Well, I'll risk overstaying my welcome for one more story. Call it 'The Chief, Dharma, and the Girl who Wasn't Sick'.
For my first field season I got a little money, enough to rent a pickup and be out there for a couple of months. I spent time living at We-Run-Away's village, but I also wanted to cover more ground. I ended up camped at a another village with a friendly Chief, nice bloke, and my first thought when I met this guy was 'he is gonna die, and soon'. About a month earlier he'd tripped while walking around with a spear and it'd poked right through his hand, or almost. It was suppurating nastily, and I begged him to let me take him to the clinic (2 hours of bad road away). He just laughed and said it was nothing. Tough folks, these.
We camped at this place because it was as close as we could get to several villages I'd heard about, all clustered around this one big spring, the legendary heart of this group's territory. Turned out to be about 8 miles away so not so bad a hike, except that much of the trail was in the deep sand of a river bed and it was about 110. My guide and I went there and back in a day, got home at dusk completely wiped out, dirty and covered with flies. It was all we could do to wash up in our buckets, eat a bit, drink much tea, and crawl into our still-smoking-hot tents.
Some time later and I'm roller-skating with Jenna Elfman (don't ask me why) and I seem to be charming the pants off her when she turns to me and says loudly ‘Moro moro! Wa panduka nawaa?” (Good morning! Are you sleeping well?). I turn to ask her how she knows herero when I jolt awake. It was 4 am, cool and moonlit, and the Chief was in our camp.
Turns out there is a sick woman in the village who needs to go to the clinic. Knowing the Chief’s opinion of the clinic, I immediately assume that this woman must be at death’s door. Not sure what to do so I dig out my satellite phone (the nearest real phone is about 90 miles away) and my copy of the Namibian phone book (there is only one, for the whole country). I find the number for the nearest clinic - no answer. I call the next nearest, a proper hospital a good 40 miles further. A bored voice answers and gives unhelpful advice. He says to call the nearer place (I told him I did) and when I ask if he can send an ambulance he whimpers that surely I have a vehicle in a ‘can’t you do it?’ tone.
I thank him and cinching up my resolve, ask the Chief to take me to the woman. New plan: see if she is still alive, then call my mom (a nurse) in the States and ask for advice. If it looks like the woman can survive the trip, I pop her into my truck and boogie.
As I grab my stick and flashlight, the story changes. The woman is actually in a different village a rough 20 kilometers in the wrong direction. Now the Chief says she had a baby a few months ago and is vomiting and in great pain. Great - a postpartum infection left untreated and now gone systemic. Splendid. This woman is gonna die in my truck before we get her anywhere. Well, I hope that the local police, doughnut-eaters of the first water, are a bit more sympathetic than I'd expect of a foreigner with a fresh corpse.
To my surprise, the chief insists we bring her back here for him to see. I point out that this would add at least an hour or two to the drive, time she could ill afford if she is really bad off. The smart move would be to head straight to the hospital, but he remains adamant. A bit mystified, I agree. Wait, why doesn't he come along and check her out on the spot? Then we could head straight for …no, no, no. He nixes this as well, offhandedly, like I'm not getting it. I figure he is hoping to forego a horrific drive and who could blame him. I’d looked at the 'road' we were about to head out on and it's barely a goat path. I'm not looking forward to driving it at all, to say nothing of 'at night'. So we get a young kid for a guide, tossed a few things out of the back seat, and set out. It's 4:30 am.
By sun up, we’ve bounced and crashed our way deeper into the brush. Darkness really adds something to a lousy road. We moved slowly but still take a pounding, bottoming out a couple of times. Foolish to try this in the dark but we have no real choice here.
We finally get near the village and fearing the worst, drive right in to find a crowd milling about. A few folks look familiar as I've already eaten with them but most are strangers. They all great us warmly, like we're arriving at a party, and seem bizarrely nonplussed for a group with a dying woman in their midst. Biting back my impatience, I exchange greetings as if we just popped by for a visit. Hell's bells, when the chief of the region hounds you out of bed in the wee hours, you’d expect a bit more concern from those on the scene.
I finally say to heck with protocol and bluntly ask to see the woman in question. My guide rolls his eyes at my lack of decorum but we are quickly led to a small hut. Inside is a woman of about 25 huddled under an old blanket, no sign of the baby and a quick inspection shows no obvious swelling or bleeding anywhere I could see. The woman is awake and alert. Very alert - she actually seems a bit alarmed to see us. My guide asks a few questions and the real problem finally emerges: the malady is not medical, but magical. Someone put a curse on her and she needs a witch doctor like the Chief, as all chief's are thought to have magical power. Those around her flatly refuse to let her be taken anywhere.
I’m relieved to hear that the woman is not physically unwell but this is followed shortly by a touch of frustration. Not only have they just wasted several hours of our time that we really wanted to spend sleeping, they’ve also burned quite a bit of my gas. I’ll now be obliged to head straight back to town to resupply the next time I go anywhere, so this just took days out of my project.
I guess I’m glad that they feel they could send for me for help, but as we head home in the gathering light, I wonder what the heck just happened. Surely they knew that her illness required a witch doctor (not my word, by the way, their's), so why send for me? The kid we have guiding us tells us that they sent word to the Chief that the woman was sick, being specific as to her symptoms but vague as to their cause. Also, they were surprised when the Chief himself didn't show.
We get back to our camp and the Chief is still there, and soon furious when we tell him how they wasted our time. I’m a little sleep-deprived and slow, but eventually things start to fall into place. Surely the Chief knows a curse when he hears about one, why did he think this was anything else? Ah, what makes me think he didn't know? What the folks with the sick woman really wanted was for the Chief himself to make the trip. My guide mentions that the folks in the village were disappointed when the Chief did not come himself, and saw this as further evidence of his lack of concern for that part of his bailiwick. The Chief just smiles and shakes his head at such foolishness.
It was only later, when I understood more about chiefs and how they get to be chiefs that I really get what happened. The Chief got word of the sick woman but knew what was really up, knew she wasn't sick or probably even cursed. But if the chief goes, everyone would know he’d been summoned and you don't get to do that to a chief. If he doesn’t go, he is being callous even though the issue is ostensibly legit and he is the man for the job. He can’t do either so instead he sends me on a fool’s errand to call their bluff.
When the Chief didn’t show but I did, they all knew the jig was up and backpedaled fast. They looked bad for crying wolf, the Chief looked generous for calling out extraordinary resources (me), and he gets to summon outrage for seeing his generosity wasted. Wonderfully elegant solution, and miffed as I was, I couldn't help but admire it. I mean I knew the Chief was a very sharp guy (his hand not withstanding) but this is brilliant.
Not only does he settle the family business, he takes the time to smooth it over with me. The Chief lived (aided some by salt-water soaks and Neosporin) and this incident lent our relationship a certain camaraderie born of shared tribulation. Remember that time I woke you up in the middle of the night and it turns out those so-and-sos were scamming us? My, how we did laugh afterwards.
But that was later. For now, we were light on gas so we had to go resupply. I wrote in my journal that when I got money to buy my own truck, 'think about something bigger, with longer legs, possibly a land cruiser.' The rest is history.
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