Before I continue with the writing I began yesterday, I should clarify two things:

1. I'm not writing these segments in any particular order. They are neither chronological, nor are they in the order I expect to put them when constructing the essay as a whole.

2. I'm only writing as much as I feel I can each day, so part one is not neccesarily complete...yet.

Ok.

Light Off, part two

My stomach had been upset all day, and I wasn't sure whether it was the spiciness of the food (a trait I usually avoid, so my stomach may not be used to it), the fact that I may have eaten slivers of meat in the soup at lunch (having been a vegetarian for four and a half years, even a little may upset me physically) or the bits of faucet water I realized I'd been unintentionally swallowing while brushing my teeth at night. Probably none of those things. Probably the fact that nothing around me was familiar. Whatever the cause, I took one bite of a perfectly bland fried yam at dinner and rushed to the bathroom to vomit.

When I was finished, I felt good, the euphoric good of being rid of nausea, so I went to find my mother, who was out on the front porch with Cosmas and Clement. The porch--really just an extension of the interior's cement floor, painted red and surrounded by white wooden posts. The boys were playing ping-pong, with paddles, a ball and no table or net, just bouncing the ball off the cement floor and at each other. Lights had just gone off, so we wanted to spend as much time outside as possible, where the sun still lit the campus. I propped myself up on the railing and cheered the game on, giggling with Cosmas when he fell diving for a shot, and laughing at Clement's singing.

As twilight began to descend, Cosmas grew more hysterical, until his older brother finally decided it was time for the game to end. With a magnificent final volley, Cosmas took the win, and collapsed, laughing, onto the porch. His mother emerged from the house, smiling at my mother and I, and agreed that Cosmas could show me one soccer trick before he had to go to bed. In the creeping dark, Cosmas tried repeatedly to perfect the rainbow kick, flipping the soccer ball over his head from behind, and I tried to capture his large smile on my mother's delayed digital camera. We both gave up, but I have a series of photos of Cosmas, in various stages of embarressed laughter, turning over his shoulder, rolling his eyes in disappointment.

Adjoa had Clement bring four white plastic chairs off the porch and into the driveway/lawn of their house, so we could sit and talk directly in the bright moonlight. She wrapped pieces of cloth around our legs, to stop the mosquitos easy access, and Cosmas joined us, silently sitting, glad to be in the company of the mother he adored and my mother, whom he doted after, so proud that she had returned to visit him, had fulfilled the promise she made. I drifted in and out of the conversation between the two matriarchs, content, as I was so often during the trip, to absorb the idea of Bechem, the smells and sounds and gossip of a village as an outsider. Adjoa talked about which teachers still hadn't warmed to her husband, Mr. Mensah, the newest principal of St. Joseph's Teacher Training College, and she told my mother more stories from the reign of President Rawlings, speaking in the second person.

"You woke up in the morning and there were bodies hanging from the trees. You didn't ask the questions--nobody asked questions, because, then, who knows what would happen?"