To Market

I remember a moment almost exactly twelve years ago when I was walking on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle with my room mate Sarah.  We were freshmen then, just a few weeks into the whole college experience, still aching with homesickness and anxiety.  I think we'd ventured up to Safeway to buy food or something.  Anyway, I distinctly remember noticing that everything suddenly felt normal.  I looked down at my feet plodding away on the sun-soaked sidewalk, and then up at the picturesque houses and trees all crowded together on an impossibly small street, and knew that somehow I could live in this strange new place.  Something inside me stopped fluttering and found a spot to rest.  Well, today it happened again.  A couple friends and I were picking our way along a dusty street in Conakry looking for the market, and suddenly everything became mine again--the rich cacophony of French and Susu (or is it Pulaar?) and broken English as street vendors vie for my attention, the redness of the dirt, the balmy warm breezes, the smell of food and exhaust and people.  It has a hold on me, now.  I belong to it, a little.  I am not making any long range plans or anything. (Don't panic, Dad.)  I just know that right now, I live here.  And it's good.

By the way, the market was AMAZING (and I do not use the caps lock lightly).  I really wish I could have taken some pictures to show you, but it isn't polite here to take pictures of people you don't know without asking permission, and even then it's not a guaranteed affirmative.  A local expat explained it to us this way.  In the West (that means the U.S., Canada, Europe, etc.) when we see something, the image belongs to us, and taking a picture is simply a way of preserving that image.  Here, what we see belongs to the people we're seeing, as it were, and taking a picture of it is a bit like stealing.  Anyway, I don't know enough french to ask permission, so you'll just have to settle for a description.

Imagine a small dirt lane with open stalls all along either side of it.  Clothing hangs along the walls and sandals are piled high on small tables.  In the space of a hundred yards, you can buy daipers, brooms, surge protectors, peanuts, and school supplies, all without leaving the street (which at this point, seems more like and alley).  Suddenly, your guide takes a hard left, darting past people and tables and into a small crevice in the concrete wall.  And while you are mentally preparing yourself for the acute embarassment of bursting into some poor person's living space, you notice two things.  First, what you thought was a concrete hallway is really a hallway-sized tunnel that seems to go on forever, and second, some guy is trying to sell you a nice pair of heels from a niche in the wall that looks for all the world like Ali Baba's cave (if said cave had been six feet deep and full of women's shoes).  And he's not the only one.  As you walk (or sometimes squelch) down the tunnel, you pass dresses, jewelry, cell phone covers, more shoes, and untold treasures of every other kind, all nestled in their own lit-up nooks that shine like merry little lanterns in some sort of enchanted mine.  Eventually, the tunnel opens up into an enourmous warehouse filled with a maze of fruit and vegetable stands.  Lemons, oranges (which are actually green here), potatoes, eggplant, and other produce lie in neat stacks all around you.  In one direction, women are grinding some sort of flour which they will sell to you in plastic bags, while from the other direction, the smell of raw meat signals butchers' stalls.  From a loft on the other side of this great cavern, you hear the industrious buzzing of fifty-odd sewing machines as tailors labor to fashion dresses and shirts and other haberdashery for their clientele.  Another bewildering tunnel (this time the men's department), and you suddenly find yourself blinking in the sunlight--on a different street.  Like I said, it was amazing.

A couple nights ago, I was up on deck 8 (the tippy-top deck) with the ukulele club (nothin' like playing 'I'll Fly Away' with the fellow ukelelists out in the balmy African breeze), and I snapped this picture:

Ain't I a lucky girl?  Yes. Yes I am.