Life Down the Rutted Red Road

They are scattered throughout the country of my birth: stone obelisks standing at intersections or brass plaques on city garden gates or wooden boards at the back of old churches with names etched in columns. I often stopped and read them, noting with sadness when there were repeated surnames, wondering if some poor mother lost more than one son in long ago battles in far off lands. For most there is no one still alive who remembers them as living breathing people. They are now just names, but we as a nation gather on the normally crisp morning in April, with the red flower that bloomed in the field of Flanders pinned to our chests and declare that we will remember them.

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There are no monuments here. No names etched into wood or stone so that people might know of noble sacrifice.

It is not because the guns have been silent. Every generation in recent memory has experienced a plane overhead or a boom in the distance bringing death.

But looking around, you cannot tell of the countless lives that have been lost protecting this land, seeking to defeat the enemy, sacrificing themselves for those they love. Graves might initially be marked with a pile of rocks, but these hills are strewn with rocks. Survival has been too precarious a thing to waste time and money on something that would not fill their bellies and which they probably could not read. But maybe monuments have also not been built because war is not an aberration, a once-in-a-lifetime war-to-end-all-wars, but simply a reality of life.

And that reality of life has started up again, a bit further north.

At this stage they are still reporting the numbers. The death toll is up to such and such, another so many have died in this place. But in a nation where many births happen in dark huts and are not recorded anywhere, where for many people there is no record anyway to say that they exist, how do you know?

Even if you can count the number of bodies with bullet holes through them, can you count the little ones who died of diarrhoea from drinking putrid water because the water supplies were cut off, or those who wasted away because the price of food rose sky high and it was not safe to plant their crops (or someone burned their crops and stole their cows) or the mothers who died in childbirth because it was not safe to travel to the hospital, and even if they made it to the hospital there was no staff or supplies or blood.

Will anyone remember these deaths?

Even here, where this conflict is not a distant news story but has trapped the aunt who went to visit relatives or the cousin who left in search of a better life, even here, life goes on. Yes, the prices are all increasing in the market, but the skies remain calm, the bullets far away, the school bell still rings out in the morning, and the ground needs to be prepared for planting when the rains come. 

Already so many people have died in this land, what is a few more?

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The first koinonia bread that I remember was baked by our neighbours from Hong Kong who owned a bakery. On a Saturday, my father would collect the round loaf of bread, and it would sit in its brown paper bag until being taken to the school hall where we gathered the next day.

The next version I remember was the wholegrain loaf with the hole in the bottom from the Smiths’ bread maker. Pieces were ripped from it as it was passed around the rows. I always felt a little guilty if my piece ripped too big, but it was good bread.

The first many times I drank it, it was just grape juice passed in tiny glass cups. Something a little sweet that I tried not to spill on my Sunday best clothes. Years later, in a room decorated with Pacific carvings, I sipped wine from a shared wooden cup. The sharpness of its taste broke some of the tameness of a sweet sip of grape juice, but then I went and sat down again on my padded seat. In a crowded Muslim city, I drank I do not know what liquid it was, alcohol being rather hard to get your hands on. But whatever the dark colour brew was, it tasted foul. But, the death we were remembering was not pleasant.

I have sat in a row with those who share my name and that combination of eyes, nose and mouth that declare that we are related by blood, passing the items one to another.

I have queued up in the ‘land-of-the-free’ behind others in their Sunday best glad for central heating from the winter chill outside.

I have stood up in a line at the front of a grass clad church, refugees on either side of me.

I have gathered in a semi-circle around a small table in an Arab city as an oil executive from the US passed it to a refugee from West Africa who passed it to an Asian businessman who passed it to me.

Sometimes there has been rich liturgy, other times just simple words. Sometimes in languages I can understand, other times not.

But whatever its shape or taste or associated particular rituals, we were doing it because of the generations’ old instruction, Do this in remembrance of me.

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I stand under an African tree with the sweat trickling down my back, my toob covering my head, the goats and sheep adding their music to the background, my colleagues from the hospital and my students from the school sitting around me on logs propped on stones.

We pray for those we know and those we do not know who are hiding from the bullets and bombs north of us. Do you see them God? Do you remember their suffering?

I hold out my hands to receive the broken glucose biscuits (I am not sure why they use biscuits here instead of the bread that is freely available. No doubt someone who is no longer remembered did it that way and the tradition has stuck). I take the red juice made from the kerikede hibiscus flowers that I first met growing wild around a refugee camp.

And as I lift my hands and eat, lift the cup and drink, I join a line of people. Not just those standing beside me on this sun-scorched spot of earth, but in all those places where the sun sends it rays and those reaching behind me, generation on generation.

And we remember.

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In another city, in ancient times past, the sounds of battle echoed, more people dying for whom no monument would be erected. They cried out wondering if their God had forgotten or forsaken them, asking if anyone was remembering them and their suffering.

And the words came back to them, “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast? No! Though she may forget I will not forget you! See I have engraved you on the palms of my hands….”

Generations later, in that same city, there was a man who gathered with his friends for a meal. Knowing that he was about to sacrifice his life for them, he could have asked them to erect a monument to remember him. But he did not. Instead, he took the bread and wine that were before them on the table and said use these to remember me.

But what were they to remember?

When one of them stood a few days later, fearful and uncertain, not sure what to make of the tumultuous events of the last few days, the man came to him and held out hands that were now engraved with scars. Look, he said, put your finger here and see my hands. I remember.

I am the one who remembers.