The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (15 page)

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Authors: William Kamkwamba

BOOK: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
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“Khamba is dead,” I said.

The rope hadn’t budged. There’d been no struggle. A terrible thought suddenly occurred to me: when Khamba saw me leave, he’d given up his will to live. That meant I killed him.

While Charity untied the rope from the tree, I dug a pit with my hoe,
my mind blank and black inside. A vigorous energy came rushing upward from that cold, dark place. It was the hardest I’d worked in months.

The rope was still attached to Khamba’s leg, so I pulled while Charity pushed with the hoe. With a bit of effort, Khamba toppled into the shallow pit.

“So long, Khamba,” I said. “You were a good friend.”

We filled the hole with soil and left no marker, even concealed the patch with grass and branches. When Charity and I got home, we told no one about what we’d done. Even after all these years, it’s remained a secret, until now.

 

T
WO WEEKS AFTER BURYING
my dog, Cholera swept the district.

The epidemic had started in November in the southern region near Mwanza. A farmer from that area traveled to a funeral in Kasiya, twenty kilometers from Wimbe, and brought the sickness with him. Within days, a dozen were dead in that village, and hundreds were infected across the district.

Cholera is a terrible way to die. It begins with a horrible stomachache, nausea, and instant weakness. Violent diarrhea then follows, milky and colorless and without any smell. It drains the body of all life and energy, leaving a person so weak he can’t even speak. Without treatment, death comes in six hours. Across Malawi and the rest of Africa, cholera is an unfortunate companion of the rainy seasons. Many villages have poorly built pit latrines, which sometimes flood and pollute the streams and wells where people drink. The blowflies also carry the bacteria after crawling out of latrines and landing on food. And during the famine, people looking for something to eat also became carriers. The cholera would strike them on the road, forcing them to become sick in the bush. Rain, flies, and cockroaches then spread the disease, contaminating the banana peels, tubers, and husks people picked from the ground to eat.

To keep us safe, the clinic in the trading center began giving out free chlorine to treat our drinking water. My mother brought it home one after
noon in a Coca-Cola bottle, and for the rest of the month, our water tasted like metal. We also covered the latrine hole with a broom handle and flat piece of tin, as advised. But once you stepped inside and pulled off the lid, the flies swarmed from the hole like the great plagues of the Bible, smashing into your face and mouth and around your head. It became quite stressful, swatting them and trying to finish your business at the same time. Any traces of diarrhea around the latrine hole would always cause alarm.

Each day, the cholera people walked past our house on their way for treatment, their eyes milky and skin wrinkled from dehydration. I’d watch them from behind the trees until they got close, then run down the trail toward home. But just as they left, the starving people would follow.

Those who died from cholera were soaked in chlorine and buried at night in the graveyard by the Catholic church, usually by the same doctors and staff who’d treated them. To speed the process, two bodies would be placed in the same shallow hole, then quickly covered. No one knows how many were dying across Wimbe. Between hunger and cholera, there were burials every day.

 

B
ACK AT HOME,
G
EOFFREY’S
anemia had grown worse. His legs became horribly swollen, and if you touched his feet, your finger left an impression in his bubbled skin, as if his legs were filled with clay.

“Can you feel it?” I’d ask, poking the blisters.

“I can’t,” he said.

He was often dizzy and had trouble walking straight lines. One afternoon I took him outside into the sunshine, but he stopped and said, “Wait, I can’t see.” We had to stand there until his eyes adjusted to the light. For months now, his mother had only served pumpkin leaves at supper. My cousin was slowly dying.

With little else to do, my mother took half our flour for the day, placed it in a basin, and walked over to Geoffrey’s house.

“I’ve come to share this with you,” my mother said. “It’s not much, but it’s enough for porridge.”

“Thank you so much,” said Geoffrey’s mom. “You’ve saved our very lives.”

“We share what we have,” my mother said. “We can’t allow our family to suffer.”

A few days later, my father’s sister Chrissy came by and said Grandpa had fainted in his yard.

“He’s only eating pumpkin leaves,” she said. “Brother, please pray for our father.” That afternoon, my mother took half our food again and gave it to Grandpa.

 

W
E WERE ALL LOSING
weight. The bones began to show in my chest, and the rope I’d used as a belt no longer sufficed. Now I’d started pinching my two belt loops together, then tying them off with a stick, much like a tourniquet, which I could simply twist when I became any thinner. My mouth was always dry. My arms became thin like blue gum poles and ached all the time. Soon I found it difficult to squeeze my hand into a fist.

One afternoon I was pulling weeds in the fields when my heart began beating so fast that I lost my breath and nearly fainted.
What’s wrong with me?
I thought. I was so frightened. I bent down slowly until my knees were in the soil, then I stayed that way for a long time, until my heart returned to normal and I could breathe.

At night I sat in my room with the lamp and stared into the walls, dozing off, passing through some other world. I watched a centipede crawl up the wall for what seemed like hours. I grabbed a mayfly by the wings that had flown too close to the flame, asking it, “How are you alive? What are
you
eating?” then let it go, watching it spiral toward the ground like a broken paper airplane.

No magic could save us now. Starving was a cruel kind of science.

 

A
ROUND THIS TIME, MY
father started weighing himself obsessively. By now his mighty frame had shrunk like a piece of fruit in the sun. Sharp
bones poked through where giant muscles once dominated. His teeth seemed bigger; I noticed his scars. One day he told me he was having trouble seeing across the compound. Like Geoffrey, the hunger had taken his vision.

It seemed the thinner my father became, the more he wanted to weigh himself. He kept a maize scale hanging by a rope from the tobacco shelter, and one morning I watched his routine. He gripped the hook, then hung there like a sack of maize or a bale of tobacco, staring up at the needle. He then made a grunting sound and said, “Hmm, five kilos. Mama—”

As always, my mother came and looked, but she refused to weigh herself. The children were also forbidden. Like many women during the hunger, she’d started tying her
mpango
tight around her waist like a belt. She said it confused her stomach and tricked her heart from beating so fast, helping her to breathe. When she nursed my baby sister in the mornings and afternoons, her hands would shake.

At night, she resorted to mind games.

“You’re losing weight because you keep thinking about food,” she’d tell my sisters. “Don’t you know that causes your body to stress and burn more energy? If hunger is all you think about, you’ll only suffer more.”

“I don’t want to become swollen, Mama,” my sisters cried.

“Then think about positive things. Please, do that for me.”

She’d then serve our
nsima,
and we’d pass through it like a dream, our three mouthfuls of food leaving no trace in our bodies.

My father then started excusing himself once the food was served.

“Papa, aren’t you going to eat?”

“No, I’m fine, you kids go ahead.”

One day, sitting in the yard, my father said the strangest thing: “One of the mysterious, yet wonderful things about the hunger is it only kills men.”

He sounded mad, but it was true. Men were the ones going out foraging, and in turn, burning precious energy that couldn’t be restored. Cholera didn’t discriminate, but hunger seemed to take only the men. Lots of men were also abandoning their families and leaving them to fend for
themselves. In the mornings, they’d tell their wives they were going to look for food and then never come home. The pressure of providing for a wife and children was just too much to bear. Widows and the forsaken now gathered at the chief’s house by the dozens. I hadn’t seen Gilbert for days because he was so busy helping care for them.

My father must’ve been thinking about this, because he turned to my mother and said: “My family is mine to look after. If we’re supposed to die, then we die together. These are my principles. God is on my side.”

A week later, my sister Mayless became sick with malaria. For days she lay on her reed mat, sweating and shivering in her sleep, then waking up to vomit. She couldn’t keep down any food, and like the rest of us, she was already so dangerously thin. At night she’d cry and moan from the pain in her arms and legs. Her fevers became so violent my parents tried admitting her to the clinic, but the doctors refused because it was quarantined for cholera.

At home, my mother stayed up for hours by her bedside, singing traditional songs and soothing her with a wet cloth. A kerosene lamp flickered inside the room.

All night we heard the same words coming through the darkened doorway.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry.”

But everyone was worried.

“Pray for your sister,” my mother said. “She’s very sick.”

When Mayless finally recovered, she was so thin she was like a ghost walking among us.

 

A
ROUND MID
-F
EBRUARY, THE TOBACCO
was finally ready to prune, and my father needed me and Geoffrey to help. We gathered the yellow, oily leaves into fisted bundles. Then, sitting in the shade, we threaded the stem of every leaf with a crochet needle and
mlulu
vine. The bundles were hung to dry under shelters made from blue gum and bamboo poles, a process that could take as long as eight weeks, depending on the humid
ity. Threading and hanging took hours and killed our backs, especially because we had no energy to stand or hold ourselves up. In our delirium, the rows of drying tobacco began to look like delicious food.

“I wish we could eat it,” I said to Geoffrey.

“Yah, by now we’d be full.”

“Soon it will be dried and the traders will line up to buy it. We’ll finally end this sadness.”

“Yah, for sure.”

But that’s not what happened. Only a week after hanging the tobacco, my father went to the trading center and started cutting deals against the crop once it was dry. He couldn’t wait for the auction. He had to find our supper.

“Brothers, my family is placing all their hopes on me,” my father said. “I’m asking you to give me a quality price, perhaps twenty kwacha a kilo.” A full walkman costs thirty.

The traders just shook their heads. “You know times are tough,” they said. “I can’t see myself giving more than ten kwacha a kilo, not during this time.”

“Please, just enough for a walkman,” my father said. “Don’t make me beg. This is quality tobacco. It’s drying very nicely.”

After some time, they agreed to fifteen. As the famine deepened, these deals became more sour and unjust.

“I’ll give you one bucket of maize for ninety kilos of that tobacco when it’s ready,” the traders started saying.

Even Mister Mangochi, my father’s friend, couldn’t resist the market, and my father had no choice but to accept. Each week, he cut more deals against the crop, attempting to keep the numbers straight in his head. Many men would’ve fought to the death to even have such an opportunity.

Meanwhile, out in the maize fields, the stalks were now as high as my father’s chest. The first ears had begun to form, revealing traces of reddish silk on their heads. The deep green leaves had begun their fade to yellow, along with the stem. While men withered and died all around, our plants were looking strong and fat.

“Twenty days,” I said, looking at my father.

“I’d say you’re right.”

We smiled and stroked the leaves like swaddled babes, enjoying the soft music they created together in the breeze.

If I was correct, we had twenty days until the green maize was mature enough to eat, something we lovingly called
dowe.
It’s the same as American “corn on the cob,” when the kernels are soft and sweet and so heavenly in your mouth. Standing in those fields in February, I felt like one of the old explorers I’d read about—lost on the ocean and dying of thirst. Water everywhere and not a drop to drink. All day and night, I dreamed of
dowe.

Toward the end of the month, Radio One said the
dowe
was ready in Mchinji, about 120 kilometers southwest. People started traveling there by the hundreds, including my uncle Ari, my mother’s brother. Along the way he saw older men stop alongside the roadside and wave family members on, saying, “Go ahead. Get to Mchinji.” He later heard those men had died. Gangs with spears and pangas guarded the fields and harassed those coming from other districts. Theft was rampant, and while my uncle waited outside Mchinji for his few kilos, he heard a great commotion on the outskirts of the village and rushed over to see. A mob had just attacked a thief and killed him. My uncle saw the man’s body lying in the weeds, his neck cut to the bone.

After nearly five months of suffering, on February 27, the radio sent a message from our president. He was letting us know that the country was experiencing a hunger crisis. After consulting with his officials, he’d finally concluded it was an “emergency.” As I said, our president was a funny guy.

 

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
March, the maize stalks were as high as my father’s shoulders. At this stage, the flowers told you everything. Once the red and yellow silk began to dry and turn brown, you could start checking to see if the
dowe
was ready. I pinched the cob very hard to feel the grain.
If they crushed under your fingers, it was too early. But if the kernels were firm, you knew it was time.

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