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"Richard plays with his great-granddaughter, Lemuel.
Cumming, Georgia
Commentary

Learned at My Father’s Feet

I took care of my father near the end of his life, as dementia slowly unraveled the strong and proud man I had known. His memories faded, his body failed him — and yet his heart was full of grace.

By Kae Dickson
The writer's father, Richard Dawsey, playing with his great-granddaughter, Lemuel.

“Daddy, can I help you?”

“Oh, Sugar, I just can’t seem to get my fingers to cooperate.”

“That’s okay. Here, I can do this.” I buttoned his shirt. “There. All set.”

He smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “What would I do without you?”

I heard that loving question hundreds of times. “Oh, you’d do fine,” I would say, but we both knew differently.

“Have you got anything sweet?”

“You know I do. I made chocolate pudding, and you can have these oatmeal cookies if you want.”

“That sounds good.”

“Daddy, how big do you think those birds are?”

We had been watching huge birds, probably American black vultures or the more common turkey vultures, whose wingspan can measure six feet or more, soaring above the trees behind our house. Daddy was always my go-to expert on birds. Before he retired, my father had worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He had loved and studied birds for years.

“I don’t know, Shug.” He smiled wanly. It hurt him not to be able to recall what he had once known so well.

“What do you think? Eight feet?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation going.

“Probably. You know they can soar almost indefinitely like that, as long as the air currents are right.”

Dawsey's portrait from the U.S. Army Air Corps, 1942.

“How do they do that?”

He explained that wherever there are people or animals, there is increased heat. Warmer air rises and creates the air flow that birds use for lift. They can manipulate their height just by lifting one wing or the other to catch the drift of the warm air. “They can go as far as fifteen miles or more without ever flapping their wings,” he added. “They’re fabulous creatures.”

I had witnessed many times how the memories my father thought he had lost would come back to him when tickled with the right questions. This is how we spent our breakfast and lunch every day, looking out on the wonderful habitat that was our backyard and talking about God’s creatures. Daddy was a fabulous storyteller, but these days he often fell into the quicksand of failing memory and depression. I worked hard to bring him back to the surface during these times.

“I hope that tree never gets cut down,” I said of the tallest tulip poplar, which was the birds’ favorite perch.

“That would be a shame,” said Daddy quietly.

I got up and cleared the table, and he shuffled off to fall asleep in his chair in front of the television, where he would stay till I called him to supper.

Such was our life now. I fixed breakfast, sat with Daddy at the breakfast table for two hours or so, cleaned up, prepared lunch, sat at the same table for another two hours, cleaned up, and did it a third time for supper in the evening.

My father was a dementia patient. Strong as an ox, he had the heart of a teddy bear. He smiled when you entered the room and called everyone “Shug,” or more formally, “Sugar.” At some point, what had been my childhood nickname became a generic moniker for the family members and caretakers whose names would escape him.

Daddy was one of the 20 to 40 percent of dementia patients who fall outside the more common box of Alzheimer’s. In my father’s case, we knew the origin of his brain disease. Throughout his life, he had experienced several severe brain traumas.

At Georgia Tech, he played college football at a time when the only head protection was a thin leather helmet. He experienced countless blows to the head, including multiple concussions. Then, in 1939, he had an automobile accident — a head-on collision that should have killed him, but left him in a coma for months. When he finally regained consciousness, he was unable to walk, sit, or stand. His spinal cord was intact, but his brain was so badly bruised that messages intended for his extremities were unable to arrive there.

Released from the hospital with a hopeless prognosis, my father was determined to prove the doctors wrong. Every morning, he was parked under a tree in his wheelchair. Every morning, he threw himself out of the chair onto the ground. Over the next weeks and months he used the tree to pull himself up to first a crawling position, then to standing. He would move away from the tree — first inches, then feet — until he fell to the ground. He would then drag himself back to the tree and do it again and again and again. A man of faith, he never lost hope that he would walk again.

Decades later, my father ran, swam, and played tennis without even a limp.

Lemuel and Richard Dawsey, married in Atlanta, 1945.

My mother was a nurse and was assigned to care for Daddy when he was injured. They fell in love and continued to correspond after he left the hospital. When World War II broke out, she joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. My father enlisted in the Army Air Corps. While serving in England, he suffered another head injury when he fell off the wing of an airplane onto the concrete runway.

Daddy recovered again. In 1945, my father and mother were married.

Growing up, I heard the story of “the wreck” many times, but the man I knew was completely whole. He taught me tennis, made me go to church, and was a strict disciplinarian. In all ways, he seemed normal.

Daddy adored my mother. I never knew him to leave the house or come home without kissing her, even if he was just walking to the corner mailbox. There was no doubt that family was the most important thing to both of them.

In 1981, Daddy was involved in another head-on collision. His car landed nose down in a creek bed, and the impact threw his head into the steering wheel, crushing his face. This accident left him with hydrocephalus — swelling and fluid in the brain. A doctor told him that his cumulative head traumas had added ten years to his age.

My father never fully recovered. His personality did not change, but his memory became worse and worse.

The symptoms at first were not so noticeable, and he lived the next ten years in happy retirement. Then my mother died in 1991, and his decline accelerated. My mother had been his world, and without her, life lost its purpose.

It became more and more obvious that my father should not be living alone. My husband Paul and I built a new house and asked him to move in with us.

Daddy had lived in the same home for four decades. Memories of his long, loving marriage reigned in every room. He liked to mow the grass around the flower beds, which had been my mother’s passion. I had to take all this away from him, and he was resistant to the end.

Finally, Daddy moved in. My daughter Julie and her two-year-old daughter were living with us as well, which made ours a four-generation household. My granddaughter called him “Greatdaddy.”

My life revolved around Daddy. After a year and a half, I went to work part-time, but a string of small accidents made me uneasy about leaving him alone. My daughter quit her job and became his caretaker for a year. I left my job so that I could be with him all the time and Julie could go back to work. We had a woman come in three times a week to bathe him, because that was the one thing that neither my daughter nor I could do.

I did learn to take him into the men’s bathroom when we were out, because I had no choice. It was not fun.

He was hospitalized several times in the last years of his life. After he fell trying to get to the bathroom in his hospital room, I stayed there with him all the time, once for three weeks when he had very severe pneumonia. His doctor admitted later that he was surprised my father survived. I never really minded these hospital stays because we had extensive opportunities to hold hands and laugh at silly old sitcoms like The Golden Girls. He wanted me there, and I needed to be there as well, for my own peace of mind.

Dawsey celebrates his last birthday, at ninety-two.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, we moved him to an assisted living facility. When I told him about my disease, he said only, “I’m sorry, Shug.” I thought he didn’t understand the severity of what I had told him, but every time I came to see him, the first thing he would say would be, “Are you doing okay?” I think he knew.

I had wanted to bring him home again when I was strong enough, but I didn’t have that chance. A few months after I finished my treatments, he made the final trip home to be with God. He was ninety-two.

While I felt some relief that his suffering was over — he had not been happy for a long time and was now together with my mother — my grief was almost unbearable. I had now lost both my parents, and I will never get over the loss.

And yet I am grateful that I had the chance to take care of my father near the end of his life. His illness never took away his decency — his love of his family, and his deep faith in God. He accepted his condition, and the patience and courage he showed throughout taught me a lot. In the time left to me with my children and grandchildren, I pray I can live my life, and face my death, with the grace learned at my father’s feet.

An Atlanta native, Kae Dickson lives in Cumming with her husband, three dogs, and a cat. Together they have five daughters and four grandchildren. Her love of God, family, and the South is reflected in her poetry, essays, and short stories.

To watch a 2000 Georgia Tech alumni interview with Kae Dickson’s father, James Richard Dawsey, click here.

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Calls for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Debt

Tell us your stories of a debt that was held, paid, or forgotten. Review a book or film that says something meaningful about those of us who owe money or something more. Send us interviews, profiles, and photos of people and groups that bring new meaning to the age-old relationship between debtor and creditor.


In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | March 2012: Debt

Note: This month we are looking in particular for photo essays. Please email us at submissions@inthefray.org if you are a photographer and have work to submit or ideas for a potential project.

Scan a recent headline and there is something about debt: budget deficits, toxic mortgages, leveraged buyouts. Lending greases the gears of our economic machine. In The Fray wants to look at “debt” in all its senses, financial and otherwise. Debts in our relationships, debts in our culture. The perpetual indebtedness of modern life, and the obligations passed down through generations. Forgiveness of debts — those of a person, or a country. Tell us your stories of a debt that was held, paid, or forgotten. Review a book or film that says something meaningful about those of us who owe money or something more. Send us interviews, profiles, and photos of people and groups that bring new meaning to the age-old relationship between debtor and creditor.

We are currently accepting pitches for articles that relate to this theme or more generally to the magazine’s mission of understanding other people and encouraging empathy and tolerance. We are looking for profiles, interviews, reportage, personal essays, op-eds, travel writing, photo essays, artwork, videos, multimedia projects, and review essays of books, film, music, and art. If interested, please email submissions@inthefray.org with a well-developed, one-paragraph pitch for your proposed piece as soon as possible — along with three links to your previous work — NO LATER THAN APRIL 8, 2012. All contributors are urged to review our submissions guidelines at http://inthefray.org/submit.

We are also looking for writers, photographers, and artists who can take care of specific assignments, including interviews, book and film reviews, and accompanying photos and artwork. If interested, please follow the instructions at the bottom of http://inthefray.org/submit to join our contributors mailing list.

We look forward to hearing from you.

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submissions@inthefray.org

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Bahía Honda, Cuba
Commentary

The Road Less Traveled

Best of In The Fray 2012. With a pack, a duffel bag, and a handful of Spanish words, I had hitched my way up the road to Cuba’s northern coast. But now it was getting dark, no more cars were stopping, and I needed to find a place to sleep.

By Lita Wong
A fifties-era Buick parked on a street in Cuba’s westernmost province, Pinar del Río. October 1999. Alastair Smith

Second in a two-part series. Click here for the first part.

Today would have to be a lucky day for hitching. Waking up in San Diego de los Baños, an out-of-the-way resort town 130 kilometers southwest of Havana, I didn’t know exactly how I’d get back to the capital — only that I would.

The fastest way was the highway linking Pinar del Río, the eponymous capital of the province I was visiting, to Havana. But I didn’t want to miss the smaller towns along the northern coast.

I decided to head to Soroa, thirty-five kilometers to the east. Nicknamed the “Rainbow of Cuba,” it is known for heavy rainfall, orchids, and tall trees. Because there was no long-distance bus or train to reach it, and I had no car, the only way there was to hitch or take several buses.

People must have been looking out of their houses every minute, because I had hardly gotten far on my way to the bus stop before a young man appeared to help me with my bag. It was the same man who had given me a ride here on his bike the previous day. He carried my bag to the bus stop, then left.

After waiting forty-five minutes for a bus that never came, I left, too. “Lejos,” people at the bus stop said, as if I intended to walk all the way to Havana.

Soon a young woman carrying a pail came alongside me on the road. “Where are you going?” she asked in English.

“Candelaria,” I said, naming the larger town just below Soroa.

“It’s a long way,” the English student said.

A middle-aged man on a bicycle had stopped, and the two talked. She then turned to me and said, “You can go with him.”

I looked at him and the bike and pointed at my heavy bag and backpack. “Noooooo,” I said, shaking my head.

“This is my father,” she said, as if that would suffice. I almost started to laugh, thinking I would be the person who would give him a heart attack.

“It’s okay?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” she said. “He’ll take you to the next town.”

I positioned myself sidesaddle on the bike rack, but her father had trouble pedaling because I was tipping the bike over. “It’s better if you put each leg on each side of the bike,” the woman mused.

Would wedging my big duffel bag against her dad’s back make him uncomfortable? I asked.

“Don’t worry about it. No problem,” she said, without asking him.

With that, I put a leg on each side of the bike and held my bag between the two of us. Chug chug chug … we were off.

And the man’s daughter waved.

At one point, my bag fell, its strap nearly choking me to death until the man caught the bag and placed it in front of him. He told me I could hug his stomach to keep balanced. It occurred to me that this probably wasn’t his first time traveling this way.

The man took me to the next town. There was a slab of rock on the side of the road. As the day was beautiful, I lay down on it to nap, waiting for my first vehicle.

There were, in fact, two. A sputtering tractor pulled up just as a truck passed by.

I was about to tell the tractor driver where I wanted to go when he pointed ahead. The truck had also stopped for me, and it was headed for Soroa, the very town I wanted to visit.

It was barely one o’clock. I could not believe my good fortune.

When I arrived at Soroa’s Orquideario, home to 350 orchid species, a guard allowed me to stow my bags with him during my visit. Feeling particularly ambitious, I decided to climb a craggy hill for a view of the valley.

By the time I finally left the orchid garden, it was five in the afternoon. Now I just had to hitch nine kilometers south to Candelaria, where I could take a direct train to Havana, another ninety-five kilometers away.

Or — I could take the road north and travel a more scenic route along the coast. After all, I’d been lucky so far.

I decided to leave it up to fate. The decision maker would be the first car that stopped for me.

North or south. Coast or train.

It wasn’t long before a a car driven by a middle-aged couple came along. They were headed north, toward the coastal town of Bahía Honda. They stopped to pick me up — and then their engine died. As I sat in the back seat, the man took two wires near the steering wheel and crossed them to get a charge. He tried a combination of pedal work and gear-shifting as the engine groaned, then roared back to life.

We had not traveled far before I noticed the sky in the distance turn gray and stormy. Still, the land was beautiful, with palm trees scattered across the countryside, the road winding its way through the hills. The car often slowed down to avoid the potholes.

We passed the couple’s house, and within a mile we reached a crossroads: Bahía Honda lay to the west, Havana to the east. Any further north, and you were in the ocean. The couple told me Havana was far — lejos — and pointed to the setting sun. Sí, I said.

A tractor pulling a cart was waiting, headed east to a nearby village. I climbed in with two local men who were also hitching a ride. We all rode standing, gripping the sides of the wagon, as the tractor jolted along the road. The wind made the air nippy. Darkness was approaching quickly.

We got off at the village. A bus had been scheduled to depart further east but appeared to have broken down, its passengers heading home for the night. There would be no more buses for now. Some cars and trucks passed, and I waved at them futilely. At one point, my wave turned into an angry middle finger.

By now, darkness had completely fallen. Never again be ambitious after 3 p.m., I thought, as I sat on the road, resting on my bag.

A man passed several times, just staring at me. “What?” I wanted to snap at him. I felt like an alien dropped down from outer space, abandoned by its spaceship. Another person walked by and asked me where I wanted to go. “Havana,” I answered. “Lejos, lejos,” he said, waving his hand toward the horizon.

No kidding, asshole, I muttered. I was so tired of that word.

No more cars came by. At one point, my patience wearing thin, I yelled, “OH MY GOD!” After all, nobody was around, just a few houses nearby.

The first man returned. It was as if he had decided in the middle of dinnertime to take a stroll. He walked while he ate, his fork scraping food from his metal plate. He asked me where I was from.

“China,” I lied, not wanting to betray my American identity.

He asked me if I was hungry. When I said yes, he told me to come with him. “Brother,” he said.

We went a little ways down the road, and he knocked on the door of a modest house. He explained to someone inside that he had found somebody from China on the street. She was sola. Could she have some food? he asked.

The brother let us in. He and his young wife took me into their living room and turned on the television. “Siddown! Siddown!” the two men said, gesturing with large up-down arm motions for me to sit. To make sure I was feeling comfortable, the brother turned up the TV volume — even though it was obvious, no entiendo español.

Their mother came into the room and tried to communicate with me in sign language. You’d think she was mute or I was deaf. They asked me if I wanted to take a bath — the brother rubbing himself with an imaginary bar of soap to get the question across. I tried to tell them I didn’t need a bath, but whatever I told them made them laugh instead.

Meanwhile, the brother’s wife had gone all out in making dinner. I was ushered into the kitchen, where a bowl heaped with rice and plantains was waiting for me. On another plate were chicken and slices of cold ham on bread.

I was starving. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. I began to shovel forkful after forkful until I noticed something black, with legs, in my rice. The ant was alive. And then, as I began to pick through the rice, I saw more. Ants were also on the chicken and crawling on the ham, perhaps two or three on each piece.

The brother looked closely at my plate and noticed an ant just when I did. He muttered something to his wife. Her back was to us, and she showed no reaction, but I think she was embarrassed. The eggs she was cooking for her husband were crackling in the oil, and they smelled good.

The brother pointed to the wall, where many ants were crawling. He laughed and told me that those ants were the same as the ones on my food. No problem, I said. The food was good. I didn’t want to eat the ants, but I wanted to seem as if I were cleaning off my plate. At the same time, leaving behind only those portions with the ants would make them all the more obvious. I did the best I could.

Afterwards, seeing me wipe my mouth with my fingers, the brother vigorously rubbed his hands together to ask me if I wanted to wash my hands. I said yes. He and his wife took me to the little bathhouse next door and brought a kettle of boiling water, which they poured into a pail for me to wash with. The wife gave me a soft, blue towel. Its newness contrasted with her sweater, which was tattered at the sleeves, and her husband’s T-shirt, which had holes.

When I needed to use the toilet, the wife gave me a shard of cotton from her bag. It did the trick. Later, I noticed in the trashcan that the same kind of shard also doubled as a sanitary napkin.

My hosts let me sleep in a big bed off the living room. The white sheets smelled like laundry, and I felt guilty about climbing into them with my dirty, dusty body. As tired as I was, the mosquito bites all over my legs kept me awake, long after everyone else had gone to sleep.

The young wife stayed up later than her husband. She was busy in the kitchen, probably preparing formula for their baby, whom I heard gurgling in the background.

Later, during the night, the baby cried. And outside, a man hollered, sang at the top of his lungs, and banged on pans. He chanted something indistinguishable, and I wondered if it was indistinguishable in Spanish as well. The husband stirred in the next room. I thought he would get up to tell the crazy man to be quiet, but he did not.

I wondered if this was normal. Perhaps it was a religious ceremony.

As I pulled the sheet over me and drifted into a fuller sleep, I thanked the man who had found me alongside the road and taken me to the home of his brother. Girberto Veltia and his wife, of the village Brail in Bahía Honda, had given me shelter, food, and a big bed, most probably their own.

Luck was on my side.

November 3, 1999

Second in a two-part series. Click here for the first part.

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Rusty
Seattle
Commentary

Girl’s Best Friend

Lessons on embracing life, from the dogs.

By Rebecca Leisher
Photographed by Peggy Leisher
Rusty.

I might not even exist if it weren’t for a dog named Mindy.

She was my dad’s golden retriever when he was in veterinary school at Washington State University, where my mom worked in the radiology department as a veterinary technician. When my dad brought Mindy in for an x-ray, my mom checked her in by playfully writing “10” instead of my dad’s name, referring to the popular Bo Derek movie of the time. He saw what she’d written and asked her out on a date. Soon they were married, and eventually they decided to start having children. That’s when I entered the world.

I’ve always been shy. My mom did her best to force me into situations that would push my limits, but it was a slow process. What other child would require coercion to attend a sleepover with friends? Grocery stores terrified me: way too many strangers. I was suspicious of anyone who gave me a compliment. In the sixth grade, a boy I had a crush on once casually offered me a piece of gum. “Umm, sure,” I muttered. I slowly extended my hand while glaring at him sideways in an attempt to see through his motivations. He must have spit on it or something — why else would he offer it?

Dogs were the one thing I could trust in life. I knew my little brown mutt Rusty had no secret agenda. All he wanted was to be petted, fed, and allowed to roll around in manure. Considering he smelled like horseshit, he was in no position to judge me, either. Rusty and I became best friends the moment I met him. I was six, and I was in awe of him and the life he led. Sometimes I wanted to be him; other times I longed for him to turn into a boy so that he could be my boyfriend. There was even a Rusty and Rebecca make-believe wedding. (Unfortunately, before my sister-turned-pastor could pronounce us husband and wife, our Boston terrier, Olive, started barking hysterically and drowned out the sacred ceremony.)

When I entered high school, I was sick of being the shy girl. I wanted more real, human friends. I wanted to be liked, I wanted to be cool, I wanted to be accepted — and not just in the canine world.

Turns out drugs are a really good way to meet people. I swear the day I started smoking pot twenty more people knew my name. At the end of freshman year, one of the cool stoner girls wrote in my yearbook: Becca, I always thought you were hella preppy but you’re actually pretty chill. Alcohol came next and helped mold a new “me” — a girl far from shy. The new me went to parties where she danced on tables and tantalized men with suggestive glances and an alluring confidence. Coke, ecstasy, and a slew of prescription drugs followed, making the new me even cooler.

That’s how I twisted it all in my mind. In reality, my table dancing was sloppy at best, and the men I was attracting were creeps and losers. But I told myself otherwise. I was running away from that image in my head of a timid, friendless girl who hung out with dogs. I rejected everything that the old me valued — including Rusty. Eventually, he learned to do his own thing.

By my senior year of high school, I had transformed into someone my parents barely recognized and struggled to connect with. I’d come home on Sundays feeling hung over and empty, dreading the five days of school that separated me from my next weekend escape. When I stopped waking up for school altogether, my parents decided to take me to a psychiatrist.

No more drinking and no more drugs, the psychiatrist told me. I wanted to feel better, but this was asking a lot. I cried. What was I supposed to do?

When I came home, my parents sat down with me at our computer — much like the days when we’d research colleges together. Somewhere far off in my mind I still dreamed of going to San Diego State, where I could take journalism classes, study abroad in Latin America, and be surrounded by palm trees and sunshine and some abstract happiness. Since then my grades had plummeted — I was even failing journalism, despite my teacher telling me I was the best writer in the class — and I refused to study for the SAT. Desperately wanting their daughter back, my parents suggested I take some time off after graduation.

“When the drugs wear off, you’re left feeling worse than before,” Mom said carefully. “But the feeling you get when you help someone in need is a natural high that keeps feeling good.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant and thought it sounded super corny. But I perked up when my parents broached the idea of doing volunteer work in Mexico. I’d fallen in love with the country on a family trip a couple years earlier. There I had met people who seemed so much more content than me — and yet had so little, from my materialistic perspective. It had been a simplistic and naïve realization, but nonetheless mind-blowing to a privileged sixteen-year-old.

Quilla.

My parents and I began researching volunteer programs in Mexico. But meanwhile, Rusty was getting sick. His coat became patchy and rough, his skin draped over his ribcage, and he wandered around disoriented. It had been a long time since I’d given him much attention. One day I sat down with him on the floor in front of the wall heater, a place where we used to love to relax. I stroked his coarse fur and kissed his muzzle and regretted neglecting him.

A few months later, my best friend slipped out of his frail body while nibbling biscuits from my hand.

The autumn after graduation, I found myself in Mexico again. I liked the idea of doing something meaningful, but the opportunities volunteering with orphanages and schools just weren’t calling to me. Then, in a small beach town called Los Ayala along the Pacific coast, I came across a free spay–and-neuter clinic for dogs and cats, aimed at reducing animal overpopulation in the area. The four-day-long mobile clinic was offered by a program called Ayuda a los Animales (Help the Animals). Coming from a veterinary family, I’d always known that sterilizing pets was a vital means of cutting the number of homeless animals suffering on the streets and neglected or euthanized in overburdened shelters. But the massive numbers of stray animals in Mexico brought the importance of spaying and neutering to a whole new level — and underscored the need for a more humane approach to the problem. (A woman from Indiana named Molly Fisher founded Ayuda a los Animales after her puppy was killed in a “dog sweep,” the local government’s version of animal population control.)

At the orientation I met a dog who reminded me of Rusty in his final days. She was a skeleton — her bristly fur in patches, too feeble to even bark, but her eyes, like Rusty’s, gentle and wistful. Rusty had been twelve when he became this sickly, but this little girl was only a few months old.

The clinic involved four long days of vaccinating animals, preparing them for surgery, assisting veterinarians during operations, monitoring animals during recovery, and discussing proper animal care with the owners. But at the end of the last sixteen-hour day, I wasn’t exhausted. I felt euphoric — rejuvenated. I finally understood what my mom had been talking about. This was ecstasy without popping a pill.

I decided to adopt the little dog I’d met at the clinic orientation. Based on her sweet personality — and my limited vocabulary — I named her Mantequilla, the Spanish word for butter. I poured my love and attention into her well-being, perhaps in an attempt to make up for neglecting Rusty in his final years. By the time I brought her home to the United States, Quilla had transformed into a beautiful, energetic, and playful dog, a process that resembled a film of Rusty’s life in rewind. In the years that followed, Quilla stood by me as I transformed my own life. I improved my grades in community college, transferred to the University of Oregon, and revived my ambition to become a professional journalist.

My life before had been a series of extremes: debilitating shyness that would give way to self-destructive overconfidence. Now, in my search for balance, I often look to my dog when I feel I may tip to one side. Her bright, wide-eyed enthusiasm for simply being serves as my little reminder that life is never something to run from.

Rebecca Leisher is a journalist who is currently wandering the world with Seattle as a home base. Her work has appeared in the magazines YES!, Ethos, and FLUX, among other publications. She has continued to travel to Mexico and volunteer with the Ayuda a los Animales program, but has resisted the urge to bring more dogs back with her.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Nairobi, Kenya
Photo Essays

Capitalism Reborn: An East African Story

Best of In The Fray 2012. Around the world, protesters decry the inequality and excess of free-market capitalism’s “race to the bottom.” But in East Africa, social entrepreneurs are planting the young roots of a new, cause-minded capitalism.

By Jonathan Kalan

For all their flaws, capitalism and its profit-maximizing private enterprises have created enormous prosperity and wealth over the past century, improving living standards around the world. Yet as globalization accelerates a global “race to the bottom”—as integrated markets push down on regulations and wages—the shortcomings of the free-market system have become harder to ignore: growing income inequalities, a stark clash of classes, exploited labor, exhausted resources, and permanently altered ecosystems. Today there are protests on Wall Street, riots in Greece, bailouts on both sides of the Atlantic—seemingly everywhere, political upheaval and social unrest.

Across national, social, and economic boundaries, the capitalist system is being cut open and exposed, criticized and amended. Couch surfers and Craigslisters alike build barter-based economies. Shoppers respond to “cause marketing” efforts and pay more for fair trade. Harvard academics propose new forms of corporations that “create shared value.” Corporations tout their social responsibility programs and social impact assessments.

While these are all noble strategies, they ultimately don’t change a simple fact: the fundamental motivator of the capitalist corporation is profit.

Enter the social entrepreneurs that are bringing about a rebirth of capitalism—this time, in the emerging economies of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. These “new capitalists” are pioneering private-sector solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges in health, water, sanitation, and energy. They are following the blueprint laid out by the late professor C.K. Prahalad, who called for tapping into new markets and fortunes at the bottom of the economic pyramid, and drawing inspiration from recent success stories, such as “Banker to the Poor” Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank, winners of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Social enterprises find profits in poverty, but their zeal for providing essential products and services to the poor—in parts of the developing world shunned by most major corporations—means that a much broader population benefits as well. By carefully balancing economic and social profits, these businesses—and their cause-minded, capitalist founders—are rewriting the global narrative of “pity” for developing countries, cultivating the potential even within formerly marginalized societies for intense levels of entrepreneurship and self-improvement.

For over a year, the (BoP) Project has traversed East Africa, exploring how these new models of private enterprise are addressing some of the most crucial issues in the region. From the slums of Kampala, Uganda, to the pulsing heart of Nairobi, Kenya, to the rolling green hills of Rwanda, these photographs and stories reflect the promise of the entrepreneurial energies at the base of the economic pyramid.

In Kitui, Kenya, I can still recall the emotion of the moment when Masaki John, a widowed Kenyan farmer, offered me a live chicken for taking a photograph of her and her three sons. Her eight beehives produce honey that is guaranteed to be purchased, at fair market prices, by Honey Care Africa, a social enterprise.

I still remember the shock I felt when Veronica, head cashier at an Ikotoilet facility in the central business district of Nairobi, Kenya, told me she once helped deliver a child in a bathroom stall. These high-quality, public, pay-per-use toilet and shower facilities, located in urban areas of Kenya and built by the social enterprise Ecotact, are not only the best option in town for a shave, toilet, and shower, but apparently on multiple occasions have been used by women going into labor, because of their highly sanitary conditions.

I remember the swell of excitement in the crowd as we pulled in just after dusk to the village of Musubiro in Central Uganda, with Ronald, a “solar entrepreneur” working for a social enterprise called Barefoot Power. As he set an array of home solar products on the hood of the car, the blue LED lights from these rugged little devices illuminated the faces of the children in front. For the cost of just two-and-a-half months of kerosene, a Firefly provides enough clean lighting for almost two full years. Across Uganda, there are over 160 solar entrepreneurs like Ronald, and collectively they’ve sold over 200,000 Firefly kits.

Each of these memories, illegibly scribbled in a stack of well-worn Field Notes Brand notebooks and buried at the bottom of an old rucksack, reminds me why these social enterprises exist. Behind that veil of poverty, beyond the images broadcast to the Western world of poor, helpless people in need of your charity, there is an incredible potential waiting to be recognized and rewarded.

Next year would have been the one hundredth birthday of Nobel Prize-winning economist and free-market apostle Milton Friedman. At this critical juncture for capitalism, it’s worth harking back to one of Friedman’s most important points: private enterprise is the foundation of economic prosperity. If private enterprise was the foundation of economic prosperity over the past hundred years, perhaps a little tweaking of the capitalist model will turn private enterprise into the foundation of social prosperity for the next hundred. Where multinational corporations and embattled governments have failed, social enterprises will hopefully find success.

Jonathan Kalan, founder of the (BoP) Project, is an internationally published journalist, photojournalist, and blogger specializing in social business and innovation in emerging markets. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, he is a staff writer for NextBillion.net, a regular contributor to Dowser.org, and a 2011 finalist for the Diageo Africa Business Reporting Awards.

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Calls for Submissions

Call for Submissions: The Kindness of Strangers

Tell us about those who have touched other people and made a difference — even if in passing. Describe your encounters with good samaritans as you were traveling, going through an ordeal, or just living everyday life. Share with us the kinds of stories that can turn a cynic's heart.


In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | November 2011: The Kindness of Strangers

Recently in China, bystanders walked by after a toddler was struck by two vans — whose drivers then drove away. Her death caused international soul-searching over the callousness and inhumanity of modern society. In The Fray wants to approach this topic through a more optimistic lens: the kindness of strangers. Tell us about those who have touched other people and made a difference — even if in passing. Describe your encounters with good samaritans as you were traveling, going through an ordeal, or just living everyday life. Share with us the kinds of stories that can turn a cynic’s heart.

We are currently accepting pitches for articles that relate to this theme or more generally to the magazine’s mission of understanding other people and encouraging empathy and tolerance. We are looking for profiles, interviews, reportage, personal essays, op-eds, travel writing, photo essays, artwork, videos, multimedia projects, and review essays of books, film, music, and art. If interested, please email submissions@inthefray.org with a well-developed, one-paragraph pitch for your proposed piece as soon as possible — along with up to three links to your previous work — NO LATER THAN DECEMBER 7, 2011. All contributors are urged to review our submissions guidelines at http://inthefray.org/submit.

As usual, we are open to submissions on other topics as well. Please see the instructions at http://inthefray.org/submit for instructions on how to send us a query.

We are also looking for writers, photographers, and artists who can take care of specific assignments, including interviews, book and film reviews, and accompanying photos and artwork. If interested, please follow the instructions at the bottom of http://inthefray.org/submit to join our contributors mailing list.

We look forward to hearing from you.

The Editors of In The Fray Magazine
submissions@inthefray.org

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Calls for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Rebirth

To celebrate a rejuvenation of our own — the launch of our revamped site in December — In The Fray magazine would like to explore stories of rebirth. Send us your tales of people who have started over. Tell us stories of redemption in the face of long odds. We’re looking for pieces that demonstrate the transformative power of a new beginning. Think broadly about the topic and get creative.


In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | October 2011: Rebirth
The most powerful stories that humanity tells itself are those of rebirth and redemption, transformation and transcendence — from ancient narratives of reincarnated deities and purifying deluges to modern-day fables of triumphant underdogs and rags-to-riches success. To celebrate a rejuvenation of our own — the launch of our revamped site in December — In The Fray magazine would like to explore stories of rebirth. Send us your tales of people who have started over. Tell us stories of redemption in the face of long odds. We’re looking for pieces that demonstrate the transformative power of a new beginning. Think broadly about the topic and get creative.

We are currently accepting pitches for articles that relate to this theme or more generally to the magazine’s mission of understanding other people and encouraging empathy and tolerance. We are looking for profiles, interviews, reportage, personal essays, op-eds, travel writing, photo essays, artwork, videos, multimedia projects, and review essays of books, film, music, and art. If interested, please email submissions@inthefray.org with a well-developed, one-paragraph pitch for your proposed piece as soon as possible, and NO LATER THAN NOVEMBER 7, 2011. All contributors are urged to review our revised submissions guidelines at http://inthefray.org/submit.

As usual, we are open to submissions on other topics as well. Please see the instructions at http://inthefray.org/submit for instructions on how to send us a query.

We are also looking for writers, photographers, and artists who can take care of specific assignments, including interviews, book and film reviews, and accompanying photos and artwork. If interested, please follow the instructions at the bottom of http://inthefray.org/submit to join our contributors mailing list.

We look forward to hearing from you.

The Editors of In The Fray Magazine
submissions@inthefray.org

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Fiction & Poetry

Autumn light

There’s November in everything, cold air affixing to tough skin like curious fingers.


Getting Used to the Light

 

There’s November in everything, cold
air affixing to tough skin

 

like curious fingers.
Each evening is a small defeat, a poem

 

never to be written.
My body started speaking

 

French. I can hardly understand it,
I can’t catch up with it at all and have no idea

 

where my words are going.
That’s why I want to start this poem all over,

 

I want to grab it and do with it
what I do with your body –

 

but a poem doesn’t always lie before a man
as full and naked as a woman.

 

Without any sleepiness I sleep
like a shadow under a tree,

 

the roots intertwining beneath me,
and there, left forgotten on a branch,

 

an apple. Its persistence is
yellow and senseless.

 

Here, there is no love – in a poem
a woman can’t be easily exchanged.

 

 

 

The Sun is Shining Above Europe

 

I’m still walking on damp sand
flat-footedly pressing upon the history

 

of the sea. Clouds are shedding from my body.
The day already fuller than usual

 

and the light lets its petals
fall all over your neck.

 

Previously I saw people carrying
thick bouquets of leeks, big as a meter.

 

Now the cold is spilling over the city
and outside on the doorknob

 

hangs a bag with two leeks,
upright and more ordinary in size,

 

while on the shellfish ever less visible
pearls are forming – towards the end of the year

 

everything returns to its usual routine.
Neglected thoughts are arching

 

through me, the city walking on me,
wrapped in a woman’s hair for a scarf.

 

I’d forgotten everything about this poem.
At times, the hand that softly holds us

 

suspended in air, shakes us like salt.
Of all the lives I don’t live, this one

 

is the best.

 

 

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A Nigerian-owned hip hop clothing shop in the fashionable Harajuku district of Tokyo, Japan.
News

The men on the streets

Creating a life in Tokyo


"Ladies, ladies!" A tall black man calls out to the two girls swishing down the sidewalk in short skirts. "Reggae bar, right here, come with me!"

 

The girls stop and turn toward the man. Behind them, the neon signs of nightclubs buzz. People of all accents and colors stream past, laughing and joking. "You got free drinks?" asks the brunette. Her face is round, her accent American. In her heels, she’s almost as tall as the man.

 

"Free entry all night!" says the man, throwing an arm around the girls’ shoulders and tugging them toward the bar.

 

The two young women don’t budge. "You got free drinks? For girls?" the brunette asks again. "We only wanna go if you got free drinks."

 

"Don’t worry, baby," the man says. His voice is deep and rich, the vowels rounded by a faint accent. "For you, it’s the first drink free. For a beautiful woman like you."

 

She remains skeptical. Her friend, a thin girl with wild, curly hair, takes one of the bar’s advertising fliers from the man. "Yeah, it says that here," she points. "It says, ‘First drink free,’ see?"

 

 

The brunette relaxes. The man, Danny Lekson, grins. The girls allow themselves to be led toward the bar, located on the fourth floor of a Tokyo highrise. The elevator doors close with Danny crowded between the two girls, his smile visible a second longer than theirs.

 

Nearly 40 years old, Danny Lekson works as a street caller – a man who pulls customers into bars – in an area of Tokyo called Roppongi. By day, Roppongi is a testament to Tokyo’s cosmopolitanism. Art museums, business offices, and luxury shopping plazas sparkle like jewels in the city’s international crown. But as dusk descends, the district transforms into a notoriously seedy meat market, where American military men prowl for willing women and international businessmen blow off steam at all-you-can-drink strip clubs. Danny works as one of the dozens of Nigerians who line the streets at night, shucking fliers and tugging the sleeves of passersby, pushing bars with cheap drinks and easy women. To the ex-pats who frequent the area, the group of tenacious Africans is "the gauntlet," a column of men whose solicitation, some say, borders on harassment.

 

Roppongi, with all its foreign faces, is an anomaly in a country that has traditionally prided itself on its unique, homogenous culture. For decades, Japan refused to open its borders to foreign influence until the American navy wrenched them apart in 1854. Today, at roughly 1.7% of the the population, immigrants are a tiny minority in the country. But as birth rates drop and the work force grays, many Japanese are calling for efforts to increase immigration. New people with new skills, the thinking goes, are needed to sustain the competitiveness of the world’s second largest economy. But the government has made it clear that Japan is not throwing open its gates to the huddled masses just yet. In the wake of Japan’s soaring unemployment rates during the recession, the country is seeking skilled, specialized immigrants.

 

The men who work as street callers, most of whom are Nigerian, are seen by some to be the exact opposite of the kind of immigrants Japan desires. Nigerians have always represented the largest African population in Japan, and their numbers have been steadily increasing every year. In 2007, the population consisted of 2,523 legal residents. "Roppongi is now virtually a foreign neighborhood," the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, complained in 2006. "Africans – I don’t mean African-Americans – who don’t speak English are there doing who knows what."

 

Often, other foreigners are no more sympathetic. One American, a ten-year resident of Japan, sees the street callers as banished criminals of shadowy provenance. "Those guys in Roppongi, they’ll cut your throat for a dollar," he said. "They all used to be in Nigeria carrying machetes on the street. And most of them can’t go back. That’s like being the worst guy in prison, getting kicked out of Nigeria."

 

Simon Ewuare, a 29-year-old Nigerian who came to Tokyo seven years ago, doesn’t dwell on such comments. To be successful in Japan, he tells newcomers, you can’t "think about if they hate you or not. Put it out of your mind."

 

A soft-spoken man with small town manners, Simon covers his solid frame with brand new Rocawear jerseys and bleach-white Nikes. But he wasn’t always so stylish. As a young man, he did, in fact, carry a machete back in Nigeria – but it wasn’t on the street, and it wasn’t for long. As the eldest son of a well-off cocoa farmer, Simon was expected to apprentice under his father and eventually take over the business. But the thought of spending the rest of his life cooped up in his family’s little village made him want to run far away. So he did. In his late teens, he ended up in Benin City, a coastal capital known as the home of some of Nigeria’s most esteemed universities. With a cousin, he started a transport business. Soon, one semi-truck multiplied into five, all busy hauling goods across the hills of Nigeria.

 

By the age of 22, Simon had become a self-made businessman. He began wondering what he could do abroad. "I actually got a visa to America," he says, with a trace of pride. "But I talked to some friends there and they said, ‘It’s so hard here, the money’s not good here.’ So I talked to friends in Japan. They said, ‘Come here, it’s good here.’"

 

When Simon first arrived on a three-month sightseeing visa, he was taken care of by relatives and friends who had come before him. The African community in Tokyo is tightly knit. In some cases, it’s as if entire swaths of villages have been uprooted and transplanted: brothers live together; cousins work together; and friends who used to attend the same primary school back in Nigeria go out drinking together. In an exceptionally lucky break, Simon knew a Japanese man who had worked with his father in Africa and who agreed to be his guarantor, a person or company required by Japanese law to be responsible for an immigrant who desires certain kinds of residency or work permits.

 

Danny Lekson, the bar caller in Roppongi, was not so lucky. After his three-month sightseeing visa expired, he stayed. Despite the risk of detainment and deportation, he’s not the only one who has made such a decision. At any given time, there are estimated to be more than 91,000 immigrants living in Japan on overstayed visas. Visa-related arrests make up a significant percentage of the crime that foreigners commit in Japan, and contribute to statistics that, compared side-by-side with the crime rates of citizens, make it look as if foreigners are much more dangerous than Japanese natives. Though the numbers are endlessly contested and re-interpreted, many people agree that excepting visa-related offenses, the crime rates of foreigners and natives are nearly equal. For five years, Danny lived in Japan without a visa, hopping from factory to factory. Before emigrating to Japan when he was 28, he had studied international relations and had worked as a journalist. Spending hours stamping sheet metal and walking on eggshells around bosses who could deport him at his first mistake was not the life abroad he had envisioned.

 

His salvation came at a Shinjuku club, in the form of an attractive Japanese woman named Yayoi. The two hit it off, and eventually, she agreed to marry him, despite his illegal status. The couple walked down to the local municipal office and announced their intentions. "How it works is, they take you to one room, and make you sign a paper about getting deported," says Danny, wearily rubbing his eyes. "And then you go into another room, and you sign a paper that says you are on probation."

 

The marriage loophole is a route to legality that many overstayers have taken. "They want to marry us," Danny says about the dozens of Japanese women who have African husbands. "I don’t know why." He pauses. "If you want to stay, there is almost no other way."

 

For Danny, marriage did not work out so well. After a few years together, his wife petitioned for divorce while he was visiting family in Nigeria. They no longer speak, but their seven-year-old daughter, Olucha, is a reminder of their time together. According to Danny, Yayoi refuses to let him see Olucha. In another long-standing point of contention between Japanese and foreigners, Japan affords foreign parents almost no custodial rights in the case of mixed children. Although Olucha lives just a few train stops away from Danny, he can’t remember when the last time he saw her was. Every time they talk on the phone, her English ability has faded a bit more. "They paint her with their native food and language, you know," he says. "I speak to her in English. She understands. But sometimes I call, and she doesn’t understand."

 

In a bar owned by his younger brother in Roppongi, Danny introduces me to his friend Michael, a 32-year-old dressed like a member of the ’80s hip hop group Run-DMC, in a black fedora and a snug leather jacket. Michael also works in Roppongi, where he says he makes about $45,500 a year as the manager of a strip club. He’s reserved but polite, and sits at the bar chain smoking. When I ask what town he’s from, he says, "Igbo," naming the second largest tribe in Nigeria.

 

Michael, who came to Japan three years ago, is married to a Japanese woman and has a two-year-old daughter. He shows me a picture of her on his cell phone: a delicately featured girl with skin the color of rain-soaked suede, staring up from the screen with eyes as bright as her smile. Michael’s interest is piqued when he learns I work as a kindergarten teacher at a Tokyo international school (where, for the sake of comparison, the average teacher earns about $9,000 less than Michael). "It’s all in English? They learn English?" he asks. "How much does it cost?" I tell him it’s $7,500 a year (later, I realize it’s more like $14,000 a year). He nods slowly, considering the price. "That’s ok, I can do that," he says. "If it’s in English." While Michael works, his daughter stays home all day with her mother, who speaks Japanese. Michael speaks English. He and his wife get by with the few words they can speak of each other’s language. But when Michael talks to his daughter, she can’t understand a word he says.

 

Simon, the well-dressed cocoa farmer’s son, was also married to a Japanese woman. Though they didn’t have any children, their relationship also ended in divorce. From the beginning, he says, her family did not accept him. "Her father took me [aside] and told me that it would not last," he says. But he wasn’t concerned; that’s how fathers are. "Even my own sister, she married a Nigerian man, but our father didn’t like him. But then later it’s ok, he’s accepted." His wife’s father didn’t end their marriage, but the couple’s differing goals did. She wanted to move to Norway, an idea that puzzled Simon. "Why do I want to go to Norway?" he asked her. "I am already a foreigner here, why do I want to go be a foreigner in Norway?"

 

Simon had a reason for wanting to stay in Japan. With the freedom of a sponsored visa even before he met his wife, Simon had been able to attend a Japanese-language school for two years while working nights at a restaurant. He had become confident enough in Japanese to begin thinking about doing what he did best: starting his own business. Just as he had turned to a cousin in Benin City to learn the transportation trade, he turned to a cousin in Tokyo to learn the clothing trade.

 

If Roppongi is where clothes come off, then Harajuku is where clothes are bought. The area, made famous overseas by Gwen Stefani and her Harajuku Lovers clothing line, is the heart of Tokyo’s reputation as a fashion free-for-all. Its main artery is Takeshita Street. On any given day, Takeshita Street is crammed with Japanese school girls and foreign tourists gawking at stores selling gothic Little Bo Peep costumes and vinyl sexy nurse outfits. To Simon, it was the perfect place for his shop: It was where people went to spend money.

 

Simon set his sights on the hip hop clothing business. The baggy style of urban America found a following among Japanese youth in the late 1990s. As fashion and rap music became increasingly intertwined, "hip hop shops" began sprouting up all over the city. For the Japanese trendsetters who could afford to pay $300 for a pair of sagging shorts, the presence of black employees made the shops’ image all the more authentic.

 

But Simon did not want to be a mere employee. He wanted to be the owner.

 

He had had only brief exposure to the intricate business customs of Japan, observing what he could while busing tables and chopping vegetables at the restaurant where he worked. His Japanese ability was far from fluent. And he was a foreigner. But he held tight to something he had learned when he arrived as a teenager in Benin City, as an immigrant on a ticking tourist visa in Tokyo, and as the unwanted son-in-law of a Japanese bride: "In the beginning, everything is difficult."

 

The first obstacle was securing a location on Takeshita Street. As one of the most heavily trafficked areas in the city, it was prime real estate. With the "gift money," security deposits, and advance rent that Japanese realtors demand upon signing a lease, the shoebox-sized space he had his eye on would cost nearly $60,000 upfront. But money wasn’t the problem. Simon paid in cash, wiring the money from an account in Nigeria where he had saved his profits from the semi-truck business. The problem was getting the realtor to take him seriously as a client. "They see you’re a foreigner, and they say no, they want to skip you," he says. He went about finding Japanese people who were willing to be paid to act as the face of his business. "You get some of their own people and push them forward, and then it is ok."

 

To Simon, this kind of adaptation is not a big deal. "A lot of foreigners complain," he says. "But Japanese are good people. In Nigeria, too, there are different groups of people. Everyone is different." In Simon’ home country, conflicts between the northern Muslims and the southern Christians have persisted for years, sparking riots every few months that kill hundreds at a time and displace thousands. If all he has to do to reach his goals is let the Japanese find comfort by dealing with other Japanese faces, then he is more than willing.

 

After only a couple of years in the clothing business, Simon was successful enough to open a second store in Tokyo and bring his brother over from Nigeria to staff it. Though he ducks his head bashfully when asked how much his business makes – "We only just met!" he says, practically blushing – he can afford to pay the $2,700 monthly rent on his Harajuku location, the $28,500 he says he pays each of his three street callers, the $45,500 salary his brother earns as a store manager, along with dozens of other expenses, and still have enough money left over to save for his next venture: a filling station in Nigeria.

 

The money that can be made by young, ambitious immigrants in Japan is seemingly endless. In some cases, it’s enough to lure them from other foreign countries. Michael, the father of the two-year-old who can’t understand him, previously tried his luck during a four-year spell in Switzerland. But conditions in Japan are better, he says. The most he could ever hope to make in Geneva was only $26,000 a year, almost half of what he makes now in Tokyo.

 

To some foreigners, especially those from developed countries, the entrepreneurial activities of the Nigerians indicate greed. "They don’t care about the culture of Japan," says one English teacher. "They’re only here to make money." But Danny Lekson says foreigners from rich countries don’t understand the circumstances behind his financial ambitions. When "an African makes money," he says, "it’s not for me alone. There are so many people looking up to me. So [$2,700 a month as a factory worker] is enough for me, but there are still problems back home. My nieces and nephews need pocket money in school. I have to pay for so many people back home." In Nigeria, Danny owns three homes. All of them house his extended family members.

 

Traveling across the world to be the main breadwinner for a dozen or more family members takes more than courage and a sense of adventure. It takes money. The average price of a one-way ticket from Lagos to Tokyo is around $1,500, and in the world’s most expensive city, charges pop up like inflatable boxing toys. Danny Lekson and Simon Ewuare both come from relatively well-off families in Nigeria. In a country where only slightly more than half of the children attend even elementary school, both men attended high school. Danny even went on to earn a four-year university degree. Talking about people like Simon, who attended a language school while working part time for two years, one Senegalese man says, "Any time you see Africans studying in Japan, they come from rich families."

 

Despite Danny’s education and Simon’ ambition, both of them are just anonymous faces in the crowds of Nigerian street callers that some characterize as nothing more than brutal thugs. Last year, the American Embassy issued a warning about partying in Roppongi after a string of incidents involving tainted drinks and stolen credit card information. Foreign users of an online forum about Japan immediately fingered Nigerians as the culprits. In one of the tamer comments, a user advised, "Avoid all Nigerians in any way, shape or form." Another described a scenario in which "a mate" followed a Japanese man to a bar, only to be confronted by an empty room until "out of the darkness half a dozen huge Nigerian dudes appeared" and demanded money. He lamented the injustice of the situation, explaining his friend was "an affluent hard-working professional who had been in Japan for over 10 years" while the supposed aggressors were "filthy african [sic] illegal immigrant [expletives] who had probably arrived on a plane from that [expletive] continent that very morning." To explain the lack of evidence connecting Nigerians to the drink-spiking incidents, users accuse the Japanese police force of indifference to crimes targeting foreigners.

 

Of course, not all of the foreigners in Tokyo are as obviously prejudiced as users of that message board. Wikitravel, the travel guide offshoot of Wikipedia that is updated freely by site users, blames the drink scams on seductive foreign females hired by disreputable bars rather than Africans working in the area. But all of the sources are right about one thing: crime does exist in Roppongi and, like every group in the area, the Nigerians have perpetrators among them.

 

One evening, a couple hours into his bar-calling shift, Danny and I walk into Don Quijote, the foreign-import emporium near his post on Roppongi’s main street. It’s the middle of allergy season in Tokyo, and Danny has had a raspy cough and itchy eyes all day. If it keeps up, it’s going to be a long night. As we walk into the store, Danny heads straight to the back, toward the medicine supplies. I linger near the entrance, distracted by a large display of makeup imported from America. After a couple of minutes, I scan the aisles for Danny, but he’s nowhere in sight. I choose a tube of mascara and wait my turn in the checkout line. As I receive my change from the cashier, my cell phone rings.

 

"Where are you?" Danny asks. I tell him I’m at the checkout, and walk a ways toward the back of the store, where he is. He comes toward the front. We meet in the middle. "You want me to buy you something?" he asks. He scans the area and offers the nearest, cheapest item, Japanese sweet potatoes roasting inside a heated glass case that cost a dollar each. "Here, you want a potato?"

 

"No, I’m fine," I said. "I already bought something, that’s why I didn’t see you."

 

"Oh, you bought something?" he asks, still scanning the area around us. "Ok, so let’s go."

 

Once we’re out of the bright store and back on the dark sidewalk, Danny opens his hand to reveal a tube of allergy-combating nasal spray. Maybe he bought it while I was looking at the mascara, I think, but I doubt it. He pulls a crumpled Don Quijote shopping bag out of his pocket and puts the tube inside. I wonder if he carries the shopping bag with him all the time, or if it’s shared among his friends.

 

I am surprised he is so trusting of me; earlier that night, it wasn’t the case. While we sat drinking and talking in his brother’s bar, an older Nigerian man had flung the door open and scanned the dark room. The moment he spotted Danny, the older man strode up to him. He had the kind of crazed eyes and ecstatic grin usually only seen with people high on stimulants, even though drug use is very low in Japan. He held a yellow plastic bag containing something heavy. He gave it to Danny, who peeked inside and then handed it off to another man. The man looked down at the object, raised his eyebrows, then stashed it behind the bar.

 

"What was in that guy’s bag?" I asked.

 

Danny barely hesitated before he answered, "Ah, some special wine, I think, some secret expensive wine."

 

A couple of minutes later, I asked Michael, Danny’s friend who had been interested in sending his daughter to international school. "Personal electronics," he said from behind his cloud of cigarette smoke. "A car stereo, I think."

 

 

 

It became slightly easier to understand how the governor of Tokyo, during an interview with the foreign press, could assert so nonchalantly that the presence of Africans in Roppongi is "leading to new forms of crime, like car theft."

 

Over on the other side of Tokyo, in Harajuku, Simon finds out his story will be told in the same article as Danny’s story. He is furious. "We are not the same people, I am not a Roppongi person!" he roars. Besides his rueful ruminations on Nigerian politics, it’s the only time he’s been anything but politely accommodating. "You say we are all Nigeria, but we are not the same! Even I, when I come here, even I am surprised about Roppongi!" But his anger soon fades to weary appeals: "Please, please, tell them I am not in that business, of the credit cards and this, it’s not for me. For me, you like the clothes, you buy them, if you don’t, you don’t!" He is, understandably, desperate not to bring any disturbance to his business: it is his future. He sees his life in Japan as an arrow aimed toward a secure, relaxed retirement in Nigeria. His profits have been bruised by recession-tightened fists, and he looks forward to opening an economy-proof petrol station in Africa. "I don’t want any trouble, I just want to do my business here," he says to me, pleading, "and then go home."

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Fiction & Poetry

I witnessed it but I did not sing at first

Beauty and ugliness, freedom and restraint, found concomitantly.


The Witnessing 

I witnessed it but I did not sing at first.
I want to wheel you round, plant a kiss on your lips & see it bloom
into a garden.
Season after season
the language  of bees is haunting.
 

Amity lakes at first light were golden
translucent as negative film.
At noon they were stark as stones, as sin.
By evening, those selfsame hills were graven
like names in silver or stone:
the air took the carving as sky bears the riding and the
rising through worst storm.
 

Be good to your girl for the even dozen
days you have on vacation.
Tear each page from the book of getting well.
Then take a deep breath. Will you ever come this way again?
Tread these streets, roll the asphalt with the wheels at twelve years
of age exchanged  for legs.
They can shatter like duck eggs, spill & stain
cardboard or wood, rather than sustain.
 

Where nourishment comes from gladness, from bitterness, however
sharply imaged, births that scratching across the ribs, which is
starvation.
 

Today I wrote a baker’s dozen.
The day was laced with sounds of transportation
like pastels on paper with a grain.
Foghorns gave a fat tuba sound in morn
& they came two times:
once for ready, twice for the real thing.
 

Low flying planes at noon took the top of the head off
like skimming cream.
One ducked the way you bring coals to Newcastle.
That futile act was not witnessed:
but a tnightfall, the most lonesome sound in the world, the train
was given bent ear
to get the mind around motion
of the girl in asylum, of the child paralyzed
erasing the desire to reverse the life’s term
would be like seeing a death & walking away from blind
would be the unforgivable act: unwitnessing.
 

The hat has been found and shaped on a wooden head
Lambie, how can I tell you my body has no longer been a good place to live
to serve.
Though I touch the map of the invisible world, I torch the one I live in.
Flocks of sheep drift down on our nightgowns
let them not be shorn.
The priest wore a black robe turned twice.
The sky is empty
and my feet have swollen with the heat
I go out in slippers
“The cries of the disabled girl down the hall drew them running.”
Not to worry. No worries.
 

Old Blaze the roses were called in the Empress garden.
It ravages and savages one.
Climbing gold is another one
printed on the old-fashioned signs.
I woke with teeth on my work
to fold the hours over, one after one.
Scrubbing has a very soothing sound.
 

There is a raven-like flock of young men.
I might as well wait outside the circle.
Last night, the buildings whose brick
looked the color of watermelon
whose windows charcoal,
reflected, for me, the soul
battling a long life to get out of the body’s hole
torn one day, flown free.
But spiritually I was a lark, the edge bitter, the core light
outshining the dark withal.

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Commentary

Jellyfish conversations

On the search for adventure and my shoes.


Every time I visitFlorida, I lose my shoes.

I don’t know whythis is, but it happens every time I go. On my first trip to the SeminoleState – a high school spring break jaunt – I left a pair of tennisshoes under a bed in a hotel room. On my second stint – a brief layover before my brothers and I left for acruise – I fell asleep in the airport and awoke to find my shoes stolen,although my laptop, wallet and video camera were untouched.  I’m generally a pretty organized guy, yetwhen it comes to shoes and Florida, I seem to attain a nutty professorlevel of absent-mindedness.[1]

Driven and Determined

Thus, I wasdetermined not to lose anything as I dipped down into Gator Nation for a thirdtime.  Twenty-eight states into my48-state road trip, I was having a hard enough time not losing my mind.  This was the part of the trip when thenovelty of being on the road and doing something grand had subsided and wasbeing replaced by acute boredom and a growing realization that 12,000 miles reallyIS too far for one person to drive alone and retain their sanity.  This, coupled by my recent near-breakupwith my girlfriend[2]  had me desperately searching foranything resembling an “adventure,” just to fight the loneliness and keep mefrom throwing myself in front of oncoming traffic.

I settled on Pensacola [3],and rolled into the sleepy town just after dusk.  Finding no one around, I decided my “adventure” in Floridawould be to sleep right there on the empty beach, something I’d never donebefore and a far superior alternative to dozing in my sweltering Taurus.

Sand-Angels Are Useless AgainstEvil Jellyfish

I slept soundlythat night directly on the warm, bleach-white sand, contently dreaming that I’dfinally picked the perfect “road trip” thing to do – that is, until I wasawoken at 6 a.m. by a four-wheeler roaring by about three feet from myhead.  Of the many possible risks Iassumed when I decided to sleep on a beach, I admit I hadn’t anticipated thisone.

I climbed out ofmy panicked sand-angel and, adrenalized, figured I’d try to recover the morningwith a calming dip in the ocean.

I was promptlystung by a jellyfish.

At least I thinkit was a jellyfish[4].  I don’t have a particular phobia ofmalevolent ocean creatures, but there’s something deeply disconcerting aboutsomething squishy squirming its way up around your inner thigh and then stabbingyou.  Especially when you’re justbouncing innocently up and down in four feet of cloudy water.[5]

Whatever it was,it hurt like crazy, and by the time I scrambled out of the water, a nicefour-inch blotch had already appeared on the front of my pasty-white thigh.  As I raced across the sand, the onlythings I could think of were a) whether or not jellyfish were poisonous, and b)if so, what  was I going to doabout it.  For some reason the notionthat jellyfish poison might be counteracted with urine kept tumbling through mymind, but I couldn’t remember if this was for jellyfish or snakebites.[6]

I jumped into the Taurus,sopping wet and swelling, and peeled out to find the nearest hospital.

I was promptlypulled over by a cop. Of course.

The officer tookforever to saunter up to my window as I sat there, shirtless, wet andpanicked.  I should have been worriedthe cop would approach with his gun drawn, thinking he’d pulled over ahalf-drowned, naked meth addict. But mostly I was just worried that my leg was going to fall off.

Children are our future.Do they know how to cure jellyfish stings?

The tall cop leaneddown, resting his elbows casually on my open window.  “Kind of in a hurry there, aren’t ya?” he drawled from undera bushy, brown moustache.

Despite the factthat my quad was beginning to inflate like a pink balloon, I decided to arguethat I hadn’t been speeding. “Sorry, I thought the sign said 30, and I thought I was under.  I have this rule about speeding.[7]  Also, I’ve been stung by a jellyfish.”

The cop did notseem concerned.  “It’s a schoolzone, this time of the morning. Limit drops to 20.  Youdidn’t see the yellow sign?”

“I’m sorry, I musthave missed it,” I said.  My legwas throbbing, as if a small techno rave was forming inside it.  “Listen, is there a hospital somewherearound?“

“Also, fine’sdoubled in a school zone,” the cop continued.  “Lots of kids around.” He glared at me, accusingly, as if I’d been trying to run kids down onpurpose.

“I’m sorry, Ididn’t see any kids.  Butseriously, is-“

“LOTS of kidsaround,” the cop persisted, staring at me.  “You always drive like that, when there’s kids around?”

I looked up athim, not sure what answer he was looking for.  I wondered if he could smell the combination of fish andfear wafting up from the Taurus. “But I’ve been stung by a jellyfish!  And isn’t it summer?”

“Summerschool.  Aren’t as many kids asusual,” he admitted.  “But they’rethere, alright.  Lemme look at yourleg.”

Confounded, Ishowed him my leg, hesitant to mention that 6:30 a.m. seemed a bit early forsummer school.  The cop frowned, regardingmy puffy limb for a moment.  Hepopped his gum.

“It’s not toobad.  I’ll be back.”

Without anotherword, the cop went back to his car, and I was left in the Taurus, leg burning,salt beginning to soak into my now-dry skin.  Another eternity went by as I waited for the officer to return,presumably with a vial of jellyfish antidote that every Pensacola cop carriesin their car.  Instead, he cameback with a paper.

 “I’m giving you a warning,” hesaid.  “But if I catch you speedingthrough another school zone, I’m gonna drop the hammer on you.”  He handed me the paper.  “Children are our future.”

I didn’t know whatto say.  “Um… thanks?” I managed.  “But honestly, do I need to go to ahospital, or something?  Can youdie of a jellyfish sting?”

“I told you, it’snot bad,” said the cop, standing to his full height.  “You may not even have been stung by a jellyfish.”

And he was gone.

I started the Taurusand headed west.  I called Craig,my cancer-curing doctor friend in St. Louis, and he assured me that no, I wasnot going to die of a jellyfish sting.[8]  After an hour or so my leg stoppedthrobbing, and the swelling went away. As I entered Mobileand started looking for something interesting to do in Alabama, it occurred tome that I’d gotten my adventure in Florida after all.  And, for a few hours at least, I hadn’t been the least bitlonely.

And that’s when Irealized I’d left my shoes on the beach, back in Pensacola.

 

“The Jellyfish Cop” is an excerpt from “48 States in 48 Days,” abook by Paul Jury about a road trip he took to all 48 continental states oncehe graduated college and realized he had no plan.


[1] Perhaps it has something to do with partying too muchevery time I visit Florida. Nah.

[2] Who was notenthusiastic about my dodging her for eight weeks.

[3] Why Pensacola seemed like a good place for adventure,I don’t recall; I guess I’d recently seen the movie “Contact” and thought maybeI’d see Jodie Foster, or some aliens. 

[4] As a Minnesota boy, being stung by random crap in theocean was not something I had a lot of experience with.

[5]And it’s not like I was even attacking their jellyfish nest! Though thisvengeful thought would occur to me later.

[6]And the idea of laying sideways on the Pensacola sand peeing on myself seemedoddly inappropriate, even for someone who’d just slept on a beach.

[7] The rule was: I already had four of them on my record,and if I got one more, the Minnesota DMV had promised to tear up my license,something that seemed quite detrimental to a

48-state road trip.

                   [8] Did Imention it felt like my leg was going to fall off?

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