In the Belly of the Elephant (8 page)

“I’ll just have to find something better.”

Spooning freeze-dried crystals into my cup, I thought of Foequellie, and how James and Gnalima, the midwife, used to come to my house to drink coffee before clinic. I missed them, too. Francis and James, Gnalima and Francis’s wife, Martha. With a sigh, I wondered how they were doing under their new government, hoping they were still alive.

“I miss everybody.” I poured the hot water and stirred, then upended the can of condensed milk and watched the thick liquid drizzle into my mug. I’d even been homesick. With the return of the heat, I yearned for Idaho in the fall—the gentle warmth of Indian Summer, cool nights, crisp mornings, and leaves turning the color of rust. Then my sister, Tricia, had written, saying she hoped to come for a visit in the spring. Trish in Africa? She’d bring a suitcase full of my father’s fears with her.

There were once two great powers in the world: Elephant and Spirit Rain. Now Elephant, who as you know was proud and stubborn, was always arguing with Rain, trying to make him agree that, she, Elephant was the greater.

My father was just like Rain, always lording it over me, raining on my parade.

One day they were arguing as usual, when Spirit Rain said in his wet, gurgling voice, “How can you, Elephant, be greater than I, when it is I who nourishes you?”

When I’d told my father I was returning to Africa for the second time, he’d threatened to disown me. Now, he was most certainly sending my sister to bring me home; Tricia—my father’s own little black cloud.

The person I really wanted to see was Lily. Lily wasn’t afraid of anything. I picked up a week-old letter from her and read it again. It brimmed with health and happiness. She wrote of riding horses, working hard, and living in the present.

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment.
Her angled script leaned across the page like a row of falling dominoes.
It is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.

I sighed. Ordinary life. The morning cool was already succumbing to the sun. It was going to be another day of driving through one of the most exotic and isolated places on earth, sweltering in the truck and breathing dust. Another day of walking around the villages, a scene out of
National Geographic
, my skin burning, my head baking beneath my hat. And when I returned, another sunset over the Sahara, another evening to relax in the refuge of my hammock and my books.

A bird flew from the branches above me and landed on the mud wall. My books, my courtyard, the office, the villages, the desert—all had become my new ordinary world.

A breeze fluttered the blue paper of Lily’s letter
. To pay attention even at unextraordinary times…To be anywhere else is to paint eyeballs on chaos.

“Eyeballs on chaos.” I couldn’t quite wrap my brain all the way around that one, but it was
so
Lily. Her quote was from
The Snow Leopard
, a must read, she wrote, and was I coming to visit in October?

I’d been saving my meager intern’s salary, hoping to have enough by October to go to Tunisia. Lily and I would throw the
I Ching
again to see if I was still butting my head against a hedge.

I turned on the radio to the familiar refrain of the BBC six o’clock news. It rang slightly flat—a sure sign the batteries were running low. The British voice began with the news headlines:

“It is the three hundred twentieth day of captivity for the hostages in Teheran. The Ayatollah has spurned a peace proposal offered by Saddam Hussein. Iraqi jets have bombed Abadan, Iran’s oil refining center. In retaliation, Iran continues to bomb Iraq.”

I shuddered at the thought of being imprisoned in a room for three hundred twenty days and took in deep breaths of free air. I dressed and hurried out my courtyard for my trek to the office. At least my self-imposed walls had a gate I could walk out of.

Kitty-corner from my house, a bevy of women were leaving the courtyard of my neighbor, a Mossi woman from the Central Plateau. They all balanced head-pans filled with liter bottles of oil. Early every Monday morning, several Mossi women and their children joined my neighbor in her courtyard to produce their weekly batch of peanut oil to sell in the market. I greeted them, and the women waved as they turned and walked up the street toward the market.

Fifteen minutes later, I walked into the office compound. Hamidou, Fati, and Nassuru stood outside talking to a small boy and his mother. I recognized the boy as the one who had been sick with guinea worm. His leg had returned to normal size, and the sore where the worm had once hung was healing into a shiny scar.

We all clucked over the boy’s renewed health. He smiled up at us, showing a gap where a new front tooth peeked out from his pink gums. His mother thanked us again for the tetanus vaccine. Smiling at her, I thought of the little girl in Liberia. I wanted to pound my chest like Tarzan. We had won this time. We had chased away Death before it had gotten too close.

Hamidou started up the Land Cruiser and Fati, Adiza, Nassuru, and I piled in for a day of project visits to Sambonaye, Toukka, and Selbo.

Clouds skittered across the sky. A jet passed high overhead, probably slightly off course from Paris to Abidjan. Soon, if I were lucky, I’d be on a jet to Tunisia. I daydreamed about the cool interior of the plane, arriving at the Tunis airport, riding horses, and drinking beer with Lily.

We hit a pothole and my shoulder jammed against the door. Ahead, a woman and two little girls walked along the road. They stepped to the side and watched us as we passed. A gangly girl stood in the dirt, holding her little sister piggyback. Just the way Tricia, seven years bigger and older, had carried me up and down the sidewalks of our block with its brick houses and grassy lawns.

Would she really come in the spring? It had been a whole year since we’d driven home together after a weekend with our parents on the Blackfoot Reservoir. I smelled fish and saw cattle grazing along a stream bed.

“Dad just doesn’t understand why you have to go back to Africa.” One hand on the steering wheel, Tricia unrolled the window and hung her arm out the side.

Wild sage overpowered the fish. Sitting shotgun, I filled my lungs with dry air and exhaled slowly, counting to ten. We crested a hill and picked up speed on the downslope. Out the side window, past my sunburned arm, fence posts flickered by. Beyond the fields, a line of cottonwood trees shivered green and silver against a cliff face of lava rock.

“Why can’t he just trust me?”

“Because he’s afraid you won’t come back. You know Dad, he expects the worst and waits for it to happen.”

Just as I had been doing, boxed up in my courtyard, waiting for something bad to happen the way it had happened in Liberia.

The huts of Sambonaye came into view. We drove along the road, flanked on each side by the village fields. Stalks of millet nodded bushy heads of grain, promising a good harvest in November. Hamidou parked the truck.

The sun burned my shoulders through the cotton material of my dress as I walked with Fati and Adiza down the hill to the gardens. Women bent here and there, picking greens and digging up groundnuts. Produce from the garden project had helped them feed their families through August and September. This was hungry season in the Sahel, when the grain stores of the last harvest were depleted and the new crops were not yet ripe. People lived on fish from the mar, eggs from chickens that produced best during rainy season, and optimism that this year’s harvest would be plentiful.

Nassuru talked to the men about constructing grain stores—large, egg-shaped mud shells set up on wooden legs that would protect the harvested grain from insects and rodents.

Fati, Adiza, and I found Emma, who took us to see several of the new mud stoves the village masons had constructed in different courtyards. The women liked the chimneys that carried away the smoke, but the mud plaster around the cook holes was cracking. One woman wasn’t using her stove, preferring the familiarity of her three-rock fire. She promised to test it before our next visit.

Our next stop was Toukka, then on to Selbo. Visiting three villages in one day was unusual and didn’t allow for a lot of time in any one place. But we wanted to evaluate as many of the new stove models as possible, and Nassuru needed to begin planning for grain store construction.

We left Selbo late in the afternoon. Tired from the heat, I rested my head against the window frame until the pot holes made it too uncomfortable. We had looked at so many stoves the whole day was a blur. Lily would have shaken her head at me, saying I was definitely not being mindful of unextraordinary times.

Out on the plain, a mud hut with remnants of a thatched roof stood abandoned, surrounded by a broken fence of thorny branches. Dried up millet stalks stuck up out of a field like broken scarecrows. And I was back in Idaho, Tricia steering the truck instead of Hamidou.

An old cabin with a caved-in roof appeared between the trunks of an aspen grove as we sped by. Over a hundred years ago, about the time my great-great-grandparents were following Brigham Young across the plains, a pioneer had quit the hardships of the Oregon Trail to build that cabin on the banks of Willow Creek. To build his own place.

The memory of my voice echoed inside my head. “I just want to go someplace where I can live my own life.”

Tricia slowed to ease the Jeep across the steel poles of a cattle grate. “That’s what worries him.”

“What?”

“He’s afraid you’ll marry an African, or worse, get pregnant.”

I pounded my fist against the side of the car and Tricia jumped. “God, I can’t wait to get out of here.”

We skirted the banks of the creek and rounded a bend in strained silence. The valley opened up before us and fields fanned out on all sides. Wheat flowed like liquid gold over the slopes and around the base of the hills. A balloon expanded inside my chest until I felt it would break. This was the land my great-grandfather had homesteaded, the wide open spaces that had forged the diamond in my soul.

I had wondered then. What do you do when your spirit lives in the land but your heart can’t stay anymore?

“We will only stay a few minutes.” Hamidou was talking to me.

I looked around. Where we normally turned left toward Dori, Hamidou took a hard right. Something squawked. I twisted around to see a chicken lying in the back with its legs bound. We drove until we found the baobab where the
marabou,
the old man who had given Hamidou the string back in March, sat in the shade of the same thorn bush. Two vultures raised their wrinkled heads from the remnants of the goat carcass. Disturbed by our arrival, they flew up into the branches of the baobab. Taking the chicken and a burlap sack tied with rope, Hamidou shook the old man’s hand, and, while talking, handed him the sack and chicken.

“It’s a gift,” I said.

Fati nodded.

“What’s in the sack?”

“Millet,” Adiza said. “Hamidou is thanking the old man for the health of his nephew.”

A sack of millet during hungry season was a truly valuable gift. Who knew if the little boy had survived because of the tetanus vaccine or the
marabou’s
medicine? Probably both.

As we drove away, the vultures settled back onto the ground, their sharp beaks picking at leather and bones.

Around five, Dori’s tin and thatch roofs came into view. Entering town on the south road, we drove toward the office in silence, everyone half-dozing. Hamidou slowed. Nassuru took in a quick breath of air and I snapped awake.

The market square, usually bustling with late day commerce, was empty. The shops that lined the perimeter of the square were all closed, their fronts covered with tin awnings that dropped down to block doors and windows.

Everyone started talking at once about
la grève
. Fati and Nassuru switched from French to rapid Fulfuldé.

“The workers have gone on strike!” Adiza peered out the windows at the empty market.

My only experience with strikes had been in Liberia. Strikes meant looting and soldiers with guns.

We pulled into the office courtyard and found Djelal, Don, and Luanne standing near the double doors. Nassuru, Fati, and Adiza were smiling. Everyone seemed pleased. It was hard not to get caught up in the excitement, but still, my hands started to sweat.

“Why are they striking?”

“President Lamizana is making the same mistake as his predecessor,” Djelal said. He explained that, after independence, Maurice Yaméogo was elected president of the new republic of Upper Volta. Yaméogo dissolved all political parties except the
Union Démocratique Voltaique,
cut the salaries of civil servants, and built himself a luxurious palace while the rest of the people lived in poverty. Lamizana had overthrown Yaméogo.

“Now, Lamizana is cutting the salary of the civil servants.” Djelal shrugged. “So the workers have called a strike.”

“Will there be another coup?” I asked.

Djelal raised his eyebrows and Adiza pointed.

A military truck entered town on the south road, followed by another. Trucks kept emerging from the dust left by the ones before. After five or six passed, I stopped counting.

We all watched in silence as soldiers piled out of the trucks and crowded the square. I recalled the night in Liberia when a soldier had stopped our car. A boy no older than fifteen in a tattered uniform had pointed his rifle at us until we dashed him a few dollars to let us pass. Soldiers made me nervous.

“What will they do?” I wiped my palms on the sides of my dress.

“Lamizana is just reminding us that he controls the military,” Djelal answered. “Don’t worry. No one has ever been killed in Upper Volta for political reasons. They will patrol the streets, then leave in a few days.”

I kept reminding myself that Upper Volta was not Liberia and hoped Djelal’s prediction held true.

By evening, more soldiers had arrived, setting up military tents, and patrolling the streets. Dori’s small military outpost had tripled its number of soldiers in one afternoon.