“But would the Ethiopians be able to read the books if they’re in English?” I said.
“Ah, well, remember, the famine covers the whole of the Sahel. Your best bet might be to send them to the camps on the border between Abouti and Nambula. There are refugees from Kefti there who are highly educated. The Keftians have an excellent British-based education system,” said Eamonn.
“Where’s Kefti?” I said.
“Rebel province of Abouti, bordering Nambula, North Africa. The Keftians have been pursuing a somewhat bloody war for independence from the Marxist regime in Abouti for twenty-five years. Highly organized culture. The Sahel famine has hit them probably harder than anyone—it is impossible for the NGOs to get food aid to them because of the war and for diplomatic reasons. There is a major exodus from Kefti at present over the border into Nambula. Very, very severe malnourishment there.”
“What about taking out food with a few books thrown in?” I said.
“Ruddy good idea,” said Sir William. “First rate. Good thinkin’, gel.”
Fired up with unaccustomed zeal, I started organizing an appeal among the staff of the corporation for the food, rounding up remaindered books, looking into sponsored flights. I rang up Soft Focus and fixed up a meeting for a week’s time with Sir William, Oliver Marchant and me. A vision of Africa, with its tribes, drums, fires and lions, danced and twinkled. I thought of Geldof, I thought of purpose and meaning, I thought of relief workers being passionate, poor and self-sacrificing, saving the grateful Africans. But mainly I thought of Oliver.
CHAPTER Three
Where’s my Kit-Kat?”
Henry was standing outside the cabana, looking around indignantly. The staff had finished breakfast and were wandering around the compound getting ready to go to the camp. Sian hurried over to Henry.
“My bloody Katerina Kit-Kat. I left it in Fenella Fridge and somebody’s Sophia Scoffed it.”
Sian was talking to him in a low voice, soothing him.
“Henry, you’re blind and stupid,” I called across. “It’s under the antibiotics. Go and have another look.”
“Ding dong!” he said, turning round and raising his eyebrows suggestively. “I do so love it when you get all strict,” and he sauntered back into the cabana, as Sian hurried after him.
The sun was starting to burn now. The first trails of smoke were beginning to rise above the camp and figures were moving slowly along the paths and across the plain: a boy leading a donkey carrying two bulging leather sacks of water, a woman with a pile of firewood on her head, a man in a white djellaba walking with a stick balanced on his shoulders, arms hanging lazily over the stick. In a few hours’ time the light would be blinding white and the heat would become claustrophobic. It was easy to imagine you were going to suffocate and stop breathing.
Betty came bustling across the gravel towards me. “I don’t want to intrude before you’ve started your day properly, dear,” she said, “though . . .”—she opened her eyes very wide and showed me her watch—“it is six o’clock. But I wondered if I could have a little word in your ear.”
Betty was round and in her late fifties. I knew what she wanted to have a little word about: Henry and Sian. She wouldn’t be up front about it. She wouldn’t say, “I don’t think you should let your assistant behave promiscuously with the nurses.” What she would do would be to tell me a little story about someone I’d never heard of who had once run a relief camp in Zanzibar or, perhaps, Chad. This person, surprise surprise, would have allowed their assistants to sleep with the nurses—and guess what? It would all have ended in an AIDS outbreak, earthquake or tidal wave and they would have decided that everyone should sleep in their own mud huts in future.
“Can we have a chat later?” I said, suddenly remembering the toothbrush and holding it up. “When I’ve finished my teeth?”
I finished the brushing, and scrunched across the gravel to my hut. I had a lot to do that day. I was the administrator of the camp, doing the organization for SUSTAIN, the charity which employed us all. I had been at Safila for just over four years. For the first two I had been assistant administrator, then I’d taken over the main job, with Henry joining as my assistant. I had to oversee supplies of food and drugs and medical equipment, the vehicles, the drinking water, the food—and the staff, which seemed to take up more time than anything.
I opened the piece of corrugated iron which served as a door, and stepped inside my hut. My home in Safila was a thatched circle of wood and mud, about twenty feet in diameter with a hard earth floor covered in rush mats. It smelt of dust. I had a metal-framed bed with a mosquito net, a desk, shelves for my books and files, two metal armchairs with hideous floral foam-rubber cushions, and a Formica coffee table. Everything was covered in sand. It got between your teeth, into your ears, your pockets, your pants. I was fond of my hut, though I think it was the privacy rather than anything else about it which held the appeal.
I say privacy, but two minutes later there was a halfhearted rattle at the door and Betty poked her head round, giving an understanding upside-down smile. She came in, without being asked, gave me a hug, and plonked herself on the bed. There was a scuffling in the ceiling, the ceiling being a large canvas sheet, which was there to catch creatures that would otherwise fall out of the thatch into the room.
“Hello, little friends,” said Betty, looking up.
Oh, no, oh, no. It was a bit early in the morning to have Betty in your hut.
“You’re worried, Rosie, aren’t you? And, do you know, I think you’re right to be worried.”
Here we go, I thought, Henry and Sian.
“It reminds me of when Judy Elliot was running Mikabele back in ’seventy-four. She’d had several arrivals in a very poor state, sent a message to head office asking for reinforcements and got her head bitten off for overreacting. Two months later there was a massive influx, a hundred a day dying during the worst of it, and of course she didn’t have the staff or the equipment.”
So it wasn’t Henry and Sian. It was the locusts.
“What have you heard? Do you think there’s anything in it?”
Over the four years I had been in Safila there had been several famine scares, hordes of refugees about to flood over the border bringing plagues of cholera, meningitis, elephantiasis, God knows what, but it had never, in all the time I had been in Safila, come to anything serious. Sometimes we suspected it was just a refugee ruse to get more food.
Betty gave a little toss of her head, offended. “You mustn’t think I’m in any way trying to tell you your job, Rosie dear. You know I have the greatest admiration for everything you do, the greatest admiration. But, you know, we must always listen to the voice of the African, the voice of Africa.”
Suddenly I wanted to bite Betty, or just sort of pummel her face for quite a long time.
“I’m worried too, Betty, but we can’t go raising an alert if we’ve nothing concrete to go on. Have you heard anything I haven’t heard?”
“They, the people, are our barometer, you know. And the Teeth of the Wind as the African calls them”—she paused for approval—“the Teeth of the Wind can be absolute shockers. They fly all day, you know. Miles and miles, they cover, thousands of miles.”
“I know, that’s what they were saying down at the distribution yesterday, but have you heard anything else?”
“When Mavis Enderby was in Ethiopia in ’fifty-eight there was a plague which gobbled up enough grain to feed a million people for a year. Of course, the thing that really worries me, as I was saying to Linda, is the harvest. Miles and miles across, these swarms are, blotting out the sun, black as soot.”
“I KNOW,” I said, more loudly than I meant to, which was stupid, as this was not the time to initiate a Betty-huff. “Has anyone said anything else to you?”
“They can eat their body weight of food in a day, you know, it’s really very worrying and what with the harvest due, and they can move so fast, great clouds of them . . .”
There was so much to do this morning. I simply had to get Betty to go, so I could think. “Thank you, Betty,” I said. “Thank you so much for your support. It is extremely worrying, but you know . . . a trouble shared . . . Now I really must get on, but thanks for bringing it up.”
It worked. Splendid. She took this as a cue to roll her eyes with affected modesty and rush over to give me a little hug. “Well, we’d best get down to the camp if we’re going to be back and ready in time for Linda’s new doctor,” she said, and gave me another little hug before departing.
That was the other thing. We had a new doctor arriving today, an American. Betty was leaving in three weeks’ time and he was going to replace her. We were supposed to be having a special lunch to welcome him. Linda, who was one of our nurses and rather uptight, had apparently worked with this man in Chad two years ago, but she wouldn’t tell us anything about him. All she did was make it very clear that she had been corresponding with him, and go all coy every time his sleeping arrangements were mentioned. I hoped he was going to be all right. We were such a small group, stuck together, all the relationships were finely balanced. It was easy to knock them off-kilter.
I sat down on the bed, and thought about what Betty had said. For all her annoying little ways, she was a very good doctor, and she did know her stuff as far as Africa was concerned. She seemed to have been working here since the early nineteenth century. There was an awful logic to these rumors. Kefti had just had the first good rains for several years. One of the cruelest ironies of Africa is that the first decent rains after a drought produce ideal conditions for locusts. Because they did, indeed, move so fast, a plague at harvest-time was one of the few things other than a war which could create an instant mass exodus.
I got up, fished out a file, and started looking through it. We tried to run an early-warning system for Kefti, but it wasn’t much help, because no one was allowed to go up there. We were banned from going by SUSTAIN because it was a war zone, and banned from going by the Nambulan government because they wanted to keep things sweet with the Aboutians, and the Keftians were fighting Abouti. All the information we had was in this file. It was full of charts about grain prices in the markets near the borders, graphs of the height and weight of children, sightings of movements of people over the border. I had looked at it two days ago. There was nothing out of the ordinary. I was just making sure.
I really needed to decide on a response quickly, because Malcolm was supposed to be arriving at eleven o’clock with the new doctor. Malcolm was the SUSTAIN field officer for the whole of Nambula. He was a bit of a prat, but if we were going to raise an alarm this was a good chance to do it. I decided to go down to the camp and talk to Muhammad Mahmoud. He would know what was up. I was feeling panicky. I had a drink of water, and tried to calm down.
When I stepped out into the white light, I saw Henry having an intimate chat with Sian outside her hut. He was chucking her under her chin in a cutesy-pie manner. She saw me watching, blushed and shot back inside the hut. Henry just raised his eyebrows and smirked—the arrogance of that boy.
“Henry Montague,” I said strictly. “Go to your room.”
He grinned gleefully. Henry had a smile which was almost too big for his face, in a widemouthed, upper-class way. He was always rather elegant, with dark hair hanging over his forehead in a foppish fringe, which presumably had been trendy when he last saw South Kensington. I was constantly trying to get him to fasten it back with a hair grip.
“I shall have words with you later,” I said. “In the meantime you can put the two cold boxes that are just inside the cabana into the Toyota. I want to go down to the camp and get back before Malcolm arrives.”
“Halliaow! Ding! Dong! Mistress Efficiency!” he said, putting his arm round me in a manner which denoted no respect whatsoever. There would be no point in talking to him now about the Sian business. Any criticism or caution would be shaken off like drops of water from a high-spirited puppy after a swim.
We set off in the Toyota pickup in amiable silence. I decided not to bring up the locusts with Henry until I had talked to Muhammad. Muhammad Mahmoud was not an official leader in the camp. He was just brighter than anyone else, us included. Driving left no room for chat, anyway. Concentration was required, even if you weren’t at the wheel. Shaken and bounced around as if in a tumble dryer, you had to make your body relaxed but tense enough to react when you got thrown up off the seat and hit your head on the roof.
“I say! Hope you’ve got a sturdy bra on in there, old thing!” bellowed Henry. He used to say this every single time, imagining he had just thought of it.
We were winding down the steep sandy track into the camp now, looking over the huts, the white plastic arc of the hospital, the square rush-matting shapes which housed the clinic, the ration distribution, the market, the school. Over the last four years misery had gradually been replaced by mundanity for the refugees, and for us too. But by and large it was a contented mundanity. We drew from each other—the ex-pats and the refugees. We went to their parties at night, with the drums and the fires, thrilling to the Africa of our childhood fantasies. We gave them the drugs, food and medical knowledge they needed. We rowed down the river, played with their kids and felt adventurous, and they took pleasure from our energy and naïve excitement at being in Africa. “We came out of the tunnel of our despair to find that we could not only live, but also dance,” Muhammad once said to me, in his absurdly poetic way. We had come through a crisis together and now we were happy. But the refugees here were entirely dependent on food from the West. It made them vulnerable.
“Bloody hell!” Henry yelled as two boys ran in front of the Toyota, playing chicken. They were not supposed to do this. As the hill leveled out and we entered the main area of the camp, a whole group of kids were running after us, waving and shouting, “Hawadga!”—white man.
As I swung open the door and jumped out of the cab, the heat hit me like the blast from an open oven door and the kids surrounded us. God, they were lovely, the kids: the rough ones running around, shouting and laughing; the shy ones standing like kids stand everywhere in the world with one leg hooked behind the other, rubbing their eyes and then putting their fingers in their mouths, as the health workers had spent the last five years teaching them not to. Two of them were wearing glasses made of straw, modeled on our sunglasses. I bent down and tried them on. They all screamed with laughter as if it was the funniest thing that had ever happened.
We usually had lunch at twelve but I had asked everyone to be back up at the cabana by eleven-thirty, ready to greet Malcolm and the new doctor and have the lunch. At ten-fifteen I was through with my jobs and ready to talk to Muhammad, but then there was a problem in Sian’s eye clinic because some of the patients had started demanding five Nambulan sous to have their eyelids turned inside out. They said that people in Wad Denazen, which was another, bigger camp about fifty miles away, got paid five sous to have their eyes examined like this.
“They say it should be the same here,” said Sian despairingly.
“Typical Wad Denazen,” I said. There were some Italian relief workers there who were pretty overemotional and lazy. The French were bad but the Italians were worse.
“What shall I do? It’s dreadful that they’re asking for money when we’re trying to help them.”
“Tell them if they don’t want their eyes examined you won’t be able to find out what’s wrong with them and they’ll go blind. And die.” I said. “Horribly.”
“I can’t tell them that,” said Sian, wide-eyed.
“Just be firm about it,” I said. “They don’t really expect the money. They’re just trying it on.”
“But it’s dreadful to—”
“They’re only human. You’d try it, if you were that poor.”
I looked at her troubled face. Actually, maybe she wouldn’t. Oh dear. I remembered what it was like when you first arrived. There were lots of things which rather let you down with a bump. I wanted to st
ay and talk to her but I had to get on.
Someone came running over from the hospital to say they wanted some IV fluids quickly, which, for some reason, were locked in the other Land Cruiser, and only Debbie had the key. Debbie was a vast girl from Birmingham, with a dry take on life who had been at Safila since the first time I came out. She was brilliant with the refugees. As I hurried along the path to where she was, looking at my watch, I heard a voice behind me saying, “Rhozee.” It was Liben Alye sitting under a little tree holding Hazawi and smiling at me lovingly and hopefully. I felt a stab of irritation, then another one of guilt for having had the stab of irritation. I loved Liben Alye, but he never understood about being in a rush. When I first saw him, sitting with a group of old men during the bad times, I had noticed him because of the way he was holding this baby, stroking her cheek and smoothing her hair. It turned out that all his children, six of them, and all his grandchildren except Hazawi had died, which was why he always kept her with him. I squatted down beside him and shook his hand and touched Hazawi’s cheek at his invitation and agreed that it was indeed very soft. And I admired her long eyelashes and agreed that they were indeed very long. I turned my wrist so I could see my watch and realized that I was indeed going to be very late for Malcolm. Ah, well.
It took me ages to find Debbie, and then she couldn’t stop what she was doing because she was in the process of extracting a Guinea worm from someone’s leg. “I can’t stop,” she said, “or the bloody thing’ll come off my matchstick.”
I watched while she wound the yellow, stringlike creature very, very slowly round a match, pulling it out of the skin.
“Bloody long bugger, this one,” she said to the woman, who grinned proudly.
She carried on winding delicately with her chubby fingers until the end of the worm came out and it hung, squirming, on the matchstick.
“There you are,” she said, handing it to the woman. “Fry it up with a bit of oil and some lentils,” and she acted out an eating movement, so that the woman laughed.