17 Sept 2007

I am madly in love with Elsewhere. I want to ask it to marry me so we can spend our lives together, and then cling to it and beg it never to send me back to Tiny Little Town. I didn’t realize until I got here just how terrified I am the whole time I am in TLT. During the day, there, I’m fine, I think. I can pretend, at least. I can scoff at the snake concept. But at night, I don’t even feel safe in my room. It isn’t completely enclosed, you see. In the corner, the screen around the top of the wall doesn’t quite reach the edge, leaving a hole about three inches deep. Plenty of room for snakes to get in. I have to check the bed, all around the edges under the mosquito net and inside each pillow and sheet, just in case. And during the night, I try not to touch the mosquito net, in case something on the outside might, I don’t know, BITE me.

And just when I thought I was getting over the critter fears? This South African guy started telling me about his park ranger class and how the spiders are worse than the snakes and how it is of them that I should really be afraid. Some kill you, he said, and some merely kill off large portions of your flesh. Which was just what I needed to hear.

Also, the bed is really rickety, and every time I move so much as my hand, it shakes so that at first I genuinely thought it was an earthquake. I’m afraid, every time I turn over, that this time will be the time the whole bed collapses beneath me.

The first afternoon here in Elsewhere, I stepped out of my room and suddenly realized that I felt incredibly free of worry and fear. What with all those fears in TLT, I suppose it’s not surprising that I love this place.

There’s the lack of fear and then there’s the fact that they serve Krest Bitter Lemon here, imported from Uganda. That made my week, pretty much. That and the Pringles, which I bought in a store whose hugeness almost made me hyperventilate. I was overwhelmed. It was maybe ten feet by ten feet, two walls of shelves, with two little stand-alone shelves in the middle of the floor. I haven’t seen such a thing since Nairobi. TLT only has dukas/kiosks.

Then again, however much I love this town, and however much I love being back in the Africa that feels familiar to me, I do not love with the fact that someone in the room next to mine just turned on a scratchy radio station playing loud music. At bedtime. The music happens to be in Arabic, although the language doesn’t really matter except insofar as it means that I can’t understand it. The rooms are sort of connected – the wall doesn’t quite go all the way to the ceiling because of the top metal beam – so I’m hearing his music just as clearly as he is. I don’t love that. Not at all.