Fire

Two days ago I went with my host mom to the Kids Centre, about a 15 minute walk away. We were there to discuss issues about the income generation bakery we are trying to start, and I was also over there to buy a loaf of bread.

We stepped outside to chat with Gogo, the 80+ year old granny who has undergone successful cataract surgery and can now see. I was greeting her when I hear ma say something fast and start walking even faster.

There was a fire across the village, next to our house, well between our houses and the vast field that occupies the middle acreage of the village. From where I stood I could not gain any perspective on how close the fire was to the house nor did I heed the urgency in my ma's voice or step.

She was out of the yard, I should I was coming too but needed to buy my bread. I stopped across the road to buy a loaf of brown bread, with my 9 year old host nephew, Ndo, at my side. As we left the bread shop, Ndo said to me, “Look gogo is really moving fast!” He said this referring to my host ma. Then as we rounded the corner he said, “Wow, look she is gone!” I then began to realize the urgency of the situation. We picked up our pace.

As we approached my house and the families house, there are four separate buildings including mine and two of which have grass roofs. The entire back lot was engulfed in flames climbing high in the sky. Smoke billowing all round darkening the sun. My host ma and sister were ripping the clothes from the clothes line. I dropped my bag with the bread and my sweater, and ran to the clothes line to assist. After the close cleared, the flames moving fast across the bone-dry grass, I ran to my room to grab my full water buckets.

Behind my house, Ndo and another cousin Sabi, had grabbed old trousers, dipped the ends in water, and were hitting the edge of the fire, thus controlling the direction it went. A women I did not know joined in. I tried to help, grabbing a 50kg maze bag from a 5 year old girl. Perhaps I was in the way more than anything, but I tried. It was obvious I had never done this before and more obvious they all had.

The fire was controlled and extinguished within an hour. I watched an empty, and deserted, Rondoval with grass roof go up, then down in flames. Fortunalty, a woman I work with had moved out of the rondoval several months earlier. It was perhaps the only damage to property, save the burning of grass for cows, that occurred.

We, and other boys around the village, go out side at night and burn the grass along the paths, creating black property lines. At night you can look across the village and see these fires dancing, marking the paths and keeping boys warm as they tell stories to one another. The front of our house is lined by these nightly meetings, the back is now a black void expanding acres in each direction.

My host ma, after the fire, as we were trying to put out the smouldering flames in the lone tree in our yard, said to me, “Siya, when I saw the fire, I said not today, not my house.” If her bedroom window had been open, the curtain would have caught fire, and the rest is too bad to speculate. The house is quite literally all they have. It is not much, it is a family living in poverty, which means to lose the house is to lose everything they have. Something that I spent the rest of the evening contemplating.

Life for everyone else seemed to go on like nothing had happened. I was still shaking from adrenaline.