Laafi - Sam

 As I look ahead to my fifth trip with Scattergood to Latin America, I find myself reflecting on what has been memorable in the past trips. The easy, comfortable moments have mostly been with my fellow travellers. We are made close by our now-obvious similarities and shared language. We see each other as a refuge. We exchange books and stories, laugh with each other, and try to make hard decisions together. We reflect on what is going on around us, and try to better understand how the world works. The moments which have been harder, less comfortable, and more memorable have often been made with our host families. A highlight for me was in Honduras, when Leah’s host mom learned that I wasn’t married yet. To help me with this obvious problem (I was already 28!) she got all of us to join hands and pray with her, to make sure that I had found a wife by the next time that I was there. I think back to the Zapotec family I stayed with last year in Teotitlan del Valle. The abuela, who looked absolutely ancient, made her own chocolate from dried cacao, slowly roasting the beans over an open flame, adding cinnamon and other spices to the mixture. It’s hard to make connections in a second language, and even harder when you don’t speak or understand much at all (which is sometimes the case for my students on these trips). I got a sense of that feeling when visiting my friend Kase who was volunteering for the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Much of my time there was spent living the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer on holiday. We moved about in small groups of white people, eating kabobs, pommes frites, and, once, a whole chicken, slaughtered and cooked to succulent garlicky perfection while we waited. Five days of this trip felt different, though. These were the days spent in Kase’s village, Zogore, about 20 km from Ouahigouya in the northwest of the country. Zogore was set up as a loose collection of family compounds, each about half a football field away from each other. I’d only ever traveled before in mountainous countries with no space to spare, houses on top of houses. Zogore luxuriated out into the Sahel. The spread of Zogore had an interesting effect on greetings. Villagers walking here and there would swerve well out of their way to say hi. These greetings in the local language, Moré, included at least three exchanges about one’s health and the health of one’s family. I mostly remember the word for “health”, “Laaafi” going back and forth, drawn out like a song. Laafi, Laaaaafi, Laafi. It had been dry for months. My third night in Zogore, though, the first storm of the rainy season hammered down on Kase’s corrugated tin roof, bringing much needed moisture to the ground and a brief respite from the heat. We had been sleeping outside, in sparse tents, and barely made it inside before the deluge. When we woke up the next morning the broad puddles were already tinged with rings of green, where only dust had been before. On this day I got more insight into all the “Laafi’s”: in a culture close to death and sickness, health is something to be noticed and blessed. The rain had brought a little more freshness to the air, but it was still very hot. Kase and I were sitting in his courtyard in the late afternoon, slowly moving our chairs to stay in the shade of the house, when one of his neighbors came by to collect us. Kase didn’t quite know what was going on, and I, speaking neither Moré nor French, was useless. We walked a short distance to a large Baobab tree. There was a circle of shoeless men. We took our shoes off too, not knowing why, and added them to the pile. I peered through the circle of men; it turned out they were digging a grave. As groups of men with an engineering project do all over the world, they were arguing about it, offering unwanted advice, being know-it-alls. Soon, though, the job was done. Later, a group of women would proceed out of a nearby compound with a dead child wrapped all in white cloth. They would wail and cry out. The child would be interred after some brief words, and we would eat together. But what I most remember is that moment standing around after the grave was dug. The moon was rising full through the Baobab tree as the sun set behind us. The ground was newly tinged with green, and we were waiting, nothing to do, empty as a pocket. The moment felt quiet and sacred: a group of men standing barefoot around a hole under a tree, a pile of ordinary shoes resting nearby, waiting also. I understood almost none of the words spoken that day, and the experience certainly was not comfortable, but the words and my comfort, weighed against this moment, mattered very little.