For Whom The Bell Tolls

“I’m just a useless, skinny African.” Alex said.

It was a familiar story, but this time there was a possibility I could play some part in it, besides being an on looker. I was beginning to ache from sitting too long on the hard cement porch and, with my mind bleary from the heat, the machinery of my thoughts moved slowly, but something was beginning to take shape. As Alex unburdened himself, laying before me a picture of hopelessness, he seemed so weak, so pitiful; and there was something in the frankness of his admissions that compelled me to want to help him.

With Alex’s permission I began to draw his portrait. As I mapped the line of his neck down to his slightly hunched shoulders, I made a mental inventory of his dress and posture: soiled, stained white shirt unbuttoned to the waist; faded, threadbare jeans rolled to the knee; back propped against a pillar, with one leg crooked and the other stretched out along the porch with his hand resting on it. As I drew him, his gaze turned shyly away from the glare of my scrutiny. I turned my attention to the background, and the receding diagonals of the porch and wall punctuated by two cane-screened windows, and an open doorway leading into the dark interior of the house. To the other side of Alex, standing forlornly on the bare, baked-mud yard, a yellow plastic jerry-can, and a tall wooden vessel for pounding cassava, seemed to deride with indifference the momentousness of the situation. I began to wash in some in colour, tentatively, and was just about to add a pale umber for Alex’s skin tone, when I hesitated, and decided instead to leave his skin white. With that, pictorial harmony was achieved, and the sketch finished.


If earlier my thoughts had moved like the second hand of a clock, now they raced round and round like the tiny hands of a chronometer. Then as if a bell had suddenly been rung, the following words ran through in mind: “….any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."


They were the words of John Donne, the 17th century English visionary. To me they seemed an expression of hope that arises from the idea that we are all connected, as one; and at that moment I knew an adventure had begun.