by Jessica Yu
But there were always subjects she wanted to write about. Programs for people with disabilities. Sleeping sickness. Pollution in Lake Victoria. HIV and prostitution. And everywhere there were individuals whose stories she could not ignore. The young woman scarred by an acid attack. The family battling hereditary disease. The boda-boda driver maimed by a truck collision.
Sometimes people simply showed up at the offices of New Vision. If, say, a fruit vendor brought in a stray child, Camilla, the sympathetic receptionist, knew that there was only one reporter to call.
“Gladys, I have someone to see you.”
“My program is too full already. Can you call someone else? There are many other reporters here.”
“Yes,” Camilla would answer, her voice bright with confidence. “But this one needs you!”
Gladys might laugh or sigh or do both, but she would come. Because she knew it was true.
Trevor
Although Gladys’s round-trip commute to the New Vision offices in Kampala was about fifty miles, Entebbe’s relative calm and serenity were worth the hours of sitting in minibus taxis. Given its proximity to the airport, its gardens and parks and hotels and golf course, not to mention its many beaches rimming Lake Victoria, Entebbe was a popular spot for tourists and urbanites seeking weekend relaxation.
It was not a cheap place to live. Gladys rented a room in a courtyard behind a row of shops along Kampala-Entebbe Road with a roommate, Esther. It was a tiny space with a couple of beds. No kitchen, no closet, no space for table and chairs. But Gladys was hardly ever there: most days she left home before 7 a.m. and did not return until after 11 p.m.
On one rare night Gladys returned home early enough to turn on the 10 p.m. news. The TV provided background for her evening tasks, and she paid it little attention until a report came on about a police raid at a boarding school. The director had been accused of embezzlement, neglect, and nonpayment of rent. The story of corruption held no novelty, even with the footage of police arresting teachers and matrons. What drew her attention was the terrified students caught in the middle of the raid. Some of the children were frozen in fear; others were screaming and crying, running east and west like chickens in a pen overrun by dogs.
She scanned the tear-streaked faces, noting with pity how young some of them were. A girl of no more than eight. A toddler, barely steady on his feet. A boy . . . She froze, a bolt of adrenaline shooting through her body.
That face. She knew that face. It was Trevor.
SHE HAD FIRST encountered Trevor at Kawempe, always one of the most cooperative police stations on her circuit, almost a year before. According to Officer Harriet, he had been dumped by a woman suspected of being his mother at Katalemwa Cheshire Home, an NGO for children with disabilities. He was small, maybe six or seven years, but he could not confirm his age. He could not confirm anything. When Gladys asked him questions, he would lower his head and mumble at the ground, or he would look off absently and say nothing, as though he had not heard her speak. The only concrete information he could offer was his name: Trevor Masembe.
He was an odd, shambling little figure, with a limp and a lame right hand. His left eyebrow arched slightly higher than his right, lending an air of detachment to his expression that was amusing in one so small. He seemed most comfortable on the periphery of things, a natural bystander. While lingering in doorways or peering through windows, he had a way of lifting his chin and frowning into the distance, as though he were awaiting someone’s imminent arrival.
A child so quiet and inscrutable might be easily overlooked were it not for his smile. Trevor possessed a smile of impish charm that bloomed over his whole face; it was a grin of small, perfect teeth, raised brow, and high cheeks. When he smiled, it was as though he were suddenly awakened and delighted by his present company. It took some enticement to draw out that smile—a biscuit, a peek at the view screen of Gladys’s camera—but the reward was tantalizing. It was like having the blur of a hummingbird come into still and solid focus on the tip of one’s finger. Surely this was a glimpse of the real Trevor, tucked deep within that tight bud of silence.
Fortunately for the children who ended up stranded at Kawempe, the station boasted two recycled shipping containers, one that served as office for the Child and Family Protection Unit, the second as lodging. The metal box contained a wall of sagging shelves and a couple of wooden bed frames, their yellow foam mattresses crumbling like stale bread.
For several months Trevor stayed there. Sometimes he had the company of other boys, sometimes he was alone. At night no police were in attendance, so Officer Harriet would lock the container from the outside. She instructed the boys to urinate in the green bucket in the corner, but most of the time Trevor would wet the mattress.
It was not an ideal situation for anyone. With his lame hand, Trevor could not bathe himself—it took him ten full minutes to button his shirt—so one of the officers had to assist him. During the day there was nothing for him to do except wander around the police motorcycles, groping the handles and growling like an engine until he was chased away.
MASEMBE ABANDONED AT KATALEMWA HOME
The six-year-old, who seems to be paralysed on one side of the body, said he was taken to the home by his mother.
Unfortunately his condition cannot allow him to speak for long. Katalemwa Home handed him over to the Kawempe Police for assistance.
Trevor’s profile in “Lost and Abandoned” received no response. Gladys ran it a second time. Still nothing. She submitted it a third time.
“You are running this one again?”
“Yes, this one really needs to locate his family.”
Dr. Wendo had moved on from running Saturday Vision and been replaced by Hilary Bainemigisha, an editor who also wrote a popular advice column under the moniker “Dr. Love.” No muscled Lothario, Dr. Love sported glasses, a slight paunch, and a colorful literary style. He was known for his metaphors (“Marriage is like government. As soon as you capture state power, you have to deploy heavily to protect it from hyenas and vultures”) as well as his earthy candor (“You can tell a relationship’s stage of development by the ease with which partners fart in each other’s presence . . . Eventually, some married people relax and start letting the chemical bombs drop”).
Behind his cheeky Dr. Love persona and his first-name-basis familiarity, Hilary operated with a steady professionalism. While he fully supported Gladys’s work, he could not ignore the fact that the newspaper’s contents needed to stay current and fresh. No one wanted to read the same thing week after week, even if it was for a good cause.
Hilary acquiesced to Trevor’s repeated appearances in “Lost and Abandoned,” but Gladys knew she was running out of time. Eventually the police would turn the boy over to Probation, and Probation would turn him over to Naguru Reception Centre.
GLADYS DID EVERYTHING she could to keep a child out of Naguru. The facility, which had been built in the 1960s for fifty children, now housed as many as three hundred. It served more as penitentiary than as home, as evidenced by the high walls studded with glass shards and the frequency of escape attempts. In such an overcrowded place, a child could not expect an adequate education or attention to special needs. Children worked at washing clothes, bathing the younger ones, and preparing food. There were reports of frightful conditions in the barracks.
Worst of all for Gladys, Naguru was virtually inaccessible, especially to members of the media. Although it was in Kampala proper, only a couple of miles away from New Vision, it could feel as remote as an island. She could not call or visit or even get confirmation that a particular child was held there. Once a child went to Naguru, the thread was snipped.
On one occasion when Gladys had been allowed to enter the gates of the reception center, word of her visit had obviously preceded her arrival. The yard was deserted. A matron told her that the children were all in class. This was hard to believe, as the one classroom on the grounds stood vacant in front of them.
&nbs
p; It would be absurd for a journalist to leave the facility without meeting any of its hundreds of children, and after some polite insistence, Gladys persuaded the staff to bring one to her to interview. A girl of about fourteen emerged from a side yard, where she had been doing laundry. Gladys greeted her brightly, but the girl only smiled in confusion and shook her head. Within a few moments, it became evident that the child could neither hear nor speak. It was Naguru’s idea of a joke: send the reporter a deaf-mute.
WITH THE SPECTER of Naguru on the horizon, Gladys was relieved when she raised enough funds for Trevor to board at a place called Good Samaritan. The school was new to her, and she informed the director of her intention to deliver Trevor to school personally to settle him in. No need, the man assured her. He would send her photographs of Trevor’s progress.
No photographs came. Not even a phone call. When she finally reached the director, he apologized for being so busy. The boy was doing fine. Of course she could visit soon. Just not right now.
Something was not right, and she resolved to find out what it was. At one point she dropped by the school at a time when she knew the director would be absent, only to find that the students were not around either.
She did not trust this man. But before she could continue her investigation, Trevor’s stricken face popped up on her television screen. Gladys wanted to jump into a taxi that very night and rescue him. But when fleeing the police, the school director had dragged the students along, eventually abandoning them in Rakai, a district over a hundred miles west of Kampala. To find the money for the long trip, Gladys needed a couple of days.
She also needed official permission to take Trevor. The authorities couldn’t just hand over a child to anyone. After the police raid, most children were retrieved by their parents. The few who remained, like Trevor, fell under the custody of the Probation Department. Through her contacts at Kawempe Police, Gladys tracked down the local probation officer assigned to the stranded students. She called to introduce herself, but the officer rudely cut her off. A journalist had no business stepping into this situation.
In Gladys’s experience, probation officers generally looked upon the media with suspicion. In a country in which half the population was under fifteen, there were many problems concerning children but precious few government resources. The probation officers knew that their bosses at the Ministry of Gender, Labour, and Social Development did not appreciate having any light shed on this disparity.
Gladys explained to the probation office that her involvement with Trevor was more than journalistic—that she had been assisting him for nearly a year, that the child had no known family, that he had a suspected disability—but this officer would not listen. She refused to understand.
There was a difference between the inability to understand and the refusal to understand. If Gladys were to spend a month’s salary on airtime minutes talking to this woman, the effort would garner no more response than an impatient sigh. Meanwhile Trevor was somewhere out there, distraught and bewildered and unable to communicate.
What else could she do?
She had to go and get him.
TRAFFIC AND BAD ROADS slowed the taxi’s progress; by nightfall it still had not reached Rakai. Gladys was forced to pay for a hotel night along the route, an expense she could sorely afford.
In the morning she reached the probation officer to plead her case again. The reporter’s tenacity served only to irritate the officer, who refused to make any decision on the matter. Instead she directed Gladys to go to a church building where Trevor and the other stranded children were being held. “Wait for me there,” she ordered.
It was a woeful group that Gladys discovered when she walked through the church door: a dozen children and a couple of matrons, all of them exhausted and hungry. They had not eaten supper the night before or breakfast that morning, and they looked hopefully at their visitor. The only thing Gladys could afford to buy them was bananas.
One of the matrons roused Trevor from sleep. Gladys was shocked at his appearance. His face was grimy and tear-streaked, his T-shirt stained, his feet bare. There were holes everywhere in his clothing. And how he smelled! Worse than a wet boy-goat! The matron said that he had slept in those filthy clothes for over a week, soiling himself every night.
Gladys tried to comfort the boy, hoping that the probation officer would soon arrive. But hours went by and the woman did not show up. It became noon, then two o’clock, then four o’clock. The kids became hungrier and hungrier, and Trevor cried and cried. Still Gladys’s calls went unanswered.
Eh! With a stubborn officer such as this, what chance did Gladys and Trevor stand of receiving official permission to leave? What if the woman insisted on detaining Trevor? How would Gladys be able to trace him?
Then the thought came into Gladys’s head, with the satisfying decisiveness of a cleaver chop: Whether the officer likes it or not, I’m taking Trevor with me.
“Help me get him cleaned up,” she asked a matron. If she had known the officer would make her wait all day, she would have washed Trevor’s clothes upon her arrival. As it was late in the afternoon and she did not want to be traveling after dark, there was no time to allow the shirt and shorts to dry. They were little more than wet rags when the boy put them back on.
As they left, she felt a twinge of guilt at leaving the roomful of sad, famished kids. One of them was a boy of no more than two years. What would happen to them if their families were not located? For now, it was taking all she had just to help Trevor.
NO TAXIS WERE available, so Gladys had to flag down a boda boda. With Trevor braced between her and the driver, the motorcycle bounced over dirt roads and veered around potholes. The wind snapped Gladys’s dress against her knees, the hard buzz of the motor as unwaning as her resolve. Had the probation officer arrived to find them gone? Was she in a car now, racing to catch them? Gladys did not care. They were going.
They rode for more than an hour, the boy whimpering in his damp clothes. The boda fare was high, as the route was a long deviation from the driver’s territory. Adding in the cost of a simple meal for Trevor and lodging for the night, Gladys would be lucky if she arrived home with a single shilling in her purse.
At least, with his belly full at last, the boy slept.
In the morning they were able to board a matatu headed for Kampala. It had not gone far when the probation officer finally called, demanding that Gladys return with the child. “You only have a few hours to bring back the boy,” she warned, “or I will have you arrested for kidnapping!”
Now the officer was doing all the talking, and it was getting on Gladys’s nerves. Should she attempt to explain that she was not the type to be threatened, that nothing short of an armed convoy could force her to return the boy, that taking care of the other abandoned students would be a far better use of the officer’s time? No doubt the woman would refuse to understand.
“Turn around right now! Or I’ll—”
Gladys switched her phone off. As the taxi approached Kampala, Gladys turned her phone back on, only to receive another call from the probation officer.
“Why aren’t you responding to me? Aren’t you going to say anything?” The woman was infuriated by her inability to provoke the reporter into a shouting match. Finally she vowed to make good on her threat: she was reporting Gladys to the Kawempe police. “Deliver yourself to the police, or you will be in big trouble.”
Preemptively, Gladys contacted Kawempe. Of course all the officers there, including the bosses, knew her. They also knew Trevor; the boy had lived in their shipping container for a month. When she explained the situation, they suggested she draft a letter for their files to smooth bureaucratic hackles. Then they all shared a hearty laugh over the image of Gladys behind bars. What time would she like them to bring her her tea?
TREVOR WAS NOT a child who could express gratitude. Gladys could not expect a thank-you for the rescue that had drained her account, for the week’s worth of missed work and s
leepless nights, or for the impassioned lobbying that won him charitable admission into Entebbe Early Learning School, a good school near her home. Gladys’s satisfaction lay in the fact of his safety. And the return of that smile.
At his new school, Trevor found his joy in the form of a football. It was an old white thing, a million kicks having erased the colored pentagons from its dusty surface, giving it the look of a ball of chapati dough. Just the sight of it could lift his eyebrows and stretch his mouth into a wide triangle, a grin that was somehow both mischievous and innocent. And then he would be off, his wake of dust masking the drag of his leg.
Gladys hoped that the Trevor behind that smile might gradually emerge now that he was in a stable place. And there were encouraging signs. When the boy had nowhere to stay over the holidays, the school cook welcomed him into her home. Her children enjoyed Trevor’s company, and the days passed in harmony. One night after supper, the boy even knelt at the cook’s feet and thanked her for the meal.
The cook’s report thrilled Gladys. Back in school, however, the news was mixed. Trevor had trouble sitting in class. When he got too restless, he would simply stand up and leave the classroom. While his classmates hunched over their desks, they could hear the thup thup shuffle shuffle of Trevor kicking his football around the courtyard.
In a typical school, such behavior would warrant a caning. But Agnes Biryahwaho, the director of Early Learning, did not believe in corporal punishment. “Such children have been through a lot, and we must show them patience,” she would say. “Trevor will adjust in his own time.”
Gladys couldn’t help feeling that the boy needed more than time. She had rescued him not only to keep him safe but to give him a chance at a life. A chance to learn and explore and discover what he could be. Most of the time, though, Trevor observed the world from a distance.