by Jessica Yu
As he was not yet an adult, Ezra had to return home to get a letter from his village’s local chairman, certifying permission for the operation. He announced to his family that CoRSU had scheduled the date for his surgery. But none of his relatives seemed to take him seriously. How could anyone fix a face like that? Don’t waste our time, he was told. Once again he went to Kampala by himself.
Gladys was dismayed by his family’s lack of support. While there was no cost for the surgery, the hospital did not cover accommodation, food, or transport. She knew the family was poor, but it was not only a matter of money. Ezra would need special care after the operation, including full-time attention for the first ten days. There was no way that Gladys could tend to him and retain her job.
Perhaps the boy did not fully explain to his relatives. “Let’s call them,” she suggested.
Gladys could not speak Lugwere, so when they managed to get the stepmother by phone, it was Ezra who did the talking.
“If you want to go through with it, fine,” responded the stepmother. “But we don’t have time to help.”
They contacted an aunt. Although she lived in Kampala, she claimed she was too busy even to visit.
They reached out to a brother. Gladys could not follow the conversation, but she could hear the begging tone in Ezra’s voice, and she could see his tears. The brother refused to come, claiming he had two cows that needed grazing. Gladys boiled. How she wished she could speak the language. She would have harassed this brother thoroughly for valuing livestock over his own flesh and blood.
A few days later they tried the stepmother again. The number no longer worked. She had shut the phone off.
Gladys persisted in her fundraising efforts, making appeals to friends, colleagues, her church. She put all her own money toward Ezra’s care, leaving nothing to help her own son with his university fees. Timothy was having a hard time making ends meet, but he was a young man now, and she knew he would not starve. This sickly boy had no one.
AS EZRA LAY down on the gurney, Gladys snapped more photos, documenting the boy’s swollen face for the last time.
“Thank you so much,” he kept saying, effusive in his excitement. The surgeons would be hard-pressed to find anyone more eager to face a scalpel. “Thank you so, so much for what you have done for me.”
Gladys smiled down at him, but her heart was racing. She had just been doused in a cold new fear. As she was preparing to deliver Ezra to the hospital, a friend had warned her not to go. “You are not from his tribe, the Bagwere. It’s too risky. Do you know about the Bagwere?”
The friend, a police commissioner, was a Musoga. “We Musoga know the Bagwere well. For you, you are staying here in the Central Region. You do not know them! The Bagwere are witches! If they just look at you in a bad way, you may drop dead! That thing on the boy’s face is a very delicate matter. If you take him in for the operation, there is a chance that he could die. Although his people have refused to come to the assistance of the boy, they will hold you responsible for him.”
Gladys felt the blood drain from her head like sand in an hourglass.
“His tribe is very fierce. If the boy dies from the operation, they will hunt you down,” was the friend’s dark prediction. “They will kill you and your entire family.”
Gladys had not been raised to believe in witchcraft, but mob justice was an undeniable plague. The papers frequently published stories of crowds attacking suspected thieves, beating or burning them to death on the spot. If a person could be killed for stealing a phone or a goat, what mercy would be shown to someone purported to have harmed a child?
“We’ve seen you struggling to help this boy, and to help other children. But as a friend, I am telling you, let this one be.” Any remaining kernel of calm was crushed by the commissioner’s final statement. “However much we would want to protect you as police, if the Bagwere come after you, we will not be able to help you.”
What if the man’s words were true? If the boy died, she would die too, and it would all have been for nothing. But how could she back out? How could she tell Ezra, “I’m sorry, but your tribe is so fierce that I’m scared for my life—goodbye”?
In the end she said nothing to Ezra as he headed happily into surgery. There was no way she could abandon him now. The Bagwere were right. She was responsible for him.
Gladys sat on a bench with only her fear for company. She could not eat, she could not rest. She could only stare across the walkway at the double doors under the sign OPERATING THEATRE.
Hours passed in a hell of waiting. Every time a gurney ferrying a green-sheeted body emerged, she jumped up to look. But none was her boy.
Why is he not coming out? Something must have gone wrong. Surely nothing that went well could take so long.
Gladys prayed. She prayed harder than she had ever prayed before. God, have mercy on the boy. Have mercy on me. Let this operation succeed, so that this boy survives and so his people don’t come to kill me or my family.
Why? came the skeptics’ refrain. Why do you care so much about the children of strangers?
Because she could help them.
Because she couldn’t help it.
Because those doors might open at any moment, and when that boy came through, there should be at least one person to greet him.
AT LAST, AFTER an agony of waiting, Ezra’s gurney rolled out of the operating theater and into the recovery ward, where Gladys settled in for more waiting.
It would take some time for the boy to regain consciousness, but at least now she could look at him. He was wrapped in a sheet and a blanket, the right side of his face covered by a bulky red bandage patterned with ladybugs. His face was puffy from the trauma, but she could tell that the mass had been removed.
Finally the boy stirred. He was awake, but he could not open his eyes.
“Where is my mother?” he croaked.
After all he has been through, Gladys thought sadly, he still calls for the mother he has not seen for all these years.
“My mother,” Ezra persisted. “Where is my mother, who takes my photos?”
“Eeeee!” Gladys rushed to Ezra’s bedside. If he could not see through the swelling and the bandages, he would certainly recognize her warm, weighty hug.
“Mommy, you’re here!” he cried. And then he fell back to sleep.
WHEN THE BANDAGES came off and Ezra first looked at himself in the mirror, he felt a jolt of shock, followed by overwhelming joy. No longer was his cheek inflated like the throat of a tree frog. The curse was gone.
“It was like I was carrying a very big load,” he told Gladys, who was just as delighted. “Now all at once it has disappeared.”
As he healed, he watched his face settle into its new shape. It was not perfect. A long scar bordered the newly flattened ridge slanting down his right cheek. And no surgery could erase the seismic effect of the bone growth, which had permanently raised his right eye higher than the left. But these residual flaws could not compare to what he had regained. The ability to breathe freely. To speak without slurring. To enjoy a day free from headaches and cruel comments. To blink his eyes! He had not been able to grin so freely since he was three years old.
Sometimes when Ezra stared at length at his reflection, he thought he glimpsed his father’s son—the boy he was meant to be, before the disease hijacked his identity.
Curiously, over the months and years after the surgery, this sense of discovery did not dissipate. Every day he looked in the mirror and saw a difference from the day before. Maybe it was because he was also growing up, but he felt that his true face was gradually being revealed, like a leaf rising to the surface of a murky pond.
All of Gladys’s agonizing over the family’s reaction to the surgery had been for naught. No mob materialized on her doorstep, demanding proof that the boy had not been harmed. In fact, not a single one of Ezra’s relatives even called. Were they not even curious about how the boy was doing? He was still a member of the family, and he had
been gone for half a year.
Gladys could not understand it. The boy was respectful, gracious, and hard-working. And so tidy! Perhaps it was overcompensation for his past deformity, but few other boys his age kept their things so clean or took such care with their personal habits. Who could fail to care for such a humble young man? Everybody in her own family who had met him—her grandmother, her uncles, her aunts, her siblings, her son—took to him immediately.
His own family’s indifference did not distress Ezra, however. When his face was healed, he came to Gladys with a wish: “Mommy, I want to go home for a visit.”
Her expectations for the reunion were not high, but she began to look for the funds for his travel. The boy was bold. If his family would not come to him, he would go to them.
WHEN EZRA WALKED into his village, everyone stared at his face. But this time they stared for a new reason. It was a miracle! His relatives, the neighbors, the children—they came from all directions. All those people who had treated him poorly were now crowding around, asking him questions as if he was someone. And he was. He was the boy who had set out to cure himself, the boy who had returned with a new face.
When Ezra saw his stepmother, she pulled him aside. She said she was sorry for what he had gone through—for what she had put him through. Her words stunned him. Ezra could hardly accept that his stepmother was acknowledging the past, let alone apologizing for it. The improbability brought tears to his eyes. Through all those years of rage and cruelty, he had never imagined a moment of such unambiguous redemption.
He forgave his stepmother. He forgave everybody. It was not that he had forgotten the pain they had inflicted. But now that he was at peace with himself, he did not want to be at war with anyone else.
IN THIS SPIRIT of harmony, Ezra longed for his two families to meet: his relatives in the village and his new mother. Gladys was curious to meet these people who had been able to twist her insides into knots from so far away. As soon as she could arrange transportation, she and Ezra went.
In the village, Gladys greeted everyone graciously, but she could not resist prodding Ezra’s brother about his decision to attend to his cows rather than his brother’s surgery. Her spear was blunt, though, and everyone laughed.
The stepmother thanked Gladys for looking after Ezra, admitting surprise that a stranger would care about him. She said, “I thought that people like you existed only in stories.”
Gladys could not retain any anger toward the woman. She had treated Ezra harshly, but many stepmothers brutalized stepchildren or threw them out of the home. This one seemed genuinely happy at Ezra’s good fortune.
Still, it was hard to digest the collective cheer without a sprinkle of salt. The surgery had not altered Ezra’s character. He had always been a fine boy. But it was only after the surgery that his people could see it. Now that he has a brighter future, the cynical might conclude, everyone wants to cozy up to him. They did not help plant the maize, they did not help shoo away the birds, but they want a share of the harvest.
The more charitable view might be, Life is not easy in a poor village such as this one. Why begrudge anyone a small taste of someone else’s feast?
When it was time to go, their departure illustrated how radically Ezra’s status had changed. The family gave him a chicken, and the entire village escorted him down the road as if he were a prince leaving the palace! Gladys giggled at the sight of Ezra flashing his new smile in the middle of the dusty entourage, his stepmother at his side, kids darting up to the front. Even the babies on their sisters’ backs craned their chubby necks to catch sight of the prodigal son.
When he had first left the village for Kampala, nobody had even bothered to wave. Now everyone clamored to touch his hem.
“Eh! This is our boy!”
FIFTEEN MINUTES. That was about the length of their first conversation at New Vision, when she had spotted Ezra in the waiting area.
Fifteen minutes had turned into six months. Then Ezra was in the hospital and she was the one in the waiting area, praying for both of their lives.
Six months had turned into six years. Now Ezra was a young man, working to complete his primary education. For six years Gladys had supported him at boarding school, fretted over his marks, and welcomed him for holidays.
Six years would turn into what? Three decades? Four?
She had not planned such a long journey. But this was the manner in which she became involved in many of her children’s lives. One small push led to another. Then the child was moving forward, and it was natural to assist with the next step, and the next one after that. Before she knew it, the two of them were running side by side. At that point she might turn around. Not to measure the distance by which she had overstepped her professional boundaries, but to appreciate how far they had come.
Even these days she would occasionally caress the side of Ezra’s face, just as she had done that very first time at the reception area of New Vision. Now, though, the touch would set off a peal of laughter, as though she still couldn’t believe the two of them had pulled it off.
“Eeeee! Eh-eh-eh-eh! Look at my boy now!”
Mommy Gladys
When one had to hide from children, it was time for a change.
Over the past few years, Gladys had placed not only Trevor and Ezra but seven other needy kids at Entebbe Early Learning School. It was a primary school of modest size, with students ranging in age from six to the early teens, in grades from Primary 1 to Primary 7. Most pupils attended by day, but there were two crowded dormitories in which a few dozen children boarded. Although the school was intended to operate as a business, with tuition-paying students, its director, Agnes Biryahwaho, was a tender soul who found it tough to close the door on hard-luck cases. For several of Gladys’s charges, Agnes was the Good Samaritan mentioned in the “Lost and Abandoned” follow-ups.
Gladys’s kids had no one to pay their fees or for their books, their bedding, their clothing and personal needs—except her. The income of a freelance journalist barely covered her own expenses, so when Gladys visited the school to deliver supplies, she often hid from them—not an easy task for someone of such visible stature entering an open courtyard.
Her favored strategy was to use Ezra, the oldest and most responsible of her charges, as the go-between. A quick handoff and she could slip away. Or if she needed to talk to Agnes, she might call to say, “Wait for me in your office. I will jump off the boda boda and run inside.” But many times she did not even make it to the gate before hearing the cries of “Mommy! Auntie! Mommy!”
It was always Deborah who spotted her first. The child was preternaturally sharp-eyed, and even with her humpback quick on her feet. The others would come swarming behind her, from the classrooms and dormitory and playground, as telepathically coordinated in their movement as a murmuration of starlings. Surely this time, the pounding footsteps seemed to say, Mommy Gladys has brought something for me!
“Mommy!”
“Auntie Gladys!”
“Auntie!”
“Mommy, Mommy!”
Today the crowd swirled around her like bodas in a traffic circle. There was Ezra, of course, who had missed nine years of education; limping Trevor, whom she had rescued after the raid on his corrupt school; Deborah, born with a spinal deformity; Douglas, who had walked barefoot to Kampala to escape a cruel stepmother; Evelyn, whose relatives had tried to kill her; Katamba, the boy whose drunken father had cut him with a panga; tiny Rose, shy Jeremiah, Faith . . . Her children had really suffered. The sight of their eager faces filled her with delight.
And dread.
“I don’t have books, Mommy.”
“Did you bring me a handkerchief this time?”
“Our pencils are all finished!”
The children enveloped her in a cloud of pungent affection. It was not hard to guess their next request.
“We have no soap!”
THIS MORNING GLADYS came with Esther and Mike, carrying only a bag of sweets b
etween them. With these children, even a small treat could make the day sing.
“Take only one, okay? That way there will be enough for everyone.” The upturned palms circled Gladys like the petals of a sunflower. “Did you get one? How about Ezra back there?”
Ezra, ever unassuming, accepted his candy with his sloping smile and a nod of the head. “Thank you.”
“Am I hearing thank-yous?” Gladys chided the others.
“Thank you! Thank you!”
As the cluster tightened around its candy-bearing nucleus, the odor of unwashed child grew increasingly sharp. Well, school would break in a few days. And as Agnes would say, They will not die from being dirty.
“What are your plans for the holidays?” Gladys asked.
“I’m going to celebrate my birthday here,” Faith piped up.
“And when is your birthday?”
“It is the twenty-fourth of December, Auntie.”
Gladys sighed. Why did she ask? Now that she knew the child’s birthday, the girl would not let her forget it. She would need to come up with something.
“December third is my birthday,” added a boy.
“My birthday was last Sunday,” Rose said.
Gladys cocked her head at this teacup of a girl. “Rose, do you know your date of birth really? Are you lying to me?”
Rose hooked a finger in her mouth and pulled her head from side to side.
“Okay, how was it?” Gladys grinned, playing along. “Did you cut a cake? Did you even keep a piece for me?”
“But you did not come!”
“Did you invite me?” Gladys pouted.
The delicate chin lifted to a queenly angle. “I will make another birthday!”
“Hee hee hee!” Gladys turned to the others. “Do you know your birthdays?”
Headshakes and stares, a few slow nods.
“Ezra doesn’t know his,” Gladys assured them. “When is your birthday, Ezra?”