The market in the center of Lunsar is about a thirty minute walk. We try to go early before the sun elevates and burns through the morning fog that is mixed with the burning of tree trunks and stumps. They light the bases of the uprooted trees on fire and cover them with dirt. They smolder and a pungent earth aroma leeches out from the smoke as it sifts into the fog to become one gaseous vapor. The burnt wood is cut up and sold in giant bags, covered with banana leaves, on the side of the road as a type of charcoal used in cooking. I ran by such a burning mound last night at dusk, just after a field was cleared by setting it on fire, the terrain blackened and sepulchral under a socketed sun whose exit was unceremonious from the day. This morning the heaped pile of dirt with the burning tree inside still emitted smoke as we walked by on our way to town.
We passed a boy carrying an oil drum horizontally on his head, wearing a faded red v-neck t-shirt that read "San Francisco Does it Better." Children came out to the road to greet us with the familiar "Ah-patto!!!" , "white man," in the local language, Temne. It remains irresistable for them. We wave and respond with a few greetings in Temne and they laugh at our pronunciation and tongue-tied and likely tone-deaf efforts. Jon is a family physician from Alabama whose wife was struck by lightning and killed 6 years ago. He was here visiting his daughter who was working as a missionary in a children's home in Freetown last year when he met his now fiancee. His daughter introduced them. He is a gentle soul who lives guided by his Menonite beliefs. He takes lessons in the local language a few times a week and plans on staying here for a long time, even after Ebola has receded back into the jungle. We passed by the creek where women using wash boards cleaned their clothes by force, wearing open back tank tops that exposed each muscle involved in the process. Children ran pushing inner-tubes with a stick that never lost speed. Everyone was doing something and a lot of it involved labor. We were walking with backpacks into the market to get some fruits and whatever else we could find.
First, I had to stop to exchange money with Kabia, an old Muslim man who owns a small hardware store. I have changed with him before. He pretends that he has just called the banks in Freetown to determine the daily exchange rate. I pretend to believe him. We have imputed his falling exchange rate to the fact that there are more of us exchanging money here in Lunsar. It is a matter of a few dollars and I prefer to exchange with him rather than the banks who give a much lower rate. So I exchanged one hundred dollars and walked down into the market. Women sat on wooden stools behind their mounds of salt they sell by the small cup that sits on its peak. They sit behind neatly arranged piles of dessicated fish that no doubt never imagined a condition in death so at odds with how they once lived. I push through and find the young woman I buy peanuts from laying down on a rough day bed made of bamboo. She perks up and doles out two cans of roasted peanuts and ties them in a plastic bag for me. Her smile is genuine and young. We find some fat cucumbers and knobby carrots and buy them all. Yusef, a teenager wearing a loud shiny necklace and sunglasses sells us popcorn in that insouciant teenage kind of way you could find anywhere in the world. Voices project and intermingle with the Zouk music blaring out of what looks like a 1970's Peavey amp sitting next to a cage full of chickens. The market is the lifeblood of a village and I was being transfused. We filled our backpacks with bananas, bread, and some rope for a bee box Jon had made and plans on suspending from a tree next to several log bee hives.
As we walked home, the same children yelled out to us "Ah-patto! Ah-patto," in their chirpy sweet voices, as they gathered on the hills and in the fields of their childhood, to watch us go by. The musical memory of them there, cheekbones and elbows and lips highlighted by the morning sun, I cut out to paste later into the Missalette, unedited, to face the page of Mohamed's song, their voices rising up above the smoke and fog to that space where the sky drifts in cool blue pools.
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