Two Years of Wonder

by Ted Neill

  Eventually Oliver went with his mother on one of her trips to the doctor. The doctor examined Oliver as well. A nurse stuck him with a needle that made him bleed into a glass tube. Oliver cried but his mother took his hand and told him he had to be brave. After that visit, he and his mother both took medicines. Oliver’s cough got better but his mother’s did not. He asked her why and she said,

  “Perhaps mine likes me too much. It does not want to leave. But people live a long time with coughs. Old men always cough.”

  Oliver asked her if he would cough when he was an old man. He did not know why, but his mother almost began to cry. She went to her room and closed the door. Oliver knew he should leave her alone so he went to his room and read one of the books Pricilla had given to him. It was one he had already finished so it was not very interesting. He could not focus very well on it and he found himself reading much more slowly than usual.

  Eventually his mother came out of her room and hugged him. She sniffed like she was still crying. She told him he would be fine and that his cough would go away. But she made him promise to always be brave and never to be afraid, like he was when the nurse had taken his blood, even if she was not around to hold his hand.

  He said he would be and this made her happy. Then she told him to get his shoes; she was taking him to Nando’s for dinner.

  Ivy’s father had just beaten her mother. Ivy knew it was important to beat children if they misbehaved, otherwise they would be lazy or play all the time and they would not do work around the house or in the shamba. She guessed that the same must have been true for adults, however, as far as she knew her mother was always working. It was her mother who went to market. It was her mother who cooked their food, made their tea, and gathered charcoal and sticks for the jiko. It was her mother that swept the house and took care of Ivy’s brother Maurice. Ivy helped whenever she could, but she knew she would not be able to do these things on her own. That was what a mother was for.

  Ivy sat in the corner and tried to make herself very small. She thought of herself as a fighter, she was often getting in fights with other girls and boys. She nearly almost won. But tonight she did not want to be beaten. Her father was so much bigger and he had a weapon this time. Father usually beat her and Maurice with a reed, but tonight he was beating her mother with his belt, flailing the belt buckle down on her like a carpenter beating a nail with a hammer. When he grew tired of that he used his fists. Sometimes when Ivy’s mother beat her, she used her slipper, so at first when Ivy saw her father remove his belt to beat her mother, a part of her laughed because his pants—which had grown too big for him—nearly fell down.

  But now she was scared. She knew the belt would hurt, especially the buckle. Ivy found herself trying to imagine ways she would try to counter such a weapon if ever used against her in a fight. Her mother had not figured out a way, except for cowering. The belt buckle made a loud, heavy popping sound on impact. Her father seemed so angry it was as if he might do anything. He was speaking in Kizungu, which was harder for Ivy to understand, but he seemed to be accusing her mother of bringing sickness into the house. He called her Jezebel, Delilah, and Salome, which were names of bad women from the Bible. Ivy knew this from church.

  But Ivy’s father was sick and old, so he did not beat his wife too long. Her mother used to laugh when he would beat Ivy with the reed. She would say that because he was so old and tired that his beatings were softer than when she beat Ivy. Ivy agreed that mother and her slipper were usually worse than father and the reed, but the belt was a different matter.

  Ivy’s father was weak. He would breathe very heavily when he walked too fast and he often coughed at night. Mother coughed too and so did Ivy, but not as much as her parents. Her father was so old that he had white hair and mostly walked with a cane very slowly. Many people, when they first met him, thought that Ivy’s mother was actually his daughter and that Ivy was his granddaughter.

  Her father did have daughters from two other marriages—his other wives had died. His other daughters and sons were all older than Ivy’s mother. To Ivy they seemed more like aunts and uncles than her own brothers and sisters. Ivy’s mother was always very kind to them and made them tea and biscuits when they visited. However, Ivy knew her mother did not like them. When her own friends would come over and they would sit outside and sort rice, Ivy’s mother would complain to them that her husband’s other children were bossy to her and treated her like a child.

  Eventually her father did grow tired and stopped beating Ivy’s mother. He coughed and spat. After that the only sound in the room was her mother’s coughing and sniffling. Then her father announced that he was hungry and asked her where dinner was. She silently got up, blew on the jiko coals and went to cut potatoes. Ivy immediately got up to help, grabbing the knife and sukuma weeki that she knew they would need to cut as well, but then her father bellowed, “Don’t make the children do all the work.”

  This was in Kizungu so Ivy froze for the moment that it took her to interpret it. Her mother was quickly beside her, taking the cutting board and knife away. Then she told Ivy to go outside and play.

  Ivy put on her slippers. She knew she should take Maurice with her, so she took his slippers as well and went to her parent’s room, where she knew her brother was hiding. He always hid there when father was angry but she knew father would be even angrier if he found Maurice in his room. Ivy found him behind the chair in the corner. Maurice was almost four. He had light brown eyes that women cooed over, full cheeks, and an ever present smile. But he was not smiling right now. He sat on the floor with his knees curled to his chest. Ivy checked if his pants were wet because sometimes when father was angry, Maurice would pee on himself. This time they were dry.

  Ivy told him he was a good boy. She put his shoes on him, then they walked, without a word, past their parents and went outside. It was already growing dark. Normally they would not be allowed to go outside, but she knew tonight they had to go out for a while. As long as she was there to protect Maurice, she knew there would be little danger. So they grabbed some sticks and drew pictures in the dirt by the lantern light that shone out from windows and the cracks between the corrugated metal walls.

  By now most of the neighbors were shunning Judith. People assumed that her husband had left her because she had been unfaithful. No one wanted to help her. No one wanted to catch AIDS.

  Judith, who was already tall and lean, lost weight. She looked like a skeleton. She had chronic chest infections as well as Karposi sarcoma lesions on her legs. Her boss at the seamstress shop where she worked fired her. She could no longer afford to pay her rent in their apartment, so she and Sofie moved to a shanty house in Kangemi.

  Judith looked for work, but no one would hire her. Around this time the lesions on her legs grew worse. They became so painful that she could not walk. She stayed inside all day. She could not afford to send Sofie to school so she let Sofie play outside in front of the shack, where she could watch her from the doorway.

  Sofie was very outgoing. She would greet neighbors as they walked by, but they never acknowledged her. Instead they simply hurried past. Judith noticed that the other children would not play with Sofie, except for the chakoras—the street children, orphans that wandered about with crushed, discarded water bottles filled with cobbler’s glue. The vapors from the glue made them high, eliminating their hunger pains, but after too much use the children would become as dumb as animals.

  Judith became feverish. The day came when she was too weak to sit up and watch Sofie. She asked the wife of the butcher to care for Sofie, to at least give her some food. The woman only made a sign with her hand that meant she was trying to avert a curse.

  Judith knew she was going to die, but she could not bear the thought of Sofie being abandoned. She could not bear the thought of Sofie becoming a chakora, wandering the streets begging, growing up—if she grew up—to trade sex for food.

  Judith would kill Sofie, then, herself. She took one of her belts
, called Sofie to her bedside and wrapped the belt around her neck. Sofie cooperated as if her mother was prepping her for school, buttoning her school uniform or rubbing mafuta on her skin.

  Judith could not pull it though. She was too weak. She wept and then she lost consciousness.

  Chapter 6

  Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Missionaries, Jesus, and other objects of my Disenchantment

  After Jacob passes, a second child who is seriously ill is placed in the nursing room. She is ten and her name is Valentine. She is a lanky girl who would be tall if she were not always in bed. She is from our outreach program in the slums that surround Nairobi. Her mother is still living and is also HIV positive. Her condition is not as advanced as her daughter’s. Valentine is asleep or comatose for most of the time. Weena, a fourth-year medical student from the States, takes turns with the Kenyan nurses providing Valentine round-the-clock care. Weena is brilliant and is constantly teaching me little bits of medicine and techniques of hospice care. She is training to be a pediatrician and one of her mottos is, “Always look at the test numbers and play with the kids.” Although she can run few tests here at the orphanage, she does play with the children every chance she gets. They love her for her sunny disposition and the playful sounding name. “Weeeeeennnaaahhhhaaaaa,” they sing when they see her. She admits to me that she never cries on the job, even after losing child patients; however, whenever she gets home after a tiring day, she will put a Disney film in the DVD player and only then be able to cry her eyes out watching Bambi’s mother or Simba’s father die.

  Weena monitors Valentine’s vitals, feeds her through a nasal gastric tube, and holds her over a bed pan when needed. As she changes the sheets around Valentine, I see for the first time that the mattresses are wrapped in a covering that makes them waterproof. It is needed, for shortly after Weena has changed the sheets, Valentine—without waking up—vomits up the nutrient rich liquid Weena has just eased down the tube that snakes through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach. I’m sitting next to Valentine as she does this. The motion is automatic and strange, as the rest of her body remains inert. It is an involuntary reflex, one of which Valentine is not even aware. Soon the frothy stuff is sinking down past Valentine’s folded hands, across her pillow, and onto the new sheets. Weena groans. The entire vomiting reflex motion brings to mind something inanimate, machine-like, such as a fire extinguisher discharging its load or a clogged sink burping.

  Maybe it’s from Weena’s medically informed explanations, or just all the sickness we are surrounded by, but I’ve become keenly aware of the metaphor of the body being a machine: the long-short-short gasping of Cheyne-Stokes breathing of dying children, not unlike a broken down car engine coughing to a stop; the leakage from my students’ ears and from other orifices when the children die; the cotton wads used to plug their noses and ears like gum on a radiator. So many bodily processes going wrong while an immune system is rendered broken by a virus smaller and simpler than the most basic of human cells.

  Weena is there, with Valentine’s mother, when she passes away during the night. Her mother weeps uncontrollably, holding her dead child. Weena moves discreetly to the far side of the room while mobiles of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck whir overhead.

  Malaika Children’s Home consists of one main building. The central room has mismatched furniture lining the walls. It is lit by a single, dim overhead bulb, and it is often smoky from the kitchen that is one room over. Opposite the kitchen is the girls’ room: a room that smells of urine-stained sheets, tightly packed with bunk beds, but military in its neatness and order.

  The boys’ room is the same but the door to it is located outside, away from the girls’ sleeping quarters, in order to make midnight trysts more difficult.

  As the sun sets at Malaika, the darkness I always associate with the mystery of Africa arrives. This is not Joseph Conrad’s implacable, brooding darkness, but rather a darkness more mundane, one from a lack of electricity and/or light bulbs. In the Ghanaian village where Hannah and I met while volunteering, with the setting of the sun, open spaces became dim and the insides of huts became dark as pitch, making this most basic abode of the Africans mysterious and impenetrable to us. Additionally, the dark complexions of Africans made their expressions that much harder to read in the dark (although I imagine our faces could be as perplexing to them at times).

  It would be easy to let imagination fill this void created by miscomprehension and allow ourselves to conclude that the Africans are just alien and impossible to ever understand.

  But as Hannah points out, this is simply laziness.

  When I visit Hannah, we spend the night in the house where she boards, a place owned by a family that is friends with Mama Seraphina. As we lay on our roll up camping mattresses, light from the setting sun fills the room. A breeze that I imagine has crossed the jungles of Congo, climbed up to the Great Rift Valley, tumbled down the side of the Ngong Hills, and over the vines of fuchsia bougainvillea along Hannah’s windowsills, tugs gently at the mosquito net draped over the bed. Lizards scramble along the rafters in search of their insect prey. It is moments like these that we are both certain in our knowledge of why we have come to this continent.

  Hannah shares the house with the family that owns it. The matriarch is Teresa, a tall Luhya woman who is a mother of two children in primary school. She supports the family with her income. Their house is large by Kenyan standards—about the size of a single family home in the United States. It is unfinished though. Teresa’s husband, Tom, had worked for a bank where he had been stealing money in order to finance the house. When he was caught and fired, the construction on the house halted. Now he spent most of his days drinking with friends while Teresa worked extra hours in order to feed the four of them. Many times she had confided to Hannah that she would have to get a new job, since as a Luhya in an office run by Kikuyus, Teresa had little hope of getting a promotion, much less a raise.

  Wires hang out of the walls in the house where fixtures were supposed to have been placed. The walls themselves do not reach the ceilings, so any impression of privacy is deceptive. From Hannah’s room we can hear everything in the house. When we make love we must maintain some type of inane conversation, one of us raising our voice, talking about grocery prices or news of home, to cover up the sounds of the other gasping. All this in order to sound like two God-fearing Christians, as opposed to two foreigners alleviating their isolation and loneliness.

  In the world of safari tourism five animals are considered must-sees: buffalo, lions, elephants, rhinos, and leopards. They are referred to as the “Big Five.” The term goes back to when a safari was less about telephoto lenses and more about rifle calibers. The big five were the most ferocious animals on the savanna when cornered and so they made the best trophies for adventurous hunters. Nowadays they make for the best pictures mounted on the walls of adventurous travelers.

  At the orphanage some of the volunteers and I cynically begin to call AIDS orphans the sixth member of the big five. No one is hunting them, thank God, except to take photos—thousands of photos.

  UNICEF actually has recommendations in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the CRC) on respecting children’s privacy. The convention, as described by UNICEF, is “a universally agreed set of non-negotiable standards and obligations. These basic standards—also called human rights—set minimum entitlements and freedoms that should be respected by governments and individuals.”1 In the spirit of the Convention it is generally frowned upon to take pictures of children without permission from their guardians. At our orphanage, permission is always granted. Those of us who live there look down upon the tourists (often from our own home countries) who come passing through in safari vans, clicking away pictures of “our” children.2

  There is a tinge of exploitation on the part of tourists, who decked in beads, dressed in khaki, and sometimes pith helmets (really), snap pictures of the “poor AIDS orphans.” But then again, there is no small amo
unt of snobbery on the side of us volunteers who in the tourists see ourselves and wish to distance our “authentic experience” from those just passing through.

  Truth is, we’re all just passing through and as Alexander Fuller writes, “Your perception of a third world country is often dependent upon whether or not you are free to leave it.”

  But some visitors get me more twisted than others. I’m in my room reading on New Year’s Eve when I hear a commotion in the orphanage’s quad in front of the schoolhouse. A few safari vans worth of American missionaries from California have arrived. Now, before I criticize missionaries, I must first recognize I have no legitimate ground to stand on, having attended Catholic high school, and college, and now I volunteer at an AIDS orphanage run by nuns and founded by a Jesuit, a missionary visa stamped in my passport. But there is something about the zest of Americans on week-long “missions” that tweaks me in a certain way.

  In front of the schoolhouse the leader of the mission trip is speaking through a bullhorn while next to him stands a man in full clown regalia—blue-and-white-striped pants, red suspenders, polka-dot shirt, and a wig of rainbow-colored hair. The mission leader, a man in his fifties with a coach’s air about him, tells the group of high school students to sit down with the kids from the orphanage for a magic show. Seating is tight on the lawn, as the Rainbow kids are outnumbered by the Californians in cargo-shorts, T-shirts, and crucifixes.