Tombstones and Banana Trees Read Online Free PDF Page B

us; we had a father figure around. Now we were protected from other people who might have abused us.
    He became very friendly. As well as large sweet potatoes he brought cloth and sugar with him. As he told us about his plan for a mass migration of our family to this new land, we all agreed that it was a good solution to our problems. He sold his land and his cows and gathered the village together to come and say farewell.
    We packed those pickup trucks with such joy and excitement. We had no idea what his plan was. We had no way of knowing quite how bad life was about to become.

Chapter Three
    Jesus Has Left the Village
    In my nightmares I can still feel the fear. My heart beats at night just as it did when, as a boy, I would run away from them. They would hunt me like an animal, using their dogs to track and find me. They would be silent as they stalked me, and then they would release their anger and excitement with cries and shouts once I was held at their feet. Whenever they caught me I knew that the physical agony I was about to experience would last for days. The emotional scars from the humiliation would take longer to heal. They were the jigger hunters, and I was one of their favorite prey.
    If you are poor, shoes are a luxury. If you are poor, soap is also a luxury. If you are poor and have to collect water by hand each day, the practice of bathing and maintaining good personal hygiene slips further down your list of priorities than is good for you.
    We were suddenly poor. My father had left us with nothing. Absolutely nothing. No clothes other than those that were stuck, like flags on a coffin, to our tear- and mud-stained bodies. No mattresses. No pots for cooking or collecting water. No tools for preparing food or harvesting crops. But since we had no land on which to farm and no house in which to live, these missing items were of little consequence. All we had was our breath, and surely that would soon run out?
    In one simple yet dramatic act our father had sent our status plummeting. In the morning we had been a family of wealth. We had possessions so numerous they required three pickup trucks to transport. We were part of a family who could look at others and say, “It is good that we are not poor like they are.”
    All that had not been packed onto the trucks had been sold. Our land, our cows and goats, our homes—all had been sold to others in the neighboring villages. For three hours my mother, my sisters and brothers, and I crouched at the foot of the tree by the roadside, fresh waves of tears coming with each realization of just how bleak and difficult our lives now looked. We had nothing. If only death would settle upon us at that very moment, then our pain might be relieved.
    Yet God had other plans. Slowly at first, like the way you take care when first stirring in the millet as you add water for morning porridge, God brought help to us. He did not restore our fortunes overnight, nor did He transform us at the drop of a hat. That is not generally the way God works. Instead, He brought us on a journey. A long journey made up of many steps. Some were painful; many were small. But today I can see that each one has brought me closer to God.
    As we lay there, hoping to die, a man came to talk to us. He had been one of the men my father had done business with, and my father had sold him our house.
    â€œI do not need this house today,” he told us. “You may return to it and live there for three weeks. But then I will need it.”
    I do not know whether he intended those three weeks to extend quite as far into the future as they did, but it does not matter that much. What matters is that for five years we lived in our old home. Free of charge.
    Even though God had begun His rescue plan, our journey through it was long. We had to endure the suffocating impact of extreme poverty and the consequences that followed. Without soap and shoes and plentiful water we were dirty. And with animal