Art Dealers

Fulla

Every morning Cecilia adds her pink, furry Hello Kitty bag to the neat row of bags outside her little preschool classroom here in Port-Gentil. With the majority of expats in town working in the oil industry, her classmates include many Gabonese children as well as kids from every corner of the globe. No one blinks an eye at names such as Pelenatita (a girl), Keziah (a boy) or even MacArthur (used as boy's first name and pronounced as if it were traditionally French).

When it comes to children's tastes in school bags, however, international marketing seems to win out, and there is much less variety. The majority of girls at the school carry pink bags, usually with a smiling Dora the Explorer (or l'Exploratice in these parts) looking out at you, while many others seem to prefer Barbie -- an American classic.
Of course Barbie seems to meet all the aesthetic requirements necessary to please most 4-year-old girls world-wide, but I stopped dead in my tracks the other morning when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of someone I'd never met before.....
Religious requirements aside, it seems tastes really don't differ much do they?

The Fire

Amadou, our guard, friend and dedicated playmate to Cecilia lost his every belonging two days ago when his house burned to the ground here in town. He's an immigrant worker from Mali working in Port-Gentil to send money back to his family each month. We've given him clothes and a place to stay for now, but he's most upset over losing all ID papers as well as his entire additional cash stash from his two years of employment with us. He's very religious, praying 5 times a day, and tells us that Allah not only gives but takes away, so clearly this was Allah's choice for his life to take this turn. It's amazing to see that through all of his troubles, someone who had very little to start out with keeps on smiling even though he now has even less.

Images in Town

This is a brother-sister team I see every day in their school uniforms waiting in the same spot for their mom to pick them up for lunch. Kids of all ages at all Gabonese state schools wear these uniforms.


The typical car size here is due to the crater-sized pot holes around town. I would hate to be in a sedan - ouch!
Hey - what's up with the two makeshift stop signs before the intersection and waaay over to the right of the road? I'm not sure I need to take them seriously.
Wood is an important industry in Gabon, and one of the views we have year-round is of the thousands of tree trunks (I'd call them logs, but they seem too big) being floated in and out of the bay each week in the center of town.
We all use bottled gas in our houses for cooking, so this is a common scene.People may not be rich, but everyone has a cellphone, thanks to Celtel.

The temperature inside my car yesterday. I think the AC is broken...
Cigarette vendor on the left, very popular lottery booth on the right, and a typical wall in the background that was most likely painted just a few months ago. Sitting pensively in the back seat of the car one day Jourdain, watching buildings go by out his window, asked me why paint never stays on walls. I tried to explain to him that in life there is something called "quality", and that the amount of time the paint stays on depends on the level of quality. I do think he got the concept in the end, but it sure makes me chuckle that in his little 6-year-old universe no one has yet figured out how to keep the paint on buildings.

Port-Gentil Art

The Grand Village neighborhood of Port-Gentil is filled with fabulous storefronts painted with advertisements, or more exactly, images of what's for sale inside. This is a favorite of mine, with a sportswear store on the right and a barbershop on the left.
Closeup of sportswear store:

And here's the barbershop, with your choice of hairstyle before you enter the establishment:
And this piece of art below is the centerpiece of the town's largest traffic circle (while it's far from being an actual circle -- with roads shooting in and out from every angle and traffic lights flashing on and off simultaneously -- I don't know what else to call it). The man depicted here is Gabon's first president, Leon Mba (last name pronounced "mmmmmm-Ba"). The whole setup here is typically Gabonese, with a streetlight turned directly toward him for nighttime illumination, some random tile formation acting as a base for the painted plywood structure, and my guess is that the antenna-like object above his head was meant to one day be covered with some waterproof material, providing shelter from the rain. You'll also note that some of the city's electric wiring is dangling precariously behind Leon's neck. I'll have to look again next time I drive by, but it's very likely that poor Leon is being used in place of an actual electric pole to hold that up.

There are many more great images out there that I'll try and catch over the next few days!

Noah's Magic Trick

This was mastered just yesterday.
Sorry about the shaky camera work.

Beach Baby

Noah first arrived in Gabon at age 2 weeks and was kept indoors for a solid week before we finally decided to attempt an initial beach outing with him.

It was only once we got to Cap Lopez, the windy Atlantic coast, that I realized how delicate Noah really was and how mad I was at myself for bringing him out to a place where the sand would tarnish his perfect little newborn skin. I quickly wrapped him up from head to toe in a towel and took the following pictures as proof for him later in life that he really was at the beach at 3 weeks of age.

This one I quickly realized proves nothing,

so, trying desparately to keep him from being unnecessarily exposed to the elements out there, I snapped a shot with beach background,
and then one of his dad and siblings playing off in the distance. (Double click for more detail)As time went on though we got more daring. When Noah reached 7 weeks of age, Olivier and I decided he was plenty ready for his first boat outing.
The best safety precaution we could come up with was Baby Bjorning him underneath a lifevest that I would wear while on the boat. And off he was to our weekend island gettaway! (See the below for experienced older siblings waiting patiently in the boat)
By the time we reached the island and our cabana, the rather loud roar of the boat's motor had coaxed Noah into a deep slumber, so he was set up on our dining table in his anti-uv baby beach tent bought back in France with this exact outing in mind.
Unfortunately, at his age he couldn't fully enjoy the view overlooking Jourdain and Cecilia playing in the sea.
We eventually woke him up for a diaper change, but I'm still not convinced he was terribly interested in the new beach setting. Maybe with time he will learn to enjoy life out here in Gabon as much as the rest of the family does! (Not that he's complaining)

By Popular Demand

Printable pics of family members with Noah:

Mango Mania

As summer approaches here the mangoes start to drip and droop down from the fabulous tree in our back yard. From late October through to Christmas we tend to collect between 15 and 30 of the things a day. And that's not including the ones the neighbor kids reach through the fence to steal or the few Amadou the guard saves for himself before giving us the day's collection. I've been freezing most of them to use throughout the year in my banana-mango bread.

I'm told that snakes like mangoes a lot too and that we might want to pull the swing set a bit forward so as to avoid an unwanted snake-on-head-while-swinging type of incident, but then there just wouldn't be any shade for the kids. And doesn't the American swing set just look so pleasantly out of place under a mango tree?

Here's a bunch I'm just waiting to grab when they fall:

Every morning Amadou strolls around and picks up the masses of mangoes on the ground. If you're in the vicinity you can hear them fall when they hit. I guess it's just a matter of time before one bonks a swinging kid on the head. Will make for a wonderful childhood memory, though. (The best story I myself have is of a bird pooping on my head while walking to school one day - much less exotic.)

Here he is with a few from the morning's harvest:

And this is what we got this morning. Yummmmm. Definitely worth dodging the mosquitoes for!

Birthday Guy 2007