She usually wakes up before everyone. Around 4:30 am. It’s cool in the morning, especially on rainy days, and it’s still pitch black around that time. The moon, bright and powerful, acts in place of a flashlight and thick mist lies low across the vast fields around our compound. She wraps a cloth around herself, walks across the compound and grabs large branches of firewood to start a fire. Water in a big metal cauldron, and on the fire it goes, held up from the flame by three solid pieces of rock. The water will heat, and will be used for bathing, tea, cooking, and more. Grabbing a small piece of cloth, a sheet of thick plastic wrap, and a large (I’d say 14 L) metal bucket with no handle, she walks out of the compound and 5-10 minutes to the borehole. There are others like her at the borehole.

The sky is lightning now, but very slightly. The moon still dominates. Manual pumping, full-body motion, and 14 L of water later, she takes a plastic sheet and submerges it in the bucket. The sheet naturally floats to the top to protect the water from mosquitoes and other insects. She takes the small piece of cloth and wraps it around her hand to form a spiral, much like a curled up snail. She places the cloth on her head, bends her knees a little, and with the help of the others lifts the bucket on her head.

5-10 minute walk back, duck under the overhang, and back in the compound. Others are waking now, gathering by the fire with their own cloths to protect themselves against the cold. She puts the water down, and repeats the process, with others from the compound joining her. Broken but continual, this process repeats a few times over the next hour.

The water has come to a boil. It’s market day in Saboba. She helps cook Boakulu, a fermented-maize-based fried snack, which will be sold in the market. It’s not her turn to sell, so the 9-year-old Gretchen will miss school to sell Boakulu today.

She takes care of the baby Jethro, who is always craving attention. Then, around 6:15, she bathes, puts on her school uniform, grabs her notebooks, and joins her friends – who’ve come to the compound to meet her – on the long walk to school. Off she goes, joking and laughing.

Her name is Lufka. She is 13.

—

After school, Lufka will come home. Around 2:30. If it’s market day, she’ll go help her mother – Dana – and Gretchen sell goods in the market. If not, she’ll join Dana on the farm. Sowing corn and processing Nairi is usually the womens’ job this time of year. Machetes, large spear-shaped rods, beating hot sun, vast open fields. Hours slip by in work and conversations. Gossiping much like people do in Canada and other places. Nairi is sliced, one by one. Corn is dropped and covered in soil using bare feet, two grains at a time; one foot apart.

7 pm. The women will come home. Lufka will join Hanna in fetching more water. Same process. Water is boiling. This time in two pots. One for T-zed. Sometimes Hanna will cook it, and sometimes Lufka. Large (about 4-5 ft long) wooden stirring rod/spoon, Lufka would rotate it with force using her arms flipping the gooey uncooked mixture of maize, cassava, and water. Stir, stir, pound slightly, flip. T-zed would stick to the edge of the pot. Lufka wets her hand slightly, clenches the fiery hot edge of the metal cauldron, and drags her hand around the edge, forcing the T-zed back into the pot. She wets her hand again quickly, to dissipate the heat.

We all eat. Regular night in the compound, we all talk about our day. Janet and Jethro are falling asleep at this point, and doze on the compound floor or the reed mat. Lufka and Gretchen will clean the pots, the dishes; our pots, our dishes. Lufka sweeps the mud huts, except mine; that one is reserved for Dana, and (despite my insistence) I’ll never be allowed.

Then, as everyone sits, exhausted from the day’s work, chatting, dozing, under the stars… As I sit and finish some work on my laptop, or reflect in my notebook, or talk to Elijah and Dana… Lufka slips away into the other hut, sometimes joined by Gretchen or other friends. Her responsibilities have been fulfilled for the day. As I continue working or talking, I can hear, slowly, in the background, words in English coming from the ajar door of the hut. Lufka is reading. Using her finger, she is pointing to words as she reads so that Gretchen follows. Notebooks open, she copies in the definitions of words or methods of solving addition and subtraction problems.

“When does her school vacate?” I ask Phillip.

“Next week.”

“Is she writing, then?” I ask if she’s having exams these days.

“Yes, she’ll write.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow, she’ll write.”

I, tired and exhausted from my completely not-physically-intense day, retreat to my hut around 9 pm. I continue working a little bit, or I listen to some music as I lay on my foam mattress under my bed net. It’s hot, and I lay as spread out and still as possible on the thin swath that is my bed, slowing my breathing so that I don’t feel hot. By 10, as I put my music away and allow sleep to engulf me, I hear sounds faintly from the next hut over that remind me… Lufka is still studying for the next day’s exams.

—

Lufka, the oldest daughter in Elijah’s family, is one of the most hard-working and inspirational people I have met since I came. I have never heard her complain, never seen her daunted or upset. I honestly don’t know how she does it. She’s never in the spotlight, and I probably wouldn’t think twice about her work if I was just staying in that compound for a few days. It’s not like she’s shy; quite the contrary. But, over time, I’ve noticed… and been blown away.

She is not alone though. Though being a girl (and the oldest) puts a lot more on her shoulders, her example speaks hugely to children here in general.

I can tell you about the time I saw farmers paying teachers to bring their classes of students as labor on the farm.

I can tell you about Mainsa, another 12-13 year-old in our compound, who spends most of his time weeding, working farms, using machetes to scrape wooden blocks, with school thrown in there somewhere. He is so exhausted at the end of some days that he lays on the cement, on his back, sprawled out and asleep before food is ready.

I can tell you about how when anyone wants something in town, it’s common to point and hiss over the closest child, who’ll come and you can give him/her money to bring what you need. Not money as in extra, you just give them money for what you need.

I can tell you about flinging small children across gutters using just their arms, since they can’t make the jump.

I can tell you about the fact that once the adults finish fresh food, they give the remnants to the children.

“Age works differently here,” I said on the phone to my mom a few weeks back. It’s almost as if children are at the bottom of the hierarchy, and as you grow up you earn the right to better things. Better food, better sitting spots, lesser chores, the right to command the younger children… But what does that look like? It looks like children that grow up and mature much faster. Remarkably fast. It results in strong and hardy adults, who are tough and able to power through the laborious life here.

“Your body becomes tired!” Isaac said to me once. Isaac is a friend of mine in town, who is building latrines as part of a World Vision project. “Everything is physical here! Too physical! We are not having machines, and your body gets tired!” I can’t imagine.

But as always, I want to make sure I’m not sending an incomplete message. Parents love their children, and take care of them. They want the best for them, and they are motivated to earn and work more so that their children have more in the future. Children are not unhappy; they play and enjoy themselves as you’d expect children to. They are, however, strictly disciplined, and don’t disobey or argue. Responsibilities increase with age a lot faster than they do in Canada, though.

In part, I wanted to write this post because after re-reading my last one I felt that this context was unavailable to you, the reader, and thus what I wrote about Elijah may be taken as bad and terrible, while the practice is just normal across many families I’ve met here. I’m guessing that after writing this one, I’ll realize more things that I haven’t written about that would add another dimension to even this post. But that’s exactly what I want to communicate, that is what complexity looks like.

—

“What do you want to do after you finish school?” I asked Lufka one day.

“I don’t know!” Lufka grinned and shrugged, carefree. It kind of bothered me. I felt with a pang that when I was 13, I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. I wanted to learn about so many things. And I could. I could do whatever I wanted, and still can. But that mass expanse of possibility, of exposure to what can be, the opportunity… it’s not even a dream here. I don’t even know if people know what that looks like. The freedom to pursue whatever you want, unbound by societal, financial, familial, and circumstantial constraints. I really don’t know.

I wish that people knew. I wish that they had the ability to know. It doesn’t have to change what people do, it doesn’t have to change the choices that they make; but I just wish they knew what was possible. The core, original reason for my passion in international development resurfaces finally. But here, in the unheard-of corner of the world that is Saboba, the world is often out of earshot as well.

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