And by hot, I mean really, really, really hot. An absolutely pitiless sun beats down constantly, its skin peeling intensity in no way mitigated by the occasional cloud cover. If anything its rays are refracted--diffused--so somehow they envelop you from all sides. The air doesn't move. A puff of wind is an event. The ground is baking hot and the spaces--whether in crowded traffic of Monrovia or the dense vegetation of the bush--are close. Everybody--everybody--is covered with a thick sheen of sweat. On those rare occasions when your room does have an air conditioner or a slow moving fan, you will leave it and within moments find your clothes wringing wet as if you've just emerged from a pool.
Red dust from the roads mixes with the sweat, creating almost a paste around your collar and under your arms--clinging to everything. Even the cameras are covered with it. The air smells of burning palm fronds and I've been eating palm butter and food cooked in palm oil and drinking palm wine--and when people sweat around here--in the close quarters of the "palava hut" in Nimba Province, for instance: the whole village jammed together, or the airless scrabble club in Monrovia, or the markets, our sweat has the sharp, aromatic tang of palm oil.
In fact, I'm tasting palm now--as I crawl back from the bathroom for the 50th time--soon to return. I've spent the last 12 hours back and forth, never sure which end to point at the bowl first. Utter misery.
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