Last to die

Part Two

Eleven

The Harmattan winds were blowing right on schedule.

It was Rene’s third autumn in West Africa, and no one had to tell her that the dusty winds had returned in full force. Her dry eyes and stinging nostrils didn’t lie. The winds blew from the deserts of the north, starting as early as October, typically lasting through February. With the dust, however, came occasionally cooler temperatures at night, though cooler was indeed a relative concept in a place where a typical daytime high was ninety-five degrees and the weather on the whole was best described as gaspingly hot. In the next five months they’d have just five days with rainfall, but at least there would be no raging rivers of mud to wash livestock, children, or entire hillside villages into the valley. Life in West Africa was a trade-off, and Rene had learned to accept that. For the foreseeable future, she’d live with dust in her hair, dust on her clothes, dust on her toothbrush, and it was just too damn bad if her friends back home just couldn’t understand why the snapshots she sent them had such a flat lifelessness about them. Even under the best of circumstances, it was hard to do photographic justice to the endless grasslands of northern Côte d’Ivoire, unless you were a professional, and Rene was anything but that.

Rene was a pediatrician who had volunteered for a three-year stint with Children First, a human rights organization that was fighting against the forced servitude of children in the cocoa fields. The inspiration had struck her in her last year of residency at Boston Children’s Hospital. One night in the lounge, while wolfing down her typical di

Côte d’Ivoire had been rocked by a military coup in 1999, and Rene arrived just in time to find it besieged by a host of medical problems-malnutrition, AIDS, infant mortality, even genital mutilation among some migrant tribes. She did it all, but she tried to focus on the mission that had moved her. Officially, the local governments denied that child slavery existed. Soon enough, however, Rene was able to put a face on the crisis, the faces of children who were routed to her clinic for assistance as they struggled to find their way home to the most impoverished of countries that neighbored Côte d’Ivoire. Children who told her of men luring them away from their families in bus stops and busy shopping markets in countries like Mali, Benin, or Burkina Faso. Many traveled by sea, packed in crowded old ships at ports like Cotonou, ironically a thriving center of slave trade in earlier centuries. Others came by land, trucking through the brush and canoeing across rivers until they reached plantations far from civilization, farther still from home. They stopped only when it was time for the men to get out and negotiate with cocoa farmers near Lake Kossou, when two or three or twelve children at a time would march off to meet other children of the same fate. They lived in overcrowded huts without cots, without plumbing or electricity, but with strict rules against talking, because talking led to complaining, and complaining led to revolt. They told Rene of twelve-hour workdays in the fields, sunup to sundown, and the hunger in their bellies from lousy food, mostly burned bananas, maybe a yam if they were lucky. They showed Rene the scars on their legs, arms, and backs, told her of the beatings when they didn’t work fast enough. The beatings when they didn’t work long enough. The beatings when they tried to escape. Beatings, beatings, and more beatings. All for no pay to the child, just a promise of perhaps a lump sum payment of ten or fifteen dollars to the child’s family, a payment that was frequently never made. No one wanted to call it slavery, but one of the first rules Rene had learned in med school was that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

Chickens clucked behind her, startling her.

“Ysugri, nassara,” said the man as he passed her on the street. Excuse me, white woman.

Rene stepped aside. The man had a long wooden pole across his shoulders, balanced on either end by live chickens unhappily hanging by their claws. The official language of Côte d’Ivoire was French, but few Africans spoke it, particularly in the north. Based on his tongue and dress, she guessed the man was from Burkina Faso, a desolate, landlocked country to the north that made Côte d’Ivoire glisten like a model of prosperity.

Rene flowed with the stream of cows, mules, and pedestrians to the city market. Some of the streets were paved, but others were just dirt trails that wound through the city like footpaths to centuries past. She knew her way, but it was easy enough for anyone to find it this time of year, as any gathering of this size stirred up a reddish-pink cloud of dust that was visible from across town. There wasn’t much to do in Kohorgo, and the afternoon market was a reliable source of entertainment, if you could stand the heat.

Rene stopped at the corner to sip water from her canteen. Two years earlier, she would never have gone out this time of day, but time had made her more durable. Or crazier.

“Wanwana, wanwana?” she heard the tourists ask. Travelers did indeed find Kohorgo, mostly on their way to someplace else, almost always in search of its crude and unusual painted toiles, a native form of art that found its way into just about every hotel and expat home in the country in the form of wall hangings, bedspreads, napkins, and tablecloths. The question at the afternoon market was always the same: “How much?”

“Good price,” she whispered as she passed a couple of hard-bargaining Australians.

“Thanks, mate,” said one of them, and then he went on haggling.

Bargaining was a way of life at the market, though Rene had stitched up more than one tourist who’d failed to realize that once you negotiated one of these artists down to a certain level, it was extremely insulting if you ultimately did not buy.

A blast of wind sent the dust swirling, and Rene covered her face with her scarf. This was a particularly noxious blast, carrying with it the stench of sewer. Perhaps some rain had fallen to the north last night, or the authorities had simply decided it was time to unload the overflow.

The wind eased back a notch, and Rene opened her eyes. Dust continued to swirl, and the market was suddenly a haze, as if she were dreaming. The labyrinth of brown walls and buildings made of mud-brick almost seemed to melt into the earth. Shawls and wraps flapped in the dirty breeze. Animals stirred at the more subtle desert odors blown in from the north. And the tourists kept haggling.

In a few moments she was able to focus once again, and her eyes fixed on a young boy standing on the corner, a boy like many others she’d seen. Ski