Vernon Mooers writes

THE WHITE MAN'S GRAVEYARD

chapter 1 (2)

He'd gone to the University the day the CUSO people had come for a presentation. The salary didn't seem bad and they gave you a return ticket. He applied and got accepted a week later and then they phoned and said he'd be going to Nigeria with a group of twenty others. He'd told them he wouldn't mind teaching Math and Science and they'd posted him to a Secondary School in the Savannah region. He had three weeks to get a passport and his shots. He made arrangements for his loan to be taken out of his account automatically, sold the second-hand furniture through an ad in the paper and packed the rest of his stuff in boxes and stacked them in a corner of his mother's basement in Wolfville. He spent a hundred dollars at Shopper's on medicine supplies and threw it into a knapsack with his hiking boots, a couple of T-shirts, a tape deck, and some jeans and cotton pants.

They sent a list of possible things to take -- batteries, candles, razor blades, a raincoat. He imagined waking up in a thatched-roof mud hut and beating the roof for snakes and working outside, sweating with the natives building things from poles and getting tanned and muscled in the tropical heat. Yeah, he could take it. It would get his mind off Sharon and he'd forget about his bowels.

They had a small going-away party for him in the back yard of his mother's house, a barbecue, a few friends and relatives present and of course, Bill Kavanaugh and the other neighbours. The next day he flew to orientation in Ottawa. He was met at the airport by a young black boy who loaded his pack into the back of a van. A woman came, the one who'd been signing the CUSO letters, who'd picked up another volunteer named Paul who was from New Brunswick. The CUSO Representative, Rosanne, looked Jamaican. They piled in the van and were dropped at a downtown hotel. Rosanne walked them to the desk and gave out an information packet and said to report to the Green Room at seven. Not bad, two days' free hotel in Ottawa. Alex thought they had the right idea.

A lot of free meals. The first week had been great. Alex hung around with Steve Morrissey, from Belleville, who seemed alright. There were older couples, a family, the rest, young, single people just out of college. There was Louise, from Mont Joli, not bad looking. It looked like they took anybody who signed up. The group got a couple of free nights in Ottawa. He and Steve Morrissey took a taxi to Hull and he picked up an Alymer local and woke up the second day with some kind of liquid dripping out of his cock. Not only did he have to worry about his rectum, but now his bladder. He had to phone Communicable Disease Control at Health and Welfare Canada and a lady answered. He was standing, trying to look inconspicuous, at a phone on the Spark Street Mall. He mumbled into the phone. "Please speak up Sir," the lady said. "I said, it's about my penis!" he said in a loud voice and several people walking by turned and stared at him. She said it might only be a minor virus, like a cold, but he could take the tetracycline he packed and if it didn't go away, get penicillin when he got to Africa. It was really embarrassing to talk with her. Luckily, Alex was leaving the country.

The entourage spent three hours at Heathrow before taking off in the rain. The Nigeria Airways 747 had blown an engine or got hit by lightning he thought. He saw a flash from the engine and the plane shook and rattled for awhile but the pilot assured them it was a slight minor mechanical problem and wouldn't happen again. It was a rough ride.

The plane landed at Kano -- cement covered buildings with paint chipping off and soldiers everywhere. They were herded upstairs and had to fill out six forms for everything. Four hours. Like an oven, fans spinning overhead. Their man on the ground -- Marcel Sacobie, the CUSO Field Officer, met them and said he'd paid the customs people to not to go through all the bags. It would take too long he said. He seemed to know his way around. Stern customs officials still confiscated all the batteries. After the passport check, they were on their way back out to a small plane at daylight. It lurched over what looked like old river beds and an hour later landed in Maiduguri, the capital of the north.

"Must be a holiday," he remarked on the bus to the hotel. People slept under trees. Nobody seemed to be working. Marcel Sacobie assured everyone it was just another regular slow-paced day, near noon, too hot now for much activity. 

The group was given several few days to adjust and get climatized at The Lake Chad Hotel. Time to mingle with the locals, walk to the market, take a visit to the Ministry of Education.

"Where's downtown?" Steve asked the first day out of the hotel.

"I think we're standing in it," Alex said. Donkeys and lorries, motorbikes and scooters, bicycles and Mercedes all raced in every conceivable direction, horns blaring. It was chaotic. There were no traffic rules.

Lizards clung to the walls of the hotel. Alex took pictures of these and the CUSO group drinking under thatched umbrellas on the patio. They sent over an official from the Ministry of Education, who carried a suitcase of local currency, an advance, bank fresh bills. Oil money. It bought services, outside expertise. They all bought souvenirs at the kiosk across from the hotel. Some got utensils at the market and a bus took them to the University where they stocked up on West African literature from the bookstore. Except for the dust and heat and smell of exhaust, plenty of products were available in the market shops. Life didn't seem so bad. Hawkers sold everything and the sweat worked up walking, dried off quickly in the air-conditioned room.

Then they came for him. He waited all day Monday before the driver showed up in a school vehicle. Ngami was four hundred kilometres away. "Oh-hoh, Ngami! Water and light all the time," the steward had said of his posting. The road had been paved once but time had almost returned it to desert, he learned. But there was a railway and a lake. He was whisked away northward.

He was the only white person in a sea of black faces. Alex felt slightly out of place. Some of the natives hadn't even seen a foreigner, except maybe an albino. He wouldn't get any darker. They said you wouldn't get a tan when taking Aralen, malaria prevention medicine. They'd all greet him and yell "Bature!" a Hausa word for European. It made Alex feel self-conscious, like an uninvited guest at a dinner-party. He was trying naively, to no avail, to blend into the culture, travel about nonchalantly, mingle unobtrusively amongst the natives.

So he walked into town preparing for his big entrance into the market. He doubted if he'd take any photos. You never knew what to expect. He'd had a film confiscated by the police outside the hotel the second day of their arrival, which had really intimidated him. Pulling the camera out of his bag only drew more attention to himself. He got one of two reactions -- either twenty people would rush into the picture or else someone would say something to him in Hausa that Alex figured was a message to get lost. Other expats said some tribesmen thought you were stealing their souls. He didn't know when he was going to offend their religious beliefs and get a poison arrow in the back.

Alex had to go to market for two reasons, the first, obviously, to buy food, to keep from starving. The other reason he went was to be with people. School hadn't started and he was the only one on the compound. At night he listened to the bugs buzzing around the porch light and drums from the village by the railway station. He had no batteries for his tape deck. He wrote letters to everyone he could think of. The first night he'd killed a hundred cockroaches. He still kept the grass-cutter's machete under his pillow. He hadn't been sleeping.

It was the nights that were scary. The first day the driver had picked him up at the hotel, they'd driven in the heat of the afternoon and got to the washed-out road at Gashua when it turned dark. Along the river the crickets were noisy and the Land-Rover bounced through the watery pot-holes. At villages along the way, fires and lanterns lit the night like sparklers. They passed Fulani on horses, turbans wrapped around their heads, swords on their sides. They stopped at villages where black faces swarmed the truck, shouting. The driver argued. Then they'd load fire-wood or yams into the back and go to the next village where they'd barter again and money changed hands and the goods or passengers put in the back. A woman sat next to him and flopped out a melon-sized breast to feed her baby. An old man sat on the tire, his face marked with tribal scars, a dagger under his arm. There was hardly room for the passengers and his luggage, and he was squished every time they hit a bump. 

The hair-raising trip took three hours on the track alongside the washed-out highway. When they arrived at the school, his stomach was still bouncing like he'd gotten off a roller-coaster. They took him to a house and opened it. He'd asked if there was a restaurant nearby, like in the hotel. He'd been thinking he could wash and clean-up, relax, get his bearings. They'd laughed. Musa, the driver's helper, said he would take him to buy food the next day and they just abandoned him there. The house was full of dust and spider webs, and cockroaches the size of fifty-cent pieces clung to the walls or scurried across the floor.