MAR-A-6
MARTYRS’
DAY HOLIDAY CELEBRATION:
AN
EARLY MORNING RUN
(MAKING
A WEEK STRAIGHT IN THE AFRICAN DAWN!),
ROUNDS TO DISCOVER A MAN CAUGHT “PINCHING
CASSAVA”
IN
THE FAMINE, AND BEATEN TO THE POINT THAT HE WILL NOT WALK AGAIN, AND THE GRAND
CELEBRATION AT EPHANGWENI, THE NKOSA’S VILLAGE, OF THE TRADITIONAL “NGOMA”
DANCE BY BWEKAWAKA JERE’ TROOP, AND THE TIKOLERANEKO SINGING AND DRAMA GROUP
PERFORMANCE FOR AIDS CONTROL;
A HOLIDAY VISIT TO OUR HOST, THE DYING 82
YEAR-OLD NKOSA MZUKUZUKU JERE
Mar. 4, 2002
Congratulations to me! I have passed the one-week point in daily African runs at dawn! It has not been easy to get out of bed while it is still dark, and with a bit of rain sometimes, and otherwise, an unfamiliarity of the environment and good favorite running routes. But, I had tried hard to continue running when it was interrupted in Mindanao by travel and issues of security so that I had gone for no runs for ten straight days—too long, especially considering the marathon season opening upon my return. But, since I have been confined to the base of the Loudon Station until today, I thought I would take advantage of the fact that I can move out without getting on ear warmers and other cold weather gear, and that I am becoming familiar with the running tracks I have explore around the station here in the very user friendly Malawi population. They are very friendly, always respond positively to me when I call out to them, and although they think the running behavior is a bit daft—especially that a grown man should be running around in short pants (illegal in the days of Papa Banda), I am given the slack of an eccentric. I will try to keep the run going until I ship out on Wednesday down to Lilongwe, for my Thursday morning departure all the way home in the next couple of calendar days. I have been invited to go with the Poehlmans and John Sutter as they are taking a holiday at a game park, and I would dearly love to, since I could serve as a big game, bird and ecosystem guide in African wildlife, and would like to. But, I must be on my way again within a day of arrival in order to catch yet another “once in a lifetime” experience (averaging four times per month) to get the narrow “window” of my trip into Cuba.
This morning, I saw the same pink painted oxcart and its yoke of oxen that had carried the body of our last patients away for funeral burial, down at the streambed where the workers were shoveling mud into the cart. It is all the same to the ox yoke, whatever burden they haul to or from the Embangweni Hospital. I then saw a familiar figure going out to celebrate the holiday—Ishmael peddling his bike with his wife and child on board. At the Church service, Betty had tried to greet the baby and it got such a fright when it looked up from its mother’s back, that it peered straight into the white face and burst into tears. If it had seen a running white man with not only a white face but also other white skin exposed, it might have been even more frightened, but it never had a chance as we two moving vehicles passed on the road like ships in the night. I am going to try to teach prostatectomy tomorrow to Clinical Officer Ishmael and the last of the patients we have to get done that is still pre-op on the ward.
I had talked with George and Betty last night after our unusual evening activity—we watched a DVD movie projected by the In Focus projector, on a spoof documentary on beauty pageants called “Drop Dead Gorgeous.” The setting of this “movie attendance” in remote Malawi made the farce even more bizarre than it might otherwise have been. But, at the same time I had talked with them about their volunteer three months service here, before signing on as PC-USA missionary specialists for a year. They had written to Bob Ellis and Dorothy Brewster-Lee on Witherspoon Road in Louisville, KY and found themselves coming back for a year’s contract from January to Christmas. They went through an orientation for a group of people going out to various places under various churches, including Episcopal and a few Catholics in a nursing home in downtown Santa Fe New Mexico, where they spent two weeks being told what to expect when they went to the place they had just come from for a several month stay. But, it was an overall good experience and one they recommend. All that was needed was a letter from a sponsoring church, which implied no special financial obligations, but the Presbyterian Church in Leesburg VA where they had once been members has made their cause the further support of this station, and helped to put up the community resource of Tikoleraneko, without any component part of evangelism, locating it on the corner of the mission station so as not to identify it with the church.
The PC-USA gave a salary that was good enough to live on if you never left the station, but would not be adequate to cover the expenses of even in-country travel to a holiday spot, for example, and certainly would not cover expenses of ongoing obligations back home. But, they did cover the big item of fringe benefits, including health insurance and medical evacuation insurance, although disability insurance was purchased separately. The biggest disability risks would be viral—HIV, Hepatitis, or rabies.
AND A FOOD THIEF,
CAUGHT IN THE ACT
I thought of the churches back home and the good-hearted women who had been knitting little baby hats and rolling bandages, which I often thought in a somewhat cynical fashion was a way to get a coffee kletz going with a conscience salve thrown in. But, on rounding through the maternity service, saying in a similar cavalier cynicism—“Let’s see just how many of my high risk abdominal deliveries of tiny infants into the hostile environment of Tropical Africa are alive this morning.” The all were, thank you, and they were all being kept warm by those little knot bonnets. Without those rolled bandages many patients would not have had their wounds dressed, and the little caps and blankets were positively life saving. My C-section patients were all fine, and we discontinued most of the IV’s and discharged several of the patients who had been operated like the hysterectomy woman who is doing well. One thing surprised me on entry into both the female ward and the male ward, is that my last pre-op patients had reasons they wanted to be postponed, while we told them if they wanted to wait, there would be no surgeon here to do them, and they weakened. The last of the pre-op large prostates has been carrying a catheter for a few months and can see right across the beds from him, two men who are now fixed from the is problem, and still wanted to go home and come back a few weeks later—when the people I had trained here to do them will probably not yet be ready to take on such an operation without help from me or someone better qualified. The young bride who was returned after she had many seizures in the one brief month she was married and was burned in a cooking fire during a serious seizure, announced through a translator that she wanted to go home since nothing was being done for her here, and she needed to have herbs put on her wounds. If she could look down and see that one leg was all resurfaced with a 100% “take” of the split graft I had put on last week, and the other has been all prepped up for tomorrow’s skin graft, she could see which limb she though looked better, particularly with the exposed Achilles tendon still awaiting treatment which we were all set to do in the morning. Her “Gogo” agreed, but the patient still insisted that she had come to the hospital for medicine to heal this and she was not getting what she knew to be medicine, and that is the traditional herbs and knicks in the skin from the traditional African healers. So, I will see if she is there tomorrow, disappointed as she seems to be, that her one leg is all healed with a completely successful skin graft, and the other side ready to do, but she is not getting a blackened paste applied to here head and other body parts which she knows to be the real medicine that actually works in Africa on Africans, whatever these Wazunga say. Score one for credibility of the Sangoma!
And, now, a new patient on the male ward. He was sullen and sleepy, lying prone with no information except that which we found when we could find the chart. He had been caught stealing, it said, and had been beaten. I’ll say. He had a laceration of the occipital scalp that the nurses had stitched as well as the right ear, which was torn half off. But, these were trivial until I found that his right leg was shattered, with an OPEN fracture of both tibia and fibula comminuted into a bunch of shards of bone. He may never walk again or get so much osteomyelitis that he will need an amputation—as was the fate of the last patient with such an injury here. He will need a prolonged hospitalization and I will not be here for orthopedic management, so we had better send him up the road to Mzima (which, I just lerned, means "the body". He cannot go as a bicycle passenger—the way he was brought here last night—but will need to get on some form of motorized transport over rough roads—which cannot be comfortable with an unstable fracture in a dozen pieces.
Only later in the day did I learn what it is that he was trying to steal—he was trying to “pinch cassava” the Nkosa had told me. In such desperation to eat, he had tried to uproot the tasteless root and make a paste of this woody pulp to keep his hunger down. The pain of hunger was life changing for him when he got his hands on someone else’s planted cassava—it has made him first a threat to life and now to limb. It is only sever hunger that can drive someone to this danger, and we will learn later how severe this is and how long it has been since anyone has seen anything similar, as Malawi should be entering good times in the end of the rainy season with enough rain this year, and none of the well-publicized previous problems of drought, yet, in these, the best of times, food is so scarce, that stealing raw pulpy root product from the field is enough to get killed. It is not because food is increasingly scarce, it is because every year there are just far too many Malawians trying to exist on a very marginal subsistence resource base in a very fragile fluctuating environment. There will NEVER again be plenty, and they will FOREVER remain dependents on the outside world for charitable aid, which may allow still more Malawians to be fed by outside sources that may never be sustainable. So, what to do? Well, one of the Malawians had at least one response to food security—go get some. And at least a couple of other Malawians, every bit as desperate as their harvest is not yet ready to bring in, had another response to food security—beat to death anyone hungry enough to encroach on my tenuous food stack, as I have no reserves either. And, so goes the future scenario of much of the Third World, sliding into entropic collapse
Our big celebration party at the Nkosa’s village was supposed to have taken place on Saturday, but he had a funeral to attend. The same was true the next day, so we agreed that it would have to be on Martyrs’ Day Monday no matter what, since it seems that there are increasing numbers of funerals every day, and there cannot be any planning around them, since they are gong to be with us in increasing numbers—as ever increasing as both the population and the hunger problem. It is not a crisis—this implies there will be some change and they may be able to “get over it.” It is critical, and getting worse, and outside help is not only necessary, it may be chronic and as it becomes reliable here as the crisis is institutionalized, the dependency may create more hunger in more hungry people rather than less. Ah, Africa!
“FOUR BABY BIRTHS AND A FUNERAL”
Remember the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral?” Well, I have my own take on that ratio here, since I have just done some of my own calculation and come up with a short-term happy note, with an ominous implication of the longer term future that means nothing but doom to this area of Africa. If one glance at the soils of Malawi and a quick look at the population does not give you the picture, and you have heard only of AIDS in reference to this area of the world, let me give you my own experience of these two weeks as a sample “biopsy” of the impending problem. My sample size may not be that small, and it may reflect rather accurately what is coming next. I call it: “Four Baby Births and a Funeral.”
It is true that there is an AIDS funeral every day and there may be even more, as the reliability of the grim reaper coming through behind this plague is well known to everyone here now, and if it has not yet sunk in deeply, it should be even more dramatically portrayed by the end of the day n the Tikoleraneko dramas for the public. Yes, there is a very regular experience with death and dying here, and AIDS is its chief cause. But, consider the numbers and the ratio I have just mentioned—a long way from “ZPG” in this unsustainable and unforgiving environment as a source of food.
Four babies have been born daily here, six or seven of them with my help, coming out abdominally rather than the higher number of “SVD’s” reported each morning from the Maternity service. “Spontaneous Vaginal Deliveries” are happening not only here in the Embangweni Hospital, but all around the area in “Home” (make that “Hut”) deliveries, and many of those by TBA’s (“Traditional Birth Attendants.”) These are no slouches at popping out a lot of squalling Malawi babies, and most have been trained by Mama Chima herself, and given a kit, including a clean blanket and an umbilical cord tie (a portfolio of office, and this official imprimatur is not one to be treated lightly, with all the economic implications of a New York City taxi medallion.) Considering only the Maternity Service in the Embangweni Station, they are delivering 2200 babies a year here with the midwives in attendance. If this average of four daily births is considered against this area’s depressing “child survival” statistics, showing that one in four of these infants will not make it to age five, that is still a ratio of 1:3. This is an unsustainable ratio. It leads to a population growth in a nation already unable to feed itself on the good years—this being one of them, but at the end of the rainy season without the failure of the rains and the frequent plague of African drought, this nation is starving. The headline in “the Nation” (yes, there is a tabloid “Registered at the G. P. O. as a newspaper”) for this weekend reads “Maize Thefts Rampant.” People cannot wait until the corn is ripe, but are ripping into it now to get whatever calories they can from the immature ears and even stalks—foraging like cattle. And it may be better for you to forage in your neighbors hard-tilled garden than your own so that you have a bit of the real thing when it comes to harvest time—unless your neighbor finds out about your plan and reacts to it. You had seen the results of my rounds this morning, and many more acts of vigilantism have not made it to the hospital, since the inside story on this headline is “Angry Mobs Kill 7 As Maize Theft Rises---Villagers guard gardens round the clock.”
This is life at the subsistence margin in a good year—what will happen if the rains fail? Why is there a perpetual misery here in this corner of the African continent where it would seem the “Warm Heart of Africa” might be even more than a tourism board slogan?
Look back
again at my “Four Baby Births and a Funeral.”
Yes, AIDS is a devastating plague in Africa in general where most of the
disease burden is falling. But, the
more lethal small killer is the fertilized ovum. Even after horrendous childhood mortality, (and the death rate
reported at rounds was four children in the NRU for the weekend—with AIDS
coming in well behind kwashiorkor and marasmus as the leading killers) that
still leaves a 3:1 ratio of new mouths to feed in an area that is so marginal
that it will NEVER be off dependency on some “outside” food surplus to prevent
them all from dying. Right now, the debt
service is much higher than the nation’s GDP, and the vast majority of all the
government’s expenditures are directly from foreign aid resources. This government has failed, it cannot
protect its citizens from starvation (and never could) and the people
themselves are guarding their food plots, hungrily watching them ripen in
vigilantism. Far from a consumer
surplus, there is an annual and recurring, and increasing consumer
deficit. There is nothing that can be
done with the fertility rate flooding the country with mouths to feed when it could
not do that in the good years under the best of management, and even so
horrendous a lethal problem as AIDS cannot make up the difference. There is only one solution that is possible
without the outside aid dependency or some miracle of indigenous food
production that cannot be foreseen and should not be counted on: The Death Rate Must Rise to the Birth
Rate.
Even AIDS is not doing that. AIDS cannot do that. Some from of “birth control” must be applied immediately in the forefront of the “death control” of the kind of treatments I have been pursuing. At least a dozen of these births were non-viable without a lot of energy input, most of it in surgical obstetrics and resuscitation. The best “child survival” method is a live, well nourished and educated mother who does not have distractions of a dozen children, and the latter is more the rule than the former. So medical care, of the kind compassionately given at Embangweni Hospital is exacerbating the problem of the Malawian Malthusian dilemma.
In the family planning program information, the pamphlets say that the condom, distributed to prevent the passage of HIV, may also be helpful in the prevention of STD dissemination. If it would have any effect at all to prevent inevitable death, it would also be in pregnancy prevention. In my own personal history, in that of each o f my sons, with two children for each of us, the question I am asked by the even-educated Malawians is “Oh, so sorry; only two?” And therein lies the “seeds” of “Four Births and a Funeral.” AIDS is an awful problem. But the worse one is the one everyone here seems to have ignored, considering the “safe (repetitive) motherhood” of medical care an unmitigated good. I had written an essay after my first visit to Malawi in 1996, entitled “Malawi: The Warm Ovary of Africa.” When I was here then, six years ago, AIDS was a growing problem. It has become steadily worse at an arithmetic rate. The population at that time was a problem. It has become worse at a geometric rate. Health care, as compassionate and kind and caring as it has been, has been one of the chief exacerbating factors in the further humanitarian devolution of the standard of living of the majority of Malawians in that interval.
AND VISIT WITH OUR
HOSTING, BUT INDISPOSED,
“ NKOSA MZUKUZUKU
JERE”
You may be ready for happier thoughts by now. OK, we will launch into a healthy and happy day’s activities, centered around—you already guessed it—AIDS.
We stopped at Tikoleraneko (at TIKO 12* 08. 37N, and 22* 20.22E) and drove the 7 km over to the chief’s village of Ephangweni (at EPHA 12* 10.35 N, and 33* 27.57 E) where the Nkosa has his TA (Traditional Authority). The Malawian central government does not extend this far out into the bush (if its basket case economy can be said to control even the capital where all of Muzulu’s ministers and operatives live in somewhat rotund splendor. We pulled up to the Magistrate’s Court, an open air building with a laughable name inscribed on its wall to suggest august authority. The power wielded by the TA’s is usually exercised through the Ndumas, the retainers he has to do his bidding and to find out what is happening.
Since we saw him last weekend, the Nkosa is going downhill fast. He had assumed power in 1953 through the arcane process of succession that no one here is willing to talk about since it would imply that he is not up to full speed. He is 82 years old, and has had seven wives and 47 children. When the last of his wives died a few years ago, the Presbyterian Church welcomed him into full communicant membership, since he had apparently repented of polygamy, and had no more wives. His eldest son was to have been the heir, but he had married a capable woman named Blandina, and moved to Zuma to start a fly fishing shop and trout syndicate of the type that I had been involved in in the highlands of the Transvaal in South Africa. He was killed on a motorbike there, and his widow Blandina moved back to care for the Nkosa who had begun to fail.
What the nature of his illness might be is beyond public speculation, and George had asked him if he had had the test when he was seen down in South Africa. “Yes, I had an X-Ray” was his response. Most people here who have a rapidly wasting disorder do not have a mysterious illness, though, and we are going to find out if he should have “the test.” In any event, he was not on the dais where I was so prominently seated for the coming festivities in his village, where we had been programmed to appear with our traveling thespian production, postponed three times by the perpetual funerals. Now, being Martyrs’ Day, it would be an even bigger event, and to make sure of that the Bwekawaka is here—allegedly the “son” of the Nkosa, but really the son of one of his twenty or more brothers, since al the male relatives on the father’s side are called “dada, whereas only those on the female side are called “uncles.”
He is the tireless leader of the dance troops and the adjudicator of the orthodoxy of the Ngoni traditions here. We would se the “full Monty” of the performances, since I am “up front and personal” with the whole of the dances, songs and drama to be performed under my nose on the dais, with four cameras and the tape recorder primed to take in the event.
But, we are too early; after all we are two hours behind the time it was scheduled to start. We will have to wait. I climbed up on several of the “kopjes” (to use the Africans term), which are granitic rock outcroppings that are hardened lava flows. They look like the mongas of the Congo, except that they did not sound hollow under ringing footsteps. They allowed the first views of the surrounding countryside we had got since being here in Malawi, since most of the time, we are in thick savannah bush with limited view. At the far south of Malawi the scarp is up to 3,000 meters high, and includes Mulanje Mountains, highest in all Southern Africa outside the Drakensberg. But, except for a few lava mounds around here—which are said to be the home of the spirits once worshipped around here—I am in flat savannah at 4,000 feet.
I was an object of curiosity, of course, but I could not waste time in a bit of idle visiting since I had struggled to save the time to be here to ---wait. So, I pulled out a sheet of stationery, and completed the letter I had been starting at my room until the electric power faded out. I wrote for another hour as the group of the actors, singers, and dancers assembled, including countless kids who gathered around for a look at what it is that would bring Wazunga to this remote area. I finished my letter as the principals of the Tiko theater group assembled, and sang a series of songs in their typical rocking African rhythm around themes such as “AIDS is a KILLER.” As Bwekawaka gathered his dancers and the start-up of the classic “Ngoma,” with four men of established seniority danced the foot-stamping Ngoma with bells around their ankles and a leopard (or civet skin covered them and the Ngoni Shield was in their left hands and an Assegai in their right or a knobkerrie substituted for it. For a first time, Vincent, Bwekaweka’s son joined in along with the elders of the dance in front of the older women who would ululate in a slow shuffle behind them.
Bwekawaka has had four wives and is looking for a fifth, apparently, since at the last week’s dance in honor of the Kennedys’ departure, he had silver hair. Now, he had his hair dyed with shoe polish, and it is strange seeing him with a black curly scalp. If it works for him, however, I will try it myself!
The “Ngoma” was spectacular, and seemed to go extra innings, since they recognized my tape recorder and cameras, taking pictures in the modalities that would have them on internet, on panoramic, prints and slides. Bwekawaka was in his glory, performing in the chief’s own village, for the gathered Wazungas and a large contingent of the folk from outside the Embangweni audience but the Tikoleraneko audience as well—all of them hams. The assegai flashed—even though tipped with corks. The knobkerries were brandished menacingly at the sky, and the shields were flipped over in what I now recognize as one of the several stylized moves of the Ngoma, along with the foot stomp.
Then followed the protracted drama of the AIDS play by the Tiko thespians—all of them hamming it up well in front of an appreciative audience. Many of the scenes were quite graphic, and they were raucously received. Several of the young girls had clustered around me, fascinated in the cameras and tape, and each trying to touch me in as unobtrusive a manner as possible. One young girl sitting on the cement floor at my side was wearing a scant dress, barefoot, and sitting as close as she could to hear what I might be saying to the recorder. I thought that she and here other blooming nubile schoolmates might be the ideal ones to listen carefully to the message, since by Malawian statistical odds, this was the high risk group that entered into regular sexual activity at age 13—which she reported she was, in standard eight. She wanted to tell me her name “Lompala,” (pronounced “Rompala,” since there is no difference between interchangeable R and L and also between B and V,) and she had a very seductive way of repeating it carefully, then giving her whole pedigree, most especially the name of her father, who turns out to be the Nkosa himself. She had the temerity to approach me since she is the youngest of the Nkosa Mzukuzuku Jere, the elderly head honcho. She told me also about her mother his sixth of seven wives and the youngest, who died in 1996 of AIDS, she said at first, then added, malaria. She had three sisters and one brother, but those that were counted were only those from her own mother, whereas she is the youngest of the Nkosa’s 47 children. I had her repeat this story into the tape recorder, which, like all of the people I have done this with, she was very eager to do, and then froze when it came time to talk, and had a lot of blank tape time.
We sat inside the schoolroom after the long play was completed, and we had a brief “teaser” of the video that George and Betty had put together on their previous stay in Malawi. The plan was to use the InFocus to show the dance done at the time of the Kennedy farewell, and especially to give the clips of Bwekawaka and the Nkosa Mzukuzuku and other performers from that time since it seems that the Nkosa is now too ill to attend the performance, let alone get up and dance a few steps in it. As soon as everyone was seated, the generator puffed out black smoke, then black clods of debris and died. An attempt was made to run the machine off the battery, and that was also a failure, so we had to pack up promising a better try at some future time.
A HOUSE CALL UPON
THE NKOSA,
AND ONE OF THE
NDUNA—ADVISORS—AND NEIGHBOR OF THE NKOSA
EACH IN
SIGNIFICANT ILLNESS
We walked up the hill to see the Nkosa in his house, with his council room equipped to receive us. Mary Bennett ran a videotape of the Nkosa as he entered to see himself on the Apple computer’s battery powered DVD, since the generator had blown, so that only he could see it rather than projecting it on a wall for all to see through the In Focus. Our arrival was expected. As we came up the hill, the Nkosa was sitting outside in a chair dressed in an oversized suit with a stocking cap over his head and thick black gloves on his hands. He waved us imperiously to the front door. He helped himself in by means of an umbrella being used as a cane, but as he entered, he slipped and fell over the overstuffed chair. I picked him up from one side and George from the other. He was all skin and bone, and had certainly “got a puncture” (as they say in Zimbabwe about “Slim”) since he certainly has deflated with the air let out of him. He has a very rapidly wasting disease, and he does not have long to live. His daughter-in-law Blandina, and, to my surprise, his saucy youngest daughter Rompala, came in to serve us SoBo. He sat in his chair with his feet on a leopard skin and his “Chona” cat under his chair. As the video was played for him, he smiled very slowly in one or two places, and clapped his gloved hands soundlessly in another. He looked up ignoring the video except still hearing the old Ngoni rhythms, and seemed to be finished watching it before the film clip was completed.
He looked very, very old, with his voice very soft. All of his visitors bowed reverentially treating him like enthroned royalty. His neighbor had slipped a cog and was seen walking down the road nude, and acting wild, so George had returned to get some Thorazine for him. To no one’s surprise, he was found sleeping soundly, after 100 mg of Thorazine. I moved over to the Nkosa’s right side, sitting in his Nduna’s (councilor’s) chair. He was talking about the fact that never in the past 52 years had he seen such hunger. “Nobody has any food!” He said. He said that a man had been beaten up for pinching cassava. I know, since I had seen the man’s severely fractured leg and scalp and ear lacerations. “Not since 1950 has there been such famine. We must be very good to strangers among us, since we will be dependent upon them to survive.” The Nkosa just proved himself to be a very wise man, who really does know the drill, as well as being informed on everything inside his jurisdiction, knowing just after I did about the assault victim.
The Nkosa turned to me as if he had just seen me, then said, “I know this man!” He then asked,” When were you born?”
I told him I was born in 1942. “Ah,” he said. “Then, you know, since you have lived. My first son was born in 1942.”
I had left my camera with John Sutter on the sofa next to the one the Nkosa had fallen over. He held it up to take our picture together. Abruptly the Nkosa turned to put his hand on my shoulder, and uttered, blessing me, “This man knows, and we will need help from people like him.” John snapped a photo during this benediction.
As gracefully as we could, we backed away from our audience with the Nkosa who now needed to rest. We planned to come back the following day, ostensibly to give Thorazine to his neighbor, but to draw blood on the Nkosa, including his hemoglobin and the HIV test he has not had to date, which is almost unnecessary.
RETURN TO GUEST
HOUSE FOR DINNER.
THEN A NOCTURNAL
NATURAL PHENOMENON,
THEN A NOCTURNAL
SUPERNATURAL PHENOMENON
We came back from our one-day holiday, and had a brief dinner before going to bed about eight o’clock. The time is significant only because I thought it was the middle of the night when I was awakened to come in to do what seems like I could do it without waking up—a C-section for a primip breach. It was only 9:30 PM when the little tyke was tucked under the drowsy mother’s side and wheeled back to the ward under the kerosene lantern. I wandered back to my room, and was still distinctly awake when I turned in about 10:15 PM.
It happened at 11:10 PM. It sounded like distant thunder, then it increased in volume and came rolling toward us in a crescendo, I thought there were no supersonic planes flying over this very non-strategic real estate unless the al-Qaeda had followed me here from Mindanao, and I thought it might be a derailing freight train more likely than a sonic boom. Each was far-fetched, however, in this area where the most common technology is a hoe. As the rolling roar passed me, it dawned on me, with no shaking tremor felt: I am at the southern end of the Great Rift Valley, and this whole Eastern piece of Africa is in the prolonged process of splitting off the continental main mass.
Earthquake! It had no sooner passed than it came back, this time rolling in the opposite direction like a big echo under the rock hard ground. I looked up at the flimsy pan roof and figured there was no threat from that direction so I just lay staring up through the mosquito netting. I still felt no tremor. I half expected to see big cracks in the hard ground when I got up in the morning, but simply rolled over and sighed “Great Rift!”
Africa can be a moving and mysterious place.