(a journal)

Last night, we dragged our foam mattresses up to the concrete roof of the house, tied a mosquito net to the underside of the satellite dish, and slept under the nearly full moon. This morning I woke up to see the egrets overhead, white and crooked-necked, flying west to the river.

An hour later, we finished packing the car and began the day-long drive back to the capital.

And so I’m back at the urban guesthouse with the fluorescent lights and mildewed walls, unable to sleep. There are all these things that deserve explanation: The pigeons received as a gift yesterday evening, the way the moon looked at dawn. The eight year-old neighbor who sat against the wall of the compound this morning and refused to smile. Goodbyes alongside cars that are already running, I’m always leaving.

In the yard, I make airplanes out of torn notebook pages, the creases in the paper already red from the dust on my fingers. A young man roasts a rat over a small fire, then eviscerates it with a dull knife and hangs the charred body from a tree. The little boys fly the airplanes briefly, then fold them into guns.

At sunset, I sit outside the walled compound, in a plastic chair, in the patch of dirt alongside the new ditch. The older children have been digging this ditch all afternoon, the younger dangling their legs over the edge and watching boys play soccer across the way. Dark comes fast; the soccer game and the distant grove of baobab trees disappear into it. When I switch on a battery-powered light to read, the younger children gather behind my chair. For awhile, they quietly watch my book, but then they turn into a little circle, whispering and tracing shapes in the sand by the cast-off light. There’s heat lightning to the south, but no rain.

The call to prayer begins at a quarter to eight, amplified and crackling over some cheap loudspeaker at the nearby mosque. The children spread out, then lie on their backs in the piles of sand that have been shoveled out of the earth. I turn off my light and look up, too, and we watch the stars through the atmospheres of cooking-smoke and dust.

We drove ten hours north and east from the capital, speeding over new roads. Camels kneel on the sidestreets here, and the wells at the edge of town are crowded with people lowering and lifting plastic containers for water.

Late last night, I was woken by the sound of metal shutters clanging against the window-grates. Then the thunder, then the lightning just discernible through my own shuttered window. I closed my eyes and waited for the rain. It fell, finally, hard and fast against the flat roof and tin doors. At sunrise, I ran the road toward Burkina Faso. There is a bridge along that road where boys quietly chant the Koran; below them, the riverbed was still dry.

In the malaria ward at the pediatric hospital, the doctor recites the status of the children. This one is emerging from coma. This one is doing much better. They have quinine drips and transfusion bags, sometimes an IV stand shared between two patients. At one bed, a father, dressed meticulously in a kaftan, stands perfectly still beside his daughter. I’m not sure he understands the French.

This is, for selfish reasons, a hard place for me to be. Outside the ward, in the open-air hall, I lean against the wall and try not to think about why.

I handwash clothes in a plastic tub on the floor of my bathroom while my laptop dials up Air France. The reservation agent greets me as I consider the dustiness of the wastewater. There is the sound of dripping, then the sound of her accented English, reverberating a bit in the bare tiled room. There are salamanders on the walls. This world is a contradictory place.

The first time I rode a motorbike taxi through a West African capital was in early December, over five years ago, in Lagos. I was giddy with infatuation, overwhelmed by the city’s frenetic crush of yellow busses and packed bridges and industrial edges crumbling into urban fishing villages. I wore heavy wood earrings that morning, a gift to myself in a market in Johannesburg a week before. When the bike hit the smooth roads of Victoria Island and picked up speed, I had to take my hands off the seat to press the earrings against my neck.

So here I am again, in a long skirt, on the back of a cheap motorbike, heading toward the river. In this country, I’m shouting broken French to the driver, who is also my friend. Speeding through cities this way– without a helmet, the heat of the exhaust at my heels– must be one of my great loves. We join the traffic over the bridge.

The city smells like diesel and dust, exactly as I expected it to.

As evening falls, I stand in my courtyard and watch the driver haggle over a small pile of fake Nokias that another man has brought in. I buy a phone. The guard stands a few feet from his motorbike, turns away, and performs ablutions. At ten minutes to eight, somewhere in this quartier of the city, the muezzin begins the call to prayer.

On this continent again, finally. Tonight I’m in a university guesthouse at the top of a hill: stucco walls and dusty shelves, bars of fluorescent lights at the ceiling. Astonishingly, there is an Internet connection. And, in the courtyard, a guard who sleeps beside his motorbike. I had forgotten about the guards.

At the end of the day, we stand barefoot in my third-floor room, the June light filtering through the blinds. I fold my hand around his jaw– he’s got a great jaw, a lovely mouth. He speaks with a Canadian raising, the vowels are all funny to me, but his voice is gentle. I am more myself here than I have been for a long time. Tomorrow night, I leave for Africa. We make the briefest of plans and no promises.