place where nursing students died while taking their lessons, crushed in their classrooms, under their school and left for weeks, only their smell signaling their presence. and beyond the walls, in tent hospitals, in the streets, the people of this country experienced things humans just aren’t built to witness and endure. this is when I realized how the natural disaster caused by tectonic plates shifting a few kilometers below the asphalt exposed the unnatural, systemic disaster of poverty…but the general hospital was also the place where, from the rubble, the team, joined by groups as different as the us army and the swiss red cross, was able to care for so many thousands of patients. the place from where hundreds of patients were med-evaced to the uss comfort for life-saving surgery. it was one of the few centers of emergency care in the middle of a city brought to piles of rocks and twisted steel in minutes.
before 5pm, january 12th, the hospital was the only public teaching hospital in the country. the new hospital in mirebalais is its replacement. we were already deep into the design phase to build a 100+ bed regional referral facility – still to be crown jewel of mspp in the central plateau. soon after the 12th, the team was asked to triple capacity and convert the facility to a national teaching center. so, for me, its very poetic that pih is able to restore the national teaching hospital, rising from the rubble as a sign of hope and healing, aligned with the slogan “build back better”. but also for me, it signifies a healing of the soul, of my soul (if i may be so selfish), to help restore all that was lost in the aftermath of earthquake.
i had the absolute privilege to work with the team until a few months ago when i finished up graduate school and took a job. now i’m in gabon helping to build the main stadium for the 2012 africa cup (the african men’s world cup qualifying tournament). on its own, this is a great job. my family will experience living in another country and we’ll get to see hippos and gorillas and some of the few remaining virgin rainforests left in the world. but its nothing to fill the breach of inequality. so i can’t stop thinking about haiti. a place that has taught me so much about structural violence, oppression, injustice, inequality, power, but also hope, faith and love. i owe her so much for restoring my faith in god and humanity and myself and i feel she needs to be loved and someone fighting for her. not by me alone, but still, if you know me, you know what i mean. i tried finding a way to make it work. but maybe i didn’t try hard enough. maybe i loved myself more than her. regardless, i’m here in libreville now – “free town”, where i don’t feel so free because me and my heart, we’re so far apart. maybe its timing, maybe i need preparation, maybe the world is bigger than haiti. but i can’t stop thinking about what i’m doing here and what i could be doing there, rising.
what i found out about blogs is that you don't have to write some huge thing every post. just a few paragraphs, some pictures, and before you know it we'll have ourselves a story unfolding. i promised not to make this a standard travel blog, but come on, i am going through some pretty cool and unique experiences, for me at least, so i'll share a few.
this past friday was eid, the celebration of the end of ramadan. i've spent some time in nigeria and so have experiences with muslim culture, but it still fascinates me. gabon actually has a very small muslim population (primarily traditional religions and catholicism reign here), but there are quite a number of people from other african countries (nigeria, niger, mali, cote d'ivoire...) and many of these folks are muslim. friday was a national holiday (the president is muslim - the story has it that his family converted after the libyans promised various forms of support). it just so happens that our office is right next to the national mosque and royal palace (the name for the home of the democratically elected head of state). we had to work and ended up having to walk through crowds of people as we headed to the office and they headed to worship. i must admit, i felt not only out of place, but disrespectful - what with our suits and computer bags draped over out shoulders. but everyone was very nice as we walked through a sea of people in brightly colored dress (i hate to group all of africa as being one place - there are so many different cultures and people and countries here, but there is something very african, west african at least, about the clothes, the smell, a sweet smell). and beggars lined the streets - many women and small children, but also many physically crippled people, shaking little plastic bowls. as we headed in the building, the call to prayer was in effect...Allah abar...Allah akbar...Allah akbar...men and their sons gathered in the yard in front of the mosque, sitting or kneeling on their prayer rug, as women and daughters gathered on the far side, across the street. we watched some of the prayers from our 4th story window. an ocean of people and color, standing or kneeling in unison with the prayers. it was beautiful...
we didn't have internet all day, maybe we shouldn't have gone to work.
and now something funny. i'm always one who appreciates practical jokes, even if done to me. but some people here have raised the bar. tonight we heard a second hand story about how various leaders take care of their own here...one guy's head had gotten a little too big, so the head guy took things into his own hands. the big-headed guy went to visit a distant town. on his way, the big boss had arranged these thugs to attacked him, place a bag over his head, stripped him down, roughed him up a little (whatever that means!), had him confess to some various things, and then they brought him into a house where the big boss and all of his people had gathered, they had the thugs remove the bag and GOTCHA!!! everyone had a great laugh. and the guy telling the story told it as if they had placed a thumb tack in his chair. good one, huh? wow. i hope i stay on their good side - that's one way to stay humble.
random picture of the day: this is a tree down the beach from where i'm staying - its my thinking tree. enough to keep me humble for a while.
so i'm trying out a blog. i've just moved to libreville, gabon. where is that, you ask...?
i'm terrible at keeping up with facebook and not much with even keeping in touch with people via email, forget phonecalls! but this is such a unique experience for me and thought that i would try documenting life via the blogosphere. but i don't want this to just be a travel blog. my life is going on here, my thoughts, my fears, my experiences, and i need a place to deal with all of that as well. i have a thing for quotes and simple prayers and good friends who send me things i think everyone should read. maybe if i start putting this stuff out there, in print, it will be more real or something.
also, i have a thing for social justice, that everyone deserves dignity, regardless of position or possession. crazy to think americans are debating, politicizing, and polarizing social justice, its as if people such dr. king, who once said, "the hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood,"are dated - i don't think so. as a dear friend grew up believing, evil continues when good men do nothing. well the first part of doing something is becoming aware, so i like to think that this may be my forum to talk about observations i make and try filling the little cracks with hope and light (and honesty as much as i can), instead of despair and dark.
so about this name - the table. i'm not sure that i like it. but it has some meaning. i've just finished up graduate school at virginia tech and i've come here for a new job. we're just getting started here. the team is small and we're in a temporary office. we're staying at a hotel, we wake up, eat together around the same table everyday, then we go in and sit around another table, then we come home together and eat supper around that table. so right now, my life literally revolves around a table. as we get to know each other a but more, our conversations are getting deeper, we're laughing more. what my british co-workers would call "that bloody table" is now becoming the beloved table...ok, no. its still the bloody table. but i don't know - its where my life is happening right now and so maybe its works for the name of this blog. i also thought that if i'm able to create something more than a travel blog, something other than a whinny journal, that maybe i can also use this as a platform, then maybe i stop writing once we're all able to sit at the table because right now, to be honest, its a table of the privileged, of the powerful, and call me socialist (or naive), but i think we have all been created as equals, and that we should die that way as well.
please let me know what you think about the name and i will try to keep posting, even if it pleases only me.
