don't be deceived

don't be deceived
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

these are young children

keeps the cigarettes close to his heart

keeps the cigarettes close to his heart
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

you know what grinds my gears, these women are the cause of all venality, the fountainhead, that is, for all vile and base activities that undermine the growth of capital. if you think that government officials are dishonest, you have to look at where they learn the ideas. they learn from the children, because children are our future and our past and our negative mirror. i have been informed that all the children have money to buy schoolbooks but they just take the money and buy these delicious balls of fried dough and then tell me that the books are too expensive. and who's propping up the whole regime? yes, the very mothers who wake up at 4am to gather the firewood and water to make the dough and fry them, carry their vials of oily, doughy crack to our school's proud cafeteria, and slurp up all of the money that the textbook publishers work like galley slaves to keep a rusty, leaky ship whose crew is stricken with beriberi afloat because they care about the future, the children, the past, and how do they thank them?

furthermore i am happy to report that my observations while riding public transport have led me to believe that a police officer or gendarme has never accepted a bribe. we have only seen rare cases where a bill or coin was accidentally left folded inside registration papers and he holds onto it for them for safekeeping, where he is asked for change by a driver and by some sleight of attention shorts him slightly, and even cases where a driver gives money to someone else, a brigand of sorts, who takes advantage of a lax moment in the official's movements to slip money into his pocket as a way of laundering the same.

pikin

pikin
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

classic

arraching

arraching
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

i teach them and they alternately show interest, make fun of the way i talk, or write down whatever just like they're told to and i alternately tell them that british victorian english is pidgin, to stand in the corner, or thank them for not cheating. i am in a cold war with the others over the work books, or so i imagine. all cold wars are woven of rumors that you fabricate so as to feel some liveliness in the tension

secteur extralegale

secteur extralegale
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

gets the job done. almost all private buildings were built by the people who live in them, because if they didn't then who could prove whose house it was?

breakfast

breakfast
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

i am inside the breakfast shack with the curtain eleves get their balls of fried dough. we gladly eat them every morning with boiled beans spiced with ginger, habanero and so much oil

at least, the whisper goes so

today has a significance. we went down to the stream to wash clothes. it was far off so the only others around were two old men who were harvesting sand from the stream bed to sell to builders (but everyone here built their own house) and breaking rocks into gravel with hammers to sell to road crews, so as to pay their childrens' school fees; thus i am becoming reluctant to force the children to buy workbooks full of grammatical errors and vapid exercises which administrators getting perks from publishers advertise to the final solution of low standardised test scores (if you ask me it's because the tests are in english and english is not anyone's first, usually not even second language, they only speak it in school).

we discussed how if one were so inclined he or she could take a raft from the rock we sat on all the way into nigeria, though it would probably be easier and quicker to walk since you could always count on free cocoyams and a straw mat in villages on the way. this practice will not work in large cities. i was informed of a court case in yaounde concerning a houseguest who transformed herself into a rat and was caught in the act of poisoning her host's food by a thief. the owner didn't know the source of her rodent problem and set out poison, which the witch was relocating to the owner's own food supply. the thief felt it was more important to speak out than to finish thieving. as in all witchcraft cases, the courts have needlessly complicated the matter.

later on i was at the bar named for the canadians who come once a year and bring in about a year's worth of business in two weeks, where the owner was lamenting how no one buys beer anymore since they spent all their money on school fees. with a motorcycle he'd have a more reliable income, either transporting people or freshly killed forest animals such as palm vipers, bush pigs, antelope and chimpanzees. i objected to the idea of chimpanzees being hunted, noting that we were in one of the last countries (the last?) with forest chimpanzees. an elder who had been quiet so far began to speak on the matter.

through translation, i learned about the mythology of chimpanzees: a chimpanzee hunter knows that the chimpanzee is the most dangerous animal to hung, because if he shoots and misses (and he's loading homecast bullets to fire with black powder) the chimpanzee will seize the gun barrel as he tries to reload, drive it into the ground, and beat the man to death without any great effort. if he shoots a chimpanzee where other chimpanzees can see or hear, they will avenge the former's death, with their grip strong enough to break the bones in a man's arm. if a chimpanzee sees a hunger carrying a dead comrade, it will beat the man to death. but it is more complicated than this, for many hunters respect chimpanzees and come to the forest to hunt only the other animals. ch impanzees have a more complicated relationship with this type of hunter, as well as with the man who goes into teh forest for reasons other than hunting. if a hunter enters a nesting area with a gun, they are known to throw tree branches at him as a warning before there can be any confrontation. the chimpanzees try to befriend and imitate the behaviour of respectful hunters and nonhunters. if they notice a hunter going after a certain type of animnal, they will kill one and bring it to his camp if they get the chance. if they see a man smoking a cigarette, they will pick up the butt to smoke, and will do similarly with the last drops of a bottle of whisky. sensing my unrest about them being killed by hunters, the elder explained the traditional conservation method:

any hunter must gain permission from the chief responsible for a particular forest. the thief indicates an area where the hunter is allowed, then changes himself into a lion to drive the chimpanzees out of this area and out of danger. how the world must have been different...

eleves

eleves
Originally uploaded by jlovegren.

school day

seven forty eight?

the destruction following the first significant battle with the hormigas coloradas, that ater generalized to all animals less complex than lizards: lines like brush strokes from the squeegie, footprints, splatterings on the wals, drying clumps in the earth outside, my whitened fingernails and rougened palms; all quicklime (chaux vive, cal viva, impure calcium oxide prepared by heating of limestone, makes slaked lime when mixed with water, also known as whitewash) in cien anhos de soledad they were not strong enough to carry off the baby cola de cerdo until the generalized neglect brought the townspeople to forget to pour cal viva in the hormigueros weekly, so after reading i secured a kilo in dschang for the day they would come. quicklime is also used to make mortar, assist in the production of elemental magnesium (in this case from crushed oyster shells), paint tree trunks, fences and houses, and prepare a type of crack found in the border region of brazil and bolivia that uses various waste products from the processing of cocaine paste. but i digress. it started when i walked to menji and found irish potatoes (etym. batata, amerindian word from amazon basin, now a loan word in portuguese and marakesh) though about the movie onibus 134 the part where they interview the woman in the favela that gave sandro a room to sleep in, and she said he would be happy and make his batatas fritas (he loved them) and i was happy to understand this one phrase out of all said, figuring that such feeling would carry over should i finish climbing the hill and wash them off to fry them on my gas stove. i made some thick potato chips the first night and was pleased, so today i decided to make french fries and ketchup. i didn't have the recipe and watson was unlikely to get back to me fast enough as it was 5am there. unfortunately the only reference i have is larousse dictionnaire du francais d'aujourd'hui and a college chemistry textbook.

ketchup n.m. inv. (mot angl.). condiment anglais, a base de tomates assaisonnees d'epices. so i found out that it has tomatoes inside... i ended up with a sweet thick tomato sauce and some steak fries, which was as wel as i had hoped for. i ate them all and sank into an oily haze, alternately napping and reading 'le mystere du capital' i got up to get water and found enough ants anywhere near where oil had splattered to carry off a premature baby. they would only use the oil to nurture the queen and multiply,t hey wouldn't even use it to create surplus value in their market enabling them to develop agriculture, writing and breast implants. they would just eat the delicious oil. bastards. i found several of their holes going into the foundation and stuffed them with quicklime, cutting off the escape, then made some slaked lime and dumped it all over the kitchen and the dirt outside the back door, squeegied everything out then went to the market for fish stew with fufu and a bottle of raphia wine (total cost ~$0.60) cut down all the grass in my back yard (mosquitoes not exempt) with my machete, and returned to the research of my essay on the uses of sarcasm in the popular culture of american expats in the grasslands region whose rightful residents speak bamilike languages. i have identified six forms of sarcasm, only one of which does justice to the word's greek roots: sarka zein, to bite the flesh.

come and play come and play forget about the movement

like the phone call you get on your way to the party from your friend suggesting a program that you would be expected to prefer, if not for fear of damaging your street credit by skipping this, the ochentaeth consecutive such party, it reminds you why you skipped the last seventy nine without any lasting scandal or remorse: fuck tha bullshit.(see the penguin portable jean-jacques rousseau)

this theme found its way into my preparations for the annual proceedings concerning international teacher's day to be held in the seat of the sub-division of clouds. the program seemed official enough: the sheet of typing paper with handwritten information concerning the day of the event, the town to host it, and the suggested amount of money i should contribute to the reception afterwards contained a stamp from the DO's office. the first warning sign was that i mostook the attitudes of the usual players in the arena of the politics of formal education in lebialem, being similar to those of preachers who must endorse, at least in word, every single event or function championed by a church member, and woke up in the morning, dressed, shined my shoes, and set aside my two mille cfa suggested donation. the second warning sign was that i didn't care enough to investigate transportation options (there is one truck, one car,a nd one motorcycle that permanently reside in the village) beforehand and strolled into the market 30 minutes before the meeting's start walking with a swagger of a man who knows he is going somewhere and willing to burn some petrol in doing so, but with the secret confidence of a man who knows that the morotrcycle would already be gone and i'd have to find stand by the road and bum a ride from the cigarette delivery man. i then realised that my destiny of skipping the meeting could be legitimated if i walked up the road a bit so that the motorcycle would pick up someone else first, forcing me to walk the whole distance--it would look quite noble to show up dusty and two hours late saying that i did all i could to arrive. on the way i scaled some hill with wild cassava plants coming from a time when the soil was more fertile, swinging down from some tree branch back to the main road, then stopped at a palm wine shack just past the rusting sign discarded on the side of the road "DOUANE" to check if people would suddenly start speaking french. the proprietor asked me about a passing italian nun talking on her cell phone "c'est votre patois?" "ce n'est guere ainsi, hein" people here are often surprised to find out that i have no traditional name, nor do i have a local dialect that i speak only in Texas (presumed to be alternately a large city and a vast desert filled with guns). when i finaly arrived it turned out to be a market day, meaning i could help myself to such delicacies as turtles and mole rats, basil, irish potatoes (so long as i would buy the entire 10 kilo bucket), rat traps, bread that was baked and not fried, soybeans and dried corn (what americans call deer corn). the meeting became officially skipped when one of the exiting dirigeants found me and took me to the back room of a bar where a woman was waiting behind a curtain. she showed us several chunks of still-warm boiled pork and a spicy fish soup. my friend bought a mole rat that wasn't all the way stiff yet from this kid that has the hookup on that sort of thing and we went off to another bar. the clouds were so thick as to creep in through the windows, obscuring even the other side of the street.

the next day, chewing on the leg of what appeared to be a monkey, (since the foot very closely resembled that of a human infant, save the prehensile toes) i decided to buy one of the piglets that wil go on sale next month, and to show more respect for the domestication of various good-tasting animals. according to my sources who escorted me to the schwaht, a skilled palm tapper can kill the viper that often lounges in the tree without being bitten or falling, then enjoy its meat later on. i must get the permission of an elder to go to the schwaht, or to even say what it is or ask questions about it in public. today ended in a string of disturbances and disappointments: englishman told me that chimpanzee skin is a powerful medicine, i had to isten to my neighbor beat his daughter with a rubber belt then stand outside so that he would know i heard, then cameroun failed to qualify for the world cup by missing a penalty kick.

quoth cortazar:
a veces se que tiene frio, que le pegan. puedo solamente odiarla tanto, aborrecer las manos que la tiran al suelo y tambien a ella, a ella todavia mas porque le pegan, porque soy yo y le pegan. ah, no me desespera tanto cuando estoy durmiendo, o corto un vestido, o son las horas de recibo de mama y yo sirvo el te a la senhora de regules o al chico de los rivas. entonces me importa menos, es un poco cosa personal, yo conmigo; la siento mas duenha de su infortunio, lejos y sola pero duenha. que sufra, que se hiele; yo aguanto desde aqui, y creo que entonces la ayudo un poco. como hacer vendas para un soldado que todavia no ha sido herrido y sentir eso de grato, que se o esta aliviando desede antes, previsoramente