Well
I almost fell down a well one day. It was the most frightening three quarters of a second of my life.
It was at an in-service training exercise for water and sanitation volunteers. We learned how to make hollow blocks to line wells. They would be very cost effective and function perfectly. The Peace Corps wanted us to introduce this technology to the masons in the rural communities. In order for us to learn it and be able to pass it on, we had to dig a well and do it experientially.
We had to travel all night to get to the Volta training site, pretty far from the Ashanti site I lived at. We got in really late, but still did some catching up with the other volunteers we hadn’t seen for many months. Morning came quite early.
The cultural tradition in Ewe land is not too terribly different from Akan land. Before starting a major project there has to be a prayer and a libation poured. In the very old days the libation was a ritual sacrifice, but now the drinking of the local moonshine replaced sacrifice.
We all stood in a circle around the beginning of the well the villagers had dug the day or two previously and listened to the fetish priest giving his blessing and rendition of the desired outcome. He talked and talked and talked, and the tropical sun rose in the sky like a marble flung out of a kid’s slingshot. By the time we were finished doing shots the temperature had risen into the nineties.
The digging began again in earnest. We hadn’t slept properly, hadn’t eaten, and had done shots of killer moonshine. Some went into the well and dug, some people had to stand on the two by fours slung across the well hole and lift out the water and rocky mud and pull it out using buckets tied onto long ropes. Some people used the red clay of the open courtyard to form templates for the concrete blocks that would line the well; others mixed the mortar for the blocks.
After some time everybody was starting to dehydrate and water was brought for refreshment. Ewe land is low, and there are marshes everywhere. The standing water that is too brackish to drink has no bacteria. The water that is not too salty to drink has been standing on the surface forever, and is essentially a science experiment waiting to be drunk to release its progeny into the closed system of the unlucky drinker. It is almost a form of torture being desperately thirsty and having water on hand that is just not potable. Some guys went back to do another shot of moonshine to quench their thirst. In case you don’t know, moonshine doesn’t work that way.
People had initially been intended to rotate tasks so as to experience each facet of the operation, but that process quickly deteriorated to people milling around doing whatever they felt like doing. Me and a couple other guys were doing the hard work because we knew it would not get done otherwise. I was standing on the planks over the twenty foot hole pulling up wet rocky mud. It was heavy and the bumping and sloshing of the buckets before me had covered the planks with wet clay. There are probably fair few of the reading audience who have ever walked on wet African clay, so you’ll have to take my word for it when I tell you how slippery it is: it is very slippery. The people who had dug before me did not want to go far before releasing their bucket loads of well bottom, so there was an amphitheater of slick mud built up around the hole, funneling any loose rocks or drunken onlookers right into the twenty foot drop.
Hunger, exhaustion, dehydration, alcohol, heat, all came together to hit me with a bolt of dizziness just as I was trying to crest the apex of the amphitheater to dump a bucket. One of my wafer thin flip flops slid down until I was on one knee holding the full bucket at shoulder height. My entire person, in tableau, began to slide down the hill of unbaked pottery and I kind of snapped to the realization that I was about to fall down a well. It only took a split second, but that split second was enough to leave a lifelong impression. I knew in that instant that there were no medical care facilities within a day’s travel. That’s the thing about getting hurt out in the middle of nowhere- you are at the mercy of God’s creation without benefit of human society. If I fell down that well it would be exactly as if I had fallen from the tree of forbidden fruit in Eden- Eden on the branch, purgatory after impact.
One of the Ewe villagers grabbed my t-shirt and had grabbed the person standing next to him. He knew what was happening. He had been pulled by my substantial weight into the slippery cone as well, but he knew that it would happen, so he had as an act of forethought held onto his neighbor. His neighbor had instinctively held onto the man next to him, and the man next to him instinctively pulled away and in so doing had fallen to the ground. His falling to the ground produced a force that was levered against the fulcrum of the apex of the crap-heap, pulling the whole line of us, and me, to the top. Once I was on the far side of the hill I nearly shat myself thinking of what almost happened.
I nearly shat myself just now, thinking about it again.
It was at an in-service training exercise for water and sanitation volunteers. We learned how to make hollow blocks to line wells. They would be very cost effective and function perfectly. The Peace Corps wanted us to introduce this technology to the masons in the rural communities. In order for us to learn it and be able to pass it on, we had to dig a well and do it experientially.
We had to travel all night to get to the Volta training site, pretty far from the Ashanti site I lived at. We got in really late, but still did some catching up with the other volunteers we hadn’t seen for many months. Morning came quite early.
The cultural tradition in Ewe land is not too terribly different from Akan land. Before starting a major project there has to be a prayer and a libation poured. In the very old days the libation was a ritual sacrifice, but now the drinking of the local moonshine replaced sacrifice.
We all stood in a circle around the beginning of the well the villagers had dug the day or two previously and listened to the fetish priest giving his blessing and rendition of the desired outcome. He talked and talked and talked, and the tropical sun rose in the sky like a marble flung out of a kid’s slingshot. By the time we were finished doing shots the temperature had risen into the nineties.
The digging began again in earnest. We hadn’t slept properly, hadn’t eaten, and had done shots of killer moonshine. Some went into the well and dug, some people had to stand on the two by fours slung across the well hole and lift out the water and rocky mud and pull it out using buckets tied onto long ropes. Some people used the red clay of the open courtyard to form templates for the concrete blocks that would line the well; others mixed the mortar for the blocks.
After some time everybody was starting to dehydrate and water was brought for refreshment. Ewe land is low, and there are marshes everywhere. The standing water that is too brackish to drink has no bacteria. The water that is not too salty to drink has been standing on the surface forever, and is essentially a science experiment waiting to be drunk to release its progeny into the closed system of the unlucky drinker. It is almost a form of torture being desperately thirsty and having water on hand that is just not potable. Some guys went back to do another shot of moonshine to quench their thirst. In case you don’t know, moonshine doesn’t work that way.
People had initially been intended to rotate tasks so as to experience each facet of the operation, but that process quickly deteriorated to people milling around doing whatever they felt like doing. Me and a couple other guys were doing the hard work because we knew it would not get done otherwise. I was standing on the planks over the twenty foot hole pulling up wet rocky mud. It was heavy and the bumping and sloshing of the buckets before me had covered the planks with wet clay. There are probably fair few of the reading audience who have ever walked on wet African clay, so you’ll have to take my word for it when I tell you how slippery it is: it is very slippery. The people who had dug before me did not want to go far before releasing their bucket loads of well bottom, so there was an amphitheater of slick mud built up around the hole, funneling any loose rocks or drunken onlookers right into the twenty foot drop.
Hunger, exhaustion, dehydration, alcohol, heat, all came together to hit me with a bolt of dizziness just as I was trying to crest the apex of the amphitheater to dump a bucket. One of my wafer thin flip flops slid down until I was on one knee holding the full bucket at shoulder height. My entire person, in tableau, began to slide down the hill of unbaked pottery and I kind of snapped to the realization that I was about to fall down a well. It only took a split second, but that split second was enough to leave a lifelong impression. I knew in that instant that there were no medical care facilities within a day’s travel. That’s the thing about getting hurt out in the middle of nowhere- you are at the mercy of God’s creation without benefit of human society. If I fell down that well it would be exactly as if I had fallen from the tree of forbidden fruit in Eden- Eden on the branch, purgatory after impact.
One of the Ewe villagers grabbed my t-shirt and had grabbed the person standing next to him. He knew what was happening. He had been pulled by my substantial weight into the slippery cone as well, but he knew that it would happen, so he had as an act of forethought held onto his neighbor. His neighbor had instinctively held onto the man next to him, and the man next to him instinctively pulled away and in so doing had fallen to the ground. His falling to the ground produced a force that was levered against the fulcrum of the apex of the crap-heap, pulling the whole line of us, and me, to the top. Once I was on the far side of the hill I nearly shat myself thinking of what almost happened.
I nearly shat myself just now, thinking about it again.
posted by Traveler at 12:37 PM
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