“Ambapo” means “where”, “pana” means “there is”, “moshi” means “smoke”, and “moto” means “fire”.
I wanted this particular job for a lot of reasons. Travel, service, knowledge. But I’d be lying if I told you that a big reason I wanted to join the Peace Corps wasn’t because of adventures. I wanted them. I’ve gotten them. This is the story of one of them.
We were building pigpens (that’s how all good stories start). It was about 3pm, the afternoon of a hot dry day, at the tail end of a string of hot, dry days. Everything in my village was brown, and will be for a few more weeks, until the rains start. We were building pigpens. When I say we, I mean my AIDS group, along with the two carpenters donating their time to help out the community. We were just about to finish Pigpen #8. Then the village chairman (my boss, a human shark lookalike, and just generally one of the greatest badasses I’ve ever met) comes by with some news. There’s a fire. And we’ve got to put it out. Me, two carpenters, and 8 HIV-positive women look at each other for a moment. Then we put down our tools and start walkin.
It’s a good 3 kilometers from where we were building the pigpens to fire. In those 3K most of my friends from the pigpen group fall back a little ways. While the chairman told us that everybody was going out, this seems to be more on the male side of the work spectrum. I fall in with an older babu (grandfather) that I know pretty well. He sells fish in the small village market. I ask him whether or not we are going to pick up some buckets for water. He laughs at me. I’m a little taken aback. Was just askin, after all. He says something about branches. I don’t get it. I will later.
The sky has seemed hazy for a while now, but I don’t get a real good idea of the fire until we come over a ridgeline...and it’s smoke. Everywhere. And we’re still a ways from the fire. But this is clearly not some lark. This fire can, and probably is, taking out farms, tree nurseries, maybe even houses. I found out later that it came right through where our beehives had been hung up (luckily they were hung with wire). This fire is the real deal. I’m not really sure whether or not I’m supposed to be nervous about this. I just keep walking. I hear something that sounds like a wrapper being crinkled. The wrapper gradually starts to sound bigger and bigger. All of a sudden, we’re there. Somebody is cooking with gas. Flames are all in front of us, and white smoke is billowing over our heads. I’m suddenly conscious of just how little water there is in my immediate reality. It feels like I’m standing on a hay bale while playing with matches. But second thoughts would have been more useful first. The babu stops in fronts of me, grabs his machete, and cuts down two 4’ branches, leaves and all. He hands one to me, keeps the other himself, and heads on in. I pull my bandana out of my pocket, tie it over my mouth and nose, grab my branch (not that I know what it’s for yet), and walk into a forest fire.
It’s hot, and I can’t breathe. The babu ahead of me is beating something with his branch. I get it. We’re going to beat this fire, like the proverbial red-headed stepchild. Real men fight fire with sticks. Of course, at some point all your leaves burn off and the stick catches on fire, but that’s what you bring the machete for: to cut a new fire extinguisher off of the nearest tree. This is simple. This is brilliant. I wish I’d invented the stick.
Couple of problems though. This fire is not small, everything is absurdly dry, and the wind is blowing at full force today. I see flames get as high as 10 feet (pretty high in grasslands), and more than once I see flames just roast an adult tree in a matter of seconds. Obviously running head on into an inferno isn’t going to work here. Me and the babu seem to have been given the left flank. Of course, that means that the wind is blowing straight at us. And so is the fire. We look at it for a second. The wind gusts. The fire jumps. We run away. The wind dies down. We cautiously return. If we wait much longer the fire is going to enter a pretty thick stand of trees, and we’re going to have a hell of time. Perhaps it would be best to do the thing.
Somehow or other, we get started. It feels sort of like charging the battlements of some tiny, hot castle. I start just beating the ground with my branch, trying to put out all the sparks, stamping on embers. Then it gets too hot, or the wind picks up, or enough smoke enters my lungs that I turn away for a few seconds, try to remember where I am, and start over. It basically works like this, we put out a spot and then move along the flanks of the fire, putting it out in a straight line, moving from side to side. The area that’s already has been burned holds no real danger, so the actual fire is only a few feet deep. Me and the babu leapfrog each other, occasionally cutting down a new branch. Then we have to double back, because of course we missed some sparks. Then something on fire is on my arm, and then it’s off. Then the wind picks up for a minute, and a 5 year-old pine tree goes up like a bonfire. Some part of me becomes aware that this is not a part of my normal routine. Then it’s back in again.
I literally have no idea how long me and the babu were beating out the fire. It might have been an hour. It might have been half that. I know at one point I was yelling at the babu that we would drink free pombe (booze) tonight. I also know that my eyes were tearing and my nose was running the entire time, so badly that my bandana clogged up and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. At some point babu gave me the machete. At some point I realized that I could hear a lot less crackling, and that I’d been doing this for a while. It was around then that I realized that most of my clothes had been covered in black.
Babu leads us down into a little gorge. There are a few sparks to be put out here. We knock ‘em out with our fire-whackers. Then...it’s over. Babu just turns around and walks back up the hill. I’m not really sure what to do, or where to go. I do know that I’ve got a rock concert’s worth of adrenaline still kicking, and that I’m barely able to breathe through my bandana. I pull it down around my neck, and start walking up after my old man, the fishmonger.
What follows next is one of those moments I hope I never get old enough to forget. I come back up out of the gorge, and see that the fire is out, hopefully completely, on all sides. I walk a little farther, following my guy, and then I see, a little ways ahead, my boss. The chairman. There’s other people standing behind him, and a bunch of them clearly did not know that I was in there, because they gasp (hot crowd. Get it?). But the chairman doesn’t gasp. Doesn’t make a sound. Far too much of a badass for any of that. I realize how I must look to him: grimy, blackened, holding a machete in one hand and a burned-out branch in the other, bandana hanging round my neck, walking out of the smoke. All he does is grin, in the most wonderful sort of way. This is the man that picked me up on my very first day, that watched me butt my head against so many walls, that was there to advise me and correct me, that has seen some of what I’ve tried to to begin, ever so slowly, to catch hold. And in that moment, in that little, tiny, half-smirk of a grin...I see he’s proud of me.
I walk up to him. He says, “Kazi”. That means, “work”. I reply, “tuko hai”.
That means, “we’re alive”.
