INTO THE VOID

CHAPTER 6: WATER FROM THE PUMP

Sweat dripping from his bald shaved head, knuckles to the gravel filled ground, the young boy; no more than 12 years did the push-ups. He was in a courtyard with 24 other children who were doing the same thing. They were arranged in an orderly manner of 5 rows. At the command of a man wearing an orange robe they bent their elbows and let their bodies downwards and upwards. “Hai” the man shouted and the children responded by an upward movement. “Hai” he said again and children responded with a downward movement. The man took a 5 second pause before each shout and the children would not move until they heard his command. The man was going to chant the command 500 times.

“Get up, get up. On the path to be strong is the hard.” The commanding man said while another man who stood by whipped the boy on the shoulders with a straight staff. The boy cried; tears flowing down the side of his cheeks. He tried his best to be quiet, to be strong, to push up his body and continue the training but he could not. As bad as he wanted too he just could not. The longer he stayed down, the more the strokes came. He eventually gave up and lay there, soaked in sweat; the salty liquid tingling his swollen bruises. This is another Saturday in the life of Lu Ming.

“Hey, Obiora wake up.” Mrs Christine Williams said calling her son by his Igbo name while she opened the curtains of the room. She walked over to the bed on which Xaviere lay; pronated covered by a blue duvet. He tapped the dorsum of his left foot lightly and cajoled him to wake up.

Christine Williams or Christy as her husband likes to call her pronouncing the “y” as “ee” in the manner many Igbo people did, was Xaviere’s mother. She was a tall female; well she was taller than most standing at a staggering five feet ten inches. She had piercing, almond green eyes; eyes that Xaviere found hard to lie to. He felt as though with those eyes of hers, she could look into his mind and tell if he was lying. Like the time he came home with a black eye. When she asked about the swollen eye, he claimed he ran into a pole; which was like the oldest trick in the book. He kept avoiding her piercing gaze and after little persuasion, he told the truth. That was how Mrs Williams got to know about Xaviere’s bulling problem.

Christine parents were Catholic missionaries who went to different African countries. In their over 20 years of evangelical expeditions, Mr and Mrs Winetemple visited various African countries; from Lesotho to Zambia and Nairobi in Kenya, the couple moved around a lot spending 2 to 3 years in remote locations setting up churches. It was quite a thrilling experience but nothing was as exciting as their visit to Nigeria.

The cold, hazy air in the mornings, the sore throats and dry leaves; Decembers in Enugu were a new experience to Christy. This was nothing compared to the harsh snowstorms of Quebec or the heat of Zambia; it was like a mixture of the both. Harmattan; a climate experience exclusive to West Africa. Christine hated it here. The weather made her lips chapped and her skin dry. She had to be coated in petroleum jelly all day which made her very sweaty whenever she walked under the sun which was most of the day because her parents insisted in walking through the village and evangelizing to the locals. They did not have indoor piping or a bath tub. She had to get water to bath from a manually operated water pump. It was a lever system connected to a pump handle which had to be cranked up and down to have the water flow out. Christine hated every bit of it. Her hair was breaking, there was dust gathered on her eye lashes, her feet hurt from hiking the rocky terrain of this place.

“Mum, when are we going back to Quebec?” Christine asked as she swept the dried leaves in front of the house. There was a big mango tree in the middle of the compound. They could get ripe fruits from the tree whenever it was mango season but during the harmattan, all it provided was dried, fallen leaves; leaves Christine had to sweep every cold, dust laden, fogged up morning with a broom made from old palm fronds.

“Whenever the Lord tells us to leave, my dear” Mrs Winetemple answered.

“I would love if he spoke sooner.”

“Young lady, how dare talk about your Lord and saviour like that?” Mrs Winetemple asked with an expression of shock on her face. This woman was a staunch catholic; same as her mother, and that mother’s mother before her. She was a devout Christian and now to have her daughter; who will one day have children of her own, a daughter who will teach her own daughters and sons of course the way of The Lord speak so lightly of such weighty matters was shocking.

“We are here to do The Lords work and we shall go wherever he pleases. Discard those thought from your mind and pray that He forgives you.” Mrs Winetemple said. Christine after hearing her mother’s reprimand said nothing else. She finished sweeping the compound and got the buckets. She was going to the pump just outside the gate to fetch some water.

Pipe-borne water was a scarce commodity in the community at this time. The water pumps were opened from 4 am to 8 am and then from 4 pm to 6pm. During the weekends, the time was increased by an hour. If you did not get water within this window then it was a 12KM hike to the river. Only the houses of missionaries had access to water 24hours a day. One of such missionary houses was that of the Winetemples; the white duplex with zinc roofing. Even the gate was painted white with two large inscriptions of crosses on it.

Christine went out and as expected met a long line of locals waiting to get water too. Metal buckets, pots, plastic containers and yellow jerry-cans all arranged in a long queue with their owner standing beside them. The moment she opened the gate, she became the object of everyone’s gaze.

“Oyibo pepper, oyibo pepper…” The children sang. They were singing about her white skin; a complexion that was alien to this people. They were light skinned people in these parts; some very fair, others tanned and orange-ish. They even had albinos. But never have they seen complexion this light. She had really represented the term, “White woman” or Onye Ocha as the locals will say. Her father was British and her mother Canadian. Irrespective of the geographical proximity and cultural differences, the couple was bound to have a fair, light-skinned white woman.

She would have normally gone to the back of the line and waited her turn but the locals insisted she got her water before anyone else. She had four large buckets stacked together. She separated the buckets and set one under the tap. She grabbed the mental handle of the pump system and began to crank it up and down. Bending her elbows and standing on the tip of her toes, she will push all her weight downwards against the lever and almost immediately, repeat the action again. Although being regularly lubricated, the level was proving difficult today. She stained; her eyebrows furrowed in response to the force she was applying. She was wasting time.

“Excuse me. Let me do it.” A young man wearing a yellow vest said. He had a brown skin; one that shone under the hot, bright sunlight of Enugu. From the singlet, you could see his well developed biceps and muscular chest stretching the fabric. At the sound of his words, Christine turned around. She was going to politely refuse the offer but all of a sudden she could not find her words. She was mesmerized, looking at the edges and indentations of his body; that chest, those arms have left her speechless.

“Uh I think I have got… got the…” Christine stuttered. The muscular young man walked up to the metal handle and put his hand at the edge while Christine looked at him stunned. As she took her hand off the handle, it touched his and for a moment she felt his smooth skin. With just one hand and with visibly minimal effort, he cranked the contraption up and down and the water flowed out making a gushing sound. As the sight of the water, the onlookers cheered and this startled Christine. She immediately withdrew, like a baby who touched the hot surface of a boiling pot for the first time. She glanced quickly at the people and averted her eyes as quickly as she looked. Unsure of what to do with herself at that moment, with a look of embarrassment on her face she peered intently at the flowing water; looking down into the filling bucket.

After he had filled the buckets, he grabbed two of them; one for each arm. Like an experience dead lifter, he picked the buckets off the ground and took them through the gates. Christine followed him, taking one bucket with her. He went out and almost as quickly as he left, he returned with the last bucket; moving with so much ease and speed.

“Thank you very much.” Christine said bowing her head slightly for courtesy. Why did she just do that? She wondered. She hated the exaggerated politeness of her parents and now here she was following in their footsteps.

“You are welcome.” The young man said smiling; exposing his brilliantly white teeth. He must have been very dexterous with the chewing stick; a slender piece of wood people of these parts used to maintain their dental hygiene.

“I am Christine. What is your name?”

“Nedu ma; my name is Chinedu.” He said still smiling. After a few more questions, Christine found out that he was in form four and had an interest in Literature. She was impressed with his English. He spoke well; better than most of the locals. He used correct tenses and even used some big words. They only thing off was his pronunciations.

“I hope to see you in mass on Sunday.”

“Yes ma, I will come.”

“Please don’t call me ma.” Christine said shyly, blushing; the pinkness of her cheeks giving her away. Christine could not believe the words coming out from her mouth. Did she just evangelize? She did invite him for mass; does that count? She stood at the entrance of the door and she watched him as he walked out the gate. As she turned around to walk inside the house, she saw her mother at the balcony. The woman watched this whole drama unfold. Christine tried not to look surprised and walked inside.

Just as he had promised, Chinedu came to mass. He was late but he came. Before he arrived, Christine expectantly looked behind towards the entrance. She was waiting for him. The same way she will wait for him at the end of many masses that they will attend together as husband and wife. This was how Xaviere’s parents met and against all odds got married.

Now, here he was, lying in the comfort of his bed on a Saturday. He had no water to fetch; they were no buckets for him to carry. It was the weekend and he was going to enjoy it.

The sun was at its peak, shining unapologetically on the Tibetan mountains. The clouds did nothing to hinder its rays. Lu Ming and Xhou Li were the only ones left in the courtyard; knuckles to the ground moving to the chants of the shouting man.

Different upbringings, on seemingly opposite sides of the world; what did Xaviere and Lu Ming have in common?