“Bonjour Madame!”

This is how the Francophones greet me; being white means being Madame.

Dead snakes on the roadside,
chicken and rice from a shack on the roadside (the Maman prepared it so well!)
and then a new puncture and I have to flip my bike again on the roadside.

Trash.
Shacks.

Four punctures in a day.

Madam has dusty clothes, hands black from chain oil, face dripping with sweat and hair in disarray.

…

I ask for water; a tap or a well. The guy turns around and explodes into a smile, his shabby shirt open and hanging loose on thin shoulders.
“Eeeey, hello!” He exclaims in English. “Right this way! Where are you going?” I follow his playful swagger to the tap a hundred meters down the road. He reaches into his pocket and hands me a crumpled bill.
“What, nooo!” I protest.
“You are a traveler!” he says, his eyes glistening charm. “Take it! Buy something to eat!”
“Thank you, thank you, please,” I laugh and push back. “You buy something to eat! You’re all skin and bones!”

…

“You really have a lot of mountains in this country!” I jokingly complain to a guy who has just sold me rubber glue to keep up with all the punctures. We are sitting on a bench by the empty road, the forest thick behind the village. He looks at me.
“Where are you going?”
“Labé,” I reply. He looks down the road.
“The mountains are up ahead,” he says. “You are actually nice!” he says suddenly, unabashedly surprised. I hold back a sigh and a laugh and a smile. He had to open a new, big jar of glue in order to portion some of it into the small plastic bottle. In the midst of it he seemed to regret overcharging me, tried to put more glue into the bottle though I really just needed the half and then wanted to give me some of my money back. I smiled, said a deal is a deal and let him sit in his little regret, amused. White skin trumps sweaty brow, dirty nails and biking shorts; it took a few minutes for him to conclude that I wasn’t the snobbish French Madame he seemed to expect.

On the bench he talks about starting his farm, shows me photos of the first chili harvest and tells me about wanting to build something steady to leave for his children.

…

There is a lot of space, a lot of silent, slow-moving nature between the villages. I pitch my tent by the groves and on the fields and make my campfire to cricket song. I love, love, love this:

The open air,
space,
silence.

At night I get cold for the first time in how long, a feeling nostalgic yet unpleasant, and I snuggle inside my sleeping bag. The mornings are wet with dew. I remember what my mother taught me once: to bring in the firewood for the next day already in the evening and let it thaw by the stove during winter. I start covering my firewood in the bike carriage overnight to have it dry in the morning.

The heat at mid-day is always overwhelming.

In a small town with an empty market I stay on a bench outside of a shop in the desolate of noon, nursing a cold soda; the only salvation in this world. Everybody is indoors or lying down; a goat scavenges idly across the road. A moto driver stops by, then another one, then some older men who linger. They accumulate and chat, and somehow I find myself torn away from writing my diary and the center of mellow-smiling attention; suddenly joking and holding somebody’s baby, posing for photos and a new cold soda pressed into my hand. These smiling eyes. Then they move on and I am left alone again, having to move the bench further into the shade, the shop owner back to napping against a sack of rice.

…

“Madame, madame!” The shouting begins again, but it is still calmer than in Guinea-Bissau. Here I am “porto“.

I lift my hand in passing.

Once on the road I lean the bike against a sign post, thinking it far enough from settlement, and duck into the tall grass to take a shit. But two girls have seen me and they approach fast, small feet pattering naked on the asphalt.
“Donne moi le veló! Donne moi le veló!” I am barely covered by the grass, squatting down with my ass out as they stop by my bike to shout.
“Go away!” I yell. “Toilette, toilette!”

Outside another village and another group of children come out to crowd me in the evening while I pitch my tent. They stare, hover nearby and sneak up only to spread as soon as I head toward them. I wave my hands and tell them to go home. They wave their hands back. They barely speak French, not even the two teenagers; just stare at me with wide eyes.

I suddenly feel the urge to beat them like their parents might beat them, these children left to stray and raise themselves outside of every village.

“What do you want?!” I shout at them. They stare.
“Largen,” someone says.
“There is no money,” I say. “What do you want?”
“Cado.”
“No presents,” I say. “What? Why are you here? Huh? Do you want this?” I take hold of my top, gray-green with a black pattern printed by a friend. They stay in stiff silence. Someone nods.
“Yes,” a voice. I tear off the top, stand in my dirty white sports bra, hold out the top as a scrunched ball in my hand.
“Take it!” Nobody moves. I wave my hand impatiently.
“Come on! Take it!” One of the boys edges forward, takes the top.
“Happy? Anything else?” I spread out my hands. They stay quiet. “No?” More silence.
“Now go home!” A final gesture of my hand to point to the village and they start backing off, heads still turned to me. But at least they are moving. I look at them until the last one has disappeared behind the curve. I wonder what they will do with the top, if they will bring it home and what they’d say when a mother asks where they got it. Or if, lacking a good reply, the top will end up in the ditch on the way, to get eaten by goats and washed off by rain. Dammit, it was a good top.

I feel hot shame for losing my temper.
A fearful ear on the road; might parents seek vengeance?
And a pity: these kids growing up believing that white people are always superior.

That they have nothing and that we will come and save them.

Fatigue; I walk back to the tent, stomach hanging naked and improper, weirdly white like the rising moon. I remind myself that people are allowed to get angry here and that the status of children always is below that of an adult in this culture, so I should have the right to expect obedience; I just want rest and no, it’s not my land but I am not disturbing anybody. Still I think about the story forming in the heads of these children: the one time they met a white person who shouted at them in the bush.

The Madame who lost her shit.

…

(This story told in pictures.)