by Shana Burg
The Malawian people are so polite and friendly. Even if they don’t want you tagging along, you’d never know.
“Hey!” I say. No sooner do I reach the bank of the river than Sickness yells, “River battle!” And Memory fills a pot with water and throws it at me. At first I stand there, shocked. That’s not polite. My hair is dripping and there’s mud on my clothes. I think it might be some mistake. Maybe Memory tripped and fell.
But then Sickness says, “Go water her!” And she hands me the biggest pot she has. Well, I’m not one to refuse a good old water fight on a day as hot as this one, so I step into the river with my sandals still on, fill the pot, and dump it on Memory’s head while Sickness holds her in place. Patuma’s flat on her back on the bank, squealing with giggles as the rest of us splash each other until we’re completely drenched and laughing till we cry.
Then we lie out in the field in our wet dresses and dry off in the sun like raisins, and talk about boys in a mixture of languages because Patuma’s English is pretty bad and my Chichewa’s almost nonexistent. By the end of the conversation, we’ve established a few basic facts: Memory not only loves Saidi, but she also plans to marry him one day. Patuma loves Norman and Norman loves Patuma back, although they’re both too shy to admit it.
“Do you date Norman?” I ask Patuma. Despite the sunscreen, my cheeks are really starting to burn.
“What is date?” Sickness asks.
So I explain and Memory says, “A Malawi girl do not do this thing called date. When a boy is ready to marry, he go to the villages and ask, ‘Is there a girl in this village who can marry me?’ Or, in the case that there is one certain girl the boy watch and know from school, he ask that girl. If the girl accept, the uncle of the boy shall meet with the parents of the girl to map the way forward. Then the wedding.”
Sickness giggles and says, “The golden rule is if the boy and the girl meet in secret—for example, the boy find the girl down by the river as she do dishes or boy and girl talk much at school—this boy and girl must not allow the parents to discover the relationship.”
Then Patuma pipes up in Chichewa, and Sickness explains, “Patuma say that even though she do not marry Norman yet, she look at Norman in the eye one time and Norman look right back at her. Patuma say this is how they talk in secret at school.”
I glance through the leaves at the clouds gliding by and feel a pang in my chest, because I know my mother would love it here. No matter where we used to travel, she always found a way to escape into nature. In Quebec, while Dad attended lectures, Mom rented a scooter and we rode out to Mount Pinnacle and spent the day hiking. And the time he had a meeting in Miami, we took a moped out to Everglades National Park, where we picnicked and laughed at the alligators and turtles. I wonder if Memory thinks about her mother all the time too. I want to ask her, but I’ve only known her a week. How long do you need to know someone before you can ask the most painful question there is?
Soon our throats are itching with thirst, but the river water is too muddy to drink in the rainy season, and I didn’t think to bring a water bottle with me. “Shall we fetch clean drinking water?” Sickness says.
And I say, “Of course! Why not!”
So the girls collect pails from their homes and Memory gives one to me. An hour after we set out for the borehole, we finally arrive. I don’t think I can take another step, though, because my left foot has blistered by my ankle.
After we fill our buckets and gulp down some clean water for ourselves, Memory splits a plant leaf and rubs the gel inside it onto my blister, and then we head back. The moon is high in the sky. I’m surprised to see it there, like an unexpected visitor in the last light of day.
My arms tremble from the weight of one water bucket, even though the other girls each carry two—one on their heads and one in their hands. And when we finally return to the village, the sun is setting behind the curtain of the earth, so I say goodbye to my friends and meet my father in the clearing.
Every cloud has a silver lining, but take it from me, if that cloud has a thunderbolt pointed straight at your head, the silver lining won’t give you much comfort.
Monday morning I decide I might actually come out of this whole adventure alive. But by the afternoon, I reconsider. During science class, Mrs. Tomasi puts a bunch of materials on each table: a single leaf, a strip of brown bark, and a yellowish oval-shaped melon that’s about the size of a cantaloupe. I’m tempted to eat it. My stomach is growling. No matter how big a breakfast Mrs. Bwanali makes me or how much water I drink during the day when no one’s looking, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to eating lunch after school. I pick up the different things. The fruit has a rough circle where the stem was attached to the tree. The leaf is cool and smooth. And the bark is wrinkly, like an old man’s skin.
While we feel the parts of the tree, Mrs. Tomasi tells us that the fruit of the baobab tree has more vitamin C than an orange. “If there is a drought,” she says, “you can cut the trunk of a baobab tree and suck out seven thousand five hundred liters of water with a grass straw. This tree can live for thousands of years and grow twelve meters in diameter. Sometimes people live right inside the trunks.”
“Cool!” I say.
Memory nods in agreement.
When the school bell chimes, we gather our science materials and carry them up front. Memory sets the baobab fruit on Mrs. Tomasi’s folding table and picks up the large cardboard box that’s on the floor in the corner. “Innocent and myself shall meet you on the hilltop in quarter hour,” she tells me. She leaves the classroom behind Saidi, Agnes, Patuma, and the others while I go back to my seat and pull out my sketchbook to pass the time.
After Mrs. Tomasi wipes the vegetable chalk off the board with a rag, she collects her notebook and pencil. “Yendani bwino,” she says. That’s one of the phrases I got right on my quiz yesterday. It means “Have a safe journey.” In fact, the only word I missed was utawaleza. It means “rainbow,” but for some reason I thought it meant “grain silo.”
I wave to Mrs. Tomasi. “Yendani bwino to you too,” I say.
The second Mrs. Tomasi leaves, a cold wind blows through the classroom and the hair on my arms stands up straight. Something doesn’t feel right, though I have no idea what it could be, other than I’ve got to sit here in this classroom alone for the next fifteen minutes. But what’s so scary about that? Chill! I tell myself. I try to breathe in love and breathe out fear, which is what Marcella does before she goes onstage, but it doesn’t work. Instead, I draw a picture of Agnes as a bongololo.
When I’m done, I grab my backpack and head outside. Innocent and Memory are halfway up the hill, and all the textbooks owned by Mzanga Full Primary are in a box on top of Memory’s head. I’m only a few feet outside the classroom when suddenly, the wind howls and the trees sway. Then, crack! A bolt of lightning strikes the ground right in front of my feet. I tremble from head to toe. Memory and Innocent turn to race back down the hill to school. “Over here!” I shout through the wind. There’s a train pulling into a station—a station inside my head! And I’m not sure if they can see me. Except for the flashes of bright white light, suddenly, it’s as dark as night.
I hurry back to my classroom and wait for Memory and Innocent while the air blinks like a strobe light and water drips—splat! splat! splat!—through the small holes in the ceiling. Good thing Mrs. Tomasi keeps a stack of empty cans in the corner. I grab them and put one beside the doorway, one on my table, one by the board. Soon I’m out of cans but not out of leaks.
The rain thunders down. My thoughts crash into each other, totally out of control. Where is Memory? Where is Innocent? Why aren’t they here?
Boom!
I scream.
Aiiee!
I can’t hear my scream. That terrifies me, makes me scream more.
I run to the doorway. Through flashes of lightning, I see a huge sheet of metal. It cuts across the field, shiny like a bullet.
My sneakers slosh through a puddle
until I see where the metal came from—the standard five block. My pulse thunders in my ears. The roof flew right off the classroom, sharp and dangerous like a weapon.
The rain turns to mist while mosquitoes whine all around me. Thousands band together in big black clouds. Mosquito armies attack my arms and legs. I slap them away. They come right back. Questions bite me all over: Where is Memory? Where is Innocent? Is anyone hurt? Is anyone dead?
The mosquitoes are ferocious! They claw me, pinch me, pierce me. I whimper as I scratch. I plead with them to stop, but they won’t. I run to a banana tree and scratch my back against the bark. I stay there quivering and sobbing until finally, the thunder stops, the lightning stops, and the sun showers down and convinces the critters to find another source of blood.
Then it’s over.
But inside, the storm doesn’t stop: Where is Memory? Where is Innocent? Is anyone hurt? Is anyone dead?
Out of nowhere, I hear a voice. “Wabalarika eti?” I look up.
Saidi is holding a ball made of garbage bags and string. “Are you scared and confused?” he asks.
I nod. My brain is whipping around like sugar in a cotton candy machine.
“I am sorry to tell you, Clare …”
I brace myself for the worst. The very worst.
“Upon my exit from the shelter of the standard three classroom where I waited for the rains to leave, I examine the situation with a great and careful eye,” he says.
I quake with fear.
“Yes, it is true,” Saidi says.
“What? What’s true?” I ask.
“Bongololo bugs are dead now on floor.” He smiles. “Do not worry, Clare. There was no person in standard five block. No person on the field in this place. No teacher. No children. Only bongololo bugs. You cry for bongololo?”
I shake my head no and swat an evil mosquito from my arm. Got him!
Then I spot Innocent walking toward us, Memory behind him. I choke out a sob. They’re drenched. We all are. Innocent’s teeth chatter. Memory rubs his back, tries to warm him up. We meet in the tall patch of field grass, all of us scratching our bites like mad.
“Don’t cry,” I tell Memory. “Everyone’s okay,” I say. “It’s only the bongololo that’s hurt.” I chuckle through my tears.
“I do not cry,” she says, and quickly wipes her cheek with the back of her hand. “The rains soaked the books is the problem. The box rip in the rains. I forget the plastic bag for the box. We run to standard one room. It is more near.”
Memory looks at the ground and turns silent. Innocent and Saidi do the same. “Thank you, Lord, who keep the children of Mzanga safe. We beg of you, our parents, our Lord: protect our books. We leave them to dry in sun behind standard one classroom block. Please do not allow the thief to steal them in the night. We do thank the spirit of amayi and abambo, our mother and father, for seeing us through the difficult rains,” she says.
My heart stops. All of a sudden, I get it. This is a prayer. A prayer to Memory’s mother. And her father! They’re both dead. Gone. It’s too terrible to imagine. I want to ask Memory how she does it. How she survives. But then Saidi says, “Enough tears, my friends,” and my chance is gone.
Saidi tosses his garbage-bag ball to Innocent and says, “Let us have some fun.” The ball crunches as Innocent catches it. He throws the ball back to Saidi, who dribbles it on his head as he leaps away over the puddles back to his soccer game. Mr. Special Kingsley and teachers walk out of the headmaster’s office. Mr. Special Kingsley and two of the teachers circle the field, checking on students. The rest of the teachers gather around the roof. It looks like they’re trying to figure out what to do with it.
And even though Memory and Innocent no longer need to drop the books off at the trading center, they will still walk past the turnoff to my house on their way to Mkumba village. So together we scratch our bites and trudge up the muddy hill. Heat shimmies off puddles, turning the schoolyard into a foggy dream. When we get to the top, there it is, arching gracefully over the muddy road: utawaleza—a little bow of God. The rainbow is bright and vibrant. I’m sure we’ll walk right through it on our way back, but we never even get close.
At home, Mrs. Bwanali greets me with sugared tea and boiled pumpkin. After I cover myself in calamine lotion from head to toe, I sit at the table and draw scenes of the storm: a can catching leaks, the ripped book box, the roof in the field.
When I tell Mrs. Bwanali how awful it all was, she throws a dish towel over her shoulder and turns to me. “Clare, it is the rains that bring us flowers. A life without rains is ugly and dull.”
I sip my tea. I know what she means, but still, I didn’t like the storm.
Even though Mrs. Bwanali walks to the house in the mornings, Dad insists on driving her home when she’s finished with work. She always tells him she isn’t tired, but we can just look at her face and see that she’s exhausted.
One evening after Dad gets back from driving Mrs. Bwanali home to Kapoloma village, he calls through the veranda that I should come outside. “Got a present for you, Clare!” Ever since our visit to the game park, things have been much better between us.
As I pull on my sandals, I wonder what Dad’s gift could be. A set of paints? A poster for my wall? I run outside. “So, how do you like her?” he says, holding up an old black bicycle that doesn’t have a kickstand. It looks like the one Saidi rides to school.
“Awesome!” I say.
“Yeah, I figured now that you’re a teenager, you might like a little freedom. She’s rickety but she’ll get you down to the village, and back and forth to school.”
I touch the black tape on the handlebars and look for the gears. “How many speeds?” I ask.
“Oh, uh, just one,” Dad says.
“That’s okay. It’s perfect!” I say, and hug him. “Where’d you get it?”
Dad strokes the stubble on his chin. “Someone left it behind.”
“Behind where?” I ask.
“You know, at the hospital.” Dad checks out the stars winking in the baby blue sky.
“Well, did they say you could have it?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” he says, and sighs. “My patient won’t be needing it anymore.”
I shiver. I don’t really want to ride a dead person’s bike. Then I sneeze.
“You okay?” Dad asks.
“Just exhausted, and my throat sort of hurts.” I’ve been tired ever since we got here. “When is this jet lag going away?” I ask. Besides, I don’t want to tell him his gift is giving me the creeps.
“It’s probably allergies,” Dad says. “Those’ll wipe you out.”
Dad puts his arm around me and we go inside, where he looks down my throat and up my nose with a flashlight and says, “Yup, allergies. Nothing to worry about.”
We light the oven to heat up the chicken Mrs. Bwanali made earlier, but before the chicken’s even cooked, the electricity goes out. Once again, we have to change our dinner plans at the last minute. Instead, we eat leftover nsima and cold pumpkin by candlelight, and I ask Dad more about his work.
“The Global Health Project can’t keep up with all the disease here,” he says. “There are cockroaches climbing on the hospital beds and walls, so that doesn’t help matters. There’s not enough medicine. Today a boy came in with a violin spider bite. Flesh on the leg was rotting. I had no hydrogen peroxide—had to clean the wound with a rag and a bottle of vodka. He may need an amputation.”
I put down my fork of cold pumpkin.
“The life expectancy is only fifty-three here,” he says. “Can you believe that?”
Well, my mother was only forty-four when she died. And she lived in one of the richest countries in the world: the United States of America. And I still can’t believe that! I feel my eyes bursting like little plastic bags full of water, the kind I used to take home from the school carnival with goldfish inside. My chair screeches against the floor. I run through the minuscule living room to my bedroom and climb under the malari
a net in the dark.
When Dad comes in, he apologizes. “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t realize that would upset you so much.”
“It’s not your fault,” I say. And it’s not. Not his fault that my mother died. Not his fault that he brought me here. Not his fault that in a country like this, kids with dead parents are a dime a dozen. “I love you,” I tell Dad. A breeze blows through the window screen and ruffles the net like a sail.
For the rest of the week, Dad drives me to school, because I just can’t get behind riding a dead person’s bicycle. It doesn’t seem right. And besides, I have other plans for this piece of machinery. Dad agreed right away to let me do it, so this weekend, I’m going to give the old bike a brand-new life.
On Friday, after assembly, I’ve just begun walking back to class with Memory and telling her about my plan when our headmaster appears beside me.
“Clare,” he says, “may I have a word?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, yes, sir.” As if I have a choice!
Memory runs ahead to catch up with Patuma and Winnie.
As Mr. Special Kingsley talks, he limps across the schoolyard, away from my classroom. “Clare,” he says, “the District Education Office is always troubled to supply teachers in the bush. The assignments in cities are sought after, but here, we do not have the housing. Many teachers do not speak our tribal languages. Even though the request for the standard one replacement was sent months ago when the teacher married and became full with child, the District Education Office cannot find a teacher to send to the country. All the young teachers want a city placement. Zomba. Blantyre. Lilongwe. Yes! But the bush? ‘No zikomo!’ they say. One and the next and the next.”
While Mr. Special Kingsley babbles on, kids lean out of classroom windows to gape at us. The American girl and the headmaster together, after classes have already begun? Clearly something unusual is going on.
“The other day, the standard one teacher and her new husband and the girl child moved to Kenya, the homeland of the husband. We are improving as a nation. Yes, this is true. And every student here at Mzanga Full Primary must do a part. I have been filling in the lessons myself, but it is not a practical consideration for the headmaster to do so for each and every subject.”
