by Jessica Yu
When Gladys was seventeen and still in school, her grandfather died. The blow knocked the nest out of the tree. All at once the family lost its champion, its sense of security, and its haven at the church compound. Gladys and her brother were sent back home. Back to a house now filled with kids, an overwhelmed mother, and a father who brought little through the door but strife and drink.
And then things got worse. While the rest of the family attended the traditional funeral rites, the women singing for three days over the reverend’s body, Gladys’s father went back to her mother’s house and sold off everything, even the house itself. And then he took off with another woman. How Gladys hated him then! Leaving his grieving family with no home, with nothing. The seven of them were forced to move into two small rooms with only a bare floor to sleep on. Complaining of headaches, Gladys’s mother stopped working. The family hit bottom.
No more suppers at the big table. No more netball games. The beat of the Sunday drums faded to silence. But Gladys had never been one for sitting and crying. As the firstborn, it was up to her to care for her siblings. She dropped out of school and began to look for work. Her first job was at the Ministry of Agriculture, performing clerical duties.
“You are so young!” grownups would remark. “Can you really manage?”
She had no choice. Her uncles pitched in, but since they had their own families, there was only so much they could do. It was Gladys who provided meals, scrounged up school fees, tended to illness, and provided comfort. For all intents and purposes, she became her siblings’ mother and father.
On the rocky uphill climb of those years, Gladys lightened the family burden by discarding her own aspirations. Other girls her age were preparing for university and buying new dresses, nice shoes. Gladys knew that if she were to buy shoes, Godfrey would not have tuition, Alex would not have a school uniform, Veronica would not have books. Indeed, she mourned the loss not of the shoes but of the education. The love of learning her grandfather had instilled in her was a luxury she could no longer afford.
Still, the achievements of her siblings brought her happiness, particularly those of her brightest brother, Godfrey. As his star rose, through college and the start of a career in law, so did Gladys’s hopes.
GLADYS HAD REACHED middle age, but three of her siblings were long deceased. Veronica and Juliet both succumbed to illnesses in their twenties. Her other brothers now worked in skilled professions, but Godfrey was struck down by an aneurysm shortly after making plans to support Gladys through college. The wound from his loss ached to this day.
Gladys never got the chance to attend university, but she was determined to see that her own son and daughter did. Her mother and uncles helped with the kids while she worked six days a week. Now in his midtwenties, Timothy ran a web-hosting firm. Sarah was finishing her teaching degree.
During the bad years, Gladys and her siblings did not see their father. The man never checked on his children, not even one time, to see if they were sick or hungry or homeless. He had fled the scene like a hit-and-run driver.
What a shock it was then, when, more than three decades after he disappeared, he resurfaced, sick and destitute. His other woman no longer wanted to deal with him and his drunkenness. Gladys could not feel anything as potent as hate for him, only a kind of curious pity. Her father had ignored his abandoned children; he had ended up an abandoned old man.
Gladys and an aunt helped him through urgently needed surgery, but he resumed drinking before he even left the hospital. Pity curdled into irritation. Could one really say that she and her siblings had not been better off without such a man?
One never knew what life would bring. Greater opportunity was no guarantee of good fortune. And bad luck could mean an escape from something worse. While Gladys was not rich, she found her work gratifying. Without all her struggles, would she ever have jumped at the chance to join a journalism class for secondary school students?
Perhaps that was part of what drew her to intervene in the lives of others. A person’s story might head in a dark direction, but that did not mean it was destined to end as a tragedy. There was always the chance for dramatic reversal. Maybe not dramatic as in those Harold Robbins novels—ordinary fates did not hinge on Hollywood producers and race cars—but even minor incidents could make a difference. One small push could alter a person’s trajectory a few degrees, just enough to skirt the precipice.
Gladys did not have much. Indeed, on most days she was just scraping by. But it did not take so much to give a little push, especially to a child.
Many people did not seem to understand this impulse. Instead, Gladys’s support of so many kids struck them as a kind of compulsion. Why did this woman care so much about the children of strangers? Children who were not her relatives. Children not from her village.
As is the way in Uganda, the questioners wielded their curiosity with a blunt edge. “Why do you want to look after so many children? Is it because you don’t have any of your own?”
Gladys would demur, explaining that she had grown children.
Ah, they are grown, her questioners’ knowing nods would say.
Maybe she was making money. Maybe she was cultivating religious converts. There had to be a practical reason for all that effort and expenditure.
Upon hearing that Gladys had sent yet another child to school, one of her work colleagues once remarked, “I think it’s you people who will go to heaven.” The “compliment” bothered her for days. Did he think he could not possibly extend such assistance himself? She was not holy!
Yes, Gladys helped many children, but not to feather her nest in the afterlife. It was just that sometimes a thought would sprout in her mind: Maybe I can help this one. Sometimes it meant buying a plate of food. Sometimes that plate of food led to an article in the paper or some phone calls or transport back home or school fees. But she did not leave her home in the morning thinking, Things have been too calm around here. I really hope today I will find another needy child or two to support on my meager pay.
And still—it happened.
LATE ONE AFTERNOON Gladys returned to New Vision after a long day in the field. Her climb up the stairs was a bit slow, as she had gone without breakfast and lunch. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a figure seated in the waiting area. At once she sensed something amiss, the way one knows a dog is dead, not sleeping, when one passes it on the street.
Turning to look, she felt her skin prickle from head to toe. Someone was sitting in there. Not an adult. A teenager. One half of his face was swollen to twice its normal size.
Gladys moved to the reception desk. Camilla, who questioned everyone entering the waiting area, reported that the boy had come for Bukedde TV. Like New Vision newspaper, Bukedde was owned by the multimedia conglomerate Vision Group, and its offices were next door. Desperate people often came to the building hoping to attract attention through the station, which broadcast in Luganda.
In the field and in her daily life, Gladys had seen countless physical disabilities, but none exactly like this one. It was more localized and extreme than the swellings she had seen on cancer wards. But could it be cancer?
Gladys waved to the boy. “Hello,” she called. “Come over here.”
He approached, a slight figure clad in a flowered T-shirt, shorts, and slippers. Up close, the distension on his face was painfully taut, as if a melon had been thrust under the skin. The right side of his head was so inflated that he had no nose, and the right eye had been pushed an inch higher than the left.
“What’s your name?”
The boy turned his head to look at the big woman. Hers was a generous, open face. Her cheeks were plump and high enough to crowd her eyes when she smiled, as she was doing now.
She introduced herself in a calm, warm voice. She was a journalist at the paper, and she was curious about his situation. Unlike the few other strangers who had spoken directly to him, she did not pretend that nothing was wrong.
She asked, “Were
you born like this, or is it a disease?”
It was an unusual encounter, surely, but then it became extraordinary. Because the woman, this Gladys Kalibbala, reached out and touched his face.
FOR EZRA, THE TROUBLE had started after he turned three. That was when the right side of his face began to swell. That was when his mother abandoned him.
The boy went to stay with his father, who was alarmed by his son’s strange metamorphosis. With several wives and more than ten children, he had many obligations, but he did what he could to find a cure.
Visits to witch doctors and herbalists had no effect on the condition, however, and by the time Ezra turned seven, his features were so contorted that no classmate would share a desk with him. He dropped out of school.
Eventually his father took him to a hospital, where they told him an operation should be attempted before the swelling became too acute.
Ezra’s father tried. He sold off everything he could find in the home. But the cost of the operation was too steep. One day he told his son, “As you can see, we are so poor here. I did the best I could, but it is beyond us now. You must try to stay alive.”
When Ezra was twelve, it was his father who died, leaving the boy to the mercy of a stepmother. This woman, who had her own children to care for, proved unsympathetic to the boy’s plight. His ugliness repulsed her. Ezra could feel her disgust, as palpable as heat. Resentful of his presence in her home, she sent him out to do heavy labor and endless chores. From morning till night, Ezra was expected to toil like a machine. No matter how hard he worked, he could not please her.
Ezra’s condition gave him excruciating headaches, and the stress only increased their frequency. Sometimes the pain physically incapacitated him, provoking his stepmother’s ire. “You useless thing,” she would spit. “You’re good for nothing. That’s why God made you this way. Your own mother ran away from you and left you behind, and now you are just wasting my space.”
As his illness and his stepmother’s abuse intensified, so did Ezra’s sense of urgency. By the time he entered his teen years, the headaches were constant, the vision in his right eye had degenerated, and the strain on his mouth and nose constricted his breathing.
His father had told him to stay alive. Ezra was determined to try. At sixteen he came up with a plan to go to Kampala, find work, and save up for his surgery. To raise transport money, he started taking on extra work, digging in people’s gardens and making bricks to sell in the village.
On the day he left his village in Kibuku, none of his relatives—not his siblings, not his aunts and uncles, and certainly not his stepmother—expressed concern. Perhaps they were relieved to see Ezra leave, as he carried with him the source of their family’s embarrassment.
The big city was farther away than he thought it was. When his money ran out, the taxi dumped him somewhere halfway. He decided to travel on foot, but the going was hard. In his own village, he was used to neighbors snickering behind his back. Here among strangers, the abuse was thrown right in his face. “Monster!” people taunted. Kids pelted him with rocks. One man took one look at him and burst into jeering laughter. Something in the man’s gleefulness nearly broke Ezra. He could not stop crying, but he did not stop walking.
Fortunately, he encountered a sympathetic traffic officer who started flagging down cars and asking drivers to take pity on a wretched boy. Through a combination of short rides and long walks, Ezra finally made it to Kampala.
“DOES IT GIVE you very much pain?” The woman’s fingers moved over the stretch of his cheek, feeling the drumhead tightness of his skin.
It was the first time anyone had touched his face in over ten years. Well, there was the doctor who had examined him when his father was alive, but that did not count. This woman not only touched him, she listened to him. In her look was something more nuanced than pity, more probing than sympathy. It was interest.
“You are here alone? Why is no one with you?”
Communication was bumpy, as she did not understand his local language, Lugwere, while Ezra spoke rudimentary Luganda and no English at all. Plus his mouth was compressed in such a way that he had difficulty forming some words. Despite the obstacles, it was easy to open up to this lady, who absorbed every detail of his story, from his childhood to his arrival at Kampala. She seemed in no hurry to ascend the stairs and get on with her day.
When he revealed that he had slept overnight at a bus station, the woman’s tone grew stern. “You must never, ever sleep on the street again! Whatever happens. Ask someone to show you the nearest police station. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
She took his photo and asked for his contact information, but Ezra had no phone, and he had no numbers for anyone in his family.
“Ah,” the woman sighed. “I really would like to help you. But even if I put your story in the paper, there is no way for anyone to contact you.”
Wishing him luck with his plans, she started toward the steps.
On impulse, he called out to her. “Auntie, can you write your number on a piece of paper? Maybe if I come across a line I can call you.”
The reporter seemed a bit dubious that he would be able to obtain a phone. But she wrote down her name and number.
“If you go to any police station, I will be able to trace you.” She gave him a 1,000-shilling note, with directions for where he could buy a chapati. “Today that is all the money I can offer. But if you find you still need help and you call me, maybe I will be able to see the way forward.”
TWO DAYS LATER, Gladys got a call from Central Police Station.
When the boy’s visit to the TV station had failed to yield any funds, he sought help in finding the nearest police, just as Gladys had advised. Upon seeing his condition, though, the CPS officers wanted to return him to Kibuku.
Ezra refused. He would not go back home. He had come to Kampala to work, and he intended to work so that he could get care for his face. He was sixteen—old enough to know there was no future in turning back.
Gladys had assisted all kinds of children, but she reserved a special place in her heart for those who were truly bold. Not the reckless ones who disregarded consequences, or the brash ones who were confident and outspoken, but the vulnerable ones who knew what they were risking when they planted their feet and refused to move. There was a difference between fearless and brave.
Ezra was young, ill, alone, and penniless. But here he was, telling these police that they could not make him go home. How could she not help such a one?
“Gladys!” an officer exclaimed. “Do you know this one?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know him.”
Ezra watched in awe as Gladys pushed and cajoled and reasoned and admonished the police to let him take refuge at the station. He had never had someone fight for him before.
At last the officer in charge relented. The boy could remain at the station, but only for a little while.
“I will find a solution,” Gladys said reassuringly. “Just give me some few days.”
With the boy off the streets, she set to work, making phone calls to Uganda Cancer Institute and writing an article about Ezra’s predicament and the necessity for a CT scan. If it was cancer, Gladys knew it must be quickly diagnosed. Among the many pictures she had taken of the boy, she chose a close-up portrait to submit with the piece.
To Gladys’s dismay, the photo was rejected by the editors. The image was too upsetting, she was told. Readers might complain. No one wanted to sit down with the paper on Saturday morning and spit up their tea.
Gladys was angry, but she was also hurt. The anger was because the decision rendered the article useless. How could they expect anyone to step forward to help a boy whose deformity no one could see? The hurt was for the boy. She had moved through town with him. She had seen the world through his eyes. How people gaped and pointed. How taxi passengers recoiled and changed seats. It made you feel small. Like you were not as good as other people. Like you were too u
gly to have your picture in the paper.
Such censorship seemed hypocritical, given the sensational leanings of the Ugandan media. For a decade every outlet in the country had tracked the antics of Godfrey Baguma, who won the national “Ugliest Man” contest. Known as Sebabi (“the ugliest of them all”), this former cobbler carried a dramatically misshapen head atop a small body. Articles, TV stories, and even a music video gleefully celebrated his marriage to a pretty young wife, his defense of his “ugliest” title, and the birth of his eighth child. And Gladys was supposed to worry that Ezra’s medical condition might make readers cringe?
The article ran without a photo. It received no response at all.
AFTER A MONTH and a half at CPS, Ezra was no longer allowed to stay. It was not proper for the police to house a child, and they had done so for so long only because Gladys had forced them to. Given no alternative, she took the boy into her own small home, where he would remain for over three months.
Again Gladys submitted her column with Ezra’s story, telling her editors, “Run the boy’s photo with the profile or don’t run it at all.”
This time Ezra’s photo dominated the page, the distended side of his face appearing to pop out in three dimensions. Look at this! it seemed to shout. Let’s get this terrible thing off this boy’s face before it explodes!
The response was immediate. Some readers gave donations; one offered to take Ezra into her home before the operation. Kampala Hospital gave Ezra a CT scan that ruled out cancer. Doctors made a diagnosis of fibrous dysplasia of the maxilla, a genetic bone growth disorder. If left untreated, the disease could cause Ezra to lose the function of his right eye, and his brain might suffer increased pressure. But there was good news: CoRSU Rehabilitation Hospital agreed to perform the surgery without charge.