My African Blue Door Already Attracking Friends

After months of Mommy coercion....and finally an ultimatum( do this chore now or you will never drive my car for the rest of your life..lol...).....our back door....is African blue.
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I thought the color would be difficult to find...but I was lucky. My hub bought some milk paint for a hobby project. When I looked at it.....I thought Bingo!
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Milk paint is a type of paint used since ancient Egyptian times....a combo of milk protein, lime and pigments, minerals, or organic materials for color.
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I'm not sure what mineral or pigment creates the blue color....I emailed a company specializing in milk paint to find out...but it must be common and cheap and widely distributed in Africa.
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If you'll look closely...there's a pink circle around a butterfly-like object on the left side of the door.
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I found him early this morning. He's not a butterfly...but a male Imperial Moth....a large moth that lives in our area.
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He's clung onto the pane all day without moving. Early this evening I switched the light on and saw him twitch so I know he's still alive.
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Perhaps the blue of the door lured him to our cool oasis under our covered porch...and cool is an important concept today with a temp of 100 degrees and the forecast for no rain and 100 degree temperatures for the next few days.
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I read that male moths can fly up to five miles looking for a mate.
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If he's looking for someone in heat in this heat.......all I can say is Good Luck!

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Update: I just posted this blog when hub called me into the garage. Another big male Imperial moth was sitting on the hood of my new car. Hub scooped him up and released him outside.

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Ah! Something fluttered on the floor just a few feet away. Another one! This time smaller and less colorful...the female. I caught and released her too.

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Guess there's IS gonna be some hot loving tonight....but NOT on my new car!

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When the Spirits call on the Living......

Tonight I looked at my pictures of a Vodun ceremony in Africa. Vodun is the religion of Togo and Benin and other parts of West Africa. It is the religion that was carried to the Americas by the slaves and transformed into Voodoo in the Creole and Haitian cultures.

It is an old religion... some say it dates back 5000 years....making it older than Christianity. It is animistic, full of spirits and souls and the dead waiting to communicate.

Many of my pictures are blurry....logically I know it was the light and the lightening speed of the worshippers moving in the shadows. I was disappointed...but now...many months later..I look at these pictures and wonder if the faces....softened, saddened and sometimes contorted by the spirits that possess them....show an intimate and intense form of communication which has been lost in our culture.

We are so neat and tidy and crisp.....what spirits would want to visit us?



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Rediscovering Africa.......

All day long I fretted. I knew I needed to start writing again. I knew I had to finish my book..6 pages to go. The community project I worked on for the last 3 months took away my concentration and my time. I was scared I couldn't go back ....that I had lost my passion.

And then I found him. A simple picture among my pictures of the sub sahel. I cropped him out of a much bigger photo. I stared at him in awe...how beautiful and powerful he was. I cropped other faces...pulled them out of backgrounds....stared at them...felt them....until I couldn't wait to write.

I tossed away the outline I made earlier in the day. The pictures that spoke to me where the pictures I would use to tell the story about this part of Africa. That's how I wrote this book....I found what stirred my passion and my curiosity and I cropped it out of the much bigger story of my travels....keeping my fingers crossed....that what excited me might excite children or their parents or their teachers.

Now it's late.....and I have to work tomorrow morning....but I'm happy. I rediscovered where I was.....I'm in the same state of trying to find the most important part of the story instead of the just merely the story.

I'm going to finish the book...just look at him.....I could you betray such beauty and not?
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The Art of Liberation Courtesy of Africa

Liberation

Tanya Hollifield

I never intend to buy art. It seems to find me. There's this mutual nod of recognition. Hello art, you belong in my house. Hello Gina, you need to take me home. There's no waffling, no angst, no indecision....and thank God overpriced art never talks to me.

Last week I was invited to read an essay on our local NPR station. They have a story hour once a month and selected one of my small humor pieces to be included in the show. They now tape the show from a local restaurant/cafe so there's comfortable background noise and laughter--hopefully in appropriate places. The old brick walls of the cafe are covered with paintings, wall art, photos.

I walked in the door, headed to the bar and stopped midway. I looked at "Liberation," she looked at me. Hello art, Hello Gina. Amen.

What stunned me about this piece (acrylic on muslin) is that it mimicked the exact pose I took when I stood on the rocks of the Djado plateau overlooking the Sahara desert. I stood naked with my hands raised to the desert, she stands naked with her hands raised to the viewer. My pictures were taken in silhouette from behind, her picture is open to those who would look her in the eye. Sometimes when I pass by her in her temporary lodging in the front room, I believe she is my brave twin... facing life, with openness and honesty, takes more guts, I believe, than crossing the Sahara desert.

I believe this mutual recognition of art and soul has its origins somewhere deep in the psyche. I don't think it's an accident I found her and it's certainly not an accident that she's home with me.
Every time I pass her, I'm going to remember the courage and toughness it took to cross Africa.

Every time I pass her, she's going to remind me of the courage and toughness it takes to live an authentic life.
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Hello art. Hello Gina. Amen.

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This Week's Door Picture from Agadez, Niger

I've decided to come out of the closet ....or at least the closet door and admit I love to take pictures of doors. I was going through my African pictures and found several....I won't tell you how many pictures I have from Paris....lol...My bulletin board has doors on it from places I can't place to very distinct places such as Tazmania, Australia, Singapore. Every place I have traveled I find myself staring at doors. So I decided I'm going to share them. Why keep such passion under wraps?

This curious door I discovered down a back alley in Agadez, Niger. "Style Love" I don't have a clue why it has an English title or what it might mean. If you've seen anything in your travels like it..... let me know. Maybe an artist or a musician...a foreigner? How about a creative guess? Who would go through this door and where does it lead?

(a.gina.picture)

Recording Memories

I took a long walk today.....in the forest.....there are woods not far from my house and I'm sentimental about them. Growing up in Chicago, I didn't have access to a forest and although I've always loved to hike and walk.....forests were something I drove to and from...to experience. So having a forest I could walk to and meander in was something very novel.

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When I first walked through my forest....I was wary and uneasy. I certainly didn't expect wild animals to attack me but city girls are taught from a young age that bad men take you into the forest to hack you up..... so although I should have known better....my heart pounded and my ears were vigilant to pick up any little sound in those early days.

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Gradually, my fear subsided and my wonder increased. I found I had a knack for identifying wild plants...the "eye for the leaf" as my grandmother called it. I liked discovering that about myself. On my paternal side of the family, I supposedly come from a long line of women who were midwives or healers in their villages and so to find that the ability to easily recognize and categorize plants was in me....touched me....made me reconnect to my feisty little grandmother who came here from Lithuania....and always hoped that I had the eye.

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I knew 10 years ago when we moved here that the forest was destined to be ploughed down but many projects fell through, the economy swung up and down for development here, and the woods were saved. Until now.....now there are bulldozers....big bulldozers....whining and beeping in the woods as they push down the trees to make way for another mall. I had hoped a year ago when I heard about the plans for the shopping mall that it might fall through......but when the bulldozers arrived....and the smoke appeared...(they burn the roots on site) ....well.... you can't stick the trees back in the ground again.

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The picture I posted here today is from a cave in the Djado Plateau of Niger. I thought of it today when I walked through the woods and pulled it off my memory card. The thing that struck me about this particular picture...was the man's legs. He is painted in mid-step....and if you closely look at his gait.... you can see how much familiarity is in that step... as he approaches or walks among his horses......

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The cave now sits in a desolate canyon in the desert. Volcanic grey rocky cliffs without vegetation....hot white sand piled at the bases...and a particular almost cruel type of emptiness is all that is left of where he and his horse stood. 5000 years ago the Sahara was a lush Savannah that supported grass and small lakes......wildlife was recorded first.....elephants and rhinos...and then men painted horses and cattle which they must have brought into these canyons to sustain them.

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As I walked through the woods with an easy familiarity ....I thought of this man.....and how at this point both he and I were alike-- comfortably strolling in a landscape familiar and known. I have only a limited time left in this place....and I wonder if he knew that too about his landscape.....perhaps that's why we needed to record our memories--his in paint, mine in photos--because we sense it will soon be the only vestige of a particular place and time...that meant something to us.

Learning About Africa Restrospectively

Well....here I am on a Friday night, enclosed in my little computer room, working working working on my book. My writing group meets tomorrow and although I'm half way finished with the children's book, my drafts are handwritten and messy. I found I couldn't work on the computer. I needed graft paper and an eraser so I could play with the layout....a picture here....an illustration here ....moving a line here or there....when I could visualize the layout I could more easily see where the text should go and how much space there was for it.

In doing all this research on where I have been and what I have seen in Africa....I've stumbled into some fascinating stuff and well as some down right scary stuff that I didn't know at the time of my travels.

The fascinating stuff?.....well okay.....I remember sitting in the desert on a mat.....I pulled out my thermometer....this was a challenging thing to do since it was small and I kept losing it in my backpack all the time.....I remember the temperature registered between 110 and 115 degrees in the shade. One of my travel companions said why don't you measure how hot it is in the sun....and I answered, "Hell no, (weirdly appropriate at 110 degrees) I'm not going to stand in the sun to take a temperature" and that was that....

I felt a sudden small bite on my leg.....OUCH.....I looked down and there were ants on the mat....but not ordinary ones........ silver ones. It was as if someone had taken the ants and dipped them in chrome. I couldn't believe my eyes. Alberto said something about "Silver ants" and I tucked it away in my memory.

So I'm doing my research work and I stumble upon a wildlife article that mentions Silver ants of the Sahara. Okay not only do they exist but they exist weirdly......they emerge from their nests during the day only when the temperature is between 110-115 degrees....(the exact mat temperature if you remember) for about 10 minutes to swoop up dead things and the crumbs of puny white women and then go back underground..... AND to add to the strangeness......these silver ants are the tasty treats of a particular type of lizard that is inactive ......guess when...? ....when the temperature reaches 110 degrees!!!!!!.....Golly Gee ain't harmonious environments wonderful????

The scary stuff I've bumped into? Well, One of my favorite places in the Sahara was the Djado plateau.....and I discovered an article talking about the landmines that exist in the Djado....many still capable of killing you. Couple of tourists rolled over a few of them with their car last year. Timit....a beautiful oasis we visited....bandits swooped down a couple years ago and stole the cars, possessions, and cash of a whole tourist group......and of course .....just a week before we arrived in Niger......21 Italian tourists were kidnapped and held hostage for a week near Dogondoutchie......okay....like I said....sometimes it's good not to know things......

Ciao.

Goats to Go

Peeing in the Desert

Report on the Toilet Paper Dilemma

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Sue, a friend of mine since High School, and always one of those folks with an inquiring mind....sent me an email the other day asking about an update on the toilet paper dilemma. Way back in August before I went to Africa, I had a blog entry discussing my great anxiety over how much toilet paper to take for a month....and since the travel company was suggesting taking purse-sized kleenex packages....how many packages I should bring. Of course, life got complicated when I discovered at Wal- Mart-- large soft kleenex in packages looking like Dot Candy.

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Yes, well the good news was I brought way too much Kleenex....so I don't have any first hand accounts of using leaves or smooth stones (which is what some dessert folks use....of course the trick is finding a stone...and then a SMOOTH one.) Although I read pre-trip about how little you pee in the desert because of rapid dehydration (the humidity in the Sahara is around 2-3%)....I can tell you it's very true......despite drinking liters and liters of water per day...three trips to the bathroom for the entire day was about max...and even then there wasn't much volume.

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Sometimes it was a bit scary, I knew how much water and tea I was drinking and it was hard to believe so little was coming out! Out of the desert, in Benin and Togo, I was a human waterfall so I actually could see how much water I was losing....so again no big need for kleenex. I must admit ....on days when tummy problems struck....it was a luxury to have nice large extra soft packages of tissues to use (ahhhh.) They also came in handy for a fellow traveller who ran out of tampons and used these to make temporary tampons till we could unload the baggage in the cars.

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And since we're talking bathroom matters, let me say a few things on that..... First of all, I could have won a gold medal in squatting. Don't laugh....it takes a solid set of thigh muscles and a lot of savoir faire to pee correctly out in the open. Squatting way down....is good.....Learning how to pull panties pants or skirts away....also good.......and learning just how far you have to spread your feet apart so you don't splash on your sandals.... priceless.

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And just as the mantra goes in real estate....location location location. That's also the mantra for peeing ....location location location. At first, all of us girls....would leave the cars and wander off looking for that perfect bush. Problem---in the savannah there were only a few bushes....so I'd wander off only to find everyone waiting in line for the same bushes ( yes ladies even in Africa you have to wait in line to pee!) As the trip wore on, we learned the best place to go....was behind the last car.......this worked in the desert as well as other places since we were off road.

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One of the odd things that happened with bathroom breaks......is that by the end of the month....you sort of accepted everyone peed and needed to do so quickly and efficiently....it was no longer such a sacred private matter.....you didn't need your own bush....and you didn't need to make sure no one was within 50 feet of you. On one of the last days of the trip, there was an ideal location to pee behind a hut.....I found myself with two other women traveling companions....squatting and actually talking as we peed.....LOLLLOL>>>>>wow....you know have become acclimated when you can pee and have a group chat!!!!

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And as far as guys go.....here in the States...most guys just stand and aim....that's what most of the males did in our group......a discreet turn around.....BUT....in Muslim Africa...which was everything up above Benin.....men pee by kneeling down....or kneeling on one knee and pointing downwards.....this is a sign of modesty and respect.....so our drivers and the native population would kneel to accomplish things.....in a way....it did seem more appropriate to get closer to the grou when you didn't have trees and bushes...a bit more tidy too...especially if it was windy.

And So It Begins.....

23 Days to Go...

I decided to keep a blog... a diary....of the comings and goings of what I jokingly call..."Gina's Big Adventure." Those of you who remember Pee-Wee Herman...know I've stolen the name from his movie. Unlike Pee-Wee, I hope my adventure doesn't conclude with me being arrested for masturbating in public. No... I'm sort of hoping for something more grand than that...maybe a book...or two? or perhaps a few great essays or articles. But even if I didn't write a word about my upcoming journey...I'm at least hoping for transformation...and a bit more texture in my life. I like texture... and transformation always sounds hopeful.

Just so we're on the same page...I'm leaving in 23 days for Paris and then I'm going to cross the Sahara desert starting in Tunisia and ending up in Togo. For the record, before this trip, I'm not sure I knew Togo was a country (Do pogos come from Togo?) and quite frankly although I knew the Sahara was the mother of all deserts..wasn't it mostly sand? and somewhere south of Morrocco? Okay...I didn't realize I was so completely ignorant about Africa and there are some days I even admit to not knowing exactly what signing up for a 30 day camping trip across this rugged environment might entail ...but a life too sane and safe ends up ....just that ...safe and sane....and who wants those words to be inscribed as your epitaph on some urn? (For those of you going for a "green " burial...picture a discreet cream colored printed card pinned onto your canvas shroud.)

So that's the kernel of this big adventure....a week in Paris... a month in Africa...but to tell you the truth I think since the first day I've signed up for this trip the adventure started....so that's what I'd like to talk about and share over the next couple months.