One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo

by Aaron Barlow

  Yvette was out of town, or it would never have happened. Helene would have told her David was sick, and she would have done something about it. I didn’t see it myself, even though I spent time with him. He would bring me a mango or some other treat that Helene asked him to deliver. He wasn’t afraid of my white skin. He leaned against me if he was tired. I gave him a taste of whatever I was eating and listened to him chatter if he had something to say. I never understood a single word. He was only three, and he spoke to me in N’Gambaye. I answered him in English or French. Mostly we just smiled at each other, easy companions.

  The morning of the day he died, I saw Helene holding him. He was dehydrating rapidly. He looked shrunken, like an infant. She had mixed some honey with water, hoping he would drink more.

  As the day wore on, the older women in the village heard what was happening, and gradually came into the yard. They sat around Helene, not saying much, just keeping her company. I didn’t understand. I was getting ready to attend a school play with one of my students when I heard Helene start to wail. I ran out of my hut and saw her holding David close, crying out.

  Terrified, I stayed where I was. The old women sat quietly, letting Helene cry until she was spent. Minutes passed. Another old woman entered the concession. She must have been waiting outside—for the commotion then the calm—before she entered. She was the woman who prepares the dead for burial.

  Helene started screaming when she saw her. She screamed over and over and clutched David to her chest. She wouldn’t let her take him. The old woman, loving and awful, pried David from her arms.

  As swift and cruel as it was, letting Helene linger over David would have been worse. It was not long after two o’clock and the temperature was high. It was easily over 110, probably over 115. He’d been dying for hours, and the smell of it was already on him.

  I retreated into my hut. I sat at my desk on my wooden folding chair, staring at the wall. The heat was unbearable, but I had nowhere else to go.

  It was quiet outside. I could hear the low voices of the old women as they cared for Helene. I listened to the murmur and slosh as they bathed her in buckets of cool water. She sobbed quietly, and cried out once or twice.

  Eventually, I heard more noise and shuffle. I went to the door and saw that the women had placed several mats together in the shade of a nearby mango tree. They led Helene, who was faltering and could barely walk, to the center. They’d dressed her in someone else’s clothing; the outfit she’d worn every day I’d known her was gone. She sat upright with their assistance; when they let her go, she slumped to the ground. They began to seat themselves around her. More women came into the yard and joined the group on the mat.

  I turned back inside, panicked. I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know what was expected. The person I could have asked was prostrate with grief outside my door. Most of my friends in Chad were men; I wasn’t part of the rituals of women. I wasn’t sure if I was welcome. Sweat dripped down the backs of my legs, and I prayed intensely that whatever I did next would be the right thing. I decided to join the women on the mat.

  The few yards I had to walk from the doorway to the mango tree were long. Everyone but Helene turned to look at me; she lay motionless, eyes shut. I‘d never met most of these women—they weren’t educated, didn’t speak French, and had no reason to socialize with the white schoolteacher. I braced myself for a negative, suspicious reaction. The women shifted slightly to make room for me as I took off my sandals and sat down. They turned their attention back to Helene.

  We sat together for an hour or more.

  Helene was in shock, still and silent. The women wept on her behalf; most were mothers, most had lost children. I cried with them; the sorrow of it was terrible.

  At dusk, a man came to let us know that preparations were complete for the funeral. We stood up and made our way slowly to the graveyard. Thomas joined us, together with the men from the village. He nodded in greeting, but did not speak. He was pale, and his face was grooved with pain.

  The men sat on rough wooden benches in the open air. We sat in front of them, still clustered around Helene on a mat. The service and the singing in N’Gambaye were brief. David’s little body was swaddled in the familiar cloth of his mother’s skirt. The grainy light of the evening passed; when it was over, we walked home in the dark. It had only been five hours from the moment he died until we put him in the ground.

  Two or three days later, Thomas summoned me to speak with him. We sat together outside of his office. He still wore the devastated expression I’d seen on his face at the funeral.

  “Did she tell you how sick he was?”

  “No. She didn’t. I didn’t know until the afternoon that he died.”

  “Me neither,” he said. We sat in silence for a long time looking at the dirt, our feet, our hands.

  “I have a truck,” he finally said. The hospital in Moundou was only an hour away.

  “I have money,” he said.

  “I do, too.”

  “I don’t know why she didn’t ask us for help.” He shook his head. He looked up; our eyes met. Neither of us would say it out loud, for fear the truth would come alive and find its way to Helene. To know it right now would break her. It was only dysentery. David didn’t have to die. We were too rich for that.

  The week after the funeral, one of the older women in the village asked me for money. They were all chipping in to buy Helene a new outfit, to replace what David was buried in. I knew they were struggling to come up with enough, and I could easily have paid for the all the cloth and tailoring myself. But they wanted to give her something. So I gave enough for the cloth, and left the cost of tailoring to them.

  Helene missed school for the next two weeks. The heat was still brutal, and she was listless and barely functional. She lay motionless on a mat during the afternoon hours. She lost weight, her skin looked yellow.

  She showed almost no emotion until Yvette returned. When Yvette walked into the yard, Helene leapt to her feet. She let out a miserable, ululating cry and ran to her. Yvette let out the same cry and opened her arms. The rest of us clustered around. Someone pulled together several mats under one of the mangos, enough for the whole family. Yvette sat in the center, with Helene at her feet.

  Thomas joined us and gave a speech to welcome Yvette back home. He talked about what had happened in her absence. He told us he was shocked that death could come to the family, that he had believed his wealth would protect them. I cried, and so did Thomas’ second and third wives. We had all been grieving silently, along with Helene, and it was good to share it again.

  Yvette told us about her trip. She had been summoned to the capital by the wife of President Idriss Déby. She waited at the presidential palace for weeks but was never received. She bitterly regretted that she’d been gone, and for nothing, when David got sick.

  The household resumed a normal rhythm, though Helene decided to drop out of school. She had missed too much to catch up, and she was exhausted. Yvette fussed over her, urging her to participate in the life of the family. Slowly she started to engage, preparing meals again and helping the older children with their homework.

  For me, life in the family and the village got sweeter. The women relaxed around me. Wherever I went, I was more welcomed than before.

  The heat finally broke; the first rain of the year swept through the village. It happened one night at dinnertime, and it was a torrential downpour. I usually shared a meal under the stars with Yvette, but the rain forced us into our huts.

  I heard a knock at the door; it was Helene. She had a tray of food.

  “I asked Yvette if I could eat with you tonight,” she said. She was nervous.

  “Come in,” I said. “This’ll be fun!” I hoped I sounded enthusiastic; doing this was hard for her.

  I cleared off my desk to make room for the food. We ate t
ogether in the lantern light. The rain hammered on the roof. It was so loud we had to raise our voices; for the most part we sat in silence. It was cozy.

  After we finished eating she gestured toward the letter I’d shifted onto the floor when she came in. “Who are you writing?”

  “My mother,” I said.

  “Do you miss her?”

  “Yes, terribly. It wasn’t so bad when I first got here, but now she’s been diagnosed with breast cancer. I’m worried about her all the time.”

  “Breast cancer!”

  Helene was shocked. Breast cancer is something Chadians don’t talk about. But I wasn’t going treat it like a shameful disease. I was very direct.

  “Yes. She had a mastectomy. Her entire right breast was removed.”

  Helene was silent. The expression of shock was gone, and she didn’t look judgmental. In fact she looked happy. Excited.

  “I want to show you something,” she said.

  Instantly she lifted her shirt up to her neck. I tried not to look surprised.

  “I had breast cancer,” she said.

  There was a long raised scar above her right breast. She touched it.

  “I had a tumor, and a surgeon in N’Djamena removed it. I’m cured now.”

  We both looked at the scar for a minute.

  “How scary,” I said. She nodded. Breast cancer doesn’t often get treated in Chad. There’s too much stigma, and there just aren’t the medical facilities.

  “Did you have to have any treatment after surgery?” I asked. “My mom is going through chemotherapy because her cancer might spread.”

  Helene looked at me blankly. She shook her head. “I’m cured.”

  I regretted asking. There was no chemotherapy in Chad, whether she needed it or not.

  She was still holding her shirt up, reluctant to cover her scar now that it was out in the open.

  “I’ve got this scar, but it’s nothing to complain about. I should have died.”

  That was the situation Yvette had saved her from. Helene didn’t share the details, but I could guess. Her husband might have refused to let her seek medical care. Perhaps he shunned her because of the disease. He clearly didn’t want her anymore, even after the operation, or she wouldn’t be here with us. She wasn’t likely to remarry, and now her baby was gone.

  Slowly she pulled her shirt back down over her breasts.

  “Do you want some tea?” I asked.

  “I would love some.”

  We talked about other, easier things as I made tea over a Bunsen burner near the doorway. I put all the sugar I had into the pot.

  Stephanie Bane was in Chad from 1993-95. She currently works as an Account Planner in an ad agency, and is getting an MFA in creative writing from Pacific University in Oregon.

  African Woman

  Dorothea Hertzberg

  What we learn, when we watch what others endure.

  You came in late tonight to the hospital; in a sharp and rusted metal chair you sat. You looked straight ahead into the dim flashlight.

  Behind you two men stood.

  They have accompanied you and steal your voice.

  They will have a man-to-man talk with the doctor about how you feel and the pain that you bear.

  You will look at the floor and listen as your baby screams for you from behind the metal door. The doctor will overprescribe you medicine for the pain in your breast. The men will go and buy it.

  Your baby’s urgent cries intensify and a woman brings her to your bosom.

  You hold your breath in fear, wondering which breast your malnourished child will suckle. His cries turn to a whimper as he clasps onto your nipple. Oblivious to your pain, his little fingernails and teeth grip your swollen and agonized breast.

  You wince and bear down on your lip as the baby sighs and takes in its heavenly sips. The pain is unbearable, you begin to pant, every muscle straining and tense. The two men have returned with satchels of medicine, as they behold your struggle…and now it is their eyes that turn to the floor.

  In this moment they relent and recognize that it is you who feeds Africa.

  Me, I sit in horror and awe. This kind of strength is unknown to me. An acceptance to nourish and bear the suffering of a nation—without pride, without choice, and without apparent anger—you succeed in raising Africa.

  A gold bracelet bound tight around your wrist, symbolizing that you are but an object to be given to a man. Two gunshots go off into the night, and you become an arranged wife and mother for life. Your chances to dream fading with the sound of the explosion.

  With hidden knees and humbled curtseys you carry a heavy burden. Each day as the sun streaks the sky you will cultivate the land until all of its children have feasted.

  Will I ever know this kind of courage?

  Prior to joining the Peace Corps as an APCD for Health in 2008, Dorothea (Dee) Hertzberg served as a Peace Corps Volunteer (1999-2001) and as a Health Technical Trainer for Peace Corps Pre-Service Training (2002 and 2003), both in Burkina Faso. Dee has consulted for several international agencies including: The Carter Center, Intrahealth International, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, JHU-CCP and JHPIEGO. Dee holds a Master’s of Arts in International Development and a Bachelor of Arts in Social Thought and Political Economy.

  My Rice Crop

  Edmund Blair Bolles

  Getting more than we gave has been the experience of most Peace Cops Volunteers.

  I said, “Have a shoe,” and handed the headmaster’s wife a potato from the school garden.

  Exchanges like that happened when I pushed the edge of my Swahili skills.

  I excuse myself: there is a similarity between the word for shoe, kiatu, and the one for potato, kiazi, but strangers in a strange land tend to be ridiculous, never more so than when they try to adopt some of the local ways.

  There was the time I took my sixth and seventh graders out to transplant rice from the nursery to the farmland. In theory, this project was an important demonstration of a better way to grow rice, the village’s staple crop. Transplanting was a proven way to increase yield per acre: I knew that because it said so on the sheet of mimeographed paper that the Peace Corps had given me; I was in no position to doubt it: I didn’t know what rice in a nursery looked like.

  Flashback to the first night of Peace Corps training. One of the women in the group dropped her voice and asked, “Do any of you know about farming?”

  The cat had popped from the bag. We were all typical Volunteers, fresh out of school, bright-eyed and citified, knowing nothing about farming. Yet somehow we had been selected to teach agriculture to the primary-school children of subsistence farmers.

  We did bring enthusiasm to our task, running to find and grab a hoe when there were not enough to go around. We didn’t want to miss the chance to work under the summer sun. And when it came time for one of us to volunteer to castrate a lamb, I stepped forward.

  Truth be told I had no idea what I was doing. I knew zilch about farming and zilch about Africa. That means I knew zilch squared about African farming. During training, we consoled ourselves with the witticism, “Farming can’t be that tough, or so many people wouldn’t be doing it.” It turned out to be not so easy.

  No, wait! There was something easy—radishes. I popped radish seeds into the soil and in no time at all, even without much rain, I had a row of salad vegetables. Forty-five days from planting to harvest with no maintenance. Now that’s easy. It was also pointless. The people didn’t eat radishes and didn’t like radishes. And I couldn’t eat a fifty-yard-long row of radishes by myself.

  Eggs were easy, too. Almost every villager had a few chickens free-ranging, scratching a living from the ground and providing the occasional egg as a bonus for its “owner.” Rooster-doodle-do echoed around the teachers
’ houses every dawn. I had some hens of my own. The Peace Corps had provided me with the leghorn and two New Hampshire reds I kept cooped up behind my house. They were twice the size of the village birds. One of the local roosters eventually discovered their presence and used to hang around outside my chicken wire making eyes at them.

  Between my three birds, I got two eggs a day. There was always a white one from the leghorn and a brown one from the reds. Every so often the reds outdid themselves, and I had a three-egg omelet for breakfast. My students were thunderstruck by the fertility of the birds and the size of the eggs. Their own birds did not deliver eggs with any kind of regularity, and the eggs they did manage were small, not quite robin’s-egg sized.

  The villagers could see that eggs flowed onto my table like honey and were properly impressed. Even so, they were not ready to follow my example because, while my eggs came easily, they were not free. The only reason my birds stayed fat and fertile was that I fed them every day. I made a feeder (probably half of the practical things I have ever made in my life were made during my Peace Corps years) and bought large bags of feed at a store a hundred miles away. Who could afford that? By American standards, the eggs were very inexpensive; by the lights of a Tanzanian villager they were prohibitive.

  The kind of farming the villagers did was hard work. Preparing the ground was just plain backbreaking labor, and then harvesting was even more painful. “Stoop labor” we call a lot of that harvest work. I found I could do it for no more than five minutes without keeling over. Picking tomatoes while bending over a plant is not as immediately exhausting as using a hoe to build a ridge for planting, but the blood rushing to the head made me dizzy. The students were more determined than I and lasted longer, but they didn’t find it much easier.