Grandpa and the Village People

Uncle Neil's farm

Mom bought guavas at the Mexican store today and I ate one. It was tiny and pale and dry, but the smell reminded me of eating them in the hot, dry sun on Uncle Neil's farm. I had dusty feet and was standing up to my knees in grass. I picked a pink guava off the tree and ate it. It was juicy. The seeds swam round in the guava's bright pink center and the juice made my chin sticky. The guavas were the size of tennis balls, sweet, and I could only eat about three of them.
Uncle Neil had three guava trees outside the gates of the electric fence. We went down there with our cousin, Paul, because he'd built a house in the grass out of boards and things. He wanted to finish it. Instead, we started touching the electric fence, with pieces of grass under our fingers to protect them. Paul tricked Calvin into touching it with a bare finger and the electricity threw him backwards onto the ground and he began to cry.
Paul wasn't always the kindest cousin, but we liked him the best.
I don't want to make you bored, but the guavas today reminded me. Mom boiled some with sugar and made guava jam.
The smell makes me happy. It does.

Where we learned to play Piggy-in-the-middle

I saw a thing in the World Vision magazine where you can buy a soccer ball for kids in Africa and it made me smile, because I have a memory about one. The magazine said that the kids in Africa don't get soccer balls and, instead, play with balls made of banana leaves or rolled up garbage.
The black kids on our street in Zimbabwe used to come by our house and stick their heads over our wall and say, "Would you like to play with us?" One time, we played on the strip of grass outside our wall. They'd brought a ball made from plastic bags tied into one great big knot and a couple of boys were kicking it up and down the street. One girl, who we were friends with, said, "Do you know how to play piggy-in-the-middle?" We said no, we didn't, so they taught us. "She's the piggy," the girl said and put me in the middle. So we learned to play that game and played with a garbage ball and we didn't think they were poor.


I think it was the year 2000, before elections, and Mugabe was terrorizing the village people with his thugs, beating them on the streets and in their villages. And they would vote for him, because they didn't know better. My dad wrote pamphlets with teaching about the wicked president and about voting. He printed hundreds of them. They were illegal. He put them in cardboard boxes under the seats of our car.

We went to Hot Springs with Mom and Dad and Grandpa Eric. It was swimming pools filled by underground springs - two hot ones and one cold.
To ride home, Tasha and Calvin and I got in the back of Grandpa's pickup truck with the canopy on it. We sat with bottles of vegetable oil and bags of sugar and I can't remember what else.
Outside the gate of Hot Springs, Grandpa stopped. A lady stood outside the registration hut in her blue dress, her head done up in a scarf. She was a worker, maybe a maid, and Grandpa Eric knew her well. He took a bottle of vegetable oil and few other cans of things. He talked to the lady and handed her the food one item at a time. She took them in her arms and began to cry. She said, "Thank you, thank you, Bas," in a strong, wavery voice and curtsied again and again to him. We left her standing there in the dust, weeping.
The food Grandpa gave her might have been the only food she had to eat that night. And never could she'd have bought oil for herself.

We stopped later where three woman were walking along the road. When Grandpa gave them the things, they began screaming. They became almost animal. He gave one lady a bottle of oil and the next lady grabbed it out of her hands, screaming all the time. It fell in the dust and broke and oil poured out. They were too busy grabbing other things to pay attention to the waste. Grandpa picked it up and half of the oil was gone. We drove from there, leaving the women still screaming.

Next we stopped at a house where there was a little dog with a dozen or more fat ticks latched onto his ears. Tasha and I picked them off and smashed them until Grandpa told us to stop, because it was dirty. We gave our toy clown, which we couldn't care less for, to a little girl in a dirty dress. She didn't speak to us. She had big, brown eyes and she held the clown close to her body like it was a baby doll. It might have been the only toy she'd ever owned.

At each place we stopped, we gave pamphlets to the people and Dad and Gramps spoke with them about elections and about God. When we drove past a village or some people walking on the road, us kids threw pamphlets out the window and yelled as we watched them fly away and we laughed so hard when the people picked them up and looked at them.
We bounced around in the back of the closed truck and ate hard sweets out of huge bag. Calvin's pockets were fat with wrappers.

One of the last stops was at a village. The children got quiet when we walked in. I can't remember clearly, but I think all the huts faced towards each other and in the middle, the dusty courtyard, was a fire pit. Grandpa gave a couple of shakes to the sweet packet and handed it to me. "Give each of them a sweetie," he said, pointing at the staring children. They were sitting down. One boy was sitting in a wheelbarrow and he had long, skinny legs sticking out of his shorts. I think I was as afraid as they were. I walked over and said to the boy in the wheelbarrow, "Would you like a sweetie?" He shot out a hand and took one, unwrapped it and popped it into his mouth, all the time keeping his round eyes on me. I, mute, let the other children reach their arms in and take one, but I don't remember them. I only remember the girl. She was older than me and she, mute as I, reached into the bag and took a green one. She was scared, I could see so in her eyes, but she was graceful, and more polite than the boy, even though she didn't say thank you. She put the sweet in her mouth and we stared at each other for a few seconds. I wanted to give her another one. I wanted to say, "Here, take as much as you want. We've been eating ourselves sick on them." But I was too shy and I left and gave the packet back to Grandpa.

Grandpa was bending over an old, old lady who was sitting outside her hut on a blanket in the dust. Grandpa had his hand on her shoulder and was speaking her. His voice was kind and warm and expressive. He was speaking to her about Jesus and she was grinning a toothless grin. I smiled, but she didn't look at me. She was looking straight up infront of her. And then I noticed her milky eyes and knew that she was blind. She was sitting outside in sun and couldn't see anything. She was a Christian, a strong Christian. She loved the Lord so much, she was crying and she was grinning and looking up to the sky and not seeing anything at all. But she was full of joy. She babble to Grandpa. Grandpa was her good friend and he visited her often. I wonder if he's the reason she was God's child. I remember she said, "I'm old, very old. I'm going to die soon."
I didn't want her to die. But, that was the last time she saw Grandpa.
Dad says that she was crippled too and that her grandson used to push her to church in a wheelbarrow. But Grandpa found a broken wheelchair and fixed it up and gave it to her.
He ministered to so many people. He probably knew all the people in that village.

I've saved the best for last, but by now you've probably all stopped reading [except for my blog die  hards, if I have any].

Anyway, here's the soccer ball story about a real soccer ball.

There was one bouncing around in the cab next to Gramps.
We saw a little boy on the side of the road and we stared out the windows at him. The truck slowed and terror came onto the boy's face. He wanted to run, like an animal does, but was too afraid. Grandpa only rolled down his window. "Hey," he said. "Do you want a soccer ball?" Grandpa was gentle with children and so kind. He bounced it and the boy caught it and seemed relived. The ball looked so clean in his hands. From farther up the road there rang a deep, aggressive shout and we saw three big boys in dirty clothes charging towards little boy. They wanted that soccer ball. Grandpa waved his hand. "Go! Run!" The little boy ran as fast as a rabbit, but the others had almost closed the gap. They yelled wild things and the boy with the precious ball leaped off the road and over a grassy bank. He had a good head start. The other boys disappeared over the bank after him. We, in the truck, yelled as loud as we could at the boy to run and at the other boys to go away. When they'd disappeared, I asked, "Will they get him?" "I don't know," Grandpa said. "I hope he manages to run back to his village."
I asked the same question again and again the whole way home. I couldn't get it out of my head. I still can't. I wonder what happened to the boy. If they did catch him, I hope they didn't beat him. I hope he got away. I wonder where he is right now.
I'd suggest not giving them soccer balls, anyhow.

I'm not done yet.

The rest of the way home, I sat in the car and threw pamphlets out the window whenever I saw someone. We threw handfuls when we went through a town and we laughed our heads off. We gave them all away. There was one left and I asked Dad if I could do it. He said yes. We were driving along a rural road. "I'll tell you when to throw it out the window," he said. Then I saw an old, bent over lady toddling all alone with a cane. Before anyone could say anything, I flung the pamphlet out and watched it fly away. I didn't see if she picked it up. Dad said that she might have been blind and probably couldn't read English, but I was glad I gave it to her anyway.

No road blocks stopped us that day. I don't remember any, but I'm sure there were some. And if they did stop us, they didn't search the car, by God's grace.

Gramps died two years later.


That's it.

A Road in Zimbabwe

[Photos courtesy of my father]