Two Years of Wonder

by Ted Neill

  Class begins one morning and I notice that Jacob is not present. Usually one of the older children carries him over from his cottage. I can’t leave the class alone to go get him, so I decide I will retrieve him when the class takes a bathroom break.

  But Miriam appears first. She stands in the doorway, looking uncertain.

  “Miriam, can you go get Jacob for me?”

  “Jacob is sick,” she says, then stares at me. The morning is cold and she is wearing a winter jacket with the hood pulled up around her head. She has pulled the strings taut so that the edges have closed in, close to her face. It is not just HIV-positive children, but rather many Kenyans I have seen piling on the layers on what would be considered only a mildly cold day outside the tropics. At a mile high, Nairobi can get cool, but there is something more to Miriam this morning. I’ve noticed she pulls the hood closed when she is upset, pensive, or wants to be alone. In an orphanage where all the children must share space, it is one of the only ways she can block out the encroaching world. I sense my reaction to the news is being carefully evaluated. My next words need to show care and reassurance at once.

  “Is he in his cottage?”

  “He is in the sickroom.”

  Now I know the seriousness of it.

  “We will go see him on the break.”

  This seems to satisfy her and she returns to her own class.

  At tea break I go to the nursing room. Miriam is waiting outside. I open the door and let her enter in front of me.

  The nursing room, or sickroom as the children call it, is decorated with colorful curtains, cutouts of cartoon characters, and construction paper mobiles, as children’s wards often are. I know such decorations are soothing to children, but I hate them, their promise of cheer rings false to me.

  Jacob is in a crib. When nurse Ruth, a cheerful Kenyan woman with a melodious voice that seems to sing her words rather than speak them, gives her permission, Miriam walks over to him.

  “Habari, Jacob,” she says.

  I have read a great deal about AIDS from a comfortable place in the developed world. That has hardly prepared me to see a child I have taught to walk, pinned to a mattress by a virus. Jacob moves lethargically. It seems incomprehensible that something so small as a virus could be so powerful, especially when I reflect that this same scene is going on in hundreds of thousands—millions—of beds throughout the world this very moment.

  Miriam has brought a toy, a plastic cash register, for Jacob to play with. He hits the keys, making it ring.

  “Kazi nzuli. Good job,” Miriam tells him.

  I lean closer. Jacob’s breathing sounds like the gurgling noise of a coffee machine—air bubbling through viscous fluids in his lungs. Ruth tells me he has tuberculosis.

  As we leave, Miriam says to me in her raspy voice,

  “I was once in there.”

  “The nursing room?” I ask.

  “Yes. They called it the ‘death room’ then. I was so sick, my skin was coming off with my clothes.”

  “But you got better.”

  “Jesus saved me.” She looks at me, waiting for me to challenge her. I don’t. She laughs inscrutably. I wonder if she is now having a go at me in retaliation for my comments about Jesus a few days before.

  Jacob is dead within a week. We bury him in a field near his grandmother’s home. His mother is at the funeral as well, but she is confused, childlike. A staffer from the orphanage informs me that she suffers from HIV dementia. The grandmother could not care for them both, so Jacob was sent to the orphanage. His grandmother stands by the grave in a head wrap, thick cardigan sweater, and skirt—the uniform of Kenyan women of a certain age. She holds her daughter by the arm. She has lost her grandson and is losing her daughter to AIDS. In a society where so much of a person’s self-worth, identity, and life’s work are tied up in offspring, I can’t imagine the sense of loss the old woman feels. As the coffin is lowered into the slot of earth, women in T-shirts and colorful skirts form a circle and begin to sing. Jacob’s grandmother walks a few steps away into the garden and collapses to her knees amid a few potato sprouts.

  That night I can’t sleep. It is November and the rains have come. Rain water drops incessantly from the ceiling into the half dozen pots and jars that I have placed about my room. I cannot turn on my lights because the rain causes termites to swarm. Attracted to light, they will exit their burrows, crawl under my door, and swarm through my windows by the hundreds, only to shed their wings, curl up, and die upon my floor.

  I light a candle and pick up a notebook, the water dripping in the pots around me, thousands of more drops drumming on the roof. I have decided that I will write an article about Jacob, about his suffering and his family’s suffering. Perhaps it will touch people back in the States, making them realize the need here. I want to draw a straight line between eight dollar mocha cappuccinos, flat screen televisions, and gas guzzling SUVs, and the privation here. I want to use Jacob to do it. I want to shame the people who don’t know, who have more. I want to make them do something. But I can’t. I get two lines into my opus and stop. I put down the pen and watch the rain water drip into a coffee mug. Everything is just too complicated.

  On my resume it says I have worked as a freelance journalist. The staff members think this means I am a professional. If professional means having all your stories rejected, never having phone calls returned, and having to pay your bills waiting tables, then I’m a professional.

  What they want is simple enough though. They ask me to write the newsletter that is sent to American donors. I say sure, I’ll do anything they need.

  My first assignment is Sofie Waceera.

  She is five. She speaks no English. I go to her cottage and color with her. I ask her house mother, Agnes, what she is like. Agnes is a tall, fierce looking woman with her hair plaited into cornrows. But her appearance belies her loving nature. She smiles as she describes Sofie, telling me that she is one of the most well-behaved children in the house. I write it down. I look at Sofie’s drawings. She’s done a couple of flowers with green petals and yellow stems.

  A driver takes me to Kangemi, the slum where Sofie used to live. He shows me down a dirt track to a shack made of corrugated tin. It’s locked up. Beside it is a butcher’s shop. The ditch in front is littered with bones, ashes, corn cobs, and plastic bags. Across the track is a high stone wall lined with razor wire. I ask the driver what is on the other side.

  “Hillview,” he says. “It is where many ministers from parliament live.”

  I walk around the wall to one of the gates. There are two security guards with automatic rifles waiting on the other side of the bars. Beyond them I see two-story homes, grassy lawns, Mercedes, and BMWs.

  I am supposed to talk to one of the social workers at the Rainbow Children’s Kangemi Clinic. It is across a four-lane divided highway from the slum. I suggest we walk, but the driver will not let me. He says the road is too dangerous to cross on foot. We have to drive.

  I see what he means. Cars and lories race down the road at well over eighty miles an hour. There are no guardrails, no shoulders, and the kiosks of the market pile right up to the roadside. I notice as we pull out that the grassy median is crisscrossed with paths worn by foot traffic. So clearly people do cross, but at great risk. I am not allowed. I sense it is because I am a visitor and somehow, my life is more vulnerable.

  Once across the highway, at the clinic I meet with a social worker. She tells me Sofie’s story.

  Sofie’s mother’s name was Judith Waceera. Judith and Sofie’s father had three children, Sofie being the youngest. Judith had never been with any man but Sofie’s father; however, as it turned out, he had had a girlfriend or two. From one of these women he contracted HIV, which was how Judith became positive.

  All three of their children were positive as well. Judith and the oldest boy became sick first. When Judith’s husband realized his wife might have AIDS, he left her.

  Shortly after, Judith’s oldest boy died
. The middle child died soon after. Judith was left only with Sofie.

  It is Moi day, just weeks after I arrived in Kenya. I am with Hannah. Hannah and I met in Ghana, we were both recent graduates on our first trips to an African country, me from the States, she from Germany. We had signed on for a paid trip out to a remote village where we helped to build a primary school: a “voluntourism” trip if there ever was one. But we both wanted more. Now she is in Kenya on her gap year between her A-Levels and University. Since we are the only other people that either of us know in this continent full of strangers, there was never any question about us seeking each other out in Kenya. After a week or two there is really no question about us sleeping together either.

  Hannah grew up in the German Democratic Republic—the eastern side of the Berlin wall. Therefore she takes nothing for granted. She splits toothpaste tubes open to get the last bits of product inside of them. She does the same with hand lotion containers. Her only luxuries are her CD player and her camera. She has an uncanny sense of lighting when it comes to photographing Africans, once explaining to me that one must account for the fact that their skin “eats the light,” whereas ours, as white people, reflects it.

  Her own skin and hair is fascinating to the children. She is fair, with blond hair that she wears in locks. In Kenya she has chosen to keep her hair under a wrap. Her clothing of choice consists of ankle-length skirts with African-style prints on them. It’s a weird inversion of cultural expectations, with her Kenyan counterparts striving to look more western in blue jeans in order to appear sophisticated, worldly, and cosmopolitan, while Hannah adopts a more “traditional” look that might penalize an African woman as “backwards” or “from the bush.” As a white woman, Hannah can put on this “Africanness” as a costume, and take it off when it suits her. There are dynamics of internalized, Eurocentric ideals of beauty and cultural appropriation going on, that as a white, heterosexual male, only recently living in a predominantly black, formally colonized country, I’m embarrassingly oblivious to as I march around in my floppy bush-hat, cargo shorts, and sandals—my own clueless version of an ugly western stereotype.

  Hannah is volunteering at an orphanage as well, but it could not be more different than my own. Malaika Children’s Home receives few donations from the West. Instead of flowers and trees, they have a muddy courtyard. In place of a playground, they simply have a large field. There is no staff; the older children take care of the younger children, and the woman that is “mother” to every child is Mama Seraphina.

  Mama Seraphina is an enormous Kikuyu woman with a gravelly voice. She is a force unto herself. While undergoing heart surgery in 1990, she died while on the operating table. The doctors had given up hope when her heart restarted miraculously. Mama Seraphina had been resurrected.

  She decided that she had been brought back for a purpose, so she began opening her home to orphans. Today there are over a hundred and forty that live with her. There are so many that there are frequent days when there is not enough food to go around. But Mama Seraphina, Hannah tells me, knows every single child as if she had given birth to him or her, herself.

  Since today is Moi day, about twenty of the children have been invited to perform at the ceremony in Ngong town, celebrating the current President Daniel arap Moi.

  President Moi has been in power for twenty-four years. In that time he has held on to power by inflaming tribal rivalries to the point of violence, bribing cronies with funds meant for development and relief, and by torturing and killing any political dissidents. Before I arrived in Kenya, a white Jesuit priest that had been criticizing the president was found dead with seven gunshot wounds to his head. The death was ruled a suicide.

  Recently, however, international pressure has forced Moi to announce that he will not run for president again. With the election looming just a few weeks away, Moi has become a lame duck. Today, on the state holiday he created to celebrate himself, the parade ground, where, in previous years, hundreds would gather, is desolate and empty. There are more dignitaries in the dilapidated review stand jockeying for position than civilians on the grounds.

  We are on the grounds with twenty children from Malaika—the older ones reading pieces of a newspaper they are passing around—as well as a dozen Maasai women that will perform a ritual dance, children from an orphanage called St. Jude’s, and then a few curious local boys with a soccer ball made from trash bags and packing twine.

  The review stand, on the other hand, is packed with local “big men,” in khaki suits and pith helmets. Upon seeing Hannah’s camera, they ask her to take their photo, which they line up for in a row, each man standing rod-straight with his riding crop stuck beneath his arm.

  The festivities officially begin when a Mercedes pulls up. A man in a military uniform, sparkling with medals, steps out, inspiring Hannah to comment in her clipped accented English,

  “Ah, see, the crooks in Kenya, they drive German vehicles.”

  The official climbs up onto the reviewing stand and reads a long statement printed and distributed by the State House especially for this occasion. His reading is monotone and unrehearsed. He seems as bored as we are. The children continue reading the newspaper. When the official has finished reading, there is an obligatory smattering of applause—most fervent from the men in the pith helmets. The official sits down in a wooden chair with a high back. One of his assistants gives Mama Seraphina the signal that the children may now begin entertaining.

  The children line up in a row facing the review stand. They stand patiently in the sun while Mama Seraphina carries over a decrepit stereo. Two children carry over the mismatched speakers. Mama proceeds to twist and cajole wires from the stereo and the speakers together, causing no small amount of static and pops which are so loud that even the military official flinches and makes a displeased face.

  But Mama Seraphina is unashamed. She is a prophet sent from God, as she has told Hannah, and she saves children.

  Hannah walks over and helps her with the stereo. In a moment it comes fully to life and the children jerk into a lockstep dance. I am surprised—they are coordinated, their expressions animated, their smiles wide. Their moves are a combination of traditional African steps and Jackson Five choreography. They are amazing. I say as much to Hannah and she laughs. “Of course they are. They are beaten by Mama Seraphina if they are not.”

  There is one child, Andrew, who has a particularly attractive face with pinchable cheeks, wide eyes, and a wider smile. He is younger than the other dancers but it is his job to run in front of them and do cartwheels. However, by the second song he is dizzy and finds it difficult to run in a straight line. By the third song his cartwheels wobble over and end with him on his back or his face. But each time he brushes off the dried grass sticking to him, runs, and starts again.

  While the performance proceeds, Mama gets a call on her mobile phone. An Indian woman has donated two dozen large bags of rice to a church in Nairobi. The pastor wants to give the rice to Malaika. Can Mama come get it?

  She says yes and leaves Hannah and me to watch the children. She says she will be back to return the children to the orphanage at the end of the ceremony.

  The Malaika Children finish their performance. They have ingratiated themselves sufficiently with the dignitaries. The military official even invites Andrew up to the review stand to shake his hand. Andrew does so, climbing up the stairs on all fours, still dizzy.

  Next the Maasai women perform. There is a brief moment of tension as one of the Malaika children, Latia, recognizes her mother in the group of Maasai. Latia is eleven and her parents had wanted to marry her off to a seventy-year-old man. She had run away and Mama Seraphina took her in. Now she was hiding behind Hannah. Fortunately, besides a few longing, pained looks from Latia’s mother, a woman in a blue and orange robe, with a shaved head and long drooping ears, no conflict ensues.

  The Maasai women finish then leave the grounds. The children from St. Jude’s are next, but their dance is hardly
as refined as the Malaika children’s. When they finish, the ceremony is concluded. The official climbs into his Mercedes and is driven away. The rest of the local dignitaries disperse.

  Only the Malaika children remain. Mama has not returned. If the parade ground was desolate before, there is no word for the abandonment of the place now. It is past noon and the sun is beating down on all of us. The children gravitate toward the review stand and sit in the shade beneath the places where the roof is intact. No one has eaten since breakfast and the children are all listless, although none complain. Bored myself and eager to get my mind off my own hunger, I walk over to a nearby ditch where I find some string and an old shoe. I tie the shoe to the end of the string and start a game of helicopter with the children.

  Initially they join the game with enthusiasm, leaping and diving over the shoe as I spin it around just a few inches off the ground. However, they drop off one by one as they grow tired. Soon I’m left with only one child.

  I remember her from the performance. She had been placed front and center. She has a vibrant face and an infectious smile. Her hair has been pulled into two braided pigtails on either side of her head. When she danced she seemed to have possessed more energy and speed than the other children. That holds true even now as I try to devise a two-person game to entertain myself and her.

  Her name is Agnes. Her English is excellent. I teach her how to spin the shoe around perpendicular to the ground then release it to send it flying. Once we have established how to throw it, I teach her how to catch it by grabbing the string alone. Soon we are lost in a game of foxtail. When Mama finally shows up I am surprised to realize that an hour has passed by.

  Agnes shows few signs of tiring, although even I am exhausted and light-headed with hunger. The children pack into the back of Mama’s pickup truck. They have to squeeze and wedge themselves between bags of rice, with the older ones laying the younger children across their laps.