Natural peanut butter is delicious

I want a poem to be beyond me.

I want it to be something that transfers a feeling
 I don’t quite understand the limits of.”

- Louis Simpson

So even though I know you all want to hear about Africa, I have to write a little about some of the books I’ve been reading, because I can and it’s interesting and I’ll throw in some things about Africa to make it worth your time.

Lately I have really been aching for some good poetry. Before I left I made a list of essential books I wanted to bring with me, one of which was a book of poetry but it didn’t seem as important at the time and I left it out. Bad idea me, bad, terrible idea. I don’t often get the need to read poetry but when I do it is nearly overwhelming. Luckily, my need has partially been met by the few Writer’s Almanac podcasts I had saved up on my ipod. Even if you don’t like poetry, just listening to Garrison Keilors voice reading them makes you want to love it. Man, can that man read a poem! He can really tear your heart right out of your chest, it’s fantastic. If you want here is one of my current favorites.

I’m hoping to find something poetic to make my heart ache when I go into town, and if anyone really loves me they could send me Sailing Around the Moon by Billy Collins and Necessary Light by Patricia Fargnoli. I think I might love them.

Since I’m poem less, I have had had to resort to listening repeatedly to the saddest songs I have over and over again. This week it’s been Joe Purdy’s “The Pretenders.” I’ve listened to it at least 50 times. Genius.

I just finished reading Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory. Quite possibly the best autobiography I have ever read, and while I didn’t know it before the only way an autobiography should be written. It isn’t built on facts of life and constructed stories of actions in the past, important things that happened each year, but just memories - memories that are never fully complete, but glimpses of color, movement, and feeling. Things that separate are nearly meaningless, but when placed together give you the idea of a person and a season, the happiness of a summer or the obsessions of youth. It’s dedicated to his wife and near the end he speaks directly to her about their son and says some really fantastic things about parenthood from the perspective of a father.

One of the greatest tragedies here, in my opinion, is that no one reads. Ever. During training we were told a joke about how there was supposed to be a meeting in one room for the teachers of a school, but someone else was in there at the time, so someone put up a sign saying the meeting had changed locations and was in the next room. But people went up to the door, saw it full of other people and then just went home. The person in charge of the meeting came out of the other room and told someone what had happened. Within 20 minutes, everyone was there after having received a phone call or been told in person what had happened. While no one ever reads, the grapevine is working in full force.

It’s important information to have, because it’s hard to notice when things are missing. Who would notice that there aren’t signs or posters anywhere? It is however very easy to notice that no one reads, especially in the summer when there isn’t anything to do. People clean, prepare to cook, cook, nap, watch a little television, prepare to cook, cook, chat and then sleep. That is incredibly boring to me, also I don’t have a television and the television that they do watch is the most boring stuff ever, in the history of the world. So I sit in my courtyard and read, and everyday someone will pass by and chat and invariably say ‘ah, reading again. Isn’t that tiring?’ Nope, it’s pretty relaxing actually. ‘Huh…well, it’s not easy.’

It’s a bummer really. There aren’t resources available here. There are notebooks available for school, but unless you are lucky or rich there aren’t any textbooks, which means that the notes you take in class usually read like a users manual and you can see people rereading their school notebooks years later remembering all the things they learned and they can because they are the most precise, exact notes anyone has ever written. It’s kind of incredible and takes them forever to write things down. But you have to do it, because otherwise there is no way for them to be reminded of it. With no text books, you have to take exact notes.

We’re told that we are the greatest resource for education here in Burkina; because we have the knowledge and the critical thinking skills and the imagination to teach physics or chemistry with just a chalkboard and no other resources. It’s an exciting challenge but so disappointing when you can’t explain the joys of reading in a way that people will understand. There isn’t reading for fun, there are no books, and there isn’t any interest in learning about the joy one can get from the way words feel as you say them or the truth in a sentence so well written that it hurts. They don’t care to understand that possibility, or at least I have yet to find it, or maybe it’s really not important.

Nonetheless a little part of me cries when I think, if only these kids kept a journal, they could write the most fascinating novels and the most heart breaking poems later on in life. Such a unique perspective that rarely gets told.