The night belongs to the animals.
Monkeys wrestle, termites swarm around light posts buzzing in harmony with the humming mosquitoes. Dogs howl, a rooster crows every hour like a grandfather clock, frogs croak, and a hyena laughs in the distance, or is it a woman?
I lay on my foam mattress, cocooned in hot pink mosquito netting, and I sweat.
When I sleep it is deep and fast, like falling into a black hole, and I startle awake as the nuns clang pots together because it is time for Mass.

The day belongs to the people. Motorcycles compete with cars who compete with trucks to pass down the one lane dirt road. Dust flies through the air and sticks to sweaty skin. Now animals hang from poles, dead, ready to be sold in the market. Chickens, fish, goat, and cow. Lots for sale, produce, cloth, plastic, cell phones.

People. This is a community that has never not known conflict and war. The trauma is palpable. Physically, there are scars and missing limbs, eyeballs, faces. There is HIV and the yellow eyes of hep b, malaria and parasite.
But beyond the skin, beyond the blood and the viruses that bubble through veins, there is a sense of unrest, something I can feel but cannot know.

It is easy to want to romanticize a place that is different from where one came. Even easier here, where amidst fear and struggle, daily life remains simple and sweet. Rising with the sun, praying together, living together.
I ate a live termite last night. One of the girls caught it, pulled off the wings and offered it to me. They were all feasting and made them look pretty good. I will try anything once. This was definitely a one time thing. The taste of chlorine and bile still makes me want to gag. Some things are an acquired taste.

The hospital is bare. Women labor in the hall and then come into a room where they give birth in rows on beds. I can help, lend a pair of hands to catch some babies, but I see the work as layered. The way that trauma manifests in the body is so clear in laboring women. Sexual abuse, physical violence, and fear of bringing new life into conflict position women into hunched over, physically closed bodies as they birth. Labors become unnecessarily complicated with no supplies to aid those complications.

I have spent the last year studying narrative. I am interested in the way that speaking a story and being heard or conversely, not being heard, affect the physical body. I think this is the place to start. As a listener and a vessel for stories and voices. The alchemical dance can journey through my body, through this keyboard, and into you. Can you feel it? Where does it live? What does it feel like? Keep these questions in mind as I return with stories.