from here

over two years ago i strolled down the main road east of the nyangea mountains. it was easy to stay oriented with respect to absolute directions, as there were mountains to the west and plains to the east. it was just like being home back in boulder.

the book i was reading at the time was v by Pynchon. i didn't get it.

february 1, 2014 was the height of burning season. the plant matter left behind after the last season's harvest had been left standing starkly in the fields, but it was time to prepare the ground for the next round of crops. fields were ignited, and what nutrients from the stalks weren't carried off in smoke settled back into the ground as ash. waves of life fled the indiscriminate devastation.

a few weeks before, i had gone for a jog along the main road to kaabong. there was a small pillar of smoke in the distance, but i didn't pay much attention to it. by the time i reached it, the fire had raged to the very edge of the road. all of the plant life was pretty small and the main road was large, so i wasn't particularly concerned about it, and intended to run alongside the blaze. 

as i drew near to the fire, the wave struck. at first it was just a grasshopper or two. then, the six or nine inches of air above the ground became completely saturated with small wildlife fleeing the conflagration. for a hundred yards my legs were bombarded, and then i was clear of the fire.

the local population makes extensive use of this side effect of burning. they encircle the perimeter of the fire and capture fleeing rats. the rats are then roasted and eaten--a low-cost, low-effort meat source in an economy with very restricted access to meat.

there are endless things to say about the cultural practice of burning. i've said a number of them above. i'm sure that there have traditionally been descriptions of wind directions, smoke types, and scents. i'm sure that there are unique linguistic reflections of culturally located concepts about the fleeing creatures.

i don't really have any data about burning practices. from here--erie, colorado, over two years after the fact, with a comfortable bed, endless food options, and delicious beverages--i feel a little bit dismayed. from here, it's easy to see how i could have done a better job.

but i'm trying to evade that narrative. i'm trying to show a little bit of grace to myself. i asked about burning in multiple ways. at some point, if the one remaining semi-speaker of the language simply doesn't remember how to talk about these things, there's not much that i could do that would help him remember. maybe i could have. but it does no good to dwell on that for too long.

my grandmother grew up speaking swiss german as her first language in indiana. at the beginning of her elementary school education, she almost completely shifted to using only english. she is a couple of decades older than Komol, the last nyang'i semi-speaker, but her personal linguistic story echoes his considerably. he, too, grew up speaking nyang'i as his first language. he, too, almost completely abandoned it somewhere between the age of six and ten--in his case, for karimojong. it seems like he might have spoken it a little bit longer and used it a little bit more after shifting to the dominant local language. he's had a shorter interval since abandoning the language for attrition to set in. but in essence, what i am trying to do with nyang'i is comparable to if my grandmother was the only person on earth who remembered anything about the german language, and i decided to try to describe german on the basis of what she remembers. even if she remembered reasonably considerable vocabulary (he remembers somewhere between 600-1200 words, depending on what you count), and even if she could string some words into short sentences, or even short stories, it would perhaps be a little bit overly optimistic to hope to document a traditional hefeweizen recipe in german from her memory.

from here, it's easy to feel frustrated with the things i didn't succeed in doing as i strolled beneath kakwanga and podolac. but i also need to remind myself of what i did and didn't do while there--and to keep in perspective what i ever could have hoped to do.