(Chris Benjamin, 3rd prize)

Muhammad Braimah was born in a large slum on the outskirts of the capital city of Ghana.  His parents had moved there from a small, dry northern farming village in search of steady nine-to-five paycheques.  They found themselves working the streets of Accra, he selling homemade medicines, she selling imported used clothing, both alone and far from home.

            Muhammad was born in a tin-roof shack.  He was the first of five children, the eldest male.  Against odds he was sent to a big city school, uniform and all.  He learned the Queen's English, maths and science, and he was the smartest boy in school.  By Senior Secondary, the smartest girl had dropped out and Muhammad won all the scholarships in her stead.

            In the early mornings Muhammad sold newspapers in the market.  The job came with the responsibility of determining the biggest stories of the day.  Whichever newspaper's headline screamed loudest of the most violent and profane acts, committed by the biggest names, was the one Muhammad held up on display.  That headline was the one he shouted to passers-by on foot, in car, or on the bus.

            Muhammad's dream of studying journalism evaporated the day a five-storey building collapsed on his father.  Muhammad Senior was inside peddling his wares on the first floor.  It was the third building to collapse in the city that year, and it was still the dry season.

            After a year of hard work and mourning, Muhammad went to Legon University to study engineering.  His focus shifted from northern skyscrapers down to borehole wells as his heart fell into the hands of a Christian journalism student, Cynthia, who was distantly related to the conservative President.  Muhammad Sr. would not have approved.

            Muhammad married Cynthia the day after they graduated, and the day before he began a new job with the Ghana Water Commission.  They moved together to the Eastern Region, packing what little they owned onto an air conditioned bus.  The air conditioning was broken.  They broke taboo and held hands for the duration of the seven-hour trip, smiling at the mona monkeys running across the paved road.

            Muhammad's new job came with a small partially furnished house in the region's capital.  He and Cynthia had little with which to fill the house, so they filled it with each other, quickly breaking in every floor of every room.

            Muhammad's first assignment was to assess five nearby communities as potential UN borehole sites.  The local chiefs, good Christian animists, shook his hand and shared their Cokes with him as non-alcoholic libations.  They told him he was welcome, and they called him 'son'.  Some offered to make him an honourary sub-chief.  All waved gold-encumbered hands over parched lands and tired subjects, and complained of abject poverty.  “If only we had the funds,” they said of their grand plans for community halls and local hospitals.  “We thank God we are still alive.”

            Muhammad tried to reassure them.  “My wife is a Christian,” he told them.  “It was by her grace I studied water engineering, to help good people like you.”  There was laughter and music and dancing to humour the esteemed guest.

            When word of Muhammad's decision reached the four unsuccessful villages the cold hard stares began.  From the day the notices went out Cynthia could no longer find fresh produce or fish.  Muhammad got food poisoning twice.  Their new car's tires were slashed even as their driver slept inside the vehicle.  One village elder was bold enough to slap Muhammad's hand as it held Cynthia's, knocking them apart.  “Decency!” she hollered at them in English, so they would know she meant business.

            “Maybe you should just tell them about the new pipeline,” Cynthia pleaded to Muhammad.  “Then they would leave us alone.”

            The Canadian government had just agreed to lend a few engineers and parts, for pay-later fees plus interest, to pipe tap-water into every home in the district.  Muhammad was working nights drafting plans.  But he had been sworn to secrecy by the President himself, at least until the interest rates were finalized with Canada and the deal was made official.  He refused to break his promise of silence.

            Cynthia, who was trained not to keep secrets, took matters into her own hands.  She was visiting the one village Muhammad had granted a borehole, planting a few well-placed rumours, the day four young men broke into Muhammad's study wielding two stone crosses.

 

He and his wife arrived in Canada in the late 90s.  He was an instinctive bucker of trends and he'd had quite enough of his own countrymen.  He ditched the large Ghanaian community in Toronto and headed east.

            At that time Cynthia was six months pregnant.  They fought over the name.  “I agreed they could be Christians,” he said.  “I just think if it's a boy we should name him Muhammad, in honour of my father.”
            “A Christian named Muhammad,” she said.  “Your father would roll in his grave.”

            It wasn't until little Muhammad Jr. was a year old, with a little sister on the way, that Muhammad got his first Canadian job interview.  The interview was granted right after he changed his own name, from Muhammad to John, on the advice of an employment counsellor. 

            “The thing is,” the counsellor had said, squirming in his under-sized office chair, looking past Muhammad at the blank grey wall behind him, “considering that your education and experience are international, and your references are also international, a more localized name might improve your chances.  Of course, it's up to you.”

            Muhammad had been his father’s name, and the Prophet’s name.  But even when Johnny was Muhammad he was never a particularly religious man.  His father had prayed constantly for health and wealth, but Muhammad derided the man's lack of self-confidence, his lack of faith in human beings to manage their own affairs.

            Then that building fell on him because a short-cutting engineer with connections and bribes had neglected his responsibility.  “This is why Ghanaians put their faith in God,” Muhammad had told his siblings bitterly.  “They can't trust each other.”

            Even then he wanted out, not just to go and come back as a 'been-to,' but to go some place where quality mattered and was rewarded.  After his near-death experience at the hands of the village punks, whom he'd been trying to help, he knew it was time.  He waited four years to get his immigration papers and finally he was free to be somewhere else.

 

In Canada he put his faith in Canadians, which turned out to be no different than putting his faith in Ghanaians.

A year at home in their north-end Halifax bachelor pad, their subsidized housing (for them and the rats and the roaches), nearly killed him.  He couldn't look his son in the eye.  He wished he remembered how to pray but he wasn't even sure which wall faced Mecca.  Cynthia suggested he try her rosary beads.  For the first time since he'd seen her witty eyes and long strong nose, he felt an urge to strike at her.  Instead he went for a walk through the Halifax slush as a bitter north-eastern wind whipped his face. 

            As he walked he thought about how in Ghana Cynthia, despite graduating near the top of her journalism class, had never worked.  Growing up in a well-to-do suburb of Accra, then marrying a well-placed employee of the Ghana Water Commission, she never had to.  But in Halifax she took a job at the African grocer selling imported fufu and hot sauce.  Muhammad, before he was Johnny, refused to go by the store or care for his son.  Cynthia took Junior to work with her, breast-fed him as required, and much to the white customers’ delight added another touch of African authenticity to the store. 

When Muhammad reached the harbour he saw a condom floating in the water and his anger shifted away from Cynthia.  “They all have water here,” he said.  “But they don't know how to care for it.”

 

When he was offered the interview Muhammad-cum-Johnny prepared with a desperate zeal.  He studied up on the Canadian interview process, wrote out answers to every common interview question, memorized and practiced them on Cynthia.  She spent every evening with him, quizzing him, reminding him to brag, to act like all his achievements were his alone, as if no one had ever helped him along the way.  He wore a brand new suit the day of his interview. 

            The only person who ever called Muhammad 'Johnny' was the senior civil engineer of a prominent Dartmouth firm.  He was a fat, balding, red-faced man.  “John!” he barked as Muhammad entered the boardroom sweating like it was February in Northern Ghana, shaking like a baobab tree in a harmattan breeze.  “Can we call you Johnny?”

            The other two white men grabbed their bellies and bellowed like horny elephants in Mole National Park, reddening as they guffawed.

            “S-sure,” Johnny stuttered, extending his sweaty palm to the senior civil engineer, who grasped it too firmly.  The white hand slipped off the sweat of the black hand.  The senior civil engineer laughed again, and Johnny forced a smile, unsure what the joke was.

            “Have a seat, Johnny!  Don't be nervous!”  the senior civil engineer barked, reminding Johnny of a Kpeshie guard dog.  He wasn't sure why suddenly everything reminded him of the home he'd not missed even in his weakest Haligonian moments.

            Johnny sat down and made sure to look into each of his interviewers' eyes.  He had learned that, unlike in Ghana, it was important to act as an equal toward his prospective employers, even though they held his fate in their hands.  He forced himself to call them by their first names.  They asked him exactly the questions he had expected and prepared for.  He recited the answers he had rehearsed.  He watched their eyes glaze. 

            He was doing everything how he was supposed to, yet somehow he had already blown it.  He had bent himself to what he thought they wanted, had surrendered his ways to theirs, yet he had lost them.  He could smell the stench of his own sweat, and the more he sweated, the more he stuttered.  It was over.  Yet it wasn't over.  He had to endure this humiliation until his questioners said it was over, just as with those stone cross wielding punks.  Then he would crawl home to his family more burden than patriarch.  He had surrendered his father’s name for nothing. 

            Finally the senior civil engineer stood and extended his hand.  “Thanks so much for your time, Johnny.  It was a pleasure meeting you.”

            Johnny stood, looked the senior civil engineer in the eye, and spit in his face.  “It's Muhammad,” he said.

            Muhammad walked home along the harbour.  He wondered how much it might cost to start a non-profit water provider back in the slum where he was born.