The CFA is the common currency of eight countries in West Africa. (People call the money “say-fah.”) CFA banknotes are gorgeous. The image doesn’t capture the subtle overlay of shimmer on parts of the bills, but trust me when I say they are truly stunning. If this particular combination weren’t worth about US$62, I would glue them to a board and frame them.
Last Thursday night it drizzled, and after five months in Senegal with nary a drop of rain, the scent of freshly-wet earth read to my nostrils as one of the loveliest smells in the world.
Today I got caught in another teeny tiny shower and realized that for the first time since arriving here, I’m going to have to start checking the weather report. The rainy season is upon us, and Mamie warns me that it will be “dégueulasse” when the water overflows the gutters and everything turns to mud.
But for now I feel positively Gene Kelly-like. And I’m excited about the prospect of using my second-favorite French word, parapluie (umbrella, topped only by pamplemousse, grapefruit), as frequently as possible.
This past Wednesday, I woke up feeling exhausted but otherwise fine. About an hour after eating breakfast, a dull sense of weakness and malaise began creeping over me and I had to lie back down. By the end of the next hour, I was unable to sit up, paralyzed by bodily fatigue. I had stitches of pain and muscle aches in my legs and sides and neck. I couldn’t find a comfortable position and every time I moved I moaned. I was chilly and sweaty at the same time.
I didn’t want to jump to malarial conclusions and I also didn’t want to go to the doctor without a very good reason, so I tried to wait it out, but by 7pm it was clear it was getting worse instead of better. I had gotten nauseous and head-achey, my aches had turned into pronounced pains, and I could barely crawl out of bed let alone stand up straight.
I hobbled with Mamie to the pharmacy next door where they pronounced their prognosis soon after my arrival: “un petit palu,” a mild case of malaria. I told them I take doxycycline every day as a prophylactic and they mimed the pill going in one ear and out the other. They gave me a fizzy paracetamol tablet to reduce my fever and told me to get to the doctor stat.
So we headed to the emergency room (salle d’urgence) of the hospital downtown, whereupon I began an epic journey / vocabulary lesson. Continue reading
Before I post pictures from Liberia, I want to share the video that I made there, which was the reason for my trip:
If you lack the attention span for a 14-minute video on reproductive health, here’s a 4-minute version. And here’s an even shorter cut that AJ+ did using my footage. Documentaries / non-fiction videos are often trees falling in forests, but AJ+ has a really big audience and their piece has gotten over 300,000 views so far, which makes me very, very happy.
It was such a privilege to see Liberia in the way that I did through this project. While I love dropping into a place as a tourist and observing on a surface level, it’s a different and deeper kind of enrichment to spend time in a country where your primary purpose is to document some facet of humanity. Criss-crossing the country from Monrovia to the most remote villages, I got up close and personal with people – mostly women – whose lives and experiences have been about as different from my own as you can get. Strangers afforded me access to their private lives, thoughts, and feelings, and they entrusted me to portray them sensitively to the public. It always amazes me when that happens, considering how guarded I personally am in front of a camera.
I would never claim to “know” Liberia or Liberians after only two weeks… but I will say that what I experienced there has made a huge impact on how I “know” and see and feel about myself and the world. I think that is the greatest gift that travel – and this line of work – can give you.
I had been told that Casablanca’s Hollywood image is completely at odds with its actual sprawling ugly blandness. So I was surprised to find it neither sprawling, ugly nor bland. In fact, it was an Art Deco wonderland. Continue reading
My Portugal flights included a stopover in Casablanca in both directions. Since it cost barely $50 more to hop out in Morocco before continuing on to Dakar, I decided to stay a few days. After an uneventful evening in Casablanca, I took a morning train from the Casa Voyageurs station to Marrakech, a little over 3 hours away. It was remarkably easy and the train runs every couple of hours. Continue reading
Every single time I talk to my family they ask me the same question: When are you coming home?
Every single time, I give them the same answer: I don’t know.
Meanwhile, this song runs through my head:
I left so many people I love behind in New York, but apart from those people, I don’t miss a thing. Not because there’s nothing in New York worth missing, but because it’s all old news to me, and none of it has proven irreplaceable with something equally interesting but novel.
A recent article in The New York Times, “Think Less, Think Better,” inadvertently spelled it out for me. The author, a neuroscientist, differentiates between exploitative thinking – “leaning on our expectations, trusting the comfort of a predictable environment,” and exploratory thinking – when “we attend to things with a wide scope, curious and desiring to learn.” Driving your commute on auto-pilot is exploitative, for example, while wandering down a hidden alley in Greece is exploratory. He posits that we need a healthy balance between the two, but I guess I’m just in a mid-life crisis exploratory phase right now, because I see absolutely no need for the tried and true and no-longer-stimulating.
Maybe one day I’ll be ready to return to familiar pleasantries. But considering that in my adult life, I have never lived in a place longer than three years before asking myself, “Where to next?”, it’s doubtful.
There are certain things I appreciate about the United States now more than ever: democratic ideals, diversity, tolerance, coffee. I’ve become way more of an American exceptionalist than I ever was at home during my time abroad. But so far that has not translated in any way into a desire to be back.
(Note to family: Don’t worry. That does not mean I am not coming back. It just means I will not be particularly enthused about it.)
I was browsing Instagram one night a couple of weeks ago and saw that The New York Times Travel section had asked people to post their #awkwardfamilytravels photos. The mother of all awkward family travel photos was sitting not two feet away from me on my laptop, so I couldn’t not post it. I was proud to post it.* Because while my family will never be the most beautiful, cultured, gracious, or fun, we hands down are among the most awkward people on the planet. Especially when we’re together: our awkwardness’s whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s nice to accept yourself and your family as is, and to embrace the thing that used to horrify you. (The thing I am talking about is our family’s awkwardness in general, but I could also be talking about my haircut here, which is the one that mortified me as a child, but which I now find rather elfin and cute.)
It didn’t surprise me one bit when @nytimestravel reposted my photo as their favorite. Of course it was their favorite. Why wouldn’t some of the most awkward people on the planet take one of the most awkward photos on the planet? If I had access to my parents’ photo albums right now, there are at least fifteen more where that came from. We could lap and double lap and triple lap other people’s #awkwardfamilytravels.
What I didn’t expect was for The Times to print the photo in the actual paper this past Sunday. I love love love this most dubious of honors and am overjoyed to have gotten such a low-brow photo into such a high-brow publication. (My parents bought a copy of the paper for me but I haven’t seen it yet. I really hope our pic is on the same page as some article about luxury ecotourism.)
*The reason I had it on my computer in the first place is because I had made it my Facebook picture after rediscovering it at my parents’ house a few years ago.
Hard to believe it’s been almost two months since I left Dakar for a vacation starting in Lisbon. Life has been moving along from one thing to the next pretty quickly, and I am only now coming up for air after a whirlwind tour of Portugal, Morocco, Liberia… and Adobe Premiere, whose depths I plumbed day in and day out for the past three weeks while working on various video deadlines.
Since those deadlines are not yet completely behind me, I’m still liable to go MIA for days at a time, but I now have a ton of stuff to post here, so I’ll try to keep up with it.
On that note, here are some many photos from Portugal. Continue reading
I have loved every second of being back in Dakar… excepts for the seconds minutes hours days I’ve spent uploading videos to send out for review. I wish I could say the photo above was stolen from the Internet ether, but it is actually the current sad state of affairs chez Ruth.When all is said and done, it will have taken five hours (if I’m lucky) for a file that is less than 1GB to upload.
But tragic network speeds and all the other things that had at one time or another annoyed me about Dakar are rolling right off me now that I’m back from my trip. Being here feels positively glorious, and such a privilege. The sun is out, rainy season has not yet begun, I have spent no more than three hours in an office in 2016, and my French has miraculously improved rather than suffered in the absence of speaking it for a month. (More evidence for my “marination theory” of language, which posits that time away allows everything to seep into the long-term, intuitive part of the brain, even while it abandons the short-term, readily accessible part.)
As Lloyd Dobler put it, I’ve been “walking around feeling satisfied. Can you imagine that?” I keep having these manic bursts of happiness while on the street or reading a book or listening to music. Even in the middle of twelve-hour edit sessions I have found myself overcome with the shock of contentment.
While I was away on my shoot and missing Dakar much more terribly than I would have thought possible after only three months living here, a similarly “homesick” study abroad student at the language center, who had just gotten back to the States, posted this video to Facebook. It’s been stuck in my head since, and it’s now one of my go-to happy songs. I think it very nicely captures how I am feeling at the moment.
talk foreign to me 