A Sense of Place

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

I got a package in the mail today. The ripped open and re-taped lump of cardboard that arrived looked like a shining gift as it was placed in my eager outstretched hands. Within the box I found a ton of clothes and a book called A Sense of Place, which includes transcribed conversations with travel writers “about their craft, lives and inspiration.”

It’s led me to thinking a lot about writing, traveling and the idea of having a sense of place. The significance and reliability of the three are so interwoven in the book that I have really taken to it. Just thought I’d share a few discoveries on what some famous travel writers have derived from their experiences:

“It’s a great big huge world. Say you’d been to every single place I’d been to in my life except that you were ten feet to my right. You would have lived a totally different trip…They (Wordsworth and Emerson) said, ‘Poetry is strong emotion recollected in tranquility.’ And I said, ‘Adventure is physical or emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.’ An adventure is never an adventure when it’s happening. An adventure is only an adventure when you’ve had time to sit back and think about it.”

-Tim Cahill, in an interview for Sense of Place

“That’s why the words ‘Let’s go!’ are intrinsically courageous. It’s the decision to go that is, in itself, entirely intrepid. We know from the first step that travel is often a matter of confronting our fear of the unfamiliar and the unsettling – of the rooster’s head in the soup, of the raggedy edge of unfocused dread, of that cliff face that draws us willy-nilly to its lip and forces us to peer into the void.”

-Tim Cahill, “Exotic Places Made Me Do It,” Outside

“Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression ‘a place in the sun’ first come from? My rational thought processes cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate. I’m here because I climbed out the window at night when I was four.”

-Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“That little moment of climbing out the window is kind of the impulse: Go. And I always feel that, I feel very split always between the desire to stay, the desire for home, the desire for the nest, the desire to gather people around in the home, and that equal passion to shut the door and go, to leave it all behind and seek what’s out there. So I think for me writing partly comes from the tension between those two things. And it’s odd because they both involve a sense of place, the place being the home, the domestic, and then the place being out there to be discovered.”

-Frances Mayes, in an interview for Sense of Place

“’Fiction’ comes not from this imaginary Latin verb fictia meaning I make it up as I go along. It comes from the actual Latin verb fictia meaning, I give shape to.”

-Jonathan Raban, in an interview for Sense of Place

Oh…love, love, love.

Thursday, March 8, 2007

In honor of Women’s Day - a story about a strong Cape Verdean woman (who represents an honest mixture of the women I know):

Daybreak

She only wishes she could awake with the sun, but her almond eyes open long before the first rays of light have drifted over the crater behind her stone house. She blinks in the darkness and reaches her long slender arms toward the familiar place where she keeps the candle, and a small box of matches. One quick strike and the dark room flares up in a vision of oranges, yellows and deep reds. For a moment, the sleeping bodies of ten others on the three beds are seared into the vision of her mind. They stir, breathe deeply and escape slumber, unwillingly and with heavy bodies clinging to the lingering moments of dreams.

She grabs her thin wrap and folds it expertly around her coarse plaited hair. The Portuguese gold earrings gleam momentarily in the flickering light thrown from the flame in her careful grasp as she creaks open the heavy wooden door and makes her way slowly to the kitchen outside. Bending down over her layers of tattered clothing, she enters the cozinha de lenha (kitchen of firewood) and grabs a few meager sticks to place beneath the pot above the smoking embers. Blowing on the flame she pours the grains of coffee from a wrinkled bag and thinks to herself she is glad she had the time yesterday to pound the coffee beans into the fine substance that she depends on to will herself awake at this early hour.

The fire begins to take hold and the thick, curling hands of smoke grab her throat and beg tears from her irritated eyes. She leans low over a large bowl and pours flour and water slowly into the palm of her rough yet capable hands. She begins to knead the dough and her life once again takes the form of one who is not truly living, yet existing simply to fulfill the tasks that will see her thin muscular body through yet another day. The angular strength of her cheekbones are highlighted in the smoky light that filters through the room, clings to the strong jaw and wide, firm lips pressed in effort against the kneading of heavy dough.

While she is not yet done with her bread and the faint aroma of coffee is just beginning to overcome the smell of smoke, her husband walks in with heavy steps and prepares to leave for another hard day of work in the fields. He looks at her briefly, ignores her presence routinely and she listens as he leaves the room, trudges toward the tree where the donkey is tied, and slaps its flanks in an effort to move the stubborn animal along. In that moment, the first signs of dawn are approaching and she can hear the sounds of the tiny community awakening – roosters crowing, donkeys burrowing, voices yelling to one another in Kriolu along the cobblestone path outside.

A mixture of high-pitched laughter and argument comes from the house across the stone quintal and she looks toward the door as a tiny ten-year-old body walks beneath the thin shirts, sheets and other faded clothing hanging along the line like a long row of subtlety and surrender. She forgets her work for a moment and imagines she too is a limp article of clothing, once vibrant and now hanging low, fully lacking of color and worth. The voice of her child, now in front of her, brings her back and she nods toward a can and tells the knock-kneed shivering body to go to the store and buy sugar. The clanking of a few meager coins rattles the woman’s nerves as the child discovers the change and walks down the rocky dirt path toward the store. She stares, still lost in her thoughts, as she watches her daughter’s tightly curled braids disappear in a moment around the papaya trees along the otherwise desolate street corner…

The baby’s shrieking pulls her back to reality like the forceful slap of a belt. She wipes her dough-covered hands on her dresses and with five quick strides enters the house and forcefully grabs the writhing body from the hands of her seven-year old son. In low, guttural intonations she chastises the boy for being burro (stupid) and slaps his hands as she orders him to feed the pig outside. Her four-year-old daughter is late taking her bath and she too is scolded and told to leave immediately for the jardìm (kindergarten) down the road. Taking her baby in her arms, she finds a wrap and ties the tiny body to her breast so she can continue her work and nurse at the same time. She orders her oldest son to fetch water with his sisters who are already walking down to the well with buckets balanced atop their tiny heads and strong necks.

As she begins to sweep the dirt cobblestone outside she notices the sun is just beginning to rise and the pinks and yellows fade to a dull, light blue. She looks out over the expanse of ocean laid before her like one long, empty table and wonders what lies beyond. Leaning against her broom and feeling the warmth of the tiny bundle nestled to her breast (her sixth child, and she, only 32 years old) she imagines living a million other lives. She tries to cry but discovers feeling much beyond weary takes too much strength. And so the tears come only in the mornings, unwillingly and without allowance as the smoke from the fire burns the lingering dreams out of her eyes and she prepares for yet another daybreak.


Friday, March 9, 2007

This is something my roommate found and shared with me - I thought it worth passing along…
I Stand In Awe
Loret Miller Ruppe
In 1983, I was invited to the White House for the state visit of Prime Minister Ratu Mara of Fiji. Everyone took their seats around an enormous table—President Reagan, Vice-President Bush, Caspar Weinberger, the rest of the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister and his delegation, and me. They talked about world conditions, sugar quotas, nuclear-free zones. The President asked the Prime Minister to make his presentation. A very distinguished gentleman, he drew himself up and said: “President Reagan, I bring you today the sincere thanks of my government and my people.” Everybody held their breath and there was total silence. “For the men and women of Peace Corps who go out into our villages, who live with our people.” He went on and on. I beamed. Vice-President Bush leaned over afterwards and whispered, “What did you pay that man to say that?”
A week later, the Office of Management and Budget presented the budget to President Reagan with a cut for the Peace Corps. President Reagan said, “Don’t cut the Peace Corps. It’s the only thing I got thanked for last week at the state dinner.” Peace Corps’ budget was increased. Vice-President Bush asked again: “What did you pay?”
Well, we know one thing: it isn’t for pay that Volunteers give their blood, their sacred honor. I can never forget the sweat, the tears, the frustrations, the best efforts and successes of thousands of Peace Corps Volunteers. I stand in awe and with the deepest respect. I always thought I could be a Volunteer until I went out and met them.
I ended many speeches when I was Peace Corps Director with this: Peace, that beautiful five-letter word we all say we crave and pray for, is up for grabs in the ‘90s. A question must be answered above and beyond this special forum: Is peace simply the absence of war? Or is the absence of the conditions that bring on war—hunger, disease, poverty, illiteracy, and despair?
When fifty percent of the children die in a village before they are five; when women walk miles for water and then search for wood to cook by; when farmers leave their villages where there are no jobs to flock to cities where there are no jobs; when neighbours ethnically cleanse their neighbours, then let’s face it America, the world is not at peace.
And here at home, when fifty percent of our children live below the poverty level in many of our cities, when the homeless abound on our streets, when our nation’s capital is bankrupt and our schools require metal detectors, racial tensions abound and immigrant bashing and downsizing terrorizes loyal workers, then, let’s face it America, we are not at peace.
The Peace Corps family must respond again to “Ask not what your country can do for you, rather ask what you can do for your country.” And today, in our world, it is, as President Kennedy said, the “towering task.” We can do it!

Saturday, March 10, 2007

There is a part of me that sometimes wonders if Cape Verde is somewhere I can ever picture myself living – and here I am, living. It is strange because when you have a dream to do this as long as I have, you can’t help but have preconceived ideas about the experience. Since my eleven-year-old mind set my heart on joining the Peace Corps, I think I always pictured myself living in the lush leaves of a rainforest, much like the cloud forest reserve of Costa Rica or the sandy beaches of Brazil. I pictured myself working with the environment and living a very simple lifestyle. I pictured it fitting who I was.

I never pictured living where I am now. This place, at first, kind of rubs you the wrong way. It is rough and harsh and beautiful in all the wrong ways – so obviously it takes some getting used to. Yet what I am finding is that although this place doesn’t mirror any part of me, it is growing on me like I’d never imagined. I am beginning to love the brutal honesty, the acceptance of the way things are, the hard work, the importance of family, the struggles that require perseverance, the determination that lies behind the eyes of those who know that Cape Verde will never have enough food, or resources or jobs to sustain itself.

I am becoming used to the smells, the rough ways in which people communicate with one another, the dirt, the dryness, the wind. And what I am slowly discovering is that I have always seen myself as a fragile person – worried the petals of my exterior would whither under harsh, sunlit rays. And yet, maybe this place does mirror me in a way. Here my roots are growing and although those petals are indeed withering away, I am realizing that I am of an entirely different species. A species that drops its delicate accessories to reveal beneath a strong, deep core. It’s not a bad reflection.

Love ... and everything else that matters

Thursday, February 14, 2007

There was a big build-up to Valentine’s Day; or, more appropriately, Dia das Namoradas (day of girl/boyfriends) here in Ponta Verde. I received a cut out invitation down the road where there was going to be a dance, a lot of my younger female students were talking about what their much older boyfriends were going to get them, and I was given a cheap plastic rose. Yet my mind couldn’t have been further from the date. Today the father of the woman who calls me her child - and whom I have dubbed as my Cape Verdean mom – passed away.

I have been to other funerals before and have experienced, in some ways, the common rituals and practices among Cape Verdeans who have lost a loved one. Yet this time it was my family who was aching. It was my best friend who headed the funeral procession wailing for the town to hear her suffering as she walked dazed and was held up on both sides down the dirt path. It was her cries that echoed through the town. This was my family - these people whose smiling eyes had turned to sorrow and whose colorful clothes were now drowning in black. It was the arms of those who had held me up all this time who now turned to lean heavily upon me.

Due to the proximity of this family to my heart, I learned a lot more about how people cope with death:

Three days after a person dies the body “comes” and there is a funeral. A week, month and then year after the death there is a church service in honor of the deceased. In the family’s home, there is a room that is cleared of furniture and emptied for visitors to come and pray for the soul of the person who has passed. In another cleared-away room many chairs are placed for the mourners to sit and wait to receive those who have come to pay their respects. After visitors have said a prayer, they make their way to this room and shake the hand of each person dressed in black. This is when the wailing starts. It is a deep, guttural sound - an almost forced sigh that escapes the throat at first in a mournful whisper or whine, and then continues to rise like the melody of a song. The melody often takes a harsh turn and often the mourners are caught up in their sorrow and it becomes a wailing, crying, shrieking, painful thing to watch and hear. Doors are thrown open and people take their sorrow to the open air and throw out the internal emotions to the wind. Tears and blood and pain writhe outward and lend to the volume of this world.

At the end of the week of mourning, the mourners are almost walking zombies themselves. During that first week, visitors are accepted at all hours and it is custom for those mourning to express their pain through these wails. It is a forced, drawn-out practice that leaves even the most passionate of mourners barely standing after a week of taking visitors, accepting the loss and crying. In this case, the house of the man who died was a 25-minute walk along a narrow twisting path up the crater behind my house. The family had to walk up and down gathering food for visitors and preparing for the funeral sometimes four times a day. My best friend, who normally won’t leave the house with a hair out of place, was worn ragged and thin, her hair hanging in her face and her eyes dark from crying and lack of sleep. I couldn’t take my eyes off the black clothing and I sat down with her, hoping to God her high-spirited personality hadn’t drown in the darkness for good. We talked and she showed me a photo of her grandfather. I helped her fill bags of water to freeze and she did what does not seem to be the cultural norm here, despite the open mourning – she told me how she felt about his death.

On this day I held my best friend’s hand and supported the members of a family that have been good enough to guide and support me since I have arrived in a foreign place where I didn’t understand anything. They opened to me like only family would. I have the stains of their tears on my shoulder. I have the warmth of their hands gripping mine for balance. And that acknowledgement of connection taught me about a different kind of love this year.


Sunday, February 18, 2007

I haven’t gotten a lot done today. My roommate and I are calling it our “American day,” which we sometimes do when we feel like ditching the 5 a.m. runs, hilly walks, tiring visits and intense Kriolu sessions. Today we are keeping our windows shut and hiding from the world, existing in a reality where only music, books, journaling and writing letters back home matters. I did try to wash my clothes earlier, but the weather sent me on my way. Now I am bundled up in bed, the covers pulled tight around me and the sound of wind howling through the cracks of my refrigerator of a house. Now I hear children’s voices outside. I can make out the sounds of their little feet as they trudge up the cement steps to my door. Knock, knock, knock. So much for American day, I think, frowning. Then, against my stubborn intent to turn them away, I think of their little faces and smile.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Lately I find it difficult to get through the Newsweeks that arrive every two months from the Peace Corps office. Since there is no television in my house and since the BBC has adamantly decided not to come in clearly on my short wave radio, I usually look forward to the pack of magazines that can catch me up on the latest world news. Don’t get me wrong – as a print journalism major I often feel as inundated and repelled by the columns upon columns of writing that depict the latest upheavals, famines, scientific breakthroughs and war, war, war of the content as the next person – but somehow it has, until late, given me comfort to know what is going on in the world. Yet with the last stack I have discovered this connection to the international atrocities have been particularly stomach wrenching.

Here’s a brief example: I just read about Oprah’s $40 million school that she is building for impoverished girls in South Africa. I read that she has an extensive selection process with an acceptance rate of 4% (Harvard’s acceptance rate is 9%, just to put it in perspective). One hundred and fifty-two girls will be accepted into this elaborately constructed and ornately decorated Oprah-esque “leadership-making” lab. Her idea is that surrounding villages will send their most promising young girls to be selected to enter a school that will, Oprah hopes, birth a generation of well-educated women who will go on to be leaders in their impoverished communities.

Good for her. She is doing a generous thing by spending a ton of money. I mean - everybody loves Oprah, right? At least they did when I left the U.S. eight months ago … I know a lot can change. My humble concern is this: why create one elitist school for 152 girls that ranks in at $40 million when you could construct ten $4 million dollar schools that would be beautiful and that would educate a whole hell of a lot more? Just cut back on a little closet space, give them 40 pencils instead of 50 in that cup by their beds? Maybe cut back on the matching china or silverware?? Save some dough on the fashion show she attended in order to pick out the girls’ uniforms? And the whole “have a village send their most promising girls” bit is complete crap if you understand the way villages are set up. The simple fact is that the girl who comes from a family with wealth and power will pass up the poor girl with all the potential in the world. Maybe Oprah didn’t think about that. You could say it’s a generous project and you would be correct – but I think it has seriously overlooked flaws that have been downsized by her desire to save the little girl (admittedly, herself) that she sees in these applicants. I don’t know, that’s just me.

Once I read about the U.S. Interior Department’s proposal that Artic polar bears are to be listed as a threatened species due to global warming, and statements such as: “the U.S. is entering a new period of post-U.S. dominance,” I opted for the lighter content of a Shape magazine my father had sent me in the mail. While I marveled at the firm, bronzed bodies of models and celebrities and flipped impatiently through the pages upon pages of Christmas gift suggestions and makeup tips, I began to fully realize that eight months has the ability to change a person drastically. I used to read the issues in the news, become distraught, think hard about it, discuss, and then go about my day. After all, you can’t allow things like world hunger and obesity to place a cloud of pity over your head all the time, right (place a curious form of sarcasm here)? I used to mind-numbingly flip through celebrity news, bitch about it and loathe the gossip chain or obsession with the tangible things in life.

Now it is hard to know what to feel about it all. I suddenly feel so separate from current events, yet all the more influenced. I compare it all to the life I live here – where food is imported from other countries only when it has passed its due date, and where the population on Fogo is less than the students who attend my commuter college back home. Dirt paths and donkeys have replaced my world of freeways and cars. Swimming pools in every backyard versus my concern that the well in the back of my house will dry up before the next rain in June. Three car crashes a week that I barely blinked at along the 91 and a truck that dumped into the ribeira and was the talk of Ponta Verde for weeks. Here, news is not about the latest NASA space race or the possibility of a woman becoming president. I was simply shocked the other day when a Cape Verdean woman stood up to a man here (it was the first woman I have seen openly defend her opinion in front of a man in my little community, and she has spent the last 20 years in Portugal, which probably explains it). Space travel here is considered traveling 45 minutes by car to the other side of the island. I’m not really exaggerating.

So, predictably, all I mean to communicate in this long and possibly drawn-out entry is that reading life on a world-scale and living on an island-scale are pretty contrasting perspectives – it makes me wonder what it will feel like to enter that world again.


Tuesday, February 27, 2007

I feel like I have stumbled into a jumbled box of mixed messages. “What is it like to be in Peace Corps in Fogo?” people back home often ask. Well, it’s like being in a world where everything on the surface hints at realities that do not truly exist. There is money (too much of it) and there is no money (not nearly enough). An author of a Cape Verde travel book once wrote this in his introduction:

He met, by all appearances, well-to-do men on a plane from Portugal headed to Cape Verde. Each man on the plane was well spoken and jovial, dressed in a suit, and gold rings on his fingers. He later ran into one of these (what he thought of as well-off) men on an island, stepping out of a tiny, worn-down shack of a home and into the dirt path. When the author greeted the man he learned that it was the house of his wife and children. He was visiting his family. The rest of the year he worked in a factory in Portugal. The suit and tie was a façade. So it goes in Cape Verde.

I am in Peace Corps. Yet, when I pictured my service in Africa I was prepared for living in “the bush” experience. I pictured poverty across the board, and sparse wealth among the upper classes. I think I pictured something like Brazil – the forgotten favellas (slums) of the side streets in contrast with wealthy overweight vacationers eating ice cream on the beach. I was prepared for that kind of distribution of wealth. Yet here, the mansion is next door to the shack. The one rich man living in a six bedroom home has a stunning view of the ocean … and the two bedroom hovel where ten people live and the children run around in rags for clothes.

Yesterday as I walked home from a visit, I ran into a woman who I consider the “celebrity” of Ponta Verde. She owns one of the three bars in town and four additional stories of her house stretch upward above its entrance like a palace. She is big and round and showers herself with jewelry. Her frequent comings and goings to and from America are the talk of the town and she drives around in her Land Cruiser when she feels the urge to go to bila. She informed me that she will be leaving for America soon and that she may stay there for months because there are no stores or malls one may go to in their free time, should one feel inclined to do so. She feels very inclined to do so. She also cannot wait to go back to the States because there she can turn on the T.V. and stay in her house all day and watch it if she wishes. And she does wish to do so. After all, Ponta Verde life is so stressful (what with her planning parties and leaving the house once a day and all that). I nod, oh so sympathetically.

I am learning to keep my mouth shut around the few people who live in the area and parade their wealth from their bright pink and orange mansions, broad iron gates, big attitudes and yellow sports cars (yes, there is a canary yellow Mustang convertible that speeds down the quaint cobblestone path each day). Here, as in most any place, image is everything.

Yet this image is deceiving. I went home and awoke the next day to a familiar knock on my door to take a glimpse at the other side of Ponta Verde – the side that screams poverty and injustice. (The part of Cape Verde that does not offer free public education past primary school and leaves hundreds of kids with only a sixth grade level of education, if that; the part that does not have Social Security or mental hospitals, addiction programs for people battling alcoholism, schools for those with learning disabilities, optometrists for my students who have visual problems and whose futures may suffer for lack of a simple pair of glasses.)

I answered the door. Four-year-old eyes looked up at me as a tiny body with a distended belly shivered in the cold. She’s too shy to speak much, but I know she wants to know if I will walk with her to kindergarten. I ask her if she’s had breakfast, and receive the usual answer in a whisper, “No.” These lovely brown eyes look up at me and all the beauty in them is contrasted with my feelings for her mother who sends her children to my house to beg so she won’t have to feed them. The soft side of me gives in and I give her a pop tart my dad sent from America. I’m not ready for school yet so I send her and her pop tart on their way. She will, like most days, return home for a beating (I will hear her screams from my house) and she will work as hard as her other five siblings. She won’t have a jacket. But at least today she will have a full stomach.

Two minutes after the four-year-old leaves the nine-year-old knocks on the door. She hasn’t eaten either and I resolve to talk to their mom about this. This second child has a severely deformed back from a childhood fall. The circle I can form between my pointer and thumb fingers have a circumference much wider than her arm. The mother of these children is expecting another baby any day now. I have heard that they are saving up for a T.V. They live on one side of my house, to the left. On the other side is one of the biggest mansions I have ever seen, on the right.


Thursday, March 1, 2007

Today was one of those days when I realize how much I love my new home. Nothing in particular happened. In fact, it was pretty bland in every way. I woke up at five to run, taught until the afternoon, announced a soccer game on Saturday, collected entries from people in the community who wrote compositions for a contest we organized in honor of Dia das Mulheres (Women’s Day), returned to the house and hand washed my sheets and towels, went back to school to give prep lessons to the sixth grade, went to the new sala de informatica (computer room) that just opened to give instruction on how to use programs, returned home to bring my laundry of the line and sweep, visited my good friend and bought some things at the store to make dinner…etc.

Despite all the running around I am just beginning to realize that this is Ponta Verde and not L.A. I think it’s ingrained in my being to rush and stress and be on a specific schedule to get everything done. I often hurry past people along the road imploring me to visit because I, in my American thinking, must get everything done. Today I let that go and allowed myself to slow down, relax and enjoy the company of my many friends here that I often neglect in a mad rush to uphold my responsibilities. And in doing this, I actually got more done. It’s a new pace that does not come second nature to me and is only now, in my ninth month in Cape Verde, beginning to take shape.

Now I am sitting on the floor, on a little duck-shaped bath mat my mom sent me in honor of the carpet I miss in the States (it makes the concrete floor all the more comfortable). My roommate is cooking tuna and grao (chickpeas) and I am reading her yoga book and comically attempting the positions as she laughs and as I take a moment here and there to write this entry. It is warm and serene in my house. My sheets are clean and there is a candle by my bedside with a new book to read. The aroma of cooking and the conversations of the day dance softly along the edges of my mind … and I am content to lean back and enjoy the slower pace.