Dorothy Rankin

Julie A. Jacob

Kyle Torke

A Different Sort of Heroism

Adrift in dreams, I suddenly became grounded to my bed as I sensed the pounding. For a second, I thought I was back home in Denver, even though I hadn't slept there for almost two years. But the insistent thuds finally brought me back to the present, in my little house in a little village in the great continent of Africa. The intrusion was an assault on my door, loud and persistent, and as I sat up, my mind whirled around the possibilities. Visits to my house were rare; night intrusions unheard of. Did something happen? A fire nearby? A student in trouble? I lit a candle and made my way to the door.

For two years I had been teaching secondary school children in Kenya. I did not go there to be a hero—to save the children, to promote Western values, or to bring religion to the "heathens." I went there for the adventure of it all. Once there, I fell deeply in love with the country and its people, so rather than buying some souvenirs and heading back home, I decided to get a work permit, find a job, and stay for as long as I could. Without support from a university or organization in the States, teaching was my only option.

Every day I would cope with classes too large, subjects too irrelevant, and a lack of books or any of the most essential teaching materials. And my students put up with a teacher who was well-intentioned but inexperienced and out of her element. In some ways, my students and I were at cross purposes. I found many of them caught up in the Christian dogma taught by earlier missionaries. They were eager to learn about everything Western. While I was rejecting American consumerism and love of the dollar, they were embracing the notion that education could bring them radios, watches, and Western clothes. I knew their transition was inevitable, but I had this notion that I could help them respect and hold on to their own traditions and values.

I opened my door to find four Maasai warriors, dressed traditionally in red togas tied at one shoulder and reaching down to about mid thigh. Their long hair was tightly braided and covered with a mixture of red ocher and animal fat. Their faces, arms, and legs were likewise smeared in red and decorated with chalked patterns. Each warrior carried either a spear or a club. I, on the other hand, was dressed in one of the few items from home I had clung to. Floor length, pale blue, with lace around the buttons, my nightgown accompanied me to bed each night with the familiarity of a different culture.

Taken aback, I could do nothing but wait. Like the lion, they required respect, and like the impala, I stood still while calculating potential danger.

One of the young men finally spoke to me in Swahili, mixed with Maa, their tribal language. Since my command of Swahili was even less than theirs, it took a little time to figure out what they wanted. But at last their mission became clear: they wanted me to drive to their "boma," their home, to pick up a man who had been speared and drive him to the local clinic. Why they had come to me instead of the to local missionaries to help them, I didn't know. But I felt I had been chosen, and something changed at that moment, like a novel's shift in point of view. I had become the great protagonist in someone else's story. I, a white woman, a simple teacher, would indeed go into the night and bring back—nay, save the life of—an elder. For this deed, I would no doubt be honored at a ceremony in which they would slaughter a goat. No, a cow! And the story of my heroic rescue would be retold to many generations to come.

Three of the warriors crammed into the back of my little Fiat hatchback while one sat up front with me. As we drove into the bush, the air inside the car filled with the heavy aroma of ocher and fat. From the rearview mirror I could see a jumble of arms and legs folded up to fit in the confined space. Ahead was the pitch blackness of a moonless night. As they directed me outside the village to an unfamiliar road, I saw that our excursion might be a bit tricky. All the roads around the village were now ankle deep in mud, as the monsoons had ceased their drenching only a week ago. My tires were the texture of turtle shell, and the Fiat's engine wasn't the most dependable, leaving me more than once at the mercy of a passerby during my occasional safaris around Kenya.

My confidence dwindled as we drove down a long and winding hill, deeper and deeper into the bush. As we penetrated the darkness, the hovering trees seemed to whisper their warnings. When at last we reached the bottom of the hill, I understood the foreboding. The monsoons had left behind what looked to me like a small lake, which extended across the road and 20 feet beyond. My heart sank, but my heroic self prodded me forward. As I glided through, I realized that the water came just to the top of the wheels, and with a sigh of relief I drove on another mile or so. Suddenly, one of the men from the back touched my shoulder and yelled, "Basi,mkalimu!" I slid to a stop. His ability to identify this particular place as being different from any other amazed me. It was bush on both sides of the road, dense and black, no different in my eyes than it had been for the last five miles. Without saying one word to me, the four warriors extricated themselves from the car, and I could only sit and watch as they walked down the road and then into the forest.

Feeling abandoned, I began the wait. Though I was fairly safe inside my little car, outside this cocoon was the nightlife of the African bush. I'd lived in Kenya long enough to gain a great respect for its wildlife. What I mean is, its wild life. It is the wildness that feels so threatening, so unpredictable. The Maasai Mara Game reserve was close by, and lions were known to roam far beyond its borders. The hyenas, my most feared and dreaded of all the African beasts, only traveled during the night. Poisonous snakes were abundant. They would hang from the limbs of trees and drop down on anyone who passed beneath. And the night was not silent. Strange animal calls in the distance and rustling of bush nearby froze me to my seat. What the hell was I doing?

Yet this was the place I had come to love, this little village of Kilgoris where I was teaching at the secondary school. Most of my students were actually not much different from the men I was waiting for, tall and lean, just like the pictures, except my students dressed in uniforms of white shirts and green shorts. The boys cut their hair to conform to western style. Shoes were optional, which was good because only a few students could afford them.

Equally impoverished was the school itself. Constructed of stone and roofed with corrugated tin, it consisted of four classrooms and a teachers' room, where I and my fellow teachers would drink sweet tea between classes. Each classroom contained maybe 15 benches on which sat approximately 60 students who, during my math or English class, eagerly watched my every move. They weren't really children. Their ages ranged from 14 to 20, depending on when their fathers had first let them attend school. The Maasai have traditionally disdained encroaching Western influences, and these small village schools set up all across Kenya were regarded with suspicion. While there were some tribal elders who saw the writing on the wall and sent many of their children to school, others would send only a few boys—evidently those who somehow did not fit in well at home. They sent many more girls.

It was probably about an hour later when wailing sounds brought me back to the present, and I sat up to see the wives and relatives, crying and moaning while carrying a man who seemed to be barely conscious. "Don't cry," I wanted to say. "I will save him."

They laid him in the back seat with one of the young men; another one sat up front. We left the others behind as I turned the car around and headed back toward the village. Once again, I drove through the pool of water, then started up the hill. We were not even half way up when the car simply slowed down, as if it were pulling something quite heavy up a very steep slope. And then it stopped. The wheels seemed to be going down into, not over the mud. I backed down, all the way to the water, then started up again. I could feel my wheels losing their grip, the mud taking hold. I came to a resolute stop. Determined, I tried it a third time. But this hill was not going to be fooled or conquered.

At last I gave up. The car would never make it up that hill, not tonight, not tomorrow. I turned to the man beside me and told him in Swahili that we wouldn't make it back to the village. He stared at me, his face void of comprehension. In frustration, I got out of the car, and went around to open the other doors. I told them again that we weren't going anywhere tonight, not without more help. "We can't do it! We need more people to help – to push the car up this hill. Go back and get more people!" When at last he understood, he growled softly under his breath, like a disgruntled old man. He said something to his friend in Maa, gave a sideways glance at me, then spat on the ground. Together, they walked down the road and in seconds faded into the blackness.

Back in my car, I was no longer alone in my vigil. In the dark space behind me lay a delirious man. He moaned, he thrashed, he grabbed at my neck and hair. When I think back on it now, I wonder why I didn't do more to help him. Perhaps I should have looked for his wound and tried to bandage it properly—with what I don't know. But I was afraid. Afraid of him and afraid of his wound. I was beyond my element. I was afraid even to stay in the car, his movements were becoming so violent. Yet I was afraid to get out. Everything had changed. Where not so long ago I had seen the situation from a distance, a story unfolding with me as the heroine, now I was mired in the mess I had created. This was real. There was a man semi-conscious and bleeding in the back seat of my car, and I was utterly unable to do a damn thing to save him.

Hours passed. At least it seemed like hours. I spent the time with a mind full of what-ifs: what if they never come back? What if they blame me for his death? What if a lion smells the blood and somehow gets into the car? What if I'm just dreaming this whole thing? Soon, I will wake up, go to my classes, and pass the hours teaching. This was my true purpose, after all, in being here. Not to be a hero, but to simply show a tiny segment of the African population, among other things, that there were some wondrous African writers who were somehow neglected in their British-styled education.

When the men finally returned, I was crushed to see that they had brought only one more person. The three of them tried pushing the car, but it was useless. Their bare feet had as little traction as the tires in the muddy road.

There was nothing to be done. The three of them left, I presumed, to get more help. Of course I didn't know what they were doing. I didn't know a damn thing. My passenger had become very quiet. Too quiet. He lay perfectly still, and I didn't dare look at him long enough to find out if he was still alive. I turned quickly around, put my hands to my eyes, and very simply and silently cried.

By the time the dawn crept up around me, I had accepted my fate. I would be here in this car on this road in this foreign country forever and ever, caught between two worlds—with a dead man. I wanted the mud to open up and swallow us both.

Then I heard the sound, ever so slight, of an engine, and hope returned.

Soon enough, I saw the Landrover. It stopped next to my car, and two uniformed Kikuyu got out. They said they had come to get the man and take him to the hospital.

"How did you know?" I asked.

"News travels," one said. They pulled my shadowy friend out from the car and literally threw him into their Landrover. They told me they would be back later to get me and drove off. The sound of the Landrover's motor grew distant and soft until the silence enwrapped me like a baby's blanket. Gone was the commotion, the anxiety, the fear, replaced only by a sense of failure and exhaustion. I knew I was in for another long wait, and I finally slept.

It was mid-morning when the police returned. They chained my car to theirs and easily pulled me up the hill. As they untied the chain, I asked, "How is the old man? Will he live?"

"Oh, he'll live," they answered with an indifferent chuckle, a clue that they were from a different tribe. Or maybe that they saw the foolishness in my attempt.

It was not until I got home that I dared to look at the back seat, which was now as red as the Maasai's ochred skin. Although I had been up all night, I could not wait another minute to get the blood out of my car. I desperately needed to clean it out completely, as if I could wash out the memory with it. I wanted to pretend this had never happened, that I hadn't failed so miserably. I was scrubbing so intensely that I almost didn't notice the student standing by me watching.

"Jambo, Joseph," I said when I looked up. But I continued washing, determined to obliterate the night. Joseph watched a while longer, then said, "I heard you were a brave woman last night."

"Not so brave," I said.

He came over to me, and I stopped my frenzied cleaning. He looked into my car, then at me and smiled broadly.

"Will you be teaching tomorrow?" he asked.

"Of course, Joseph. I'll be there."

"That is good," he said, and walked away.

Dorothy Rankin is currently pursuing a master's degree with a specialization in creative nonfiction at Regis University in Denver. She writes and edits primarily for nonprofit organizations and co-wrote Divorced But Still My Parents. Her passion is photography, and she plans to combine photography and writing through a career in photojournalism. Some of her African photographs can be seen on her website: www.rankinfiles.com.