DREAM BENZIKI

Another dream written down and saved. Benziki, a friend everyone should have.

DREAM BENZIKI       

                                                We had just stepped off the freighter into the searing heat; I took a moment to tell my business partner, "You have to choose your words carefully with these people. You have to know your audience; friendship is sacred, and these people take things you say literally. 

We sat under a shade lean-to made of ferns and grasses stacked together. We were served a thin fermented berry juice in tall glasses with parasols and straws; just as I remembered it, tangy, lemony, and so refreshing. A large palm leaf on strings was suspended over our heads, and a young boy and his sister took turns moving it up and down, keeping the flies away from the two white men who came to visit.

 I took the opportunity to tell my friend a short story describing a past trip when I had left another friend alone for some time while I went for provisions. And that by the time I had returned, over one week had passed.

Upon my return, I told my friend I hesitated before entering the tree branch and calfskin mud hut where the two of us lived, but finally, I dropped to my knees, and after lifting the bright red rag covering the opening, the stench overpowered me, and that I reeled from side to side and almost fainted. I continued my story and told my friend, that I had forced myself to crawl through the small opening and into the cool blind darkness of the primitive hut. The stench of human feces was fierce upon my senses, and I fought for every breath in the brutal heat. I paused for a moment before continuing as a long-forgotten milestone in my life had suddenly come back to drown me in feelings of sadness and despair, I was having a very personal moment that I had not imagined when I started my sad tale as a learning tool for my friend who was going to stay for a while on business.

After composing myself, I continued my tale by saying;

 after a few moments, my eyes adjusted, and I found my dear friend Benziki sitting in the stench-ridden darkness on the wet mud floor in the corner of the hut, naked, afraid, and sobbing uncontrollably. 

I asked my dear friend if he was hurt, he said "no", I asked if I could do anything for him, he said "no", and finally I said, "Why my friend, why are you sobbing so, today is a glorious day, your friend has returned!

Watching me intently, and with tears running down his cheeks, he took a shallow breath and explained that when I had left him almost two weeks ago, to go to town for help and food (he paused, then continued), he said that I had told him not to let the fire go out.  In a slow methodical effort to speak, he continued and again explained he ran out of wood to burn on the fourth day. So, at first, he put his shirt in the fire to keep the fire going; on the fifth day, his undershirt went into the smoldering coals. On the sixth day, he stripped to the underwear I had given him as a gift for he had never seen underwear before, and on that sixth day, he threw his pants on the coals. On the eighth day, his prized white man sandals went on the coals and smoldered for four days.

So, on the twelfth day, he thought he went crazy from hunger and threw his prized white man underwear on the coals because he had no one to go to the desert to find wood for him.

  After he burned everything he had, he was left with nothing to burn so the fire went out the night before I arrived this morning. So not only was my dear friend cold, starving, and scared, but in his desperation and sorrow, the one thing he feared the most had happened to him, and it broke his heart. He was sobbing uncontrollably because he had let his only friend in life down, by letting the fire go out. I will never forget that day. For me, it was an awakening, a moment of sadness and compassion when I realized I had at least one friend who trusted me with his life.

 It is with great sadness, that I must confess, I have lost contact with my dear friend Benziki. Last, I heard he was happy, had started a small family, and was a ship's captain of a carnauba freighter out of Luanda, Angola. One of the pirates working the "straights" during off-season, a known criminal and smuggler said, "yea I know him, he's the one with the new tennis shoes, and white man's clothes; he tells people he is rich, he has a faraway friend that loves him".