In the Belly of the Elephant

by Susan Corbett

  Out on the plain, the baobabs turned into a ghostly herd of elephants, all raising their trunks in salute. I’d never seen a real elephant, not even in a zoo. But I was hearing a lot about them. In African stories, the elephant was not known for being the most sweet-tempered of characters. With their great strength and size, they symbolized pride and stubbornness—two qualities I happened to admire. Without stubbornness, I’d have never made it to Africa. African stories were full of all kinds of animals. And they had all been here—elephants, rhinoceros, giraffes, and lions—when the Sahara had been lush plains leftover from the retreat of a prehistoric inland sea. Now, the desert was a land of ghosts—ghosts of what had been and what could be but for the gift of water.

  I closed my eyes and cast my line out over the deep waters of the Blackfoot Reservoir. I had spent my summer there, after my return from Liberia the previous June, fishing with my family and arguing the way we always did. My father had wanted to know why I had to go back to Africa. My mother had kept wondering where my college sweetheart, Steve, was, and why couldn’t I just marry that nice boy? My aunt had summed it up for everybody by asking, “What do you want to go over there and work with all those black people for?”

  Someone poked me. I opened one eye. Fatima, young and recently married, asked in French, “What did you see this time, Suzanne?” Humor swung her voice up and down like a song.

  I paused. “Un rhinocéros.”

  Fati released a peal of laughter, and Nassuru turned his smile on me. I swear, I had never met so many people with such perfect teeth, a state I had yet to achieve after years of orthodontia. Nassuru, a strikingly handsome young man with the dark skin of his Nilotic ancestors and the long nose and high cheekbones of the Berbers to the north, was a high-ranking prince in the Fulani tribe. He was also the assistant coordinator for economic development projects. I was the project coordinator in charge of developing income in the villages. I was Nassuru’s boss—me, a potato-peasant from Idaho.

  In front, Hamidou laughed softly and shook his head, again. Since my arrival, Hamidou had shaken his head at me more times than I could count. A quiet man who smiled easily, Hamidou drove us to and from the seven villages in the northeastern and poorest region of the country where FDC had projects in health, agriculture, and small business development. He was also a member of the Fulani tribe and a devout Muslim, as were nearly all the Voltaique members on staff.

  Hamidou was very kind to me, and I understood why he shook his head. A young woman away from home and family was a bizarre thing in a Muslim land. Like my father, Hamidou had trouble understanding why, at age 26, I was not home, getting down to the business of marrying and having babies. His Muslim expectations were the same as my father’s Mormon half of the family’s (my mother’s side was Catholic). I understood that. What I couldn’t figure out was why Hamidou found me so consistently amusing.

  That morning, we had driven to Sambonaye, a village of mud huts and thatched roofs at the end of a valley that boasted a stream during rainy season. In Sambonaye, we delivered bales of cotton for a spinning project and held a meeting with the village women. The women of Sambonaye were well organized and wanted FDC to loan them seeds for small gardens in order to grow greens, groundnuts, and black-eyed peas to improve their children’s nutrition. The meeting had gone well, and we would deliver the seeds before planting time when the first rains fell in late May.

  Now, late afternoon, we drove west, back to Dori, into a lowering sun. Nassuru hung his arm out the side window. The wind shifted and slapped its hot hand against my face. A scant scent rode on the breeze, a hint of grass and flowers. If the ghosts of seeds slumbered just beneath the baked earth, would the gift of water awaken them? Only one more month, and the rains would come. I refused to consider that they might be late, or not come at all, as I was told sometimes happened in the Sahel.

  In Liberia, when the rains came, the sky opened up and dumped heavy curtains of silver water. The way it had the day I met Rob two years before. Soaked and splattered with mud, he had said hello, looking at me with those robin-egg-blue eyes. I had fallen for him hard; taken the line so fast it went taut with a ZING!

  I waited for Rob’s letters the same way I waited for the rains. He had written several times since my arrival in Upper Volta, telling me he’d been transferred to Cameroon.

  I unscrewed my water bottle and drank. Hot water moistened my throat but did little to quench my thirst. I had been thirsty since the day I arrived in Upper Volta. Water helped, but I was thirsty for love and all the good that came with it.

  “I got a letter from home office a few days ago.” Don turned, his bald head glistening with sweat. A short man in his late thirties from Virginia, Don’s grin had been the first thing I’d seen beyond the custom’s door after landing at the Ouaga airport. “You’ve been listed as a reference for some guy who’s applying for my job.” Don, the type of manager home office sent to straighten things up when needed, would be leaving for Somalia in a month or two.

  I stopped breathing. “What’s his name?”

  Don frowned and thought for a moment. “Rob somebody…Rob Thompson.”

  My heartbeat cranked up and I struggled to keep my face neutral. “I knew him in Liberia. He had a reputation as a real competent guy. He’d be a good director.”

  Don cocked an eyebrow at me and grinned. “I’ll pass it on to home office.”

  “Do you think he has a chance?”

  “They seemed pretty interested,” Don said. “Sounds like you are, too.” He turned to face the front and chuckled.

  My cheeks grew even warmer. Fati nudged me, and I clasped my hands together, forcing myself to breathe normally. For a year, Rob and I had visited each other as often as possible, a short-distance relationship, me in my up-country village and him in various places around Liberia.

  Rob in Upper Volta! I had seen him only once since returning to the States. He had visited me in Vermont while on a short leave from CARE. But now! The right time had finally come! We would work on development projects together in Dori, then in different countries, build our careers, raise a family. Suddenly, everything out the window was brighter, the heat tolerable, my fatigue replaced with a surge of energy.

  Hamidou accelerated the truck up the side of a bank toward a baobab tree that towered 30 feet off the plain. Its trunk stretched as wide as the length of the car. Just beyond the tree, an old man sat in the shade of a thorn bush.

  Hamidou parked, and we all tumbled out, scurrying into the shade like a bunch of cockroaches. Fumes from the engine mingled with the stench of a goat carcass near the riverbed. Crouching in the shade of the baobab, I pulled my T-shirt away from my back, then breathed into my cupped hands to calm my glee. Hamidou walked over to the old man and folded his lean figure into a squat, sitting on his heels. They shook hands, and Hamidou touched his fingers to his heart in a gesture of respect.

  A breeze lifted the old man’s rags. The tails of a turban hung loose over his scrawny neck and shoulders. Hamidou and the old man talked in smooth syllables sprinkled with hard K’s and T’s, the sounds of Fulfuldé, the language of the Fulani. The old man pulled out a length of string from the folds of cloth that wrapped his hips and thighs. As he tied a series of knots, he breathed and whispered words on each one. Hamidou accepted the string, shook the man’s hand, and rose.

  The sun was at its zenith, the shadows their smallest. Hamidou, Fatima, and Nassuru took rolled mats from the truck and prepared to pray. I sat against the tree and hugged my knees. Rob in Upper Volta! A month of waiting would be an eternity. I would concentrate on my work, not get my hopes up too high until I heard for sure. With a deep breath, I focused on Fati, Hamidou, and Nassuru.

  Fatima unrolled her mat and set aside the humor that made the delicate features of her face so expressive. In her head wrap, puffed sleeve blouse, and ankle-length skirt of batik cloth, Fati was the height of fashion. The best dressed in the town of Dori, the female staff of FDC were among the few women who
had paying jobs outside the home or market. Fati stood slightly apart from Hamidou and Nassuru as all three wetted their hands from a plastic bottle and rubbed the dust from their ears, faces, and heads. Cleansed, they turned east toward Mecca and Jerusalem and began their prayers. The words of the first pillar of Islam, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet,” floated on the air like the buzz of a distant beehive.

  Hamidou had told me that Muslims faced Mecca when they prayed because it was the birthplace of Muhammad and Islam. They faced Jerusalem to symbolize Islam’s connection with Judaism and Christianity and because the Angel Gabriel had taken Muhammad there on his Night Journey. It was during this Night Journey that God gave Muhammad Salat, the second pillar of Islam. Salat required the faithful to pray five times each day: dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and night. At noon and five every workday, no matter where we were, the prayer mats came out.

  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 sche
duled. 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.