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My living room in Béré is simple. There are holes in the ceiling over the table in the corner. In the rainy season we put pots on the table to collect the drips. The table is covered with fake plants, a kerosene lantern, a laptop computer, a satellite phone, a calendar, a box with corks, a clay pot with notes inside from people who've borrowed money and a straw basket woven locally and filled with pens, rubber bands, paper clips and various other odds and ends.

A woven wicker wasted basket sits to the side. A metal file cabinet with no door and a few shelves has been converted into a bookshelf containing Christian books in French, a Tchadian Arabic dictionary and grammar book, CDs, DVDs, Surfing magazines and a few odds and ends like Don Quixote in the original Spanish, A Tale of Two Cities, Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, The Gospel According to Biff--Christ's Childhood Pal, and Spanish playing cards.

In the corner are three African drums of various sizes, a guitar case, a car battery, a rusty machete, a broom, sandals and a few odd clay pots. A wicker couch covered with a curtain, a small table in the other corner, 4 chairs and a coffee table complete the furnishings. Two bush knifes, a Safari hat and various postcards adorn the otherwise bare, white walls.

Out the front door comes the sounds of an old typewriter being painstakingly tapped by André on his porch across the courtyard. A metal, rebar frame on the verandah houses a sagging, limp mosquito net. The cement railing has chipped paint and many missing blocks leaving some suspended virtually in mid air.

Out the side window one hears the sounds of twittering birds, scratching chickens and the mumbling of kids at play. A bare dirt yard has piles of raked weeds and leaves ready for burning and smoldering piles and ashes from this morning's burnings. Several guava trees have cracked leftover bricks arranged in something resembling circles around their trunks so they can be watered. An old clothesline is currently bare of its usually brightly colored African clothes or drably colored hospital scrubs. A rooster and a hen with her chicks scratch at the base of the newly watered trees.

The recently constructed wall is made of locally fashioned and fired mud bricks with sand-heavy mortar up to about 3 feet high where a thick, chain-link fence takes over. The heads of children are barely visible on the other side where they have gathered to drink from the hose draped over the bricks and through the chain-link to the outside. Some sort of game with a small deformed ball is being played to the side. An older boy rides by on a rickety bike with a hundred pound sack of rice tied to the back.

Behind the kids is our neighbor's stack of newly fired bricks. The mud bricks were assembled in a rough pyramid with holes on the outside layer and underneath where sticks were shoved and lit. All night long the family and neighbors gathered around the warm glow until morning brought a blackened outside crust housing bright red fired bricks within. The neighbors' mud brick, thatched houses weathered by years of rain rest just behind almost seeming a part of the natural landscape unlike our cement and tin roofed behemoths and rude metal fencing.

The elementary school is a few hundred yards off the corner of our fence, abandoned now in the hot, 120 degree afternoon. Everything seems oppressed by the heat. Even the air seems afraid to move lest it start to sweat or expend too much energy in providing its wind. The only thing unrestrained by the heat is the universally boundless energy of the kids, one of whom hangs casually off the chain-link while the rest have changed games slightly, now tossing the ball in the air in a circle with who knows what objective.

A man walks out of the hole in the neighbors wall serving as a door, leading three cattle. The cattle have huge, floppy humps between their shoulders and 2-3 foot long curved horns. A chain or rope through the nose allows these otherwise unpredictable steers to be guided even by a child. The man leads them off for some undetermined task:� perhaps hauling wood, carrying bricks, pulling a cart, or just to be watered and grazed.

In the kitchen, Sarah sits at her desk with white lace curtains behind her. She is intently flipping through pages scratching her neck with a pen. Her hair has been pulled up tightly and she wears a tank top in a vain attempt to escape some of the heat. A rooster crows. Ephraim calls for his papa. A boy runs past the fence with a stick pushing a rolling metal lid. The briefest of winds evaporates the sweat running down my back providing temporary refreshment.

The hospital is quiet but at any moment that dreaded clap-clap could appear on the porch in the form of a scrub-wearing, white-coated nurse calling me forth from my malaria-induced reverie back into the world of the Béré Adventist Hospital...

James