Free In the Belly of the Elephant by Susan Corbett

air. I dressed and hurried out my courtyard for my trek to the office. At least my self-imposed walls had a gate I could walk out of.
    Kitty-corner from my house, a bevy of women were leaving the courtyard of my neighbor, a Mossi woman from the Central Plateau. They all balanced head-pans filled with liter bottles of oil. Early every Monday morning, several Mossi women and their children joined my neighbor in her courtyard to produce their weekly batch of peanut oil to sell in the market. I greeted them, and the women waved as they turned and walked up the street toward the market.
    Fifteen minutes later, I walked into the office compound. Hamidou, Fati, and Nassuru stood outside talking to a small boy and his mother. I recognized the boy as the one who had been sick with guinea worm. His leg had returned to normal size, and the sore where the worm had once hung was healing into a shiny scar.
    We all clucked over the boy’s renewed health. He smiled up at us, showing a gap where a new front tooth peeked out from his pink gums. His mother thanked us again for the tetanus vaccine. Smiling at her, I thought of the little girl in Liberia. I wanted to pound my chest like Tarzan. We had won this time. We had chased away Death before it had gotten too close.
    Hamidou started up the Land Cruiser and Fati, Adiza, Nassuru, and I piled in for a day of project visits to Sambonaye, Toukka, and Selbo.
    Clouds skittered across the sky. A jet passed high overhead, probably slightly off course from Paris to Abidjan. Soon, if I were lucky, I’d be on a jet to Tunisia. I daydreamed about the cool interior of the plane, arriving at the Tunis airport, riding horses, and drinking beer with Lily.
    We hit a pothole and my shoulder jammed against the door. Ahead, a woman and two little girls walked along the road. They stepped to the side and watched us as we passed. A gangly girl stood in the dirt, holding her little sister piggyback. Just the way Tricia, seven years bigger and older, had carried me up and down the sidewalks of our block with its brick houses and grassy lawns.
    Would she really come in the spring? It had been a whole year since we’d driven home together after a weekend with our parents on the Blackfoot Reservoir. I smelled fish and saw cattle grazing along a stream bed.
    “Dad just doesn’t understand why you have to go back to Africa.” One hand on the steering wheel, Tricia unrolled the window and hung her arm out the side.
    Wild sage overpowered the fish. Sitting shotgun, I filled my lungs with dry air and exhaled slowly, counting to ten. We crested a hill and picked up speed on the downslope. Out the side window, past my sunburned arm, fence posts flickered by. Beyond the fields, a line of cottonwood trees shivered green and silver against a cliff face of lava rock.
    “Why can’t he just trust me?”
    “Because he’s afraid you won’t come back. You know Dad, he expects the worst and waits for it to happen.”
    Just as I had been doing, boxed up in my courtyard, waiting for something bad to happen the way it had happened in Liberia.
    The huts of Sambonaye came into view. We drove along the road, flanked on each side by the village fields. Stalks of millet nodded bushy heads of grain, promising a good harvest in November. Hamidou parked the truck.
    The sun burned my shoulders through the cotton material of my dress as I walked with Fati and Adiza down the hill to the gardens. Women bent here and there, picking greens and digging up groundnuts. Produce from the garden project had helped them feed their families through August and September. This was hungry season in the Sahel, when the grain stores of the last harvest were depleted and the new crops were not yet ripe. People lived on fish from the mar, eggs from chickens that produced best during rainy season, and optimism that this year’s harvest would be plentiful.
    Nassuru talked to the men about constructing grain stores—large, egg-shaped mud shells set up on