Paska, one of our caretakers, is a woman with disposition as creased and hardened as the palms of her hands. I’ve developed a kind of involuntary affection for her, because she won’t do anything unless she’s told to do it, but when she’s told do it, then she’ll do it (gracelessly). She missed […]
Archive for December, 2007
Christmas was a sheep slaughtered in the morning and our children dressed in their new clothes and posing for the cameras. It was the joyous entrance of the choir and our prayers reaching out beyond the broken teeth of the fence. It was meat and rice and salad waiting without complaint in the […]
Two nights ago they started a fire on Gordon Hill, and it swept down in a long ribbon like a slanted line of forlorn hopes waving tattered colors. You could see the noxious orange and delirious yellow smoke rising into cloud forms above the hill before you could see the flames themselves. The dusk shivered […]
In the course of the past two years I’ve been misidentified time and time again. I’ve been called a soldier by a security guard at the Moyo airfield (“Are you hiding a gun under your hat?”), and I’ve been called mara de kweys or good woman by a group of Dinka ladies somewhere in the […]
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