In the Belly of the Elephant by Susan Corbett

Author:Susan Corbett [Corbett, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
Publisher: Untreed Reads
Published: 2013-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Flood

June/Shabar

I awoke in the night to the pounding of heavy rain on the tin roof. It had rained the past three nights, chasing me off the patio and inside the house to sleep. Adapted to spending my nights out in the open, I had slept fitfully inside, dreaming that the walls closed in to crush me. I stared into the darkness until the fists of rain beating the roof lessened to the snapping of a thousand fingers, then I went back to sleep.

Someone shook me. Dim light through the window slats illuminated Jack’s face.

“Hurry! Get up! There’s been a flood!”

I sat up, confused. “Here?”

“No, Sambonaye. News just arrived. Wiped out the whole village. We’re heading out there now with relief supplies. You have five minutes to get dressed.”

“The whole village?” A noose tightened around my heart. “You mean everyone was drowned?”

“As far as we know, nobody was killed.”

We had just visited a few days ago—Emma and the women, the gardens, the stoves, the grain stores. My limbs wouldn’t move.

Jack went to my armoire, pulled out a pair of long pants and a shirt and tossed them to me. “Let’s go!”

Ten minutes later, Jack and I sat in the back of the Land Cruiser with Nouhoun. Hamidou, Nassuru, and Djelal sat in front. Luanne, Adiza, and Fati were staying behind because of their pregnancies. We were fourth in line of a relief caravan led by two Voltaique military trucks hauling soldiers, tents, and blankets. The FDC and U.S.AID trucks were loaded with sacks of millet and corn. Last in line, the ORD (the government Organization of Regional Development) truck carried four bariks of fresh water.

The trip to Sambonaye that normally took about an hour stretched into two as the trucks slid along the flooded roads. Halfway there, the ORD truck got stuck in mud up to its axle. A military truck stopped and soldiers dressed in beige camouflage got out with shovels.

Djelal turned toward the rest of us. “It’s good to have a few soldiers along in these situations.” He adjusted the sleeve of his boubou.

“Are floods common?” Jack asked.

The soldiers began to dig mud from around the ORD truck’s tires.

Nassuru nodded. “When the storms come one after the other.”

When Gueno bakes the land too hard, I thought, remembering when I had first arrived, when I had asked how the Sahel had come to be a desert.

“The rain falls too fast,” Hamidou said. “The ground cannot accept it.”

“The flood came in the middle of the night.” Djelal told us the rains had begun the previous Tuesday morning and had continued through Thursday night, just as in Dori. But northeast of Dori, where the mountains came together, rain had spread across the hills. Water had gathered into streams in the cleavage of those mountains. The streams had met and flowed into washes that snaked between and around the mountain bases down into the lowlands. In the valley west of Sambonaye, the washes had joined to become rivers, overflowed the shallow banks, and spread across the plain.

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