Travels with Tavish

N.B. Kalabante = jokester, trickster, troublemaker (used among friends in a loving fashion) It is noon, three hours after today’s rays of direct sunlight have become unbearable for more than five minutes. I am sitting under the disintegrating shade structure in front of Baba’s hut as he prepares attaya. One of the six posts—which used to be living trees in the nearby bush—holding up the bamboo-and-straw roof is listing slightly toward the center of the yard, and another is leaning twice as much. Baba attributes the problem to termites chewing up the underground portions of the posts. The former trees are no longer stable in their new jobs. “I’ll fix it,” he says, though we both know this means “I’ll fix it when it falls down.”   I reposition my chair, itself made from the wood of a palm-like tree gathered from the seasonal river that flows by my village, so as to dodge the new shaft of sunlight piercing through the patchy straw above me. There is no sense in replacing the shade-cre...

I am walking through the cornfield to greet my host father in the morning, him bent over picking up a piece of split bamboo that he will weave to make a fence. Corn will be planted next month; the field sits fallow, a dead wasteland of dry soil and two lonely mango trees that have just shed their final fruit of the season. It has not rained in seven months.  Baba is wearing a pair of work-torn dark grey pants and a navy blue suit jacket with no shirt. His short salt-and-pepper curls of hair give away his receding hairline; it has been three weeks since he last shaved his head. A Guinean cigarette dangles out of the corner of his mouth, the smoke dissipating quickly in the morning breeze. The sun is bright and the air around me is beginning to heat up already. “Baba!” I say three times with steadily increasing volume. At my third call, Baba turns around and straightens up, saying “Hmm?” Then softly, in his deep baritone, he says “Mamadou, naamansii” in mumbled greeting, a warm grin ...

Here are some book reviews from the last couple months:  Alchemy I flew through Sutherland's audiobook on a long drive. When I reached my destination I almost wanted to keep driving around for another hour so that I could finish it. Sutherland's thesis is that our society would benefit greatly from increasing the amount of non-logical thinking that we do. This applies to business, personal happiness, and all other facets of life. He provides copious examples of how non-logical thinking (not necessarily anti-logical, just "non-sense," as he calls it) has greatly improved lives and examples of how our logic-obsessed culture has failed to do so. There are some problems that can be solved with logic--and should continue to be solved with logical thinking--but there are far more problems which resist being solved with such a method. Despite the obvious resistance of some issues to this way of thinking, we continue to hold logical thinking in the highest regard as we try to...