We had arrived in Nyarubanda village, about an hour north of town, and turned off the main dirt road down into a valley. Goats and small children ran out of our way and then turned to watch from the embankments along the path, following our progress down the hill with steady, serious eyes.
The construction site we were visiting is on the edge of the village, where an open field goes on and on until it meets the next village over. A river runs through the valley, and we've laid about 1 kilometer of pipes to bring water to a coffee processing station. At one point on that kilometer, the pipe recrosses the river above ground. It had been cut and we had to repair it before the coffee harvest began. It was a beautiful spot where they had broken the pipe--the river flows over a terraced series of stones that are square-cut as though by human hand.
We got out of the car and the construction manager Shaba, and a group of villagers went ahead of me, striding down the hill to the place where the pipe was exposed and needed repair. I nearly ran into them as they stopped and drew back sharply.
"Heh!" Shaba breathed in an involuntary puff of surprise. He looked at the ground, and stood there a minute
"Heh!" he said with more force. "What's that?" He pointed to the ground where bushes around the river parted, where we had dug the trench for our pipe.
A single stick of incense was smoking. Stuck in the ground, it had only burnt down about an inch. The smell of sandalwood suddenly surrounded me, as though by seeing it I smelled better--or it had been creeping along the ground but decided to rise towards our noses when we acknowledged it. The group of men from Nyaruboza didn't say anything. Although their feet stayed put in the mud, they drew back.
"What's that," Ishabakaki asked again. The four men averted their eyes and kept their distance. No one said anything; it was as if they acknowledged the stick's presence out loud it would have power over them.
In distracted bursts we started talking about fixing the pipe. Once the stick burnt out the men returned to the water system and began to work. We watched them shovel the clayey mud from around the pipe onto the bank. Shaba turned to the head mason, the oldest and most confident person there. "Where are the people who lit it? They must be near."
"We don't know who lit it," he anwered.
"Well this must be a sacred place," Ishabakaki said with a nervous smile. "No no," one man said quickly, "it's just them. they just decided that it should be a sacred place."
Shaba sighed with relief when we got back in the car, the tension left his shoulders. "You can light incense for good prayers and for bad prayers," he explained to me. "I can't say which one this was."
