The mercury tells me it’s a touch over thirty five, but I suspect she’s trying to make friends with the unbearable heat outside; it’s a lonely life being a themometer. Everything is parched, I pass palms pleading for a shower; their shoulders dusty and sagging. The grass and crops threw up their wispy arms and succumbed to the heat a few months ago, depressed cows murmur and kick dust in the shade. It’s only the bougainvillea that remain defiant despite the sun’s assault; pink, orange, white bracts waving in the hot wind, hidden spikes keeping even the heat at bay.
60kms of sad palms, dusty fields and bougainvillea, and I pull the bike over in Melolo at a favourite little warung of mine. I park in the shade, peel my helmet off like it’s a suction cup and wander in for a hot sweet tea. The sweat runs as the sugar hit begins, and I sit there, a pungent river in a parched and weary land. I begin a three-day reflection on how folks ever survive out here with distant water sources, seasonal crops and little, if any income. It’s certainly not by being lazy, uneducated, ignorant, inefficient or any other labels the poor are granted by those who scored better in the lottery of birth. A few mistakes is a death sentence in this kind of climate. There’s little room for error.
It takes a mix of numerous things: tenacity, a thorough knowledge of local resources that can be drawn on for survival when the crops fail, perseverance in the face of hopelessness, the discipline to ration meagre food and water supplies though your belly and your children beg you to do otherwise; it takes incredible grace and tact to preserve relationships with family, friends and money-lenders who might need to be drawn on should the ugly beasts of illness or famine make the short distance over the threshold and into the bodies of your loved ones; and it takes incredible wisdom to navigate all these things with an empty stomach and a malnourished mind.
And despite all that, they downed tools and plied this bule with coffee, rice and chicken they can’t afford to share; gave him the double bed with the only mosquito net in the house, extended grace to cover his cultural blunders and kept him shaded, watered and befriended ’til he decided to leave.
I’m beginning to understand – in a very tangible way – that thing the apostle Paul said about God using the ‘foolish’ to shame the ‘wise’; the ‘weak’ to shame the ‘strong’; that thing that Jesus said about our meeting him whenever we help the poor. And as I fled the heat on the fourth day, I had 60kms of branding asphalt to reconsider some long-held assumptions about exactly who is helping who; who is teaching who, and my place in it all.
If you want a comfortable life comrades, take my advice and don’t mingle, don’t get near, and don’t ever make friends with the poor.
It’s devastatingly transformative.