The little boys set up a soccer pitch in the lane. After dark, they play in front of our house, in the light thrown by our lights, for they have no electricity. These boys will flag my husband down as he comes down our lane, clamoring for a ride in his heavy, diesel-powered Toyota. He opens the door and lets them pile in. They roll down the windows so that the happy singing they impetuously break into carries down the lane ahead of them. The women look up from their cooking and laugh. I watch our car roll into our driveway with its load of excited passengers. It barely stops before the boys fly out like birds released from a cage.

Our house is the second to last one in a cul de sac. I must walk up the entire lane to the main road. A black and white mongrel guards where the lane meets the road. I've seen him warn other dogs which approach with stiffened head and legs. One of his ears is badly ulcerated from a fly bite. By the time I reach the end of the lane I have said "Bonjour" at least twenty times. I feel that my lane isn't a lane but a village. I call my village "Television".

I walk in the early morning, before the sun breaks out from behind leaden skies. A Tropical bulbul's crystal clear song from a tree beyond my garden wall serves as my alarm clock. From the bottom of my lane, it takes me another ten minutes to reach a stadium which is busy and noisy on weekends when football matches are played there. We can hear the uproar from fans from our house. The stadium is protected by a high metal fence with an entrance gate sometimes guarded by a soldier. My young woman friends complain that they are harassed by soldiers around Brazzaville. I tell them that the advantage to reaching 51 is that rarely do I have to worry about the unwanted attentions of men. Inside the stadium's gate is a track of broken concrete which encircles it. No cars are allowed inside although one morning huge lorries had made it past the guard. Barefoot men stripped to the waist washed the trucks down with dirty water from buckets made from sawed-off plastic containers. The vehicles' doors were open and their radios blaring Congolese pop. When I stuck my fingers in my ears as I passed, the men laughed and danced a little jig for me.

Bands of young men pass me at a run on the stadium's concrete track. I assume they are football players keeping in shape. Every patch of litter-ridden dust functions as a football pitch. The players are ordered by their coaches to weed the pitches first, but they never clear the playing fields of the empty plastic bags and flattened bottles which are strewn across Brazzaville. The young men exercising in the stadium have thin, sinewy legs. They wear an odd assortment of footwear—flip flops, sandals, runners with the toes cut out. Some have no shoes at all. They run barefoot.

I stepped outside my gate for my early morning walk and found a new born puppy at my feet. It mewed a little, but its tiny eyes were rolled up in its head and it was barely moving. It was a miniature version of the black and white mongrel at the top of the lane. I silently swore that it had found me. Women in the lane directed me to where the puppy had crawled from. A teenage boy dressed in shorts and tattered shirt acknowledged that the dog belonged to him. He was embarrassed to be addressed by this white woman with her rough French. The dog's mother was dead four days ago, he said. It is hungry I told him, without meaning to accuse him of not caring. There was an awkward silence. Then the boy shrugged, his hands splayed and uplifted as though to say "What can I do?" I looked beyond him to his concrete block hut. The front door was a dirty yellow curtain. The family which lived there could barely feed themselves. I left the pup there. I am leaving Brazzaville in a few weeks for a month. I am not around to take care of it.

Afterwards, I thought this teenager must be the one who I've seen sweeping the lane several doors down with a whisk broom held together at the apex of triangle by a flattened metal container. He handed my husband a note this week in English which mysteriously read, Monsieur, I was cleaning behind the wall of your garden and I killed a snake. I will return to finish the job. Behind the house is where the Tropical bulbul sits and sings in his tree. There are no houses there, just subsistence garden plots of manioc. I see the women working in the plots when I look out my study window. I think of snakes. We found cobras in our garden when we lived in Tanzania. My husband tells me that several black mambas were killed at his Brazzaville construction site.

On Saturdays after my walk I treat myself to small twisted donuts, freshly fried in a wok of hot oil. Soft and sweet, six of them cost me 50 cents. When I first arrived in Brazzaville, I was buying them every day. Now I resist and look forward to my Saturday splurge. The woman who makes the donuts sets up her shop of small table, stool and cooking pot early morning on an intersection with a side lane so that she attracts a good flow of customers. She usually sells out by noon. She wears her hair in braids which stick out all over her head. Her clothes are gaudy colored cotton prints. She smiles in pleasure when I tell her how good her donuts are. She is not the only business woman in the lane. Rickety stands outside private houses sell papayas and mangos, popcorn to be scooped from large containers, and small bags of charcoal.

05-10-2007