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A boy with a leather messenger bag slung over his shoulders rode into town on a too-big, black bicycle. He eyed me as he climbed off and leaned it up against an iron fence. I was standing in the zócalo of a village in southern Mexico. Rico strode over full of eleven-year-old curiosity and asked where I was from.
An outline of Che is spray painted on the leg of his jeans. I ask about him. Revolucioniario, he says. Héroe. Do I know him? Yes, I nod.
Rico politely tries to sell me a bag of tortillas and when I decline, seems just as content to ask me questions. How many brothers and sisters do I have? Do I have a husband? Niños? My Spanish is enough to carry me, so we chat as his friends look on. Before I know it I am surrounded by a circle of boys. Each has a bag of something to sell. Rico has tortillas, a dozen to bag, made fresh that morning by his mother. The others have cookies, candies, sweets, all homemade. I start asking their names, how old they are, why they are not in school, where is their mama and papa, where am I, what is the name of this village? Rico takes my notebook and pen and writes in neat letters: Ciudad Teopisca chiapas. Ricardo, 11, Jovani, 12, Daniel, 11, and Jorge, 6, tell me they go to school from 2:00 to 6:30 p.m. Mornings they sell food in the square to help their familias. Rico let me take his picture standing stoic but proud, holding his bag of tortillas. A solemn, dark-eyed boy, who has had to work too hard and grow up too fast. The same for all the Teopisca boys. I wonder what Che would say.
No toilet paper, no toilet seat, no hose, no lock. Nothing.
I stand in the tiny stall, head peeking over the top, and sigh. Fifty sets of Thai eyes stare back. Among them stands my sister Trisha, blending in ever-so-slightly with her 90-pound, five-foot-nada frame.
“Hurry the hell up,” she says.
The women gaze longingly at her. Thai women love Trisha – the pale skin, the tiny figure – she can do no wrong. I, however, seem to offend everyone– even this stall – with my very presence. 'Same-same,' people say when they see Trish and me together, their hands circling our faces. But 'you too big' they say to me, shaking their heads.
Nothing in this country is built for me. Not that it should be, but a moment’s privacy as I figure out how to urinate would be lovely.
“That’s it,” Trisha says. “If you can’t, I will. Out. OUT. Get out.”
The women all but applaud her.
I leave the stall a tad pissed, my head floating above the crowd. Everyone chirps about The Tiny One’s ability to throw giants from stalls.
“I hate this place,” I tell Trisha as we leave the bathroom.
When I arrive back in Canada I meet my self-confidence at customs:
Anything to declare?
No. (I’m a beast.)
Nothing?
No. (I scare Thai children.)
No clothes?
No. (Nothing fit.)
Shoes?
Maybe a pair or two...
When the men tear apart my suitcase, dumping out cosmetics and eyeing my tweezers, they lay the pathetic remnants of my trip out for me: one pair of tailored black trousers, a set of wooden salad tongs and two pairs of elephant embroidered flip-flops that will never see a BC street, thanks to all the rain.
The men almost looked as sad as I did.
“Romancing the Rails: A train journey through Sudan’s Nubian desert.”
With longing eyes I waited in Atbara’s stifling heat for the train that would whisk me across the desert. I imagined a romantic journey - the sunset painting the sand gold, the sky laden with stars and the colonial carriage gently rocking me into a peaceful sleep.
She staggered drunkenly into the station. Rust dyed her blue carriages crimson; planks covered the windows. Nothing wrong with a little character, I thought, remembering Paul Theroux’s quotation: "It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places."
As I stepped aboard the putrid smells of latrines, food, bodies and heat mingled. Locating my compartment for six, I realized that in Africa where women went, so did their children. We were 15.
Thoughts of survival replaced all else.
We stumbled down the track. Fine Nubian sand infiltrated the boarded windows, stinging our eyes and drying our throats. We soon wore a thin layer of Sudan.
Fatima sat across from me. She had learned English before marriage and was anxious to talk. As her son launched into what would become a broken-record version of Twinkle-Twinkle Little Star, Fatima asked:
“Do you know satellite?”
“Yes.”
“And Oprah?”
I grimaced. “eeee…yesss.”
She clapped her hands in delight. “Before Oprah we thought you Westerners had no emotion. That you didn’t cry. From Oprah, we see you are just like us.”
I smiled. Forget peacekeeping and politics. The world needs more Oprah!
32 hours later the train pulled into Wadi-Halfa. I'd not slept a wink, missed the sunset, and not seen the stars, but heard of them twinkling in a song. If walks on the beach and cliché sayings define romance, the night had been disappointing. But romance is found in the most unusual of places, at the most unlikely of times. Romance is a remembrance to which you can always return. It brings a smile to your lips, fills you with warmth, and casts a dreamy look over your eyes. By this respect the night had been magical – now a memory that transports me thousands of miles to the heat, dust and kindness of Sudan’s Nubian desert.
On the night of my eighteenth birthday, I emptied my savings account and boarded a plane at O’Hare. Born and raised in rural Michigan, locked in by the tall corn of summer, the snow drifts of winter, my adolescent blood had been long burning for a drastic change of scenery.
I cannot recall my exact reasons for choosing County Donegal, Ireland’s remote northwest, as my ultimate destination. Whether prompted by my father’s sentimental tales of ancestry, or simply because I had once heard an acquaintance praise its beauty, I found myself, one May afternoon, ascending a serpentine road outside the village of Kilcar.
Nothing could have prepared me for the magnificence of this place. A small scattering of civilization nestled between a forgotten coastline and hills that loomed like tired monsters, so green they appeared lit from within. Amid such vastness, I felt curiously recreated; a bright conspicuous object bobbing randomly before the dark sea, the lush desolate land and the cool misty wind, always the wind. A sense of freedom sharper than a sword stole into me, and thus I wandered the hours away.
Toward evening, a young man named John, whom I found leaning against a fence, invited me to a friend’s house for tea. The friend turned out to be old Cara Cunningham, local legend and owner of Cara’s Hostel, a converted thatched cottage belonging to his family for two-hundred years. The men spoke with timeless good humor, their two sets of azure eyes periodically gazing through windows toward the pounding tide and whispering pasturelands. They were apparently as enamored of their Donegal as I, even after a lifetime of encounters.
I lingered there into the night, allowing my giddy heart to settle, listening to stories told a thousand times before, and drinking my tea with sugar.
When asked how I spent my summer, I’ve taken to telling people that I studied abroad. In New Orleans.
Perhaps its unfair to call an American city “abroad,” but if studying abroad is the total immersion in an experience unlike anything within one’s own world, the introduction to new people, environments, and adventures at a heady rate that leaves a person permanently changed, then I was indeed abroad.
New Orleans is not like the rest of America. Despite the diversity of our country, there is something decidedly familiar about every place I’ve been, from Seattle to Nashville, from New York to Chicago. New Orleans was unfamiliar. The air was almost sagging with heat and moisture. The rains would come in the late afternoon, and the sidewalks would hiss and steam as everyone standing on Magazine, shoppers, wandererers, locals, loiterers, would reach into a bag or purse and pull out the at-ready umbrella, as though the move were part of a choreographed number. Only tourists get caught in the downpour.
New Orleans is something like what I’d imagine the West Indies would resemble if the islands took a cultural tour of Paris before settling back down on the edge of the Caribbean Sea. New Orleans is all color and culture, candy-painted houses with wide porches and shaved ice stands flanking cathedrals. The people all seem to know each other, and when I first settled into my attic room in a 1900s house next to the famed
Prytania Theatre, I took a long walk around Uptown and felt like a stranger. But men tipped their hats to me; ladies smiled. For that matter, men wore hats here.
On my last day living in New Orleans, I took another stroll, and the man who works at the stationary store on St. Charles was sitting at La
Boulangerie, and I joined him for a spontaneous cup of coffee at the little outside table. It started to rain, and we both pulled out umbrellas without a pause in the conversation.
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