Initiation

A few days ago, during a 6 hour stretch at the tailor, I faced an inevitable evil at the machine. I sewed my finger.

I was just finishing a sack to match a dress I had made that day and was feeling pretty good about my progress as a ‘seamstress.’ Fasting was about to break, so the sun was setting and because of the late afternoon rains, we had all retreated inside where now my only light source was from the door way into the windowless shop.

On my last few stitches, the machine lost my attention as I guided my hand right under the needle and it stabbed clear through my index finger. Normally, the force of an electric machine would have swiftly pulled the needle out without much hesitation, but this machine is manual. Something as dense as flesh and bone slows it down a bit, to a full stop and my finger stayed pinned down. As I sat there staring at my finger, needle pocking out both sides, in shock of course, I took my free hand to manually remove the needle by turning the wheel.

No blood. No blood. I’m OK. I looked toward Dirisa, a well-seasoned tailor, sitting across from me, not able to communicate what had just happened. Half embarrassed, half pissed that I was so dumb not to pay attention to something so easy to avoid. Then I looked back at my hand as I saw the blood, not a lot, but thick, coming out both the entry and exit wound. For some reason, it doesn’t take much for me to feel woozy in this climate, so I broke into a cold sweat. I thrust my hand to Dirisa, who now understood my predicament and he too was speechless. He called Vielle over to look at my hand. Only seeing one hole, he said to me, “Oh don’t worry Alima, this is nothing. Little Vielle pierced his finger last week and the needle went clear through!” I had my head down on the table, moaning in between bursts of nervous laughter. I heard Dirisa’s voice mumble lowly, “Vielle, it went all the way through, there was blood on both sides.”

Vielle barely reacted. He calmly doused my wound in machine oil(!) and wrapped the finger in a piece of cloth from the shop floor. Work, for me, was done for the day.

We sat outside giggling over my mishap, breaking fast with tea, bean cakes and peanuts. Knowing me almost too well at this point, Vielle joked, “You had better call your mom and tell her what happened!” And I secretly had been wanting to hear her voice, so I called to make her miss me that much more.

The other tailors were on their way back from praying and upon seeing me with my bandaged finger raised above my heart promptly knew what had happened. “Eh! Alima! You stabbed yourself with the machine needle! You’re a true tailor now!” What a way to finally be welcomed into the group. They all proceeded to share with me their war stories of them versus the machine. Some do it all the time, others only once. But in all their years as a tailor, only one of them has never once sewed their hand into the machine, Vielle.