morning everyone, oh sorry I mean good afternoon. We are lucky to have someone to talk to us today who has worked and travelled extensively in the deveIoping world. Please give a warm welcome to Eliot Wilson. After he has shared some of his experiences with us he told me that he is more than happy to try and answer any questions that you might like to ask him .
Eliot smiled, cleared his throat and set about briefly describing some parts of the journey of thirty five years, the journey of two people in partnership, the lucky breaks, the unavoidable calamities, the laughter and the pain and when he finished and sat down he thought that the room full of midddle aged men had been engaged.They had looked at him, not through him. His words had made them think, they had quiet thoughts. But now the questions didn’t come and there was an uncomfortable silence for a few seconds and then Marion’s brother put his hand up.
Thank you for the question Barry.
Two smiles crossed the room and Eliot relaxed. He was about to tell some stories and he enjoyed telling stories . Now it occurred to him that he so rarely heard his own voice these days as he negotiated away the hours of each day alone in his apartment. Especially his voice of authority and confidence and he liked hearing it again. Being alone was too easy.
I think that I can best answer Barry’s question by telling you a little story……. Africa can be a dangerous place and often the greatest dangers sneak up on you, something or someone sneaks into your life and things are never the same again.
There is an experience that has stayed in my mind for over thirty years. In 1986 we were working in Zambia, my wife and I, in a small city called Mazabuka, not far south from the capital Lusaka. Nearby was the Kafue National Park. We were working with a couple who came from Nottingham at the Luyobolola Community School and together we jumped at the chance to see leopards and cheetahs and the black rhino in the National Park before it was too late. So many people said that. Not for one moment did we suspect that we were living dangerously. My wife and I booked a lodge, hired a four wheel drive vehicle and set off with our new friends, Simon and Brenda for the Kafue river.
We liked Simon and Brenda, they were fun to be with, intelligent, but they didn’t take themselves too seriously. We might have been friends for life. We have always swapped Christmas cards with Simon, but life goes on and he has married again. I liked Brenda very much because she knew what she was talking about, because she was genuine but perhaps most of all because she was funny.
We arrived at the lodge late on a Friday night and sat under the stars and drank beer and began to talk rubbish. The next morning we took a boat out on the Kafue river and a hippopotamus surfaced suddenly near our boat and as the boat rocked and we were splashed with water, you sensed how easy it would be to capsize and then the hippo opened its huge mouth and showed its yellow peg teeth and it could have eaten us all, if that is what they do. But this didn’t happen. Over more beers Brenda said bullshit, she sure wasn’t going to be eaten by a hippopotamus because she was three months pregnant and then there was a lot of hugging and tears and then laughter.
Two days later she said that she didn’t feel well. She had the sweats and a terrible headache and then a pain in her abdomen. So we set off in the Landcruiser for a small town called Mumbwa where there was a doctor and a clinic and the doctor said that she most likely had malaria, so he gave her some Fansidar and we turned around and retraced our steps but her condition didn’t seem to be improving. She went to bed, she needed rest.
Just after three o’clock in the morning Simon stood at our bedroom door, his face pale and grotesque. Later, he said that life could never be the same for his family and her family and that it wasn’t fair. He had felt her tossing, felt her sweating and then she must have stopped breathing in her sleep. She was dead in their bed and over the next few days we learnt how this had come about. I am no doctor and maybe there are doctors in the room who can explain it better than me, but the severity of malaria is greater in pregnant women where the wrigglies accumulate in the placenta accelerating their spread. There is also,apparently, impaired immunity from malaria for women who are pregnant. Brenda’s body was flown back to Nottingham.
I have told you this story because today, here in our world we expect everything to work out the way we would like it to and get upset when it doesn’t. We sometimes forget that life everywhere is full of dangers, people brush up against nature, against their own weaknesses, against other people, and who knows what will happen. You can’t expect to live a life without some pain. Sometimes people run out of luck. Brenda went to Africa to do what she believed were good things and she never returned. I can still see her rolling her eyes and I can still hear her laugh and her loud shout of bullshit. One evening back then, a few months before her death, I remember we sat together on the concrete floor of a small bar on the outskirts of Mazabuka and drank luke warm beer and it seemed then that we were all safe and the future, our future, was sure and certain. But it wasn’t.
On New Year’s Eve we had counted down the seconds in unison and we had hugged each other and I tell my self today I can still feel Brenda’s hug. Late one night in the new year, when the generator had been shut down, the lights gone, the stars dazzled us with their brightness, their number, we sat on plastic chairs in our compound and waited for Halley’s Comet and we felt lucky. And we thought of all the things that happened to people since the last time that the comet visited our planet, the things discovered and the things lost. The people who flourished and the people who suffered. It flared across the sky and we were lucky and only months later all you could say was that Brenda was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was unlucky. She decided to go to Africa in 1986, to Zambia and someone made the decision to travel to the Kafue river and her life ended there. Everyday decisions sometimes cause extraordinary outcomes that resonate in some people’s lives for a long time.
Eliot’s face muscles were working over time, holding back a tide of emotion. Suddenly It felt as if Marion was standing at his shoulder, always there at times like this. The applause was spontaneous.
Thank you Eliot.
3.
Nine a.m. and rush hour was just dieing and Eliot was not off to work. Maybe if things had turned out differently he would still be sitting in a bubble with hundreds of others in theirs , off to the office, off to stare into a computer screen with their lanyards with swipe cards proudly displayed around their necks. Maybe he would be having a quick beer after work with a couple of his work mates. But instead the daignosis came from nowhere and his hand was forced , Marion needed him, needed him every day and they moved into the apartment. At first to help with those every day things and then in the hospital for company and as they held hands and she became smaller, they talked only about the future, as if Marion had one. About Alice and Joe in London and the possibility of grandchildren. Of Louise and whether she would ever find a a life partner. And what would he do when she had gone? Don’t talk like that he had said.
Eliot could see his reflection, his pony tail, in the train window and unease spread through him, the dream of last night and the murky depths of the Ganga came back to him, he was still the old Eliot. What about Marion now? It was bad enough talking publically about their life experiences, their challenges together, their hopes and beliefs? But he was planning to start a journey without her. The journey, if he was honest with himself, she had caused to start. There was time to change his mind, to pull out. A phone call and a couple of emails really amounted to very little. He heard himself say let’s just see what today brings, that time would eventually tell him what to do and so he tried to concentrate on other things. But the little things in his life were soon overwhelmed by thoughts of this day.
The train curled through North Melbourne, houses on both sides and the back windows of these houses looked across their yards at the train and Eliot looked back at the people’s lives through the grime and the graffiti on the glass. The old Holden jacked up on bricks, the staked broad beans beginning to flower, two little girls, maybe twins, both in yellow dresses with one pram, clambering under the feet of a women hanging out her washing. Some boys playing pool on a battered table under a carport next to a van with the painted sign : Ken The Plumber, Anytime, Any where. Every yard making its own statement, every yard different, inviting you to make some kind of judgement about the people who lived there and Eliot