waali - page 1 of 8

Waali was a boy who dreamt of Paradise.

Icham Takache: www3.sympatico.ca/hicham.takache

He was 16, but he was rather small for his age. He was

actually slightly handicapped. Since birth, he had suffered from

polio, but he had slowly rehabilitated himself. He could move his

arms and legs and walk quite well if he set his mind on doing so.

Unfortunately, he rarely felt like going around; instead, he sat all day

long and read books or listened to what was going around him

without really seeing anything of the world.

His house was built in the middle of a land loaded with fields of

millet and wheat, the basic food in Africa. The plants seemed to

preserve him from the outside world; at the same time they blocked

his view of the horizon since he lived most of his time on the ground.

Like the ants that made their nest at the root of trees, he often sat in

the shade of palms near his home. He watched the tiny insects and

felt small like them, enclosed in a world that was made of herbs

swinging all around him in the garden, a world of winds and bird

songs that reached constantly his ears, but not his eyes.

However, when he climbed the two-story house and propped

himself on the ledge of the roof, he could see a little bit more of this

world that was his. His parents were planting seeds on the north side

of the river at the time, while his brothers and sisters harvested fruits

on its opposite bank. There stood many date palms and olive trees,

but in the middle, right where the river forked through the fields,

there grew an enormous cypress that stood like a king. As time

passed, the tree took root into Waali's imagination. Now, the cypress

spread its branches all over the fields, blocking the sunrays and

freshening the air for the workers. The odor around the tree

somewhat inspired a bliss of Paradise to Waali; in his imagination he