dogobom

Finally! A few hours out of the city and there they are. The stretches of open land I have dreamt about all year, last winter's journal filled with images of meadows, of the infamous green pastures in which I might lie down, miles and miles of nothing that make it possible to actually truly finally be alone, that make me feel that there is something in this world still undiscovered, land without boxes or buildings or buses or boys or anything broken just basking boldly with nowhere to be. The image my clustered soul has longed for this year.

But we don't have time to get lost in the fields. The bus pulls off the road onto a path I didn't know was a road and we jiggle along until we reach Dogobom.  We have barely pulled in and the bus is surrounded by kids, all jumping up and down, waving and singing.  After a brief introduction in which we are welcomed by the chief, they lead us to the main water source for the village. In Dogobom, they bathe, cook and drink from a small pond no bigger than the  one our neighbors recently installed in my backyard at home. The water is the color of bark, of coffee beans, of my hair.  As we are being led around the pond, two young girls come with pails atop their heads to fetch the water for the day not knowing whether or not it will make them sick, will make anyone in their family sick, just getting water because not getting water is worse, I suppose. Meanwhile, our program leader is passing out ice cold water bottles for those of us who have come to build the water purifiers. The irony makes me uncomfortable.

So, we get to work. It feels good to get my hands dirty. It feels right. To be doing something, to be allowed to help. Not with my words or my mind or my gifts, just my body. Just another pair of hands and feet.  As if I can somehow sweat off where I'm from and what I represent. As if in cleaning the rocks, perhaps I can cleanse myself of this guilt I've been carrying over where I was born. Maybe I can carry heavy buckets and feel the cliche yet ever present burden of my ancestors and the weight of the history that got us here. If I dig deep enough for sand, I might also find the pieces and particles that have have formed this great gap. And so, we sweat, clean, carry and dig. Mostly in silence. Waiting for the permission or the justification that will never come.

It seems to me to be an ingenious system- this filter. It is relatively inexpensive, using easily accessible materials, requiring only lots and lots of manual labor. The process involves cleaning large amounts of sand, gravel and larger rocks to be put into containers. These materials do the work of filtering out the bacteria and other germs as the water moves through the big plastic barrels. By the time the pond water has been sifted down through the sand and the rocks it is somehow 98% pure. It comes out of the spicket on the side of the barrel, blue and translucent; the way water is supposed to look.

We pause only for lunch and a post-lunch jam session, in which the women and girls from the village teach us their favorite dance. I appreciate their obvious determination not to laugh at our efforts. Dance is as much a part of daily life here as cleaning or sleeping. A young girl bounces over to me, sensing my need for instruction, and she starts popping and locking like she does it for a living. Girl could move. I try to follow her but she's too advanced. Her mom comes over, laughing and shows me step by step.   I am struck by the power of dance to instantly bring us together, so that for a moment we move in synchronicity, like we are a team, like we've been doing this all our lives. Because if we share this response to rhythm, if we are all hearing this song, then surely we share more than we think. We must. We danced and I tried to picture mom and her friends breaking it down after feeding us lunch on the deck. Again, I am uncomfortable. The drumming slowed to a stop and the task at hand drew me back to my side of the chasm as I resumed the cleaning of rocks.

Finally. We finished. With great pride, I snapped a picture of the finished filter my group had completed. But my pride washed away as my camera zoomed out on the dirty classroom in which the filter was placed next to a few broken desks, in the school with no textbooks or computers or where do the teachers come from anyway, in the village far from hospitals or grocery stores surrounded only by the pastures in my journal. Tomorrow morning the little girl I danced with will wake up and maybe she'll have water, but she'll still be wearing the same shirt. She'll still have that scary rash on her arm and there still won't be much to eat.


We haven't done anything, my sweaty hands said to my muddy feet as we drove back through the open fields and Mr. Gyasi came by with cold bottles of water.