Love at the Speed of Email (9 page)

But Bunny shot me a winsome smile.
“
Ahhh
!
You are very young. You are too young! Do you
like African men?”

“I like Africa. I like coming to Kenya.”

“That is good. I myself am in the marriage process. Yes,” he
said.

Temporarily relieved, thinking there was a girlfriend on the
scene, I ventured actively into the conversation.

“Oh, are you engaged?” I asked.

“Not yet.
But soon.”

“Oh, do you have a girlfriend?”

“Oh, no.
Not yet.
But soon.
I
am liking
the white
woman.”

By this stage I figured that all hope of a graceful and
reserved exit from this taxi had completely disappeared and I might as well ask
the question on my mind.

“What is so good about white women?”

“
Ahhh
... They are very good at
the love.”

This was more of an answer than I had bargained for.
Thankfully I stayed quiet long enough for Bunny to speak again. “They are very
good at the relationship. They have lots of understanding.”

“Understanding of what?” I asked, confused.
“Politics?”

Bunny laughed at me. “They are very social.”

It
was
a long trip
back to my hotel, albeit a rather entertaining one. By the end of it, Bunny had
figured out that I probably wasn't keen on marrying him. That didn't stop him
from handing me his phone number and email address as I got out.

“Do you think it's possible,” he asked, “that we could
meet?”

At least I think he said
meet
.
It might have been
mate
—the way his
accent, with its beautiful round cadence, smoothed out the words made it hard
for me to tell, but I chose to give him the benefit of the doubt. The answer
was the same in any case.

“I don't think it is possible,” I said.

At this Bunny gave me one last grin. “
Ahhh
,
but with God all things are possible.”

Bunny definitely had the last word in that conversation. I
had to agree that, yes, with God all things are possible, but I still wasn't
going to meet, or mate.

But between Bunny in Kenya and now Gideon in Baltimore, I
was beginning to wonder if I just might be missing something. After all, I
sometimes thought, I’d made several other major life decisions on the basis of
reasoning that more than one small nudge in the direction of an open door was
irrefutable proof, quite possibly divine guidance, that I should walk through
that door. Many of those decisions had worked out all right. Perhaps I was
making a mistake by continuing to turn down these types of offers, offers that
never seemed to come from remotely sensible options who actually lived anywhere
near L.A.
 

As we shook farewell, Gideon held my hand a shade longer
than necessary.

“If you have spent time in Africa, then you know me, here,”
Gideon said, placing his hand over his heart. “And since I have lived here for
almost ten years now, there is not so much I don't know about you, I think.
That makes love not so hard, I think.”

I smiled, thinking that I seemed to learn more about love
every time I talked to a taxi driver.

“Give me a call at your convenience,” Gideon said, handing
me his card. “I’ll take you to Nigeria.”

Itonga
, Vanuatu

While I was eating chocolate ice cream out of the carton and
chatting to taxi drivers on street corners, it seemed that Mike had been very
far from both ice cream and street corners. When a flurry of emails from him
hit my inbox after three weeks of silence, I smiled and immediately settled in
to read the first of these, a mass email to friends and family about his time
in Vanuatu.

Monday,
November 26

From:
Mike Wolfe

To:
Friends

Subject:
White skin and other tales from the bush

“If our blood is the
same color, why is my skin black and your skin white?” the village chief asked
me. It was my second day in
Itonga
village on
Tanna
Island. Relative to the nearest skyscraper,
Itonga
is a four-hour flight, then a one-hour hop in an
eight-
seater
biplane, then an hour drive down rutted
dirt roads, then a thirty-minute walk down into a tropical ravine on a steep
path crowded by dense foliage. No cars, no computers, no mobile phones, no
light bulbs, no Coca-Cola (gasp).

There’s a beautiful
simplicity to life in the bush.
 
The taro
roots (breakfast, lunch, dinner) come straight from the rich dark volcanic soil
of hillside gardens. Coconuts grow all around. The meat is slaughtered just
hours or minutes before we eat it, the muscles still twitching as three men
pick up an entire side of the cow and carry it to the roasting pit. The water
comes from the creek, which is nourished in turn by the downpours and the
gentle, steady rains that drip down thousands of verdant green leaves.
 

In the evenings, men
sit under the magnificent banyan tree drinking kava and telling stories while
the women finish up the day’s work, sometimes with a chorus of voices singing
thanks to God.
Sunrise, sunset.
Simple.
Sitting in
Itonga
on my last day of three weeks of
the bush, as the gentle rains massaged the bamboo hut, I felt an amazing sense
of connectedness. It was a beautiful moment. Pity that it took me three weeks
to arrive at that moment. For up until my last day in the bush, I had been
mostly counting the days until I got to leave.

I’ve been doing this
humanitarian aid and development work for a few years now. I still struggle
with my white skin. Most of the time it’s a liability, I think. When I show up
in a village people think “Father Christmas,” which is in direct opposition to
what we’re aiming to do. We’re trying to help the community see ways that they
can improve their sanitation and hygiene practices themselves instead of just
waiting for handouts from others, which is essentially what they’ve been
conditioned to expect from centuries of village strongmen, colonialists,
missionaries, and consultants.
 
I loathe
the extra attention I get in these villages and I go out of my way to keep a
low profile. During our sessions with the community, longing to go completely
unnoticed, I try to sit at the back of the meeting place. But alas, despite my
best efforts, there are rarely other white people in these villages and I can’t
just blend in. Goodbye anonymity, hello foreign zoo animal on display for all
curious onlookers.

So during the past few
weeks a lot of the thoughts that have sprung to mind have had something to do
with looking forward to getting back to “civilization.” Cold beer, red wine,
chocolate, hot shower, comfortable bed, food that makes my taste buds dance
(taro three times a day gets old pretty quickly). Not having to watch people
sit around picking lice out of each other’s hair. Yep.

And clattering around
in my head have also been anxious thoughts about what I’m going to do next, and
whether I can actually go on much longer in this exciting/ exhausting line of
work. My first contract here finishes in three months. I feel pulled to leave
the field and settle down in America, where certainly things would be more
normal and where my white skin wouldn’t stand out. But I also I feel drawn to
living in the field closer to the communities where there are real needs. And
I’d like to actually live and work in the same place for more than one year.

And so early in the
mornings while I’m walking down the well-trodden path to the river to bathe,
these thoughts bombard me. Certainly it must be better living back in America.
Certainly I’d be able to find a normal job, and I’d be able to surround myself
with good friends, and I could adjust to living in a world with broadband. And
I’d be anonymous. I could just be a normal person again.

And of course there
would be no rush-hour traffic, no moments of loneliness, no information
overload from having to select one of 45 different calling plans from mobile
phone providers, and no frustrations with insurance companies, and no strain
from 24-hour news updates. Yes, life back in America would certainly be bliss.

So walking back from
the river after bathing, or in between planning sessions with the communities,
the question that has continued to surface in my mind during the past three
weeks: Why do I continue to choose to live and work in places where I’m always
an outsider to some extent, where isolation and loneliness are reliable
companions?

Well, after three
weeks in the bush, here it is: despite all the painful and uncomfortable
moments, I still feel drawn to do it. I still have desire to use my abilities
to help others. I still believe that people are valuable. And occasionally,
just occasionally, I get to catch a glimpse of the difference that my work can
make in the lives of people who are living in some pretty difficult
circumstances. There’s still great purpose in this work, and at least for now I
still believe the most effective role I can play in it all is to be the
engineer who spends three weeks in the bush training national staff how to
conduct sessions on community planning and design effective water and
sanitation systems.

So I vacillate between
wanting to pack up all my stuff and get on the next plane home and wanting to
get on the back of a pickup truck heading out to the bush. But right now,
despite the restlessness, the continual pondering opportunity cost, the
complexities of being a foreigner, the power dynamics of development work, and
the yearning for the normal, it’s worth it.

“Your skin is black
and my skin is white,” I told the chief in my best broken
Bislama
,
“because in America the sun is cold.
 
In
Vanuatu the sun is very hot.”
 

He was satisfied with
my answer. So am I.

P.S. As I was leaving
Itonga
, the chief gave me a traditional bow and arrow and a
woven basket. Gender roles being what they are in the Pacific, the chief
explained to me that the man hunts and the woman follows with the basket tied
across her head to gather what the man kills. So now I have my bow and arrow,
and a basket. Which is going to be more difficult: successfully killing the
prey or finding the woman to follow after me and pick up the kill? In my first
try with the bow, I managed to miss a target that was only five meters away.

Mike,
Papua New Guinea

Sent with this letter was another, more personal one to me
alone.

“It rained for almost 36 hours straight, so when we left the
village yesterday the small trickling creek at the bottom of the ravine had
been transformed into a muddy torrent,” Mike began. “We had to wade through
waist-high brown water to get out of the village. But I am back from the bush
now, and thank God for hot showers and razors and beer.
Aaahhh
.”

 
He was enjoying local
Thai food and a cold beer, he wrote. He’d also just enjoyed a couple of days
off work to do some world-class scuba diving and “caving, climbing across
boulders, swimming down a canyon, jumping off rocks, and all sorts of little
boy adventures.”

As we had signed off three weeks earlier, I had told him
that when we were both back on terra firma I would want to know, in detail,
about three highs and three lows of his time away. That’s what filled the rest
of this second letter – several thousand words on brilliant, sunset-lighted
highs and some searing lows.

He finished with a bit of teasing and a few questions.

“I read the taxi driver essay you sent out,” Mike wrote. “I
laughed, although I’m actually quite jealous because I’ve never been able to
manage to get a proposition from an African man. So if/when I leave the field
and move back to the ‘normal’ world, does that mean that I’ll still receive
multiple offers to marry the daughter of whatever village I happen to visit?
And speaking of normal, is it normal for those of us at this 30s stage of life
to be constantly pondering whether we’re better off spreading our wings and
pursuing our dreams of careers with adventure and excitement and purpose or
whether we’re better off going ‘home’ (wherever that is) and doing something
‘normal’ (whatever that is) and having stable friendships and singing
kumbaya
at night?

 
“Your writings are
funny.
And vulnerable.
I know you said that you read
essays like that so many times before you send them that they don’t seem so
vulnerable, but you do really bare yourself. I like it. It’s genuine.
Naked.
But why
do
you choose to write essays and post them online for
all the
digitally connected world to peruse?”

Lisa,
USA

“I really enjoyed reading your white skin essay,” I began my
own letter back to him later that night, cushioned against the cold by the
fluffy white comforters adorning the hotel bed, my laptop on my lap. “But
regardless of whether we blend in on the outside we’ll never be internally
anonymous again, you know. We’ve both passed that point of no return where we
could ever fit into one ‘place’ completely again – either here or there. I’m
not sad about that, except very occasionally when I'm having a really bad day
and being entirely unreasonable. But it does regularly make things less than
comfortable on a non-abstract basis.
That constant
restiveness can seem more like a curse or a goad than a blessing a lot of the
time.
Where does that restiveness come from?