a gospel number

Still basking in the warmth of our new internet access, I was looking up "elephantiasis" tonight and came across this photo, which is an example of the disease.



There is a homeless guy that walks barefoot around the market in downtown Chimoio sometimes, and he's got it really bad, in both legs. At least I wondered if that is what he had and definitely he does. When I write 'walk' in reference to him, I mean it in a generous sense of the word, because he barely can. 'Hobbles' is more accurate. It is painful to watch.

In my life here, when I'm not traveling I go basically everywhere by foot because we don't have access to the truck very often. One day I was hoofing it back from the yellow and green Muslim store that sells 25kg sacks of rice but not toilet paper, and suddenly there was this lanky, earthy-looking guy in front of me, chatting and waving to somebody else as he rolled past on his rickety old bicycle. He was weaving considerably as he did, back and forth, in an awkward, nervous way and I had to hop to the side to avoid collision. Then my heart lurched forward about three feet because suddenly I noticed that this guy on the bicycle only had one leg. But by golly, he was riding that old clanker and going faster than I was. It was a freeze-frame moment, when all the world microscopes into a single point of terrain, onto a single fact - we are naked, caught surprised - bereft of sound or distraction, and it flung itself upon my soul in a flash of honesty and light.

Three times I have tried to read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, which 98% of people tell me is a marvelous, deeply moving book about Africa. I believe them, but only as a polite acquiescence, because I myself cannot get past page two hundred and five.*

HOWEVER - there is a passage in the book that I like a lot, where Ruth May, a young American girl, observes this:

Our neighbor Mama Mwanza almost got burnt plumb to death when [her roof caught on fire] but then she got better. My mama says that was the poor woman's bad luck, because now she has got to go right on tending after her husband and her seven or eight children. They don't care one bit about her not having any legs to speak of, how she just has to scoot around on her hands, which look like feet bottoms, only with fingers. To them she's just their mama and where's dinner?

To all the other Congo people, too. Why, they just don't let on, like she was a regular person. Nobody bats their eye when she scoots by on her hands and goes on down to her field or river to wash clothes with all the other ladies. She carries all her things in a basket on top of her head...and all the other ladies have big baskets too, so nobody stares at Mama Mwanza one way or another. They've all got their own handicap children or a mama with no feet, or their eye out. When you take a look out the door, why, there goes somebody with something missing off of them and not even embarressed of it. They'll wave a stump at you if they've got one, in a friendly way.

At first my Mama got after us for staring and pointing at people, but now she looks too. She'll say, That big gouter like a goose egg under her chin, that's how I remember Mama Nguza.

[Once], she explained to us: "Why, here they have to use their bodies like we use things at home - like your clothes or your garden tools or something. Where you'd be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees! ... It appears to me their bodies just get worn out, about the same way as our worldly goods do."

I'd say the only difference for Mozambique is that, in addition to the ordinary wear and tear from a life lived in hard poverty, here many of the people missing limbs likely lost them to a bloody machete during a senseless war, or maybe to a land mine, with which Mozambique was deluged not long ago.

(Mozambican man who lost his hand, arm, and leg to a landmine)

People with astonishing disabilities or diseases - be they gaping cleft lips, enormous tumors out the side of the head, or lame, twisted feet - wear them like a brand here. They are part of the normal landscape and often enormous creativity is shown in accommodating such afflictions. Need I add: one-legged cyclers included.

Few things touch me more.

* Actual page number. My most recent attempt failed yesterday. I would be genuinely happy to have a cross-continental book club with anyone who'd like clarification about this embarrassing social anomaly.