A Walker in the Suburbs

To spend two days in Toura is to go back in time and forward in time, is to meet at least a hundred people, none of whom speak English.

It’s to wander through a village on the edge of the Sahel under a full moon.

It’s to drink Beninoise beer, eat a freshly killed and grilled guinea fowl and learn two Bariba words: abwado and alafiya (both spelled phonetically here!).

It’s to go to Sunday mass and hear Ibo songs accompanied by hand claps, dancing children and an earnest drummer who looks up to heaven in rapture as he pounds out the ancient rhythm.

It’s to wonder what we lost when stopped living together in community.

Twelve hours on a bus has taken us to the north of Benin, where the call to prayer echoes from one mosque to another, where French and Bariba are spoken in one breath. So many impressions, so little time. Best today to capture it in pictures.

The first post of 2015 finds me sitting on a stool in Suzanne’s little living room. A ceiling fan whirrs above and traffic noise filters in from the street. The new year is getting lost in the shuffle for me, since I’m getting to know a new country, a new continent.

Take last night, for instance. In retrospect New Year’s Eve seemed a good day to arrive. There was a festive atmosphere abroad in the land, people preparing for the celebration. “Bonne Fete!” they said. Have a good holiday. (There’s another phrase specifically for Happy New Year but I’ve already forgotten it.)

What I hadn’t accounted for — but should have — was the racket that lasted past 1 a.m. Firecrackers that seemed to be exploding right outside the window, the high-pitched voices of Beninese women singing. Dogs parking, horns honking. And then, just as I was drifting off, roosters crowing.

It certainly was a memorable New Year’s Eve; I doubt I’ll have another like it. As for resolutions, mine so far are simple. Eat right, drink only bottled water and work up enough courage to ride a motorcycle taxi. I’m almost there!

I woke up this morning with that familiar jump start. I ran through the possibilities: Is someone I love sick or in need? Is there a work deadline? Something else I have to do?

Oh, that’s right. I’m flying to Africa today.

While the exquisite shorthand of modern travel means this requires very little effort on my part (I live less than 15 minutes from Dulles International Airport), the decisions, postponements and preparation it took to get here have occupied me for more than two years.

This journey, then, begins not just with a single step but with a series of partings, reunions and reflections. They have brought me here, to this point of departure, to this familiar action, boarding a plane. But the plane will take me to another continent, one I’ve never visited before. A universe of its own with customs, climates, peoples, beliefs and practices I can barely begin to fathom.

Travel is, at best, about possibilities. I begin at home. I will land, God willing, in a faraway place, a continent so vast that our country would be swallowed up by it. It’s a place my daughter has come to love. I go there to see her world.


(Photo: Katie Esselburn)

A trip to Africa requires not just one packing list but several. There’s the electronic one I’ve been tapping on my phone whenever I think of something on the run — ear plugs, a headlamp, the Kindle! 

There’s the scribbled one upstairs near the brand new suitcase — kitchen towels for Biba, a book for Apollinaire, candy, gum and pens for other friends I’m about to meet. 

And then there’s the carefully typed list Suzanne sent me a couple weeks ago — her attempt to rein in her mother’s (ahem) over-packing tendencies. After all, she took only two suitcases and a carry-on for two years.

So my new motto is travel light, take only what I need, nothing “just in case.” Let’s see how long it lasts!

If all goes according to plan, two weeks from today I land in Africa — first in Ethiopia, where I board a connecting flight, and then in Cotonou, Benin. It’s a trip I’ve wanted to take for three years, since Suzanne learned she’d be joining the Peace Corps.

I’ve tried to imagine it, but I get only as far as stepping out of the airport into a steamy, tropical afternoon. The sights and smells and sounds — I’ve heard about them, but they’re abstractions. So I’ve turned to … a book, of course.

In The Shadow of the Sun, the late journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski writes that three things struck him on his first arrival in Africa: the heat, the odor and the people. Here’s what he says about the aroma:

It is the smell of a sweating body and drying fish, of spoiling meat and roasting cassava, of fresh flowers and putrid algae — in short, of everything that is at once pleasant and irritating, that attracts and repels, seduces and disgusts. This odor will reach us from nearby palm groves, will escape from the hot soil, will wait above stagnant city sewers. It will not leave us; it is integral to the tropics.

 And here’s how he describes the people:

How they fit this landscape, this light, these smells. How they are at one with them. How man and environment are bound in an indissoluble, complementary, and harmonious whole. …  [They] move about naturally, freely, at a tempo determined by climate and tradition, somewhat languid, unhurried, knowing one can never achieve everything in life anyway, and besides, if one did, what would be left over for others?

I will have 19 days to meet the people, see the sights, sample the pace. To get a taste — just a taste — of a continent.

(Photo: Katie Esselburn)