Two Years of Wonder

by Ted Neill

  I do my best to take her rejection in stride. It’s only back in my room later that I find myself crying.

  I console myself with the daily drama of the orphanage. As it turns out, the Maasai guards, although brave as warriors, are not skilled at dispute resolution. I learn that Bonava is often called in to mediate bickering among them ranging from whose turn it is to make tea to who was sleeping on the job. I also learn that the children are convinced there is an invisible killer chicken stalking the back garden although after numerous investigations we are not able to find much evidence except for chicken droppings. After a lengthy debate, only some of which I am able to follow for the children conduct it in rapid Kiswahili, it is decided that an invisible chicken would indeed leave behind only invisible droppings, which means (a) the droppings that had been found must have been from regular (read: not killer) chickens and (b) if there is an invisible killer chicken that is leaving invisible killer chicken feces in its wake, we all could be standing in them and wouldn’t even know it. As a result, the search is called off while the boys of Cottages Red vow to “Invisible-Killer-Chicken-Proof” their cottages. This takes the form of some traditional charms—feathers, beads, and tiny bones—set on the windowsills along with a number of action figures including Spiderman and the Hulk.

  And then there is the endless quest to find Cottage Blue—the missing cottage, since the other colors of the rainbow are accounted for in Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, and Purple cottages. This mystery is a source of great speculation among the children, even though on this particular day when I join the search I make the mistake of questioning whether or not Cottage Blue is where the invisible killer chicken lives, which leads the children to abandoning the search for at least the rest of the afternoon.

  Lialabell, one of the children I sometimes read to in the school, came over during story time and tried to sit on my lap. This was not unusual, but the fact that she tries to do so with her legs spread is strange to me. She is eight. She is the only child that does this and it does not seem right to me. Lialabell also asks a lot of questions about what boys have “down there” and what girls have “down there.” The other kids her age do not ask these questions.

  I think about what a psychologist friend of mine once said: “Sexuality is a box that is always in us that is not supposed to be opened too quickly or too early. If it is, through abuse, the therapist tries to close it as best as he or she can.”

  I have a hunch that Lialabell has been abused, but her house mum has no idea. After a process of approval and consulting with Rainbow’s social worker, I get permission and go through Lialabell’s file. After the admissions form I find the following:

  Lialabell Kidenda. From Western Province. Age 3. Admitted after being defiled by father. Mother deceased from AIDS related causes. Three siblings. Father was convicted and sentenced to prison. Child could not walk after defilement. Underwent surgeries to correct tearing and other damage. Lialabell is HIV+.

  I stop reading. Wondering about the horror of what I just read. It is hard for me to imagine the mind of a serial child abuser, those men who kidnap, rape, and murder children, even their own. Was that Lialabell’s father? Or could this have been an uneducated man, whose wife had died of AIDS, who was becoming ill himself, then someone tells him that he can lose the disease by having sex with a virgin . . . but the only virgin around is his daughter. Does he try to justify it by saying she won’t remember or that this is the only way he might live so he can care for her? Judith had been ready to kill her daughter Sofie before letting her live on the streets. Would raping your daughter be a lesser evil for both of you to live? Is there any explanation for such evil? How can we prevent it? Is it wrong to even try to imagine what led him to it, how he rationalized it, even if in effort to see that it never happens again? Yet, trying to take a step into his thought process makes me feel cold all over.

  I’ll never know what motivated Lialabell’s father. He died of AIDS in prison.

  The dispute between Hezekiah’s families does not resolve. We learn that it was the paternal side that tried to kidnap him. To all of our frustration, they still insist on visiting rights. When we object they threaten to sue the home.

  After each visit from some of the same people that tried to kidnap him, Hezekiah has nightmares and wets the bed. Mum Amelia is usually so angry she remains in her room, afraid that if she came out she would say something that would get somebody hurt.

  The family sits in front of the cottage with Hezekiah. I usually make no secret of the fact that I am watching them. They speak to Hezekiah in Kikuyu, which only a few of the children understand. Mum Amelia is Luhya and does not. Oliver and Miriam do however, so I strategically place the two of them nearby with books that they pretend to read. I have to give Oliver children’s books because no one who did not know him would ever believe that he was reading The Lord of the Rings. Miriam can recall the gist of any conversation and can alert me if anything is amiss. Oliver can repeat word for word, so between the two of them I have an effective monitoring system.

  A few months later, however, Hezekiah begins to suffer from incapacitating headaches. They take him to the nursing room. He is diagnosed with encephalitis. He is treated aggressively, but nonetheless, passes away three days later. When the vehicle leaves, bearing his body away to the morgue, Maina is the last one standing at the gate. He stares down the empty road long after the car has gone.

  The families even argue over who will bury Hezekiah. His body languishes in the morgue for months until it finally, simply, disappears.

  I am at the market in Karen, buying tomatoes with a volunteer nurse, John, when someone forcefully shoves me aside. As I bend down to retrieve the tomatoes I dropped, I see a street boy running away. He is dressed in ragged clothes and carrying a bunch of bananas in the crook of his arm. Immediately voices are raised all around me.

  “Mwizi! Mwizi!”

  Thief.

  Two security guards quickly follow, knocking me and John out of the way. Once he is clear of the market stalls, one guard stops, raises his rifle, and fires two shots.

  I watch as the street boy collapses in the middle of the road. People stop on the roadside, startled. John and I are of the first to reach him. He is face down, his eyes wide open. He is panting hard. There is a scattering of pink brain matter on the road before him. The bullet struck him high on his head. His brain stem is still intact, so his body is still struggling to survive even while bright red arterial blood is spreading out all around him—already it has reached the bananas that have fallen alongside.

  John moves to take his backpack off and administer first aid, but the officers have come up now. They motion with their rifles for us to clear away. I don’t understand. I try to explain that we are trying to help him, that he is not dead.

  The officers say nothing. Their eyes are invisible to me behind their sunglasses. If they were not armed I would rip the glasses from their faces. Finally, probably sensing that I am endangering myself, a soft-spoken Kenyan man wearing a Roman collar pulls me aside. He speaks in measured, almost apologetic tones. “They are waiting for him to die,” he says to me. “If he lives they must take him to the hospital and that will require them to do a great deal a paperwork. If he dies it will be less work for them.”

  I take another look at the boy. The “who” of him is already gone, spread out in the brain matter at my feet. The “what” of him is all that remains, and not even that for much longer, I realize, as the people that have gathered take steps back to avoid the growing puddle of red, broken only by the island of yellow that is the bunch of bananas.

  Oliver is sitting in the sun wearing his cap. It has faded to a lighter, less bold shade of red. He feels too ill to go to church in the schoolhouse. Everyone is there but us. It is Easter. Last night a record amount of rain fell, flooding streets, fields, houses, and slums. Rumor around the home is that people have drowned in Kibera. I picture women and men trapped in their shanty houses, pounding at the me
tal roofs that won’t give while brown water, carrying all the trash and excrement of the slum, floods in around them. I’m sure they cried for help while they still had air. Or maybe no shanties have been washed away at all. Perhaps the people who have drowned were drunks, who passed out from local brew too close to the stream running through the slum or perhaps they were street boys or small children.

  I find it difficult to reconcile those images with the image I have before me of the Rainbow children in their finest clothes dancing and singing to Jesus. It seems such a violation that two such disparate tableaux could exist on the same day, in the same country, in the same hour, or in the same world at all.

  But I suppose it happens every day, not just on Easter.

  One of the older children is reading the gospel. Mary Magdalene has just heard from the angel that Jesus is not in the tomb. I turn to Oliver and ask him if he is afraid of dying.

  “No,” he says. I ask him why.

  “I know my mother will be waiting for me.”

  Josiah makes good on his promise and brings Nea to our nursing room for check-ups and refills of her medications on a regular basis. Our doctor, an unassuming Ugandan woman with a gentle demeanor that puts the children at ease, tells me that Nea is sick but stable. “The environment where she stays does not seem good,” she tells me. I can only nod my head.

  Nea herself hugs me when she sees me. Somehow she has connected me with the improvement in her circumstances—as marginal as they may be. I make sure she has time to play on the swings on the playground, even enduring a long and boring conversation with Josiah in order to delay him from leaving and giving her more time to play. It’s warmer and sunnier here in Karen than up at Corner Biradi, and seeing Nea smile and play with other children strengthens my resolve to find a more suitable home for her.

  After I see the street boy shot to death in Karen, I go through bouts of irritability and frustration. What good is anything we do, when people can turn on one another so easily? When the answer, to those with so little, to those suffering from injustice, deprivation, oppression, is not to help one another but to hurt?

  Then again, was I so naïve as to think otherwise? To think of the world in such simple binaries of good-bad, victim-victimizer, oppressed-oppressor? Had I not already learned that nothing was as simple as I wanted? And if the problems were complex, so too would be the answers.

  It was just that I didn’t want them to be.

  Angry and cross, I take a bus into town to run a few errands. While walking down Aga Khan Way a street girl, no more than seven years old, with a toddler on her back, comes up beside me begging for bread. Usually I ignore street children, while keeping a wary eye on them as well as a hand on my wallet. I think of it as benign neglect. I also feel justified since I am in Kenya to help children. I can ignore these children with a clean conscience.

  “Tafadali. Please bread,” the girl says. Then she touches my hand.

  Begging I can tolerate, but not touching. I yank my hand away and tell her in Kiswahili to get away or I will beat her. For just a moment, I’m completely convicted in my righteousness. This was how you dealt with street children who invaded your space. They should know better.

  The look of fear on her face as she looks up at me in horror brings me out of myself and I wonder what I have done. But she is already running away, casting scared looks over her shoulder as I try to follow.

  I try not to run too quickly as to scare her or make her drop the boy off her back, who is now crying. I call after her in broken Kiswahili and tell her I am very sorry. Nothing stops her. She is a child that thinks only of survival. Realizing this, I say to her I will give her bread.

  Now she stops. She is breathing hard. She is still scared but I can sense that she is weighing the risks of trusting me. Food is a powerful temptation for a starving child.

  I sit down on the sidewalk as to seem less threatening. I am oblivious to the Kenyans walking by me, surely thinking that I am just another insane foreign do-gooder. I reach out my hand. I say I am sorry again. The girl comes up. I tell her my name is Teddy. She says she is Rebecca. She is fascinated now, to the point that she is ignoring the boy on her back. I ask her what his name is, bringing her attention back to him. His name is Paul. He is her brother. She pulls him off her back and makes him shake hands with me as well. He looks uncomfortable touching a mzungu. His hands are gray with dirt and grime.

  I ask Rebecca where her father is. Kufa, she says, dead. Mother? Kufa. Grandmother? Kufa. Grandfather? Kufa. I asked her who took care of her. She did not seem to understand the question. I know that means no one. She is the provider for her brother and herself.

  I tell Rebecca to come with me. We go to the nearest supermarket, which on the inside does not look too terribly different than a supermarket back in the States. With the equivalent of five dollars I buy her enough food to last her a week. I constantly watch tourists give money to street children with scorn, writing them off as suckers for sentiment. If they really wanted to do good they would give the money to an institution or a charity, I think.

  But I am not so sure anymore. Rebecca and her brother need food now. Of course they will need it tomorrow and the next day and the next week and my handing over food and money now is not “sustainable” as we like to say in aid circles.

  But that does not change the need she is experiencing at this moment.

  While she follows me in bare feet through the store, a clerk tries to throw her out. I explain to him she is with me. He hesitates at first then leaves us alone. We exit the store and now I follow her to the Kenya Bus stage where there are two other girls her age with younger children on their backs begging. Rebecca calls them over to her to share her bounty.

  Realizing I was buying for six and not two, I return to the supermarket, buy the same things, bananas, bread, nuts, milk, and orange juice, then return. Rebecca and the others are still there in the middle of the sidewalk. If one ignored the passing legs of commuters on their way home and the gray sidewalk beneath them, one would think these children were in a field or at a playground having a picnic.

  In a way they are. The world does not make room for these children, so their playground, their picnic site must overlap with our sidewalks and our bus stages.

  I tell them to be careful and save some food for later, then leave.

  Chapter 28

  Kursk

  I wrote. The writing was hard. Messy. At first it was easy, I just based it on my experience and the experience of children I knew. No need to invent a plot, no challenge in recalling, but then it became more difficult—how much of me should I share? And it was me in those pages, even if I call it fiction—those are my memories, my feelings of unrest, doubt, and sadness flowing out, like black miasma from my chest. I continue to write in hopes that there will be some clarity at the end of the draining. But I don’t know. I am reminded of a Russian submariner, who trapped in the darkness of the Kursk wrote a letter to his wife, beginning it with the phrase, “I am writing blindly.”

  Chapter 29

  Ukimwi

  While Tabitha lived in a world of magic, exploring the maze of roadways, walkways, and alleyways of Kibera slum and all the wonders and terrors offered there, her mother spent more of her time at home. She remained in bed until late almost every morning. It was up to Tabitha, most days, to mix ugali or make tea. Some of her mother’s men friends still came by and when they came, Tabitha would go and play. Tabitha noticed that while there seemed to be many men that came to their house, few women ever did except for Tabitha’s auntie. Besides her, when women came by they sometimes would scowl and some even spit at their door.

  Eventually Tabitha and her mother moved to live with Tabitha’s auntie. Her mother said this would be easier since she was often tired and Auntie could cook their food. Tabitha liked her auntie, she was a big woman with breasts that were bigger than mangoes that hung down to her waist. But Tabitha was afraid that she would send her and her mother away after the first n
ight they slept in her house because her mother coughed until early morning.

  Auntie proved to be very kind, however, and took care of Tabitha’s mom. Auntie owned a hotel where they made mandazis, and chipatis and hard boiled eggs. When Tabitha visited her shop, Auntie would always give her a little something to eat, which made her happy.

  Now that they lived with Auntie it was a longer walk to Flo’s house and Dorris’ house. As a result Tabitha only saw them on Sundays, after church—Auntie made her go to church every Sunday. Her mother would come if she was feeling well enough.

  It was after they had begun living with Auntie that Tabitha’s skin began to turn white. It started on her head and spread to her hand. Auntie did not know what it was and neither did mother. It did not hurt so mother told her not to worry. Tabitha was afraid, though. She feared that her skin would turn gray and that the crippled boy’s curse was spreading to her.

  In time some of her mother’s friends began visiting again, even at Auntie’s home. But there were also new men that came to visit. One of them, Herbert, would bring a radio with him and sometimes he would play it loudly so Tabitha could dance.

  But the women in Auntie’s neighborhood hated Tabitha’s mother even more than at their old house. They would walk by her and call her “malaya,” a word Tabitha did not know, but it sounded like “mbaya” which meant bad, so she knew malaya could not be much better.

  Tabitha asked one of the older boys that lived nearby her what malaya meant. He told her it meant to “make family,” which Tabitha did not understand because the house was small, only one room, and their family had not grown at all. She remembered her mother had had a baby a few years before, but he had died and they no longer talked about him at all.