by Helen Wells
Then they started in on the native huts. All of them had been swept clean, tables, stools, and sleeping pallets. Jeff and Chuck showed their crew of Kikuyu workmen how to work the pressurized spray bombs, and in two days the interiors of all the huts had been thoroughly disinfected. Following that, the workmen did the same for the thatched grass roofs.
Next, the young engineers mixed up huge tubs of lime whitewash, and the crew began to apply the mixture to the inside walls. This job took longer than the spraying, but when it was finished, the interiors were gleaming white and the gloominess of the huts had been replaced by a cheerful brightness. At first the native women had been appalled by what was going on, and a little bit frightened by it all. But when they saw the difference it made in the inward appearance of their homes, they grew cheerful again and even helped the men.
By the end of the first day, all the native workers were covered from head to foot by a thick coat of whitewash. But they washed it off with a mass bath in the river, laughing and splashing around in the water like small, playful boys.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Cherry said to Bob. “They all seem like different people from the ones we saw the first day we were here.”
“They are,” Bob agreed. “I told you that the chief help these natives needed was learning how to help themselves.”
While the men had been spraying and whitewashing the huts, Cherry put her own little private home-improvement project into action. With a hoe she scratched out a small garden plot on either side of the hospital steps. There she planted the flower seeds that Chuck had brought from town. Then she watered the beds and roped the area off with heavy string.
When she was all through, she was not too surprised to see two of the village women standing silently behind her, watching her with puzzled looks on their faces. Each of the women had one or two small children clinging to her long brightly colored skirt.
The younger of the two spoke rapidly to her companion in Swahili, then she said to Cherry in hesitant English, “Is madam sowing mealies?”
Mealies, Cherry knew, was the native corn.
Cherry brushed back a curl of hair that had fallen down over her forehead and gave the women a friendly smile.
“No,” she answered, “I am planting flowers.” She held up one of the seed packages and pointed to the picture of zinnias on its front. Both women inspected the package closely. “Soon,” Cherry went on, “all of this”—she gestured in a sweeping motion over the little garden—“all of this will be a lovely garden of flowers. Won’t it be pretty?”
“Pretty!” the younger woman echoed. And the older one, who seemed to speak little or no English, pronounced the word as “Petty!”
The two conversed in Swahili, then the younger one asked timidly, “You help sow flowers for us?”
This was what Cherry had been hoping for. “Certainly,” she said. “Which house is yours?”
The woman pointed to the hut nearest the hospital building.
“Me,” she said, still smiling.
“Then come on,” said Cherry, picking up her hoe and seed packages. “We’ll do it right now.”
The earth in front of the hut had been trampled down until it was hard, almost solid, underfoot. But Cherry went to work on it with her hoe. The Kikuyu woman stepped around to the back of the hut and reappeared with a crude native hoe of her own. Working side by side, they soon had a small area scratched up on each side of the round, doorless entrance. Cherry then laid out rows, planted the seeds, and roped the plots off with string just as she had done her own.
“Now,” Cherry said, standing erect, “in a few weeks you will have a pretty flower garden all your own.”
By this time a crowd of perhaps a dozen women had gathered to watch, each one accompanied by two or three small, wide-eyed children. They were talking quietly but animatedly among themselves, gesturing with their hands and shaking their heads.
Now the young woman who had first approached Cherry spoke to them in Swahili. When she had finished, there was a loud hubbub of voices and everyone was smiling from ear to ear.
“They want to know if madam can help them sow flowers too?” the young woman asked Cherry.
Cherry nodded happily. “Tell everybody to get a hoe and you and I will show them how. And tell them I have lots of seeds, enough for everybody.”
With much giggling and chattering, the women scattered, each hurrying to her own hut.
Cherry was off duty at the hospital today at these hours, and for the rest of the afternoon she was busy supervising the planting of the gardens. At one point, Bob happened to stroll by. “What’s all this?” he wanted to know.
Cherry explained. “The flower beds will make all the difference in the world.”
“They sure will,” he agreed. “Between whitewashing and landscaping the outsides, we’ll have a model town here.”
“And a healthy one,” Cherry said, “with happy people in it, I hope.”
“Maybe the idea will spread all over Kenya,” Bob said in a teasing voice. Then he grew serious. “It would certainly be a wonderful thing if it did. You look tired. Why don’t you stop now?”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Cherry said. “The women know how to do it now. They can get along without me, and I’ve given them my whole supply of seeds to work with.”
After a shower and a change into fresh clothes, Cherry returned to the hospital ward. She was having one last look at her patients when she heard a commotion at the front door. For their day patients, those with minor ailments, and for outpatients, Dr. Bob and Cherry conducted a clinic every morning. The excitement at the door sounded like an emergency. A tall native, wearing khaki shorts and a loose-fitting white T-shirt, came up the steps and into the big room carrying a small boy, about ten years old, in his arms. He was followed by a woman, clearly the boy’s mother, who was sobbing softly and reaching out now and then to touch the little fellow’s hand or foot. His right foot was an ugly purplish brown and was swollen to nearly twice its normal size.
“Bring him in here,” Cherry said, lines of worry creasing her forehead. She led the way between the rows of cots to the little lab in back. “Put him there,” she instructed the man, indicating a cot at the side of the room. Then to Sara, who had followed them, she said, “Go quickly and find Dr. Bob.”
Sara scampered from the room and Cherry knelt by the bed and looked at the boy. His dark face was slightly gray, and one touch of her fingers to his forehead told her that he was running a high fever. The reason was his swollen, discolored foot.
“Him step on poison stick,” the man explained anxiously. “He die?” The boy’s mother stood a few feet in the background, her body swaying slightly, her heavy lips trembling.
“No, we won’t let him die,” Cherry promised. She saw that Kavarondi had entered the room. “What does he mean by poison stick?” she asked.
“He mean scorpion, Miss Cherry,” Kavarondi replied. “Very poison. Very bad.”
At that moment Bob came in. “What’s happened?”
“It seems,” Cherry told him, “that the child was stung by a scorpion.”
“Let’s see,” Bob said, and gently picked up the boy’s foot to examine it. Then he ordered Kavarondi: “Get all these people out of here.”
When they were alone, Bob explained, “This probably happened yesterday, and in the meanwhile the poison has taken hold.” He ran his fingers lightly over the instep. “And the stinger broke off; it’s still in there.” His manner was crisp and workmanlike. “Cleanse the foot with alcohol. First we’ll give him an antivenin shot. Then I’ll remove the stinger.”
This was the first poison-bite case that Cherry had seen in a long time. Anxiety was in her voice as she asked, “Is this—bad?”
“If you mean fatal,” Bob replied, “a scorpion sting usually isn’t, although it can make you mighty sick. But we got to this young fellow in time. We’ll have him up and around in a day or so.”
When Cherry had cleansed the f
oot, Bob injected the antivenin serum in a vein in the boy’s calf. Then he made an incision with his lancet and extracted the sharp, curved stinger, which was almost half an inch long. Black blood oozed from the wound, and the semiconscious boy groaned as Bob squeezed the sides of the cut to keep the blood coming. Cherry kept wiping it off with cotton wool soaked in antiseptic.
“That does it,” Bob said at last, straightening up. “Bandage him fairly loosely. Then we’ll give him something to make him sleep, and put him on a cot out in the ward.”
When the treatment was finished, Kavarondi picked the little boy up in her strong arms, carried him out, put him to bed, and covered him with a sheet and blanket.
“Keep an eye on him,” Bob said to Cherry. “His temperature should go down in a hurry; but let me know if he doesn’t respond the way he should. In the morning I’ll take a blood sample to make sure he hasn’t been bitten by a tsetse fly as well as a scorpion.”
When Cherry made her rounds early the next morning, she found the little Kikuyu boy sitting up in bed, happily eating a bowlful of hot milk and toast. His face had regained its normal color and his eyes were clear once more.
After Kavarondi had taken away the empty howl, Cherry removed the bandage from the boy’s foot. She saw that the swelling had gone halfway down and the angry red skin around the incision Bob had made was nearly normal again.
The boy certainly has a healthy body, she thought. It was repairing itself the way a good body is meant to.
As she cleansed the foot, preparatory to winding on a new bandage, the boy said, grinning, “Sank you berry much, Missy Sherry. Kavarondi tell me your name.”
Cherry was startled that he spoke English so well. Then she remembered Kavarondi telling her that the Kikuyu children picked up English much more readily than most of their parents.
“Now you just hold still,” Cherry said, smiling.
“My name Kandi,” the boy volunteered.
“Well,” Cherry told him, “that’s a nice name. Shall I call you Candy?…No, I think Sugar Candy would be better.”
“I help you,” Kandi said eagerly. “I be your houseboy.”
“You’re going to stay right here in this bed until I tell you to get up,” Cherry told him sternly, although she couldn’t deny to herself that she was pleased and flattered. Kandi was a charmer, she thought.
“Hi, Kandi! How are you today?” Bob walked up to the bed. He looked Kandi over—grin, foot, and all.
“Well, our patient seems to he greatly improved,” the young doctor said to Cherry.
“Yes, his foot is healing nicely,” Cherry answered. “I think we may have a little trouble keeping him in bed.”
“Keep him there if you have to tie him down.” Bob winked at Kandi. “Now we’ll take that blood sample.” He opened his kit and took out a large syringe.
“This will sting a little,” Cherry told Kandi as she swabbed the inside of his forearm with alcohol. “But you’re a brave boy, Kandi. Don’t look at your arm, look over your shoulder.”
“Kandi do what you say, Missy Sherry.”
He couldn’t help wincing as Bob plunged the needle into a vein and drew out a sample of blood. But the white-toothed grin never left his face.
Cherry patted him on the cheek. “Now you keep on being a good boy, Kandi, and do what Kavarondi and Sara tell you. Maybe we can let you out of bed by tomorrow.”
“Then I be your houseboy, Missy Sherry?”
“O.K.,” Cherry said. “Then we’ll see about you being my houseboy.”
“You seem to have made a conquest,” Bob remarked as they went toward the lab.
“Well, I couldn’t have made a nicer one,” Cherry said. “Isn’t he simply the cutest thing you ever saw?”
Bob put a drop or two of Kandi’s blood under the lens of his microscope and examined it closely.
“Looks perfectly normal,” he finally said. “But I’ll send it along to Washington just to make doubly sure. And that reminds me. After we’ve had some breakfast, you and I will get to work taking specimens from all the people here in the village who don’t seem to have been infected.”
Over hotcakes and coffee in front of Tomi’s grill, Cherry heard the roar of a plane in the sky. Looking up, she saw the spray plane flying low over the hills, spilling out its familiar streamer of cloudy mist.
“Thank goodness,” she said, “this is the third and last time. That thing bothers me.”
“It bothers the tsetse flies a whole lot more,” Bob declared. “By now all of them ought to be cleared out of this entire valley.” Then he added, “Everything is coming along fine, Cherry—’way ahead of the schedule I had set up in my mind originally. As a matter of fact, if things keep going as well as they have up until now, our worst troubles are over.”
As Cherry, Bob, Jeff, and Chuck watched, the amphibian—instead of zooming up and heading back for Nairobi—touched down on the water of the river. The pilot throttled down his engine and taxied up onto the sandy bank on the wheels that he had let down on either side of the float. The side door opened and a familiar figure stepped out. Over his shoulder he had a canvas duffel bag, and two cameras hung by straps around his neck. A big smile wreathed his face.
It was Ed Smith, the photographer.
“Hi, folks!” he said cheerfully. “It looks as if I made it just in time for breakfast!”
CHAPTER VII
The Orange Airplane
“MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME, SMITH,” BOB SAID AS HE WALKED over to the plane. “And you too,” he said to the pilot. “You could use a bite, couldn’t you?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” the pilot replied. Smith introduced him as Gus Fisher. He was a tall, thin scarecrow of a man; his khaki slacks and a cotton windbreaker hung on him. “At least I can use a minute or two to stretch. That cockpit is small for me.”
In a few moments the visitors were digging into heaping plates of Tomi’s hotcakes and washing them down with steaming mugs of coffee.
“I had intended to rent a Land Rover for the trip,” Ed Smith said at last. “But I happened to be at the airport yesterday and learned that Gus Fisher here was flying in today to spray the place. So I bummed a ride.” He and the pilot exchanged a glance; something understood and special. Cherry noticed that glance, and wondered. Smith spread his hands in an expansive gesture. “And here I am, all set to do the story of the year.”
“Ed is going to make us all famous,” Bob said to Chuck and Jeff. And he explained the photographer’s mission. “I’ve told him he can have free run of the place. So if you see him snooping around with those cameras of his, think nothing of it.”
Smith chuckled. “Snooping is a rather unkind word, Doctor. Any magazine photographer usually has to expose several dozen rolls of film in order to get ten or twelve of the right kind of pictures for a story. So I actually will be aiming my lenses at just about everything in sight.” He looked around. “You certainly have made a lot more progress here than I would have imagined you could in such a short time.”
Bob told him about the preliminary work the young engineers had done. The photographer asked them a few questions. Bob, meanwhile, briefed Cherry on their day’s work in the clinic.
Cherry expected her patients would ask her who came in the orange plane. She herself was fascinated by the color of the plane. Up close, the dazzling orange paint, almost luminescent in its glowing intensity, reacted on her eyes like the rays of a bright light suddenly flashed into them.
“That’s a mighty fancy plane you have there, Mr. Fisher,” she said, teasing the pilot. “It looks like Times Square in New York all lighted up at night.”
“Now don’t you go making remarks about my taste in colors, Miss Ames,” the pilot replied with a smile in his voice. “That paint is purely for self-protection.”
“Protection?”
“That’s right. You see, I’m what you call a freelance bush pilot. I fly charter trips all over this rough country here in Kenya, and often over the rain forests o
f southern Tanganyika and the Rhodesias. Now if something went wrong, and I had to make a forced landing, I would radio for a rescue plane. But if my ship was painted gray or green, a search plane could fly a hundred feet straight over my head and never see me. On the other hand, this bright orange stands out, as you say, like Forty-second Street and Broadway. A pilot looking for me could spot me ten miles away.”
Cherry laughed. “I’m sorry. I just never saw a plane the color of yours.”
“It’s my own invention, Miss Ames. I don’t know why other bush pilots don’t paint their planes the same way. Maybe they’re superstitious; maybe they think it’s asking for an accident. But you can just call me Safety-First Gus.”
After a little while the pilot said, “Well, I’ve got to hop off. If a couple of you fellows will help me get my plane turned around, I’ll take her back to town.”
Jeff and Chuck jumped to their feet to lend a hand, and soon they had the amphibian pointed toward the water. Gus, bent nearly double, squeezed into the cockpit. He started the engine, and in a minute or two was taxiing up the narrow river. Then the engine roared louder, the ship put on a burst of speed, lifted off the surface, and rose gracefully over the treetops.
Smith got to his feet. “Well,” he said, “with your permission, I’ll look around the place, before I try to take any pictures. O.K. if I leave my cameras here for a while?”
“Help yourself,” Bob told him. “And if there’s anything you want, just ask for it.”
“We have an extra tent,” Jeff said. “Chuck and I will fix it up for you and put in a cot and a table.”
“That’s swell, fellows.” Ed Smith smiled brightly at them all, with a special gleam at Cherry. She did not respond. The photographer’s smile remained fixed and very bright. “Just swell of all of you. But I don’t want to put you to any extra trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” Jeff said. “Just be sure you get some good pictures of us so I can send one home to my girl.”
After breakfast everybody went to work. Chuck and Jeff were installing permanent electrical and plumbing fixtures to replace the temporary ones they had put in so that the hospital would be workable at once. Ed Smith was looking over every nook and cranny of the village to get ideas for his pictures. Cherry and Bob were taking blood samples from the people in Ngogo who had shown no symptoms of the sleeping sickness. Kavarondi had rounded up some of these persons—about a dozen of them stood in line outside the laboratory door—and was ushering them in one at a time.
