Pirker Across the Browlek

by Simone Scott

One of the nicest passports ever to come my way was presented to me today. From Burkina Faso. Its cover is multicolored (very rare), its red-and-yellow emblem stands out against a dark green background.

The man to whom this passport belonged told me Burkina Faso is complicated and wonderful, vibrant but rife with contradictions.

He was a professor on his way to a college in New England, so his English was impeccable, and right after he said that I thought: That’s an interesting choice of words, but can’t most places be described that way? So I asked him if he could explain what he meant, and once he saw that I was paying close attention, he thought about it for a minute.

“It’s not easy to explain my country.” He leaned across my counter as he spoke, his voice low and steady. “I love it, but I cannot live there. I feel pride and shame together at the same time. There is no word for this in your language, correct?” He squinted at me, waiting. “I have wondered about this for a long time.”

I looked up at the fluorescent lights and shuffled through my mental dictionary. “I’m afraid there isn’t,” I told him. “Maybe you can work on creating this word up at the university.”

He smiled and shook his papers.

Once he’d passed, I chuckled. How many people really have a need for such a word?

I decided to conduct a test on the next few groups of people—a couple from France; two young men and a girl, traveling together from Spain; a woman in her sixties from Latvia.

“How’s France (Spain, Latvia) these days?” I asked. “A vibrant place, rife with contradictions?” I wanted to re-create my conversation with the professor, to see if they would reach the same conclusions.

“Ripe?” the French asked. I used what French I have to get my point across, but they still didn’t understand. The kids from Spain smiled and agreed, but they seemed like a bunch that was willing to say yes to anything America presented. The Latvian woman spoke very little English, and since it’s not every day that I meet someone from Latvia, I got excited and went off track.

“How do you say ‘How are you?’ and ‘Fine, thanks’ in your language? Is it Latvian?”

I took out my language notebook and started a new page. I have phrases from all over the world. The languages I speak best are Spanish and French, because these are the ones that I practice the most, next to German. Since I sit on the edge of the United States, it’s important to understand what people are saying to me and vice versa, don’t you think?

The woman tells me “Ka iet?” means “How are you?” An appropriate answer would be “Labi” (fine) or “Slikti” (not so good).

“But you onley say when you really want to know how is someone doing,” she told me maternally, while chopping the air with the edge of her hand. I put a star next to slikti. It sounded nice.

The woman looked nervously at the notebook, but I showed her it was just words, and she seemed relieved.

I took her crooked, arthritic fingers and scanned her prints. My test about the word for the contradictions had failed, but I held onto my hypothesis for later.

I wrote: A vibrant place, rife with contradictions? Pride and shame...need for new word? I wrote in English under “Burkina Faso,” even though people there speak French. And other languages.


My supervisor has recommended that I consider switching from Customs and Border Protection to Border Patrol, so lately I’ve been bringing home information from work, reviewing the materials for the language, math, and logic tests. Information is strewn everywhere: the stairway is like a bookcase, the kitchen table’s my desk. If Joanna still lived here, she’d be horrified. But after sifting through the materials, I’m not convinced. Sure, there are a lot of people who shouldn’t be allowed into this country, but I don’t want to just hunt them down and throw them out all day long.

“Come on, you’re a people-person, Chuck,” my supervisor always tells me. “We need to get you out of this box and into the field.”

At the airport, my line is always the longest, and that’s long, since the average primary wait-time in Miami International is the second longest in the country, next to George Bush International/ Houston: 62 minutes versus 66.

“Long wait today,” I sometimes say to folks, so tired by the time I creak open the country’s front door that their eyes match the red-striped after-dinner mints I have sitting in a bowl for them on the counter. “The line’s much shorter down in Puerto Rico,” I tell them. “Average primary wait-time at San Juan International is just 22 minutes. That’s the shortest in the country.”

I know they just want in, but I have questions: How long are you here for? What will you be doing here? You here on vacation? Business? What kind? Where are you staying? Are you alone?

Then there are the fingerprints and the background check and the electronic photo. I figure if I work an eight-hour shift and spend five minutes with each person, that’s almost 100 people each day. If I write notes about their countries, it’s even less....