Chasing Bananas, Finding Rice

I work the night shift tonight from 8 pm until 8 am so it gave me some time to walk into the town.  I set out to find bananas.  The food here has taken a hit as well.  All the roadside markets and produce vendors that are typically commonplace everywhere you look are conspicuously absent here.  But surely I could find a regime of bananas.  I greeted the children playing in front of their houses with sticks and whatever they could fashion into a ball.  Barefoot feet kicked palm kernels and then chased them towards the creek, clotted green with organic and not so organic waste.

In the center of town, a half-finished concrete mosque had a sign on the front that read "closed for Ebola".  Ebola has risen to an evil deity here.  Something lurking invisibly everywhere, casting yet another spectre  of fear across the land.  But still the Sierra Leoneans smile.  I was greeted with kindness and smiles everywhere I walked.  I met a high-school chemistry teacher, Benjamin, who was hung over from the preceding night's New Years Day celebration that it turns out could not be stopped from occurring after all.  At the hotel we are staying at, the Bai Suba, there are a number of circular buildings with bamboo and thatched roofs.  We take our meals there and it also serves as a bar for the neighborhood that can afford the expensive beer by Sierra Leonean prices.  Last night when I went down there for dinner there were colored lights spraying across the dining hall and loud music I could hear from a good 300 yards away.  The WASH team (the group responsible at our Ebola Treatment Unit for washing and decontaminating everything) was having a fiesta.  Their bodies moved like liquid trees to the west african beats, swaying and flittering like leaves who hadn't felt wind in way too long.  They drank Cody beer imported from Germany and, for a brief time, celebrated just being alive.

Woody Guthrie has a song entitled "It takes a worried man to sing a worried song."  Since I have arrived I haven't heard the faith songs I have been accustomed to hearing when in Africa.  I don't know that there are many songs to sing at a child's funeral or when a whole family dies at the hands of a cruel virus.  That there probably are in certain cultures hollows me.

I met a woman named Bula as I was walking back on the empty streets.  The wooden market stalls sat like scaffolding holding the emptiness just behind her.  She was drying rice kernels on one side of the unused street.  They reminded me of something my children play with at aftercare called fusbees which are small plastic beads kids can arrange into shapes or figures and then have ironed to stay together.  The rice kernels were all a golden wheat brown and baked in the overhead sun.  Bula is a nurse at our treatment center and also a subsistence farmer, mother, wife and aunt to many  I asked her where I might be able to find bananas.  "Not today," she responded, adjusting her  floral serape.  "And maybe not tomorrow, but you will find them soon."

I can wait for the bananas to come back.  I have rice after all.