Scott Tucker
>Life is unfolding exactly the way it is meant to
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| Ronald Ceuppens @ Paper Darts/ |
Scott Tucker recounts the everyday encounters in Guinea, West Africa @ Etude.
The sound of the boys crying out in pain is new. The other sounds are the same. The bat wings, quick and rubbery, flitting overhead in a haze of mango leaves and wood smoke. The old counterfeiter, sitting outside his front door, talking quietly with visitors in threadbare suits.
The children sing a school song in French outside in the dark, then start up a game of “de donc/dernier,” Simon Says, jumping forward and backward over a circle drawn in the dirt. They cheer noisily out of habit when the electricity comes on, although they continue playing the same games electricity or not. There are no vehicles again tonight on the main road, due to a military curfew that’s been in place since the near-assassination of President Dadis Camara more than a month ago. A dundunba party carries on, however, past 11 p.m. in a neighbor’s yard, with drumming and dancing and excited announcements coming over a microphone. C’est normal. C’est Conakry.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I have come to Guinea, West Africa, at a time when the U.S. embassy is closed and all Americans have been urged to leave the country. I have left the comforts of Seattle, Washington for this, to remind myself that there is power in ordinary people, even the world’s poorest people, going about living their daily lives. These people can save a nation. They can make a nation worth saving. They can turn around your thinking. I know only one person “on the ground,” Karim Koumbassa, my drum and dance teacher in Seattle, and a native of Guinea. He is, like most men in Conakry, strong and pliant from years of physical labor in the equatorial heat. He is 33 years old, best guess, although age is happily unimportant here. Dates of birth are routinely invented on official paperwork.
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