ITURI FOREST PEOPLES FUND

Evening in a Lese village

By six in the evening the sky turns a spectacular red, and the sun plunges out of sight. Here at the equator days and nights are always twelve hours long, and the beautiful twilights last only a few short minutes. Uboobi crosses to where her sister-in-law Melinea is cooking and returns with a hot ember with which to rekindle her fire; neither the Lese nor the Pygmies know how to make fire and must carry hot, embers with them or extract them from smoldering remains of giant forest trees felled by lightning. This evening as always Uboobi leaves a bowl of hot wash water for Mupenda and returns to her hut to sit with her children and co-wife Alimoya; she later moves the fire into the hut and rolls out the sleeping mats. As her older children fall asleep and her baby, Tofi, fusses, the sound of Lese voices is punctuated by the crescendo yell of a tree hyrax. This small mammal is not much larger than a house cat, but remarkably it is most closely related to the elephant. It screams its territorial imperative each night at dusk. There's no moon tonight and city lights are thousands of miles away. The stars seem that much closer, and beyond the red glow of the fire the night is dark indeed. Tofi is still fussing as the village quietens for the night. Uboobi mentions that she must visit the Efe camped nearby tomorrow and get them to find some stomach medicine in the forest, so that she can changa Tofi and cure her stomachache. Patients are treated for sicknesses of all kinds by changa: small cuts are made in the skin over the area where it hurts with a knife or arrowhead, and a herbal potion is rubbed into the shallow incisions. Lese medical histories can be read, much like a map, by examining the extent and location of past changa marks.