Inflection Point

A name change for Chankan Ouwass and a milestone reached

A programmatic note: In the early going I had Patrick write things and photograph the pages, whereupon I would transcribe them and post them here. That proved pretty quickly to be untenable—the photographs were often hard to decipher, and Patrick was busy with school and all of the demands of his relentlessly manual life anyway. So gradually Chankan Ouwass became a place for me to muse about his progress, illustrated by his photographs. This has worked out pretty well but I don’t think Chankan Ouwass the right name. Patrick introduced himself to me as “a tall boy” and I always liked the phrase, so henceforth A Tall Boy it is. We now return you to your regular programming.

At some point in my misspent youth I idly picked up Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and wound up transfixed for years by the ideas that bubbled up out of its pages. Some of it—hot and cold media, which I guarantee meant something very different than whatever notion it conjures up in your head, I swear—was balderdash, mere probing assaults at best. But in places McLuhan blew my mind and rightly so. His idea of technologies as extensions of human activities has prompted in me a lifelong habit of asking myself what human activity is extended every time Grapple or Macrosloth introduce a new (and likely thinner) bowbob or franglejoist onto the scene. The ur-example given the reader by Mr. McLuhan is the wheel, which abstracts the motion of the human foot as it rolls heel to toe along the ground; abstracts it and then repeats it at a speed no mere foot could ever reach. Voila: Buggati Chiron Super Sport 300+.

McLuhan plays around with idea a bit—hammers and fists for instance; I don’t think he said so but I reckon mastery of fire is an extension of the digestive system. Eventually he moves to the present, or 1964 at any rate, with a discussion of electronic media, including radio, television, and, in later books, computers. These he sees as extensions of the brain itself. I don’t know about y’all but I dig it. But there were some weird bits that McLuhan didn’t get to because he didn’t really live long enough. I have had the fortune to outlive him, however, and I will now ask you if you think it’s weird that social networks look a hell of a lot like a brain—a bunch of nodes with connections that have a peculiar habit of remembering celebrities when they die, making jokes as the general stress level builds up, and periodically eating itself with uncontrollable schisms and rippling waves of anxiety.

Whatever follows from that observation is fecund territory for wild-eyed futurists like Ray Kurzweil. In our case it is enough to note that computers have extended the faculty of communication, in a radically democratic way. Television amplifies the expression of those entities well-enough endowed with cash to afford the infrastructure. The Internet amplifies everybody—loud sleazy conmen with cotton candy hair and mail-order brides, but also a random kid from a tiny African nation. I doubt this is what Jack Dorsey had in mind when he founded Twitter, but it’s a literal example of the world-changing nature of this technology. It should be in the company’s prospectus.

To Patrick I suppose this seems like a miracle. I have little doubt he and his siblings were headed for a bad end; they were living so far outside the bounds of society I don’t even think a life of crime was an option. The most likely outcome would have been an early death for all of them. Patrick probably would have died from the boil he had a year and a half ago, quite honestly. But it’s not a miracle at all, and I am certainly no angel.

There was certainly a lot of chance involved: I could have chosen not to respond to his initial message, which looked as much like a pigeon drop to me as it does to everyone I tell the story to. I responded for the sole and unlovely reason that I like to entertain myself by toying with scammers. It quickly became apparent that this was no scam, but I could just as easily have chosen to not put myself out as I have, as guarantor of his education. I didn’t do it because I’m preternaturally moral or anything like that. To me it was just an interesting puzzle with an objectively high payoff that I felt could be solved with resources I could muster.

A miracle perhaps from his point of view, but the simple fact is that Patrick put his thoughts into a machine literally designed to connect people, and that’s what happened. Likely tens or hundreds of millions of others have done the same only to find that the connection wasn’t quite right. Yet it’s almost a certainty that one would produce dividends. It’s exquisitely improbable that Patrick and I should connect, but it’s a foregone conclusion that two people somewhere would.

Anyway, none of this reckoning shields me from the sudden impositions of reality, often in the quiet hours of the night, when I remember the five of them sleeping in unfurnished mud rooms thousands of miles away. Five people I not only didn’t know but didn’t even imagine prior to that first message. What strange things the Internet gives us.

In Patrick I recognized very quickly a person that would not take the help for granted. I know it pains him to be dependent on anyone, and that he looks forward to being able to support himself and his family; that his every effort has been directed to that end. For two years he has worked with superhuman effort in school, often against powerful tides, all the while keeping his siblings fed and clean and dry and with a roof over their heads. It was our money, my crazy determination, but Patrick’s effort.

And now he’s done. Tuesday he messaged me to let me know he’d finished his last exam. All that remains is to await his final grades. I have no doubt he’ll make it—he’s surmounted so many devilish obstacles: homelessness, sickness, weather, even death; he’s not going to let himself be stopped by something so prosaic as a final exam.

Part of me wishes he wouldn’t send me gifts, but who am I to deny him any of the pleasures of being human. Send me a gift he did, and since you dear readers have stood by my side it’s a gift as much for you as me. I present it, forthwith:

The mystery package at the Brikama Post Office. Patrick didn’t notice that the customs form gave it away, and I didn’t tell him.

Three weeks later, sitting on my dining room table. He must have put aside a few hundred delasi every month to afford the postage.

Everything you see here was a topic of conversation between us—the “juice” in the little packages is what they drink as a treat. We’ve discussed cashews, which are native to the Gambia, and groundnuts (peanuts). Even the little house is a product of the Brikama Art Market. There was also baobab fruit but, er, well, it didn’t make the journey unscathed. The two unshelled peanuts were in the same bag—I kept them out briefly because they weren’t black and crawling with ants.

Here’s what baobab fruit looks like when not covered in terrifying black mold. Guess I’ll have to go to Africa to find out what it tastes like.

Ok so that last picture has absolutely nothing to do with any of the preceding words or images, but I ran across it while looking for the others and a) it’s a great picture and b) it’s got me thinking about what happens when Patrick is standing on his own. This kid seems to be doing alright but West Africa is chockablock with people struggling. I’ve been thinking it might be nice to set up a small scholarship foundation, to assist in the education of needy and promising young kids like Patrick. I have no doubt, in his future capacity as a teacher, that he could identify worthy candidates for such a benefit.

I know nothing about how this would work; it probably needs to be more “official” than how I’ve been managing to date, and while the requirements are fairly low cost I haven’t a clue how one arrives at a foundation that provides enough money without eating its own seed corn. This, if it becomes a project, will be a long-term one, so I have time to figure it out. But if you have an interest and perhaps a scintilla of knowledge, drop me a line in the comments.

All for now. I hope next time to be reporting a successful completion of studies. Stay tuned.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little. — Franklin Delano Roosevelt