by Dave Smeds
“Start her up,” I said. “There’s no reason to stay here.”
July, 1990
As I watched the first news broadcast concerning the Termite bacteria, I remembered Grape Nuts. In a flashback to my childhood Euell Gibbons appeared, white-haired, fatherly, pouring a bowlful of cereal. “Ever eat a pine tree?” he asked in his backwoods accent.
The geneticists explained how they had developed a strain of E. coli capable of converting cellulose into sugar. Doctors calculated that the effects, though disconcerting, would not be dangerous in the long term. Politicians justified its release into test populations in East Africa and Bangladesh on the grounds that it hailed the end of world hunger, a new chance for the stricken nations of the Third World.
I kept thinking of Marie Antoinette. Let them eat wood.
August, 2011 continued
We made our way to the main road, a dirt track that would take us down the valley, past Mt. Elgon to Lake Victoria, and eventually across the border into Uganda. The grimy windshield showed us a view of bleak mountains and dust, broken by an occasional cactus or bit of scrub brush.
KoCherop sat between Greg and me, taking no note of the surroundings, a contagious gloom that kept my husband and I from saying more than ten words to each other all morning. It was as if each mile enervated her, until it was all she could do to simply sit.
We approached Sigor, the district’s marketing center, the only “big town” KoCherop had ever visited. It was little more than a collection of dung huts with tin sheet roofs. Nowhere on the wind-whipped ground was there a tree or a blade of grass, only dust, rusting oil drums, black requiem birds, a scent of human poverty. In temperate climates, poverty smells sour, but in hot regions it is sickeningly sweet. Small knots of people gathered at the periphery of the street as we rolled through: sad black faces, pleading eyes.
We kept our weapons visible, but here, as with the boy the day before, no one had the energy to threaten us. They simply stood with the passivity of the starving, hoping that perhaps we were famine relief workers. I did not look at their faces. Though we had an ample supply of food in the Land Rover, we didn’t dare stop and try to share it, or the spell holding them back would have been broken. Our food stayed hidden inside plastic, metal, and canvas, as inconspicuous as we could make it.
I couldn’t save them. There were too many. What mattered now was KoCherop. I could, God willing, rescue one person, if she would let me.
She paid no attention to the audience, though they stared at her beads and naked breasts, which in their minds marked her as more primitive, and therefore poorer, than they. Perhaps they were wondering why she, and not they, deserved to ride. We didn’t stop until long after the village had merged with the dust of the horizon.
February, 1992
“You don’t have to do that anymore,” I said.
KoCherop continued picking bits of stems and stalks out of the sorghum she was grinding. She looked at me with skepticism.
“You don’t have to separate the chaff,” I clarified. “Just grind it in. The bacteria will allow you to digest it, just like the grain.”
“It is meant for cattle, not people,” she said firmly. “You talk like the government advisors.”
“The crop’s been very poor this year. You don’t have much to waste.”
“Do they eat chaff in California?” she asked. She knew that I had just returned from a visit to my hometown in the San Joaquin Valley.
“No. North America hasn’t been infected yet. But it will be. There’s no way to stop E. coli. Eventually it’ll get everyone. We’ll all be Termites. I’m one already. So are you.”
“No, I am not.”
“Yes, you are. It’s even gotten into your cattle. That’s why the dung burns so poorly,” I said, pointing at the smoldering fire underneath the kettle of porridge. There wasn’t enough fiber left in the cow pies to serve as fuel. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed a big difference in how food passes through your system.”
Not being Caucasian, her blush didn’t show, but the expression was the same. I, too, had been embarrassed by the sudden, violent cycles of diarrhea and constipation, and most of all by the methane, though more recently my body had begun to adjust.
“I will keep doing it this way,” she insisted. “This is the way my mother taught me.”
August, 2011 continued
We began to catch up with the refugee caravans by mid-afternoon. The first contained about fifty people, shuffling along at a pace of perhaps a kilometer an hour. It was much worse than in Sigor, for they made no effort to get out of the way of the Land Rover — many, I suspected, would not have cared if they had been run over — and it took a considerable length of time to weave our way through them, all the while aware of their eyes an arm-length outside the windows. Their lighter coloring and thinner features told me that they were Samburu. They had come even further than we, from the vicinity of Lake Turkana, where the normally bountiful supplies of fish had become exhausted from the excessive demand.
At least they were away from the water and its mosquitoes. Fewer would die from malaria.
In due course we came upon another, somewhat larger group, readily distinguishable because some of them still carried significant possessions, either in carts, on packs, or slung on poles. They even drove a pair of oxen and a few bony cows ahead of them. I noticed four men huddled around a bowl of milk and blood, a traditional meal of the pastoralists of the Rift Valley, while a knot of women and children watched, quiet with envy. My hands, lubed with perspiration, slid along the stock of my rifle. Greg gave me a glance, and I knew he saw what I did: these tribesmen had enough strength left to cause trouble should they wish.
Three young men, painfully lean but still muscular, were very slow to get out of our path. They glowered at us as we passed. I pretended to be distracted by the constant bouncing from the ruts and chuck holes, but I could feel their eyes riveted to us. It was like the sensation a woman gets when a man blatantly undresses her in his mind.
The last obstacle was a boy who strode behind one of the oxen with a thin whip. For a full two minutes, though it was obvious he knew we were behind him, he refused to move himself or his animal out of the way. Finally the track widened and Greg began to pull around. Suddenly the boy began lashing at us. The sound of leather on metal made me jump. The boy shouted — a guttural, wordless roar. The tip of his lash struck the steering wheel.
Greg stepped firmly on the throttle, shooting us into the clear, and didn’t let up until the irregularity of the road shook us more than our aging bones could tolerate. He eased off, put the .45 back into its holster on the dash, got out his handkerchief, and wiped his forehead. The boy, his image shrinking out of sight in the mirror, was laughing that his whip had spurred us so well. His poor ox could not have been so vigorous.
“Bloody little blighter,” Greg cursed.
My hands were shaking. I turned to share a sigh of relief with KoCherop, only to find her gazing ahead, lips pursed, as if nothing of importance had occurred. Greg noticed and, like mine, his eyebrows drew together.
Ahead in the distance, well away from the Samburu, an escarpment loomed. “We’ll pull over when we reach that,” Greg announced, pointing. “Time for a rest.”
September, 2001
We were walking down a trail between two plots of farmland, one belonging to KoCherop’s uncle, the other to her brother. For once, the rain had come in full vigor, and neither locusts nor the flocks of marauding queleas had come to steal the grain. Dozens of tribesmen worked the fields, the glistening brown backs of both men and women happily bending down to harvest a bumper crop.
“Why do you do what you do?” KoCherop asked suddenly.
The question had come from out of the blue. “You mean, why am I an anthropologist?”
She nodded. “See my people with their scythes? See this mountain? I am in my place. Why do you live so far from your parents? Why do you go to the forest to study the pygmies, in
stead of having children? You are too old now to start a family. How can you be happy?”
There were occasional times, as menopause approached and I wondered what would have happened if I had married my college sweetheart and stayed in the United States, that I wasn’t totally content with the alternative I’d chosen. But I was able to answer KoCherop honestly, “I do what I do because I want to. My work fulfills me.”
She shook her head, mystified. “I could never be like that. Take me from my clan and this dirt and I would die.”
August, 2011 continued
We stopped in the shade of the escarpment, where we were relatively inconspicuous but nevertheless had an unobstructed view of the road. Greg got out quickly, looked toward the rear of the truck, and groaned.
“I thought that last mile was a mite rough,” he said. I walked around to his side, and saw that we had a flat tire.
“A gift from the Samburu?” I suggested.
“Could be. Most likely the frigging road.” He opened up the rear of the Land Rover. “Last spare,” he said, which we both knew already. I checked the map to measure the distance to Lake Victoria, and gnawed at my inner lip.
I began to help him, but he convinced me to relax, and in exchange I would drive the remaining short leg until sundown. KoCherop and I found a relatively comfortable spot in the talus a few yards away, where I spread out the last of our fresh fruit, as well as bread and, most important of all, a jug of water. The flies were overjoyed at the repast.
KoCherop ate a piece of fruit, a treat even in good seasons and a part of her diet of which she had surely been totally deprived lately, drank her fill, and turned to look at the plain.
“Have more,” I said.
She didn’t answer. Occasionally her glance would dart toward the north, where we had now left the last of the Pokot lands behind. She began taking apart her head-band, running the beads off the ends of their threads one by one and flicking them away.
I am ashamed to confess that my own appetite was ravenous, and when I was certain my friend was not going to touch another bite, I saw to it that the ants had nothing more than stems and gleaned rinds to attack. The sand at the edge of the talus was now vivid with specks of color, an inadvertent piece of artwork created by KoCherop’s cast-off beads, each one a particle of the life she knew, gone. I made sure not to disturb it as I walked back to check on Greg.
He was cinching the last nut. I handed him his canteen. He drained it. “Next time we bring a chauffeur,” he joked, slightly breathless.
“We’re losing her,” I told him. “She’s just waiting until the wind calls her name and takes her away.”
He stowed the tire iron. “Well,” he murmured, “the choice is hers now, isn’t it? You can’t make it for her.”
The words seemed callous, but I had no answer for them at the time. KoCherop was waiting for the world to conform to her desires, not unlike the scientists who had created the Termite bacteria. But the world has ways of turning the tables back around. Now it was mankind’s, and KoCherop’s, turn to adapt, and she was refusing.
Brooding, I assisted Greg in lifting the flat tire into the Land Rover. The winds of upper Kenya had arrived with their usual vigor, hurrying us toward the next leg of our journey.
March, 2007
We were walking along the bank of a river. The drought had been severe for three years, and now the watercourse contained only sand, pocked with pits where the tribespeople had dug to reach the watertable. Now even those holes were desiccated. Thirty years before, when I had still lived here, the river had been lined with grass and overhung by broad, leafy acacias. Now even the stumps were gone.
Ironically, it was the industrialized nations that had benefitted from the modified E. coli. The sugar industry no longer had to boil away ninety percent of the raw cane during refining. Grains no longer had to be as thoroughly processed. But in the Third World bureaucrats became dangerously lax in educating the people about the need for population control, and the added demand for wood exacerbated the already severe deforestation problem. The climate had rebelled.
Cherop, the granddaughter for whom my friend had been renamed, skipped along ahead of us, always alert for a sunning lizard or a pretty stone. We were solemn in spite of the child’s exuberance. KoCherop’s husband had died two months before. This was my first visit since that event, and our conversation had awakened some of KoCherop’s sense of loss. Now we just walked, thinking about the changes brought by time. It was young Cherop who broke the silence.
“Look!” she cried, pointing. Not far off the path, partially hidden in a thorn bramble, stood a termite mound.
Assured that we were watching, she ran over to it and began climbing. The mound was nearly three times as tall as she, rising into a dozen eroded towers. A hyena or aardwolf had dug a burrow at its base; birds had done the same, on a smaller scale, in its heights. The termites themselves had abandoned the site. Cherop explored the structure as much as the thorns would allow, no doubt hoping that one of the nests would still contain something interesting.
I smiled. The girl gave me a big, toothless grin, breaking off a small projection to demonstrate her strength, offering the dust to the wind.
I turned to KoCherop, and stage by stage my smile faded. I had never seen such a bitter look on her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“I wish that all the termites had died ten thousand years ago. Then maybe your people would never have thought of a way to make us like insects.”
It felt like I had been stung. The worst part of it was that she seemed unaware that she was hurting me. I could not avoid blurting out a response.
“Maybe if your people had stopped having so many babies, my people wouldn’t have tried to solve your problems.”
August, 2011 continued
We reached an armed checkpoint shortly before dusk. An overweight minor officer, skin so oily it gleamed, examined our papers with a frown, peering repeatedly at our vehicle’s contents. He spared KoCherop a disinterested glance, mostly toward her breasts. Greg bribed him with two packs of American cigarettes and we were on our way. “Wish it could be that easy at the border,” said my husband. We camped not far down the road, reasoning that bandits might be discouraged by the proximity of the checkpoint.
It was crowded in the back of the Land Rover. I slept between Greg and KoCherop, listening to the wind moan and the crickets trill, unable to sleep. KoCherop’s scent evoked memories. It is strange that an entire tribe can have an identifiable essence. When I had lived with them year round I had become oblivious to it.
I thought about the city, trying to picture KoCherop walking to the supermarket, wearing a cotton smock, smelling the civilized odors of cement and auto exhaust. What kind of fool was I to think that, simply because I loved her, I could succeed in transferring a human being from her culture into mine?
Greg woke and crawled out of the vehicle. Soon I heard the muffled, rain-on-the-roof sound of urine splattering dust. I glanced at KoCherop. Even in the dim illumination I could see the determined, stubborn tension in her shoulders, and I became angry.
“Damn it,” I murmured. “What more do you want me to do? It’s not my fault.”
She didn’t stir, but something in the stillness of her breathing hinted that she was awake. But after Greg returned and began snoring, I convinced myself that I had imagined it.
In the distance, I was certain I heard a hyena laughing, like a ghost of Africa of old.
July, 2011
The refugee camp was a sea of humanity. Our guide was a young doctor who, judging from his haggard cheeks and the red in his eyes, had not slept in four days. Somehow he kept his humor as we threaded through the crowd from checkpoint to checkpoint, trying to find Lokomol and the rest of KoCherop’s family.
A little girl, bloated with kwashiorkor, stared at me as I passed. I turned away — from her and from all the faces, keeping my glance on the doctor. Here and there sat a lucky family with a tent or blank
et to shade themselves; for the most part the refugees simply lay on the packed ground beneath an open sky, waiting until the next shipment of food arrived at the distribution point, or until the doctors received a fresh supply of basic medicines.
Some attempt had been made to funnel members of various tribal groups into specific areas of the camp. Otherwise we might never have found Lokomol.
He was sitting with his youngest daughter propped in his lap. I spotted him immediately; his lean features and long fingers closely resembled his mother. He was, much to my relief, apparently in good health.
“We came as soon as we got your message,” I said. “We’ve arranged for transportation to take you to the camp near Kampala. It’s much better supplied than this one.”
“You have always been good to us, Chemachugwo,” he answered pensively. “But it is for my mother that I sent for you.”
“Why isn’t she with you?”
He shrugged.
Knowing KoCherop, I understood completely. “You want me to try to bring her?”
He nodded. “I am ashamed to ask this of you, but you are the only person I have ever known who can make my mother listen.”
August, 2011 continued
“Wake up, Janet.”
It was Greg’s voice, coming from the other end of a long tunnel. I peeled my eyes open. The morning light was unforgivably bright.
“Time for breakfast,” Greg said for the second time. “I want to get to the border well before dusk.”
I moaned, rubbed the grit from my lashes, and went about the meal like a zombie, hoping that my headache would soon go away. KoCherop sat nearby. I noticed that she ate a full share this time, but otherwise I avoided paying much attention to her. The border crossing was enough to think about, I told myself.