Icons

Red clay of the unfinished walkway. The outside charcoal stove where Maria, Kaswera, and Linda cook. The plastic buckets that we use to carry hot water for bathing. In three very short weeks these have become icons of this place and time.

Red clay, dust, hardpacked earth breaks free here to grow lush vegetation. There is no escaping the red dust. I bathe and wash my hair in the morning only to arrive at school, not two hours later, baptized for the day by this earth. I run my hands through my hair and feel the coating of dust from our drive. My feet are powdered red.

During one of our professional development days, a teacher held out a piece of chalk and explained that it symbolizes teaching here. You can write on the blackboard (a 4' x 6' piece of plywood painted black and mounted on two posts). She explained that you write on the board, erase, and write something else. But the shadows of all the previous writing remain. And the chalk dust clings to your hand. You can't shake the experiences, the interchanges, the conversations. Everything about teaching here stays with you.

The Congolese red clay, burnished and fine, clings to me. Each day when I return home, I am eager to take a bath, even though it's a cold one (hot ones are at night, after the fire has been used to cook our food). I am eager to get clean. I need, no, I want, refreshment from the day. Or do I?

I will miss it--this baptism dust.

The buckets. 20-liter plastic workhorses. We use them to cart bath water and launder clothes. Dishwashing and large loads of laundry are done in deep and wide plastic basins outside in the open passage between the house the outside kitchen. On the road, along the paths, people haul water in big, yellow, rectangular jugs. They must be 40, 50, or more liters. Everyone carries water here. But what irony! There are almost daily deep and drenching rain showers. Rivers and streams are the capillaries and blood vessels that trace, it seems, every valley and crevice. The Congo River is here--a river second only to the Amazon in terms of its flow. So how much personal energy, time, and resources are lost daily as people have to carry their water?

Back to here--the buckets. We share them. They are daily reminders to be humble. They are daily reminders that when I lose touch, step away from my basic needs, rely on systems, processes, other people's labor to meet my basic needs, I too easily neglect to care, to honor, to be grateful. At home I can turn on the shower and let hot water run, fill up the pipes, wash down the drain before even stepping under the shower head. Here, on those nights when I wait to take a hot bath, when the charcoal fire is no longer needed to cook food, when we can enjoy its excess to heat pots of water, I make every preparation first. Lay out clothes, towel, and soap. Check and recheck the drain plug to make sure it's secure. Only then do I go to the kitchen, dip the pitcher into the pot of hot water and pour into my bucket, reaching down into the bucket so as to pour hot water directly, and not lose any of the precious heat in the cooling air. And when I take the bucket into the bathroom and pour it into the tub, I am judicious in adding just enough cool water from the tap.

And the outside charcoal stove where Kaswera, Maria, and Linda cook. It's always a joy to be there and help--peel potatoes, pick through the cassava flour, rinse and sort beans.  Stove, fire, food preparation. It is hard work to cook this way. I do not romanticize this stove and the charcoal fire. But I am gladly branded by its fragrance and the accompanying voices, mostly in Swahili. It is a reminder that living is best when we allow our lives to weave and flow together, unbounded. The charcoal fire wakes me every morning when Kasero (sp?) the night watchman, starts the stove for the day. Subtle yet pungent as incense, it drifts around the corner of the house and into the open window of the bedroom just as light cracks the sky.