Your Mother Has Been Caught (3)

 [Update]  I really freaking love this memory. It still teaches me everyday, though it happened years ago.  Unfortunately, my computer recently crashed (hence my absence) taking away many of my posts and, most tragically, the pictures I have to post for the grand finale of this story.  So, even with prayer and Divine Intervention, it may be awhile for part 4. But for now you can click here for part 1 and here for part 2 if you want to get caught up on a simple tale of Magic. A Village Babies Fairytale. 


Once Upon a Time....(time, time, time)


          I have seen people light fires since I was a little girl, "How hard can it be?" I thought, "I'm pretty sure I caught all the pertinent details from the lighting of yesterdays fire out of the corner of my eye; I got this."  This is all despite the fact that I've seen "Cast Away" several times and should know better.  It isn't as easy as you'd think, I believe, was the motto of the moment. However, all I could recall from the movie, was Hanks' final triumph. 

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           This was my guiding image as I squatted down towards the logs, lighting match after match and failing miserably to do what I had assumed would happen naturally (Tom didn't even have matches!). I had began with some prep work.  The logs were actually still smouldering underneath from this mornings breakfast fire, but I did recall the need for dry grass, to......well, I wasn't sure for what, but I remembered it being a vital ingredient. Dry grass, check; matches, check.  

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Little woodland animals who will come and do all the work for me while I tralala for their benefit.....not so much. But evening was fast approaching, the troop would be home any minute, I would have to proceed without the animal minions.







            After several attempts at lighting the grass bundle, I realized it was best to hold the brush (ahem) on a downwards tilt so the flames reach upwards (yeah, I was thoroughly breastfed as a child).  Despite this significant discovery I could get no more than a minuscule brush flame going no matter how much I tried to tuck it into the logs and sticks.  Clearly there was a piece of this formula that I was overlooking.  The last light had seeped out of the twilight evening; I could barely make out the shape of the hut in the near distance.


            Suddenly the scampering of little feet filled the air behind me, and the children appeared out of nowhere to swarm around me.  The messenger service had sent me a rescue team.  At first they sat around me shy and giggling, simply watching, but the moment the surmised my objective as I continued to try and get the fire going, they jumped into action.  Their tiny little faces, the youngest must have been four at the most, bowed down, deep into the logs and began blowing, in unison: "Wheewwwww, wheeewwww".  Before I could finish my arrogantly naive thought, "silly little chil-" the flames responded in earnest and caught on, growing quickly and fiercely.  My initial exclamations and huzzahs turned into concerned scolding because they refused to abate their huffing and puffing and were now dangerously hovering over a growing, barely contained camp fire.  I tried to pull them away, only to have them giggle, shrug me off and continue their exhausting stunt.  There was nothing for me to do, but sit back and watch the process with apprehension and marvel in equal weight.


            One by one they finally bowed off the flames and sat triumphantly down on the logs by some unspoken signal.  I looked at the fire and saw that a few of the bigger branches had now caught that deep, hot coal look, whereas before, when I was giving it my best effort all I had ever seen were those light yellow, superficial flames.  And then I understood what I had been missing and why my fire would never have been successful.  These children had used team work and persistence to achieve this long lasting blaze; I had neither the common sense to ask for help nor the were withal to understand a flame does not equal a fire; I had rewarded myself too quickly, sought the end result too impatiently; my huffing and puffing was but a fraction of what was needed for the flames to take root in the logs.  I'd needed the children; they knew it; I didn't. And this realization filled me with awe.  I was nothing but a Visitor, age and privilege had no influence on that fact.


            So, I did what any Visitor would do in this situation: the ritual of thanks-giving.  I dashed off to the hut and returned with a large sized bar of Cadburys chocolate.  This is a bar of chocolate I can, and do, easily consume in a casual 20 minute sitting between classes, waiting for a subway, walking home from the gym...you get? Consuming this treat, for me, is a non-event.

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        I looked around at the sincere, little faces with firelight dancing on their dark skin, and their large eyes warmed from within. I opened the package and slowly broke the chocolate down into small pieces, thinking this would be a pathetic gift indeed, as there was barely a mouthful for each. The Leader watched me with a quiet fierceness; the others murmured amongst each other, chatting about the fire flames and making a distinct effort to ignore the site and smell of chocolate, as if not to embarrass me into sharing what they assumed was just for me.


          They oohed and ahhed as I began handing each their share. I just assumed they would swallow down the quickly melting bits as fast as I handed them out, but as the last piece was parceled off, I was nonplussed to see each had waited until the others had.  The pieces had turned to liquid in their palms, but they still took patient, small licks with many murmurs of appreciation in between. This was a life-event, for me most of all.  Then it took another turn; my previous awe was nothing compared to the deep feeling of wonderment that hit me next.


         The Leader had not sampled her chocolate yet. Instead she had noted that I had not broken off a piece for myself.  That sweet, stern, powerful little girl scooped up half of the gooey mess in her palms and dutifully handed it to me.


          I, the Visitor, was so thoroughly naive, bumbling about with a contrived comprehension of local custom. I had finally realized that my privilege had only born ignorance and the absence of want, born from the surety of nothingness had given these village babies a wisdom I have only read of in scared texts.  Above all, I knew, I was in safe hands...


         
          It was after this moment, with our mouths filled with sweetness, our bodies warm, our hearts a bit of both, that the children began to tell me the reason behind their visit. It had never occurred to me that there might have been a purpose, besides Divine Angelic intervention.  They chittered and chattered in native tongue, like birds returning home at sunset.  I am terrible with languages; my mind seems only capable of retaining English, French, and Other, but for some reason my mother's tongue (ironically not my mother tongue which would be my father's language-ha!) has always hit a soft spot of familiarity in me.  I think I understand it through my heart, not my mind.  And of course, it is always, always the babies I understand and converse with best.


         But the speed with which they spoke and the content of their tale, only gave me a few phrases to catch upon that left me more confused than if I hadn't understood at all.  Translated, it went something like this:


      children:   .......Your mother's is not coming back......so sorry for you.....poor you........
      me: No, she is coming. She will come.
      children: ..........?
      me: I don't know. I don't understand. I don't....I don't know.
      children: your mother is caught!.....She will not come back. (they point to the Leader).........?
      me: I don't understand. My mother is coming.
      children (to each other): She says she is not understanding.
      me: Yes!
      children: You are not understanding??
      me: Yes! I do not understand.
      children (to each other): But poor her, she is alone, her mother has gone.
      me: No, my mother is coming.
      children: You understood?! Oh! You understand some but you do not understand everything?
      me: Yes!
      children (to each other): Ohhh, she understands some but she doesn't understand everything.


             At this point the conversation came to a standstill, as there was no way either they or I could miraculously cross this chasm in communication.  To their credit, I have had many an awkward silence far more uncomfortable than this one with adults who had a perfect grasp of English.  They understood the issue, but it did not offend them (nor should it).  That, perhaps, is the very key to why communicating with children in a foreign land is ALWAYS more satisfying than communicating with adults: those cultural differences are never offensive to children; they rightly see them as superficial and therefore amusing, but innately insignificant.


             However, the babies soon grew weary by simple fact that it was getting late, and they had surely not had dinner yet.  They gathered the young ones up and without affectation slipped off into the night.  I stood and looked around.  "I, myself, could use some dinner", I thought.  It was, after all, getting rather late. They had after all only gone to the market.


             "Where were they?" I wondered, as the children's words echoed in my head, "Where IS my mother?".......


         

Your Mother Has Been Caught (2)

        The thing about playing Visitor in a world such as this, is that it is very easy to forget this is not a game for the people who inhabit it; they are not playing; for them, this is real.


        It didn't take long for reality of living in a mud hut with one mother, one younger brother, one best friend, a handyman/driver, and several village rats, to grate on my apparently fragile nerves.  I thought 48 hours was heroic, but the troop was nonplussed by my decision to beg off the trip to the market and instead bask in some much needed alone time.


        Even alone (save for the rats), being cooped up in a mud hut was not appealing; instead I chose to sit beneath the big tree, drinking leftover tea from the large saucepan.  I am not sure what advanced form of technology was used to divine that I had stayed behind, alone, but as soon as the message was received an executive guard was sent to awkwardly stand on centurion duty in my best interest.  The guard came in the form of an 13 year old boy named Ham.  Ham, ironically, was made up of not much more than bone-thin, malnourished arms, and a great wide smile; he looked to be about 9, such as it goes.  But I have mispoken; among those superficial qualties, he also possesed a valuable gift: the unyielding sense of duty to protect and look after me.  I was willful, desperate, and in my defense, thoroughly Americanized; I could not understand this gift or why I should need protection and set about making myself wholy unagreeable and put off until I chased him away.


       Shortly thereafter, a man came down the path that seperated our compound with that of our host.  He was carrying a jerrycan for fetching water and not far behind him followed 3 young girls doing the same.  It was then that I realized, this path was the main access to the well at the bottom of the hill in the lower fields.  In chasing away my centurion I had left myself utterly exposed to be gawked at by pretty much ninety percent of the village, who would all need to fetch water at some point for their household duties.

And gawk they did.  They were not going to waste this jewel of an opportunity to have a real live Black Mzungu sitting on display before them whilst they carried out one of the more gruesome tasks of village life.  The tableaux I painted, with skin bursting at the seems with extra flesh, legs long and heavy, feet soft, fingers carelessly adorned with rusted jewels, would have been aptly labeled "La Negresse En Chomage". It would have been considered a provokingly ironic piece of art, should the gawkers have had the time, language, or inclination to articulate what they saw.


     Needless to say, I soon scrambled to the safety of the hut, to commiserate my humilation with the sympathetic rats and peer through the small wooden windows, my hubris tucked between my legs. I could hear Aesop's ghost laughing in the treetops. At one point, I watched a man come down the path on his bicycle, pause, and look directly, or so it felt, at my hidden form. He watched and waited; I watched and waited. In a sudden show of bravado, he threw his bicycle to the ground and walked with swagger to the hut that resembled a dog's house. It was not a dog's house; it was, in fact, our outhouse; and this man was now defecating in what I could only assume was a luxury: the privacy of a privy.  He came out and took one more cocky glance my way before resuming his journey. I squealed at this affront, and ducked down into my mattress, having lost all interest in the scenic view. 


     In time, I feel asleep, only to wake to the troop of children surrounding my mud castle with chants for me to come and play. Perhaps the messenger service, realizing my aversion to Ham, had decided to appeal to my maternal nature while still securing adequate watch over me.  It didn't work. At first I sat up in fear, feeling as if the Wolf himself was at my doorstep, daring to blow my house in; my three little hairs were at an end. But soon enough, as I realized the rusty nail that was my bolt was doing much to keep the children in check, I sat back and listened with amusement to their lilting, sing-song chants heroically made in broken English, while the leader of the pack futilely scolded them: "move off, she's asleep, move off!" By the proximity of her voice, I knew she, herself, was too enchanted with my possible emergence to mean what she said. 


       I must have drifted off again. I awoke, the second time, with a Snow White resolve to cheerfully adapt to my novel, rural life. With virtuous humming, I looked out at the setting sun and proclaimed:


       "I will go and light the fire."......

Your Mother Has Been Caught (1)

Once Upon a Time....(time, time, time)


          It was near about Christmas time and the family had decided to spend it deep in the village. Not our ancestral home, but a village in Uganda near to a town called Hoima.  This place had become a kind of home for us as we had decided to commit our love and support to enriching the ancient land and empowering the people.


          The exact place in this village that we called home was a plot adjacent to a man with five wives,  two brothers, and a gaggle of babies between them. He was a prominent member of the village council.


           When we first visited his home to show our respect to his hosting us, we went to the back of his compound behind the main house where there was the typical hard dirt area and a hut for the kitchen.  The babies were everywhere, in all shapes and sizes, with large dark eyes indicating the distinct relation to their father (underneath the dirt you could believe they were the children of a king).  By the kitchen hut lay a sleeping pig with engorged pink nipples, a dusty dog with puppies tucked beneath her, and a young woman beached on a mat and heavy with pregnancy, staring listlessly at the visitors; the flies intermittently landed on each one and all seemed too bored and bloated to do a thing about them.  Every year I've gone since-though it has been awhile-there is always a fresh baby to hold whose eyes still have that blank, blind look about them, but they are large and dark, just like their fathers.


        On this particular occasion, we had come more by self-indulgent capriciousness, rather than dogmatic dedication.  We had come to play.  My mother had charge of three naughty twenty-something year olds, young enough to need her protection, old enough to demand freedom for mischief.  We were carelessly innocent.  It was a perfect holiday brood.


       The abode we called home, in that adjacent plot, was made entirely of sticks and mud and we would giggle when we forgot and tried to lean against the wall, only to have pieces of the house come crumbling down.  Lucky for us no wolves came knocking. Our kitchen was the open fire under the big tree, and it was often here that visitors and family alike would gather and commune.  


        The babies were allowed to escape from the eternal tedium of their lives to join in the adventure of watching and interacting with us-visitors from another world.  When they weren't playing "throw rocks and dirt" or stealing fruit we would have given them anyway (a habit of the perpetually hungry), they were waiting on hand for any instance that they could find to run an errand for us: fetch sticks for the fire, bring us some fresh cut sugar cane, or dig up some greens for supper.  Only one of the wives was actively in charge-it was not the young woman I had seen earlier.


        They willingly allowed us to play with them like dolls, piling them up for pictures, adjusting their torn, insignificant clothes to hide their genitals from the peering eye of the camera. It didn't take long to observe there was a distinct character designation among this troop of 9-12 children. There were leaders, fighters, and a caretaker who managed the disturbing act of maintaining an infant of no more than 12 weeks on his small bony back while playing a game of futbol.  At times I would dare to intervene, lifitng the wailing baby to me, gently clearing the dirt from her eyes, asking that she be sent back to her mother "where she belonged".  But, even at such a fresh age, she new whom to depend on; she would only wail harder until she was back in the arms of the boy. And should she be sent to her mother, within 15 minutes he would come trumping through the dirt path, shoulders hunched and strong, the wailing baby tucked between them in her rightful place.  I never stopped marveling at how gentle he could be with her, a mere four or five years old himself. No, that is not an underestimation or a miscalculation due to his malnutrition: by two you can help your mother with small tasks, by four you are the primary babysitter, by six you will have had your first beer-this is Village life, and we are only visitors.
         


         Or so I thought.....