precipitation

It is drizzling here tonight.

There is an African proverb that i love:

Let your love be like the misty rain: coming softly, but flooding the river.

But i only experienced misty clouds, not misty rains, in Africa. Rains were usually tempestuous, temperamental downpours that you could hear coming for kilometers, thanks to corrugated metal roofs. Sometimes that advance warning was enough time to bolt for home before getting soaked (and having one's laptop and grading get soaked). Sometimes you were too far from home, and could feel your shoulders instinctively droop in the hopelessness of staying dry. I like playing in the rain, but not with my computer, work clothes, and books!

I miss the rains in Africa (yes, like the song). :-) But because i am tired, if i finish this entry now it will be more melancholy than it ought to be. I will wait until tomorrow.

Today: The canyon winds are blowing. The sky is clear; the air is dry. Despite last night's rain, i need to water the plants in pots on the porch.

Back to about Cameroon: Even under an umbrella or overhang people got wet, because the water ran ankle-deep on the ground, and came down so hard it splashed up waist-high. Walls there are spattered with orange about one meter up--hence why it's aesthetically smart to have mud-brick houses, or paint the plaster a nice terracotta color: the splashes blend in. A good half of the rains were thunderstorms: the lightning was amazing, spidering horizontally across the sky or staking the ground. I liked it when the power was knocked out (for a short while) and you could sit in awe of the power of the storm outside. The thunder drowned out the sound of everything else (even the raindrops on roofs) and made me think of some Psalms where God's voice is described as thunder: mighty, awe-striking, and not to be taken lightly.

culture is how you look

In Cameroon a modest woman, national or foreigner, doesn't boldly look unfamiliar men in the eye. To do so, at least in the city, invites more lewd comments than usual from the idle loafers in front of the road-side shops and bars, who spend their time playing checkers, discussing sports, & checking out girls.

In Cameroon, the route to school did not have a sidewalk, only a wide shoulder. It was paved but uneven, with all sorts of interesting bits of things on the road. Chickens and dogs crossed at leisure, and either began browsing (the chickens) or flopped down for a nap (the dogs).

Because of all this going on, and because i have a tendency to trip over nothing as it is, i usually kept my eyes down as i walked to school. Sometimes this was embarrassing, as when i would pass someone i knew well. They would catch my arm, i would look up startled, and then we would laugh and greet each other. Overall, i developed a tendency to either look down as i walked, or if i held my head high, look straight ahead and make little eye contact with men.

I come back to the States and discover i'm doing the same thing. I pass a kindly-looking older gentleman on the street walking to a mailbox, and i don't acknowledge him. I'm at Starbucks reading, look up for a breath, notice a man just walked in, and look away hoping he didn't notice what i just risked. Even at church, i avoided eye contact with men.

This poses several problems!

For one thing, i think Dallas Willard is right on target in Restoration of the Heart when he says the two ways humans hurt each other are through attack and withdrawal. He writes that drivers where he grew up used to acknowledge each other with a friendly fingers-off-the-steering-wheel wave, even to people they did not know. It was a simple, polite acknowledgment of the other's existence and human dignity. We don't really do that anymore in the general public.

I think our society (and world in general, it's not a particularly American flaw) suffers from both attack and withdrawal. I'm not talking about how personal/family relations are messed up here, but regarding strangers. People don't smile, wave, or even make eye contact. I feel like i've failed to be Christ-like when i don't. It feels almost as bad as when i do look up to smile and acknowledge passers-by, but they are looking down or straight ahead: ouch, rejection!

The other problem is that, ahem, i want to appear open and friendly. I want to meet new people and make new friends, men and women, and maybe have a few coffee dates with interesting guys. That isn't going to happen if i don't appear friendly!

So, i'm practicing. When at a stop light, sometimes i'll look over and acknowledge the other drivers. Instead of looking away, which might (or might not) be taken as a huff, i'm trying to smile. I know, no sane, sober man is going to roll down his window and ask for my number, but it's practice for when smiling does count.

2007

My supervisor in Cameroon had a fantastic tradition of asking people where they had been in the past year. She'd usually ask at your birthday: what were you doing or where were you last year? I started asking myself those reflective questions at other milestones, like Christmas and New Year's Eve.

I can't remember what i did for New Year last year, which bothers me, and i have no immediate resource to check. I have a journal entry for 23 December 2005--while in Maroua, describing the trip and jotting down notes of what i needed to write from the past few days (which i didn't do, oops). The next entry is 15 January 2006, after going to Kribi with friends for a quick weekend away after the first week of the semester.

2005-2006 was a very different holiday season--traveling and away for Christmas, friends out of town when i was back--i wish i had written down more. One day just blends in to the next when they're spent in similar ways. Perhaps i could try capturing bits of it now before even more memories fade, and i could ask a few friends with whom i know i spent it.

This New Year was fun, although it was also very different. I didn't write down a letter to read in September, and we didn't have a reflection time before midnight. Kind of missed that. It's interesting how a similar setting throws into sharp relief what isn't the same.