Fire!

I’d been reading a little before dinner when I hear a commotion from outside. Neene alternates between wailing “La-illah-illa-Llah” and repeating, in a tone both angry and distressed, something about Amadou not having listened to what she said.

I look outside. Smoke is pouring from an enormous fire. There is the crackling of the fire and the pounding of running feet and the hissing of water tossed on the flames. I stand still long enough to confirm that none of the houses is on fire (yet) but whatever is burning is awfully close to both Neene’s and Gaye’s thatch roofs. So I dash back inside, shaky with adrenaline, grab my bucket and run to the well.

Ma Balde is there, trying to get the pulley to cooperate, but the rope keeps getting caught. Jainabou and another girl take over hauling the water. A large group of women has now appeared, as have numerous buckets and wash basins, waiting to be filled. I wait for my bucket to be filled, but once it is, another woman grabs it and runs over to the fire. I start to feel useless, so I hurry back to my house, pour the water from my bidong into the wash basin I use for laundry, and bring this over to the fire, where I toss the water. I see that what has caught on fire is a pile of dried stalks. Amadou had probably been instructed to burn them bit by bit, or to bring the pile somewhere away from the compound before striking the match. He'd obviously done neither.

I return to the well. The women are getting frustrated because the well bucket is not filling quickly (there’s not as much water in the well now that rainy season is over). Most of them decide to grab a bucket and run over to the pump instead. So it ends up just being Jainabou, the other girl, and me at the well, although other women occasionally come by to grab the buckets Jainabou has filled.

Jainabou looks down and asks where my shoes are. I say I do not know. This she finds hilarious. Later, when the fire has been reduced to smoldering ashes, she tells me to go and find my shoes. I go inside. They’re next to my bed. At dinner she notices that I’m wearing my shoes. She asks where they were. I tell her, “Inside my house.” This is even more hilarious than my not wearing shoes earlier.

After dinner we have a campfire, which we hadn’t had in awhile. Maybe we wanted to prove we could control fire after all.

When Kairaba joins us at the campfire he has lots to say, some about the fire but mostly about Allah. Neene says, "Allah is a question." They also talk about how grateful they are to live someplace where people will come to your rescue. "Even people from Sinchan came; they saw the smoke and they came running." And thank God there wasn’t any wind. Heh! If there had been wind! There is some silence, thinking of this, because with even a little wind at least two houses would have caught fire.

Kairaba then bursts out laughing and tells us how Gaye had been scared of the fire—Gaye just stood there and repeated, “I don’t know what I will do!” Kairaba continues the teasing until Gaye explains that a house he’d been staying at once had caught fire and he had been the only one putting the fire out. Neene and Kairaba repeat how thankful they are that the people in our village are rescuers.

When Gaye leaves, Kairaba returns to repeating, “I don’t know what I will do!” But the way I see it, it’s perfectly logical to feel scared when your dried thatch roof (no rain since October) and dried coos stalk fence are feet away from a raging inferno.