Corps de la Paix
B.P. 1127 Abidjan
COTE D'IVOIRE
Sunday, July 20, 1980

Dear Dad & Mom,

I just finished handwashing some of my clothes. I am writing this letter in one of the classrooms of the C.A.F.O.P. (le Centre de l'Animation de la Formation Pedagogique), here in Daloa, which is a teacher training school for primary teachers. Daloa is at least a four hour drive from Abidjan in a northwesterly direction. We arrived Monday afternoon. The "staging" or le stage is taking place here. All twenty-three "volunteers" are referred to as stagiaires at this point. So far one person has dropped out, Jack. I gave him your telephone number. He said he would call you from Washington, D.C. He couldn't handle it. It seems like I've been in the Ivory Coast for months. Abidjan was hectic. All I can remember is the endless stream of people everywhere, and the pale, rose colored dust, the bright green and orange taxis, the women with their babies slung on their backs and a pan of food or cloth balanced on their heads and wearing bright colored dresses, and men walking up and down the street or waiting for the bus going downtown. We stayed at the hotel Konankro on Marcory street. I have not been able to write until now because I have not felt up to it until now, although I wrote off a quick letter to Mark Bender a few days ago. It takes about two weeks for a letter to reach the U.S. I hope he is still living on 17th Ave. because I sent the letter there. I was suffering from jet lag, a party I never fully recovered from in Philly, the many shots, and a slight case of dehydration, not to mention how the mind plays tricks on you. I heard that the stagiaires are at first manic due to the newness of the environment and then suffer from depression afterwards. I'm suffering from homesickness, yet I feel near everyone at home, and even John. But, we've only been in Africa a little over a week. Thursday we began French classes and Monday I will teach for fifteen minutes in front of a class of fourth level students who are equivalent to our ninth and tenth grade students. There is a primary school next to the C.A.F.O.P. So I won't go to my assignment cold. They have not yet told the English teachers where we will be teaching and I don't know exactly why, although the Director of the "staging" said "they" don't know yet. The teachers here, or the encadreurs, are very sophisticated and educated Africans. I have not gotten used to this fact. Most of them are bilingual, not to mention that they speak their native tongues. My French professor, Mea, is an Agni. Gbari, the language director of the stage, is is the Minister of the Enseignement Technique et de la Formation Professionelle, one of the three Ministries of Education of the Ivory Coast. They go for long titles here. One good thing about my job is that I will have a long vacation at which time I would like to travel around and perhaps see a poorer country like Niger. Here you can get anything. It is one of the richest countries in Africa. Abidjan is one of the most expensive cities to live in in the world. The stagiaires are from all over the U.S. Two of them are from Cleveland. We had a party last night and I met a U.N. volunteer from Dublin. This morning I heard drums off in the distance, the first time since I've been in Africa. This afternoon there is a soccer game between a team from Abidjan and Daloa. It starts soon so I'll end the letter.

Affectionately Yours,
Matt

Vivid dream last night reminiscent of Saas-Fee in its colors and interiors of its bars. A revivifying dream in that I hadn't got enough sleep the previous two nights. I felt alone and the place did not conform to the exact memories I have of Saas-Fee, especially the depression I felt because of the oppressiveness of the mountains at night shouldering their way into my bedroom through the pitch blackness, reminding me of the time I lived in a small town in West Africa with its weird night inhabitants. A vivid form appeared in a corner of an interior, a kind of weird sexual being with voluptuous legs but small, it stood in the corner and had the presence of a form in a Francis Bacon painting without the blood, almost like an inverted exclamation point whose presence held my attention while I discerned its fishnet hosiery, or the circular, whorled form of a dog turd. Then a human sexual being appeared, of a dusky color, a Baudelarian whore, of indistinct sexuality, hir breasts barely prominent but pointed, like that barber here in town whose silicon shots made his chest under his turtle-neck shirt appear to have very erect nipples, titillating to me. This sexual dream being held my gaze with hir gaze, not allowing me to look down at hir sex, so I did not know it, yet I could see s/he was naked, hir bronze color suffused evenly throughout hir skin, hir gaze caught by mine and holding it like an animal frozen in headlights. I moved on and encountered some boys or young men, reminiscent of those I met as classmates in Saas-Fee. They were playful with each other as the latter were, and even poked each other in the ribs in jest, much like that gay I knew in Albuquerque who roomed with me in a house, and invited his "side-kick" (he did not want to initially tell me he was gay for fear I wouldn't allow him to share the house with him) over once, Craig, the man, playing with the hair of Dominick, the woman, as the latter knitted, one time I observed Craig at a party poking Dominick in play, then later going outside in the backyard and kissing him, he said that they were never deep kisses for fear of contracting AIDS. Then I left this interior down a staircase that had a strange strap-like gate every few steps that I had to latch shut behind me, the latches very vivid and sharp but whose mechanical nature I cannot describe let alone remember. Outside I was in the same steep terrain as Saas-Fee's, yards that served as grazing for dark, hairy cows and at 45 degree angles, but I felt more closed in and confined to funicular paths that I had to be careful to negotiate and I could not look ahead consequently. I was headed to a place, a row of dim stalls, perhaps exuding the air of skiraums or lodges, or those strange, dark larder houses on stout, mushroom-shaped stilts that I was told prevented rats access to the store of cheeses inside and other victuals for the winter months in the mountains. Then I recognized D, one of my classmates, but I did not talk to her, but entered a place I can't remember since it was dark as my bedroom in Bettina house where I stayed with another classmate, R, in Saas-Fee. I felt exposed and alone, having been left behind, sometimes I returned at night to my flat in Bettina house very depressed and lonesome for my wife and children, from whom I have no dearth of attention normally (that has an effing lit'rary sound, 'dearth'). Then I came out of the darkness and felt naked, as if I had not found in the darkness what I was looking for, my clothes, perhaps? Packing my backpack that night before R and I left Saas-Fee to return to our normal lives, from where we had come. Finally I was alone, seeing the sky from the side, like J and I on our walk on the mountainside above Saas-Fee, he and I had fallen behind from the others, but in the dream I was alone, in a strange place whose name formed its own mind in a word in my mind which I cannot recall, somewhere in the U.S maybe.