Where There's Smoke...

Aside from the laughs had around Saturday night’s adventure, yesterday was fairly quiet. I spent most of my day in my room going over my plans for the week; what material I was going to cover in class, other projects on which I was going to work, etc. After about three hours my stomach let me know in no uncertain terms that it was time to pick up where I had left off at breakfast.

As I grabbed the last three slices of leftover pizza out of the fridge and reheated them in the microwave, the phone rang. I picked it up and on the other end was Dr. Carol, a missionary doctor who frequently comes down here to run a clinic and who has made a name for herself in this community. “There’s a fire down the road near Phelipe and Anthony’s house. I think it’s a parishioner’s house; you guys may want to get down there and take a look at it.” I relayed the message to one of the priests here and 30 seconds later we were in the car and on our way.

Like most spectacles of fire, a crowd had gathered; as we approached we passed pedestrians who were leisurely walking towards the commotion which had gathered the locals. A fire truck was there and the firemen had already extinguished 99 percent of the blaze while the throng of locals stood around talking. The family who had just lost everything was safe and no one was harmed but everything, and I mean everything, they owned had been incinerated. One of the family members was napping and the fire woke him. He dashed out of the house, realized that a baby of the family was still in there, raced back in, grabbed the child and once again exited the burning building.

They are a family of 8 and they were living in housing provided by Food For the Poor. These prefabricated wooden houses take practically no time to assemble and have a footprint of 12 feet by 12 feet. This family was fortunate in that they were living in a larger version of this housing which was nothing more than two of these units put together. Less than 600 square feet of wooden house sitting atop a foundation of cinder blocks was their home and it went up like a tinder box in record time. Anything which was not made of cement was reduced to a layer of charred ash and the only recognizable items were a microwave and a refrigerator. During the fire the four sides of the latter appliance had peeled away from each other like a banana and curled down towards the floor leaving it looking like a piece of apocalyptic art work.

Around me people walked and talked while members this family cried out in agony realizing that the only clothes they had now were the ones they were wearing, they had no money, no food, no personal possessions of any kind and an even bleaker horizon that the one to which they had woken up. Last week someone had given them a generous cash donation and since they do not have the means with which to open a bank account, they kept it in a locked room in this house and now, with everything else, it all went up in smoke. The poorest of the poor had just been kicked while already writhing on the floor. An elder woman in this family, probably around 65, simply sat in a doorway of a neighboring house smoking a cigarette and cried, “God give me the strength. God give me the strength.”

This former house sat behind two other houses, each of them made of concrete but with only a flimsy hollow core door protecting the innards of the homes, and given the proximity of the blaze, neighbors rushed in to empty them of all their personal belongings just in case. A fourth house sat off to the side of these three about 20 yards away. About 70 people gathered and moved about clamoring and talking, some of them trying to figure out how they were going to provide for the family in crisis. It was determined that among the neighbors, this family in crisis will have a place to stay and that today would begin the work of scraping together some petty cash, clothes and new housing either donated or paid for through various means.

I felt pretty useless standing there looking at the smoldering remains and watching this gathering of people. My eyes drifted from image to image; a bed frame that had been pulled from the blaze whose metal and wood frame was charred black and letting off white smoke, a dresser that had been somewhat salvaged and was now warped and contorted from the fire and water, the gray concrete foundation and its newly acquired black scars. As the wind came up the mountainside it carried the smoke of the fire over all of us and many people took to covering their noses and mouths with their shirts and then turned their backs to the smoke to shield their eyes and their lungs. I turned my head to the side to avoid the blast of smoke and my eyes met those of a girl who could not have been older than three. Having found as much privacy as she could carve out in this moment, she was squatting over some weeds with her shorts around her ankles and was peeing. She just stared at me as if it was a normal occurrence, pulled up her shorts and went back to playing.

The entire episode seemed surreal and the smoke which blanketed the area ever now and then gave it the look and feel of a somewhat cryptic dream. “Maybe I am dreaming,” I thought. “Or maybe I was hit by an oncoming car while trying to my broken one last night and now I’m in some sort of purgatorial limbo thing.” The fact that I haven’t gotten more than five hours of sleep on any given night in the past week might have had a little something to do with it too.

Having done all he could do to help in this moment, Fr. Sam collected me and we drove back to the compound. “So now what,” I asked him.

“Well, we’ll have an emergency meeting with some people tomorrow and see if we can ease their suffering. We’ll try and get some money together for them, see if we can get some clothes donated and beg for some housing from someone.”

“And that’s just how it goes here,” I asked.

“Yes,” he said plainly. “We do what we can.”