Security

I think that one of the first things that I noticed when I came to Zambia was the ubiquity of gates and gatekeepers.  Most of these men (they are all men) are uniformed; there are a few prominent security companies that seem to handle most security concerns.  Some wear military style berets; others, such as G4S, wear baseball caps.  Remember that security company, G4S.  They are seen at some gates, and also a lot of businesses.  At the Shoprite in Solwezi, for example, four G4S guards stand at the exit and put a small rip in your receipt on your way out the door.  I have never once seen one of these guards cross-reference the listing on the receipt with the contents of my grocery bags; but it is still the fact that one does not get out of the door without submitting the receipt.

The need for such services was demonstrated when Kirsten and I returned to our mud hut one day to find roughly half of our clothes stolen off of our clothesline.  The burglars were tasteful and clearly cultured, pilfering only those items that were expensive and easy to wash.  They kindly left us with several stretched t-shirts, most of which I acquired when I worked for the Army Cadets, and some permanently stained pants.  We have since browsed the Solwezi markets to see if we might be able to purchase any items that might be remarkably identical to the ones we lost, but so far to no avail.

Security is not so tight in all places.  Kirsten and I were in the capital last week to speak to Ministry of Education officials about secondary school standards.  We found the building, and asked the security guard for the Standards Office.  He told us to proceed to the second floor.  We asked if we were required to sign the register book in front of him; we were not.  We mistakenly went to what would be called the second floor in Canada, which is called the first floor here, like many Commonwealth countries.  We searched the entire floor for Standards, and didn't find it; however, we did walk right by the office of the Minister, the Deputy Minister and the Permanent Secretary without more than a listless glance from a janitor.

I should mention here that our eventual meeting with the Zambian Secondary School Standards Officer was very friendly and informative.  She was on her way out to lunch, but she put a halt to that and answered our questions for about an hour.

It was a slightly different matter when we wished to go to the Canadian High Council.  Kirsten had encountered some trouble (ahem... corruption) at the border, and we wished to seek the advice of a consular official before proceeding to Immigration to confront them with the issue.

The Canadian High Council, proudly waving the Canadian flag in the Longacres region of Lusaka, built firmly on de facto Canadian soil, providing services to Canadian ex-patriates:  We walked through the entrance, and were met by four G4S security guards, baseball caps and all.

"What is the purpose of your visit here?"

"We are Canadian citizens.  We wish to speak to a Canadian government official."

"For what purpose?"

Feeling simultaneous irritation and amusement that we were being kept from our embassy by the same folks who police receipts at the Shoprite, I explained briefly that we wished to register as Canadian expatriates and we sought advice on dealing with Zambian Immigration.  At this point, they called someone on a telephone and, after a brief exchange in Nyanja, the guard passed the phone over to me.

"Can you tell me what you want to do here?" asked the friendly but clearly Zambian voice on the line.

I explained the situation again.

The Zambian voice assured me that I would likely not need to speak to anyone from the Canadian government, and that they were all out for the rest of the day anyway.  But if we wanted to register, we could come in and do so.

During the time this phone conversation was going on, six Zambian workers, carrying grass slashers, pipe wrenches and tire irons, if I'm not mistaken, passed by the G4S guards, ignored the beeping metal detector, and disappeared somewhere in the halls of the true north strong and free.  Kirsten and I asked to be allowed to go in, but the guards declined our entry because our backpacks contained electronics.  We asked if we could leave our backpacks with them, and they politely declined to take them from us, either.

So we left the Canadian Embassy that same hour, confronted Immigration quite successfully on our own, and resolved that if any unforseen circumstance should arise in Zambia that would require our security or evacuation, we would find our way to the U.S. Embassy, where we would only have to navigate the security of the U.S. Marine Corps.

***
Speaking of security, the Zambian method of immigration control is interesting and bears consideration.  When I first arrived in Zambia, I applied for a work permit at a cost of 500 000 kwacha ($100).  I was told that my permit had been approved, but wasn't "ready" for pick-up, and I was given a Report Order to see Immigration again on or before 28-January-2012.

Last week in Lusaka, I was advised that the permit was now "ready"... and that it would cost another 500 000 to obtain it.  Seems that the government decided to retroactively change the fees.  I did not have this money on me, and asked to have my visa extended for another month.  I was told that this was not possible from Lusaka the capital, but it would be in Solwezi, the small mining town in the Northwest.

So Kirsten and I found Immigration in Solwezi this week.  This itself was a mission; of all of the various signs for government buildings in the provincial administrative capital, not a single one exists for the Ministry of Immigration, the one service for people who really don't know where they are.  We divined through some feat of interpreting gestures and unfamiliar references that we were to go to a large but unmarked building on the main street.  We were quickly directed to a certain room down a plastered hallway with dangling lights and random leaflets on the walls.

Finding the Immigration Officer, a man of no more than twenty years in civilian clothing behind a desk cluttered with passports and scads of memoranda, I explained that I was reporting, as ordered, before the 28th.  He took my passport and, without looking at the nationality, picture, my name, or asking any question, he stamped it with an order to report back on or before the 27-February-2012.  And thus I am legally entitled to be in Zambia for another month, at which time I will, I suppose, repeat the process.

Christ's Mass

It seems that nearly everyone wants to know what happens in Zambia for Christmas.  And I'm afraid that the folks who really want to know are likely to be really disappointed with the answer.

A little context may help.

One afternoon, Mukimba stopped by the project house's cooking shelter and reclined on one of the chairs.  He looked at me sideways, long arms lanking behind his head, and asked, "Why do you celebrate Christmas?"

I assumed that this question was to try to trip me up into betraying some sort of Western materialist philosophy, so knowing his devotion, I answered quickly, "It is the celebration of the birth of Christ."

"But how do we know that it is December 25th?"

"We don't.  It likely wasn't.  We just picked a day and went with it."

"So it comes from man, not from God."

"Of course."

"That is why we in the Seventh Day Church do not celebrate Christmas."

There are many Christian demoninations in Zambia, or the parts of it that I've seen, but it is true that Seventh Day Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses are very prominent — and none of these denominations recognize Christmas as anything but a secular celebration more concerned with business than the Bible.  This, in fact, is precisely Mukimba's argument; that we shouldn't observe any religious rite not specifically sanctioned in the Bible.  I asked him about the Festival of Booths, and he responded in that delightfully brilliant way that some people have of deflecting the question leaving you uncaring that you never got an answer.

There is Christmas, though, and in the high churches (Roman, Anglican) there is a sense of it really being Christ's Mass — that there are feast days for saints and other occasions, and the birth of Christ is one of them; not nearly so important as the Resurrection, of course, but a good excuse for incense and candles and music.

As for the secular world; every now and again you might see a sparsely decorated Christmas tree, usually in establishments that cater to the out-of-country crowd.  Christmas music is occasionally heard in some shops the week of Christmas, but it's by no means universal.  There is some reference on television to Christmas gifts, but you get the sense that this is not at all an important element of the season for most Zambians (besides the fact that, for the past week, the call from the street has changed from "Mzungu! I'm poor.  Give me money," to "Mzungu! Christmas! Give me a present.")

The day of Christmas was a fairly typical Sunday.  Some shops were closed, others were open; the traffic in Kitwe died down, but not appreciably; the Christmas-keeping churches were not, as far as I could tell, any more or less busy than on any other Sunday.  Occasionally someone lit off fire crackers; and there were advertisements about parties at various night clubs on the Eve.

People who have known me for a while know that none of this is especially disappointing to me.  For if the outward signs of Christmas were sparse, so was the inward turmoil.  No one was stressed out about preparations, at least none that I encountered.  No one was worried about how they would afford gifts; in fact, the entire notion of gift-giving seems to be lost in a culture where families and friends share every material element so liberally.  Likewise, the notion of family time is lost in a culture that celebrates family and friends every day.  And I don't know for sure, but I think the notion of a "Blue Christmas" would be lost, too, in a land where tragedy and disease and poverty are so common that there is no Norman Rockwell normal against which to juxtapose.

It gives rise to a purity of intention, or something that looks like it.  People who believe that there was a Saviour born for their sake get to celebrate that birth if they wish, or they choose not to, and those who do not so believe continue hence.

Hitch

Don't ride with someone who is driving in the snow.  Don't ice-skate without a helmet.  Don't start the gas barbecue unless someone is watching you at least ten metres back.  Don't get into any boat unless you're wearing a CSA-approved life preserver.  Don't walk the streets of Toronto after dark.

What might a person in Zambia tell a friend who is going to spend a year in Canada?  I have no idea.  But I suppose that a well-researched list of warnings might just do the trick to keep the person safe.  All good advice, perhaps, if you're not living in Canada.

Don't wash your clothes with river water.  Don't eat food from the street.  Don't drink the tap water.  Don't go outside without bug spray.

Splendid advice that I heard again and again, mostly from well-read people who had never spent a minute in Zambia.

Don't take rides from strangers.

Hitch-hiking is not only common practice in Zambia, but truly the only consistently affordable and reliable means of transportation.  The thumbs-up sign is fairly rare to see; usually, people flap their wrists at on-coming traffic.  Everyone's got their own thing, though.  For me, I usually hold my hand out and partly bow, making eye-contact with the driver; it works as well as any other method I have seen.

I have ridden with a variety of drivers, all men.  About half were driving transports to or from the mine.  One was a family vehicle; they charged double the typical rate.  Once was a businessman in an otherwise empty SUV; he charged nothing.

One truck driver, referring to his wife in the back seat (unspeaking, likely unsure of English), said to me, "You see, I travel with my wife; you think this is OK?"

"Yes, absolutely."

"But you, I see, you do not travel with your wife."

I laughed, "I know."

"You are perhaps jealous of me?"

"Yes I AM," I said, and assured him that when Kirsten arrives, there would be nothing that would take us apart ever again.

"Yes, I think that is good," he said, taking a long drink of Savanna, a locally brewed cider.

"You have the right idea," I said.

"Yes, I do."

The most frequent question: "How many languages are there in Canada?"

Followed by the very similar question: "How many tribes are there in Canada?"

I answer this question honestly.  I say that there are many languages, perhaps as many or more than Zambia.  But many of them are hardly spoken anymore.  The English also colonized Canada, but never really left.  And even today, languages and tribes are being lost.  I also tell them that within Canada, people speak languages from every country in the world.

It is an elaborate answer, but not only is it truer than saying "English and French", but it is also very easily understood by the people here.  The idea of only English and French existing in Canada is inconceivable to a people for whom even the uneducated classes speak nine languages fluently.  But the idea that the European hegemon managed to assimilate or repress the Canadian languages is very plausible.  Most of what I describe about Western culture seems rather terrible to most rural folks that I have spoken to here; but describing various First Nations cultures seems to resonate, to the point of not particularly impressing them.

Early on, I tried writing during the hour-long trip to Solwezi.  This was an epic fail.  The road is so bumpy and full of cracks and potholes that it is impossible to make out anything that was written, and anything that was was a stream of consciousness being disturbed.  With the countryside now becoming my norm, however, I have sometimes taken to reading on the trip when it is clear that there is a language barrier and conversation is neither feasible nor really welcome.  This too can be challenging, but a mere matter of getting used to new parameters.

I don't have the name of a single person from whom I've hitched a ride; it's not something that seems to happen.  All are but brief exchanges, signs of generousity or mutual benefit, all a part of the rhythm.  I don't suppose it's any more ridiculous than driving in the snow, after all, with the same desired effect, and with greater possibility of something meaningful along the way.

Mzungu

In less than a month, the word causes my skin to bristle.  It is usually used harmlessly enough, I need to emphasize, but I hate it anyway.  It creeps out of the cattails on the exuberant mouths of innocent children, it is announced in the alleys of the markets as I pass through, it is said under the breaths of women to one another as I pass by.

White person.

English person.

Person with money in a poor land.

Does not belong here.

I am an unabashed liberal, and I have worked hard to eliminate racism from my lexicon and prejudice from my behaviour.  Such a task is not easy for any person in the world, for we are all born with the intrinsic sense of “other”.  But working on it can be done and it has been done by many, many people.  And I have stated great pride in how Canada and Canadians have shown similar resolve in their purging of discriminatory elements.  Of course there is a long way to go, of course it isn’t perfect yet, but aren’t things so much better than they ever have been?

To which some of my friends have told me, to my great frustration, that I will never truly know what it is like until I am the only visible minority in a place.

Now, the other SWSC volunteers are home for Christmas, and so are most ex-pats from Canada, the United States, Australia and South Africa.

Here is what it’s like.

I have experienced no patent, malicious racism in Zambia, ever.  But everyone is constantly conscious of what I am.

To taxi drivers, I can afford extra fare.

To waiters in higher-end restaurants, I deserve extra attention and care.

To the staff of venues serving cheap local food like deep fried mystery fritters and Fantas, I am eyed with suspicion; as though it was only by mistake that I walked in there.

To beggars I have money to share.

To random men, I must work for the mines and make ten times what their brothers and cousins are making for the toil they bear.

One said, “Welcome to our land, you there,”

                until I told him that I taught in a Kaonde village, after which he decided that I was a friendly and harmless enough novelty, and we talked about the road graters that he drove that were like those that were made in the town where I grew up.

The women pounding rocks on the side of the road just stare;

until I put my hand to my chest and call “Moi-nay” in the traditional Kaonde greeting, and then they chatter amongst themselves about my quaintness.

I have learned how to greet and ask questions and provide answers until the folks I meet in Solwezi believe that I’m one of the good ones.  A good mzungu.  Not here to exploit the wealth under the rich soils of Zambia, but here to help its children seize their own power.

One of the good white people.

One of the good rich people in a poor land.

And of course, they’re at least partially correct.

But I am still mzungu.

And I find my lips wanting spontaneously to form those words that seem so cliché in the West: “If only people could see past the colour of each others’ skin!”

The people have been wonderful; this post is not a complaint.  It is a statement that I get it, in a way that I never did before.  Racism is everywhere, when it’s not really there.  Even when it’s systemically eliminated in all of its overt forms, it lurks in the shadows.  Visible minorities must be afforded special care if only to compensate for an undeniable and quite forgivable element of human nature, the archetypal sense of “other” that we share as brothers and sisters in humanity.

Before I wrote this post, I read that mzungu is a word in a number of Bantu languages meaning, literally, “one who wanders aimlessly”.  At least in the village, in contrast to the city, when people label me mzungu, this seems to be what they mean.  I can live with that.

Of Monitors and Malaria

Under the straw dining shelter, watching an unboiling pot over a slow brazier, sawdust falling like light snow sent by termite sprites, I told Keith that I saw something very large and reptilian on the road that same day.

                “Its head was on one side of the road, and its tail touched the other side,” I said, “Could it have been a monitor lizard?”

                “Oh no,” said Keith, “It was a charm”.

                “A what?”

                “A charm.  It is a sign,” he said wide-eyed.

                “A good sign, right?”

                “No, it is not a good sign,” Keith said flatly.

                “Are you sure it wasn’t a monitor lizard?”

                “Did it have a man’s face?”

                “No.  It had a lizard’s face.”

                “Did it say anything to you?”

                “Well, I wasn’t close enough to hear...” I shook my head quickly to exorcise the spell, “No.”

                “Maybe it was just a monitor lizard.”

                “I see.”

                A couple of nights later, I asked Keith about monitor lizards.  “Are there many around here?”

                “Here?  No.  You will not see them,” he said, and before I could protest with my own experience, he explained, “but by the Basic School,” referring to the school less than five kilometres away, “yes, even there are many.”

                “Are they dangerous?”

                “No, they are not hurting you.  Maybe it will knock you down with its tail; it is very powerful.  But that’s it.  And they taste like fish,” he smirked.

                “You’ve eaten them?” I smiled.

                “Yes, but I did not know what it was.  If I had known, I would not have eaten.”

                Keith is a volunteer with Same World Same Chance who hails from Kitwe.  He has been with the project for about eight months, but you would swear that he grew up in the village.  Though he comes from the city, he perfectly knows the ways of the people of Kibombomene.  He is also genius with technical matters.  He once constructed a set of speakers for an iPod out of a couple of cardboard boxes and various other materials he found kicking around the project headquarters.  At twenty-one, he has designs to go to university to become a pathologist, but he has to pass the Zambian government Grade 12 leaving exams for science first.  I have seen them.  I wouldn’t be able to pass them; they are so full of spelling mistakes, technical errors on diagrams, improper nomenclature and misleading questions that I think one would need a profound misunderstanding of science in order to pass.  There is no question in my mind that he would be university-bound on scholarship if he had grown up in the West.  Ironically though, and sadly, I fear that if he had, he wouldn’t make nearly so good a pathologist as he might having grown up here, needing to be so resourceful.

                I have been here for three weeks now, and I (wisely, I think) took all of that time to try to get to know the day-to-day of this place before starting into the classroom.  After all, how could I help the children to name their worlds if I didn’t have a sense of what those worlds were?  The ESL books don’t come with lessons on the English words for the steps of starting a brazier fire or cooking nshima or laying mud mortar.  And I won’t allow English to be some mysterious language used to describe only mysterious things.  It will start as merely another way to talk about what the children already know.  It will, I hope, culminate with students being able to describe and give instructions for some of the tasks that interest them.

                Yes, grand schemes, and I was going to start today.  I had the plan.  I had the teaching aids.  I had the cues all mapped out in my head.  And then...

                “Vance, I think I am having malaria.”

                Keith does not look well.  It would be impossible ever to describe him as lethargic, but he is missing the exuberance that he normally exudes.

                In the West, the word “malaria” is grouped with words like “plague” and “polio”.  But here, malaria happens.  There is a pill for it.  Of course, the nearby medical clinic has not stocked this particular pill for months; we need to go fifty-five kilometres to Solwezi.

                Bushimbe and Katamfya, two of the SWSC teachers, come with a posse of children at about that time to gather the food for the breakfast program.  They greet me warmly.  I explain to them that I need to accompany Keith to the hospital in Solwezi, and I cannot start teaching today.  “It is not a problem,” they smile.

                “I need to make sure Keith is safe.  He might have malaria.”

                “Oh malaria.  Heh heh,” says Katamfya.  Then Keith and the teachers have a brief exchange in Kaonde.

                It is a two kilometre walk to the highway, were we will hitch-hike into Solwezi.  Not five-hundred metres from the house, a worker comes to Keith.  I don’t understand Kaonde, but I hear Keith explain that he has malaria.  The exchange continues.

                “Vance, I am just going back to the house to get this man a slasher.”

                “Keith — we need to get you to the hospital.”

                “OK, I will hurry,” he says, and before I can protest, he is running, head throbbing, muscles aching from the blood parasite, backpack which he won’t let me carry weighing on his spine.  A few minutes later, he is back with the slasher, looking no worse than he had done before.  It is humbling.  I have a caffeine withdrawal headache that keeps me from wanting to open my eyes.

                A hundred metres later, Katamfya approaches Keith about money for the breakfast program for tomorrow.  I can tell that the very act of taking out his wallet is a chore.  We move on.

                Near the highway, one of the women of the village hails Keith and asks him, so he told me, about purchasing a goat.  Keith explains that he has malaria.

                Switching to English, perhaps for my benefit, or perhaps to bridge the Kaonde-Bemba language barrier between her and Keith, she says, “No, even you are not a doctor; you cannot say you have malaria.  You say you are sick.”

                “I know it is malaria,” says Keith.  Keith could tell me how many times he has had malaria; more than he can count.  But the argument ensues.

                I am not accustomed to all of the social graces of Kibombomene yet, and some I may never adopt.  I can perceive a nameless root in this collective consciousness from which shoots both notions that I can take the day off without notice, and that Keith has a lethal illness, and neither bear any fruit of concern.  I know well that I should be involved in the conversation with this woman, but I am at the road trying to flag down a vehicle.

                Keith is now safely at the hospital and I am at a nearby lodge drinking coffee and writing this post.  He’ll get his meds, he’ll come and collect me, and we’ll return to the village together later this afternoon.  Hopefully it will be Roger who takes us back again — by extremely good fortune, he, the profusely generous South African businessman who was my host in Kitwe, was passing by Kibombomene and took us into Solwezi.

                For me so far, the most significant adjustment in this place is learning to trust its rhythm.  Things happen, gently coaxed but unforced by human imagination.  There are many ways in which this culture is more advanced than my own; Western culture operates on the simple principle of fear of stagnation.  Nothing is stagnant here, but every action is a part of a story ten-thousand years long.  Every single man, woman and child whom I have met understands something that they know fully that I can never fully know, they smile sympathetically at my muzungu impatience, they permit and even facilitate it, and I am learning to smile back in polite acknowledgment of my own limitations.

Basic School

In Kibombomene, there is a Basic School, which is a government-run elementary school that goes up to Grade 9 (the extent of elementary education here).  Grades 10, 11 and 12 are usually user-pay in Zambia, and one must pass the Grade 9 government board exams to qualify for entrance to them.  The Same World Same Chance school exists in part to provide that secondary school program that would otherwise be completely unavailable to the sustenance agriculturalists living in this village, and in part to ensure that students are able to pass the exams to begin with.  As such, we have a strong relationship and partnership with the state-run counterpart.  So after more than two weeks here, learning the rhythm, making plans for the ways in which I can best help, I decided it was time to meet the Headmaster of the Kibombomene Basic School.

I walked through dense grasses and trees, past thrity foot ant hills and sprawling cassava plantations, along the too-narrow baking highway until after four kilometres I reached the Headmaster's house.  From the highway, there is a red mud structure with an unglassed window, like an abandoned shop, and a fence made of reeds with a splendid grass archway leading to the yard.

"Welcome!  Welcome, my friend," came the jovial voice and smile before I was blinded by the yellow corporate T-shirt for MTN, a local cell phone company.  I barely noticed half a dozen or so dusty clothed men camouflaged against the russet dried mud, sitting in the shade.  The man in yellow practically ran to shake my hand in the complex way that is done here, "I am Wilson.  I am happy to have you here.  Please, sit."

I sat on a wooden bench with some of the other men who may have been in audience with him.  In front of us was a table-top nailed onto a stump, and upon it, three or four plastic glasses with a milky-looking brown liquid that was poured from a red plastic facsimile of a tea pot.  Wilson wasted no time in explaining, "Here we sell this Zambian Brew," I could hear the capitalization, "It is a fundraiser for the school.  My family and I, even we brew this ourselves from corn and sorghum.  We sell it for a thousand kwatcha," about twenty cents.

"If I purchased one, would you have one with me?"

"Mm.mmm," a tonal Zambian response that translates roughly into "Uh-huh".

The brew is very difficult to describe, but I will try.  Suppose that someone poured a pitcher of stale beer and left it in the sun all day until it was flat and warmer than the air.  Then someone threw in a little corn meal and let it soak; and perhaps stirred in a little bit of wood glue.  "It's excellent," I said, "I love it".  When men talk business together for the first time, it is always best for the initiate to match the patron drink-for-drink.

It took no time for the conversation to switch to education.  We laughed at the similarities of the public school systems in Zambia and Ontario — new initiatives like new socks, changed well before the effectiveness of the older systems can be demonstrated; difficulties in implementing truly good new ideas (or truly good old ideas that were never popular with the faculty); perennial lack of funding for programs, but seemingly infinite funding for non-classroom infrastructure.  And, of course, the stinging sense that while the public can agree in principle that education is a good thing, no one seems able to come to consensus about its ultimate aims.  Parents who like the idea of their kids being educated but have no ambition to be a part of that process.

So the chief challenge in Zambia, if what emerged from the conversation between Wilson and me is any indication, can be reduced to the fact that students need to write these board exams.  I've seen them.  In the first place, they're only in English, and the English level of children at Kibombomene is very low.  Secondly, the tests themselves are not constructed well; one must understand English at a very nuanced level to have a hope of knowing what some of the questions are asking.  I doubt many Ontario students could pass them.

The result of the conversation was a very cordial mutual invitation to work together to develop and coordinate our programs so that they were complementing each other.

What is the ultimate goal of education?  Capital worth?  Understanding of the world?  Striving for peace?

All true, but none true enough.  The goal is, or ought to be, emancipation.  Providing a choice.  Allow people to name their worlds and move within them freely, and let them make up their own minds.

Call me an optimist, but five Zambian Brews later and I think we're closer to that ideal for the people of Kibombomene.

Constellations

Clear night in Africa, and Kibombomene is washed in the gentleness of the illumination of ten-thousand stars.  Something surreal when I slide my foot through slippery mud to the side of the house; it is Orion, sure enough, but here he is not the sentinel of darkness and bitter winds.  There seems to be a little asterism, like a row of medals, on his chest that I have never seen before, and then something in my stomach wretches when I see that he is upside-down.

In two heartbeats I see him as I always have, but with his legs in the air, doing an awkward hand-stand or cartwheel on the Zambian treeline, his dagger about to fall out of its sheath.  I suck air through my nose and shut my eyes, searching for the nerve to look for the first time at what is beyond his feet, past that point where his toes point, the point where my own toes once pointed in the New World night.

But I don't decide to open my eyes; it is done for me by some power outside of myself, and I see the whole alien sky, new shapes and connect-the-dot rhythms playing out in some dance a million years long.  Unlike Orion, they can be connected in any way that I choose.  My mind is not drawn to any truth that my legends have told me that they convey.  And I am left in sudden damp post-rain chill wondering if I should connect those dots, or if I should learn what the people here see when they look in their formless direction, or if I should just let them dance.