CONVERSATION ACROSS TIME -3

GREEN HELL

I: It’s 35^oC and the humidity is almost 100%. There is a stench of decay everywhere – of filth, disease and death. Why and who are you?

Miché: I am Miché and Kinshasa is my home. What you see is daily life; It’s about poverty, extreme poverty. It’s about scraping a living – the meanest possible living in a hostile city. Here is noise all day and all night; here is disease, everywhere; here is cruelty and betrayal. These are the basics of life here. We are not stable as a people; my father left my mother for another woman and she doesn’t want me. Girls are lucky – they can work, make money, be a prostitute, but boys are thrown out as being “bad” and “evil”.

I: Explain to me “evil”…..

Miché: They call us “sorciers” – wizards – I am 12, I think and my new mother threw me out of the house because she couldn’t afford to feed me. So I went to the streets to find what food I could and only came back to her house to sleep. She beat me and broke my arm – see – and said I was not at ease with myself and therefore I was a sorcier.

I: And are you?

Miché: M’sieur, how do I know? I have strange feelings; I can think myself into the minds of others in their dreams. I can’t control myself. I don’t want to hurt people but it just happens….

I: We comfortable western peoples cannot bring ourselves to consider that: now I have heard you speak maybe our visions of peace, protection, love, companionship, security, happiness and satisfaction are  just that – visions. We create them to make ourselves comfortable; but we either have them or we pretend to ourselves we have them.

Miché: I know nothing of these words, they mean nothing to me. Last week some kids accused me of killing and eating my father…what can I say to them… they believe anything and everything is possible. We have no stability, no hope, no life, no future.

I: But you must have something to believe in….

Miché: Perhaps so, m’sieur, but it is so deep inside me I cannot let it escape, as it would kill me. It is possible – no probable – that you will never see me after today. Maybe some of the older street kids will kill me for what I am. I can see my future; alone, frightened, and dying a nasty death at the hands of others who want what I have.. but what do I have? Nothing.. and I will be just another body lying in a ditch somewhere, thrown away like all the other garbage. Thank you for your kindness to me…talking helps me get through another day.

Peripatetic Scribe