Quixote looking for postcards

K: I went out for postcards this morning, acting on a tip from a Chadian friend. I had found a few postcards at a bookstore in the past, but they were images of a pile of mudbricks, a dried river bed and small, dried fish hanging from sticks in various shades of ochre. So, I went to the front of N'Djamena's post office, where there is a garden nursery (logically), and found that the post office was actually open. I walked inside and saw 8 counters and glassed booths open for business - with no one actually there. A door was open to the back, and I could see piles of paper lying on the floor and my curious glance drew a curious glance from down the hall - of a goat. Your days are numbered, my friend, as the festival of meat is coming up next Tuesday. I went outside again and someone who had been watering the plants in the nursery walks up and asks what I want. Oh, this is the post office attendant/gardener. He said that he has neither postcards nor postage stamps, but wanted to know if I wanted to buy a mango sapling. "No... but do you know where I could get postcards?" "Well, there is a guy who's usually here. Definitely on Thursdays. In the mornings, but sometimes in the afternoon. But he's always reading under the light of the lampost over there." Ok, so I wander towards the various people intently shuffling through paper and tables of numbers. They look like they are money lenders and seeing a few soldiers among them keeps me from asking any questions. I ask another guy sitting on a bench about postcards and he points to a bank across the street. I go to the bank, but the security grill is closed and locked, though I see people moving around and working inside. A boy walks up, reaches through the grill, and pushes open the interior door and yells to someone inside in Arabic that the white foreigner wants postcards. Someone walks up and asks what I want. "Postcards" and he returns with a dirty envelope of postcards. He starts handing me blank postcards from Belize, Cypress, Costa Rica, etc. until I ask for Chadian postcards. He looks at me a little blankly and starts really digging through his envelope which is now bursting at the sides from the handling. He drops half of the cards in a bloom of dust and dead insect bodies, but manages to find three Chadian postcards from the bunch. One is of a rock on top of mountain. No vista, no people, no perspective or context, just a rock somewhere, with the only indication that it is from Chad being the phrase in French on the back: 'Rock formation in Chad.' Specimen number two was a faded, torn, scuffed mountain vista in the north, and specimen three was an out-of-focus picture of parched ground with dry weeds on it. My search continues, but we'll see where it takes me next. Maybe I'll get a mango tree.

Greetings from Belize!