"The · darkest · thing · about · Africa · has · always · been · our · ignorance · of · it"

Bootleg DVDs here come in all sorts of great combinations and titles (like “The Female Heroine Does Battle With The Action Film” and “Jennifer Lopez vs. Kate Winslet”), which is why my “DISNEY CARTOON THEATER WONDERFUI” (yes, that last letter is actually an “I” on the package) is one of my favs. Did you know there’s a Lion King 3? And that Fox and The Hound 2 is voiced by stars like Reba McEntire? But the biggest surprise came when I watched Beauty and the Beast, an old fav. Does ANYONE out there remember a song in that movie called “Human Again?” Because none of the PCVs here had ever seen that part of the movie. But it’s in this DVD’s version of the movie. Sort of odd to watch a movie you’ve seen a hundred times only to suddenly discover a new scene…

I visited another URR volunteer recently, and spent some time chatting with her friend, Alieu. He started in on me with the whole Gambian “take me to America” routine, but since he was her friend, I tried to reason with him instead of blowing him off. But after explaining why I couldn’t afford to get him there, and why that didn’t matter anyway because he’d have to get a visa and that’s nearly impossible here, we’d gotten nowhere. So I decided to explain to him why he wouldn’t want to live in Colorado anyway. Gambians don’t really grasp just how cold weather outside Africa can be, or what snow is really like, so, not surprisingly, Alieu didn’t find this to be much of a deterrent anyway. So then I began talking to him in terms of mol keme wo keme (every one hundred people, the Gambian phrasing for percentages). When I told him that in my village in Colorado, for mol keme wo keme, 95 of those people are white, he was shocked. “So for mol keme wo keme, only 5 people are black???” No, I explained. Those 5 people out of mol keme wo keme have to include the “Asia people,” the “Mexico people,” and the “Arab people,” in addition to the “Africa people.” So I told him maybe, maybe, 1 or 2 of mol keme wo keme is a mo fingo (black person). He didn’t seem so interested in Colorado after that.