Nine thirty … lights out. The generator ground
to a halt. The full moon cast eerie shadows across the mission station. A light wind afforded the only relief from the
muggy night. A hush fell over our house as the activities of the day came to an
end. By candlelight we prepared for bed and crawled under the sheets.
“Do
you hear that drumming?’ I asked my husband, Jim.
“Yeah,
it sounds close.”
The
discordant beat and sinister chanting grew louder. My heartbeat quickened. I looked at Jim. “This gives me the creeps.”
Eight
days earlier my husband, Jim, our eighteen month son, Christopher, and I had arrived
at Chitokoloki Mission Hospital in a remote area of the Northwestern Province
of Zambia, Africa. For our first week we lived in the guest house of the doctor
and his wife, Doc and Hilda Worsfold. They introduced us to the mission station
and the new hospital, which they called Kariba. Post-operative and more
seriously ill patients received treatment in the wards of Kariba.
Across
the road, Doc showed us the old hospital compound which was a square mud brick
building made up of individual cubicles. Patients with minor illnesses and their
families could stay and care for themselves while they received treatment. As
we walked through the open courtyard of the old hospital, the smoke of the
cooking fires, the smell of slightly rancid meat and various body odors filtered
across the open space. Quite a contrast
from our antiseptic, germ-phobic hospitals in Canada.
While
we stayed in the guest house we got to know Doc and Hilda. Doc struck us as a sort of Jekyll and Hyde
personality. He had worked at the hospital for twenty-six years and showed concern
and commitment to the Zambians. At the
same time, he delighted in relating stories about the “rascals” from the area
and their love of the local whiskey, called lituku.
His favorite name for these rascals was
“silly sausages”.
Another
story he told us was of an early Scottish explorer and missionary, F. S. Arnot.
When Arnot arrived at Chief Msiri’s boma,
or compound, in 1886 he found skulls of the chief’s enemies on poles
surrounding his palace. As he told us
the story, Doc watched our reactions as though he hoped for a shocked response.
We obliged, though we weren’t sure which of Doc’s stories were truth, which
were fiction. However, while we stayed in Doc and Hilda’s guest house we felt
relatively safe and protected. After all, the doctor slept next door, so we had
to be safe.
But
this was the day for us to leave the guest house and move into the two-storey
house, the only one of its kind in the whole province. Doc dubbed it “Mawhiney’s Folly” after its Irish
builder. Unlike the other homes with
cement floors, this house had floors of wooden parquet and a wooden staircase
to the upper floor. It stood on the northern end of the mission station,
slightly apart from the rest and near to the closest village. It looked out of
place; grey, gloomy, and foreboding.
“What
are we doing here?” I asked Jim that night. “This doesn’t feel like anything I
signed up for.”
The
repetitious beat of the drumming and chanting increased as the breeze changed
direction and wafted through the windows. We huddled together in our bed,
neither of us able to sleep. I remembered Doc’s stories and wondered how much
could actually be true.
“I’m
going to get the grass slasher,” Jim said. “If they’re coming for us, I’m going
to be ready.”
He
inched his way across the hall and down the stairs to the kitchen. In the
storage area he found the three-foot flat iron rod, curved and razor sharp at
the end. As he retraced his steps, the
stairs groaned and the floor creaked.
As
I heard him returning, my mind flashed back to expectations I had while still
in Canada: Florence Nightingale curing malaria-stricken children,
relieving the suffering of the malnourished, saving babies in complicated
deliveries. Africa was an adventure
waiting to be experienced. Some of our
friends thought we were out of our minds taking a baby to such a remote place.
Others told us how brave we were to leave everything, pick up, and go to Africa.
Now, here I was, immobilized under the covers.
“Maybe
we should call Doc,” I said. “He could take us back to the guest house.”
“It’s
two o’clock in the morning,” Jim said. “I don’t think so.”
I
looked at Christopher, sleeping undisturbed. If we ended up in a pot of stew, surely
they would spare him. Weariness finally overtook me and I fell asleep, dreaming
of skulls on poles and foreigners in cauldrons over cooking fires.
Crowing
roosters woke me a few hours later. The
sun streamed into the room as voices from the path to the Zambezi River drifted
through the open window. I rubbed my blurry eyes and scanned the room. Jim lay
snoring. Christopher was stretching and yawning. No more drumming. No
massacres. No missionary stew. Relief and fatigue swept over me as I drifted again
into another world.
“Hoity mwani, hoity mwani,” someone called
outside our window – “I’m here, thank you.”
I
awoke from my dreamland. I threw on my tee shirt and wrinkled skirt and hurried
downstairs through the kitchen to the back door. I had been told by Hilda that
a man called Luvuwa would come to help me with household chores. I guessed this
was Luvuwa.
Beside
Luvuwa stool a man dressed in spotless brown trousers, a white shirt, and
wearing a broad smile. In his arms he carried a squawking chicken. He spoke in the local language, Lunda.
Luvuwa, in his limited English, explained that this man was the headman in the
village beside us (the same village tha, as it turned out, had just been
partying through the night). He and his village wanted to tell us how happy
they were that we had come to help them.
He came this morning to present a chicken as a gift and to welcome us to
Chitokoloki.
I
felt foolish, but relieved. It would be chicken in the pot, not me. In the
future, I’d try to restrain my vivid imagination.
Kathryn Rennie lives in Burlington,
Ontario, with her husband. She and her husband worked in Zambia, Africa for
fourteen years in a medical mission hospital. She enjoys writing stories
of her family's experiences during those years. She has three children, two of
whom were born in Zambia, and ten grandchildren.
See Brian Henry's schedule here, including writing workshops and creative writing courses in Algonquin Park, Barrie, Bracebridge, Brampton, Burlington, Caledon, Collingwood, Georgetown, Guelph, Hamilton, Ingersoll, Kingston, Kitchener, London, Midland, Mississauga, Newmarket, Orillia, Oakville, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, Saint John, NB, Sudbury, Thessalon, Toronto, Windsor, Halton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Muskoka, Peel, Simcoe, York, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.
