to revive a fire smoldering underneath a blackened pot sitting in the left corner of the small room. A troubled look marred her face, transforming it into a pessimistic mask, Very soon, we are going to have to burn Amnogu’s doll for firewood. That old mix of wood is the only thing the little child has. Already, she and the children had torn down chunks of the hut for fire. But she knew that even if they tore it all down, there would only be enough wood for two people to survive the next harmattan. She knew that if something did not happen soon, the next one would kill them all. ~ Every day, she walked the twenty four kilometers to the town outskirts, and gathered as much as she could at the refuse dump. On a good day, she made about twenty arian scavenging for metals, plastic and cans; but normally, she barely made five. The money was meager but she didn’t complain; she knew that things could be a lot worse. Besides it was among the trash that she had found the ragged doll that Amnogu so loved. At the dump, she was part of a crowd of workers that gathered trash in big black polythene bags. When they were done, they hauled the bags over, with the laborious concentration of strongmen at a tournament to the counting center, praying that the scraps they gathered would not tear through the bags. The man at the counter wore a pious smile on his huge lips to go along with the gold-plated cross around his neck which he toyed with. She forced herself to look at him as he measured her bag. There was a time when she had been fooled by his smile. Then, she had smiled toothlessly back at him, making small talk and listening as he recited short scriptures from the Bible. But all that changed when she heard from the other workers that he cheated them with the weights. “But how can we prove it,” they asked. “None of us can read or write.” Now as she listened to the man preach, all she wanted to do was shove ground pepper up those broad nostrils of his. God punish him! As she walked back home, with the two five arian notes warming her small breasts, she wondered what the children would eat today. She knew she was very fortunate to have found a rat two weeks ago. And as if that was not enough luck, the rat was already dead when she found it! Even though she had to fight off, with kerosene drops, the swarm of soldier ants that had begun to work on the rodent’s gaunt carcass, she didn’t blame them for biting her. After all, meat was a very scarce item. That day, when she brought back the meat, the children had chattered excitedly, waiting as she spooned the thin soup out for both of them. She sat in a corner of the room, hungry, watching them eat hungrily. She had blamed a diarrhea for her rumbling stomach. But the children were old enough to know that one did not get diarrhea from eating nothing. They chewed their food slowly, heads down. And then one of them, Anneki, did a very wild thing: he offered his leftovers to her! There was nothing but a few strands of stringy meat remaintheMeadow 81
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