by Jessica Yu
“If you think you can’t do well in the classroom, learn to do stuff with your hands,” Mike urged. “Learn to fix cars. Learn to be a carpenter. There is no job that is not meant for girls. You can do anything a boy can do.”
Esther the electrician nodded approvingly. For her part, Sylvia seemed startled by this attention from an adult male—attention that was neither authoritarian nor seductive. She ducked out of its path as if it were intended for someone else.
“If you can learn to make sweaters,” Gladys jumped in, picking up the thread, “you can make sweaters for different schools here, and before you realize it, you will have changed your life! So you mustn’t just sit here and think that there’s nothing you can do.” She circled the girl with an arm. “I don’t like hearing that you don’t want to go back to school. Is this what you want? To stay in the village and have these men make babies in you all the time?”
“Maybe I will go back next year,” Sylvia mumbled unconvincingly.
“Next year? And miss two terms?”
No answer came. The girl’s eyes were opaque in the full dark. The night had left no light to reflect in them.
“WHY DON’T THESE men like Ivan want to use contraception?” It was a short drive to get Collins back to town, and Gladys would not waste her remaining minutes with the veteran probation officer.
Collins spread his hands. “They say that God told them to do—what?”
“‘I’m sending you into the world to produce so that your number grows,’” Gladys paraphrased.
“Yes!” Collins uttered, startled that one of his questions had actually been answered.
“So they quote the Bible.”
“Yes. And they say that family planning is put there by the mzungus to keep the numbers of Africans down.”
“Ah, so they think the Europeans want to make Africans reduce their number.” Gladys had heard this theory before. “But do they see the mzungus producing like this?”
Collins’s laugh was good-natured. He stepped out of the car and into the late night, waving away Gladys’s thanks and apologies. The man had the patience of a tortoise crossing the Kalahari.
The main road was clogged with swaying sugarcane trucks, their cargo piled precariously high above the walls of their beds. As the car grudgingly trailed the overloaded caravan, Gladys mulled over the evening’s revelations. What could she form out of this story, now that she had her Who, What, Where, When, and Why?
She found her thoughts drifting past baby Benjamin to his teenage mother. Sylvia was a child too. She lived under her parents’ roof. She appeared healthy. Yet she still seemed somehow “lost and abandoned.”
“I didn’t like how Sylvia thinks she can’t learn,” Gladys mused out loud. “It’s good that Mike has tried to talk some sense into her. Just because she has produced a child doesn’t mean she can’t go back to school or go in for something!”
“The father is putting that idea in her head: You can’t pick studies,” Mike responded, bristling. “So they are agreed on that—they confirm each other’s low opinion of her abilities.”
“That’s very, very wrong!” Gladys said. “You can’t tell a girl of that age that she can’t do anything. No. She’s too young to give in like that.”
“The problem is, they don’t have anybody around who is an example,” said Esther.
“Yes. An auntie who is a nurse or policewoman . . .”
“The only example she has is marriage.”
But for Sylvia, even that path had become obstructed, Mike reminded them. A girl who had been sampled and burdened with another man’s child was damaged goods. She would not fetch a high dowry.
A man might normally demand two cows for a daughter, Mike estimated. “Then maybe three or four goats. And two chickens.”
“People in this area cannot afford such a dowry,” Esther countered. “You might find in some cases that it is just one goat.”
“In this century!” Gladys smacked her lips in disapproval.
“It is what is happening in many villages,” Esther observed in her impassive way, as though she were talking about the traffic or the weather or the corruption of politicians.
“But how do we change it?” Gladys scolded, glaring out at the oil-black countryside. “It must change, surely!”
It made no sense to treat a wife like a breeding sow and daughters as livestock. Why not just raise cattle or goats in the first place? Or plant more crops. Or educate your child to enable her to contribute to the family upkeep. Surely that was the best investment the family could make. It was the only form of wealth that could not be taken away.
“And the price of a chapati?” Mike prompted.
“Five hundred,” the women answered in unison.
“So this man Ivan, he gets himself sex, he takes everything from this girl, for five hundred shillings.” The price of one minute of airtime. “Can you imagine?”
“‘But he promised me chapati and shoes.’” Gladys imitated Sylvia’s soft voice, then gave a yelp of physical pain. “Eee! Oh my God. All your future, you surrender. For a chapati. And shoes that do not come.”
It wasn’t only girls in rural families. In his latest column, Dr. Love had chastised parents for pressing their daughters to find husbands immediately after college. He urged them to give their graduate “say, ten years, so she will have time to see the world, discover herself, and make money.” It was a tough sell. At every level of society, a girl was a hanging piece of fruit, prized only as long as she was ripe for picking.
EVERY DAY THAT Gladys had lived with her grandparents, she had known her value. She learned as the boys learned, she played as they played, and she worked as they worked. In Grandfather Obadiah’s eyes, however, she was not the boys’ equal. She was something more. When he went into town to sell eggs and gather provisions and make visits, his Gida was the one he chose to accompany him. Sitting at his side, how could she fail to feel important?
Gida was the only kid who was never caned. Oh, the canings were funny to remember now. Her grandfather thought it wrong to break off a stiff branch to use on a child, so he would use the soft banana leaves used for wrapping food. Although it was like being beaten by a feather duster, the naughty boys would cry and put on a show. But Grandfather could never punish his beloved Gida. He could not even pretend to punish her. She was special.
Ah, but that life was good! And even when life became bad, after her grandfather’s death, her father’s abandonment, and so many other reversals, she never forgot that she was special. Perhaps it was this knowledge that had carried her through everything that came to pass. If the ones who raise you give you love, she thought, there is a way you feel that your life is worth living.
And here, this Sylvia. This was a beautiful young girl. But everyone, including the girl herself, had written her off as a loss. Her value was less than that of a goat.
No wonder she had succumbed to the charms of that chapati. It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t witchcraft. It was only that the chapati made her believe that she was special.
Zam
Life was tough for the very poor. More so for very poor women; most of all for very poor young mothers. But the bleak truth was, no matter how difficult their lot, it was up to these girls to build something out of their lives. No one would be there to do it for them.
In her work Gladys paid special attention to struggling mothers, stressing to them that their lives had not ended. “You are young,” she would urge. “You can still be creative. What do you feel you can do? What help do you need to do it?”
Sometimes they needed a bit of shaking up. There were some, like Sylvia, whose belief in their own dependency had made them vulnerable in the first place. But given half a chance, a girl could show surprising resourcefulness.
A year ago, when Gladys was researching a story on the problems of teen pregnancy, she met two young women at a resource center for teens: Banura, seventeen, and her cousin, Zam, twenty-two. Gladys was drawn to the plight of Banu
ra, who had been raped by an uncle when she was thirteen. Now HIV-positive and the mother of a three-year-old daughter and an infant son, the girl was so dispirited she hardly seemed to notice her children. Zam, who was acting as a “peer mother” to her younger cousin, was pregnant herself.
As Banura mumbled and sighed out her answers to the reporter’s questions, she absently nursed her baby at her breast. Gladys said nothing at the time, but this risk of HIV transmission worried her for days. Even if she scrounged up 40,000 shillings to buy Banura infant formula, what would happen when the tin went empty? The girl needed some means to support herself and her children.
Some poking and prodding revealed a flicker of interest in the idea of a small business. Gladys raised a little bit of capital for Banura to start up a food kiosk and some funds to send her daughter to school for two terms. When Gladys had no funds for the third term, Banura proudly declared that she had earned enough from her enterprise to cover her daughter’s fees by herself. It was a modest but undeniable triumph.
When Banura’s older cousin Zam gave birth to her own baby, she came to Gladys. “Mommy, the father of the child abandoned me,” she said. “Can you assist us? I am here too.”
As Gladys had catered for Banura, it seemed only fair to help Zam. After two months she had gathered enough money for a little stove and some pots, stools, and cooking oil. The young woman did not let her down. Within days Zam was up and running, stirring pots of piping hot katogo, a breakfast dish one could sell all day, on a busy Kampala lane.
THE VALUES OF resilience and creativity Gladys held up to those young women loomed large as she planned her own three-acre startup. The entrepreneurial spirit had infected Esther as well. She purchased a smaller land parcel less than an hour’s walk from Gladys’s plot. The two friends joked that they were starting their own village.
As Gladys could not afford to make the trip to the plot in Luwero more than once a month or so, she required help in managing her land. And as she knew no one in the area, she had only one choice: the man who had sold her the parcel of land, Jovan Kiviri.
In those parts, Kiviri was a big man, a successful landlord. It seemed that everyone knew Kiviri, and everyone grumbled about him. Gladys began sending Kiviri regular payments through her phone: 150,000 shillings a month to oversee her parcel and hire laborers to tend to the land.
On her visits, the progress was visible to Gladys: the cleared brush and weeds, the rows of grasslike maize shoots, young beans and cassava plants, the lines of saplings that would grow to delineate the edges of her property. It was looking more and more like a real garden.
While it would take many years to realize her dream of a children’s home, she was eager to start building something on the land. A simple house. Through some great stroke of luck or act of God, an offering of funds came to her from some Good Samaritans.
Aside from the occasional round at the office, Gladys refrained from personally soliciting donations; if people wanted to help, they would do it on their own. If readers were moved to assist a child, they could call the phone numbers listed in her column. Sometimes people would call her to ask where to send money. Or they would donate goods: books, bedding, clothing. After she wrote an article about a boda driver who had been mangled in a truck collision, a reader even donated a supply of colostomy bags. She never expected to receive any donations herself, though, so she was overwhelmed to receive support from some Americans who had heard of her work with needy people.
The funds were not enough to finish construction, but with Kiviri’s help she went ahead and started anyway. After a few weeks a solid cement foundation stood in the middle of her plot, circumscribed by a two-foot-high brick wall, marking the precise point at which the money had run out.
Gladys hoped that such sturdy groundwork would declare her presence to the neighborhood: she was here to stay. One could argue that the stunted foundation only underlined the owner’s lack of resources, but Gladys enjoyed gazing upon it. It was a step forward.
As the months went by, though, expenses continued to mount. Labor costs. Bush clearing. Hoes. Slashers. Jerry cans for water. More bush clearing. Spraying for pests. Gladys hadn’t known about the need to spray beans!
When she expressed discouragement, Esther assured her, “It is always like that. You can’t get money out of nothing. You have to put money in to get money out.”
While Gladys did not expect much bounty from the first crops, the prospect of chipping away at her debt excited her. But the first harvest disappointed even her modest expectations: the two paltry sacks of beans did not even cover her labor costs.
Prospects for the next harvest looked no brighter. Some of the crops were growing more slowly than expected. The weather was again unseasonably dry. Most disturbing, though, were the subtle signs of plunder. Beans were disappearing. Ears of maize vanished off stalks.
PROBLEMS DEMANDED ANALYSIS; solutions required creativity. Gladys spent her long commuting hours and sleepless nights thinking on her situation. Everyone knew that the large lady who owned this plot did not live in the village. They could see her arriving on a boda boda, visiting the gardens for a few hours, then moving back down to the main road to catch a taxi. They knew she would not soon return. Maybe not even for a month.
With gardens, Gladys had learned, thieves usually came in the night. But her place was unattended: anyone could pick and choose from her gardens in broad daylight, like shoppers at the market. There was little risk in snatching a few ears of maize or some beans, especially when the theft might go unnoticed for weeks.
Gladys could not hold Kiviri responsible for such setbacks. His own home sat way over near the main road, and anyway, it was not Kiviri’s job to monitor who might be coming or going. The gardens needed someone to guard them.
It was then that Gladys started to think about Zam.
RECENTLY THE YOUNG women’s food businesses had not been doing well. The police performed periodic sweeps of the neighborhood, overturning kiosks in an effort to clear the streets of informal vendors. In the latest raid, Zam and Banura had lost their frying pans and other supplies.
It occurred to Gladys that Zam might be interested in a job. The girl had shown initiative by acting as her cousin’s peer mother and approaching Gladys for help when her own baby was born. She might be the type to make something of such an opportunity. After all, the ultimate purpose behind Gladys’s farming enterprise was to support her kids and other disadvantaged people. So why was she paying Kiviri 150,000 shillings a month when she could be directing that money to a needy young mother?
It was not that Gladys believed that Zam could run the place. The young woman might have no experience at all in farming. But Gladys was looking for someone she could trust.
Even if she could trust her, would Zam want to come out to this country place? She was a city dweller, living on the lively, crowded Kampala streets of malls and shops and music and crowds and cars. There were no big buildings out here in the village. The nights were black and quiet. Move here? The girl might laugh in Gladys’s face.
Prepared to spend a good amount of time selling the positives of this homely endeavor, Gladys introduced the idea to Zam. But the girl immediately said, “Oh! Yes, Mommy, I am ready! Where is the place?”
“It is deep in the village!” Gladys replied, startled into more candor than she had planned.
“Oh, it is not such a problem,” Zam said easily, “whether the village or what.”
“But really, can you dig? You, who have been staying in town?”
“I remember digging at my father’s place when I was eight years old.” The family garden had paid for young Zam’s school fees.
“Okay.” Gladys suddenly felt like it was she who had just been convinced, rather than the other way around. “I want you to help me.”
She invited Zam to the New Vision offices to discuss the plan. They sat down in the conference room and compiled a list of requirements for Zam’s new home: a mattress, a blanket,
saucepans, jerry cans, a lamp, a kettle, plates, a knife, a spoon, paraffin, salt, soap. They wrote down everything they could think of, down to packets of matchbooks. The projected costs were daunting, but Gladys agreed to cover them. She would not dump this young mother and baby in that remote place without basic necessities.
Zam and her baby, Maria, could not live on the plot itself, with only the foundation of the house completed. Gladys rented a small room from a woman with a house a couple of miles away, near Esther’s plot. Some kind neighbors there were willing to watch baby Maria when Zam went to tend to the gardens.
The living arrangement did not give the gardens much security from thieves, but at least Gladys now had an ally on the ground.
“THIS IS A good-sized plot, Gladys,” Mike remarked. “You can do a lot with this piece of land.”
It was a pleasantly overcast November day in Luwero; an early-morning sprinkling of rain had intensified the colors of dark earth and green vegetation. As they walked the length of Gladys’s parcel, Esther breathed deeply, appreciatively. Unlike city air, fumy with exhaust and sewage and burning trash, this air was sweetly filtered through trees and bush.
“I tell you, I was overwhelmed,” Gladys said. “What to plant here, what to plant there . . .”
“Didn’t you want more land, not less?” Esther teased.
The two women had not been able to visit their gardens for weeks, and they were eager to measure the height of the stalks and the breadth of the leaves with their own eyes. They hastened past some thorny branches, ignoring their snagged skirts.
Gladys was eager for counsel. Her land was still a patchwork: there were areas with crops, areas still thick with bush, and cleared sections that had not yet been planted. As with almost all subjects, Mike was quite knowledgeable about farming. As they walked, the trio discussed various options for the uncommitted areas: coffee, jackfruit, papaya, pumpkin, groundnuts, avocado, pineapple, cacao, perhaps mangoes . . .