We’re training.

The education group of 2006-2008 is currently busy with our In Service Training. It’s a chance for our group to come together, share ideas, listen to new ideas, receive updates on our work and Gambian education, and catch our breath from a long haul of work. In the rush to prepare for the week of training there wasn’t much time to prepare a Blog post this week.

To make up for the lack of Gambia content here is a small snippet of a rough draft to a short story I was working on a while ago. I’m not sure what the goal was exactly (In a way its just thoughts and images put together), but perhaps lost in the world of The Gambia I wanted to write that reminded me of the complexity and strangeness of America as well.

My friend Sheriff, who I work with at the YMCA, is dedicated to improving the literature and literacy in The Gambia. He seems to always find the right connections to make this happen, and he and I recently met someone doing their PhD on Gambian literature. She told us that there is a literary festival coming to The Gambia in July. Quite possibly the first large scale showcase of world and Gambian literature we have heard of here. We were both rather thrilled with the idea. With these thoughts and events in mind, I thought all the more reason to post some of the scribbles that were written during my time here.


A Homecoming for Clarity

When I was a child I had an imagination that never let my mind rest. I lived in my own world that was filled with daily episodes of epic space battles, greedy trolls, magical castles, or fanciful journeys. My mother often would walk past my room and stop to peek in, and her face would squeeze into a mixture of pain, worry, and doubt. She would raise her raise her right hand, take in a deep breath, and just barely open her mouth to ask a question, and then her entire body would relax again and her mouth would close shut; it was as if her body reacted to the strange sight first and her mind stopped her from going any further.

I suppose she had reason to worry, or at the very least have questions. When I try to imagine the scenes she must have walked in on I think I would be a worried parent as well. I would lie flat on my bed, hands in the air creating patterns and shapes that helped fill in what my imagination could not. The whole world was created before me and it was easy to eventually let my eyes and hands fall back and let my mind take over for the rest. So it must have been that there would be a small boy on his bed, perfectly content, but starring off into space as if his brain had just gone dead. When I was a child, the world was painted in vibrant colors.

When I was 18 and I would gladly say now, still in my youth, I spent my weekends drinking away my cares. It’s not as if I had much else to do. It was 2004 and it was America, and in my little frame of the world I didn’t have much responsibility to weigh me down. Keeping my grades at a B average and keeping my spot on the school basketball team were the two things I wanted to keep, and keeping them was easy. Life simply breezed by and unchallenged with difficultly or strife, I watched it move through a window that was becoming smudged and tinted.

When I am honest with myself, I think I can say that period of my life is when I started to shut off to the world. I no longer observed what was going on around me, I just looked at the world as a person might look at paintings after spending four or five hours wading through a museum. I saw what was going on around me, and sometimes even told myself, “Oh that is nice,” or, “I don’t quite the emotions I get from that scene,” but I never internalized it. I never used it as a basis to keep my thoughts and imagination alive.

To make matters worse I was soon after in college. It was a small college in northern Wisconsin, far away from any big city or big attractions. That meant two things, bitter cold winters and absolutely nothing to do but stay inside. I would walk down the dark corridors of our two story dorm building and look at some of the other kids in their fluorescent lit rooms. I would pass rooms of people I didn’t like and stop at others I did. Jim, a guy I was taking Introduction to Western Philosophy with, often was glued to his room staring at a computer screen. He spent those winter nights playing God knows how many hours of one of those online games where you can become someone else. His world was no longer one of the movement and life, it was a static mechanical world, but one in which he seemed perfectly happy.

Then there were the rest of us. The rest of us who thought we were living life to its fullest. We were the ones who took our weekend high school drinking and made it an institution; we made it a definitive characteristic of our very being. We were the ones who would spend a January night, when the breeze of the winter air could tear and rip at your face, inside a small box dorm room drinking the kind of alcohol you can only find at the corner Save-A-Lot drug store.

I think back to that time and I don’t know if it was the way America had brought me up in ease, the, the amount of alcohol rotting away at my brain, or my own faults, but I do know now that it was the time when I fully stopped observing life and merely looked at it.

So the years of college were blurred, and it’s hard now, looking back, to think of how I could have changed that. I went through a hard three years hoping from one restaurant job to another, and ultimately those years too were blurred. It wasn’t until I spent those four weeks in the hospital, feeling every muscle in my body scream out in agony, that I began to see again.