I Will Call Myself Future

When I can sleep comfortably through the night and awaken without a cold shiver in the morning,
  and when the rains begin to fall in loud and heavy downpours every afternoon
  watering the maize which has been planted in careful rows in the village fields,
;  then I know that the old year is over and a new year has begun.  

I have seen this change of seasons take place several times before, but I’m not sure how many.  
   I wish I knew because then I would know how old I am and when my life began.  

      With the return of the rains the green elephant grass has sprouted up again and eventually it will grow taller than me along the red clay paths in our village and cover all the brown memories of the dry and cold winter that has past.  Even I am changing and growing; I can see that my feet are growing bigger and my legs are getting longer.  Maybe someday I will grow as tall as the elephant grass and be able to see a little further down the path from my home, but today I am still small, and the grass towers above me.   I feel all fenced in by it as I sit by my fire and wonder about what I will do now that I live alone.  

     Who will take care of me and what will I eat?   For as long as I can remember, I have lived here as an orphan in this bush village called Funda.  My father and my mother died in the days before I have a memory and left me in the care of my grandfather.  Even though my grandfather paid little attention to me and never told me much about myself, I am sad that he is now gone also and no one remains to look after my needs.   I don’t even have a name of my own; he called me by my mother’s name, Nakaleya.    He would say to others, “That one is Nakaleya’s son.”  And still others often call me by my grandfather’s name and laugh at me for being the grandson of a witchdoctor.

     The mango tree and the banana tree grow near my hut and will soon produce a sweet treat for me, but right now when my stomach tells me that it is empty and hungry, the fruit is not yet ripe and hangs from the tree green and hard and I am unable to eat it.  Besides a few chicken eggs, all I have to eat is just a small bag of nshima, ground from Grandfather’s last maize harvest, which I can boil in a pot for my daily meals.  The rain has collected in my bucket for water to drink, but I do not know what I will eat or drink when winter comes again. What will I do when the rain stops falling and the trees bear no more fruit, when the maize bag is empty and the chickens do not lay their eggs?