Life Down the Rutted Red Road

When I first moved to this region, I would notice that sometimes people would stand at strange angles, have conversations in certain lines. Then I realised that they were standing to align themselves to the shade of a tree trunk (as sadly most trees lose their leaves in the hottest and driest months). Now, this angling of the body to shade, planning my path according to the pockets of shade is a normal part of life. I long for shade, I celebrate shade. Shade enables me to survive.

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Our ancestors stood under the shade of trees in a stream-watered beautiful garden. Every day they had the choice to continuing living the life they had been given, or to choose knowledge of that which was outside their shaded haven. One day the shade looked constricting, the offer of other knowledge intoxicating and they chose to step out of the shelter. Instead of freedom though, they found out that the sun that gives life, which makes the grass grow and the fruit ripen, also takes life when there is no shade, where there is no water.

And so, they started constructing their own shade. Living trees were cut so that dead wood that was draped with dead animal skins or smeared with mud could provide shelter in the heat of the day. Clay was shaped and packed to create cisterns to store water. And yet the shade they could construct was never enough. Termites ate through the wood and the beams collapsed. The cisterns would get cracks and dry up.

They could not re-create the garden and the life they had known there.

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Generations passed. People got better at creating shade, at finding water. Cities grew, irrigation schemes were started. And yet they had not managed to recreate the garden. There was never enough, and what they did get did not satisfy. So, there was jealousy and jostling for power, cruelty from those who had it, desperation from those without.

One day rough beams from a once live tree were dragged to a hillside and nailed together. They cast a shadow across the ground.

Women sat in that shade.

Mourning.

They had hoped that maybe a new era was coming. Shelter and freedom from their suffering. And yet all they could see now was death. Blood and water spilled into the ground and there were no signs of life.

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The sun was shining fierce in the April morning as we stood next to the decades old Baobab tree. Some of the group were lucky enough to stand in the shade caused by its wrinkled elephant-skin-like trunk, which would take maybe ten people to encircle. The rest were left with aligning their bodies to the shifting spears of shade provided by bare branches growing from the massive trunk or using their toobs to create their own shade. Every few minutes someone would stand up and move over to the battered yellow plastic 20L container and take a drink of water.

A young man stood up in front of the group. His father was killed during the war. The boy in front of me clapped hands disfigured with leprosy. The women behind me had left sick relatives in the hospital.  The teenage girls from the high school will be married off to whomever pays the dowry their father wants.

“Al Mesiih Gam”, the young man called out. “Akam Gam” the group shouted joyfully and they started to sing. He is risen. He is risen indeed.

As I tried to shift parts of my body into slivers of shade and squinted up through the lattice of branches, I saw a couple of bright green shoots of new leaves sprouting. The rain is still maybe a month away, and yet somehow the tree knows it is coming and is already sending forth new life. Not enough to increase the shade, but enough to give hope that the rain is coming, the heat will not last forever.

And we kept on singing.