The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (24 page)

My mother’s fire was still warm from breakfast, so I added a handful of maize piths and blew until the fire caught life. I placed the pot in the center and waited for greatness.

About fifteen minutes later, I heard a rumbling inside the pot and the water began to boil. The plastic puffed and danced from the steam, but the rope held tight. My heart began to flutter. I’d give it a few more seconds before starting the final test.

Suddenly, I heard a voice behind me. My mother.

“What’s that smell?”
she shouted.

“Biogas, it’s—”

“It’s horrible!”

By now the plastic was rumbling like mad, ready to blow. I had to act quickly. It was time to remove the reed and proceed with ignition.

I reached over and quickly popped out the reed, and when I did, a pipe of silver steam came rushing out the top. My mother was right, it smelled vile. I’d set aside a long piece of grass, so I grabbed it now and poked it into the fire, catching a flame.

“Stand back!” I shouted. “This could be dangerous.”

“What?!”

I stood up and ran to the door, pushing my mother aside. With half
my body shielded by the door frame, I stretched out my arm, inching the flame closer and closer.

“Here it goes,” I said.

I touched the fire to the piping stream, clinching my eyes to shield them from the flash. But when the flame touched the gas, all it did was sputter out and die. When I opened my eyes, all I saw was a piece of grass, dripping with foul water. My mother was furious.

“Look what you’ve done; you’ve ruined my best cooking pot! Boiling goats’ poop, I can’t believe it. Wait until I tell your father…”

I wanted to explain that I’d done it for her sake, but I guessed it wasn’t the right time.

I
N LATE
2003,
WHILE
I read books under our mango tree and tinkered with my experiments, my mother went to visit her parents in Salima and stayed for two weeks. Salima is by the lake and very hot, and the mosquitoes there are like small vicious birds. When my mother returned home, she developed high fever and dizziness, then every part of her body began to quiver, as if plunged into an icy bath. We all knew it was malaria.

In sub-Saharan Africa, almost everyone gets malaria at some point. Most people first contract the virus in their childhood. If they don’t use proper bed netting to keep from getting mosquito bites, they’ll continue to get infected each year until they’re old and gray. Because we didn’t have nets at my house, malaria was a yearly problem for us all. If we caught the virus in time and took the medicine provided by the clinic, we’d feel better in a week or two. But some stubborn strains of the virus are more ferocious and attack the brain, and they’re harder to treat. Every year in Africa, malaria kills over a million people, many of them children.

My mother’s symptoms seemed normal, so we put her to bed, and made plans to get her some medicine the following day. But as with my sister Mayless, the fever kept getting worse. By morning my mother was vomiting and shaking even more, and she could no longer speak. Her breathing
became so heavy I could hear it across the corridor in my room. By noon, she’d lost the feeling in her legs.

Our village doesn’t have an ambulance, so my father hoisted my mother onto his bicycle, told her to hold on, and pushed her to the clinic near the trading center. The nurses took one look at her and demanded that she be rushed immediately to the Anglican hospital in Mtunthama. My father quickly flagged down a pickup and loaded her in the back.

In the waiting room at Mtunthama, the doctor said, “What are your symptoms?”

“I can’t really walk,” my mother said. “My legs feel paralyzed.”

After testing positive for malaria, the doctors gave her two injections in the leg. But there were no free beds at the hospital, so the doctor sent her home.

Two days later, my mother began slipping into a coma.

The morning it happened, we managed to get her to her feet and walk her outside. We lifted her onto the bicycle, doing our best to keep her from falling off the saddle.

“Mama, you have to hold on,” I said, but it was no use.

As we pushed her down the trail, her limp body kept collapsing like a sack of beans. Her head rolled back, so I grabbed a handful of hair and held her up.

“Don’t worry,” my father kept telling my mother, the fear straining his voice. “Just try to hold on until we get to the road. We’re taking you to the hospital now. They’ll fix you and make you better.”

The pickup stop was just a small space under some mango trees near the clinic and primary school. Once there, we gently pulled my mother off the bike and laid her on the grass. In minutes, a pickup came rumbling from the trading center, headed for Kasungu. My father waved it down.

“Make way!” he screamed. “My wife is sick!”

About ten people were squeezed in the back of the truck, along with crates of empty Coke bottles and a few sacks of maize. When the passengers saw my mother, several of them jumped out and made room.

“It’s bad malaria!” my father shouted to the driver. “Take us to Mtunthama!”

We slid her into the bed of the truck and leaned her back against the cab. My father sat beside her, holding up her body and placing her head against his shoulder. The road to Mtunthama was filled with holes and bumps, and laying her flat would only rattle her body against the bed.

“Look after your sisters, William!” my father said. “Tell my sister Chrissy and the others where we’ve gone.” And like that, the truck sped away.

The truck reached the hospital in fifteen minutes. Once there, my father carried my mother in his arms through the door.

“We need to see the doctor now!” he shouted.

My mother was quickly admitted into a room, where the doctors administered an IV drip to battle the virus.

“This doesn’t look promising,” the doctor said. “It appears it’s gone to her brain.”

The room had pink walls and ESCOM-powered lights. Various posters on the walls showed people suffering different diseases, things like AIDS, tuberculosis, and gonorrhea. Another woman lay in a bed beside my mother. She was from Chamama and kept vomiting into a bag.

That afternoon, my aunt Chrissy and Socrates’ wife, Mary, arrived and stayed through the night, keeping vigil. My father came home to try and sell some maize and soybeans to pay the medical fees. He was quiet and kept pacing the courtyard, as if he was waiting for something.

“Papa, is Mama going to be okay?” Mayless asked.

“She’s very sick. Pray for your mother.”

My father was able to sell a few kilos of grain the next morning in the trading center and he immediately returned to the hospital. I volunteered to stay home and watch my sisters; I was also too afraid to see my mother in such a state. The next day, when I finally did get the courage to go, I quickly regretted it.

My mother’s dark skin looked drained of color against the white sheets, and her lips were dry and cracked. Her chest rose and fell from her
labored breaths like a toy boat on the waves. Her eyes were closed, but her eyeballs were dancing inside.

My mother later told me that deep in the recesses of her darkness, she’d already accepted death. She’d given up her fight and was waiting for Jesus to come and take her. But something wouldn’t allow her to depart. She’d feel her body sinking through the bed, only to rise up again. When this happened, her eyes opened and she saw people she knew, standing above her. Everything would go dark again, and the cycle would repeat. Seeing all those people made her remember her children. At one point in her darkness, she saw a vision of Tiyamike, so young and still so fragile. In the dream, she was alone and frightened because her mother was dead. Thinking of her daughter, my mother struggled to free herself from the blackness for good. It was a terrible fight, which explained why her eyes kept squirming like termites. When she managed to break free and open her eyes, she saw me standing there.

“Tiyamike!”
she screamed.
“Where’s Tiyamike? Where’s my baby?”

I jumped back, as if she were a snake. Her eyes were wide, and pulsing with fear.

“Tiyamike!”

“Tiyamike’s at home,” my aunt said. “You’ll see her soon. Don’t worry.”

Slowly, as if being deflated of air, my mother then slipped back into the darkness. Every time she came back, she’d scream my sister’s name again. Seeing your mother like this is like having God steal the sky from over your head. I was certain she was going to die, and witnessing this made it even more emotional. But after several days, her fever miraculously broke. I’d never prayed so hard in my life.

N
OT LONG AFTER MY
mother came home, Gilbert told me that his father wasn’t doing so well. Ever since the beating by the president’s thugs, the chief had lived in fear for his life, and his health had grown worse.

Whenever I visited, he always appeared quiet and weak, and lately, he’d lost a lot of weight. I saw him sleeping on the sofa or taking walks
alone in his fields when the sun was warm. But because he was the chief, I never really spoke to him. It wasn’t my place as a young man.

A few months later, when I was visiting Geoffrey at the maize mill in Chipumba, we passed some women on the road who said they had some bad news.

“Brothers, our Chief Wimbe is no more,” they said, tears in their eyes.

Geoffrey and I got on my bike and tried to hurry home, but my tire burst and I had to push. While we were struggling with the bike, preparations for the funeral had already begun. A stream of cars and trucks rumbled past. The lorries were filled with chickens and goats and great bags of flour to feed all the guests, who were already arriving to honor the chief. Dozens of village women were also on their way to cook for mourners. All of these people were silent as they passed. Not one radio could be heard. Once the traffic had cleared, I heard the great pounding of a drum, like none I’d ever heard—a dull boom, like a hammer banging the very shell of the sky. A chief was dead.

Hundreds of people were gathered around Gilbert’s house when we arrived. I saw my parents and sisters and aunts and uncles, along with all the traders from the market. Women ran back and forth carrying buckets of water on their heads. Others hunched over fires, wrapped in wood smoke and sweating as they stirred giant pots of
nsima.
A church choir stood under the blue gums softly singing “The World Is Not My Home” while a steady line of people poured out of Gilbert’s front door, wailing and screaming.

“Our king has left us!” they cried. “What will we do?”

Geoffrey and I sat down under a tree and waited. Soon, someone came and said Gilbert was ready to see us. He was sitting on the other side of the house under some trees. My friend looked like he was in shock, even though he was trying to stay strong for his mother. Seeing him filled me with sadness.

“I heard about your father,” I said. “You know I’m here for you in this terrible time. God is in control.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I just remained silent and comforted my friend.

The funeral ceremony was held in the yard of the primary school underneath the big blue gums. A light rain started falling. Someone erected a large canopy for the family and delegation of chiefs and officials who’d arrived from all over. They crowded under the shelter while hundreds of villagers huddled outside, moaning and sobbing in the downpour. Up front, the chief’s body lay in a closed wooden coffin, covered in wildflowers. Every church and mosque around Wimbe was in attendance. Their choirs took turns huddled around the wooden box singing songs in Chichewa. When they finished, the silence was broken by the banging of the drum.

The funeral dirge was slow and steady, then rose in tempo. Atop a fast and furious rhythm, out walked the Gule Walmkulu. More than fifty of them pressed around the coffin, each wearing black masks in the shape of cows’ heads, with long exaggerated snouts, black horns, and round bulging eyes. The mystical dancers had been there for days, camping behind Gilbert’s house and huddled around their fires, never revealing their faces. Now several of them broke free of the group. Their bodies locked in spasms as they began to dance. They crouched low in unison and kicked out their legs, sweeping their arms over the red soil as if telling the earth it was about to receive our chief.

After the dancing, the funeral procession filed down to the graveyard near the Catholic church. The chief’s grave had been dug much like Uncle John’s, with a smaller compartment at the base of the pit. Prayers were said and wreaths were laid on the coffin. Mister Ngwata, the chief’s messenger, appeared in his khaki policeman’s uniform and fired a shotgun into the air. With our ears ringing and faces stinging from tears, we watched as our beloved leader was lowered into the ground.

I
F THE DEATH OF
our chief wasn’t bad enough for our district, later that year, another famine fell upon the country. It arrived in spite of some newfound hope: in May 2004, our despised President Muluzi had finally stepped down and made way for new elections. Malawians then chose Bingu wa Mutharika as our new president. Mutharika was a respected man
who’d earned degrees in economics in the United States and held high posts in the United Nations. President Mutharika pledged that change would soon come to Malawi, and one of the first things he did was reach out to us farmers. For the next planting season, his government began subsidizing fertilizer, and that meant my family could afford it for the first time in three years.

Fertilizer coupons reduced the price from four thousand kwacha to nine hundred fifty, with each family getting four coupons each. However, this scheme didn’t stand a chance against the culture of corruption that already existed. Instead of distributing the coupons to farmers, many local leaders horded them and sold them to the people with the most cash.

In December 2005, each farming family received their four coupons. To split up the work of hauling these heavy bags, my father and I each took two, then waited in line all day at the ADMARC in Wimbe, where the government sold its maize and fertilizer. My father received his bags and left, but when it was time to get mine, the corrupt officials had given most of them away to their friends. They closed the shop early and the farmers in line nearly began to riot.