Chapter Three: Jacanas in the Delta
Meanwhile, across the ocean in Liberia, children like Tre are abducted from their families and conscripted to fight in civil wars, stolen from their homes and forced to fight.
Mating season in the St. Paul Delta is a deadly affair that brings forth new life.
“Forward,” Captain James shouts loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of Jacanas coupling furiously.
Long-toed males, called lily-trotters, skip across stagnant ponds and lagoons to battle fellow suitors for much larger polyandrous females, females with more than one husband.
The prized cock fighters stab at each other with horned wings. The birds vocalize aggressively and chase each other through the air to secure their territorial prerogatives, protect their turf.
In due time, intruders are driven beyond the outer banks. Then the victorious breeders fertilize female eggs and hover nervously between their nests and the frontiers of eternal threats, they win the war and have to always protect what they won.
On the flat region by the lower tidal waters of Lake Piso, mangroves and peat swamp forests spread luxuriously into view beyond refugee Camp Tzwanna where cholera rages and devastated survivors from the war suffer quietly and pray for death, the teenagers are dying because of the war.
Captain James ladles his Angel dust with care, doling out meticulous portions to each one of his forty-three rag tag warriors, to numb their pain, steal their loyalty, and make them fearless fighters. Their bodies lay low and take rest in the mire by the delta as the incoming tide pushes brackish water upstream and carries putrid chemical residue and airborne seeds that slip and slime under foot as the teenagers trudge deliriously through toxic mud and civil war, children forced to crawl through a wasteland.
A larger and stronger than average boy-man strips water vegetation of its leaves and blossoms to gather hardy stems to bind together to make a cheap truncheon. Adjani cleaves with a rusted machete through vines that cling to him as he climbs the vertical wall of tropical ivy to collect fresh shoots and get a view of the desecrated river.
“It’s beautiful,” he says as the St. Paul, saturated with diesel and bilge flows silently by. Tonight, above the sewage strewn banks the mottled water reflects brilliant twilight as the sun sets.
“It’s beautiful,” he shouts to Dukulay as a miasma of twisted ripples waft aloft a thick blanket of fear and despair.