Here is Chapter 24: Dust and Honey, a chapter where the strength of what has been built is tested—not by failure, but by the storm no one saw coming.
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Chapter 24: Dust and Honey
The rains came early that year.
But not the soft, life-giving kind that kissed the maize green.
This storm roared like a wounded lion.
Winds howled.
Skies cracked.
And the Rebuild Centre—so full of promise—stood trembling.
It began with a leak in the roof of the baking room. A slow drip onto the flour bags. Then the water found its way into the walls. The listening room flooded ankle-deep. The garden beds by the Seed Library were uprooted, their sprouts flattened like fallen soldiers.
By morning, half the Centre was a mess of mud, water, and broken hope.
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Bonitah stood in the middle of it all, boots sinking into wet soil, eyes burning with saltwater not from the rain.
She'd been here before—the wreckage.
But this time, she didn't feel alone.
She felt grieved, yes.
But not abandoned.
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Thando arrived first with buckets and mops.
Then Mama Esther, holding a kettle of tea and muttering prayers.
Then the women.
Then the boys.
Then strangers—people from the neighborhood who had never once stepped foot inside the Centre but had heard about the bread, the stories, the seeds.
Together, they began to clean.
Not because anyone told them to.
But because this place was theirs now, too.
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As the sun broke through the gray, Benaiah stepped into the Seed Library.
The floor was soaked. The soil overturned. Paper notes floated like wreckage.
He dropped to his knees, gathering the wet slips, reading what remained.
One, nearly torn in half, read:
> "I want to grow... healing."
He swallowed hard and pressed it flat against his chest.
Then, gently, began to replant what the storm had taken.
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Bonitah walked through the halls in silence that evening.
Everywhere she looked, there was damage.
And yet, something pulsed underneath—life.
She thought about honey.
How it's made only after the flower breaks. How bees endure storms just to keep sweetness alive.
She whispered to herself:
"Even now—there is honey."
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The next day, they held a gathering—not to mourn the damage, but to mark the survival.
They called it The Dust and Honey Ceremony.
Each person brought something lost—or broken.
A ruined recipe book.
A cracked plant pot.
A torn apron.
They placed them in a circle.
Then, one by one, they told stories not of what had been taken—but what had endured.
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Chido stood up and read a poem.
"When the wind blew,
it thought it could unmake me.
But I am the seed.
And the seed knows
how to begin again."
Silence fell.
Then applause.
Then tears.
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The roof would be repaired. The walls dried. The gardens replanted.
But what had truly taken root could not be flooded away.
Because this place—this Centre, these people—had never been built on concrete alone.
They had been built on grit and grace. Dust and honey.
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