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After an intense several days, our schedule had magically lightened up, so we decided to take a half-day to sleep, catch up on personal stuff or just relax. After breakfast and a short group check-in, Fanty helped us brush up on our Ijaw (the local language). The villagers typically laugh when we try out our phrases. It seems to please them and we tell ourselves they’re laughing with us, not at us.

After a long, circuitous walk, Cliff and Fanty finally reached Fanty’s sister—only to discover that she was not ready for visitors at that time. She was well into her laundry, hand scrubbing the clothing in a tub on the front porch of her home. Fanty moved on undaunted, as she had plenty of other relatives in the area she could blindside with a cameraman and question to her heart’s content.

She descended upon her cousin, who allowed them into his home and consented to an interview. He was a rather imposing figure; yet spoke with a voice barely audible over the village din. Then Fanty brought up the topic of fishing...

Ever so gradually his voice gathered force and his gestures ramped up in proportion to the anger growing in his voice. This was obviously a topic near and dear to his heart. He became quite animated when he spoke of how the fishing in the area had been destroyed by the environmental contamination and alteration in the area. He believed that the only way for them to be able to catch fish anymore was to somehow procure a fishing trawler, which is capable of hauling bigger nets deeper—a far cry from being able to make their daily catches with the traditional hand-drawn nets. And this is how we ended up visiting Fanty’s home village.

Somehow, because of this visit, Fanty’s cousin offered up his boat to carry us across the river to the village Fanty was born and raised in. It is also a village that for all intents and purposes is now defunct because its main source of income stemmed from fishing.

After our noon production meeting, everyone trudged out to the jetty in the hopes that we would all fit into the boat. Of course, this was not the case, so director, camera crew and Nigerian guides, Fanty and Ibiba, piled in. After a bone-jarring ride across the river, they arrived on what was left of the sandy shores of this village. Numerous huts lined the shore, along with a few boats tied off in the water near the edge of the beach. Several lengthy, hand-built nets made from local foliage could be seen. A handful of people gathered on the shore to greet the boat—essentially the members of the only remaining family in what was left of the village.

Once the team made landfall, we were introduced to yet another of Fanty’s relatives who is the custodian of what is left of the village. Fanty’s persona changed perceptively almost as soon as her feet hit the dirt of her childhood village. After the briefest of introductions, we found ourselves traipsing headlong down a trail and into the dense foliage of the jungle.

The first thing we noted was the fact that the humidity in the jungle, because the total lack of any perceptible air movement, increased almost immediately and to the point of being near tangible. Pores and glands that seemed to have been overtaxed prior to this little jaunt ramped up to a whole new level of production. It was literally like walking in a sauna.

Fanty settled more and more into her element by the minute. The sight of this finely dressed woman in dress shoes making her way down that muddy trail was almost surreal. She was indifferent to any of this. She was in her element. She was home.

The village that Fanty had known as a child no longer existed. We pressed our way through unyielding vine and limb down a muddy path that had nearly lost its identity to the encroaching jungle. At random intervals Fanty would point to anonymous patches of verge and declare things like, “This is where my father’s house was” and “I used to play in this area when I was a child—there were houses here.”

And there would be nothing to see; save for the errant 4x4 piling set low in the ground to offer any evidence that human habitation had existed there. Fanty seemed to revert to an earlier phase of her life, becoming more animated and more playful with each passing moment. Yet at the same time, as she noted these various landmarks, there seemed to be an undercurrent of sadness as she struggled to juxtapose the fond memories of this place of her past with the brutal realities of what it now is in the present day.

This, at one time, had been a fishing community whose life’s blood was dependent upon the bounty of the river. With no other real means of supporting itself, all but this last family moved to other villages—most to Oporoza. So the jungle, left to its own devices and free from human intervention, reclaimed what it once possessed, slowly but irrevocably erasing any evidence of what was once the village of Fanty’s childhood. It is a reoccurring theme in the Niger Delta and one that continues to play out.

Meanwhile, Sean with camera in hand accompanied Tammi, Kendra and Leslye around the Zion neighborhood (see 8.13 entry). They were joined as usual by a crowd of children as they stopped to chat with people and watch village afternoon life unfold.

As we were writing the field reports and downloading photos, two 19-year-old men, Alex and Raphael, stopped in to share a poem they wrote together. Their words were genuine and heartfelt. “One day with Love” they said, was in part inspired by some reading of poetry they had done at the library. Sandy asked for their permission to use the poem in the film and they granted it. The whole experience, from their presence to the fact they had been using the library, was inspiring. From the poem:

One day with love, things will change. One day with love, we will accomplish our dreams. One day with love, hard life will go. One day with love, suffering will end.