Yell Fire

April 5, 2007

Reclining upon a lawn chair overlooking a glassy pool that reflected the starry night above, I sat and wished upon the falling stars in contentment. There were dim lights that illuminated my face in the darkness of the hotel’s ambience and I moved my eyes to the person reclining in another chair at my side. He was a German tourist, and he was talking about his life in Brazil, in Switzerland, in traveling the world. I listened to his kind, contemplative mood and my eyes wandered to the group of volunteers who had come to visit us from the mountainous island of Santo Antao. I thought about the epic beauty and great heights of both the Alps and the wondrous shifts of land in the sparkling mystery of the northern island of Barlavento that my friends call home, and I think, How did I get here?

My wandering mind shifts to my friend who lives within the crater of the volcano and I can accurately picture the enormous grin on his face, the hop in his dance step, and the inviting lyrics he mouths behind an ardent enthusiasm for reggae. I begin to think, as the German tourist inspects the inner workings of his fate, about what this sense of home is and how I would define this recently rooted feeling to the land in which I have been living for 9 months. A fondness for language, a newly acquired knack for cooking, the desire to create a space to belong, the familiar recognition in my neighbors’ eyes as I drive past and wave, an understanding of a my village’s culture. What makes a home a home? Is it a deep, internal craving for the nourishment of the soil? Or is it the anticipated acknowledgement and realignment of priorities, interpretations, and behavior?

For all these internal wanderings and misplaced precisions, I am content to close with a lack of conclusive thought. The future holds nothing but answers, and a myriad of new questions to consider. I look up into the night sky and see only the underbelly of an intricate tapestry being woven from above, and am content to wonder at its mysterious, illusive pattern.

April 6, 2007

Today is nine months completed in Cape Verde. It’s not yet a year, yet not little enough to be offhandedly thrown into the category of a mere stint in the forgotten abyss of African’s coastal Atlantic. It’s not enough to be fluent in Kriolu, but it is enough to have formed Fogo hick accent (think Minnesota accent, folks) even when I speak English, and I have more than a few times peppered my conversations with Kriolu when the English word is not as readily accessible in my mind.

My roommate wished me a happy nine months today and said, playfully, “You could have had a baby in this amount of time!” I laughed, but realized she was correct and thought of all the new people who were born in my village during my time here. New personalities, new responsibilities, new names, new conflicts, new love. In a way, I have given birth to a new life as well – my life. When I arrived, this new being was conceived within me and over the months I have often felt like a child, dependent upon others, learning to live in a new world, trying to speak and express myself all over again in order to respond to my new surroundings. And so today I give tribute to who I am, and for what I feel I have learned and accomplished during the infant stage of my experience on this volcanic rock amidst a tumultuous sea. Today I am opening my eyes, looking around, and using each day to grow into my new self.

April 7, 2007

“Those who start wars
Never fight them
Those who fight wars
They never like them
And those who write laws
They can’t recite them
And those of us who just fight laws -
We live and die them.”

-Spearhead, Yell Fire