Welcome

Everyone laughs when I tell them about soap.

Tanzanians laugh at the mmerikani, apparently terrified by things nobody can see.

Americans laugh when they hear there are still people who don’t believe in germs.

With dripping hands, I wonder who holds the truth.

“Frederiki anapenda sabuni,”

Frederick loves soap, my neighbors smile as I request a bar to wash

before sharing a meal of maize porridge and pumpkin leaves after the village meeting.

I think of our fingers, returned from hoeing fields, guiding goats, holding drooling babies, and of course, toilets without paper.

I wait for Mungu to descend from the heavens and say I am right this time.

“Yes, really, there are invisible creatures lurking on every surface that will make you cough or run like mud.”

Instead my neighbors continue grinning at my antics as I rest my soap beside the basin.

–

In the West, we pride ourselves on superstitions we shed as we rode science ascendant into the heavens.

Yet I find myself selling soap to my American neighbors too. Pointing to the evidence of insidious forces. Going through clinic log books to count the numbers admitted for diarrhea, coughs, and other preventable diseases. Please boil your water. Don’t drink from puddles in the forest. Wash everything with soap.

We are dismantling the life support systems of our planet and selling them for scrap.

–

At the outskirts of the village

the beekeeper and I pass an abandoned house,

the thatch roof collapsing, mud bricks crumbling.

I ask why this house fell into disrepair

and my companion’s reply burns,

“amekatwa na panga”

he was cut with a machete.

Dear god what could have happened?

But his answer only invites more mystery

“what would you do if you saw a jacket floating in the air?”

What do you mean? I ask? Was a jacket caught in a tree, dangling on a string?

“No,” he says gravely, “there was no string, but people said they saw a jacket floating in the air. This man was a wizard.”

–

We may look down smugly at beliefs that seem from another time, but how will our ancestors look upon us?

Should you be more suspicious of a neighbor who is a wizard or a capitalist?

The Belgian king Leopold killed 8 million Congolese in a simple pursuit of gold, not to mention the uncounted millions and entire cultures swallowed by Westward expansion…

what wizard could claim that kind of efficacy? What hex could be more devastating than faith in endless economic growth?

–

Feeling out of place in a foreign land is easy. Home can be more uncomfortable because you aren’t supposed to feel lost.

When I am compelled to bring up the climate again and wonder why our actions don’t reflect a state of crisis or why we walk past homeless people like its normal to treat each other like greasy takeout containers

I catch myself from suckling too long on the milk of conspiracy theorists and men’s rights advocates. The feeling of being an outsider is not, by itself, evidence that you are right.

But what would you do if you looked out your window one bright morning and saw a mob carrying away your neighbor with torches and pitchforks?

Would you wade into the crowd, try to convince them of their shared insanity?

What if death was slower?

What would you do if everyone around you swore everything was normal

while weather slowly destabilized

the bare essentials of life drift towards luxury

and societies begin to accept anxiety as a normal state of being?

What would you say when nobody accepts your offer of soap?

Wash your own hands and hope for the best?

Or plead with them

because you cannot bear to live

in a world

so sick?