Maatstaf. Jaargang 34

[p. 79]

Don Bloch
The Little Miracle

How Godwin and I began to call James ‘The Little Miracle’ I can't rightly remember. We were studying people's disease-related behaviour in Nyanza Province, western Kenya, flat scrub country not far from Lake Victoria. James Hawkins Ohundo worked as our interpreter, guide and, ultimately, friend. He was twenty-three, roly poly, not quite five feet tall. He was indeed black. His large head was cleanly but not deeply sculpted, teeth regular and dazzling, voice given to sudden changes of pitch.

Despite James's considerable and varied abilities, tribal politics had blocked every path to preferment. He accepted life as it was, however, without scheming or bitterness, bouyed by religious faith. James picked us up one afternoon while Godwin was interviewing James's sister Rufina, a leprosy case. Rufina was married to the minister of the local Namulungu pentecostal church, the Legio Maria denomination. You often saw them on the road in white uniforms with red crosses, thumping their drums, full of frenzy and passion, stirring up dust in the name of salvation.

‘Hodi.’ James came into the hut where we sat on low, folding wood chairs talking with Rufina about how people in the neighbourhood treated her. He shook our hands, holding his right wrist with his left hand as he did so, bending slightly, stiffly from the waist. Then he sat and listened, intelligent eyes gleaming in the shadow. Rufina had a baby on the breast. She spoke to the point with a minimum of embarrassment or evasion. ‘God decides who is sick, who is well. Who am I to question God?’

When we left the hut we were temporarily blinded by daylight. James followed on our heels. He asked Godwin if we had work for him. Any kind of work. His question came in slow, clipped, friendly English. Godwin consented to give him a trial, a decision we never regretted.

James was married. His wife Margaret had brown skin and was a full head taller. Rich in mischief she used to laugh at the sight of him walking along beside Godwin and myself. She knew this was bad manners and laughed with both hands pressed over her mouth. She had suffered a string of late miscarriages before finally a girl child had survived delivery. James took parenthood seriously. He made sure the child had an egg to eat every day, and green vegetables. During the months we worked together

[p. 80]

he invariably turned up every morning at the compound where we lived just at the moment we were about to begin our breakfast. The bicycle Godwin had bought for James was so large that James had to stand on tip-toe to pedal. Dismounting always involved a clatter. We might have used his arrival as an alarm clock.

‘Hodi.’ James would enter our hut just as our tea water came to a boil and I was hacking slices of sweet, crumbling bread. At my urging Godwin suggested to James that he might report for work half an hour later. Still, even before we'd had time to knot our mosquito nets, James would come tumbling off his bicycle to share our morning meal. He never accepted all the food we would offer, however, and he never ate quickly.

The simple truth of the matter is that James was poor. In addition to wife and child he had an infirm mother to support and a brother dwarfed by malnutrition. Born in Uganda, James had witnessed his no-account, drunkard father suffer abuse at the hands of Amin's soldiers. James had led the rest of the family out from danger. He had done extremely well at secondary school in Kenya but with no resources to pay bribes he was unable to continue his studies. Originally a Catholic, James found the religion too expensive to keep up. Besides, the fervor and intimacy of Legio Maria appealed to him. Members of the church had remained close to Rufina after her disease became known. The Catholics provided the most elaborate funerals, however, and if James ever rose in the world he would gladly revert to Catholicism. Godwin, the product of a Calvinist upbringing, traded quotations from the Bible with James as we travelled about the countryside. Back and forth the Lord's words flew, something for every occasion, leaving me silent, smarting with ignorance.

On the whole it was to make light of his sufferings that James would cite the Holy Book. He was always impeccably clean, even when his clothes were out at the seam or patched with dogged futility. At the time his family first arrived in Nyanza, James had bought a small plot of land. The farm was too sandy, not fertile. James told us matter-of-factly that he had to depend instead on the fertility of his imagination to earn his living. He did a lot of buying and selling. He lent money when he had it, some small amounts, at high interest. He wrote letters for people, or read letters or government papers for them. Scrupulous, yes - of that there was no question. But oh so resourceful. His survival was touch and go, a matter of manufacturing opportunities for profit out of thin air.

James's cardinal virtue was tact, a quality rare in Nyanza Province, especially among young persons. His manner was courtly and deferential, not at all a bad fit with his archaic, archly formal textbook English. He called us sir despite our protests, or Mr. Godwin and Mr. Daniel. To be honest, at times I found him a shade too ingratiating, too prompt and ready to please. He ad-

[p. 81]

mired white skin openly and referred to the Bible to substantiate his antipathy for blackness as a curse.

Not long after we met James, Godwin already trusted James's ability to pursue answers to delicate questions. No situation was too precarious for James not to be able to solve it with guile and charm. We needed, for example, to talk with a woman suspected of madness. The older woman's grown daughter hovered protectively, too present to allow her mother to speak freely. Suddenly James developed a craving for papaya and sent the daughter out into the yard to search for ripe fruit. We didn't understand his fit of hunger until the daughter disappeared and our interview could proceed, successfully, without her.

Another time James was on his own collecting information from an epilepsy patient when a neighbour intruded, one of the patient's husband's relatives. In answer to a challenge about what James was doing there, James smiled and explained he was the woman's long-lost brother, come from far away after a long separation. When the prying visitor withdrew, mollified, the epileptic paid James a compliment which he proudly repeated to us: ‘My, how clever you young men are who have been to school.’

At the end of an interview with the wife of a traditional doctor, a man renowned for his magical cures, the woman asked Godwin to say a prayer before we left. Godwin tried to demur. James advised us that we would never get away if the woman herself ever began to invoke God's blessing on us. At James's instigation we joined hands and he prayed with gusto, briefly. Although the woman made no secret of her disappointment at the brief salvo of Halleluja's, she smiled bravely. She even allowed Godwin to photograph her out in the yard with a framed portrait of her absent husband in her arms.

James did not feign the pleasure he took in religion. Far be it from me to suggest any hypocrisy. He did not drink, not even locally brewed maize beer. He did not smoke, or use profanity. He sang in the Legio Maria choir. In fact he played solo harmonica for the choir after we gave him an instrument we found in an Indian's shop in Nairobi.

Recognizing a good thing when he saw it, Godwin trained James as his research assistant carefully. James was an avid learner and caught on quickly. He soon stopped venturing to answer all of Godwin's questions himself, and instead allowed respondents to speak for themselves. If Godwin repeated the same question twice, James no longer respectfully reminded him he had asked it already - the second time around the answer might be very different indeed. Most difficult of all was for James to translate responses literally, and not to interpret or to abridge them. Godwin insisted on verbatim repetition. James had an excellent memory for the task. What Godwin impressed upon him was how an anthropologist usually strikes gold where he least expects it. Incidental words and phrases can be far more valuable than they seem at first hearing.

[p. 82]

In addition to our visiting people in their homes, we called at various medical treatment centers throughout the province. James was often at his best on clinic days. He could melt into crowds of waiting patients, chat and eavesdrop, later reporting everything he heard. One weekday in June, after a torrential morning downpour, we slithered in our Renault to an outlying health center. James in the back seat laughed every time I nearly lost control of the car.

We crossed a bridge of saplings that rumbled and cracked under our tires and we were there. The setting of the health center was magnificent. It was within twenty yards of a bend in a swiftly moving river, churning and bubbling now with muddy water. There were towering flambouyant and breadfruit trees in abundance. The health center itself was of standard breeze block construction, low and whitewashed, topped with a peaked roof of corrugated iron sheets. Above the sky was of conflicting intentions. To the east all was a radiant, clear blue. To the west, storm clouds massed, their ragged edges touched with silver light.

It was a special clinic day for mothers and under fives. Word had spread that a doctor would be visiting from Busia Hospital. A musungu, a white man. This prospect had attracted an unusually large crowd. Women in bright cloths, reds, gold, green, sat in groups under the glistening trees as we walked past. A straggling queue of mothers with infants bound to their back or astride one hip waited for a sharp-tongued nurse to admit them, one by one, to the health center. James waved and greeted the women. They greeted us back. By now we were a familiar sight to them.

At a loud squawk we turned just in time to see a large white hen fly out a health center window. ‘The bribe wants to escape,’ James whispered. A second later a male nurse charged out the door in pursuit. Women laughed and cackled at how the man's legs in white trousers churned helplessly in bare patches of slick mud while the hen skittered off. They cheered when he went down, flat on his face. James asked Godwin to hold his shoulder bag and went to help the nurse to his feet.

We circled around back, where we saw the doctor's Land Rover parked. ‘Hodi.’ We entered the treatment room. It was barely furnished. A few posters, a few chairs, a table, a scale, some bottles and jars, a filing cabinet. Walls and floors were cement and gave off damp. Three female nurses were pressed nervously together near the far corner of the room. The doctor was bending over a baby whose arms and legs waved in the air while it lay on its back on the table. A young woman was crouched down with her eyes just above the far side of the table, staring up at the doctor with great sadness. He was oblivious to her. He was testing the responsiveness of the baby's eyes. It was a Marasmus baby whose wrinkled, enlarged skull was studded with tufts of discoloured reddish hair.

[p. 83]

Our entrance distracted the doctor for an instant. Dr. Anderson, a Dane, a bear of a man with bristling redgold beard and dark eyebrows that met in a solid line at the bridge of his nose. His receding hairline made him look to me at times as if his head was on upside down. He wore a long white coat and high rubber boots splashed with mud. Anderson was a notoriously hard worker, ill-equipped, however, to deal with the inevitable, relentless frustrations of rural health care. Despite long years of experience, he still took loss of life and needless suffering personally. In contrast to the doctor's enormous, sure hands, the dying infant's wormlike fingers, their frailty, were pitiful.

Anderson was clearly in a filthy mood. Just as James caught up with us and stepped into the treatment room, Anderson erupted at the cowering nurses. He spoke Swahili badly at the best of times. In anger what he said came out as foam, froth and gibberish. Anderson knew full well that a display of anger was seen by local people as a sign of weakness, but he couldn't help himself. He thundered so loudly surely all the women outside under the trees could hear.

‘This place is one horrible, stinking mess,’ he told us in heavily accented English. ‘Bandages on the floor, pus, blood. Imagine, they give injections without sterilizing the needle. And do you think they know what to do about diarrhoea? Do you think they know the first thing, or care? Nurses? Murderers!’

The butts of Anderson's tirade exchanged sidelong glances and chattered to each other in their own language. Godwin put a hand on James's shoulder as a signal to pay close attention. In response James gave a knowing, almost imperceptible nod.

Later we drove to the nearest village, a series of simple, shacklike shops facing each other. Godwin led us through puddles into a hotelli for tea and mandasi. The walls were lurid with glow-paint zebra and flamingoes and crocodiles with gaping jaws. The man who came to our table to pour tea from a giant steaming kettle appeared unable to lift his feet. They shuffled along as if magnetized to the floor.

‘Now tell us, James,’ Godwin said, blowing on his tea, ‘what did the nurses have to say to each other about Dr. Anderson?’

James preceded his answer with a giggle. ‘They were angry, sir.’

‘Yes.’

‘They were saying he must be one of the Christ killers.’

My stomach muscles tightened. Tea burned the roof of my mouth, behind my front teeth.

‘What?’ Godwin asked.

‘They said the doctor was a Jew, sir.’ James chuckled. He reached for a mandasi with his right hand, supporting it with his left clasped around the wrist.

‘A Jew?’ Godwin avoided my attempt to catch his eye.

‘That's what they were saying, sir.’

‘Why?’

[p. 84]

‘He was shouting at them.’

‘A Jew is someone who shouts?’

James shook his head, no. ‘Someone who is a bad man, sir, he must be a Jew.’

We sat in a brief silence. Godwin used his spoon to create a whirlpool in his teacup. James spoke again.

‘“Why does he pretend to save babies,” that's what the fat nurse was saying, “when everyone knows Jews eat Christians.”’

I felt the eyes of all the animals on the wall staring straight at me. Godwin sighed.

‘Shall I tell you something, James,’ he said, levelly.

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Mr. Daniel is a Jew.’

James broke into spontaneous laughter. He leaned back in his chair. I couldn't help smiling but my face felt like it was cracking.

‘It's true, James,’ Godwin said. ‘Mr. Daniel is a Jew.’

I nodded, my head top-heavy.

‘But that's impossible, sir,’ The Little Miracle replied.

‘Why?’

‘Mr. Daniel’ - James looked at me with an ingenuous grin - ‘is a good man.’

‘I see. Mr. Daniel is a good man, James. But he also happens to be Jew.’

James laughed again, now out of nervousness. What if white wasn't white, and black wasn't black?

‘Where did you learn this, about Jews, James, that they are bad?’

‘Everybody knows.’

‘Jews,’ I asked, ‘or Israelis?’ The distinction was lost on James.

‘Dr. Anderson isn't a Jew, James.’ Godwin looked at me crossly for interfering in his lesson. ‘He doesn't even look Jewish.’

‘They were just saying he was a Jew, the sisters, because of the way he criticized them harshly.’

‘You know who was a Jew though, James? Jesus.’

‘The Lord Christ?’ James laughed harder than ever.

‘Jesus was a Jew. The first Christians, James, where do you think they came from? They were all Jews.’

The essence of Godwin's style was never to say too much. He planted seeds, as he put it. We never raised the subject with James again. We only raised it once in fact with each other, that same night, before sleep.

‘Do you ever sometimes lose hope?’ My eyes strained to make out the form of the bats we knew hung from the poles of the vault of our hut.

‘You Jews,’ Godwin chided, ‘you're all so hysterical.’

‘That the church still preaches such nonsense. I feel trapped in a time warp. Did you ever imagine -.’

[p. 85]

‘Yes, I did.’

‘The evil Jew. Jesus!’

‘You shouldn't have done it.’

I laughed in imitation of The Little Miracle. And I did it very well. After long silence, Godwin spoke again. His voice was gentle, but teasing.

‘All right, you're not a Jew.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘If it makes you happy, tomorrow I'll tell James I was just making it up.’ Bats swooped, rowing the darkness with their leathery wings. ‘Pleasant dreams.’

Copyright © 1986 Don Bloch/Amsterdam.