To Ghana, Zimbabwe, and home.

I've spent the last few days running around and finishing things -- work, disembarkation forms, saying goodbyes, and packing. I leave for Ghana tomorrow (again at the impossible 4:30 am) in a hired car and escorted by Patrick, a Ghanian crew member. Then to Zimbabwe for a few days, and then home.

I rode through town today for the last time, and I watched women with bowls on their heads, half-naked children, and life just going on in the streets. I felt the twinge of tears, knowing that soon I'd be back where we live very separate lives, where at a traffic light, you can't really see who is in the car beside you, and the regular measure of a traffic light decides the tempo, not the motorbikes pushing, not those on foot scurrying across with platters of fish on their heads.

It's the stuff like that, the lives lived on sidewalks and on sidestreets, that makes people want to take pictures here. You see things that seem strange, that seem unnatural like an old woman wearing a long wrappa skirt and no shirt sweeping the packed earth in front of her home, and the impulse to show it to friends and family takes over and you forget that if you were sweeping your front walk, you wouldn't want a stranger taking a photograph.

But they're images you also want to keep. I want to remember the things I've seen here that show how fully and deeply these people live, how they move and speak to one another and shake hands, how they answer the telephone no matter what, how they always say hello or bonjour, how everything is so different from my bungalow in Austin, Texas, and my neatly rowed streets -- Avenue A, B, C, D, crosscut by numbers 41, 42, and 43.

I'm sad to leave this place and its force, its life.

Street scene.

Look closely on the right side of the photo for the yellow awning. Beneath it are spots of color -- blue mostly, but yellow and pink as well. There the woman sells plasticwares, and there her babies sleep on a wooden bench beneath shade as the motorbikes and cars pass, and eat bowls of rice and tomato-fish soup from metal, not plastic, bowls.

Sleeping twins.

In D ward there are a brother and sister. The boy is healthy, but the girl has lived two years with a fistula in her digestive tract, which made her sick each time she ate. I thought at first she was normal size for a two-year old, until a nurse told me they were twins, and I noticed that she was three inches shorter with spindly little legs and a bloated belly. 

The boy approached me with outstretched arms the other day, so I picked him up. Then he wanted me to blow bubbles for him, then he began to wail when I put him down to leave. I mentioned it to another who'd been working in D ward, and she explained it well: his whole life, he's been healthy, and his sister has been sick, so his whole life, she's demanded their mother's attention. And lovely young woman though she is and as good of a mother as she seems to be, she could not be enough to both.

You never want to cause more trouble than you're worth -- wailing is something you never want to set in motion -- so I debated about going down again. But I decided this morning to say hello, maybe not pick him up, just hug him and then greet all the other children and with their little catheters and foley bags and nasal-gastric tubes.

But he was there, arms up, and I caved. He was happy to see me, happy to click my pen again and again, and yet I needed to leave for a dress ceremony for the VVF ladies. So I asked his mama, "Can I take him?" She nodded, smiled, and shooed me toward the door with a few wrist flicks. 

Down the hallway in the arms of a semi-stranger, he was unfazed. Into the ward full of drums and dancing and women in hospital gowns, his eyebrows were contorted more inquisitively than fearfully. And so he stayed in my arms for the next 15 minutes and glanced around, glanced up and down, and finally, he put his head down on my shoulder.

I was amazed when I felt his head loll off to the side in sleep, because the music was loud and we were only a couple feet from the drums. It was warm and he was heavy in my arms, and I worried that I wouldn't be able to write while holding him. I decided to bring him back to his mother and let him nap there.

As soon as I opened the door, his mother was standing at the sink washing her hands. She smiled when I whispered, "Il dort." I looked over at the bed where they sleep, and his sister was on her back, sleeping peacefully in her pink hospital gown. I carried him over to the bed and his mother took him from me, laid him down, and said her thanks. 

I returned to the dress ceremony relieved -- sleeping twins are much more pleasant than screaming ones.

À la plage in early June.

In the late afternoon, the beach was filled with Beninoise playing soccer and lounging in the sand. 

By the time the sun was down, we were the only ones there, with a fire and the fixins for s'mores. Our party ended abruptly at 10, when a storm blew in that picked up sand and threw it against our skin with force. We barely made it across the beach and back to the car before the bottom fell out in sheets.

Out at night.

There's a Chinese restaurant in an area called Cadjehoun where we go for cashew chicken and the nice breeze that filters through the lanterns to the second-floor dining porch.

At restaurants like these, you can expect a few wealthy Beninoise -- who last night were all six staring toward us as we entered the room, which was a little strange until I realized they were enraptured by a bizarre, Mad TV-like French program emanating from a flat-screen just beside our table -- and some hardened-looking expats sipping liquor on the rocks and smoking cigarettes, the type of men straight out of a Graham Greene novel.

The first time I went, it was midday and we met two former military men from the States who were training UN peacekeeping troops in North Benin. One lived in Germany with his French wife who was two decades his junior; one was the self-proclaimed "fourth best French speaker in the state of Missouri." Both had heavy beards and went on profanity-laced tirades, saying things like, "In Togo they still have railroads that the Germans built in 1915 -- colonialism did a lot of good for this continent" and that the Peace Corps was ineffective -- "They hate us, but we're the ones keeping the peace. Have you ever killed a man in Iraq?"

Last night was calmer. We ate and listened to Latin music blaring from across the street, and afterward we decided to stroll toward it. Under a dark evening sky, beside a busy road teeming with motorbikes and the occasional luxury vehicle, dozens of wooden tables seating four each dotted a wide swath of street-corner. The casual maquis -- a small, local restaurant whose prices are for locals, not expats -- is always busy, always full of men and women with their fingers pulling at fufu and dipping it through the tomatoey fish soup. 

Two young teenage boy who said they were orphans (no mama no papa no maison no house, they said) overturned plastic beer crates for seats and we commenced rough conversation in Fon and French and English. The Chinese lanterns continued to glow at us from across the street, behind the silhouettes at the tables relaxing in the cool breeze, and it was easy to feel there was no hurry.  

When I leave, I'll miss Africa -- "plenty plenty."

Riding zemidjans.

There are reasons why women here wear long skirts.

Riding zemidjans is just one of them.

 One good one. Sidesaddle isn't the safest option.

Selling on a rainy day.

The roads were full of water – poor drainage and heavy downpours don’t mix well. Times like today bring a twinge of guilt for being the ones in the SUV, not wading down the sidewalk with baskets of yams covered with plastic sheeting, not pushing a motorbike through knee-high water, not standing under an awning hoping for the rain to pass. 

At one corner, a little girl stood soaked in rain. She was about twelve years old, and she wore pastels: a second-hand striped shirt, faded, and a cotton skirt in a large floral print. Her head was wrapped in a purple scarf. She was unshielded from the heavy rain, rain that makes Africans so cold, but she stood there unmoving. 

She held in her hand ponchos for sale – for 60 cents each. For the eight ponchos in her hand, for the five dollars she’d bring home if she sold them all, she was a hunched, solitary figure on a street corner.

Later I thought of her as 18 children, orphaned and abandoned but dry, danced and screamed under a solid roof while playing with red balloons. And as I fed a child who looked ten months but might have been twice that, whose skin was mottled with a fungal infection and whose hair was sparse and feathery from poor nutrition, I wondered if she had sold them all.

We were shielded from the waters lapping at our ankles, waters mixed with refuse and filth that seeped among buildings and down thoroughfares, but the girl selling ponchos, a little matchstick girl at a warmer latitude, was etched there on the sidewalk with her feet in a puddle and her head lowered to shield her eyes from the rain.