In the Belly of the Elephant Read Free Page B

the stories and rituals of Islam as much as I had enjoyed the robes and incense of the Catholic mass as a child.
    Fati, Hamidou, and Nassuru bent at the waist, then knelt and touched their foreheads to their mats. In my youth, back when my tie to God was strong, my own knees had logged thousands of hours in the pews of Holy Rosary Church. Now, seeing the peace on Hamidou’s face, I envied him his faith. I had begun to lose mine in college. Then the pope came to Africa and forbade the use of contraceptives, even to women who’d had ten children in ten years, half of those children dying before the age of five. That was the last nail in the coffin of Catholicism for me.
    I stood as Hamidou, Fati, and Nassuru finished their prayers and rolled up their mats. “ Jam hiri .” We all wished the old man a good afternoon.
    “ Allah hokke jam ,” he responded. Allah give you peace.
    After three tries, the engine’s roar broke the desert stillness. The truck spit a tail of dust as we continued along the riverbed.
    “ Pardon , Hamidou,” I said. “Who was that old man?”
    “He is a marabou .”
    “A medicine man?”
    “ Oui .” He nodded. “He has lived in that very spot for many years.”
    “Why?”
    “It is his place.”
    Beneath the sand that coated my scalp, a tingling sensation rippled just under my skull. This happened to me now and then, when the differences between my life in Africa and the one I had left in America struck with such intensity, I swear, my brain vibrated.
    “He makes traditional medicine for children,” Hamidou said.
    “The string is to protect your children?”
    He nodded. “ Ensha’allah .” If Allah wills it.
    Ensha’allah . I was having a hard time with this one: passive acceptance of God’s will and reliance on talismans to cure diseases. Islam meshed with ancient animist beliefs. On the other hand, how was this any different from my uncle, a Mormon bishop, calling people together to pray for someone who’d had an accident or was about to undergo surgery? Had I not grown up wearing a Saint Christopher medal to protect me, wishing on stars and four-leaf clovers? Seemed we all walked around with knotted strings, in one form or another, in our pockets.
    Far out on the horizon, afternoon sun shimmered off a lake of liquid air. April, the hottest month in the Sahel, was also Jumada al-Ula , the fifth month of the Muslim calendar. One thousand four hundred years after the birth of Muhammad. In Idaho, April was the transition from winter to spring. As soon as the ground thawed, Aunts Nonnie and Ethel would be planting corn, sweet peas, and those little tomato vines they’d been growing on the kitchen sill for the last month. Mom and Dad would be fishing again. All of them content with their lives and unhappy with mine. So let them be unhappy. They were the ones who taught me to love my neighbor, unless his skin was a different color.
    Hamidou slowed and turned at the edge of another baobab tree. Gnarled limbs pointed different directions, a road sign in the desert. Just ahead, Dori, my home for the past month and the upcoming year, appeared and disappeared behind a curtain of heat waves. Situated atop a wide sand dune, Dori, a square-mile town of mud walls and sand streets, housed about five thousand people of the Fulani, Rimaybé, Bella, and Mossi tribes.
    We entered the eastern edge of town and drove slowly down a narrow sand street noisy with chickens, dogs, donkeys, and children. Near the center of Dori, we turned into the office compound situated at the corner of a large market square. The office compound boasted two buildings that faced each other across an open courtyard. The buildings, like all the others in Dori, were built with mud bricks and a thin cement/mud plaster called crepissage . Neem trees, planted for their resistance to drought, stood in lines at the east and west edges of the compound, shading the buildings.
    In front of the double doors to the main office, a woman