Choosing Africa
A Midlife Journey from Mission to Meaning
B. Susan Bauer
Chapter 1
A Handful of Leaves
Our overnight Air Afrique flight from New York to Dakar, Senegal, had spilled us out into the transit lounge of the Yoff International Airport for our four-hour layover. My lanky husband struggled to find a comfortable position for a nap on the hard plastic chair next to mine. Despite the sticky heat and the filthy toilets, I was happy to pass those hours watching busy Africans in their colorful clothes. The men sauntered past in their brocade dashikis and elaborately embroidered boubous, loose-fitting shirts worn over matching trousers. No less elegant were the women in their vivid blues, greens, and yellows. Most wore tight wrap-around skirts and matching full-sleeved blouses, nipped in at the waist and flared to the hips. These were the well-heeled international African travelers. At the back of the lounge, sitting not sauntering, were tired-looking men in crumpled white shirts and trousers a bit too short for their limbs. Their wives wore Western-styled suits of soft blue and pale pink. Surrounding them was their luggage: huge shopping bags of red, white, and blue woven plastic, the kind of material I recalled seeing on lawn chairs. While I waited, I tried to pick up snatches of French conversation.
When our flight to Niamey, Niger, was announced, a herd of swarthy-looking men in long white robes charged out of the first-class lounge, and started pushing their way to the front of the line. I remembered this was an open-seating flight. Lou grabbed my hand.
“Stand your ground!” he said. “We were here first.”
As we hurried across the dusty tarmac to the aircraft, the white-robed ones grumbling in our wake, I remembered the village feasts to which our study group had been invited the previous year. It was always the same. While villagers gathered in the open space outside the chief’s hut and stared at our group of thirteen Americans and five drivers, the elaborately garbed village chief would say a few words of welcome. Well, more than a few. After ten minutes, everyone’s gaze was fixed upon whole roasted goat on the table in front of us. The poor creature looked as if he had simply fallen asleep in the sun. There were huge bowls of foufou (millet porridge), rice, and groundnut stew, and plenty of bottles of Orange Fanta, Coke, and Sprite. I could tell, from the expectant twitching of the crowd, that the chief was winding down. As soon as he finished speaking, the villagers surged forward and attacked the groaning board, yanking greasy hunks of meat from the sacrificial goat and filling their plates with huge spoonfuls of everything else. We had already learned an African lesson about he who hesitates.
Happy to find two seats together, Lou and I settled in for the flight to Niamey with, we had been told, a brief refueling stop in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The pilot announced that we might experience some turbulence from the typical evening thunderstorms. I watched Lou’s knuckles turning white on the armrest as the aircraft rocked and rolled its way across West Africa.
We landed in Ouga in dusty twilight. The pilot said we’d only be on the ground a short time, so we would not disembark. We didn’t know it then, but “short time” is what Africans say when they want to make sure you don’t grow impatient with delays. This particular short time lasted one hour. Then two. Finally, the pilot said a small repair was needed, and we were welcome to disembark—for another short time. As we left the aircraft, we saw the white-robed ones scrambling for empty rows of seats in the middle section.
Only one other plane was sitting on the tarmac, and it didn’t seem in a hurry to depart. The two small concession stands in the terminal had closed for the night. My eyes felt gritty and I tried to calculate how many hours I’d been awake. From time to time, Lou would walk out onto the tarmac to check on the progress of the repairs. Several workmen seemed to be holding a conference around the left landing gear. Finally, at 4:00 a.m., one of the flight attendants said we could board the aircraft. The white-robed ones were all sleeping soundly, row after row of them, in the middle section. Thirty minutes passed. Lou got up and walked to the front of the plane. When he returned, his face looked grim.
“I stood at the door with a Peace Corps Volunteer, and we watched this guy in dark trousers and a white shirt. His tie was tucked into his shirt. He kept taking off the wheel, examining it, and putting it back on. Susan, it was the flight attendant!”
Forty minutes later, the pilot announced that the aircraft was ready to depart, and would we please put on our seat belts. Somehow, seat belts seemed inadequate for the crash landing I knew awaited us. I also worried about our friend, John, waiting for us at the Niamey airport. Our flight was already twelve hours overdue.
When we began our descent to Niamey, I looked out the window and saw what appeared to be military vehicles on either side of a runway at the farthest edge of the field.
“Uh oh,” said Lou. “Look at those tanks. Remember what we read last week? That there was a bomb threat at this airport?”
All the passengers applauded when we touched down, jostled but safe. The vehicles turned out to be fire engines, and the firefighters were rolling up their hoses while we walked across the tarmac.
I’d never had the slightest interest in traveling to Africa. If I wanted heat, humidity and bugs, I could rent a cottage without air conditioning at the beach. I knew as little about the continent as most other Americans, but a chance encounter in May 1992 changed my thinking. I had accompanied my husband to the annual weekend gathering of Lutheran clergy and laity in North Carolina. I’m still not sure why I had decided to go. Conventions and conferences always made me feel shy, awkward, and uncomfortable, so I tended to avoid this sort of event. I put on my best pastor’s wife smile and joined the other clergy spouses gathered for breakfast in the college’s dining hall. After we refilled our coffee cups, a vibrant, gray-haired lady stood up and said, “I will be leading a study tour to West Africa in November. If anyone is interested, I have brochures.” Edna explained that before she retired she had worked for Lutheran World Relief, an organization dedicated to providing assistance in developing countries. I stuffed a brochure in my handbag.
The following afternoon, during our drive home to Chapel Hill, I found the pamphlet and read it to Lou. “It seems as if there will be about a dozen people in the group, and for three weeks they’re going to visit LWR projects in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. Things like irrigation and gardening, well drilling, women’s empowerment, and literacy. Apparently, LWR has a regional representative who lives in Niger—an American fellow—who will oversee the trip.” This was sounding more interesting than I’d thought.
I expected Lou to say that the cost, about $4,000, was much more than we could afford. Instead, he began telling me how we could squeeze the money from several savings accounts and arrange the time away from our jobs. I caught his enthusiasm and tossed it back. We could probably persuade Jason, our 22-year-old son, to move back home from his apartment on the other side of town and take care of his 16-year-old sister during the three weeks we’d be in Africa. We were still chattering when we pulled into our driveway two hours later. Of course, we wanted to see the good work those Lutherans were doing in West Africa but, to be honest, it was the adventure that was reeling us in.
When Lou and I had become engaged in 1967, we wove together dreams of living abroad and raising bilingual children. But dreams had given way to duty, and we had slipped into a more conventional track for a clergy family. For most of the next twenty-five years, Lou had served as a parish pastor in various congregations and I had learned how to be a minister’s wife, a role for which I had absolutely no training. My parents had not been churchgoers, and I had taken myself to Sunday services and youth group activities. Halfway through college, I was so young and so head-over-heels in love with my tall, handsome divinity-school graduate, I never once thought about what it might be like to raise a family in a series of church-owned parsonages. Some clergy spouses resented the fishbowl life in which parishioners always seemed to know exactly what was going on in their families. I had not minded that aspect very much because our congregations had almost always treated us kindly. What I did mind, though, were all the nights and weekends my husband was engaged with church meetings and other people’s problems. We had so little time together. I had begun to wonder what had become of those two dreamers who had thought their life together would be unique, even adventurous.
When we moved to the university town of Chapel Hill, a physician in the congregation asked me if I’d like to work for him. John was the chairman of one of the medical school’s ethics committees, its Institutional Review Board. The board’s task, said John, was to review research protocols and clinical trials, many of which were designed for desperately ill patients. Within a year, I was the director of the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine’s Office for Human Research Studies. For the first time in my life I felt as if I, like my husband, had a calling, a vocation that mattered. As much as I loved this job, I was asking myself if this was what I still wanted to be doing ten or twenty years from now. When I shared those thoughts with Lou, he confessed that life had begun to feel flat for him, too.
A three-week trip to Africa offered an exciting diversion. We renewed our passports, updated our vaccinations, and read travel books. I learned that West Africans consider it disrespectful for women to wear slacks, so I bought cotton skirts and dresses. We obtained a prescription for anti-malaria pills and went to a camping store to buy their strongest insect repellent. I listened to French-conversation cassette tapes while driving to work to reacquaint myself with the language. Our friends and family considered us brave and adventurous for choosing such an exotic vacation.
Lou and I joined ten other people on the study tour. We were a diverse bunch: from the young professional couple in their twenties to the 79-year-old widow who was fulfilling her life’s dream. Excitement ran high, and the complaints were surprisingly few. For three weeks, we traveled the rough roads of West Africa, visiting mud-hut villages and women’s empowerment projects. Everywhere we went, the villagers greeted us with dancing and singing and their gentle hospitality. The children giggled, pointed, and sang songs to us. We slept in tiny hotels and freshly-swept huts. We learned to eat foufou and chewy pieces of goat.
In Burkina Faso we met a retired government official who said, “We watch your TV shows, like Dallas, and we see that you Americans have so much. Why can’t you share with the poor who have so little?” Although we tried to assure him that most of America was not like what he saw on Dallas, his question wouldn’t go away.
West Africa not only saturated my senses, it assaulted my conscience. Against the romantic images of teeming markets and Fulani dancers were the ragged village farmers, the polio victims pushing themselves along the dusty road in their wooden carts, and the children. Always the children.
On our final day in West Africa, Lou and I were sitting at a small table in an outdoor café with John, the Lutheran World Relief tour guide who had been living in West Africa for seven years. We sipped our Cokes and watched the market women peddling bananas and fried pastries. When Lou asked John, “What, exactly, is it like to be an American who lives here?” I knew that he had already begun to wonder, “Is there any way we could do this?”
At the time, the thought was too big for me. I had too many “Yes, but…” thoughts.
Yes, but our children needed us.
Yes, but what about our secure, lucrative jobs?
Yes, but what would we actually do in Africa? We weren’t exactly trained for development work.
Back home, we gave the expected talks and slide shows. As the months passed, I noticed that my friends’ eyes would glaze over when I kept talking about those three weeks. “Do you know that the illiteracy rate for women in Mali is sixty percent?” They nodded politely. “And that literacy is the key to a better life for those women and their children?” They were grateful when I switched the subject.
Meanwhile, Lou and I bought more books and maps, and as we pored over them, I remembered our premarital scheming and dreaming. We may have missed out on rearing bilingual children, but perhaps it wasn’t too late to make something of those dreams after all. Maybe we really could do something worthwhile in Africa. And have an adventure, too.
We were no longer twenty-somethings, and we knew a lot was at stake. Figuring out how to finance such an undertaking was only one of our concerns. If we moved to Africa, we would probably have to sell our house and put our possessions into storage. Could we undertake such a venture with a daughter still in college? Would our children feel abandoned? And what about my elderly parents? What if our yearning was nothing more than the foolishness of two middle-aged warblers who knew they’d soon be sitting on an empty nest? I knew those guided, protected, three weeks in Africa bore little resemblance to real expatriate life, but how could we know what that life would be like unless we could somehow sample it? Somehow, we would need to test our desire and own physical stamina.
We wrote to John in Niger. He said that he could provide us with a Lutheran World Relief vehicle if we wanted to visit West Africa on our own. His assistant, Yacouba, would be honored to be our driver, guide, and translator. Now, almost one year to the day of our previous departure, we had returned to West Africa. Inside the terminal, John and Yacouba were waiting for us. “I had invited a group of my friends to meet you here last night, but I sent them home to bed around midnight.” Our sleepy friend chuckled when we told him our tale.
“I guess I never told you my name for this airline. Air Tragique.”
By the time we reached John’s home in Niamey, I’d lost track of how many hours I’d been awake. When Yacouba finished unloading our luggage from the Land Cruiser, John handed him a few coins and asked him to buy some fresh bread at the boulangerie down the road.
“Why don’t you both take a shower?” He gestured toward the bathroom. “I’ll make some coffee, and we’ll have some croissants and fruit. Then we can all have a lie-down.” John had been awake all night, too.
Although I’d been yearning for a chance to get horizontal, I was too exhausted, or maybe too excited, to sleep. I listened to bees buzzing on the flowers outside the window of the little guest room, and wondered about the coming weeks. The itinerary John and Yacouba had proposed at breakfast included trips to some remote places with exotic-sounding descriptions. We might even travel to Timbuktu.
Later that evening, I sat in John’s kitchen watching him prepare dinner. He was soaking carrots in a mild bleach solution in his sink.
“If you find yourselves living in West Africa, you’ll have to do this, too. You don’t want to know the sort of water the locals use to water their fruits and veggies.”
While the stew simmered on the stove, we sat on John’s screened front porch nibbling cheese and crackers. I looked up at the thatched roof.
“What’s that crackling noise, John?”
“Oh—those are termites. I have to replace this roof every year or so.”
When we awakened the next morning and walked into the living room, John and Yacouba were stashing canned food, plastic plates, cups, and cutlery into a metal footlocker.
“We’ve loaded the Land Cruiser with two cases of bottled water,” said John. “You can always buy more along the way. And we’ve strapped some chairs, camp beds, and mattresses on the top.”
While we sipped John’s good, strong French press coffee and spread jam on the baguettes still warm from the bakery, Yacouba proposed a small change in the itinerary.
“I would be honored if you both could come to my village. It is called Sorbon Goungou. It is really an island in the Niger River. We could go there for two or three days, and then continue our trip. It will only take us two hours to get there from here.”
Lou and I exchanged quick glances and nodded. This was exactly the sort of encounter we’d been hoping to have, the chance to spend some time with villagers in their own environment.
“The honor would be ours,” said Lou.
Yacouba parked the Land Cruiser under a tree near the riverbank and handed some money to a young man who would watch it while we were visiting Sorbon Goungou. He carefully loaded our gear into the pirogue: camp beds, sheets, mosquito nets, two boxes of food, a carton of bottled water, ice chest, and our suitcase and tote bags, an embarrassingly huge array of supplies for our two-day visit to the tiny island village. Holding my sandals in my left hand, I waded out to the boat and reached for Yacouba’s outstretched palm. Yacouba exchanged a few quick words in Djerma with the bare-chested young man who would row us across the river, and we began our fifteen-minute trip.
A dozen grinning children in tattered T-shirts were waiting for us on the edge of the island. One little fellow waded into the muddy water and pulled our craft ashore. A young teenaged girl grasped my hand and pulled me up the sandy riverbank. She told me, in the easy-to-understand French of West Africans, that her name was Beba Sumana. The children grabbed our gear, hoisted it to their heads, and marched, single-file, to the village. Disturbing movie memories filled my mind: white men in khaki shorts and knee socks tramping through the jungle followed by a procession of African porters. I wondered what the adults in the village would think of these two Americans with all their gear. When we arrived, Yacouba showed us the mud hut that would be our home for the next two days and hurried away. Perhaps he was going to tell his father that we were here. A young woman smiled at us while she continued vigorously sweeping the dirt floor. Our neighborhood was an assortment of mud-brick huts with pointy, thatched roofs. I heard a rhythmic thunk-thunk and knew that somewhere a woman was pounding millet into meal. A few skinny chickens, displaced by our arrival, resumed their hopeful pecking. A faint, hot breeze bore the pungent-sweet aroma of dust, dung, and woodsmoke, a scent I would forever associate with Africa.
Yacouba returned carrying two tin pots: chicken and sauce in one, rice in the other. We expected him to join us for lunch, but he simply smiled and said, “No, here we honor our guests by allowing them to eat alone.”
After lunch, Yacouba enlisted two young men to carry our beds to the large mango tree at the river’s edge. Here we would pass the heat of the afternoon, he said. The children gathered around us again, and we showed them postcards of our home in North Carolina. Amadou, a boy of fifteen, was peering at the words on the back of the card when Beba took my hand and indicated that I should follow her. We stopped outside a small hut surrounded by dusty bushes, and a wizened woman with tired eyes emerged from the entrance. Beba introduced me to her mother who gestured for me to sit down on one of the woven blankets on the sand. She ducked her head and disappeared inside her home. I watched a teenaged girl braiding a younger girl’s hair. Another young girl of about seven shyly fingered my straight, brown hair and giggled. Who was this anasara (white woman) who refused to tuck her hair into a headscarf? Beba’s mother returned with a baby on her hip, put a small square of fabric on my skirt, and placed the naked infant on my lap. The baby grasped my finger, looked at me, and cooed. Before Beba walked me back to the mango tree, she gave me a handful of leaves which I tucked into my pocket.
Back at the tree, Lou and Amadou were hunched over a book. Lou was naming the pictures in a coloring book we had brought for the children, and Amadou was busy scribbling the English words into a small notebook. “Teach me!” he kept saying. Although my college English degree hadn’t prepared me to teach, I wondered if I could teach English to children like Amadou.
At twilight, after another solitary meal, we slathered ourselves with insect repellent and noticed a small, wavering light coming closer. It was Yacouba, carrying a kerosene lantern. “This is for you,” he said. I asked him why we saw no other lanterns in the village, only the flickering glow of cooking fires.
“The villagers can no longer use their lamps. They have no money to buy oil. I do worry about my family here. When my father, the chief, passes away, I will be responsible for all of them.”
As I was getting ready for bed, I reached into my pocket and found the leaves. I tossed them under a bush. The next day I asked Yacouba why Beba had given me those leaves. “Oh,” he said, “those are for tea.” I was glad I hadn’t told him I had thrown them away.
During the next three weeks, Yacouba became a friend. A good friend. We had driven and walked, laughed and sweated our way through hundreds of dusty miles. On our last evening in West Africa, we sipped cups of tea in a restaurant in Côte d’Ivoire. The crisp white tablecloths and flickering candlelight again offered a movie image: Casablanca. We reminisced with Yacouba about the places we had visited, like the animist Dogon villages in the Bandiagara Cliffs and the Great Mosque in Djenni, a holy pilgrimage for Yacouba and many other West African Muslims. Without this trip, he said, he probably would never have seen them.
“Oh, no,” said Lou, “We are the ones who are grateful. Very few Americans have had the privilege of traveling where you have taken us. Very few have had the honor of knowing someone like you.” Although we had already paid him well for his services, we wanted to give Yacouba a gift. After dinner, Lou handed him a fifty-dollar bill and said he should use it as he wished.
“Could you please write a small note?” asked Yacouba. “I will need a letter when I take this to the bank, so they won’t think I have stolen the money.”
The following morning we sat on the tarmac of the Abidjan airport, waiting for our Air Afrique flight to depart. My mind was still replaying scenes from our three-week adventure. I had only one regret: I had really wanted to brag to my friends back home I had been to Timbuktu. We had been a mere four or five hours’ drive from that exotic city whose very name suggests the end of the earth, but Yacouba had said, “I’ve been there many times, and I always get two or three flat tires on that bad road. Really, there isn’t much to see.” We hoped that we would see Yacouba again, but nothing is certain in Africa. As he himself would say, “Enshallah.” God willing.
The trip was physically demanding, and it had shown me my limitations. I could not live in a mud hut, pee in bushes, and wash my clothes in the river, but I knew that one day I wanted to eat dinners with the villagers. I wanted to bring oil for their lanterns, and respond to Amadou’s urgent plea for English lessons. I wanted to be a woman who knew what to do with a handful of leaves.
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Copyright © 2009 B. Susan Bauer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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