The Sound of Dry Pipes
I have spent some time thinking about the particular sound a dry throat makes when it tries to swallow. It is a sandpaper sound. In the camps outside Freetown, after the rebels had finished tearing the country into pieces, that sound was everywhere. It was the rhythm of the displacement.
Fatmata Turay was not supposed to know that sound. Before the war, she was a woman of "substance" that heavy, loaded word we use in West Africa for people who have successfully navigated the chaos of business and come out with their dignity and their bank accounts intact. She had shops. She had a home where the walls were solid and the water flowed when you turned a knob. She was a mother who didn't have to calculate the cost of a cup of tea. Then, the world broke.
There is no elegant way to describe what happens when a middle-aged woman of stature becomes a refugee. It’s not just the hunger; it’s the way your skin begins to grey from the dust of roads you were never meant to walk. It’s the way you have to stand in line behind people who used to ask you for jobs, waiting for a ration of grain that smells like damp storage. Fatmata didn't just lose her "assets." She lost the version of herself that knew where she belonged.
By the time she settled into the Kroo Bay area, the war was technically over, but the aftermath was its own kind of siege. The water was the enemy. It was either missing or it was poisonous, green-tinged, stagnant stuff that moved through the gutters and took the children first. Imagine her, Fatmata, with her memories of linen and lace, now gripping the handle of a yellow plastic jerrycan. The weight of twenty liters of water is about twenty kilograms. It is a weight that pulls your shoulders down until you start looking at the ground instead of the horizon.
I suspect there were mornings when she simply didn't want to get up. Why bother? The shop was gone. The status was gone. The city was a jagged tooth of what it used to be.
But anger is a strange fuel. It can burn for a long time if you keep it out of the wind. Fatmata got angry about the water. Not a loud, shouting anger, she was too tired for that, but a cold, precise irritation. She looked at the other women in the settlement, their spines curving under the same yellow plastic containers, and she saw a wasted army.
She started talking. At first, it was just grumbling by the communal taps, but slowly, it shifted. She had been a businesswoman; she knew how to move people. She knew that if you want something in a place where the government is a ghost, you have to build the ghost yourself. She began organizing the women into a sort of collective. They weren't "displaced persons" when they sat with her; they were stakeholders. It’s a small shift in language, but it’s the difference between waiting to die and deciding to live.
The goal was a solar-powered well. It sounded like science fiction in a place where people were still boiling mud to drink. Fatmata became a fixture in offices where she wasn't invited. She would sit in the plastic chairs of NGOs, her back straight, her calloused hands folded in her lap, speaking with the measured authority of someone who had once owned the room. She wasn't asking for a favor. She was presenting a necessity.
During those months of relentless walking from office to office, through the humid, suffocating Freetown heat, she carried a Lifestraw Peak Series personal water filter in her small bag. It was a rugged, blue tube, nothing fancy, but it was the only thing in her life that worked exactly the way it was supposed to. On the days when the city’s pipes were dry or the water from the tankers looked suspicious, she used it to stay upright. (The item mentioned above is linked for readers curious about the exact one.) This was the structure that helped her mark time again, one safe sip at a time.
It took years. Real life doesn't have a montage. It had setbacks, broken pumps, and arguments over who owned the land under the well. There were nights when the money ran out and the women looked at her with eyes that said you promised us. Eventually, the water came. Not as a miracle, but as a result of engineering and stubbornness.
When the clean water finally sputtered out of the new taps, Fatmata didn't celebrate with a speech. I’m told she just watched. She watched the children drink without their mothers worrying about the fever that usually followed. She had her second chance, but it didn't look like her old life. She wasn't back in her big house with the mahogany furniture. She was still in the thick of it, her skin still marked by the sun, her hands still rough.
But she was the woman who brought the water.
She had traded her status for a different kind of power, the kind that comes from being the person who ensures the community doesn't go thirsty. It is a quieter life, I think. More fragile, in some ways. But when she walks through the settlement now, people don't look at her with pity. They look at her with a kind of wary respect, the way you look at a river that has found its way back to its bed after a flood.
The shops she once owned are probably still ruins, or someone else owns the land now. She doesn't talk about them much. Why look back at a house that isn't there when there is work to be done at the well?
If the life you’ve spent forty years building vanished tomorrow, which part of your character would be the first to start digging the new foundation?
Is it possible that we only find our true "substance" once the things we own are gone?