In the Belly of the Elephant (3 page)

I sat against the tree, feeling very much the infidel. I did not share their faith, but I enjoyed the stories and rituals of Islam as much as I had enjoyed the robes and incense of the Catholic mass as a child.

Fati, Hamidou, and Nassuru bent at the waist, then knelt and touched their foreheads to their mats. In my youth, back when my tie to God was strong, my own knees had logged thousands of hours in the pews of Holy Rosary Church. Now, seeing the peace on Hamidou’s face, I envied him his faith. I had begun to lose mine in college. Then the pope came to Africa and forbade the use of contraceptives, even to women who’d had ten children in ten years, half of those children dying before the age of five. That was the last nail in the coffin of Catholicism for me.

I stood as Hamidou, Fati, and Nassuru finished their prayers and rolled up their mats. “
Jam hiri
.” We all wished the old man a good afternoon.

“
Allah hokke jam
,” he responded. Allah give you peace.

After three tries, the engine’s roar broke the desert stillness. The truck spit a tail of dust as we continued along the riverbed.

“
Pardon
, Hamidou,” I said. “Who was that old man?”

“He is a
marabou
.”

“A medicine man?”

“
Oui
.” He nodded. “He has lived in that very spot for many years.”

“Why?”

“It is his place.”

Beneath the sand that coated my scalp, a tingling sensation rippled just under my skull. This happened to me now and then, when the differences between my life in Africa and the one I had left in America struck with such intensity, I swear, my brain vibrated.

“He makes traditional medicine for children,” Hamidou said.

“The string is to protect your children?”

He nodded. “
Ensha’allah
.” If Allah wills it.

Ensha’allah
. I was having a hard time with this one: passive acceptance of God’s will and reliance on talismans to cure diseases. Islam meshed with ancient animist beliefs. On the other hand, how was this any different from my uncle, a Mormon bishop, calling people together to pray for someone who’d had an accident or was about to undergo surgery? Had I not grown up wearing a Saint Christopher medal to protect me, wishing on stars and four-leaf clovers? Seemed we all walked around with knotted strings, in one form or another, in our pockets.

Far out on the horizon, afternoon sun shimmered off a lake of liquid air. April, the hottest month in the Sahel, was also
Jumada al-Ula
, the fifth month of the Muslim calendar. One thousand four hundred years after the birth of Muhammad. In Idaho, April was the transition from winter to spring. As soon as the ground thawed, Aunts Nonnie and Ethel would be planting corn, sweet peas, and those little tomato vines they’d been growing on the kitchen sill for the last month. Mom and Dad would be fishing again. All of them content with their lives and unhappy with mine. So let them be unhappy. They were the ones who taught me to love my neighbor, unless his skin was a different color.

Hamidou slowed and turned at the edge of another baobab tree. Gnarled limbs pointed different directions, a road sign in the desert. Just ahead, Dori, my home for the past month and the upcoming year, appeared and disappeared behind a curtain of heat waves. Situated atop a wide sand dune, Dori, a square-mile town of mud walls and sand streets, housed about five thousand people of the Fulani, Rimaybé, Bella, and Mossi tribes.

We entered the eastern edge of town and drove slowly down a narrow sand street noisy with chickens, dogs, donkeys, and children. Near the center of Dori, we turned into the office compound situated at the corner of a large market square. The office compound boasted two buildings that faced each other across an open courtyard. The buildings, like all the others in Dori, were built with mud bricks and a thin cement/mud plaster called
crepissage
. Neem trees, planted for their resistance to drought, stood in lines at the east and west edges of the compound, shading the buildings.

In front of the double doors to the main office, a woman and a small boy stood talking to Luanne, the American coordinator for health projects.

I got out of the car, approached the doors, and stopped. The woman was sponging down the boy’s leg from a bucket of water. The leg was swollen to three times its size from the thigh down, the skin stretched taut. A flat white worm extended from an open sore behind the knee and hung ten inches to the ankle. A sour smell clung to the boy. I swallowed several times.

“What is it?” I asked Luanne, a registered nurse from California.

“Guinea worm.”

Although I had never seen it in Liberia, we had learned about it in Peace Corps training. A particularly nasty parasite, guinea worm infected humans when they drank water contaminated by the urine of an infected person. The worm larvae entered the bloodstream through the intestinal tract and grew to adulthood in connective tissue. The female worms laid their eggs close to the skin, causing a blister, which became a painful open sore as the worm slowly emerged. Victims of the disease had to wait for the parasite to exit at the end of its twelve-month life cycle.

FDC had begun guinea worm prevention by demonstrating how to filter drinking water to the people who came to the clinic.

Tears ran down the boy’s face, trailing wet streaks in the dust that powdered his cheeks. Hamidou pulled out the ball of string the
marabou
had given him and wiped the boy’s face with the open palms of both hands. He tied the string around the boy’s neck, then placed one hand on the top of his head.

“Is that Hamidou’s son?” I whispered to Fati.

“He lives in his compound, the son of a relative,” Fati said, then turned to the woman and spoke to her in Fulfuldé. The woman shook her head.

“He has not had a tetanus shot,” Fati said to Luanne.

Tetanus could infect the open sores before the worm exited fully. Tetanus, once contracted, was nearly always fatal. The boy wore a dusty pair of shorts, and I suddenly saw the little girl in the clinic waiting room in Liberia. I clasped my hands together so tightly my fingers went white.

“The clinic ran out of vaccines last week,” Fati said.

Even though FDC had purchased a kerosene refrigerator for the clinic so they could store more vaccines, Fati explained that vaccines came from Paris and took a long time. Planes broke down, flights were canceled, or, more often, vaccines were rerouted to the more populated areas in the south. Djelal, the Dori office assistant director, had gone to Ouaga a few days earlier to discuss Dori’s vaccine problem with the government health department and to visit a few of the private clinics that carried their own vaccine supplies.

“Djelal is supposed to return tomorrow,” Luanne said. “He’s buying as many vaccines as he can until the clinic gets their next shipment.”

Fati talked with the boy’s mother about keeping the wound as clean as possible until he could be vaccinated. In the meantime, the boy had the
marabou’s
string to protect him.

Hamidou and I followed Don through the double doors to his desk where he picked up the one office phone and called Ouaga. His conversation confirmed that Djelal had purchased several boxes of vaccine, including tetanus. He would return tomorrow as scheduled. Hamidou smiled, saying he would make sure the boy got vaccinated the next afternoon.

Relieved but still unsettled, I exited Don’s office to find the secretary sorting packets of mail out of a large canvas bag. Mail, the biggest treat, came once a week on the commercial plane, a twelve-seater twin-engine Fokker, from Ouaga to Dori. She handed me several letters and a package. I took it like a kid takes candy on Halloween.

Across the courtyard and into the second building, I sat at my desk, inhaled, and let the air out slowly. I checked the package. It was addressed in Rob’s handwriting. This would be the news that he had applied for the job! I took my time opening it, the way you unwrap a present you know is the gift you’ve been wishing for.

Inside was a deluxe model Swiss Army knife, the kind with scissors, two knives, a can and bottle opener, a corkscrew, and an ivory toothpick. There was also a letter. An expressive writer, Rob described the lush wetness of Cameroon and the food aid work he was doing.

Devouring the news, I turned to the second page. “I won’t be taking the Upper Volta job,” he wrote. “I’ve met an old friend from my Peace Corps days, a woman…” The last line at the bottom said, “Thanks for the great times.”

All sound stopped but the rush of blood against my eardrums. My vision narrowed to the Swiss Army knife. The white cross stood out bright against the red cover. The knife’s stainless steel edge reflected the vivid green of a leaf outside the window. I turned the letter over a few times, the edges of the lightweight paper trembling in my hand.

Why send a knife with a Dear Jane letter? What was I supposed to do, slit my throat with it? Or, was it his way of compensating me for the two years we had been together? That’s all it was worth? A Swiss Army knife? I rubbed my thumb over the smooth white cross. At least it was a deluxe model.

The son of a bitch.

Chapter 3

Muhammad’s Journey

May/Rajab

In my dream, I sweltered, wrapped in blankets under a blistering sun. Deep in sleep, I could not wake up, tried, dreamt I did, only to find I still slept. A pillow of heat pressed against my face. Forcing my head sideways, I broke the dream and woke with leaden limbs and a pounding head—the afternoon
sieste
hangover.

Sunlight filtered through the branches of the two neem trees that sheltered the hammock in my courtyard. Above me, slender leaves lay immobile against a white haze of sky. No air passed to ease the oppressive heat. I lacked the energy to get up and return to the office for the second half of my working day.

I had seen a Wolof proverb once, written in black paint on a whitewashed wall somewhere:
One does not have to learn how to fall into a pit; all it takes is the first step, the others take care of themselves.

In the month since Rob’s letter, each day of the unrelenting hot season I had questioned whether I could survive for another year in a foreign land on my own, again. Most days were a resounding NO!

What good could I do anyway? According to the BBC, UNICEF had just predicted twenty million Africans would die from famine and war in the next decade. The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was already falling apart. Eight American soldiers had died attempting to rescue the hostages in Iran. Hell, they hadn’t even gotten anywhere near the embassy. I lay in the hammock, miserable and hot, unwilling to get up.

Depression was relatively new to me. My sister, Tricia, had suffered from cyclical depression her whole life, as did Lily. I knew their depression was chemical. Tricia’s was a deep river of melancholy that ran in her blood. Lily was like a bottle of soda pop, so full of effervescence she overflowed now and then and left herself half empty, flat and immobile, until she filled up again.

Mine was just a heart torn open by a barbed hook. That’s what happened when fish went for the bait too fast and swallowed it whole. When the hook came out, it ripped out a few guts with it.

Rob had been in the dream, wrapped up somehow with the blankets. Lily had warned me about Rob that day we threw the
I Ching
. There had been an additional six lines at the top: A goat butts against a hedge. It cannot go backward, it cannot go forward. Nothing serves to further.

I had chosen not to see those lines. Hell, I’d practically taken a stick and poked my eyes out.

Lily’s recent letter lay on the low table next to the hammock. I had written, telling her of Rob’s Dear Jane letter and my inability to shake a terrible sense of hopelessness. She wrote back to remind me of the time she had not shown up in class for several days. Three of us had picked the lock to her room, found her in a deep funk in bed, and thrown candy at her until she got up. Her piece of candy to me was to use mental imagery to banish Rob.

“Imagine he’s in a canoe on a river,” she wrote. “Then imagine him going around a bend and out of sight.”

Closing my eyes, I tried it again. But he kept getting snagged up on a log, sitting there in the canoe, whittling a stick with my new deluxe Swiss Army knife.

“Shit.” I pulled myself out of the hammock. If Lily could get up, by God, so could I.

I shuffled across my patio to the
barik
, a fifty-gallon barrel that held water for drinking and washing. The water level had dipped to well below half. I picked up a gourd, leaned into the barrel, and scooped up the last of the water, pouring it into a tin bucket.

With the bucket, a towel, and a cotton shift off the clothesline that stretched between the house and the tree, I walked the path to the hut that served as my bathing room, and pushed aside the mat to enter. My “shower” had a cement floor, walls of mud brick, and an open ceiling of tree branches and sky. I set the bucket on the floor and hung the towel and dress on a nail high on the wall. A tin cup dangled on a second nail.

I unwound my
pagne
, a square length of cloth worn as an all-purpose wraparound, and draped it over the towel. The sun dappled my skin through the leaves. Blissfully naked, I poured water over the back of my neck and hair. The cool water sent a shiver down my spine and banished the pounding from my skull. Straightening, I splashed water over my upturned face.

An image came, unbidden. Aunt Ethel stood against a green backdrop of alfalfa fields, hanging fresh-washed towels on a clothesline. Hands mottled with sunspots, she wrapped each towel end over the line and fastened it with a clothespin.

The image faded. My own hand, holding the tin cup, had the same wide palm and long slender fingers of all the women in my father’s family. My father called them piano hands—strong hands, working hands.

I continued to dip and pour. When the water level no longer filled the cup, I picked up the bucket and doused my head with a final splash—the ritual of the bucket bath.