“You should see the clouds. The altitude makes them still and definite. They smear and they explode, they lace and overcome. You should see the paths – worn winding and beaten, all leading to the same location. There are ten thousand ways to reach any given spot. You should see the work. How it’s done with bare hands. How cooking takes hours and is only done in bulk. How the women crouch over fires in sheds when it rains and how the men mix cement with a shovel. You should see the land. Lush and green and seductive, it’s pages of a pop-up storybook at best metaphor. The land is jungly and muddy and spiked with weeds and poisons. The slugs that crawl out from another galaxy after a heavy rain. They are fat and bloated with tenacious slime, blazing creeping colors on these roads an uncharted footstep, clinging to anything they cross with alien goo. The ants are a culture, rather than a colony. Lengths of them for days, piled on top of one another, they make their own roads with lanes and signals. The matriarchs with heads like crowns keep little workers guided on a specific line: carry, take, move, make.”
– me, writing about Arusha, Tanzania in 2006
V'Artichoke 