What’s a madfish?

The Dinka who live along the Nile call me reec-col:  madfish.  You’d be mad, too, if you’d been treated as I have. 

I’d had a pleasant life in the Nile until the day I was suddenly snarled in a net and flung roughly from the river into a canoe. I flopped and flailed, of course, but couldn’t breathe. Soon the life ebbed out of me.

Then began my out-of-body experience, or was it just a dream?  Someone rubbed salt on me and laid my silvery self on a mat in front of a mud-walled hut. I was left in the blazing sun for several days. Such scorching heat! It shriveled my skin yet somehow preserved my flesh.

Then a woman, knife in hand, crouched next to me and sliced me into thin, rubbery strips. Strangely, I felt no pain – only curiosity.  She collected my strips, spread some oil on her palms and massaged each slice of me. After that, she began to weave me together, as one might braid long hair. 

Now I was a dried, braided madfish.  What next?

I should have guessed: she sold me to an exporter.

I left South Sudan in the back of a pickup truck, one braid among hundreds of others, headed for the camps across the border, where a quarter-million refugees were hungry for a taste of home.

I ended up stacked with dozens of others on a rickety table in an open market in Pagirinya Refugee Camp in Uganda, surrounded by plastic buckets of rice and manioc, pyramids of red tomatoes, tiny imported packets of spice, stalks of sugar cane, bright bolts of cloth. 

From a distance, we could have passed for braided leather belts. But up close, our pungent smell said otherwise.  

And the South Sudanese women, exiled from home, recognized us and smiled their welcome.