December 8 — I have never slept with a mosquito net, and wake up looking at the plain cracked white walls through the tiny mesh and imagine I am in a Rudyard Kipling story. The three of us run through the island and lift rocks on the beach. Pat and Markus head in and I indulge in my most recent random obsessive hobby: Slinging. David and Goliath style. I am good enough that I can hurl a rock about 100 yards. Accuracy wise its now worth it to me to set up a target at 40 or 50 feet. I find a bit of broken ceramic tile that litters the rocky shore and pick up one of the smooth, egg-shaped stones that litter the beach. After a dozen or so shots I have hit the target and proceed to set up another. I look up to find a man staring down at me with a big grin. I wave him over.
Our most effective communication is hand gestures and I mime the motion of the sling, slightly thrilled that I will get to teach someone new this antiquated and, at least to me, profoundly entertaining skill. I hand the sling and a rock to him and immediately realize from how he holds it that he knows exactly what he is doing. The sling whips through the air two, three, four times and flies off into the surf. Absolutely thrilled I jump around the ruble on the beach tossing him stones that he throw into the surf. I point to myself and say my name and he does the same for me. I fumble the pronouncement enough that he writes his name in the sand and I do the same. He is Lamora and he is from Ghana. He walks me back to my place and we say good bye shaking hands for the third or fourth time in the twenty minutes of our friendship.
I do some reading, write a bit and continue to be frustrated with Internet that worked a day ago & now no longer works. Markus cooks an exceptionally good breakfast. As we sit down to eat, Lamora comes up to our table. Out of his pocket comes a plastic bag with loose pages of hand-inked Koran. He carefully spreads it out to show me bits of his Koran and the beautiful pictures on each of the pages. I ask them if this is the David and Goliath story in the Koran. He nods enthusiastically and he carefully gathers up the pages and heads out.
After our meal settled we surfed. Pat caught the first wave in Africa. Markus is very good and not many waves go by that he does not catch. More locals were out than I had yet seen and several birds dove into the water around a spear fisherman who was swimming around the edge of the surfers. After almost two hours in the water I am exhausted from sucking at surfing and leave Pat and Markus to it. I walk back home, wash and go out to the beach to indulge in more slinging. After 40 minutes a man approaches. We start our exchange in French, which comprehensively for me means I understand ‘hello’,’how are you?’ and ‘yes.’
“Parlez-vouz anglais?” I ask.
“Oui oui,” he replies.
We introduce ourselves – His name is Barbaco.
“May I?”
I hand him the sling.
“When I was a child I use to… I could throw it very far…”
The young girl and tourist with him looked on skeptically and stepped back. In the exact same style as Lamora he whipped it around his head throwing it 60 or so meters into the surf. The young girl nods, clearly impressed.
“You know baobab tree?”
“Yes,” I answer.
“We would peel the bark and…”
He mime’ed rolling it into some kind of string on his thigh.
“They were very good! Thank you! This reminds me of being a boy. I am very happy!”
We shook hands and he patted his chest and smiled.
“I know,” I said “my father taught me when I was a boy.”
“Are you on the island with your wife?” he asked.
“No, I am not married,” I reply.
“I am over by the US embassy, I will find you a Senegalese wife!”
We both laugh. Slinging: bringing the world together through obscure passions.