Down the street from our house is a wadi which forms when the rains fall here.  Usually we have a short rainy season from July to September.  During this time I enjoy running onto the roof to view the lightening and rains in the distance.  Papa and I watch the storms travel across the sky.  Most of the rains come in the afternoon and last about an hour.  Because the rains come quickly they take sand with them and slowly form a wadi or what you might call a ravine.  The wadi down the street is about five football fields long and most of that is filled with garbage up to my knees.  Mostly I see crushed cans and rotten food which the goats eat from the piles.  It smells and nobody really wants to go near it.  People put their garbage there because there are no garbage trucks here or any organized way of taking care of it.

One Sunday morning our garbage was overflowing, which meant someone would have to take it down to the wadi.  Usually we pay a boy 50 cents to take down the garbage for us.  But on this particular day the boy, Mohammed, was shepherding his family’s sheep, cows and camels.  So my mom asked me to take down the garbage.  In Chadian culture taking out the garbage is a job that is very shameful.  Most often the beggar boys do it.  So I worried that people might wonder why the nasara boy was taking out his family’s garbage because we have enough money to pay someone else to do it.  I don’t want Chadian people to think just because we have more money that I am better than them so I decided to do it even if people stared at me.

I lugged our pail of garbage next to our wheelbarrow and dumped the banana peels, onions, egg shells and leftover spaghetti in.  Then I began to push the wheel barrow down to the wadi. As I walked, my friend, Ali, offered to help push it.  I was happy to have someone to talk to.  As he pushed the wheels hit a bump and garbage splattered unto his hand.  I laughed.   Finally we reached the dump.  We got rid of the garbage and were eager to go back home.  Once there, I had one final messy task – to wash out the gray slime from the bottom of the wheelbarrow.

By Nehemiah Broten and His Mama

PS  Nasara is what the Chadian’s call white people.  It comes from the word Nazarene.

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