The Road to Ncheleni

"Difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations."

No map showed the path to Ncheleni; but every grief-marked soul in Mphunga village knew where it began.

It began with death.

When Chisomo’s mother died, she took the rhythm of his life with her. The village mourned with their practiced silence. Women came with water and firewood. Men sat under the musika tree and muttered, “He was a good boy. She raised him well.” Then, as they always did, they returned to their worries.

She had been everything: his teacher, his shield, his only parent. In her final days, she still tried to hum while stirring the pot, though her arms trembled. Chisomo kept the spoon she used, carved from miombo wood and stained dark from years of cooking, and tucked it into his travel sack on the morning he left.

He was seventeen. Just old enough to know how far grief could stretch, and just young enough to still believe it could be outrun.

“Ncheleni?” his uncle had said weeks before, flicking ashes from a hand-rolled cigarette. “It’s a school. But not the kind with uniforms and chalkboards. They teach you things no soil can: letters, numbers, and how to dream different dreams. You won’t come back the same.”

That was the whole truth. Not that it was salvation. Just that it was different.

Chisomo didn’t want salvation. He wanted motion. Something to silence the echo in the house he no longer entered.

He walked away from Mphunga with nothing but a canvas sack, worn sandals, and a silence that clung to him like smoke. The first day passed in sun and dust. The second in hunger. By the fourth day, the blisters on his heels had torn open.

But he did not turn back, because there was nothing to return to.

The land stretched vast and uncaring. Termite mounds rose like sentinels. Thorn trees jutted from the earth like bones. He passed empty kraals, dried-up riverbeds, and once, the burnt husk of a house — the scent of loss still thick in the soil.

In one village, a woman with a silver-tooth smile offered him roasted maize and water. She asked where he was going. When he said “Ncheleni,” she fell quiet.

“I had a sister who went,” she said eventually. “She used to tell me life was like millet — bitter to chew, but strong in the belly. She wrote once. Said the journey changed her before the destination ever could.”

She handed him an old scarf. “Wrap your feet. Keep the road from eating you.”

By the seventh day, hunger gave way to something worse: doubt.

The sun baked the road into a cruel riddle. He stopped sweating. His thoughts blurred. That night, he stumbled under a baobab tree and lay flat on the earth. He dreamt of his mother — not young and vibrant, but weary, as she had been at the end.

In the dream, she stood beside him with the spoon in her hand.

"You’re chasing wind," she said, not unkindly.

“I don’t know where I’m going,” he whispered.

“Then why are you still walking?”

He opened his mouth, but no sound came.

She turned away. “Even birds rest.”

When he woke, tears had dried on his cheeks. He sat up slowly, turned the spoon in his hands, and murmured, “I’ll rest. But I won’t stop.”

Then came the storm.

It rolled in from the east, fast and violent. Lightning licked the sky. Thunder cracked like ancestral fury. He scrambled under a rock ledge, holding his sack close, teeth chattering.

He felt the earth shift beneath him. A stone rolled free and clattered into the dark.

In that moment, he truly considered it — letting go. Letting the rain take him. Wash him into the soil.

But a single sound stopped him: drumming.

Not literal. Memory.

His mother pounding cassava. The cadence of her song. Her voice rose through steam and woodsmoke.

He clutched the spoon.

“I’m still yours,” he whispered. “But I must keep going.”

By the twelfth day, his legs were weak, but his eyes were clearer than they’d been in weeks.

He reached the ridge at dusk.

The land opened like a waiting bowl: wide fields, low buildings with tin roofs, smoke rising in calm spirals. Children ran across a courtyard. Laughter floated up, light and real.

It wasn’t majestic. It was humble. But it pulsed with life.

He sank to his knees, not in exhaustion, but in relief.

He had reached Ncheleni.

The headwoman met him at the gates. Tall. Barefoot. Her hair was wrapped in bright cloth. She didn’t ask questions. Just looked him over and said, “Hungry?”

He nodded.

She pointed to the kitchen hut. “Then you are home.”

That night, they fed him thick porridge and a watery broth. He slept on a mat with four others. He didn’t care. The mat didn’t creak. The air smelled of sweat and wood and something else: hope, maybe.

They put tools in his hands before books.

“You must build the body before you rebuild the mind,” a teacher named Baba Sefu said.

Chisomo learned to dig compost trenches, repair roofing, fix door latches, and balance buckets on narrow beams. When his hands stopped blistering, they gave him a slate and chalk.

He didn’t know the alphabet. But he knew rhythm. And reading, he discovered, had rhythm too. He copied shapes late into the night, lips moving silently.

Every mistake he made, he kept on a folded sheet under his mattress.

"So I never forget how far I’ve come,” he explained once when a teacher found the pile.

Months passed.

He watched the seasons shift: from flood to drought, from hunger to harvest. He measured time in lessons and laughter, in the faces of other broken boys who arrived, fists clenched, eyes wary.

When one cried at night, Chisomo sat beside him and said nothing. Just place the spoon in the boy’s hand and let him hold it until morning.

One evening, years later, a visitor came. A boy named Tiyamike, looked too thin for his age, shoulders hunched like he expected to be struck.

They gave him food, water, and a mat.

That night, Chisomo found him alone behind the goat pen, knees drawn to his chest.

“The first day’s the hardest,” Chisomo said gently.

Tiyamike didn’t look up. “Everyone says that. But it doesn’t help.”

“I know,” Chisomo said. “That’s why I’m not saying it to help.”

He sat beside him.

“Where’s your home?”

Tiyamike shook his head. “Gone.”

Chisomo nodded. “Same.”

A pause. Then:

“I walked for eleven days,” the boy whispered. “I saw things that made me want to disappear.”

“I did disappear,” Chisomo replied. “Piece by piece. Until there was only the walking left.”

“What brought you back?”

Chisomo reached into his shirt and pulled out the spoon. Smooth. Dark. Worn with time.

“This. Not the wood, but what it meant.”

He placed it in the boy’s hand.

“Even broken things carry stories. Sometimes they carry us.”

He never told the boy that the hardest part wasn’t the road.

It was what came after.

Learning to trust again. To laugh without guilt. To stop asking what life could have been.

But Ncheleni didn’t demand answers. It offered space to grow new questions.

And sometimes, that was enough.

Word count: 1,370