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.

Dear Annie

I wrote this letter to myself in preparation for our trip to Bolivia. I brought a lot of my fears to light, and I think it will be interesting to look back on this letter when I am there to see how things match up, to see if I have been able to conquer these fears.

Dear In The Future Annie,

How is it going? I hope at this point you are no longer apprehensive about staying with strangers and that you are enjoying yourself. As I am writing this letter I am imagining myself not knowing what to say or how to act, but one of my goals is to be able to use any means necessary to get my point across. That could be drawing pictures or waving my arms about like a lunatic. Have you been doing that? I am nervous that I won’t feel comfortable being myself around my host family, but I hope that is not the case and that you have felt comfortable enough to be weird. I think having Jaci with you will help that.

I am really excited to be around the little kids, and when we go to the schools I am excited to do hard work that will benefit them. I am a little worried that you will feel embarrassed if your Spanish is worse than a second grader’s, but I know that it is okay. You need to believe in yourself!  I am really excited, though, to have the opportunity to improve my Spanish! I think that living with a Spanish speaking family, and basically only speaking Spanish for a month is going to be awesome! I bet you are so much better already. I am also really excited to go to the markets and see all of the handmade things, and buy stuff to bring home to my family and friends!  Remember to do these things if you haven’t been doing them already.

We have never been out of the country before and so I am nervous/excited about this being my first time. Are you homesick? If you are, it will be okay I promise. Just try and remember how amazing it is that you are in Bolivia and maybe all of the other stuff will fall away. How was the flight? I hope it wasn’t too crazy or uncomfortable. Did you get altitude sickness? As I am writing this I am wondering what that will mean for me. I am taking some immune support pills right now, do you think they have been helping at all?
What is the environment like? Does it seem the same as what you learned about? Is it better? Worse? You should be writing things down in a journal and maybe cutting things out of newspapers, or other magazines to bring back to the US as momentos. Thats a good idea. Do it right now! Eat lots of yummy food, try new things, don’t be afraid to go out of your comfort zone. I trust you to not let fear rule your time in Bolivia. Maybe don’t try guinea pigs. That doesn’t sound too appetizing to me right now, so maybe try some other food that you might not normally. LIVE A LITTLE. Because all too soon you will be back on that plane returning to Iowa, and you will graduate. And we will both regret it so much if you don’t try new things while in another country.

Adios,

Present/In The Past Me.

After Five Consecutive Viewings of Watchmen... - Neal

I got off the plane and I was in Norway, a friend and I were staying at a farm house out in the country. Sometimes we would boat over to a lakeside cabin that my friend’s parents had, but for the most part we were staying with the family at the farm house. Here there were fun things to do. We had access to a go-cart, a gator (a farm equivalent of a 4 wheeler) and a various number of tractors and boats. On our way over to get the gator, we were walking along a path and out of nowhere we started to notice slugs. These were slugs that were a fair size and they kind of grossed us out a little. Never the less, not enough to stop us from putting them on my friend’s sister and her friend. Victory us. 

So we got the gator and my friend was driving it back on the road to the farm house.

Not really noticing out of the ordinary, I struggle to place what was wrong with the situation I was in. Never mind that two young teens were driving at top speed with two middle schoolers in the back wagon part, screaming at the top of their lungs. I shrugged it off and enjoyed the scenery and the manufactured noise. 
When we got back, we broke for dinner and had the standard Norwegian hot dog (over a foot long it was the best). After dinner and retiring to our little alcove of a room hidden up the stairs we discussed about where we were going to go next. We could just drive to the cabin and to the lake shore but that was old hat. 

There was however, a quarry that we had seen on the way to the cabin from the airport where we landed when we first arrived in the country of rain and moose. Wanting to see what was it was like there, we hopped in the gator and sped off, this time with me driving. This is when what was odd feeling earlier finally hit me. While earlier we had come up with the conclusion that we were supposed to be driving on the left side of the road, it turns out we were wrong and while slowly putting this together (hmm I wonder why the past three signs have been backwards, oh well screw it) it became ever so apparent when over a hill came a car on our side of the road. The need for speed professional stunt drive came out in me and I veered to the right. Though unnecessary because we had a good amount of clearance between us and the car, we were screaming and shouting, scared and hysterical at the same time. 

 Joking about how we would relate this story to our host parents later, we decided to keep our mouths shut because though the car didn’t kill us, we could not be as sure about the woman we were staying with. We finally got to the quarry and started to explorer. When, after getting the gator stuck twice, we finally got back to the house and decided that we should be done with the gator and start trying our luck with the boat.