I am sure I mentioned that my (non-Ipod) MP3 player died just before I left for site placement back in June? Yep. I had used it here on a very long and tormenting bus ride up to the northern part of the country, where it saved me from having to listen to a terrible “lion-roars-a lot-while-white-family-in-jeep-screams-a lot” movie on the bus ride home. This nerve-racking movie was followed by three young men dressed as old men being really fun in Setswana, which sadly wasn’t that funny to me. So I listened to my music and survived, then put the thing back in my suitcase until I pulled it out again on June 8th and discovered the music files were empty but I now had a lot of animated videos of bugs. They sing, they dance, they fall in love, get married, have baby bugs for all I know, but they aren’t singing my music. So siree Bob. Not sure where they came from, since the mp3 had never been anywhere w/o me and certainly was never stuck into any place too dark to see, like a virusy computer.
So now a month into this, I am surviving better than I imagined. After all, most evenings I can get decent music to bathe by on the radio and on weekends there is a lot of Motown, R&B, and Rap (which I can avoid if needed). There is too much Chris Brown and Rhianna, but then lots of decent stuff from the 60’s to now. (That small solar, battery operated, crank radio has come in quite handy, except for there is only one place in my house that it gets any reception - from the top of the fridge.) The real problem is the a.m. radio, when I am getting ready for work and need music because I can’t sit and watch Matt Lauer while having breakfast. Morning Talk Radio is a serious problem here too, it seems. I know they blame most of the road accidents on drinking and driving, along with the free range cattle, donkeys, sheep and goats, who do in fact, range quite freely on the roadways at really inappropriate times. But I think an underestimated cause of car accidents has got to be people calling in to am talk shows, or perhaps screaming at the commentators, while driving along these roads with their free range traps, sober or not. No Rush Limbaugh here, but people still sound so animated at times during those calls…I just can see them on the roads in the middle of nowhere, yelling their heads off at that tiny box in the dash. Right before saying hello to the California Dairy Cows’ very distant cousin in the windshield, or missing a critical turn and landing in a culvert full of goats. Not a morning well spent.
Peace Corps drills into us during our pre-service training that we are not to travel at night. Many of the volunteers felt that this was just PC trying to be too parental and not allowing us our birthright to freedom of movement (wait, is that in the constitution??) But I have to say, after bad timing got me home later than I had planned: it is VERY DARK HERE when it gets dark and before it gets light again. There aren’t street lights in many places, and walking down my hillside, on the gravel (big chunks, mind you, not those quaint pea gravel things, but chunks you can twist you ankle, knee and hip joint on, if you really hit it at a decent pace) is quite an undertaking. One early morning (which darkness wise, is the same as late night) I had to get to Gaborone for a work related conference and had my headlamp on as I staggered down the gravel road. Around the corner, suddenly and without warning, appear two women, seemingly just dumped in front of me out of the dark. I said hello, they said “oh, a miner!” laughed and went on to be swallowed up again in the darkness behind me. One of them said, “eish, I need one of those things.” Those were the last words I heard and I never saw them again, but I hope they made it home.
The bus ride was even more frightening than this walkabout, because I was traveling through the same pitch darkness without benefit of my lamp, in the complete control of the driver and quite a bit faster than I normally travel on my own two feet. Imagine you are traveling along, left in the driver’s seemingly maniacal control, seeing nothing, nothing, but the 2 lane road in front of you. You can’t see anything off to the side of the road –all the cows waiting to commit suicide are lined up there – you just know it, but they are going to hide until the very last possible moment. On the other side you see nothing, until a car comes along from the opposite direction. And then you see nothing again, because after the complete and total darkness their headlights blind you silly until they pass. If your driver is still driving, you and hopefully he, have the opportunity to recalibrate the rods and cones in your eyes and get ready for the next vehicle to assault them again. And on, and on until you get where you are going, or meet a cow, or a drunk driver who is also doing the whole going blind thing on the other side of the street, but may not be nearly as worried about it.
Is it any wonder, with the loss of my music and the driving and road habits of beast and man here that I have the lyrics “drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry…..” bouncing around in my head? They should have played that song at our training as a cautionary tale – it might have at least caused me to back up my music. Oh, I forgot. I do have some music. Bollywood. That’s a whole different story and yes, I AM liking it and I am every so grateful to my dear, dear friend who gave it to me. But it ain’t enough.
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