In the Belly of the Elephant Read Online Free PDF

income, the children’s nutrition improved.
    A breeze ruffled the leaves outside the window, and a cicada chirped far enough away to be soothing. Finished with the report, I sat back and shook the cramp out of my hand. Above me, sleeping in the cool darkness of the far corner of my office, hung two bats, wings folded. I had kept an uneasy eye on them for the first few weeks but had learned to live with them, the way I had learned to live with spiders the size of sand dollars in Liberia. Spiders and bats ate mosquitoes. Mosquitoes killed more people than any other animal, except maybe man. Now, I simply thought of my two bat friends as my landlords, loaning me their space when I needed a place to sit.
    A sudden gust of wind flailed the tree branches and slammed a shutter with a loud crack of wood against cement. Adiza’s round face and brilliant smile appeared outside my window. Adiza, half Ghanaian on her mother’s side, spoke excellent English and was my counterpart for women’s income generating projects.
    “A sandstorm is coming!” Adiza said loud enough for all within a half mile to hear. She slammed and locked my shutters.
    I hurried out to the courtyard and joined the rest of the staff who stood, looking west. Adiza continued to rush from window to window, closing and latching the shutters of the two office buildings. I faced west and stopped, unable for a moment to comprehend what I was seeing. A wall of churning red sand rose fifty feet into the sky, rolling toward us with the speed of a stampede. A warning wind hit the courtyard and bent the trees, whipping their leaves into a rush of white noise. We ran into the main building. Adiza followed and closed the metal doors, cloaking the office in shadow.
    The excitement shook me out of my doldrums and I laughed for the first time in a month. Adiza grabbed my hands and we jumped up and down like schoolgirls. Fati clapped her hands and laughed. Not the kind of laugh where only the lips stretched and a barking sound came out of the mouth. This was a laugh particular to Fulani women—a full body laugh that started at the eyes, came out the mouth in a whoop, and threw the body forward, hands slapping thighs and hanging on the nearest pair of shoulders. Legs and feet lurched forward and back in a stagger of uncontrolled delight. Laughter was serious business and done with great gusto. Don snorted, Djelal rolled his eyes, and Luanne joined in with a laugh like a Kookaburra.
    Then the sandstorm hit. The corrugated tin roof creaked and drummed and the shutters rattled as fists of wind and sand pummeled the building. We stood together wide-eyed in the semidarkness as the storm whined, spit sand through the shutter slats, and shook the doors on their hinges. I clenched my jaw and crunched sand between my teeth.
    After fifteen long minutes, the wind stopped as abruptly as it had started. A low rumble rolled overhead. Adiza threw open the doors and ran outside. Something that sounded like a rock knocked against the tin roof, then another, and another. I stepped into the open and caught a wet splat in my palm. Tiny puffs of dust danced across the courtyard where drops of water hit the powdered dirt. Rain! The first rain since my arrival, the first rain, they said, in six months.
    Children’s shrieks came from the market square and the streets. Raindrops splattered cold onto our hair and faces, more and more until the rain fell in a glistening curtain of glorious water. We ran inside to the sound of a thousand fists pounding the tin roof.
    The rain poured for twenty minutes. The pounding on the roof lessened to the sound of a hundred hands clapping, followed by the snapping of a hundred fingers, then fifty, then ten, until the last sigh of a fine mist washed overhead. Finally, all that was left of the storm was a cool breath of washed air.
    Chattering, we picked up branches in the courtyard until six p.m. Don offered a ride home, but I declined, wanting to walk through the cool