Katja Malmborg

the retirement of a notebook (December 25th)

My notebook is starting to smell really funky. Something not quite unlike the CFA and Cedi notes here. A combination of sweat, dirt and human greed, I guess. Not particularly pleasant, anyway.

It’s the notebook that I used when doing my transect walks in Ouahigouya and Kaya. According to my ethics review, I’m supposed to hand over my notes to the Sahel project once I’m done with my thesis, but I don’t think anyone will want to touch this notebook after all it’s been through.

But it will get an honorable funeral, I can promise you that.

a study of waves (December 25th)

I went for a swim in the setting sun. It was high tide, so I could only stand on the edge between beach and sea, having the ravenous waves wash over me, on after the other.

The power in the surge of water, pulling back in anticipation of the next wave. Standing there, having it grow like a wall in front of me, until it breaks and crashes down on me in a determined white foam.

Being at the mercy of something so powerful, so inhuman. It’s a rush.

If I was a surfer, I’m sure the feeling would be the same when catching the perfect wave, only enhanced ten times over.

Like the moment when the horse leaves the ground in the jump over a high fence. Or when finally letting go and rushing down a steep snow-covered slope on skis.

But considering my indifference toward tropical beaches, I’m not likely to find myself on a good surfing beach anytime soon. I really should find the time and money to go skiing again. Soon.

kids and kids (December 25th)

Santa Claus is black. At least at Coconut Grove Beach Resort in Ghana. And he arrives in a Fanti boat from the sea, making the rich parents’ children jump with delight on the beach.

(My very failed attempt at sneak photography.)

Some way further down the beach, the kids from the village celebrate Christmas Day by jumping in the waves and playing football and volleyball.

breakfast pancakes (December 25th)

Every morning at Stumble Inn, I have a pancake with fruits and a glass of freshly squeezed juice for breakfast. Some mornings, the fruits are pineapple and banana, sometimes there is papaya, or mango. One time, there was even watermelon. And the juice is either orange or pineapple. For some reason, they don’t put any salt in the pancake batter, but with a sprinkle of salt on the fruits, this breakfast is perfect.

It brings me back to another set of breakfasts. I know you must be sick of my travel flashbacks by now. But that’s kind of how my brain works, connecting things. Time is not linear. Maybe I like these early morning breakfasts (mom and I are mostly at the bar by seven, when the kitchen opens) because of the good memories that they invoke, or maybe the memories turn good because the present is so nice. I don’t know. I just know I very much enjoy sitting there on my high chair at the bar at Stumble Inn, eating my fruit pancake and remembering all the pancakes I ate for breakfast at Parque Machía in Villa Tunari in Bolivia.

I was volunteering there, taking care of maltreated monkeys in the quarantine, feeding them, cleaning the cages, playing with them, and singing to them when none of the other volunteers were around. I even got the very shy spider monkey Marucha, who always kept her distance, to come and sit in my lap by just sitting on a log and singing Swedish folk songs to myself. Some creatures just need time to get used to you. Most will come around, eventually, if you act harmless enough.

And every morning, I had a pancake with papaya for breakfast. It was a tough job, I’ve rarely been as tired in my entire life, both physically and mentally, but all in all, I remember it as a mainly positive experience. Especially those pancakes.

At Stumble Inn, there are no monkeys. But the cats climb on tables and walls not quite unlike the cappucines that I worked with. And both were and are always looking for food.

Christmas celebrations (December 24th)

My Christmas was a quiet affair. I spent all day lying in the shade, reading. I took a dip in the ocean, and then a nap.

For dinner, I had grilled lobster and mom had red snapper.

For dessert, we opened the box of gingerbread cookies that mom had brought with her from Sweden and shared it with all the other guests and the staff too.

Then, a bonfire was lighted and mom and I and the other guests, two Belgians, three Germans and a Congo-Brazzavillean, sang “Silent night”. On the ocean, there were 54 boats, with lighted lanterns on each, floating like a band of stars along the horizon.

my favourite faded fantasy (December 23rd)

Damien Rice has released a new album. His third. I bought and downloaded it over the internet while in Kumasi, and have been listening to it ever since. His voice, the melancholy and honesty. Its addictive.

In the song “The greatest bastard”, he sings: “Am I the greatest bastard that you know? When will we learn to let this go?” and I feel like he’s singing me.

We hurt each other. We, humans, as part of relationships, we’re jealous and petty and vindictive and we hurt the people that we love. I’m no exception. It doesn’t happen very often, but I have a sharp tongue and when I’m hurting I have this passive aggressive snake that likes to show its head. And it’s the ones I know the best that I have the ability to hurt the worst, of course. I know exactly what words to say to make them really sting, and it scares me. That I am capable. And relationships – oh, life is complicated.

And Damien gets this. I guess it’s a weird thing to feel connected through, our ability to hurt other people, but right now I feel as if we get each other on such a profound level. I’m addicted, again.

Reading this much into a song. I must have regressed, back to the teenager I once was. When a song could give me an almost religious experience.

Damien and I go way back. I even wrote a kind-of-paper about him once, for a creative writing assignment in English. This is what I wrote:

25 March 2007

yesterday, I met this boy

When he finally walked on stage, I felt that my legs were killing me. Earlier on the day I’d had a riding lesson on a horse that had made my hands bleed, and my muscles were telling me that they couldn’t take any more. Thanks to my friend Kirke, we had managed to get to a spot right in front of the stage, there was just a girl in a baseball cap between me and the fence. I had full view over the stage and it was just made to be a great concert. But my legs didn’t care. They thought that I should’ve got a ticket for a seat, and not this stupid immature standing-for-hours-to-get-as-close-as-possible-
to-the-stage-idea. Would my legs let me survive this night? The candles and the incense that was placed out on stage didn’t help a bit.
But then, suddenly, the lights were dimmed and he just stood there, Damien Rice, with his guitar in the candlelight, singing The Professor and La Fille Danse. With a glass of French wine in one hand and playing on his guitar with the other, talk-singing the words. He had me wrapped around his little finger and my legs were gone, my body was gone, it was just me and the crowd and Damien’s voice.

My relationship to his music is very tightly connected to strong feelings. Not really positive feelings. The first song I heard by him was The Blower’s Daughter, a guy sent it to me the autumn I was sixteen. I had a crush on him, the music sending guy, and he claimed to be in love with me.
Then, right after New Year, the owners to the pony I had been hiring for two years, cancelled my hiring contract, just like that. I really loved that pony, she had been really hopeless when I first started to ride her and I had worked like hell to make her the wonderful, sensitive pony she was now. And just when I was about to start enjoying the results of all the effort I’d put into her, they cancelled my contract. They needed her for something else, the owners claimed. And as if that chock wasn’t enough, the guy that I had a crush on suddenly stopped talking to me, he didn’t return my e-mails and hung up the phone when he heard that it was me calling. When I ran into him months later and asked why on earth he had ignored me like that, he just said that it was for the best. We wouldn’t’ve worked out. Well, nice to hear.
I spent most of the early spring when I turned seventeen crying and burying myself in school books. And it was about then that I bought O. It was the only album I listened to for months. Damien’s lyrics went right into my heart and his voice became my best friend. Still, when I hear Cannonball or Amie, it’s like stepping right back into the seventeen-year-old Katja.
I bought 9 Crimes when it was released last autumn. My grandmother had just been diagnosed with lung cancer and I kept on getting reports from my uncles in Finland that she was just getting worse, her lungs were filling up with blood and she couldn’t breath. I listened to 9 crimes, got the same kind of intense love and fascination to every syllable as to O when I was seventeen. It was my diary and Damien that kept me company in my despair. I became totally dependent on the songs, I had to listen to 9 Crimes and Elephant every morning to be able to manage the effort it took to eat breakfast and take the subway to school. And I put the album on repeat first thing every afternoon when I got home. 9 crimes became me that autumn.

Seeing him live, on stage, just a few meters from me, made me relive all those feelings. The intensity of his voice and being able to see the expressions on his face made it almost too much to bear. At first. He sang I Remember, and I felt like crying. But then he mixed it up with Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) and made me smile. He started talking. Telling things between the songs. “This song is about…” and then a long story about how the song was born, often pointless but always funny and very personal. He made me see the songs in a different light. They didn’t have to force a pressure on my lungs. They didn’t have to make my want to cry. They could be just beautiful, powerful. What in my lonely room seemed so ultimately sad, could with new live arrangements fill me with a warm, fuzzy, butterfly-y feeling. Make me shiver. Make me laugh.
And when we applauded him back after the last song, he entered the stage drinking from a glass of wine and the band started to play modest chords behind him. He took the mike from the stand and walked to the edge of the stage, slowly took a sip of his wine, looked out in the crowd and then started to tell a story. But even before he had made it through the first sentence, his voice changed direction and casually asked “Does anyone have a cigarette?”. I don’t know if he expected an answer, but suddenly I heard my friend Kirke shouting “I do”. And just like that, she picked up a cigarette and a matchbox from her bag, reached out and gave them to Damien. He took them, lighted the cigarette and gave the matchbox back to Kirke. “Oh, you can’t smoke here? But that’s part of the show.” And so he continued the story, there was this guy who met a girl, lady, thing, whatever, at a pub in Dublin and the guy thought that this was a night to remember. Damien sat on a speaker right in front of me, sipping on his wine and taking puffs on Kirke’s cigarette, telling the story. All while the band continued to play modest cords. In the end, the guy was left alone at the pub, feeling failed and bitter, and without ending the story, just continuing it as if it were the guy’s own thoughts, Damien started singing Cheers Darlin’. And in the middle of it, he started to come up with new lyrics. “It’s kind of ridiculous … that you all paid money to come here and see me get drunk on stage. It’s kind of ridiculous … that so many would come to see me. It’s kind of ridiculous … that we all search for something that we can’t seem to find…”
The last song he sang was Accidental Babies. First him, the words and the piano. Then the cello stepped in. And then the whole band, making this subtle ballad into something huge, creeping down my spine, lifting the roof. I couldn’t breathe, I didn’t need to breathe, I could live entirely on the song and the sight of Damien playing it.
Now, I need air again. And water and food and sleep. But apart from that, I won’t need a thing. I’ll live on this concert for days.

I liked using big words already back then, at nineteen.

Gosh, nineteen. How much life that has passed since. It’s crazy.

mismatches (December 23rd)

Walking home along the beach from my internet session, every new wave seemed to reach higher up than the last. It was high tide.

And I was thinking about something that I wrote in an e-mail just a moment ago. That I can’t seem to get the pieces of my personality to fit together right now.

It was just something I wrote without thinking. I do that sometimes. Get instant infatuations with wordings, without really knowing what I mean with them. But maybe now, here, I had managed to accidentally hit my head on the nail. Temporary personality incompatibilities.

My mother, who is a very wise, albeit quite chaotic, person, says that life is a neverending succession of cycles. We go through crises, lurches of development, stabilization and stagnation. Quite like the adaptive cycle of the resilience scientists, only on the very personal, psychological level. In that way of thinking, the idea that the pieces of my personality don’t fit at present isn’t such a far-fetched concept after all. It just means that I’m between the crisis and development phase. Things are as they should be, and I just need to ride it out.

It’s just. This has been going on for years. This being lost in one part of my life – then I think I’ve figured something out, just to have another part of me freak out or turn upside down and I just don’t feel like one person anymore. Molding my identity as a student, trying to figure out if the identity of a researcher is something that I could carry, rearranging my identities as a daughter, sister, niece, cousin, colleague, woman, friend. Most of all friend.

The epiphanies keep on coming, but they’re washed away just as fast. Like my foot prints here on the beach, being washed away by the ruthless, high-tide Atlantic. I think I know who I am, for a moment, and then it all comes crashing down again.

And, to be honest, today it all feels quite fine. The tropical beach might not be an inspiring landscape for me, and I’m not having any epiphanies. But walking barefoot on the sand, having the warm ocean occasionally wash over my feet, while the sun is turning into an orange behind the palm trees, puts me in a kind of stability. Temporary, for sure, but rest nonetheless.

My personalities might not fit, but what does the Atlantic care about that that? The tide will come and go and the only thing I can do is to see it happen. Wash away my footprints as if they never were even there. And that’s perfectly fine. Beautiful even.

Beautiful even.

Christmas preparations (December 23rd)

Mom wanted to send a Christmas greeting to family and friends, so we went to steal some internet and electricity from Coconut Grove Beach Resort, the neighboring luxury hotel, today. I made a quick design of a Christmas card and sent it around the globe. I also uploaded it on the blog.

Now, with the computer fully charged, maybe I’ll even be able to watch a movie tonight. Otherwise, the internet isn’t anything that I’m really missing. It’s actually quite nice, not being connected.

But also: sending messages across the globe, from Thailand to South Africa, Finland, Sweden and France to the US and Canada, made me realize that I can never be fully unconnected. Not with such a spread out network of friends and family. The people that I share my life with are all over the place, and the internet makes it possible. I need it, for retaining my sense of me. I am a true product of the twenty-first century.

Leftover from our Christmas card photo session earlier today. Two of the boys are guests at the lodge, and the third works there.

Stumble Inn (December 22nd)

The ecolodge, Stumble Inn outside Elmina, where we’re staying is a really cozy place. It is rustic, for sure, with only solar-powered lamps and no other electricity, but it has a kind of simplicity to it that just calms a gal down in no time. The food in the bar is quite cheap and really good, mostly vegetarian or seafood. There are four dogs and a couple of cats.

The clay hut where we’re sleeping has an open-air bathroom with a shower and a dry-toilet (or, what we in Sweden would call utedass). Our hut door is only twenty meters from the beach, and every evening the staff lights a bonfire under the palm trees. The hut has no glass in the windows, only mosquito nets, and at night the sea breeze softly blows through the hut like a natural fan. Without the electricity, there isn’t much to do in the evenings, so we go to sleep early, to the sound of the waves.

There are many small, pretty details to explore on the grounds, small pieces of practical art. It is obvious someone put a lot of love into the place, even though it now has become a little bit worn down. Still, it’s a wonderful place. Definitely worth a stay, if you ever happen to be in the area.

Star, the beach dog.

weird fruits (December 22nd)

I like trying exotic fruits. On a street corner in Elmina, I saw a woman selling round and orange things that she claimed were fruit. She said they were called alamamba in Fanti, the local language in these parts, but she didn’t know if it had an English name. I bought some, to try.

It has three or four big seeds in the middle. The pulp is mainly around the seeds, meaning you have to suck the seeds to eat the fruit. And the pulp. It is slightly sweet, but mostly, it’s incredibly sour. Like, lemon sour. But with a taste that is not citrusy, but more berry-like in flavor.

For some reason, it made me think of sharon fruit. Which doesn’t really make sense, because sharon fruit is sweet and this was crazy sour. But maybe it was the color. Or the consistency. Or the after-taste, once the sour was gone. I don’t know. Interesting fruit, anyhow.