Sun burns the land. In the heat of summer, the earth bakes like a clay oven. Shimmering waves rise from the broken, uneven pavement and the starched dirt laid out before us. For a long time there hasn't been anyone here to fix the roads.
White-washed walls of tenement structures pock our neighborhood. People call them homes, but I think they are more like concrete shrines to broken promises. Those are for the fortunate. So many, like me, live their days in makeshift, interspersed shanties - foundations built under a nation's blind eyes.
Standing in my doorway now I look out over this place, immune to time, the same as I have always remembered it being. Since a young girl, darkening in the midday sun and laughing with friends, I have seen the feral dogs poking through the trash. Kicking the goatskin ball then, as is true this day too, the youth watched military men arrive packed twenty deep in their open trucks and waving their loaded guns. The ground, a testament to the archaic roughness here, stays craggy and unkempt except for the disrepair of a few manmade pieces.
This place does not change and I think maybe we have been forgotten.
"Nuru, come." Mother, a relic of my history, calls me from inside the single room hut. In her puffed sleeve dress and Tukwi head wrap she is the image of generations long passed. For so many nights, in her arms, I have fallen asleep as she runs her hands over my unbound hair. She is, as I have always remembered her being, a stoic and unmovable force. For anyone who has witnessed the cruel inhumanities of which our people are capable, it makes sense that she must be.
I turn to help her prepare the food.
At the milling table, heaps of maize kernels are piled high and ready to be ground. We have picked out the small stones and stubborn pieces of earth our sifter could not catch. The dried vegetables are ready to be stamped and chopped. I grab a pestle as mother begins to break apart the maize and together we start to make the Samp.
Sometimes I imagine I am a bird, like the Egrets skimming across the small lakes not far from here. It seems silly, but I fly high above the trees and away from this place, a place with borders I have never crossed. Before me the world unfolds and for a fleeting moment I might know the wonders beyond the edge of our tiny village and across great and beautiful oceans. At least the stories we share by fireside some nights help me believe this to be true. They are enough to buoy my soul even when I find my wings are bound and shackled.
Summer days like these are cruel masters. When the temperatures rise too high, our small crops suffer at their hands. We are lucky to have food now and as hot as it is, our garden has not yet been decimated this season.
But the days the sun and drought take the plants - an offense to the culmination of so much hard work - are the saddest to me. I see, in the withering of the poor, dying growths, my own doubled-over reflection and know I will go hungry that night. And maybe the next and next again.
If I could stave anything from my children it would be the certainty their small stomachs not know the prying, yawning pain of an empty plate. In my mind I give my children bountiful crops; corn, bean, and grain alike, ready to be eaten by the fistful. They laugh and smile, happy knowing there will be food after the sun sets.
Because the youth deserve life, do they not? They deserve it as much as the bone-thin wild animals that run through the night. Those husk-bodied creatures scavenging amongst the days remains, why should they survive when so many of our youth crumble instead? I don't believe this is fair.
Instead, I believe in the hope of the green shoot of a plant - an upturned stalk - offering its life for ours. In its earthy growth I see the possibility of a future, amidst this banished land, and I dream my children should know it too.
"Nuru, where are you?"
I look up, shaken from my thoughts. Mother stands there with a questioning look on her face. I know she has been standing this way for a while.
"Where do you go?" she continues. "I ask you a question and you are not there. Often child."
"I'm sorry," I say, still thinking about the plants and the children.
"Pass me the bin."
Picking up a small container beside me I hand it to mother and she uses it to whisk away the dust forming from the crushed maize on her side of the table. Her hands are covered in the powder and she looks to me like a baker at her post, a creator of many things. Indeed she always will be. I reach in front of me and carry a large handful of the unhusked kernels to the flat plate where I set them down and continue to grind.
I don't forget that beside the hunger there is sickness too. They say it is borne from our water, the murky consistency bringing with it plague. I do not know the reasons for the diseases but the pain is evident enough. I have felt its sharpness and been lucky to survive, though many of our young have succumbed to its choking grasp. When we can, we send the infirmed to see the doctors with their stethoscopes and crosses on their arms, but this does not happen often.
I ask, is the rest of the world like us? They must suffer too because I do not know life much in any other way. I think the youth, if they are not disabled or eaten by the stricken nature of our land, may know the world as an innocent place. Their concerns extend only as far as the distance they throw rocks in their games. For me, childhood has long since passed. The world is bigger, if only slightly, and the rocks and games have been replaced with the trepidation of making it unscathed one day to the next.
We are poor, I know, but in the simple being of our existence I believe there is much to rejoice about too. I am thankful for mother, a woman who has seen the tides of culture change in the shifting of leaders and a thousand calls for a country's reformation. She has given me an island on which to stand. She is strong and, while having been thrown against the rocks more times than we talk about, she has not given up hope. I think I am like her, that we both know our lives are fated, wanting the next generations to realize those things we will never have ourselves.
For this reason I am thankful, too, for my children. On their brows our future is set. Rows of white teeth and lips upturned, their smiling faces are reminders of the naiveté I once possessed. I would die for them, as any mother would. They are who I am, an imprint of this impoverished land, but a beacon nonetheless. In their continuing health is the manifest of promise.
And the absence of war is also a reason to be grateful. At least for now, the militant unrest is quiet like a thousand sleeping lions. I, as so many other women do, fear the worst when war arises, a time when even the fairest souls are swept up and wrung out in a muddy and careless heat.
I would rather perish a thousand times than see my children become instruments of war, the like of which happens in so many nations around us. Conscripted and controlled before even the chance to protest, young bodies are drugged to carry out the will of delusional militias. Conflicts are so often waged for the intangibles of power and respect, not food or water or the will of the people, and the youth are set aside to die in its wake. I shudder to know these problems are not far from where we live.
"Here mother," I gesture to her to hand me the almost full bin. I am paying more attention now to our task, but only barely. Our preparations are something I have done a hundred times before and there is a certain instinctiveness about it.
She hands me the bucket. I set it by my side and take the last bit of hardened maize to be ground. After this we will add the water and make the paste. If we are lucky, as I think we are today, we will have Samp with beans and smile as we eat.
Dusting my hands, I wipe them on my apron, careless in getting the fine chaff on the dress below. Mother shoots me a dirty look and I turn my head away.
I am a bird and I will spread my wings.
The heat is less intense in our small hut, but heavy all the same. The work makes me hot and I reach a hand to my forehead to wipe away the beads of sweat that have formed there. Thoughtless, my pestle falls down over and over in cascade, breaking apart the dried corn. My mind wanders.
Maybe again he'll come once more tonight and I cannot help the concern that seats in my stomach. A man like any of the others in the village he is tall and weather-worn except once, as children, we professed our love to each other under a bright and naked sky. At that time we held hands and skipped and laughed at things I can't remember why were funny.
Now, when he comes it is always in the dark. He takes me by the wrist and sets me upon an unwanted bed. With his musky breath of alcohol, I am sad I cannot fight him. If I do he will set his hand hard against my cheek. With every shifting of his body he professes love once more, a twisted aberration. When his lips touch my ear I turn my head far away and stifle tears, trying to think of other things. He never stays and when he goes I often cry softly into my arms or wonder why such things happen.
Mother says that these injustices are simply the way it is and have been for decades past - that men should act so heedlessly. When I hear her talk like this I bow my head and pray for another passage. It is unkind that we are such usable subjects. When the men leave after they have been satisfied, they go unburdened into the night. We sit here and tend to their mistakes, bearing a woman's burden should their transgressions mean our belly's swell.
The last of the maize is pressed and I look up at mother and smile. I ask her if I may step outside to watch the children play, hoping my veiled discontent does not show. She nods and sometimes I think she can read my mind. I turn to the door as mother fetches water from a bowl in the corner of the room and adds it to our work.
Leaning again in the doorway I pat my apron clean. I watch as the dust travels into the air and is carried away on the wind, perhaps taking it to those places I have only heard about and leaving a part of me with it.
The sun is still strong and I put my hand above my eyes to shadow them from its intensity to watch the game outside. Chirps and shouts of laughter flow from the young. Their improvised goalposts of broken wood, as tenuous as the structures we live in, catch the ball with surprising sturdiness and I think perhaps today will be a better day. I will fold the children under me and carry them to safety, to a better place and a better future.
I am a bird and I will spread my wings.