Orange Land

I'm in the middle of the last few weeks of preparation. I've got so much to do. One of the projects that I have been putting off is going through some of my old notes from college. Much of it was burned in the fireplace, but some will be tape bound and stored for future reference. It is all full of memories. One of the assignments that I came across caught my eye. I thought some of you might be interested. Here is the introduction.

As soon as we left the paved road, everything began to melt together into a hot orange dust. I had only arrived in Africa a couple of days earlier. It could have been the motion sickness or the jet lag, but the blur was definitely the color orange. As heavy-laden logging trucks whizzed by at twice the speed any sane driver would, they seemed to pick up buckets full of the fine orange dust and deposit it on the giant leaves of the great, green forest. The houses were even made of it. They were constructed of long straight sticks, and the orange clay was used to fill in all of the spaces and smooth out the rough spots. Some of the houses were finished with a thin layer of cement on the walls, to make it more pleasing to the eye, and to tell all who saw it that the owner was wealthy enough to buy cement for his house. However, the dust covered the cement too, so that even the prettier houses seemed to be one with the earth around them. Teenage boys walked the dirt road with the coolest clothes that they could scrounge up. They wanted to be in the spotlight, to be the best dressed in their little village. However, even the coolest of clothes attract dust. Women worked in their little houses and outside in the open with their babies strapped to their backs with a length of cloth. Even the infants had an orange glow about them. Older children played soccer in cleared areas of forest. Their shoeless feet kicked up even more of the orange powder, and each child went home to his mother where he was dusted off with the same cloth that had secured his younger sibling to the back of his mother only a few minutes before. It too, was orange.