House and Machete

I was restless. It was dusk, and I was alone at Uncle Ben’s. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi was lying on the bed beside me, spent. So I went for a walk. That is, I went for a stroll, as Krio speakers are liable to look at you as if you are crazy if you tell them you are going for a walk, and if you instead mention the word stroll, they instantly understand.
Case in point: To begin my stroll, I left Uncle Ben’s and turned right instead of the usual left. I followed the road along a ridge around to the west of Uncle Ben’s, through a schoolyard with a red dusty field, past maybe fifty different steaming pots of rice and twenty unabashedly fascinated children. That landed me amidst a narrow grid of orange-red clay houses. The path was very narrow, and I walked through more than one front yard, and had to graciously decline a dinner invitation. Then I turned a corner and was face to face with three girls, about my age.
“Eh!” One of them made the peculiar high-pitched squeak that is ubiquitous in Sierra Leone. “Ousai you de go?” Where are you going? She looked affronted.
I shrugged. “Jus’ strolling.”
“Ohhhh.” All three nodded in agreement. It was a fine night for strolling. Nothing amiss here. I proceeded on, over a narrow path through a swamp, and then found my way back to Uncle Ben’s.
But I was still restless, so I left again. This time I walked down the main road out of town. Perhaps ten minutes southeast of Uncle Ben’s, the main road dips into a kilometer wide valley. The valley floor is a checkerboard of swamp, bush grasses and boulders, with rolling hills in the distance. Some are bald save the light green fuzz of freshly planted rice, and others have a smattering of palm trees. Tall old growth trees are rare, and from a distance it’s hard to tell whether the bush grasses at the feet of the palms and trees is two feet high or ten feet high.
The main road itself is typical of Koidu Town; somebody paved it once upon a time, but now the pavement bears more resemblance to the moon than the 401 and so all the vehicles drive with one wheel on pavement and the other wheel on the shoulder. This road isn’t as bad as some; on the Kainkordu Rd. in town, the pedestrians walk on the pavement in the middle of the road and the vehicles use the shoulder. It’s a strange inversion, as strange as the backwards development that has left Koidu Town with these roads. It was the diamonds, the locals will say. Before the war, they go on, with a clichéd widening of their eyes, Koidu was very big, with lots of money. Everyone was coming, and you could find diamonds just walking along the road after a rain. But the rebels took it all, they end. I’m never sure how much to believe the fairytale vision of Koidu. I believe the part about the rebels.
In the middle of the valley, off the road to the right, I noticed a shell of tiny house. It was made from orange-brown clay bricks, but all that remained was most of the exterior walls and window frames. One of the two corners closest to the road was smashed, and it looked uninhabited. That last point was a bit odd, because throughout Koidu there are similar ruins of houses brimming with people that clearly still live there. Amhidu confirmed my suspicion that by and large the inhabitants of such ruins are not the original owners.
The house was perched on a rocky promontory, above the valley, set back thirty paces from the road. At the end of the valley the sun was sneaking away into hazy obscurity instead of broadcasting a sunset across the sky. It seemed kind of fitting in the humidity. I thought about going to sit down on the edge of the promontory as I first passed the house, but didn’t.
A little further along I came to a bridge. I stopped, pulled out my cellphone and looked at it with purpose so that my fellow pedestrians wouldn’t think I was lost, and then turned around and walked back to the little house.
There was a path going past the house that was quite well-worn. The fork that headed towards the house, however, was very overgrown. I cut around to the left of the house, paused, and then sat down on the rock face.
First I considered the clouds. Some were puffy cumulonimbus clouds, filling out like anvils just as the textbooks say they do. But layered between those clouds were hazier white clouds, obscuring the sun. I don’t know the name for these clouds. Katie often points out how majestic the clouds are here, but I didn’t think they were very different from clouds anywhere else until I could think of a good reason for the difference – the humidity. Poor Katie, she’s very patient.
Those clouds weren’t majestic, though. They were calm. The hazy white clouds cast a fog over the hills, so that as they shrank into the distance they also vanished into the mist. For some reason palm trees stand out particularly well against hazy fog, so I could see many spiky palm trees silhouetted against the sky. For a few minutes, I was calm too.
All around me cricket chirps competed with car and motorbike engines. My mind kept wandering back to the idea that I was just far enough off the road, with my back to the path, the sun going down and no one else around, to be a great target for robbery. In general Koidu Town is safe, but the unspoken rule in Sierra Leone is that you don’t present an opportunity for crime, not if you’re wise.
I waited a minute longer. There’s some youthful pride in me that hates to let quasi-rational fears dictate my actions. At least right away. After thinking about it for a moment, and promoting the idea to fully-rational status, I stood up to leave.
Immediately I was face to face with a small boy, maybe eleven years old. He was staring at me intently, with a very serious face. In his hands was a giant machete. He was hugging it absentmindedly.
In retrospect, the machete wasn’t giant; he was small. At the time, though, my brain filled with images from A Long Way Gone, a book written by a former child soldier from Sierra Leone. And I heard the voice of Bailor, explaining about the amputations. “Foday Sankoh recruited the youths. And the small boys, they were too small for guns, but you can give them a knife, you can give them a machete, and then you give them some drugs, and then...” He says the word ‘machete’ with only two syllables. There’s no “eee” on the end – it sounds like “mash-et.”
“Good evening, sir.” I spoke deeply and firmly.
“Good evening,” he mumbled back, eyes still wide and fixated on me. We paused a moment. Then he set off down the well-worn path, and I walked back up to the road, restlessness gone.