03 March 2010

Palm Wine Story - Fiction

Fiction - any resemblance to any persons - living or dead - is purely coincidental. Yes, I made 90% of this stuff up!

In Gueckedou I worked with a young American logistician named Doug Mackintosh. He had an undergrad in something from Cornell and a master’s in operations planning from somewhere else, and one had the feeling that he was making up logistics as he went along. Kickbacks were a common feature there as in all of Africa, with the local staff getting the lion’s share and the expatriate bosses attempting to keep a clean nose, but there was one he couldn’t resist. A Lebanese merchant from whom the organization we worked for – the International Rescue Committee – bought all of its cement, had offered him a dyker as a gift of thanks for all the business.

I had never seen a dyker, which resembles a miniature deer. It has two small conical horns poking up from its head, and though ours was a female I am certain that both the male and the female have the same feminine aspect. In the way it moved its head – quickly, gracefully, and with carefully controlled movements – and looked at things and people for a considerable time, as if in contemplation, the animal appeared intelligent, at least as smart as the family dog. It proved this one day when it showed its jealousy after Doug took a girl home to spend the night in his bed for the first time. While we ate breakfast the dyker snuck into the house and made straight for his bedroom, and left a large pile of droppings in the middle of the bed. The message couldn’t have been more clear.

I am sure that the Lebanese man meant for the dyker to be cooked up and promptly eaten. It was only luck that it had been trapped alive, and to anyone in the area it would simply have gone for bush meat. But we all fell in love with the animal, and it became a fixture of the high-walled garden. It had two prominent gashes along the sides its face between its nose and its eyes, which were scent glands. It would rub these organs against anything at its face level, leaving a trace of its scent that was undetectable to humans, and as it did so, stick out its long tongue on the other side of its slightly open mouth. The animal’s tongue could reach to cover its eyes, a good six inches away.

Shortly after the dyker arrived we adopted a white bunny, and then a three-legged tortoise rescued from a refugee camp where it was being dangled on a string. We struggled to find the tortoise the proper food, and I never once saw it eat. The dyker and the bunny, on the other hand, ate whatever we would give them, and when we took our breakfast out on the patio off the kitchen in the morning the two of them would come springing over to join us for the meal.

After Gueckedou I went on to Sierra Leone, where I stayed for additional two years. While I was there the entire town was overrun by rebels whose identity was never accurately determined. The heavily forested, rugged area, known as the Mano river junction for the three countries that share its banks, Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, is awash in young disaffected men, guns, and diamonds. I never even heard what language they spoke. I only heard that the guards killed the dog – remember was his name – before they fled, lest he should meet a more painful end. That they started the attack in the early morning hours before dawn by calling all the Fula men to the mosque with the call to prayer, where they were slaughtered. That they overran the town and all the houses we lived in, and held the town for several weeks before they were chased out by the Guinean army and went back into the forest, likely to Liberia. It was a beautiful, dirty, awful place, a place where many bad things had happened before and many more were sure to come. While I lived there I witnessed a wave of child kidnappings there, used to feed the human sacrifices of politicians trying to improve their chances in the local elections. I have written about it elsewhere. It was something about the forest; it was so rich, so green, rugged and beautiful, and it seemed to breathe violence. The forest people were know for their deception, their black magic, their ruthlessness. In a part of the world known for its friendly, open people, those at the Mano river junction were suspicious and reserved.

There was place outside of town where we go and drink poyo, the local palm wine. If you stick a tap high up into a palm tree and gather the juice that comes out you will have alcohol, a milky white, slightly viscous sour fluid. It’s an acquired taste, and I acquired it. There was a building, if I remember correctly, but we never went inside, preferring instead to drink outside with all the regulars seated on the long trunks of felled palm trees. The name itself – cinq kilos, for the distance it was from town – was indicative of the kind of place it was; a no-name place, just the closest one could get to the source of the palm wine. The tappers ventured further and further away from town as all of the trees close to town were tapped out and killed. You would see them carrying two 20 liter plastic jerry cans into town, one on either side of a pole carried across their shoulders. They walked down the sidewalk-less two-lane tarmac road with a characteristically hurried-looking bobbing up and down that maximized the forward motion and minimized the effort required to keep the 40 liters off the ground.

Tapping was dangerous work; tappers died rather routinely. But in a place where work was scarce and cash even harder to come by, there always young men willing to climb the tree, just as sure as there were always customers, there large round pot bellies on otherwise skinny frames bearing testimony to their years of love for the stuff. The tappers climbed with bear feet and a simple loop of woven fiber cut from the forest, making a three-way pivot point with their two feet and leangin back into the loop which enclosed the tree and themselves. One false step and it was straight to the bottom, 8 meters plus with no brakes.

For us the only danger was worms, tiny white ones that you find floating in your cup or caught between your teeth. You had to bring your own cup, and often one of us would forget, and we’d end up sharing. You also learned to bring a piece of old pantyhose to slip over the jug to catch the worms before they made it into your drink. The other danger, of course, was getting drunk, but that’s what we were after. The fresh poyo was, to my taste, the best, while day-old poyo was much stronger, but also a lot more sour. Add a couple of spoonfuls of sugar to the bottom and the next day it would be even more potent. Poyo wasn’t the kind of drink we drank anywhere else; in town we’d drink Castel beer, an awful, formaldehyde-tasting pilsner bottled in the capitol, or Nigerian-brewed Heineken in cans, when we could get it. But it was a special pleasure to end the working day with a drive out to cinq kilos at sunset and drink as much poyo as you could before it got dark.

The place had all the character of a neighborhood bar in north America, and it was a rare day that you wouldn’t chat up another regular on the palm log next to you, or even buy him his next jug from the tappper most recently back from the tree. They were nonsense conversations, to be sure, and though I don’t remember the content of a single one in all the many hours that I spent at cinq kilos, I do remember much laughter.

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