It is now the dry season. It has not rained for a couple of months and will not do so for another four months or more. There is still a tinge of green in some plants and some of the animal drinking holes by the side of the road still have some murky water dampening their bases, but that memory of rain is not going to last long. Already children have started digging in dried-up river beds to find water for them and their animals to drink. Dust from the drying earth and ash from post-harvest burn-offs mingles in the air creating spectacular sunrises and sunsets before settling as a red blanket on every surface.
The ground thirsts.
In the mornings I wake up to the sound of the girls chattering as they go to the water point in the not quite dawn light. I hear the particular squeak of the wheelbarrow that our neighbour uses to bring our water. (Males only transport water if they have something to cart it with such as a wheelbarrow or bike or donkey cart. Females carry the 10 or 20 litre containers on their heads. And I, being neither graceful enough nor strong enough to carry it on my head, pay the neighbour boy to bring it). Oh good, maybe he is going early to get water for us. Or maybe not, and we will spend the rest of the day trying to find him as we watch the water in our barrel get lower, using and re-using water so that we still have enough to drink.
In the nights I wake up to my two-year-old neighbour’s cry, “Ana daayir mooya. I want water”. It is the first sentence he learned to speak. It is his most frequent statement. He guzzles from his bottle and goes back to sleep. I peel myself off my foam mattress, to which most of my body water seems to have transferred, and I also take a mouthful or two from my water bottle.
I thirst.
This coming year Ramadan will fall at the border between the dry and wet seasons. Maybe the rains will come on time and we will dance in the water that marks the end of the hottest time of year. (Okay, maybe only the khawajaat are crazy enough to dance in the rain – the Sudani are too worried about getting their clothes dirty and having to carry water to wash them). Or maybe the men and women will sit in the dry, dusty 45° heat and not swallow a drop of water from dawn to dusk. I get to ten in the morning and already the thirst drives me to drink another cup or two of water. And yet, out of discipline, out of devotion, or pressure or pride they do not.
There is a problem with the water points. This one’s pump has stopped working. For that one the people have delayed in bringing the diesel to run the generator-powered pump. The queues grow. Children spend their days waiting at the water point for their jerrycan to get to the front of the queue. The chatter in the early morning becomes desperate questions about where to find water.
They thirst.
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There was one time where for three days they travelled in the desert without finding water. When they did find it, it was bitter. Another time they were directed to camp in a new place, but when they arrived there was no water: no spring, no wells, not even a dried-up river bed. And they were not just a few: 600,000 men plus women and children and animals. Even if they only used water for drinking and walked around with cloths in their noses to block out the smell of unwashed bodies and clothes – that is still a lot of water and a very long queue of jerrycans. They cried out against their leader, “You have brought us to this place to die of thirst!” They grumbled. They complained. They even wished to return to the place where they had toiled under the lash of whips.
From our comfortable West where water always comes out of the tap and a single flush of the toilet is 20 litres down the drain, we role our eyes at their grumbling and want to point out that they got free food for 40 years – so what were they complaining about.
And yet here I sit in my bit of shade (oh shade, it is such a wonderful thing) with my drink bottle sitting next to where I write, and I wonder that they waited three days. I would be complaining after a couple of hours.
We thirst. We cry out.
And the leader was told, “Go strike that rock”. And he struck the Rock and water flowed out from that place that had been struck.
And they were satisfied.
Life Down the Rutted Red Road 