Published: 13 July, 2009, 23:20
Edited: 13 July, 2009, 23:20
I'm home in New York now, my body running on nervous energy, my stomach reeling from a bacterial infection for which I am ingesting strong antibiotics. In the less traveled areas of Africa like Benin, it is nearly impossible not to catch some form of intestinal ailment. When you must deal with these pains in the gut on two impossibly long, back-to-back sleepless flights, you begin to hallucinate and, on occasion, fantasize about the onset of early death.
I'm back in familiar territory.
Back to sitting behind my drums and banging out the super fast tempo to a punk rock song. Tonight my band, The Blisterz, is rocking the house at a downtown club called Bogies. According to the big wall-mounted banner, it’s local radio-sponsored "Stripper Night," which promises to be a real crowd pleaser, not to mention good for liquor sales.
On stage in front of me, two scantily clad young women are kissing one another. Under normal circumstances, I might be enthralled with their open display of affection. But these are not normal circumstances anymore. Not after returning from impoverished Africa. And because these are not normal circumstances, I'm not seeing them. I'm looking right through their sunlamp-tanned flesh, right through their transparent play acting.
I'm playing the drums and I'm in New York, but in my mind, I'm still walking on the red clay soil of Africa. I'm seeing the fishermen in their sail and pole-powered longboats. I'm smelling the rich gamey scent of fish just netted and I'm feeling the heat from the campfires that burn along the concrete and gravel sidewalks of Cotonou at night. I'm seeing a mother laying her baby on a bare mattress set on a dirt floor inside a wood-scrap and tin shack, and I’m reliving the wide-eyed anxiety on the faces of the people who still take refuge in the water-based stilt village of Ganvie. Even while drumming, I'm seeing the people and the places I have been writing about for a month now. But I am also seeing the many images I have yet to write about:
-The small belly-bloated boy of no more than three, washing himself with the rainwater collected in a pothole in the street.
-The uniformed solider sitting in the back of the open camouflaged Jeep, his right hand gripped on the tripod-mounted machine gun, his left resting on his sidearm, his eyes hidden by wraparound sunglasses.
-The long line of crippled, blind and tumor-afflicted Beninois waiting in 100-degree heat to be examined by Mercy Ships medical staff.
-The roadblocks that appear from out of nowhere on the bush road, the sunglass-wearing, machine-toting soldiers eyeing us with suspicion but allowing us to pass.
-The two bare-chested teenage fishermen who balance themselves in a narrow longboat in heavy swells, trying in vain to pull up nets caught on debris at the bottom of the harbor.
-The piercing screams of the child whose teeth were being pulled inside a dental clinic.
-Speeding along narrow city streets through the throngs of people while seated on the back of a smoke-spewing motorbike.
-A man laying in the middle of the road, begging for money with a bright grin planted on his narrow, dark face, his crippled legs shaped like pretzels.
-Sharing a beachside dinner of rice, grilled fish and “local” beer with my Mercy Ships friend and fixer, Marie, on a brilliant moonlit evening, the hardship of Africa seemingly a million miles away.
These are the images I have wanted to write about, but have not. Yet these are the images I dream about when I fall to sleep at night.
Now, while the crowd of drunken patrons tosses dollar bills at the strippers, I realize how difficult it will be readjusting to life in the land of plenty. Long before I left for Africa, I had already become disenchanted with the old life I had been expected to lead -- the impossible to attain “domestic tranquility,” the storybook marriage, the cookie-cutter McMansion, the mortgage, the country club, the idle gossip, the never-ending debt, the heated arguments, the loneliness and the despair for something far more meaningful than two weeks paid vacation and a new car every year.
In 21st century Africa, poverty, disease, hunger, war and corruption are business as usual. But in the USA, the once promising American Dream is decaying. It is becoming as corrupt and disease-ridden as any third-world country. America is now a place where the wealthy can become distrustful of their own children and where buying your way into heaven is somehow more palatable than doing some real charitable good.
In the words of Ernest Hemingway, fear of death increases in direct proportion to an increase in wealth. Listen, any American who fears mortality or worse, sudden economic insolvency, ought to switch up the Disney tickets for a flight bound for Benin, where one out of five children survive past the age of 7 and the average life expectancy is 52 years old.
I miss the fellow travelers I’ve met not only in Africa, but also in Asia, Europe and elsewhere. Men and women, young and old, that I met in airports, bars, beaches, trains, hotels, cafes, marketplaces… I miss their stories, their smiles, their sharing of advice. I miss laughing, drinking, eating with them; running away with them. I miss talking about future destinations unexplored — the Amazon jungle, Nepal, Vietnam, Tibet, Russia, South Africa... The list of destinations is endless. But then life is long.
But is it long enough?
I gaze at the Africa photos laid out before me. The Nissan 4X4 buried in the swamp; the red-shirted man obsessed with my bracelet and its voodoo power; Joseph the boatman carting me upstream to the Ganvie Stilt Village; a blind woman seeing for the first time in decades; the Mercy Ship doctors volunteering to perform nonstop eye surgeries onboard the Africa Mercy when they could be earning thousands elsewhere.
I see them in my head and realize how much I miss these people. These selfless individuals call the world their home. They give of themselves unsparingly to help the sick and the impoverished, not by writing a check to their church, but by actually laying their hands on human flesh and bone. I have come to know these adventurers as people who are uncomfortable with being comfortable and secure. I now consider them my friends.
Author's Note:
24 hours prior to my departure for Africa, an Air France Airbus A330-200 bound for Paris from Brazil plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people aboard. Miraculously, a young Italian woman who was scheduled to be aboard the flight missed its departure when she ran late. Little more than a week later, she was killed in an automobile accident along with her fiancé in Austria.
Only days prior to my homecoming in the United States, a second Air France Airbus, originating in Paris and bound for Comoros off the Indian Ocean, crashed into the sea. While it was initially believed all aboard perished in the accident, it was soon discovered that a 14-year-old French girl somehow managed to survive by hanging on to floating aircraft debris. The girl, who survived in the seas for more than 13 hours until she was rescued by a passing ship, didn't know how to swim. She was the sole survivor.