The Fire

This happened yesterday while you were sleeping.

A man runs into the Shermans house and yells something in Swahili.
Steve responds in Swahili.

"Let's go." he tells me.
"What is it?" I ask.
"Fire."
"Where?"
"By your house."

I drop everything and I run. Down the stairs, out the front door, around the Shermans house, past the soccer field, past Brook's house, past Bibi's house, and I see my house with a wall of smoke rising up behind it carrying ash and debris over my head. It is windy and the smoke is moving fast.

I open the padlock on my door, run through the kitchen into my bedroom and throw important things into my trunk. Camera first. Books. Sleeping bag. Malaria pills. Warm clothes for Kili. I turn to leave, but I stop and fish out my camera and throw it over my shoulder before I run outside. I leave the trunk because the fire is not here yet, and I don't know where it will go or what it will do. A brick wall stands
between my yard and the burning grass and the thick white smoke on the mountainside.

More people have come – men, women, children, anyone who lives on our small, dry hill – and the smoke is swirling around them, billowing over my yard and around it toward the houses extending behind it, the other missionaries homes. My house is at the edge, the first line of defense. Next to my house, there is a small cluster of houses for Bible school students and teachers. A wide strip of dry, dead, thirsty grass stretches down the hillside from our homes, and beyond that, the firebreak. The flames are inside the firebreak, and they are marching through the grass toward our houses, leaving behind a circle of ash.

I jump over the wall and Nestori is there, cutting branches from a eucalyptus tree. I take one. I do not know how to fight fires, and there is no water around. Instead we all have tree limbs, rich and green and full of leaves and life, and we swat the fire with them as it eats the dying grass. Even children fight the flames, pounding the ground with small branches. We swat, the flames recede, and they come back stronger and eat more grass.

The wind is against us, and the fire is overwhelming. The flames forge toward our homes, and in some places they are taller than I am. The ring has reached the path that lines my wall, the only thing standing between my tinderbox of a yard and my home. The smoke is overpowering, blown by the changing winds, and I cannot help but breathe it into my lungs and it chokes me. I cover my mouth with my shirt, but the smoke still gets through. And so I run, gulp for fresh air, and run back. The grasshoppers jump and flit naked, their skin and wings taken as they've fled the flames.

I am hot and frustrated and out of breath, and I want to quit, but I am without sufficient excuse to leave the others, the women, the children, the missionaries to fight the flames without me. I am praying for help with the wind and simultaneously wondering how God can allow such a beautiful and useful thing to be so dangerous, to do such damage. This fire is not beautiful like the ones I have watched across the valley as farmers burned their fields at night. I am not taking pictures. I am sweating and grunting and gasping for air. I have calluses on my hands and they're already open and every swing of the branch stings, but the fire will not go out and we are the only things to stop it. Steve is next to me, and I tell him sarcastically that I am not having fun anymore.

The fire is creeping toward a cluster of trees, and I run in and begin to try to swamp it with my branch. I am downwind. My back is to the trees, and the fire is moving toward me and the flames are as high as my waste. A gust of wind. The flames are at my feet, at my jeans. "Get out of there!" comes from Steve's mouth, strong and desperate. I squint in the smoke and begin to run out of the fire. I feel the heat of the flames against my skin, yellow flames swiping at my face, at all of me. I raise my arms as I run, and behind me the flames take the ground I was standing on. I run beyond the smoke, into grass that will be consumed in a few minutes, and as I gasp for air I can smell burned hair on my arms. I feel my beard, and the hair is short and curled. My face is hot, but I am not burned. Only my hair is singed, gone from the underside of my arms and curled lightly up at the back of my neck below my baseball cap, now drenched in sweat. I am unharmed, but I'm going to have to shave.

The fire takes several acres of land behind my house to the east and south. It stops only at the path beside the brick wall. One side is completely burned, but the grass next to the wall is untouched. It doesn't get into the cluster of houses next to mine, only a short footpath away. It consumes a long stretch of grass, creeping toward the missionary houses behind me, in one place only twenty feet from one with a thatched-grass roof. Trevor tells me that they stopped it at one spot with a single bucket of water. Had it gone past, the wind could have taken it as far as his house, the last one on the hillside. Now, there are several acres of black land and sparse trees unharmed by a hasty and thirsty fire that wanted nothing more than to eat lots of grass and cover as much ground as possible.

The fire started inside our firebreak. Two kids who live on our hill were carrying coals to start a fire near their garden in the valley and dropped them in the grass along the way. They owned up to it later and received a public beating.

Steve tells me this happens at least once a year and that they don't have any pictures of people fighting fires. Now I know why. I had my camera with me the whole time, and not once did I think to stop and take a picture.

The only battle scars I've taken from this are the blisters on my hand and some singed hairs along my chin, on my arm, and at the top of my neck. All of our houses are fine. Still, I would rather not have to fight another fire in Mumba or anywhere else.