10.17.11

It is a warm Saturday morning in Ntinda; the kind that remind you that here, along the equator, the afternoons come quickly and drench the city with a dense, palpable heat. The sun, elsewhere so fickle, beams down in a strange consistence, as though the world is finally able to rest in a routine balance. The sun; the sun that "[God] maketh [to] rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matthew 5:45, KJV).

It is a short walk to where we are going. First we take a small asphalt path to Bukoto road where, directly across from us, there is a gigantic Evangelical church: Victory Christ Church. On Friday and Saturday and Sunday nights, large crowds fill the hall and sing until early hours of the morning. I wonder now how they feel as they sing, how they feel after. Do they smile as they think back on their evenings? Do heavy heads nod in blissful relaxation?

We turn right and walk along Bukoto. On the left (across the street) there is a slight hill which drops down sharply to end in a small gutter before meeting the road. On the right there are a few gated houses which are lined with bushes and low trees. Trucks often park along the grassy sidewalk, their gigantic hulls finally resting from whatever long journey ended with their march into the city, no doubt being slightly annoyed as they did so by the many small streets that would hardly admit them. Eventually we cross to the left side and start walking up the small hill along a dirt path. To our right is Buddies - a small, yet immensely popular bar and dance club. Strait ahead, just behind Buddies, there is a beautiful building within a gated complex; it is to this building that we are headed.

The building is locked, so we wait out front for Christine to come with the key. As we wait, a large open-backed truck backs up to Buddies and the workers there start loading it with crates. I hardly notice at first, we are still a bit tired as we stand here in the early morning - the heavy mists of dreams still squeezing our eyes tight and pushing yawns from deep behind our cheeks and jaws. Eventually I notice though; I notice the tall towers of crates waiting to enter the truck, I notice the men walking back and forth, in and out of the club as more crates and more crates and more crates now populate the small dirt path. In the aftermath of some swirling massacre, these men work to clear away the decay.

The crates are full of empty beer bottles, empty laughs, empty hours of escape. Some still half-full of liquid, they slosh and spill as they were thrown into the truck - bleeding carcases flailing their rag-doll limbs as they are stacked in a putrid bliss. More crates, the bottles clinking together in posthumous screams, their open eyes staring up at heaven, empty, blank, the glassy film of death eternally contemplating in rapt unawareness, as though the eyes, before their glazed atrophy, were forever fixed on one delightfully elusive thought; a fixation now so completely unaffected by any movement of flesh that one could almost believe that in resting peace, in some cloudy afterlife, that empty soul just might find it.

More crates, more bottles, stacking, hefting, stacking, sliding, the hands of these gravediggers wet and soiled. No gloves, no masks, they laugh in foreign tongues as they breathe the fumes of forgotten lives. I don't know how to feel; I feel sad, angry, a twitch of melodrama in the monotony and unfeeling nature of the task being witnessed. I wonder where the souls had traveled to after leaving the open bottles, where they had finally laid down to rest. I wonder what brought them here. I wonder how many more crates they will pull out of the minotaur's cave.

And then Christine is there, opening the gate that we might enter the compound and begin to clean the building. I grab a broom and start with the largest room upstairs, the room where our Sunday services are held, the room where men in white shirts pray and bless our bread and water, where sincere voices sing a cappella, where children wonder why everyone is suddenly so quiet and why their mothers weep.

I think of the men outside, sweeping away as I am sweeping. Sweeping away the same dust and ashes, but from so different a faith. I suddenly feel a slight defensiveness as I reach for some rational claim, for some logically gated compound within myself. It is frustrating that I do not find it, I find only simple, longing waves of sadness. Where do the souls go before their ghosts are swept up by our brooms?