Unlikely Brothers

by John Prendergast

  J.P. with kids in Zanzibar, 1985

  It was only my second trip to Africa, and my illusions were already taking a hit. The industrialized world gave so little to Africa, and from where I stood, it looked to me like back in the United States, we weren’t willing to address the structural inequalities that were causing deep poverty in Africa, like our demand for cheap food and raw materials and our lack of sustained commitment to investing in peace and democracy.

  At the end of our stay in Zanzibar, the students and I flew to Nairobi. They were all heading off for a couple of weeks to the Ngorogoro Crater, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the other great tourist attractions of East Africa—a trip I had little interest in. Most of them were hanging out in the bar, enjoying their first beers in weeks, so I took advantage of a few hours off and wandered out to the hotel pool with a stack of reports and position papers to keep me company. The news out of Ethiopia was staggering: deaths by the thousands.

  A shadow fell across the papers. “You heading up there?” an American voice said. I looked up to find a very attractive young blonde woman standing over me.

  She told me she worked for the UN refugee agency in Hargeysa, northwest Somalia. Near the Red Sea and east of the Ethiopian border. The United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and a bunch of NGOs had camps there for Ethiopians who had fled the war and famine in the Ogaden Desert. She was taking a few days to decompress, which she needed because of the intensity of the situation there.

  Refugee camp? War? Famine? I put my papers on the patio and sat up. I wanted to know everything. How did these wars affect the people, what were the medical effects of malnutrition, the politics that were driving them across the border, the organizations that were assisting them, the diseases the refugees contracted, the types of wounds they suffered from. The poor woman barely had time to finish one question before, in my typical fashion, I was firing another at her. She’d been to the very places I wanted to understand and illuminate. We moved from the pool to the restaurant, where I grilled her without stop, and then to her room. Truth be told, I’d have been hard pressed to tell you which part of the night I enjoyed more, the parts when we weren’t talking or the parts when we were. I crept out of the room at first light, and went walking downtown to find a travel agent. I traded in my tourist trip ticket to Mount Kilimanjaro for a flight to Somalia. One way.

  Somalia’s main airport was a rerun of Mali’s, but now at least I knew what to expect, and I made it through unscathed. Most everyone at the airport was trying to get out of the country, not get in, so I had little competition. And hardly anybody was trying to fly from Mogadishu, the capital, to Hargeysa in the north of the country, so that was easy too. The people running the UNHCR camp near Hargeysa were so glad to have another pair of energetic hands that they barely asked me who I was or how I’d gotten there, and they accepted me as a volunteer on the basis of a sole recommendation from the lovely lady back at the swimming pool in Nairobi. A harried French doctor showed me to a tent full of sweat-stained cots, pointed to an empty one, and said, “You can sleep here.” A nurse asked if I was hungry and put in my hands a tin bowl full of what looked and tasted like Elmer’s glue. I was in it now, for real.

  Someone handed me a clipboard and sent me over to a fenced compound full of trucks. Keep track of the food coming in, were my instructions, and make sure it gets sent to the parts of the camp that need it. Young Somali men were heaving white sacks off the trucks and stacking them into neat mountains. The heat was unbelievable. The papers on the clipboard told me how many sacks of grain the men were unloading. When I counted the bags, though, about a third of them were missing.

  “Welcome to Somalia,” a wiry, bearded Australian told me when I checked with him about it. He told me how the Somali president, Siyaad Barre, had his henchmen take their cut of the food aid right at the Red Sea port, adding that other soldiers would take further slices as the food made its way to the refugees.

  He pointed out that Siyaad Barre was one of America’s most reliable Cold War allies in Africa. “What’s your expression? ‘He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard?’ Killing his own people, and stealing from the ones he doesn’t kill. Your tax dollars in action, mate.” The Australian laughed and walked away.

  I stayed in the refugee camp for a few months, and here is a partial list of what I learned: War can reduce people to abject deprivation and family dislocation faster than anything else in the world; the brains of malnourished children weigh less than those of kids who eat properly; a bullet fired from an AK-47 will tumble around in the human body, causing horrific wounds; foreign aid can be a real money-maker for unscrupulous officials; kwashiorkor is a deficiency of protein, whereas marasmus is a deficiency of both protein and calories; the United States gives food aid not only to keep people alive but also to prop up grain prices for U.S. farmers; land mines can look like little toys and often lure children to them; the diseases that ravage the people of Africa include schistosomiasis, river blindness, sleeping sickness, Guinea worm infection, a hundred varieties of dysentery, tuberculosis, polio, cerebrospinal meningitis, and malaria.

  Most important, I learned that geopolitics, not compassion, were driving American foreign policy, which meant that real problem solving was rarely a priority. In Somalia, for example, the United States was willing to provide money and munitions to a thieving, murderous dictator like Siyaad Barre because he was nominally a counterweight to Soviet influence in Ethiopia on the Cold War chessboard of the 1980s. He was killing, torturing, imprisoning, and starving his own people, and U.S. taxpayers were unwittingly underwriting much of the mayhem.

  My stay in the refugee camp in Somalia shifted my entire perspective on what the solution should be. Until then, I’d thought the solution was more generous amounts of foreign food and medical aid. Now I was learning that the policies of countries like the United States in the context of the Cold War helped prop up dictators and actually promoted conflict. Sending more aid just treated the symptoms. Sure, the aid kept people alive, which was crucial, but they could be killed the next day by ammunition subsidized by American taxpayers in tandem with the food aid we were sending. Mind-bending lessons for a foreign policy novice.

  What followed was the very question that Mohammed had left me with in Mali: Now that I knew how my own country was part of the problem, what would I do with that knowledge? How could I help change America’s policies to stop making matters worse in Africa? And now that I’d seen the effects of war in that refugee camp, shouldn’t I do more to promote peace? So what should I do next? Do I work my way up to running one of these humanitarian aid agencies? Do I sign on for a life of refugee camp work, bathed in righteous sweat but feeling overwhelmed by the bottomless need all around me? Do I walk away from the whole thing as too complex for my pure intentions? And if so, would I just turn my back on the people whose lives had been torn apart by war and whose plight had stirred me to action in the first place?

  No chance I walk away. I wanted to dig deeper and get at the root causes of these crises. And then dedicate my life to figuring out how to get my own government to stop being part of the problem and start becoming part of the solution.

  The trip to the refugee camp in Somalia brought about the dawning of a realization that took me by surprise: It wasn’t going to be enough to visit every conflict-torn corner of Africa and understand each famine and war firsthand. I was going to have to work the other side of the ocean. I was going to have to become equally expert in the politics of foreign policy in Washington, D.C. If I was going to be as effective as I wanted to be at changing the way the world protected its most vulnerable, I was going to have to become as comfortable in a jacket and tie as I was in sweat-stained khakis.

  And since I had given away all my jackets and ties, I thought that might pose a problem.

  I didn’t have much time to think about all of this because as soon as I got back to the United States, I learned that a runaway train was heading right at Michael and his famil
y, and they didn’t even know it was coming.

  5. “Earn It Myself”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  James and I spent a year on North Capitol knocked back on our heels a little bit—scared of the violence around us and put down by the kids in school—before I started figuring out that what I had to do was make some money to buy us some motherfucking clothes. That’s how it started with me; I was sick of me and my little brother getting dissed for what we wore. I was eleven by then; starting to become a man. And there was this dude hanging around because he liked my sister, Sabrina, who could teach me the ways of the life. His name was Gomez.

  Gomez was about fourteen. He lived with his mom, Miss Lucille, and his stepdad Ellis, and was polite the way you’d expect of a guy living with two parents. He was a clean-cut dude. Dark-skinned. Built. He used to wear a sweat suit everywhere, had a little gold on, and always had money in his pocket. It took me a while to figure it out, but eventually I did: Gomez was a drug dealer.

  He was the first drug dealer I had ever hung out with. I remember thinking: I want to be just like this motherfucker. He’s got the rings, he’s got the clothes, he’s got the moves. He ain’t scared up here; he’s living it! Even though it was my big sister he was interested in, it was me who hung around him. I stuck by Gomez as much as I could, watching how he did the thing—how he’d get himself a ball of crack about the size of a baseball, cut it up with a knife into little nuggets the size and color of teeth, slip the nuggets into plastic bags no bigger than a postage stamp, and sell them on the street. He made it look so easy, like there were no cops to worry about or nothing.

  I watched how Gomez got by until one day I cut off some chunks of Ivory soap into little pieces and sold them for $20 apiece. Before I knew it, I had a couple hundred dollars in my pocket! Eleven years old! I took that money, and James and me went right out and got us some real Nike shoes, just like Mr. P had bought me.

  I cut up some more soap and ran off to another block to sell it. I didn’t worry about some crackhead coming back and kicking my ass. By the time they come back, you ain’t around anymore. And even if they see you, it’s too late. The money’s gone. And anyway, they’re crackheads. I was already learning that most of the time they don’t do shit.

  Right around then, though, a guy in the neighborhood got killed passing off bits of soap as crack. Crackhead came back and shot him six times in the head; dumped him in the trash can. That word went around North Capitol like a fucking wildfire, and I knew right then I had to straighten my shit out or get out of the game altogether. I wasn’t ready to give it up. I liked buying things for my brothers and sisters. I liked bringing home a little money for my mom. She and Don were drinking pretty bad by then and were fucked up most of the time. If I wanted to have money in my pocket, I was going to have to earn it myself. But I sure as hell didn’t want to end up in no trash can with six bullets in my head.

  I used to climb out the third-floor window of my house at night after my mom would go to sleep. I’d stay out until the sun came up with my buddies: Albert, Mickey, and one kid who became real important in my life, Little Charles. Little Charles was my age—eleven—but he seemed older because he really knew the streets. He wasn’t anybody to be afraid of; he was short and skinny, with dark brown skin. But he walked around those nasty streets at all hours like he owned them, because he was smart. He observed things. One of the tricks he taught me was to melt a candle in a pot and mix in some baking soda and a tube of Orajel when it’s all bubbling. Crackhead’s liable to bite a little piece before he buys; the baking soda gives it that chalky quality, and the Orajel makes his tongue numb, just like crack. Sell that, move on to the next block. Little Charles walked with me, and he knew who to sell to and who not to fuck with. “Not that guy,” he’d say. “He’ll whip your ass. That one over there. He’ll buy.” Little Charles could be a crazy-ass motherfucker too. One night he and I smashed the back window of a Jeep Cherokee, stuck a snatch bar in the ignition, and peeled out. We were joyriding like a motherfucker when a police car fell in behind us. I figure we’re caught sure, but Little Charles stomps the gas and off we go. Those cops chased us all over Northeast but never caught us. Little Charles finally gave them the slip. That’s why I’ve always liked Jeep Cherokees since then; I know they can go.

  I’ll tell you what: Little Charles was my best friend, no doubt about it.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  As soon as I got home from Africa, I spoke to one of the social workers familiar with Michael’s family’s case. She told me that given the litany of family problems, Denise could be heading toward a situation in which she would be at risk of losing the kids to foster care. I decided to ask Denise if I could take Sabrina, Michael, and James—the three oldest—off her hands for the summer and have them come live with me in Philly. This could potentially relieve some of the pressure on her, allow her to focus on her four younger kids, and maybe get some help for her own problems.

  Denise agreed to let me take them for a while. I said I’d check in with her in a few days, and I took the kids with me out to my car. We shot north on I-95 and were back in Philly in two and a half hours.

  I wasn’t prepared for the reaction in my little Italian neighborhood. Instead of waving me over to give me a hug, the old ladies on the street pulled themselves arthritically out of their aluminum lawn chairs, turned them 180 degrees, and sat back down with their backs to me. The old vets on the first floor pushed their door closed from the inside when they saw me in the hall. Mine happened to be one of the blocks in the neighborhood that hadn’t yet been “broken,” as some realtors called it back then, meaning inhabited by black families, which in that perverse, corrupted system, drove housing prices down dramatically. The sight of three little black kids coming and going from my apartment was the harbinger of doom for them, as they saw it. Hardly anyone in the neighborhood ever spoke to me again after Michael, James, and Sabrina moved in.

  I didn’t have beds for them—I didn’t even have enough chairs for us all to sit around a table together—but none of that mattered to the kids. One of ’em kept peeing on the cushions they slept on, but I’m not saying who. Once they fought over who would sleep where; suffice it to say Sabrina won. It was all a big adventure to them.

  I had graduated from Temple University by then, my fifth college in my cross-country wanderings, and I was taking graduate courses at the University of Pennsylvania. I was still working in Congressman Gray’s office, and on weekends I’d go work with the Russian landscapers. As soon as I knew the kids were going to stay with me for the summer, I sent out word to all my friends, my brother Luke, and my parents: All hands on deck. My old Georgetown roommate Geoff came to Philly and stayed with us for a while to help me out, and those kids really took to him. He is one of the greatest spinners of fantastic yarns I’ve ever met. In my dad’s league on that one. The kids were mesmerized by his tales and his flashy car, gold chain, stylish clothes, and smooth dance moves, and he and the kids would break-dance for hours to Michael Jackson songs.

  Basic nutrition for the kids was not an insignificant challenge. Friends and family would bring casseroles over, and I had just enough knowledge of the kitchen to be able to heat them up. Otherwise, we ate a lot of Honey Combs. And hot dogs—I knew how to boil them, a dozen at a time. Once I tried to cook a chicken; the desiccated piece of plastic that emerged from the oven brought an unceremonious end to my culinary career before it began.

  Of course, there was my parents’ house as a fallback, and we spent a lot of days and nights over there. By now the novelty of the kids had worn off, and my parents treated them like their own. Wash your hands. Grace before supper. Sit up straight. Weed the flower bed. Skim the leaves off the pool. My parents cleaned them up every Sunday and took them to church. It was great for everybody; my parents got a chance to act like parents again, and the kids got the kind of structure and rigorous love they needed.

  Sabrina, Michael, and James were with me for the whole summer. I co
uldn’t leave them alone in the apartment, so I took them with me everywhere. At first, the people in Congressman Gray’s office didn’t know quite what to make of that. It didn’t take long, though, for them to figure it out. Of course, everybody in the office loved those kids. They’d ply them with candy and make up little games for them, give them scratch paper to draw pictures on, even dream up little jobs for them—sorting buttons, cleaning out desk drawers—just to see them go at it so eagerly. I could go off in the fleshmobile to help some old lady sort out her electricity bill or fight with her landlord, and I knew the kids would be perfectly well cared for until I got back.

  That was my way: I made the kids everybody’s responsibility. There was a gym not far from my house where I liked to play basketball and lift weights. I’d take the kids there and let them run around while I worked out. I figured someone would look after them, and someone always did. They’d get into a game, or hang out by the snack bar getting people to buy them treats, or amuse themselves with the medicine balls. Half the time there’d be some disaster—they knocked over a rack of free weights, they left the water running in the bathroom and flooded the place—and I’d have to deal with that. But there wasn’t any other choice. I’d made them mine for the summer, but I wasn’t going to give up my life. I simply counted on the goodwill of those around me.