Big Village

This is no doubt neither the time nor the place to reflect on anything at all, having just arrived several hours ago back in the capital city of Katanga, after a two and a half day drive from Where We Were.

Which is why I feel the need to sit down and speak (write, reflect) already. Perhaps this is mere reaction, and should be filed away neatly; yet perhaps reaction is also the best thing to capture as soon as you can, to nail down some slip of the passing realities of transition.

We are no longer there - where we were - in the village that used to be (72 hours ago) the Big Village, in comparison to Where Else We Had Been.

After two and a half days driving we have passed many villages (appearing as they do out of the brush, thatch-roofed domes, popping up people waving hands); also rivers and streams (flooded, overflowing, us following a road that turned into river, indistinguishable, hooking up the cars more than once to haul another one out of the mud-bound sinkhole it had found, roads washed away by the edges, down the center: ravines and canals in the place of what is expected to be the road itself: the road to Lubumbashi). We crossed a pulsing river on an old metal ferry, guided by a tugboat and after that descended towards the south. Along this road (the first day) there were still rivers, lakes.

But as we drove the villages changed, from a land more flat to a land more hilly. From a land more sparse to that blossoming with trees; from a place where mango season has finally coughed out its last, to roads lined by trees heavy with reddening fruit.

We knew we were getting closer (to the city? To civilization? To a place of commerce, energy, connection...) when we saw the first electricity pole. Still hooked up only to a generator, still more than a day's drive away from the capital, but a pole! Electricity! At the same place there was a painted building, with red writing. At this, too, we exclaimed.

We stayed the first night at a priest's hotel. Or, rather, in the rooms they are preparing to one day be a hotel. Former military barracks, or so we understood. Tents popped up inside to keep mosquitoes away. Reed mattresses found. Sleeping bags. Milky water from a deep and spartan well.

The second day we passed to the other side, or so it felt.

There was first a mist-hung mountain, with a rocky road of 7km that wound about its edges. We waited at the bottom with men who ring the bell (one long piece of metal, suspended from a wooden frame) and listened for its sister to echo from the top, where other men also stand guard, waiting to hear the message of whether or not the cars could pass. They could not, the bell said. So we waited for the truck that was coming down our side, greeted them when they finally cantered from the hidden curve and then signaled our own debut. We climbed the rocky path, knocked our heads against the roof and wedged our feet into the floor and said at every moment, how beautiful! How beautiful! About the view. Green valleys and a spread of gorgeousness that from our height we could see like birds, imagining elephants below like ants. Primeval. Lion King Africa. All the kingdom: animal and vegetable and mineral...

At the top we met our brother convoy, traveling from and towards the opposite direction. There were jumps out of all the cars to slap the backs and shoulders of team members; grins and shouted greetings.

That is how it often goes around here; the only other vehicles we see belong to us and our organization. Otherwise a broken down truck, or a lumbering one topped with twenty people and covered in plastic sheeting. We see those sometimes. But normally there is little competition for the highways (highways!).

That was what was strange. Hitting the asphalt for the first time, only a few hours from the capital, and I felt my cheeks flush and my stomach gasp and my legs lift, weightless. Or so they felt. It was too smooth a ride, too straight a road, too oddly fast for me to adjust to in the quick space of time. I felt that we were in a spaceship and that my body was suddenly floating in the cab of the truck, so unassaulted as it was from the usual bumps and slams to which it has grown accustomed. It disturbed me. Made me ill inside, for some unexpected reason: thinking of all that asphalt, and paved roads, and sudden jumps in speed entail. Thinking about how we were transitioning back into something, and I didn't know what (even though I know) and I felt that even physically I was not ready.

The second night (last night) we stayed with Carmelite nuns. It is one of the best things about the Catholic church: that when you are far from anything at all, they are there. Coke and Catholic nuns, or priests. And with the idea of the church comes some idea of hospitality - that ultimate kindness of taking in strangers from the road (12 hours of driving, rainy season, the sun going down, no room at the inn...) and hosting them.

It was not the smoothest of conversations – us arriving with all the cars and people, all of the sudden, no announcement (how and to whom, anyway?), and saying, can we stay here? Please? We brought our own tents...will be gone by 6:00. No trouble at all.

But a solution was found. Desks in the classroom pushed aside, water from the well pumped into buckets, chlorinated water tossed over the latrine floor, and a bar of soap placed beside a plastic cup. We put up the tents, parked the cars in formation. Found a fancy restaurant with posters of Jesus, Riyanna, Brittany and Wayne Rooney and veiled women in front of Mecca, and sheafs from the Koran. All Served Here. Spicy sombe. Dry and crumbling ugali. Fish unrecognizable as such.

And 15 exhausted, full-bellied, happy people.

We sang a few chorused rounds of Christmas carols as we fell asleep. Voices piping up from the tented floor: Little Drummer Boy. Oh Holy Night. When a child is born. We tried to remember the lines to Good King Wencelus; couldn't; sang it anyway. I thought about how our voices would sound from outside, in the night quiet but for frogs croaking, and the smell of the pink wildflowers spread up the hillside, heads nodding between the blades of tall grasses.

I dreamt of climbing icy mountains: my eyes filled with the light, and the jagged sense of snow that had frozen and refrozen and could cut hands, or swallow legs to knees.

I dreamt of the blue cold box with the vaccines in the back of our truck: that it had popped open with all the bouncing and that one corner was bent back. It let out mountains, pillows, snowblowers of ice and flurries. It was connected to the sudden summit. Pandora. And though we were alone, in golden costume, a beautiful sorceress also climbed. She was unforgiving. I felt akin. When I turned (a full 360) I faced the summit. I was standing at an angle not 90, one that should otherwise have led to sudden death and tumbling. I felt all hot and cold at once: utterly singular, utterly lonely. Happy.

I saw the cold as what it was: a thing that could not hurt me.

I even knew that for all my flailing and scrambling through the fluffy nothingness of the snow and ice that went in and out of existence, even in the dream, that I did not need it: this thing that Would Not be Held. Refused.

Knew that I could climb it, still. Would reach it, still. Knew that the summit stretched towards a sky white and blinding and that in the blindness was a place that I knew; that knew me, too.

A home.