Stories From Ancient Times 01: “The Wise Women”

Hello friends, I hope you are doing well.

Today I publish my first article on this wonderful community, and most of my posts will be short and interesting stories that carry a lot of lessons.

The events of our story today take place in a country called Algeria, which is one of the former French colonies, and its heroine is an old woman named Aisha.

French colonialism decided to surround one of the Algerian villages with a fence, to prevent its residents from joining the revolutionaries who were fighting them and forbidding entry and exit from the fence permanently.
Day after day, the supplies of the poor villagers were evaporating, and it did not take long for most of the villagers to starve. Here the villagers gathered at their leader in a miserable attempt to find a solution to this crisis. Opinions differed and views differed, while hunger hurts most of them and they did not reach a solution while everyone was about to leave. One of the village elders said, "We can't hold out any longer. We must go to the enemy and ask for mercy and sympathy. Maybe we can save ourselves."

Hunger was stirring most of them, so they agreed to his proposal, but an old woman intervened, saying, “We cannot trust our enemy, and if mercy was in their hearts, they would not have done what they did to us.”
“What do you suggest then” everyone shouted. She said, “if you all help me, we can survive this predicament and save ourselves and our village”. They were all like a drowning man who would grab any straw to survive, so they said “what should we do? ” She said to them, “first, you must find a calf”.

Some of them mocked her and others said, "We haven't seen a calf for several days, and the fence surrounds us. How can we find one?"
She insisted that they look for a calf. Indeed, after a long search, they found a calf in the barn of an old miser who brought him to her. They all hoped that their crisis would end soon and their lives would return to what it was before, but her requests did not end yet, she asked them for a bag of corn. Here some of the villagers defected, desperate for a solution to the problem, and some of them argued with her, saying that her requests made matters worse and did not solve the problem. In the end, they went to look for a bag of corn and returned. Some of them filled their pockets, and another carried a handful. There he was carrying a cup of corn until the bag was filled, and here was the thunderbolt for everyone. After all this trouble that the residents of the village endured in fulfilling the requests of Aisha, who promised to solve the problem, started mixing corn with water and feeding the calf.
The villagers were amazed and some of them said, “Our sons are dying of starvation, and you feed the calf with corn. What is this absurdity?”.
She finished feeding the calf and said without turning, “Wait and you will see”.

When she finished feeding the calf, he approached the fence gate, where some enemy soldiers were standing. She said to them gently “I want to take this calf out to graze a little outside the fence. ”
Smiles of irony and mockery appeared on their faces, and they opened the gate, saying to themselves, This calf will be our dinner tonight. It did not take long for Aisha to return to the villagers until the soldiers slaughtered the calf, but surprisingly, they found its stomach full of undigested corn, so they hurried to tell their commander the story.
He was confused and said “I thought that these villagers would starve to death soon and would come asking for mercy while they were feeding their cows corn, so what do they eat? ”

A little thought, then he ordered his soldiers to remove the fence, He said, “It seems that they have more supplies than we have, and we cannot besiege them. ”

Aisha and the villagers woke up the next morning and did not find any traces of the soldiers or the fence. Everyone was happy and praised Aisha's wisdom and praised her greatly, and the villagers lived in peace after that.

This story has been passed down from generation to generation for a long period of time and a version of it is found in the book Wise Women by Suzanne Barchers.