What is your Life?  It is a mist that appears for a moment and then vanishes away.

There are those who live as if life’s focus is to prepare them for retirement.  There are government plans to build up retirement funds, even in Zaire where Grandpa lived and worked for many years, though he never paid into the SNSS accounts established by the government there.

I was, however, accused of being the cause of the death of one of my retired employees. 

His name was Ebeli.

Ebeli had been properly retired from his employment at the Rehty Academy dorm and was eligible to receive his retirement benefits from the Soceite National de Security Social in Zaire.  Plans set up by any government rarely work as anticipated.  We had diligently researched our responsibilities as an employer and submitted all the required payments into the SNSS fund for Ebeli.   Except for the currency conversion from Franks to Zaires, the law had not been revised since it was established by the Belgian authorities in Leopoldville.  The country was then known as the Belgian Congo.

Now in order to retire in compliance with the law, the age of the employee needs to be established.  When I was assigned to be the Dorm Supervisor at Rethy I suddenly became the employer of about 25 workers, all of whom were already working, having been hired and trained by those before me.  Each knew his daily tasks and things were running smoothly.  I knew only a few of the workers, but most knew me from before the Simba Rebellion when I was one of the MKs at the school.  I knew Silavano, Abrahamu, and Hosea, but I knew nothing about Ebeli, except that he was old for sure.

Ellen and I were in the intermediate dorm with 23 children to care for when we first became aware of Ebeli as he went about his daily tasks. We didn’t even know his name.  His was apparently the job of making sure we had hot water and clean floors.

Having running water in the dormitory was the result of a lot of resourcefulness and skilled work through the 70 years that Rethy Academy had been in existence.  The source of water was a spring in the valley about half a mile away and several hundred feet lower than dorm hill. 

Having hot running water required a lot of ingenuity and effort as well, since the heat came from firewood harvested from the Black Wattle forests planted in the early days of the school.  The wood heat was no longer transferred from an open flame under a half drum of water supported on rocks, but delivered using an enclosed firebox.  The bricked in drum was plumbed in to pipe the water directly into the building. 

Making and tending the fires under the hot water drums for the three dormitories, the laundry, the cook house, the dish room, the pantry, and the infirmary was no small task.  Fortunately for Ebeli, Black Wattle makes excellent firewood and will burn even though green, with the sap hissing and bubbling from the wood on the end away from the flame.  Carrying hot coals from an existing fire, planner shavings from the carpenter shop, and using partially burned wood remaining from the last fire, Ebeli would assemble the materials and then go off to lay the next fire.  White smoke would soon become evident drifting up from among the shavings that Ebeli had cupped around the glowing coals using his dry calloused hands.  Unattended, the smoke would gradually intensify and then eventually a small flickering flame would appear.  It was almost uncanny that Ebeli would always come staggering around the corner with a loaded wheelbarrow of wood at exactly the right time to tend his fire.  He would add a few small pieces to keep it going, pile firewood nearby to be used as needed during the day, and then move on to the next water heater.

Ebeli had an invariable routine, certainly having worked out the best paths to follow to each water heater when pushing his heavily loaded wheelbarrow of firewood.  He always wore the same Kaki shorts which somehow retained a bell shape around his thin bowed legs with the large knobby knees. His cracked, black plastic shoes, possibly originally designed to resemble dress shoes, had no lacing strings left, yet they still stayed on his wide, dusty, bare feet.

Ronnie must have also observed the aged man with the bent body slowly pushing the heaped wheelbarrow load toward the Biggie Dorm.  This inspired Ronnie to offer his help.  Ronnie was in eighth or ninth grade and radiated the strength of his youth.  Ebeli looked up sideways from his stooped position as he listened, smiled, then slowly set down his load for Ronnie.  Black Wattle firewood can be extremely heavy. 

When Ronnie confidently grasped the two handles he no doubt felt acute embarrassment when the wheelbarrow abruptly tipped, to fall on its side, dumping the carefully stacked load.  Yes, Ebeli was old, very old, yet he was still strong.  He again smiled as he righted the wheelbarrow, and began reloading.

How old was Ebeli? Shouldn’t he be retired to enjoy the life he had left to live?  What if he died on the job of a heart attack or something?

When the children were at school between recess and lunch and all his fires were burning well, Ebeli would care for mopping the floors.  We remember particularly when he mopped the long hallway floor that connected the intermediate dorm to the dining hall.  He had a large bucket of water and a square of material cut from a cheap blanket that he used as the mop.  The mop was rinsed in the water, wrung out and then on hands and knees he removed the muddy footprints left by the kids on their way back to school.  The process was repeated, this time to dry the area just mopped.  Ebeli moved backward down the hall, pushing the bucket behind him with his foot as he progressed.  In our apartment Ellen could hear sounds of the soft, swishing, of the mop, and Ebeli’s heavy, labored breathing.  She heard the water as the mop was again rinsed then the scrape of the bucket on the floor as he moved onward.   As long as she heard his wheezing breathing, she knew he was still alive.

We needed to find out how old he was.  Certainly he was past the SNSS retirement age.  Would we be blamed for keeping him working too long?

We asked him when he was born.  He didn’t know.  We asked Silavano and Hosea.  Timmona was old too.  We asked all of them.  No one knew how old Ebeli might be.  The records didn’t exist.  The older missionaries knew he had been around a long time; certainly he should be retired and not have to work anymore.  Ebeli smiled and agreed to retire. 

We knew very little about retirement in Zaire, but the SNSS rules existed (in French) and we had been paying the tax monthly, sending in the money to Djugu.  With the help of those who taught her, Stanley Kline, the Field Treasurer, and Marianne Crossman, Ellen filled out the forms with all the numbers, accurate as far back as we could find dorm records with Ebeli as an employee.  Ebeli’s age was an estimate. 

We needed to submit the papers to the Zone office in Djugu 45 miles from Rethy on the road to Bunia.  There was no mail service, no delivery service of any kind and the road trip to Djugu took at least 2 hours by car in dry season. Since an elderly missionary, Dr. Harry Stam, and his driver Upoki were traveling that way for pastor training seminars, they took the papers down to be sure everything would be in order. 

Ebeli went with them as of course he was the evidence that he existed, was very old and eligible for retirement.  He could also be identified as the one to receive his SNSS benefits as the documents from the Rethy Academy dorm proved. 

We were relieved that all was now in order and Ebeli could go back to his family village and enjoy his retirement.  He wasn’t our problem anymore.

The next time I heard about Ebeli, someone told me that he was walking back from Djugu and I needed to go get him.  I have no idea how he got to Djugu but it turned out that in order to receive his retirement money he had to show up in person to collect his SNSS benefits.  With no mail service and no banks, there was no way to send out retirement checks from Kinshasa, about 3,200 km away by road, so the SNSS benefits were to be paid in cash.  I suppose any SNSS money received from other workers was to be used to pay the retirees.  The bureaucrats had no way to get their checks from Kinshasa either, so any money received was spent immediately.

With no bus service and no taxis, I could only guess that Ebeli had gotten a free ride on the back of a truck headed to Bunia with farm produce.  He was dropped off halfway to Bunia at the MPR monument in Djugu.  He had walked the rest of the way to the zone office, only to get told that the money hadn’t arrived and he needed to come back the next day.  That left Ebeli with only one option; start the 45 mile walk back home.  With no Zaires and no relatives in Djugu he could only begin walking and hope that somebody, somewhere, would recognize him and help him.

In that part of Zaire there was no way to use any device, more modern than the tongue, to communicate quickly.  Word of mouth can travel as fast as a man can walk, run, ride a bicycle, or ride on a Toyota Stout pick-up.  I had received the communication so I followed the only road from Rethy to Djugu and eventually met Ebeli walking from Djugu towards Rethy.  It wasn’t easy for him to climb up into my 4×4 Chevrolet pick-up truck, but he did, and after we turned around he gave me directions to drive to his village.

He lived near Rethy at Bwa in a fairly small village of thatched roof huts, none of them in good repair.  The hard ground around the huts had been swept bare by the daily cleaning and nothing grew near the dwellings.  When I stopped near his house Ebeli smiled, thanked me, and backed down off the seat of the truck to the ground.  He was probably four times my age and had walked many miles that day yet it didn’t seem appropriate to offer to lift him down, though I could have.   He was safely home again to enjoy his retirement.  I promptly forgot about him.