June 18, 2009
So we are to the gods... (June 18, 2009)
Seth Einterz '11 -- In lieu of a letter, I've decided to share excerpts from a daily journal:
12 June 2009
Today we had a splendid trickle of water. I alternately placed one cup under the faucet while pouring the second over my head, and – slowly, slowly – I could almost imagine myself beneath a showerhead. At dinner I expressed my gratitude that I had been able to achieve such luxury, but Aunt Ellen cut my words at the stem. “No,” she said, “That is the hostage mentality.”
13 June 2009
Nothing. No water. No electricity. As flies to wanton boys…
14 June 2009
“One must always hope,” says Myra. But hope seems reckless in such desperate times. We visualize our food needs and their location before opening the refrigerator, and Aunt Ellen refuses to allow me to wash dishes, as I might waste water.
15 June 2009
Today, even as my hope had exploded into resignation, we came home from the hospital to find a veritable jet of pressure. I ran around to the side faucet, and shouted to Myra, “I’m giddy, Myra. I’m hysterically giddy.” I filled the sanitation pot in a record six seconds. I washed two weeks of sweat and sand from my clothes, I let my basins and my buckets overflow, I flushed my toilet excessively just to hear the sound of rushing water. My bathroom faucet has a leak that keeps me awake at night, but – family reunions aside – I have never been happier to find something dysfunctional.
16 June 2009
The lights flickered today, and icy fear rushed down my spine. The feeling was akin to the sudden realization that I was going to faint, or the horrible despair when you watch King Lear divide his kingdom in two. It was only for a moment, and then the familiar hum of the freezer and the fan and the lights flooded back into my consciousness. “Easy come, easy go,” Myra muttered.
17 June 2009
We were in the middle of dinner, left-over pork and potatoes, and the electricity went out. “It’s a hell of a country,” said Aunt Ellen. I excused myself, climbed into bed, and cried softly into my pillow.
...
Love to all, especially Frannie who is also immersed in French, but hopefully more-so than me, and hopefully with running water.
Seth
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Madame Baye (June 17, 2009)
“When I grew up, we were poor,” she says this with only a fool’s idea of wealth, “and being poor, we had no money for silverware, and no knife. We cooked with the same machete that we used in the cocoa fields.” This, apparently, explains why she cuts the tomatoes with no cutting board. Only her hands. Once criss, once cross, then twice more. She slices perfect sections into the pot. The juice fills her hands, the pieces cling to her weathered fingers, and the sauce will taste of tomatoes and forever be remembered with these hands, which wave good morning, tend to orphans, and bless the food.
There is a constant menace that the hordes of children will overrun the house, and I ask which are hers. Actuellement, she said, stressing that word, none of these are my children – by which she meant: you are all my children. A few were orphans, most were various nieces and nephews that lived with her. They did small tasks for her, like cutting the fat from the meat, or feeding the baby his milk, or showing the nasahra how to pound garlic. And they had a lot of love, enough to go around twice again. As we finished cooking, they turned the television on: Morocco versus Cameroon. “Tu vas partir? » Asked one of them. “Mais c’est le football! C’est le Cameroun!” I decided to stay: the game was interesting, the redolence of rabbit stew was heavenly, and - as I've learned throughout my life - one can learn a lot of lessons hanging around home-made food.
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Tuberculosis, Malaria, and Death by a Broken Heart (June 8, 2009)
Seth Einterz '11 -- I was scrubbing the windows in the Isolation Ward (particularly dirty), when Fabien came by to check on a patient. “Why,” I thought to myself, “do we isolate the TB patients, if a doctor can walk in with no protection except his spiffy white coat?” I spent the next twelve window panes congratulating myself on such a superb observation, with which I would save the life of a medical student or two, no doubt. Thus at dinner I posed the question to my aunt. Without time for a breath, much less a beat or hesitation, she responded: “Because doctors are heroes.” She said nothing about window washers.
BUT, as any connoisseur of Greek tragedy or pop television could tell you, hero carries all the baggage of hubris. Fabien somehow convinced himself that he could go three months without his malaria medicines, and just yesterday I found him vomiting his entrails and cursing quinine. As he will return chez lui in nine days for a wedding, I tried to cheer him up, “But Fabien, consider: malaria is quixotically exotic. It’s intellectual in a spicy, self-sacrificing way. It’s like Kipling, or the Four Feathers, or Shooting an Elephant. The bridesmaids are going to fall all over you – and your parasite.” He wiped a little vomit from his chin, and told me that he prefers jewelry.
Other notes from the wild, wild, North: Amelia’s adventure almost turned into a third-world disaster when her train ran off the rails. Unfortunately, this happens often, she got to the airport on-time, and everyone is safe, which makes for a boring story. Tomorrow I play tennis with my aunt, a rite of passage for any young Einterz; may I come out faring better than the more traditional rite of passage in the Extrême-Nord, where the young men spend the next two weeks holding their garments away from their raw genitals. And, finally, I’d like everyone to meet Falta. Falta stepped on a snake. In approximately 90 minutes –lacking a hero – Falta will begin hemorrhaging from the mouth. And yet when Doctor Ellen asks, “What snake bit you?” Falta, with an elegance to match the Queen of England at tea, reaches into her purse and pulls out a cobra. If her schmuck of a husband wasn’t in tow, crying at the cost of the anti-venom, I would have proposed to her on the spot.
Love to all, especially my dear, dying Falta, and then a little more directed towards Rob, courtesy of Nestor,
Seth
p.s. a couple administrative pieces:
To Mike H. - My camera has broken, so please accept my apologies. I'll try and figure out a way around this.
To Everyone - I've been procrastinating on my school work, here, so future notes might be few and far between in the future. Thanks for staying tuned this far, and I hope you will not take offense if my silence between letters is a little more extensive than has been usual.
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So we beat on... (June 2, 2009)
Seth Einterz '11 -- The hospital was caught in one of the flash storms that preview the rainy season, and everyone had filtered to sit and stand beneath the rooftops. I found myself next to three nurses: Abdou, Luc, and Bouba. After the usual greetings, commentary on the strength of the rain, and predictions whether the electricity would hold, the nurses turned to me and inquired about America, where the streets are paved with silver and gold.
“In America, there are no beggars?” asked Luc.
“And everyone has work?” added Bouba, “There is no unemployment.”
I explained, si, there is unemployment. They did not look convinced. They asked me how many people were unemployed. I admitted that I did not know the exact number, but I guessed that it was around five or six percent. “And of course there are people who have nothing,” I said, “Everywhere and always there are people who have nothing.” The nurses nodded their heads, grudgingly aware that the human condition has no frontier.
“But in America,” added Bouba, “Everyone goes to school.”
“Everyone should go to school,” I said, “Yet we have our problems. Not all schools are equal, so some people do not receive much of an education even if they do go to school. And many people drop out of school.” But I felt foolish, trying to explain the malaise in our public schools to these men.
“At least everyone in America can read,” Bouba said. I acknowledged that this was mostly true.
Luc then asked me if it was actually -10 degrees Celsius at Obama’s inauguration. I confirmed this, and the nurses looked at me with an expression that bordered terror. “And further, I prefer those winters over this heat.” They laughed uproariously at my joke (I was not joking), and rubbed the goosebumps from their arms. As we spoke, the temperature was hovering around a cool 35 degrees Celsius.
“And you were at Obama’s inauguration?” asked Bouba as the rain let up.
“No.” I explained, “I live in Indiana, and his inauguration was in Washington.”
“That is far?” They asked. “Like what? One hundred kilometers?”
“No, much farther,” I said.
“One thousand kilometers,” they said with skepticism.
“Farther,” I said, and this required a suspension of belief tantamount to imagining -10 degree temperatures. I lost the thread of their excited banter, but it seemed that in America one can, of course, traverse such distances on supersonic metros and airplane taxis. I gave up any effort to correct their illusions of my country. I was in a culture where the unemployment rate is eighty percent, patients do not always comprehend the tally marks that indicate the dosage of their medicine, and one might need three hours to cross one hundred kilometers. If one could dream of 5% unemployment, universal literacy, and interstate highways – if one could dream of America, that is – then one could dream of anything.
Much love to all, but especially Mr. Rodgers, green lights, and boats against the current,
Seth
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Notes on the Run, Part II (May 29, 2009)
Seth Einterz '11 -- After convincing my aunt that I was not joking, but I was actually going to major in Philosophy, she looked at me with arched eyebrows. Now she enlists me in the menial tasks available for my particular set of skills – making photocopies, washing windows, cleaning storerooms, filling out surveys. She also poses philosophical conundrums at the dinner table, and looks at me with expectation, as if the utility of my education should be apparent in my effortless ability to answer yea or nay: Three starving shipmates should or should not eat the cabin boy? I bury my face in a mango and mumble, “Umm, Aristotle said, I mean, he would...well, Plotinus...actually, could you pass the water, please?" The saga of my inadequacies flows onward.
Consider today, when Aunt Ellen relieved me from window duty. She sent me with Falta to vaccinate the newborns of a small village just a couple kilometers from Kolofata. Falta, of course, did all the syringes and hard work and I had the single, simple task of placing two drops of Polio vaccination into the mouths of the infants. I landed drops of medicine in the baby’s nose, on the mother, and everywhere else except the mouth of the screaming child. Falta looked at me with skepticism, no doubt expecting a Polio outbreak in the near future and wondering how someone so incompetent could be related to Doctor Ellen. I considered telling her about Aristotle and Plotinus.
On top of sharp windows, demanding relatives, and screaming babies, I have encountered less predictable problems on my morning runs. For example, the first time I stumbled upon a herdsman and his cows, I slowed to a sheepish walk and I jumped with every subtle movement of the beasts. The second time I stumbled upon a herdsman and his cows, I ran through the herd with a semblance of bravery, spooking some of them, and leaving a very frustrated herdsman to chase after his property. I put on my apologetic face, but I was secretly pleased to have established my position on the tenuous hierarchy of man and beast. The next morning at the hospital I saw a patient gored by a bull, which prompted a miniature story time (real quote: “Remember the patient a couple days ago who was gored in the ass?”), and re-established – in dominating fashion – that particular hierarchy of man and beast.
Much love to all, but especially to Dylan who runs a 4:13 mile, which is fast enough to do the following three things:
1) Run away from a bull and escape being gored.
2) Single handedly and two-leggedly remove the Einterz family from the ZCHS track record books.
3) Win Regionals. Then, with a bit of luck and a bit more grit, win State. Good luck.
Seth
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Notes on the Run (May 28, 2009)
Seth Einterz '11 -- A portrait of Americans in Kolofata:
Doctor Ellen received a Bachelor’s in Humanistic Studies from McGill, a Bachelor’s of Chemistry from IUPUI, an M.P.H. from Tulane, and a Medical Doctorate from McGill. She speaks English, French, Kanuri, Mandara, and one universal language with her very skeptical eyebrows. She is everywhere at once, and therefore impossible to find. She sees new patients, checks on old ones, signs papers, scolds mediocrity, and generally keeps the ship upright (and, of course, Myra plugs all the leaks. But Myra’s Canadian, we’re just covering the Americans)
Amelia received a Bachelor’s in History from Dartmouth College with lots of work in the sciences, and after after three years in Mali (two with the Peace Corps) she speaks French and a dialect of Fulfulde. She is now in her second year of medical school at Duke. She floats wherever she is needed, and today I saw her working with the ultrasound machine.
Brianna received a Bachelor’s in Community Health from Wisconsin-Lacrosse, and after six months with the Peace Corps, she speaks French and sometimes Kanuri. She, too, fills whatever void appears – fundraising for a new school, spreading health awareness, or helping with a vaccination campaign.
Seth (that’s me) is working on a Bachelor’s in Philosophy from Wabash College. He cleans the windows.
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Maroua (May 25, 2009)
Seth Einterz '11 -- Aunt Ellen describes Kolofata as if it were the best friend who still doesn’t have a date to the Prom. “No village in all of Cameroon is more genuine,” she promises me. Great personality notwithstanding, Kolofata has only a small gathering for a market, its electricity and water have been copping out, and the weekends provide little amusement beyond an emergency caesarian section here and there. So yesterday I escaped to Maroua on the back of Fabien’s moto.
Maroua is the capital of the Extrême-Nord. It is the other sort of Prom date – not so genuine but real physical real fast. We sat at a street side shack, a shank of raw meat turning over a hot grill, and enough flies for every entry in the encyclopedia of infectious diseases. It was tough, and spicy, and delicious. They offered a special cut of whitish-yellowy meat. “La mamelle,” explained Zachary, a friend of Fabien. “D’où vient le lait.” Where the milk comes from. I tried some, because you do that when you’ve already resigned yourself to death by diarrhea, and I was next trying to empty a mouth full of oily fat without swallowing. Sometimes, one must sacrifice grace out of sheer necessity.
Students come from Nigeria and Chad to learn the craft of tanning in Maroua, and so I went as a tourist. The school is situated across a dried out riverbed, and it reeks like a butcher’s shop crossed with a wrestling room. The skins – goat mostly, but also serpent, antelope, n’importe quoi – soak first in tepid pools of water, then bird excrement, then the mashed fruit of the acacia tree. The children of the trade are street urchins in the dirtiest sense, they wear rags and trachoma-thick eyes and they dip their hands carelessly into bird shit to show us the soaking products. They eat with these hands, and they quarrel and they laugh, as we all do.
We ate dinner up the road from our hotel, where they vend fish from Lake Maga. In this street, conversation competes with the music, and dinner drowned out any surviving vestige of small talk – grilled in our sight, lathered in a basil oil, and surrounded by fried plantains; it was messy to touch (no silverware) and, topped with a Fanta, it was perfect. We returned to our hotel, where Fabien and I received catcalls from scantily clad women (“Bonjour les mignons”). I was thrilled, but Fabien explained this was not a normal salutation, and those women were the last kind of prom date: the one you pick up at a street corner. I explained that I take compliments where I can, and Fabien shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Much love to all, but especially Mike, Big R, Richmond, Lurch, etc. because when I spend more tranquil weekends in Kolofata, I sift through my aunt’s collection of The New Yorker.
Seth
p.s. it rained last night. Temperatures still in the 120's, but at least it's super-humid now.
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