by Jessica Yu
In the sting of the moment, Gladys almost walked away from the woman’s desk. But she knew she must think before acting. This is one of the editors to whom I have to submit stories, she reminded herself. So. Let me just ignore it.
Gladys smiled patiently. “As I said, the mother is at reception. If you like, you can escort me down there when I hand the money over to her.”
The woman gave her a prolonged, narrowed-eyed stare, followed by a single 1,000-shilling note.
Gladys reached for the bill, humiliation flooding her face. This from a coworker. A born-again woman, a “savedee.”
In the end Gladys succeeded in raising the sum needed for Mukisa’s transport, and some weeks later the operation saved the child’s life. It frustrated her that the encounter with the editor burned as strongly in her memory as the boy’s successful recovery. She could not forget how the woman had looked at her: like she was one of those beggar women holding up a baby in traffic, tapping on a car window with her hand out.
While she could not excuse such uncharitable behavior, she could not deny that in this country, people had grounds to be suspicious of do-gooders. There were so many con artists and fortune-seekers scattered about, from witch doctors to evangelists, bureaucrats to charity operators, land sellers to street hustlers, each with a convincing story to tell.
It was a matter not of defending her honor but of changing the situation so that she did not have to answer to anyone except herself. As the burden of her obligations to her children had increased, so had her dependence on others. It discomfited her. She had always been the self-sufficient one, the one who labored the longest hours and slept the least; the one who went out to work, raised her siblings and eventually her own kids; the one who took on whatever responsibility needed taking on.
Was Gladys the Capable becoming Gladys the Needy? A few years past the half-century mark, she was still sharing a small rented room, still owned nothing upon which to build a future for her growing brood of dependents or herself. She was no longer young, of course, but now she felt it in her bones. She had always plowed through her long days with an indefatigable energy, but her bimonthly bouts of malaria were harder and harder to push past. Her legs hurt all the time. People said she needed to lose weight. They scolded, “You must control your eating, or you will burst!” Gladys laughed off the suggestion. She had always been fat; she had not always been poor. She needed to control her finances.
“But Gladys,” one of her less diplomatic friends had once remarked, “you will always be poor because you work with the poor.”
Her thoughts had been circling this problem for some time when she took on the assignment of profiling a woman farmer for the paper. Jane Bbale had begun farming after being driven from her marital home by her husband. Left with no income, she started bit by bit to cultivate. Over time she had amassed four cows, five goats, twenty pigs, a banana plantation, and a garden of fruits and vegetables—all on a plot of one acre. “I had children and did not know how to cater for their school fees,” Bbale told Gladys. “Ever since I started farming, life has changed for the better.”
Gladys was impressed to learn that a pig could produce profitable litters and then bring six to eight times its price at market. The woman’s cows also provided a steady income stream through their milk production. And then there were Bbale’s gardens. Vegetables alone brought in at least 20,000 a day. The profits of her enterprise, the farmer asserted, had put her children through both primary and secondary education.
This could be the solution Gladys had been seeking. Farming. Gardens. Land. It all sounded so solid. Productive. Fundamental.
There were, she acknowledged, a few hitches in this plan. One: she didn’t know anything about starting a farm. Two: she didn’t know anything about buying land. Three: she had no money to buy land.
New experiences excited Gladys more than they intimidated her, and this idea seemed very exciting indeed. Raising livestock, selling produce, hiring workers—these were all activities regular people performed every day. She was a city woman, but as a child she had worked in her grandparents’ garden. If she applied her full effort, there was no reason why she should not be able to acquire the necessary skills to start her own.
ON TUESDAYS, New Vision ran a section on farming called “Harvest Money.” Gladys began to scan those pages regularly, studying articles like “I Started Farming on One Acre but Earn Millions,” “Cucumber Has Changed My Fortunes,” “An Acre Can Grow 20,000 Cabbages,” and “I Am Enjoying a Juicy Purse, Thanks to My Mango Trees.”
It appeared she wouldn’t need very much land. Just an acre or two nearby. She’d sell her produce to pay for her kids’ school fees and expenses. As the gardens flourished, she’d be able to raise some livestock. It would make her very happy to start a piggery. Eventually she could build a house on the land, with a couple of rooms for kids to stay in. No more running from place to place every time she got involved in a case, trying to squeeze a child through a crack in some door.
Imagine. Someday she might even be able to build a small children’s home on the land. Just for a dozen kids. Twenty at the most. This home of hers would not be crowded. It would not smell of urine. Men would not leer through the windows at the girls. Kids like Ezra and Douglas and Deborah could live there and eat healthy food from the gardens. Trevor would have plenty of room in which to chase his football. It would be a bright, happy place, where she could be sure her young charges were safe.
Of course, she was standing at sea level, imagining the view at the top of a mountain. But the mountain was not so very high, was it? It was not as though she were planning to win the lottery or become president. She only wanted a children’s home. It felt like a big ambition because she had so little. And because she knew in her heart that this was her life’s dream.
When she discussed her new plan with friends, she skirted the part about the children’s home. Many already considered her involvement in the kids’ welfare excessive. Gladys focused instead on the potential of the farming enterprise, and the response was encouraging. Cultivation was a wise investment, everyone said. Her boss, Cathy, even advised her to take out a loan from work to secure the land. She could borrow money at a low interest rate and have the payments taken directly out of her wages. Camilla, the New Vision receptionist, had put her children through school with help from this loan program.
This news made the plan suddenly feasible. But how much money would Gladys need? As she lived in Entebbe, she naturally researched land prices nearby. A relative told her that a good price for an acre in Entebbe was 200 million! And prices in Kampala were even more outrageous—up to 850 million an acre there.
How naive she had been. One could not hope to buy farmland by a major urban center like Kampala or Entebbe. One had to go further afield. It was Cathy who gave her the lead on some land for sale in Luwero District, up in the Central Region.
“Luwero!” Gladys exclaimed. “How far away is Luwero from Entebbe?”
Perhaps sixty miles, Cathy replied.
“No,” Gladys demurred. “I can’t travel that far. I don’t have a vehicle.”
“So you think that is very far?” Cathy cast a sideways glance at Gladys, knowing well how her colleague commuted for hours every day from Entebbe to Kampala, and how she somehow managed to get herself to the farthest-flung places in pursuit of a story. “Listen. In Luwero, I know a place where you can get a three-acre parcel for ten million. Other places are ten times as much!”
Gladys became convinced, then excited, then discouraged. She borrowed money against her earnings, not realizing that land title and lawyers’ fees required an additional chunk of funds. Esther and another friend came to her rescue, loaning her the necessary amount.
Once the three acres were hers, she allowed herself to feel excited again. It was a rectangular stretch of unruly bush, grass, and thorny acacia that would need to be cleared, tilled, planted, watered, fertilized, and harvested. It represented endless work but also endle
ss potential, and if she allowed herself a moment to daydream, she could envision her future compound in the middle of a tidy plot, surrounded by maize and banana trees and vegetable gardens and pigs and goats and playing children.
And then her stomach would suddenly flip, her thoughts turning again to the enormous financial hole she had dug for herself. This was not the first time she had launched an enterprise, but her investments in the bookshop and the fish business had been of a far smaller magnitude. This was certainly her last, biggest risk, the one that would either propel her into stability or sink her into ruin.
How would she ever pay back those loans? What of the capital needed to pay laborers to work the land? How long would it take before she had maize or beans to sell? How many harvests before she started to see any profit? How often could she even make the journey to check on her plot? So many questions. She did not know if she really wanted the answers.
Oh God, she thought. Have I really taken this on? She had. She was doing this. And it was about time.
There was an old saying: “Old men sit in the shade because they planted a tree many years ago.” That’s what she wanted for herself and her children. A little patch of shade. It was a late start, but at least she had planted her tree.
The Enchanted Chapati
For months a dry spell had choked the country. There was no escape from the collective dread. It wafted in the stinging air. It weighted the dust that collected in noses and throats. It shriveled the silk of the young maize.
Then it rained. Gloriously, for days. And when the sun returned, it revealed a world of color as saturated as the gomesi, the ladies’ dresses, at a wedding party. Red soil, blue sky, and everything else green, green, green. On the side of the road, cows were tethered on fresh patches of grass, grazing contentedly in the afternoon’s long shadows. Goats knelt on folded front legs, as though in prayer, to nibble at soft new shoots.
Feeling the cooling breeze whisking through the windows of Mike’s car, Gladys glimpsed in every direction figures bent intently over the land. After waiting so long for the rain, people rushed to tend this good damp soil. In bristling rice paddies, scanty bean patches, and endless maize fields, backs might be aching, but the sight of such industriousness cheered the heart. With hard work, what might her own plot of land soon produce?
Gladys recalled the sweaty satisfaction of working in her grandparents’ gardens. On Saturdays she and the rest of the children would be digging, each sprout and seedling a tiny investment in the season. There was a mild, steady pleasure, like the breeze of a fan, in the knowledge that what they helped cultivate would someday be served at their own table. Groundnut, cassava, sweet potato, sugarcane, papaya—all was grown not for selling but for eating.
The garden produced fine coffee too. They would dry it, roast it, and grind it. Her grandfather and her grandy would sit at their own small table with individual steaming pots. And the flavor! That one was so good. The coffee people drank today, it was brown water compared to the coffee of Gladys’s childhood. And they wondered why she only took tea.
Back then she was not Gladys. Everyone called her by her nickname, Gida. As the only girl among the fourteen children in the home, Gida was assigned to the gardens’ only decorative crop: flowers. Every Sunday she would cut fresh blooms for the sitting room: red roses, pink roses, and some buttery yellow ones. One expected visitors at the reverend’s house after church, and it was up to Gida to create a bouquet to welcome them as they walked through the door. How she had loved that job!
What happened to that culture? she wondered now. Maybe everyone had gotten too busy. When her gardens started producing, perhaps she would set aside a patch for flowers.
Gladys reeled in her mental kite string to focus on the afternoon’s mission. She, Mike, and Esther were running late even by their own loose standards. The morning police station rounds had delayed their departure from Kampala. They were only midway through their three-and-a-half-hour drive northeast to Kaliro District, and already the sun was dropping as fast as a stone in water.
Well, they might end up convening at dusk, like moths. So be it. It was an important meeting, as it concerned a baby.
BEFORE SHE COULD make any plans to help a child, Gladys needed to find out all she could about how that particular child had come to be endangered. Some children were simply lost—those who let go of a mother’s hand in a taxi park, for instance. Others were abandoned by overwhelmed relatives. Then there were kids who were mistreated or kidnapped or forced to beg in the streets. In every case, it was crucial not only to locate parents or relatives but to assess whether those family members might be counted on to assist the child.
Whenever possible, Gladys pursued her own investigations in order to make these assessments. Most case reports she received were little more than lists of facts. Sifting out the real story could be like guessing a fruit’s flavor from the description of its shape, color, and weight. In the end, one had to climb the tree to taste it for oneself.
Take the report on today’s case. It told her that the victim in the matter was a baby named Benjamin, now one year old. Benjamin’s father, Ivan Nabwami, was being held in remand for child neglect. According to the report, Benjamin’s mother was Ivan’s second wife, Sylvia. Five months after giving birth, Sylvia had left the boy with Ivan and his first wife. In their care, Benjamin had suffered severe burns. The first wife claimed that she had intended only to bathe the baby, not to scald him. The police detained her, but as she was heavily pregnant, she was released. The baby had been temporarily placed in Young Hearts Orphanage, a children’s home in Jinja.
Gladys planned to check on Benjamin, but first she had questions. As one officer had recently observed, with a mixture of admiration and bemusement, “The police just want to know who, what, where, and when. Gladys wants also to know why!” Of course! What good were four of the W’s without the fifth? How could one find proper solutions without the Why?
To get to the Why, Gladys wanted to meet the second wife, this Sylvia who had placed her newborn Benjamin in such a situation. What woman would give up her baby of five months and dump him with the man’s first wife? Everyone knew of the problems when a cowife was forced to assume care of another woman’s baby. Sylvia might be mentally defective. Or maybe, Gladys surmised, she was young and unable to cope.
Also, Gladys had not seen many fathers put in prison for neglect. Men were almost never arrested in this common situation. The report said that this Ivan had actually been brought to court and locked up. Why this one?
TO GET TO the heart of the matter, she would trace the story back to the Where: the home of Benjamin’s mother, Sylvia, near Kaliro town.
They reached Kaliro in classic Uganda time—so delayed that everyone feared to look at the clock. Gladys got out of the car and looked up and down the street for Collins, the probation officer on the case. But she did not know what he looked like, as they had not met before.
She called his mobile. “We are finally here. Just look for the fattest lady in town.”
A pause on the other end, then: “I see you.”
A thin middle-aged man in dark trousers and a long-sleeved plaid shirt advanced toward the car, phone in hand. Though he had waited for her for hours, Collins returned Gladys’s greeting of “Sorry, sorry!” with a light smile.
“This is Martin Waiswa, the grandfather of Benjamin, the father to Sylvia,” Collins said, introducing the solemn-faced man stepping up beside him. Martin had a dusting of white stubble on his scalp and a deep, bird-in-flight crease extending across his forehead.
The family’s village was a little over a mile away. Even for the short drive, Gladys could not hold back her questions.
“So, old man, why did your daughter dump her baby of five months?”
“The girl was impregnated when she was still in school,” Martin answered.
“So she is young?”
“Yes. Sixteen.”
“Ah.” Gladys’s hunch had been on target
. This case involved not just one child but two.
IN THE FEW minutes it took to reach the village, the afternoon began its surrender to evening, the sky shifting from blue to gray. A few crickets started up a mild chorus, chirping at a heartbeat tempo.
Martin’s compound was surprisingly large, with one finished brick house and five small huts: three for sleeping, two for kitchen and storage. Gladys and Esther stopped to appreciate the new green maize planted nearby, and a cheerful patch of beans. Soon there would be a nice harvest from this investment.
As family members emerged from the house with a bench, a couple of wooden stools, and a plastic chair, Gladys met Winnie, Martin’s wife. The woman had to be close to forty, but the loose blue cloth around her small, impish face gave her the air of a child playing dress-up.
“So where is your daughter, the mother of Benjamin?”
“She is that one,” said the mother, pointing. “Sylvia.”
Gladys looked over to see a girl in a long red skirt and a pink-sleeved top decorated with a rainbow and the phrase HAPPY SWEET MISS. Sylvia smiled shyly at the ground as she knelt in greeting.
“My God! This sweet one . . . eeeeh!” Gladys’s exclamation stretched out as long as a rooster’s crow. “She even fears to look at people. Look at me.”
The girl lifted her chin, but she still did not meet Gladys’s gaze. The roundness of her features was not completely youthful; there were shadowed furrows extending down from the inner corners of her puffy eyes, as though a flow of tears had left permanent tracks.
Gladys placed an arm around Sylvia, cooing like a doting aunt. “How are you? But you look cute. What class are you studying?”
“P Six.”
“P Six. Oh my God.” This “second wife” was still only in primary school. “Where do you go to school?”