Deep South Sudan

i. bulletpoints from the beginning of this chapter

• the market was closed on sunday and monday, the 5^th and 6^th of october, because of outrage over the selling of a piece of land near the border.  a dinka man sold it to a somalian entrepreneur.
• citizens fear that the somalian, who wants to build a depot, will usher greater arab influence into a community that is predominately christian and animist (and only a few years after the end of the southerner’s two decade war against the arabs of the north).
• this land acquisition by a foreigner also highlights the current debate over property rights.  established tribes such as the madi and acholi, who have lived in the equatoria region for centuries, want the dinka to return to their homelands.  (large numbers of dinkas were displaced to nimule and the surrounding area during the civil war.)
• dinkas suspect the disappearance of their soldiers on monday was a reprisal by the madis or the acholis or both – an act of violent resentment toward the dinkas’ immovability.  
• the magwi county commissioner arrived on tuesday and informed the soldiers to stop harassing the citizens of nimule.  the tension slowly dissipated.
• rumor has it that a local “big man” by the name of kisire, who is a madi and who has a reputation for murdering both his enemies and members of his own family, was responsible for the disappearance of the soldiers.
• people say “a vehicle came and picked up the men” as if the machine itself kidnapped the soldiers.  the car was said to have gone down to the banks of the nile river. 
• among members of each and every tribe there is a belief in demons that reside underneath the water.  some say you can contact them if you dial a certain number on your cell phone. 
• kisire is widely thought to have intimate relations with the devil.
• but the nile’s murky depths and and kisire don’t have exclusive rights to darkness.  it’s everywhere.  it’s inside each one of us.  and right now it’s calling this wounded community to a feast. 

ii. tender spots in my handwritten journal

October 12^th:  But there is a difference between turning the other cheek and sticking your head in the sand.  As I write these words in my notebook I’m sitting on a bench outside the Kololo Primary School’s administrative office, awaiting a meeting of the School Management Committee, of which I am the co-chairman (a position that was thrust upon me in the same manner that a Sudanese matriarch compels a visitor to eat food or else risk causing a unforgivable offense).  I’m surrounded by about twenty children in their white and blue, vaguely British uniforms, and they’re staring at me as if I’m an animal in a zoo, performing some curious task with my hands.  I know that I wrote that first sentence for them, because the events of the past week – even the past year – are approaching a crisis point where their lives and the lives of every other soul in this town could end up trapped, by brutally ignorant or sadistically selfish forces, in the crossfire.

     I want to believe that violence, whether on the scale of a Goya desastre or a Michelangelo chapel-flood, will be avoided.  But as I wait for the meeting to commence and I look at all these kids crowded into classrooms that are nothing more than wood posts holding up thatch roofs, I keep seeing the squad of soldiers rumbling across these same grounds last week, running over a student or two, and propelling themselves forward like a living, shouting, armed and ready machine of terror.  And that last word, though overused and retrofitted to justify vengeful and flawlessly executed instances of itself, is the right one in this context.

October 13^th:  Last night, exactly one week after the shooting death of the Olubo musician and the disappearance of the SPLA soldiers, a group of military messengers drove around town in a pick-up truck, announcing through a crappy PA system that there was a curfew.  Have we crossed that line into martial law, again?  This morning they had another declaration:  anyone with a firearm needs to report to the barracks so that the weapon will be registered.

     I later learned that the announcement was specifically directed at the wounded veterans, many of whom have become loose cannons.  Many are no longer attached to the barracks and they are usually the last ones to be paid by the government.  Their unfair treatment was the catalyst behind the town wide protest last August, and it seems that some of the higher-ups in the military don’t appreciate their unpredictability.  When the vets assembled at the barracks, the commander said they didn’t need to register their weapons; they needed to relinquish them.  The vets refused.

      Friction seems to sprouting from every quarter, even from within the SPLA itself.   

iii. a way forward

     That same morning, October 13^th, I spoke first with Akera Emmy, one of our youth leaders in the church, and then with Pastor Juma about the current state of affairs.  I talked about the pattern that I feel has begun to develop over the course of the past year, and as I spoke the pattern itself seem to come into even sharper focus. 

     In July, a Dinka man with a history of mental illness trespassed on the Merlin residential compound in the neighborhood known as Motoyo.  (Merlin is the UK non-profit that is assisting the Nimule hospital, and its residential compound accommodates their senior medical staff.)  The man was shot and killed by the watchman on duty.  In retaliation, a mob composed of Dinka citizens and soldiers descended on the hospital itself, which is located near our home in Kololo.  For a full day, the group would not allow any vehicles to enter the hospital.  Doctors were turned away with violent shouts and hurled stones, which left their patients under the management of the nurses on duty.  Medicine was given to the patients, but for those in dire need there was no doctor in sight.  A day later, Merlin agreed to pay what I assume was a rather hefty sum of money to the family of the man who was killed, and the mob disbanded.

     In August, SPLA  soldiers, led by wounded Dinka veterans, effectively put the entire town under martial law, forcing businesses to close and halting all public and private transportation.  This systematic shut-down was the soldiers’ way of demanding that they receive their long-delayed salaries.  And within 24 hours the government responded and assured the SPLA that the money was coming.

     Finally, we saw the SPLA’s unwarranted acts of violence and intimidation against the civilian population at the start of October.  I told Juma that these events are showing us something, and even though everything seems normal right now, the soldiers have clearly demonstrated that they can and will take the law into their own hands at anytime.  To what extent are they capable and willing to exercise this power?  And the tension between the tribes hasn’t ended – it’s merely gone underground for the time being.

     I told him I felt that our church and all the various congregations in Nimule ought to have a unified voice to address these issues.  I don’t know exactly what the churches in Nimule could do to help, but they cannot be silent.  If nothing is done then we’ll be partly responsible for any of the blood that’s shed.  And I honestly feel that an armed conflict is not that far off.

     Juma agreed with everything I said or perhaps threw at him.  He mentioned that in the past few years violent tribal clashes have erupted in other parts of South Sudan.  He saw the same brutal potential here in Nimule, and he said that the current dilemma would be one the topics at an upcoming meeting between local leaders, which was being organized by the Governor and Commissioner of Magwi County.  Juma planned to attend the meeting and said he would inform me of how it turned out. 

     Obviously, God wasn’t only speaking into my heart, for none of us own the exclusive rights to darkness, or the Lord’s revelatory light.

iv. bulletpoints from the end

• kisire wasn’t the only one fingered in the disappearance of the dinka soldiers.  his brother angala was also a suspect.
• angala is a store manager at the nimule barracks.  the two soldiers who vanished happen to be assigned to his store.
• angala led a protest on the same day in which the soldiers went missing.  he marched from the town center to the barracks with other outraged madis to raise some hell over the purchase of the land by the somalian businessman.
• the commander of the nimule garrison came out to meet the protestors on the road and angala vented his anger toward what he saw as an unjust acquisition of traditionally madi territory by a foreigner.
• angala was arrested in connection with missing soldiers, but released in mid-october after the men were discovered within nimule.  the explanation for their disappearance isn’t clear.  however, they themselves testify to the fact that they weren’t kidnapped.
• madis believer the disappearance was staged in order to imprison and therefore shut up angala, an outspoken opponent of the dinkas continued presence in nimule.
• the governor and commissioner of magwi county asked the two tribes, madi and dinka, to put their concerns and complaints into writing and submit them in preparation for a meeting on the 17^th of october.
• the meeting was relatively successful and the parties agreed to postpone the resolution of the land issue until a government committee could be set up to deal with it.
• in the meantime, the sudan council of churches will hold a conference in november with the main aim of bandaging the still open wounds.
• the devil’s appeal to come and feast hasn’t been drowned out completely.  there are many voices now and we’ll see which one the people choose to follow.

v. my minor role in the future of this town

     Akera has been taking down the minutes from the meetings that he and Juma are attending in preparation for the November conference.  He asked me to transcribe them to a computer, because he doesn’t know how to type and because, You know, Kelly, you are one of us now.

      I feel I can’t describe to you how much his words mean to me.  Even though I find him incredibly annoying at times, I believe he was being sincere.

      He sat beside me as I typed out the minutes, and when we came to the list of names for the documentation committee for the conference, he told me to add my name, which I agreed to do.  The Community Peace and Reconciliation Conference began yesterday afternoon.  I enlisted Emmanuel Okot to help me in videotaping the proceedings, which was a smart move, because I was possessed by some kind of stomach bug and had to excuse myself a couple times so as take full advantage of the conference facilities.  Nevertheless, I’m feeling rather dapper today, and I believe the meeting is starting to move into territory wherein the participants will either find solutions or renew their divisions . . .

On Monday of last week I heard a single gunshot cut through the dissonant sounds of the night.  The choir of frogs, the distant voices of evening travelers along the road, the laughter from a shortwave radio – they all seemed to cease for a moment.  I don’t think much about gunfire (about its source or its result); it’s a common occurrence in Nimule and to live here you have to put on a blinder or two. 

The next morning someone told me the outcome of the single shot:  a dead young man in the dust of the Nimule-Juba highway and the culprits on the loose.  Part of me couldn’t or didn’t want to put together the sound of the screaming bullet and the image of a boy leaking his life all over the ground.  Part of me wanted to pretend nothing happened.

Late in the afternoon the kids told me they saw a large number of SPLA soldiers moving along the road toward Rey, the neighborhood whose western boundary skirts the edge of town.  Half an hour later the kids and I watched about twenty soldiers – all of them clad in dark green uniforms – appear on a nearby hill and walk like gang members through the Kololo Primary School grounds.  They found some children studying in one of the bare brick classrooms and they chased them out, slapping an older boy in the face as he fled.  Engineer Lawrence, the man overseeing the building of the children’s new home, had stopped to watch the scene unfold.  I turned to him and said something about the injustice of the soldiers’ conduct.  But I kept standing where I was . . .

Tombe and Amacha came running across the compound and nearly fell over each other as they halted in front of me.  They said soldiers had come to the borehole where they’d been pumping water and told them, in no uncertain terms, to go home.  I decided now would be a good time to contact our night watchman (himself a member of the SPLA) and ask him to explain what was going down.  The cell phone network was “jumping” as they say, but after a few failed attempts I managed to get Zakariah on the line and handed my cell to Awi.  (I didn’t trust that my Arabic was fluent enough to obtain the info I wanted.)  You could feel the air constricting itself as the seconds passed and I tried half-heartedly to translate what Awi was saying to Zakariah. 

The atmosphere reminded me of the day in mid-August when the SPLA brought the entire town to a stand still, shutting down businesses and setting up roadblocks to stop all transportation in and out of Nimule.  The soldiers hadn’t been paid in months and so they went on strike and made everyone else follow suit (or face the consequences).  I remember sitting and eating lunch in the dining room with Sophie, Jon, and Charlene.  We watched the waylaid bus passengers tramping down the side of Gordon Hill, carrying their suitcases and babies like refugees.  Near the hill’s crest you could see the front end of the first bus that the soldiers had stopped.  Then a woman started to cry along the road behind the church, her wailing rising and falling like someone messing with the volume knob of a scratchy stereo.  Her outpouring seemed to have something to do with the slow descent of the travelers.  I expected to hear a bullet tearing apart the air at any moment and for no particular reason.  But no violence came about, and the soldiers got their cash in a few days, proving to themselves and to everyone that extreme measure will sometimes garner quick results.

Awi clicked off the phone and said Zakariah wanted us to know that there’s nothing to worry about.  The soldiers were merely looking for some lost friends.  I asked him what that meant and he said he didn’t know.  Zakariah hadn’t given any further details.  I moved around the compound from hut to hut, informing the kids to stay put, to not go to the borehole uphill, and to not worry (even though I felt there might be some brazenly legitimate reasons to be concerned).

In following days the details made their way to me along with more stories of unnecessary force.  The murder victim had been an Olubo musician, and on the same night that he lost his life two Dinka soldiers vanished.  The SPLA was engaged in a search for its missing members and for the killers themselves.  I had to wonder if the army suspected that the missing and the murderers might be one in the same. 

The incidents of soldierly antagonism were numerous even among people we knew, and so I assume nearly everyone in Nimule had a bad run-in with a good old boy in uniform or knew someone who had endured some ill-treatment.  Akera, a youth leader in the church, was threatened at gunpoint while walking home.  Dominic and Ocan were accosted while playing football.  And a nephew of Pastor Juma was slapped in the face by a soldier as he was making his way to the church.  This boy – a slender teenager with glassy eyes, a scar on his right cheek, and a pocket New Testament that appears to be glued to his palm – told me something rather extraordinary on Thursday morning.  By this time the tension had dissipated significantly, and people were moving about town without the fear that some a-hole with an AK was going to treat them like a violent criminal.  The boy came into my office and sat down as if we’d scheduled a meeting.  The first thing he told me wasn’t so amazing.  He asked for 10,000 Ugandan Shillings, the equivalent of about $6 US dollars.  I asked him what he intended to use the money for.  He let out a hmmph, then sat silent for a moment, carefully preparing his next statement.  I want to buy a soda.

 I told him that I was sorry, but I couldn’t help him to drink a soda today (and besides, I thought to myself, 10,000 would buy about five Cokes).  He said it was OK, and we started discussing the recent troubles, which led to the recounting of his own humiliation at the hands of a grunt.  He said he didn’t mind that the soldier hit him.  He asked what could he do to a tall man with a gun?  It’s not for me to judge, but God.  I leave it to him to repay.

His flat eyes settled on me and his mouth broke into an oddly disarming smile.  I could tell he meant what he said.  He looked away, opened his small Bible, and flipped through a chapter or two.  I glanced at the pages and noticed blue lines beneath a number of verses.  So I wasn’t surprised when he asked for a pen, which I was glad to give to him.  Satisfied with having received something from me, he rose from his chair, shook my hand, and left.   

Sometimes it takes a weird young man materializing on a weekday morning to remind us that God is in control of everything, he has a magnificent love for justice, and he fully intends to repay what the unrepentant have chosen to sow.  Nevertheless, I remain unsettled.  The events of the last week are symptomatic of a much deeper malady that is gnawing at the heart of Nimule, perhaps even at the core of this entire nation.

And there is a fine line between turning the other cheek and sticking your head in the sand . . .

To love someone is to reveal to them their capacities for life, the light that is shining in them. 

                                                Jean Vanier

She’s gone and she took the damn dog with her.

I remember this beautiful young woman sitting across from me at the Catholic’s compound (the only place – God bless the Pope – to access the net at the time) and I remember wondering to myself if I should’ve shaved.  We exchanged hellos and I tried hard not to sneak any glances her way.

I remember trying to impress her when she visited our home in August of last year.  I showed her around the premises:  the children’s huts, the unfinished dormitories, the modest church.  I led the kids in a seminal rendition of the Cornerstone Song with its ridiculous dance moves and wacky lyrics.  She appeared to love everything about the place, and we swapped contact info before she untangled herself from the kids and returned to her side of town.  Something must’ve gone right, because she wrote to me in the fall, exclaiming the news that she’d been asked to live at Cornerstone for a year. 

The Lord was the man who’d made the drastic proposal, and I could discern, from the tone of her message, she wasn’t going to refuse him.   

She arrives in January, but I’m so messed up with the office work and our crazy-ass kids and our constant lack of money that I forget to throw her a welcome party. 

She tells me later that it doesn’t matter; I tell her it does.

Some of the kids have never experienced a mother’s love.  Not like this.  She provides the stuff everyday for eight months, pumping them full of tender words, ambushing them with hugs, delivering multitudes of kisses upon their unsuspecting heads. 

I usually only kiss and embrace the children when I find out that one of their relatives has passed away.  She’s 24-7 into this tender-loving-care business.  I’m learning from her . . .

Once upon a time, an itinerant pastor by the name of Joel insulted her in front of some of the kids, because she’d been too sick to attend a Sunday service and he decided her absence was a manifestation of a lack of faith, a breach in his personal code of Good Christianity.  I wasn’t there for the verbal bruising, but checked on her shortly afterwards and saw immediately that something wasn’t right.  She told it to me plainly, and I saw her cry for the first (but not the last) time.  I believe this was the point where the year suddenly became a much fiercer beast. 

I tell her that what she is doing is far more difficult than what I do.  She has walked into a patriarchal culture where most men still see women as property, who are meant to serve their every need, bow to the ground when greeting visitors, and consider a beating to be a husband’s fundamental right.  The fact that she can speak and argue with greater eloquence and tenacity than almost any man in town awakens feelings of intimidation in many a masculine heart.  So they want to try to put you in your place, I tell her.  Or their place . . .

But don’t let this shit get you down.

She and I were the ones who discovered the septic wound on Daniel’s shin.  The kid came out of nowhere with a smile the size of the Vegas Strip and a heart big enough and magnetic enough to swallow whole teams of missionaries in an instant.  A single blast of his divine laughter and you were already falling in love.  Akuru John said Daniel was his brother, which was easy to believe.  (Apart from sharing similar facial feature, they both have the gift of drawing out people’s affection.)  I thought Daniel would return from whence he came, but he stayed for dinner and was still hanging around during the impromptu dance party in our lamplit dining room.  After we shut the festivities down, John said his brother had a dabara on his leg.  I expected to find a minor cut when I rolled up his pant’s leg to assess the damage; instead I discovered a five inch gash that appeared to have opened out of a web of old scar tissue.  In a slightly shocked movie voice I told Sophie she needed to have a look at this . . .

The bond between them grows as the days tumble into one another.  He becomes a constant fixture in her room, poking about at her things, dancing to her music, forcibly uncovering any and every reason to be close to her.  He manages to be both a splendid blessing and a spectacular annoyance. 

His mother is a desperate soul repeatedly displaced by the Lord’s Resistance Army; his father, one of the countless casualties of a pointless war.  And so Daniel slips effortlessly into our home, laying claim to the emotional territory inside each one of us as if he’s a long lost relative who has returned to take what has always belonged to him.

Then, to our dismay, he begins experiencing periods of extraordinary pain.  The hurt radiates from his chest and causes his entire body to slacken, his lips to loosen and spin out strings of drool, his consciousness to come and go, his eyes to blaze or deaden or close completely.  After two or three episodes, Matt takes him to the hospital where the doctors admit him, but due to their limited facilities they cannot explain to us exactly what is wrong.

They said the pain constituted some kind of cardiac failure, which could be due to an imperfection in the chest (of an otherwise perfect boy) or due to an infection.  The festering wound on his shin may have festered for so long that the infective agents spread throughout his body, finding footholds in the bulwarks of his heart. 

The nurses told us they remembered Daniel from the time that he was admitted last year.  He’d fallen from a tamarind tree whose fruit he’d been collecting.  His bone must’ve busted through the flesh of his shin.  Unfortunately, whoever set his leg set it rather poorly, because the boy walks with a limp, a visible misalignment in his bone, a curve in his leg starting at his knee and ending above his foot.  I imagine the resulting clumsiness in his step may have caused him to fall again this year.

And reopen the old wounds.

He is checked out with a bouquet of antibiotics and painkillers which are meant to fight both the infection in the leg and the theoretical one near or within his heart.  As the days stagger forward, his episodes of absolute pain begin to decrease until they stop completely.  Matt and Ansley must be departing now, but before they go Matt shows Sophie how to dress Daniel’s slowly shrinking wound, twice each day, morning and evening.  Daniel will probably hate when the wound is finally closed, because he loves the attention he receives when someone removes the dirty bandages, washes the injury, and adorns the red slash with ointment and fresh dressings.  He especially loves the process when the person who carries it out is overtly, fanatically, everlastingly in love with him.

In August we were exhausted and not ready for (or particularly excited about) more visitors, but Charlene and John didn’t know that and they came anyway.  To our surprise, they spent a good deal of their time ministering to us, teaching us about the Spirit, reminding us of why God placed us here.  And in midst of this spiritual renaissance, God revealed something unforeseen to Sophie.  He told her she needed to go home sooner than she’d intended.  In fact, he told her he wanted her back in the States by the middle of September.  He wanted her to sacrifice the last three months of the year – time which she would’ve otherwise spent with the kids (and with me). 

And the kicker:  the good shepherd got all shut-mouth when it came to the question of why.  He seemed to be asking her go and find out the answer for herself.

Since the day I learned that she  would be leaving earlier than originally planned, I’ve been making my own new plans, which involve the controlling of my emotions when I have to watch her board the plane.  She enters the office today while Santos and I are discussing clamping down on the kids’ almost nonstop tendency to ask for stuff.  She says something to Santos and the two of them go for a round or two of cute back-and-forth.  I look at the scratched-up surface of my desk and feel tears edging their way into my eyes.

I’m not in love with her.  I just love her dearly, and I’m going to miss her more than some fiery undergrad affair, more than some seemingly endless, yet sadly cut-short summer from my unrecoverable childhood, and more and more, rather than less, as the days rush on ahead as if nothing actually happened, as if there never was a time when she and I did a damn fine job of being the mom and dad to forty-some kids in one of the poorest places on earth.

The lengths that time will go to so as to prove its indifference to the lengths of the human heart . . .

I’m not ready to make sense of all of this.  What I know is that she’s gone, and she took our little white bastard with her.  And now the canine sentinel is crouched on her front porch in Cincinnati, Ohio – a wooden echo of our flesh and blood dog who lies in luxurious stupidity beside the door to her former room, waiting and waiting for God knows what.   

In these absentminded days, I will bend down to give the poor thing a few pats on his head and I’ll tell it to him straight.  I’ll say, “Look, you lazy, fat, flea-infested mutt, if you’re waiting for a first class lady like Sophie to just appear out of nowhere and start living here in this scorching hot patriarchal society with you and a bunch of crazy-ass orphans then, you know what, you’re an idiot.  You’re a brainless carbon unit and no one likes you.  But I like you.  You remind me of myself.”

On Sunday morning Betty suspected that there wasn’t enough bread for all of us.  I told her to count the pieces that we’d bought from Pastor Juma’s wife.  I told her this in passing, then set myself to another small errand (probably ferrying a jerry can of water to the bathing shelter).  After completing my task, I went to the dining area to check Betty’s progress.  I found she was still counting and so I sat down across from her and tried to calm my nerves.  (Sunday mornings are slightly hectic endeavors as we prepare the kids and ourselves for church.)  I watched her transferring the bread from a blue bucket to an orange one and counting the pieces two-by-two in Madi.  Her numbers were a sing-song murmur, and I fell in love with the way she double checked herself.  Once the orange bucket was full, she restored them all to their original location, which meant I listened again to her enumeration, faintly melodic and presented in one of the many tribal tongues that circumvents my ears.  It was even better the second time around.  As my senses were tempered by her voice, I felt myself seeing her for the first time.  Her eyes were downcast; her face was concentrated beauty.  Her mother, who left town a few months ago, has higher cheekbones, sharper eyes, and if you look at the sole of an iron machine then you’ll see the hard then tapering contours of her face, and yet she gave Betty a charming nose and an upper lip that’s so full it almost forgets to dip in its middle.  The girl’s yielding eyes and elliptical face must’ve been the gifts of her father, even though I’ve never seen the man to confirm my idea, and never will.  I thought about what he must have seen with Betty’s eyes when he fought in the liberation army.  I thought of the illness in his mind, which Betty will never be able to cure through recollection.  I saw her mother’s unbreakable carved-from-midnight face, the lack of tears in her retelling of a self-inflicted death midway through an exodus in 2004.  I thought of how Betty must miss him, how she must long for his approval, for his eyes on her (and only her).

And there in our dining room in a spell of quietness within an otherwise hyperactive Sunday morning my faith rears its unruly head and advocates the impossibility that her father’s war-torn eyes will one day recover their innocence, fiercely supports my feeling that there are eternal glances between souls in the post-world, and worsens the good cancer inside me that says there won’t merely be a recovery of what was lost, but a transformation by the spilt blood of the servant king, the final victim and conqueror in the war above (and in the subterranean depths of) every conflict, every holocaust, every beating and blown-up heart.

After Betty’s father was gone, the family had no one to lead them into refuge.  So they turned around and walked back to Nimule to wait on peace, that fainting hope for a better world.  Against every expectation in the devil’s province, the war in Sudan ended a year after it claimed her father’s life.

As it turns out, Betty was also wrong.

There were 150 pieces of bread; there was enough for everyone.

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternatively stone in you and star.

                                – Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m recovering from a second round of the ol’ malaria parasite.  It seems the pesky bug laid some eggs in my liver last June and out the little suckers popped, unwelcome visitors in mid-August wreaking havoc with my immune system.  They were more restrained this time around or perhaps more sinister.  I didn’t get the two day tour of diarrhea, vomiting, and fever, but a the weeklong deluxe package deal that included headaches, joint pain, general exhaustion, minor delusions and dismay at all the “prettified happiness” of our world – the symptoms of a hangover, a very very long and seemingly ineradicable hangover, a drowning of the soul so to speak . . .

Half way through the immune system shake-up two wonderful visitors from San Antonio arrived:  John with a faux-hawk, huge jet-black DKNY sunglasses and enough fabuloucity and Holy Spirit to light up Broadway (or at least a strip mall somewhere in Missouri), and his aunt Charlene, a tall black woman with green irises, ageless skin, and the voice of a sage.  John is the product of an interracial marriage, and I feel it is inappropriate, at this point, to mention that when Erykah Badu met him in his check-out line at Wal-Mart she realized that he was the result of a different kind of fever and boldly proclaimed, “Black and white, baby, it’s a beautiful thing!”

So all this was, as you might expect, terrifying.  However, the real soul-swallowing horror – the low point of my week of illness – began when Charlene gave Sophie a recent copy of People magazine and I knew Sophie would be giving it to me like it was some kind of precious manifesto from an alternative universe.  (We don’t get American gossip rags around here so receiving a copy of People was analogous to US soldiers getting their hands on a box of cigs in the trenches of the Great War.)  I was high on meds and yes – GOD YES! – I wanted to see Brad and Angelina’s new babies and see random celebs wearing swimsuits and rolled-up jeans straight out of 1985.  And yes I wanted to know whatever happened to Lauryn Hill, whatever happened to the summer of 1998 . . .

When the magazine was safely in my possession I went to my office and shut the door, my face stricken with a lust for trash.  Sweat was pouring into my eyes and my heart was pounding like a blockbuster soundtrack.  The malaria blues mixed with the prescription high exacerbated the dark need to feast my eyes on the world of wealth and beauty.  But I got my heart stuck on Lauryn and what was the summer of her Miseducation and how I seemed to have forgotten it all, or missed it all . . .

Back in July there was a night where the missionary girls who were around at that time – they’ve since departed – were organizing the donated clothes for the kids.  Drew and Seth and I were listening to the Boss while the girls laughed and talked in the adjacent room.  Then I found Miseducation on Drew’s iPod and hit play.  I remember meaning to buy the album like the other 8 million people a decade ago, but something held me back and I never had the pleasure of hearing it.  But I got it that night and hit something deep inside me.  Pras is absolutely dead-on accurate when he says that she has something that can move mountains.  Part Nina Simone and part Motown and mostly all her own – her voice shook me up.  How the hell did I miss this for so long!  While I dropping my jaw in wonder, the missionary girls starting playing dress up and Seth joined in, putting on a Christian Service Brigade button-up and making himself look like a Latino hood.  The girls and Seth knew the words to Lauryn’s songs and did some back-up singing.  This was – and I mean this in the nicest possible way to my readers out there – a bad idea.  You can’t sing along with L-Boogie!

Now, in my present stage of decrepitude within the weird locale of my lonely office here in this bordertown and with the time aching nearer and nearer to midnight and my mind feeling like a dirty mound of melting snow, I meditated on Ms. Hill, her five kids, her sporadic output since that summer, her suburban life, and I went back to that time, the things I got and the things I missed completely, the wet party girl kisses that once felt like eternity wrapped in a bow, the promises that turned out to be semi-vicious jokes, the year that was just there to delay me from getting out of Kansas, and no God or gods in sight, except my pen, the lord I believed might one day usher me into some bohemian dream, some secretly desired recognition, some over-the-rainbow . . .

As I sat there in my office, as I hunched over the glossy pages like a scientist fingering his hypotheses, as I let my brain escape and circle the stars and the planets, I came to the conclusion that I was in love with Lauryn Hill – that I had, in fact, always been in love with her – and I went to bed with this conviction, setting myself up for a night of torment.  Hour after hour I awoke gasping for air beneath my mosquito net.  Hour after hour I got the feeling – like an obscenely loud knock at the backdoor – that the whole world was askew, out of line, not as it should be.  The madness has since worn off.  I feel like my old self this week, like my soul has returned to my body after an unscheduled Wanderjahr.  But I still feel a tangible, yet inexplicable connection to Ms. Hill.  Maybe it’s a kind of cabin fever setting in after almost a year in Sudan.  Maybe it’s something else . . .