Sunday 6/29

As I’ve been sleeping off the last of this sickness, I’ve been having a rare and beautiful chance to dream (and I’m not even on mefloquine!). If I don’t write down my dreams immediately, I often forget them and even if I remember to write them down, by the chance I can, they are sometimes already lost. I just woke up from a strange and fascinating mid-morning nap that provided me with (as strange as it sounds) one of thematically cohesive dreams I have had in a while. To provide some context, the book I just started reading What is the What account of a Sudanese refugee’s experiences in the Darfur conflict, though I also see much of my own recent life experience in the dream too. This is what my mind tells me:


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I was in a place like Bamako, though it was much more open. The ground was unkempt and muddy in patches, pickup trucks and other machines lined the one road we were following downhill. I do not know why, but I feel I was in Ethiopia. A small group of us was being led against our will down the hill, but we were free to walk as we pleased. Wherever we were going, we were being prepared for the first and most basic level of firefighter training, something that both excited and terrified me. I remember thinking to myself, “but what if I freeze inside and can’t move to fight the fire at all?” I can picture myself in that thought just slowly being enveloped in flames, my skin starting to crack in the heat. And then I come to and step forward, starting to take down the fire, one room at a time. I know I can do it, though I have never had to before, and I know that this is not the last time I will fight for my life. I know I will survive.

This brief daydream evaporates and I am still walking down the hill to basic training. As we walk, I realize I am carrying basic but very heavy firefighter’s gear and that everyone else around me on the hill is already suited up and around my age. We seem to be child soldiers of some sort, but no one is rebelling. I realize that there is no point in escaping and actually wonder if it is even worthwhile, so I offer to help a group of women firefighters that we pass along the road. I don’t have time to help – we’re in a rush. But I think the man in charge, wherever he is, will see this and appreciate my eagerness to help. I recognize one of the girls as a Brown student I know who is a brilliant pre-med student, carrying impossibly heavy objects to her own fire truck, which is actually just a hollowed out van (like a mobili). She declines and we keep walking.

When we pass her van, the scene changes. We are entering a warehouse, sliding under a propped open cargo bay door. I am rushed under first and immediately, six foam mattresses fall on me from some unknown location. It doesn’t hurt – it’s just bizarre and jarring. The inside of the warehouse is humongous and there are young boys scattered around at office desks, each smoking and casually feigning a resemblance of work. They immediately tell me to move the mattresses, which I do. And no sooner have I moved them to one place, they tell me they need to be organized and removed. And it is in this moment that I resign, that I realize this is my new life: I am a slave. But strangely, no more than a split second later, I make a new discovery that changes that: In a desk drawer near where I am, there is a small piece of folded up paper with two decrepit dolls made from trash scraps that I recognize as being mine. And then I remember: I have been here before. These were mine. And I escaped. And I just keep walking. I don’t know when and I don’t know how, but I am going to escape. And somehow the knowledge of that appeases me enough to accept this life as my own with pride. Because I am NOT a slave – I am a master.

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In so many ways, it was an amazingly empowering experience to have this dream. I don’t often bring it up, but I’m a pretty strong believer in energy and dreams and being flippantly Freudian about it, I do see dreams as a source of strength and knowledge. As I’ve been struggling here, this dream was a great message for me and one I am proud to have contained, even if only briefly. One of my big challenges in life has been running from things that scare me and inherently embedded in that is the fatally flawed believe that I know what I need in any given moment. As I have grown up, it has taken time and a lot of patience to truly admit that I rarely know what I want, let alone what I need. Therefore, all I can do is love what I have and trust that it’s exactly what I was supposed to find all along to get wherever I am going next. Thus, I’m actually quite proud to have had a dream of submission and furthermore, a dream in which I derive power from that submission. It is a way that I try to live my life day to day and after two years of trying to make it work, this is a beautiful sign that it is becoming integrated into my being. What a great gift – not only in the global sense, but also as a sign of the remaining month or so in Sikoroni. All I have to do is the same thing I ever have to do – release my expectations and desires of my current situation and just embrace it.


Last night I came home and danced in the rain. I broke in my new yarmulke, just getting pummeled by torrents of wetness and finally, for the first time in a week, felt like I could breathe again. We played word games and laughed. We went to the only Tex-Mex restaurant in Bamako and told funny stories about our college roommates for hours. We met South African Jews who greeted me in Hebrew and we sat next to Russian whores who worked the brothel in the backroom. It was a surreal night and it was delicious. And for the first time in a week or so, I’m looking forward to many more delicious nights just like it.

X Adama X