Fruit Bats Munching Mangoes!

by La NiñadeSusOjos      Job 35: 10  WHERE IS GOD, MY MAKER, WHO GIVES SONGS IN THE NIGHT, WHO TEACHES MORE TO US THAN TO THE BEASTS OF THE EARTH, AND MAKES US WISER THAN THE BIRDS OF THE AIR?

I was four, and one evening I lay on my cot listening to my brother’s soft slow breathing as he had just drifted off to sleep under the other mosquito net on his narrow metal bed across the room.  Mac always fell asleep before I did! Sweat dampened my sticky hair and made the small of my back feel tickly under the thin cotton pajamas.  It was always HOT on the equator in the middle of the West African jungle!

I loved my house there, which loomed darkly on a large hilltop and was already old in the early sixties, having been built by Germans before World War One with hardwood timbers brought to the Camerounian jungles on a European ship and carried to the remote forest outpost of Sakbayeme on the heads and shoulders of Africans.  Those facts didn’t bother me, at age four.  Now they do.

The house stood on stilts and, underneath were whitewashed pillars with column bases.  Yesterday, attracted by the cool shadow of the concrete, a Horned Viper had curled sluggishly next to a pillar where Daddy had rested his hand for a minute, not seeing the deadly snake.  He was talking to our Uncle John Smith, who did life-saving operations on the Africans every day.  Uncle John got sad some days, when some of his patients died.  My daddy  had a very important job too.  He kept all the hospital equipment running smoothly and when the instrument sterilizer broke down or the electricity generators would not work,  Daddy made new parts for the machines and fixed them.  All the doctors and nurses loved my daddy and my mommy.

This evening, I tried to keep my eyes shut by squinching them tightly. They kept popping open anyways.  Mommy and Daddy had told Mac and me to lie still and go right to sleep and, whatever we did, NOT TO GO OUTSIDE OUR MOSQUITO NETS.  Our nets got firmly folded in all the way around the edges of our mattresses by Mommy when she tucked us in at seven thirty p.m. after stories and prayers, and sometimes checked again by Daddy when he came in a minute later to say “goodnight”.  The bed nets made our sleep hot and sticky but we knew that malaria was the Sakbayeme  killer and that mosquito nets protected us from the insects that carried the horrible illness and that flew on tiny wings all through our windowless houses after dark.   Nets and quinine pills swallowed every morning protected all us mish kids –  Sakbayeme ones, Edea ones and Hope School ones – from getting bitten.  Most of the African kids didn’t get to take quinine or sleep under mosquito nets and when I thought about that it made me sad that they might get malaria and made me envious that they could sleep cool and free at night.  Both feelings at the same time.

Now I listened for the Fruit Bats in the mango trees, or for the Mountain Gorillas trumpeting in the Babimbi Hills behind our house but all I could hear this night were the African Tree Toads roaring in my ears!  When I was scared of their LOUD rasping metallic cacaphony Mommy had explained that they were only two-inch brown tree toads, hundreds and thousands of them, and that the noise was them singing me to sleep.  After that I was never afraid of them any more.

Now, suddenly, their singing stopped!  Silence enveloped the jungle! Was it a sleek black Puma, gliding through the trees out there, that had disturbed my tree toad lullaby?

I bolted upright on the cot, sitting cross-legged and reached down the side of the bed with my left arm.  I tugged at the heavy cotton muslin edge of the bed net, pulled it loose from under the mattress, slipped smoothly down through the opening and crawled across the dilapidated wooden floor toward the open window, trying to avoid the floorboards with the worst CREAKS and the biggest termite holes, which hurt my tender knees.  Crouching under the black hole of a window opening, I imagined the black Puma gliding, the tree frogs huddling beneath leaves on their trunks and stems, the Fruit Bats munching mangos and the gorillas trumpeting in the Babimbi Hills, just across my beloved Sanaga River a short walk down the forest path below.

  Mommy was coming!  One of my floorboards must have CREAKED!  Brisk, light footfalls sounded, coming closer through our shot-gun styled house.  She was through the large living room, into hers and Daddy’s room, where Baby Sister lay sleeping in her bassinet under a soft mosquito netting of her own.  She was almost here!

I slid behind the mahogany door to the huge boxy room.  Just then, the chorus of tree toads started up their nightly song once again.  Perhaps Mr. Puma had felt hot and sweaty too and had glided into the swiftly flowing river to have a swim, leaving all the little tree toads in peace again?

Mommy looked at her children’s beds and saw that mine was empty, the wrinkled voluminous net hanging loose at the side.  She looked all around the shadowy room, then saw my back and my pony tail hunched close to her and the floor, behind the edge of the open door!

“What are you doing out of your bed, young lady?”

“I was looking for the tree toads, Mommy!  I needed them to sing me to sleep!”

August 14, 2014 | Categories: Africa in my Heart, Bible, early years, Mission, My Africa, outreacher, Scripture, Words, Writing | Tags: Africa in my Heart, Bible, Cameroun, malaria, Medical Mission, Mission, My Africa | Leave a comment