Another Fortnight, Another Chapter

     In Chapter seven of My Heart Is Like a Cabbage, a lonely Stephen is preparing to spend a very "white" Christmas, feeling alienated from his fellow staff members, his Peace Corps training, and his surroundings.  Here are the opening paragraphs; to read the rest of the chapter, click on the title of the novel under "Pages" on the right side of the blog page.     - Tony

The Sierra Leone of our contemporary consciousness—infamous for diamond smuggling and the rapacious savagery of a “civil war”—this was not the Sierra Leone I believed I had come to in 1962.  For me, located where I was at the edge of the Colony mountains and within an hour’s time from world-class beaches on the Atlantic, it held all the charm and, more, the unrelenting monotony of a South Sea island.  It was the land of palm wine, hammocks, malaria, and bureaucratic ineptitude—a kind of shuffling, swaying, sensual dance toeing the tightrope of survival.  The only violence that assaulted my senses in those first few months was the appalling poverty and in-your-face presence of disfiguring and debilitating diseases—elephantiasis, yaws, ascites, kawashiokor, even leprosy—afflictions not hidden from sight in hospitals or clinics, those institutions of convalescence that keep pain and suffering hidden from American eyes.  

There was an undersized, precocious boy in my first form English class, delicate of feature, so irresistibly cute your heart melted as he hobbled from the classroom at the end of the period on a leg swollen to the size of a tree trunk by elephantiasis.  And, yet, Kei’s disarming smile is what I remember most, those perfect white teeth gleaming, an uncomprehendable felicity, a charmed mystery that defied understanding.