Last week Ebeli’s story ended with him happily retired as far as I was concerned.  It was the government’s business to care for him through their INSS program.  I had paid his wages and made the INSS contributions as required.  The papers had been properly submitted.  It wasn’t really reasonable to expect a man too old to work to walk 45 miles to the Zone Office in Djugu to collect his retirement funds each month.  It was very likely, in fact, that there would be no funds available, but then, I had done all that was required of me.  I never checked on him.  The last time I saw him that year was when I dropped him off at his hut.

Work continued at the dorm and the tasks formerly assigned to Ebeli were taken over by other workers.  He was hardly missed.  Maybe the fires weren’t as skillfully monitored as when Ebeli faithfully made his rounds.  Heating water in an enclosed system had certain risks.  If the wood fire was too hot there could be a number of problems, but if it went out or didn’t start at least wood was saved as fewer wheelbarrow loads of wood were required.

The Av-Gas fuel barrels were filled with fuel only once and were painted inside so when used in our dorm water heaters gave the cleanest hot water.  Though the diesel barrels were made of heavier metal the fuel residue took longer to dissipate and they began to rust more quickly, though they didn’t rust through as fast as the Av-Gas barrels.  Welding the leaks or replacing the barrels happened more frequently after Ebeli’s retirement.

When Ebeli made his fires he checked the hot water outlet pipe, building only a small fire if he found the water still hot from the night before.  When our new employee built a hot fire under still hot water, the water soon boiled.  The steam pressure forced the water back out the inlet pipe or up the pressure relief stack we had installed where possible.  Boiling the water stirred up the rust and sediment in the drum so that black superheated water blasted out the cold water faucets and sputtering steam hissed out the hot water faucets in the bathrooms.  The boiling water forced back into the hard plastic incoming plumbing softened the pipes causing them to sag and glue joints to separate.  Steam released too rapidly from the hot water side in an attempt to reduce the pressure in the drum could fail to save the drum when cold water rushed in too quickly at the inlet pipe.  The steam in the drum then condensed rapidly causing an internal partial vacuum resulting in an implosion of the drum caused by outside atmospheric pressure.  It was a two or three-day job to remove and replace the collapsed, distorted, leaking drum.  I don’t recall any imploded drums when Ebeli was tending the fires.

Sometime later word got to Stanley Kline that Ebeil wasn’t doing very well in his retirement, so he and his driver, Richard, went to his village to visit him.

Caring for old people who are no longer useful in the village was not a high priority.  On a good day they would be found sitting on a low stool in the sun outside their hut. They probably needed help to get back inside when it rained and again at nightfall.  Theirs was a single daily meal of Ugali, the cheapest most basic food available.  It is a stiff, starchy, malleable mass of dough made by cooking powdered Muhogo root and white corn meal in water.  The leaves from the same Mohogo plant pounded to a soft mush provide some greens.  A sweet potato and some sugarless tea may have been the only other food that day.

They found Ebeli and his wife sitting outside in the sun.  I’m sure Ebeli greeted them and smiled, but the large, open, draining tropical ulcer on Ebeli’s leg was the first thing that caught their attention.  The leafy weed he was using as a whisk had very little effect on keeping the persistent flies away from the thick, pale, liquid oozing from the depths of the sore.  With no nutritious food, only limited hygiene, and the lack of any medical care he clearly needed urgent attention at the mission hospital.  For the family to take old Ebeli to the hospital tied on the back of a bicycle was an option, but paying for the medicine and the services was not possible, nor was it possible for the family to improve his diet.

Stanley Kline and his driver, Richard, took Ebeli to the hospital where his ulcer was properly treated.  He needed to come back to have the sore flushed out, and cleaned daily; then medicated and rewrapped with new dressings.  He also needed a healthy diet including protein, vitamins and minerals.  The families of the patients were expected to supply the food. 

The Klines decided to help him.  Since they took their meals with us in the Rethy Academy dorm and there was often food remaining that was shared with the workers, they could have some of that.  The Klines also saved some milk to give to Ebeli along with a share of the left-over food set aside for the workers.

They delivered his meals and took care of his transport to and from the hospital.  The ulcer gradually healed, the rotted flesh being replaced by new muscle and Ebeli was eventually able to walk again.

As an old friend he just showed up one day in the Dorm Kitchen and joined the workers when it was time to check for left-over food after the meals.  He was clearly welcomed, joining in whatever was going on at the time, shelling peas for example.

The peas came directly from the local gardeners, who brought all our fresh vegetables right to the door, and often there were some of them in the kitchen shelling peas as well.  The talk among the men, as they worked, must have been a welcome change from sitting in the sun.  The large mound of fresh peas became a number of smaller piles of pea pods and a similar number of containers of peas all to be emptied into the large sufferia to be set on the wood stove to be cooked for the dorm.  The pods filled two buckets.  Ebeli was the one that carried them out past the laundry building, through the large dorm garden, then the barn and the barnyard, to the pigs.  Maybe he just offered to do it.

When I was going through the kitchen to have early morning devotions with the Silavano and the other workmen, there was Ebeli sweeping out the kitchen.  He had apparently already built up the cook stove fire because the smoke had cleared and the room was warmer than usual.  The ends of the firewood that protruded from the glowing firebox hissed, dripping white foam down into the open ash-drawer below.  The tied chickens, purchased earlier for the noon meal, seemed comfortable where they huddled together under the big wood table below the windows.  Still sweeping, Ebeli responded to my greeting with a smile as he looked up sideways from his bent position.

Ebeli was making himself at home taking on tasks he saw that needed to be done.  I hadn’t given him a job description; others were making the hot water fires and cleaning the dorms; so he began to find things to do to help in the kitchen area.

Officially Ebeli was retired, but his life now had new meaning.  Ebeli’s hair was turning white.  The workmen began calling him Kenyatta, the only other white haired black man they knew about.  The buckets of garbage that accumulated in the kitchen for the pigs could become too heavy to carry, but that became his job.  The men caring for the farm animals enjoyed visiting in the kitchen and gave Ebeli any necessary instructions.  They didn’t mind his help.

Payday was coming up and Ellen was preparing the wage envelopes for each worker.  She checked each worker’s attendance, his wage advances, any hospital bills paid for the worker or his family and his wage rate from last month.  Due to the monthly inflation of the Zaire we regularly reviewed the wages and made adjustments to the daily wage rate.  From the total owed by the Dorm she subtracted the items already paid and of course the SNSS retirement tax

Ebeli was so much a part of the group of his former fellow-workers; he would certainly show up at the end of the month with the other men when Silavano distributed the pay.  How much do you pay a retired worker whose job doesn’t exist, isn’t on the list of workers, and for whom there is no record of hours or days worked?  We couldn’t fail to have an envelope for him; so one was prepared with a few packets of Zaires enclosed for our “pensionnée” to receive when his name was called.

I brought Silavano the envelopes standing like files in the open wooden box we had made to keep them in order.  The workers were all waiting in the area at the back of the kitchen near the wood shed.  Ebeli was there too.  Each went in turn into the workers’ prayer room to receive his pay.  Ebeli went in as usual.

The workers knew that their money bought less and less at the Dukas so they spent their wages shortly after they got paid.  They also took wage advances during the month up to half their anticipated pay.  No one asked questions about the total paid, not even Ebeli.

The exchanges of money and the related discussions among the men on payday was always a mystery to me.  There was enough Swahili mixed in with the Lendu and Alure languages to let me know that all this involved the settling of debts and the making loans to each other.  There was some sort of rotating schedule they had worked out among themselves where every worker contributed to a single worker so he could realize his personal need when it was his turn.  Ebeli was very much involved in the exchanges.

The school vacation month was in two weeks and everybody’s work schedule would change when all the dorm kids went home and the kitchen was closed.  Ebeli’s source of food would be gone and there would be no need to clean the kitchen and build up the cook-stove fire.  There would be no garbage to take to the pigs.  Ebeli could go back to retirement at his village.

School closed.  The dorms were quiet.  The kitchen stove was out and there was no food preparation.  The vacation month passed.  We had heard nothing from Ebeli.

I was headed over to join the morning devotions with the workers and saw smoke from the poorly tended cook-stove fire drifting up like mist from under the eaves of the building.  The cookhouse floor hadn’t been swept.  Days old accumulated garbage nearly filled the buckets waiting to be taken to the pigs.  In the smoke filled kitchen flies could be seen clustering around a damp spot in a patch of sunlight on the big wood table, flying up, and then immediately returning every time the screen door slammed. Across the empty cookhouse the night guard’s chipped enamel tin cup waited to be washed.  The damp spot must have been from the guard’s cup resting there when he built the fire.  There must have been some sugar in his tea.  No one had tended the fire, swept the floor, taken the garbage to the pigs, cleaned the tables, or washed the cup.

“Where is Ebeli?”

“You killed him”, Njaba replied, you didn’t give him anything to do.