Pure heart (#259).

Rokupa, Wellington had always been noisy with roosters at dawn and poda-poda horns at dusk.

But in the rainy season of 2023, its sounds changed.

Tin roofs rang under relentless downpours, and gutters overflowed into doorways.

And the price of rice rose like the water in the streets.

In the middle of it all lived Idrissa Kamara, a slim young mason with calloused palms and a laugh that carried across the compound.

His neighbours knew him mostly by his quiet routine: sunrise prayers.

A bowl of garri for breakfast, then off to mix cement on half-finished houses uphill.

Yet when the troubles deepened, Rokupa discovered how wide a heart could stretch inside a modest chest.

A knock in the night.

One stormy Thursday, the power failed, plunging the neighbourhood into darkness so dense you could hear your own heartbeat.

A frantic knock shook Idrissa’s zinc door “Bra Idris, come quickly!”

Alima, the widow next door, held her asthmatic son, Osman, who was gasping harder than the wind.

The clinics were closed; motorbikes refused to travel on he flooded road.

Without speaking, Idrissa wrapped Osman in his only dry jacket and hoisted the boy onto his back.

And waded waist-deep through the brown water toward the main highway.

He flagged down a slowing trailer, convinced the driver to risk the detour,

And reached Connaught Hospital just before Osman’s lungs collapsed.

Later that dawn a nurse asked, “Family?”

Idrissa, soaked and shivering, said, “Neighbour.”

Bread from broken blocks

Work dried up after the floods.

With no sites to plaster, Idrissa began scavenging broken concrete blocks.

Grinding them into gravel, and selling buckets for a few leones at the quarry.

Each evening he returned with half his earnings converted into three loaves of bread.

One stayed in his own room; the second went to the blind carpenter.

Pa Koroma, who often skipped meals to feed his granddaughter.

The third he tore into pieces and placed quietly on doorsteps where he heard children crying at night.

When someone tried to thank him, he laughed it off:

“Bread must travel faster than hunger, en? If it reaches your pot first, just keep the journey going.”

The broken wall

Weeks later, a retaining wall above the compound cracked, threatening to collapse on the clustered shacks below.

The community had no money for engineers.

Idrissa rallied eight unemployed youths, lent them his only shovel,.

And taught them how to shore up the wall with bamboo, stones, and tire wire.

They worked three days straight. On the final evening, as the last brace slid into place.

The sky cleared for the first time in a month, and an orange sunset spilt over Rokupa.

“You saved our homes,” an elderly woman whispered.

“We saved one another,” Idrissa corrected, pressing her dusty palm between his.

A ripple no flood can drown

People began leaving small gifts outside Idrissa’s door—plantain.

A secondhand pair of boots, a note scribbled on scrap paper:

“Yu heart clean pass wata.”

He accepted them with gratitude but passed most along to someone else.

The kindness he sowed kept multiplying, like ripples from a single stone cast into the Juba River.

One evening the compound gathered for a shared meal.

Lanterns flickered over rows of enamel plates filled beyond what anyone imagined possible only weeks before.

Alima raised a cup of ginger beer and spoke for all:

When the rain came, we feared we would drown in it.

Idrissa showed us that a pure heart can float everyone.

Thank you for reading.

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