by Judith Meyerowitz
In the summer of 2008, I became J Dawg. I was christened that in a rural village in Ghana where I volunteered for the summer. We were part of Operation Crossroads Africa, the precursor to the Peace Corps.
Our home was a house in a village without beds, running water, or lights. We slept on air mattresses, cooked on coal stoves, and the younger volunteers carried buckets of water on their heads from a well a good distance away. Until we figured out the food situation, we basically starved for several days. No running water also meant no indoor plumbing. There was an outhouse and I believed it was in the jungle with lions roaring but this was West Africa.
I was close to sixty and my roomies were mainly twenty-year-old college students except for Dina, a teacher from D.C. in her thirties with whom I shared a room. Together we watched unidentified bugs crawl up the walls that looked as scary as lions.
But I want to share with you the nights, our sleep rituals. First, we had to blow up our mattresses; then we had to attach the mosquito nets. How? We tucked the ends under the mattresses. Our heads became the apex, creating the tip of the tent. Then, we hunted for our flashlights hoping we had remembered to bring them into our woman-made shelters and not leave them out where the wild things were.
We would sit up under our tent beds and engage in girl talk as if at a sleepover. I heard about Dina’s life in D.C.. We listened in the night to the tick tock of her biological clock. “There will never be Mr. Right.”
We counted the holes in the protective netting and laughed darkly: “Were we hallucinating from the anti-malarial medication? Would we know if we were?” With our backs against the crawlies’ wall, we got to the fundamental question: “Why were we in bed in the middle of the night in the African jungle?”
Eventually we dozed off from exhaustion, laughter, and Ghana Star Beer. But between my age and the beer, I soon had to go. Where was the flashlight? Under me! I untucked the netting, pulled up my pj bottoms which were dropping from weight loss and with flashlight in one hand and pj material in the other, I made my way into the sounds of the African night and to the hole in the box, where I semi-crouched imagining being bitten by things. With pjs and light in hand and being barely wiped or dried, I found my way being ever so quiet, back to our room with the bugs. I then had to lie down and retuck or did I first retuck and then lie down? My hands held the light to see as I tucked in the net holes, often further tearing the netting as my pjs fell. And then I heard Dina hysterical in the dark:” Scrunch crunch swoosh, plop” the music of the night, the soundtrack to my bed-making.
Dina would continue watching me struggle and we laughed, over the top, from the ground. Night after night often twice a night scrunch crunch all around the mattress edges.
I have never been so sleep deprived nor shared such laughter.
Dina eventually married, had two children despite remaining unsure he was Mr. Right. I visited her a couple of times in D.C. but we no longer shared African nights and lost contact.
I still have a scatter pillow made from colorful Ghanian textiles with all the volunteers’ signatures and Dina’s inscription to “J Dawg”.