Gas station at night.

It was dark. Darkness in Koidu town is completely free of
streetlights. But it's not empty; motorcycle headlights swept by often
enough to prevent our eyes from fully adjusting to the dark.
It was also raining. The motorcycle headlights lit up all the
raindrops around us, leaving their pattern on the back of our retinas
for a heartbeat after they went by. It wasn't raining very hard, but
it was still raining hard enough that the sound of the raindrops
wrapped around us and kept us from hearing anything else. Except, of
course, the motorcycles.
We were walking down the Main Rd. in Koidu Town, but it was emptier
than I've ever seen it. Our dinner meeting with Allan had started as
the sun went down, and we'd spent all the time before the rains
sitting around and talking. It was nice, but now the nightly
thunderstorm was coming down around our ears in the midst of the
twenty-minute walk home.
"White man an' a white woman..." A young man in hoody walked past us,
his hood pulled up. His tone was observational, not surprised. It
seems that while we sometimes elicit conscious surprise, the response
of many seems completely unconscious, as if they see us and then say
"White man!" or "China!" or "Chinese man!" without thinking.
We walked a few more steps. The roads in Kono are a bit like holes on
a golf course; they have fairways, where the motorcycles drive, and
rough, where the pedestrians walk. Katie was completely silent, and I
thought she was scared. In retrospect, that was probably just some
kind of macho projection of the fact that I was pretty uneasy.
"Katie, would you please just walk on the inside? My backpack is
reflective." Katie switched to the inside. But it was a lot messier
there, lots more potholes where she could twist her ankle.
Don't get me wrong, Koidu Town is very safe during the day. I've never
felt threatened, and hardly anyone has even tried to get their hands
in my pocket. On the other hand, it was colder, darker, wetter, and
stranger at night. It's fair to say that I may have been a little
unsettled.
It started to rain harder, with big, soaking drops, just as we
approached the gun intersection. The gun intersection is a roundabout
with a big artillery cannon in the middle, painted white and
ostensibly a memorial for the rebel occupation of Koidu Town for the
entire civil war. The war is another story, one that I don't know
outside of what I've read, but suffice it to say that almost every
building in Koidu is new, and the old ones are identifiable because
they are burnt out broken down shells.
"Do you want to duck under some roof somewhere?"
"Yeah!"
We walked (fast) up to the gas station. There were two pumps under a
big circle of concrete. A large crowd of motorbikes and young men were
gathered underneath. We jumped up on to the curb between the gas
pumps, and said nothing. The young men were talking in Krio. After a
minute or so, one guy gestured to me.
"You wan' go insigh (inside)?"
"No, it's fine out here!" I'm really leery of the 'privileges'
afforded me because I'm white, both because I'm worried that someone
will later seize them as a grounds to ask me for money and because
it's not fair that simply being white guarantees me special treatment.
A couple more motorbikes rolled in, to take shelter from the
accelerating downpour. One was wearing an aqua blue down jacket and
another was wearing a Santa Claus hat with a 'P' on it.
"Hey, hey, hey! White man!" A young guy in a white muscle shirt was
getting my attention in the usual way. I looked at him and nodded for
him to go on. "Do you have your local tax papers?"
"What?"
"Your local tax papers! You have to pay a local tax in Kono!" Clearly
trying to scam me for money. Don't misunderstand, the vast majority of
people in Kono have been unbelievably kind and generous to both Katie
and me. For instance, yesterday as we walked through Sinnah Town, a
small village on our route from town to the clinic, a delightful old
grandmother in a colorful blue and purple dress summoned us to her
doorstep to give us mangoes. She gave us five excellent, ripe mangoes.
Then, as we walked back towards the clinic, Jalloh gave one of them to
a small girl walking home from school. The girl was carrying a bunch
of sticks under her arm, but wearing her dark green school uniform,
and Jalloh thanked her and tucked the mango into her other hand.
"I don't live here."
"Oh, you didn't pay the local tax?"
At this point a skinny older man chimed in. "He's a tourist! He come
to see Kono! Probably from Korea or something, right?"
"Uh, Canada and the USA..."
The first guy was a bit annoyed. "No, everyone must pay the local
tax!" I decided to say nothing for a bit, to see what would happen.
The wind was now blowing, and the concrete circle fifteen feet
overhead wasn't really sheltering us anymore. Katie looked really
cold.
"No, he no got to pay no tax," then he turned to me, "I be your
lawyer, I do the talking for you."
"Thanks. Hey, wetin na you nem?" (What's your name, in Krio.) I nodded
back at the first guy, the one in the muscle shirt. He took my
outstretched hand.
"Osman. An' you?"
"Chris."
"What?"
"Christopher." The extra syllables help.
"Ok."
I looked back at my lawyer. "Thanks, sir. But I don't need a lawyer,
though I'm happy to meet you." He smiled and said something
unintelligible in Krio. Katie spoke with him about the fact that we
were from the USA and Canada. People are always amazed that Katie is
not from China.
"Hey, hey!" Osman was getting my attention again. He had the
exasperating tone of a testosterone-overloaded young man looking to
show off. "Have you ever seen one of those before?"
"One of what?"
"The gun!"
The gun. It was sitting in the middle of the roundabout, white,
getting rained on and getting lit up by the occasional blast of
lightning.
"Uh, well,"
"When it's working? You ever see it when it's working?"
"No, not when it's working."
"It's amazing."
I attempted to damage his credibility a bit. I won't claim to be
immune from testosterone myself.
"Who made it? Where's it from?"
"It's Russian."
"Oh."
A moment of silence, only pounding rain.
"It killed a lot of people, that one. During the war." Osman was
smiling, and his tone was reverent. I replied without thinking.
"What, are you happy about that?!" Luckily he couldn't parse the fast
and angry English. It really wasn't the ideal time to create a
confrontation. "That's not good." I'm not sure if he heard that
either.
"It was an amazing thing, to see it working."
I let the conversation trail off. It kept raining, and it was pretty cold.