The build finished with the rainy season, in October. To celebrate, an event was planned in the new yard, half a football pitch of cleared ground. We weren’t involved in the planning—the village action committee did that—and Aimee didn’t arrive till the morning of the same day. But I’d been on the ground for a fortnight, and had grown worried about the logistics, the sound system, the size of the crowd, and the conviction, shared by everybody—children and adults, the Al Kalo, Lamin, Hawa, all her friends—that the President himself was going to make an appearance. The source of this rumor was hard to determine. Everybody had heard it from someone else, it wasn’t possible to get any further information, only winks and smiles, as the assumption was that we, “the Americans,” were behind the visit anyway. “You ask me if he is coming?” said Hawa, laughing, “but don’t you know yourself?” The rumor and the scale of the event quickly fed upon each other: first three local nursery schools would participate in the parade, then five, then fifteen. First it was the President coming, then also the leaders of Senegal, Togo and Benin, and so to the mothers’ drumming circle were added half a dozen griots playing their long-necked kora and a police marching band. We started to hear that communities from several other villages were being bussed in and that a famous Senegalese DJ would play after the formal events. Running underneath all this noisy planning there was something else, a low rumble of suspicion and resentment, which I couldn’t hear at first but which Fernando recognized at once. For no one knew exactly how much money Aimee’s people had wired to the bank in Serrekunda, and so no one could be sure how much Lamin personally had received, nor was anybody able to say precisely how much of that money he had placed in the envelope which later arrived at the Al Kalo’s house, and how much he had left at that house with Fatu, our Lady Treasurer, before the remainder finally landed in the coffers of the village committee itself. No one accused anybody, not directly. But all conversations, no matter where they began, seemed to end up circling the question, usually coiled up inside proverb-like constructions such as “It is a long way from Serrekunda to here” or “This pair of hands, then this pair, then another. So many hands! Who will keep clean what so many hands have touched?” Fern—as I also called him now—was disgusted by the general ineptitude: he’d never worked with such idiots as these idiots in New York, they made only problems and had no conception of procedure or local realities. He too became a proverb-producing machine: “In a flood the water goes everywhere, you don’t have to think about it. In a drought, if you want water, you have to direct it carefully along each inch of its path.” But his obsessive worrying, what he called “detail-orientation,” didn’t annoy me any more: I made too many mistakes, every day, not to understand by now that he knew better. It was not possible any longer to ignore the real difference between us, which went far beyond his superior education, his Ph.D., or even his professional experience. It was about a quality of attention. He listened and noticed. He was more open. Whenever I spotted him in my reluctant daily walk around the village—something I did purely for exercise and to escape the claustrophobia of Hawa’s compound—Fern would be locked in intense discussion with men and women of every age and circumstance, crouching by them as they ate, jogging next to donkey-drawn carts, sitting drinking ataya with the old men by the market stalls, and always listening, learning, asking for more detail, assuming nothing until he was told it. I compared all of this to my own way of being. Keeping to my dank room as much as possible, talking to no one if I could help it, reading books about the region by the light of a headtorch, and feeling a homicidal fury, adolescent in nature, toward the IMF and the World Bank, the Dutch who’d bought the slaves, the local chiefs who’d sold them, and many other distant mental abstractions to which I could do no practical damage.
My favorite part of each day became the early evenings, when I would walk over to Fern’s and have a simple dinner with him in the pink house, cooked for us by the same ladies who fed the school. A single tin bowl, full of rice, sometimes with just a green tomato or garden egg buried in it somewhere, other times with an abundance of fresh vegetables and a very skinny but delicious fish laid on top which Fern graciously let me tear at first. “We are kin now,” he told me, the first time we ate like this, two hands in the same bowl. “They seem to have decided we’re family.” Since our last visit the generator had broken down, but as we were the only ones to use it Fern considered this a “low priority”—for the same reason I considered it a high priority—and refused to lose a day traveling to the city in search of a replacement. So now, once the sun went down, we strapped on our little headtorches, making sure to wear them at an angle so as not to blind each other, and talked late into the night. He was good company. He had a subtle, compassionate, intricate mind. Like Hawa, he didn’t get depressed, but he managed this not by looking away but by looking closely, attending to each logical step in any particular problem, so that the problem itself filled all available mental space. A few nights before the party, while we sat considering the imminent arrival of Granger and Judy and the rest—and the end of a certain peaceful version of our life here—he began to tell me of a new problem, at the school: six children missing for two weeks from their classes. They were unrelated to each other. But their absences had all begun, the headmaster told him, on the day Fern and I arrived back in the village.
“Since we arrived?”
“Yes! And I thought: but this is odd, why is it? First, I ask around. Everybody says: ‘Oh, we don’t know. It’s probably nothing. Sometimes the children have to work at home.’ I go back to the headmaster and get the list of names. Then I go through the village to their compounds, one by one. Not easy. There’s no address, you have to follow your nose. But I find everybody. ‘Oh, she is sick,’ or, ‘Oh, he is visiting his cousin in town.’ I have the feeling no one tells me the truth. Then I am looking at the list today and I think: these names are familiar. I go back to my papers and I find this microfinance list—you remember?—this thing Granger did, independently. He is a sweet man, he reads a book on microfinance . . . Anyway, I look at this list and I find it is the same six families exactly! The mothers are all the same women Granger gave these thirty-dollar stakes, for their market stalls. Exactly the same. So I think: what is the connection between the thirty-dollar stake and these missing children? Now it’s obvious: their mothers, who could not repay their debt on whatever schedule Granger has arranged with them, they assume the money will be taken coin by coin, from their children’s school fees, and the children will be shamed! They see us back in the village, ‘the Americans,’ and they think: better keep these kids at home! It’s smart, it makes sense.”
“Poor Granger. He’ll be disappointed. He meant well.”
“No, no, no . . . it’s easily resolved. It’s just for me an interesting example of follow-through. Or of not following through. The financing is a good idea, I think, or not a bad idea. But we may have to change the repayment schedule.”
Through one of the blown-out windows I saw a bush taxi rumble down the one good road in the moonlight. Kids hung from it even at this hour, and three young men lay on their bellies on its roof, holding down a mattress with the weight of their own bodies. I felt that wave of absurdity, of pointlessness, that usually caught me in the earliest hours, laying wide awake next to a deep-sleeping Hawa as the roosters went berserk on the other side of the wall.