by Jessica Yu
“He has no other clothes?”
“The ones he had were burned,” an officer explained. This sleeveless top had seemed the best choice to avoid aggravating the blisters.
Gladys noticed that the boy’s feet were bare. “What about shoes?”
“Everything was stolen.” Junior spoke Luganda in a husky whisper.
“Stolen?”
“When I ran away from the fire, I left my slippers there. Someone took them.”
“Ehhh . . . So when that thing exploded, everyone started running away. Show me, where did it happen?”
Junior pointed toward the back of the station, where the children often loitered around the wrecked cars. The half-dozen crushed and rusted heaps, one perplexingly upside down, had been there as long as anyone could remember. Between them, in the open area where sewage and other refuse was dumped down the slope to the street, a dark circle of black ash stretched across the dirt.
“The place where you were burned? It was right there?”
The boy nodded, his voice quiet but matter-of-fact. “The officer, he told us to clear some stuff out of storage for him. And then he told us to light it up and to make sure it burned completely. I was standing near there and something exploded.”
“What exploded?”
“It was a tin.”
“So when it exploded, it sprayed something on you.”
“Yes.”
“How about the other boys? How were they burned?”
“One on the face, the other on the leg.”
“Badly?”
“With one kid, the eye nearly came out.”
“Eh!” Gladys’s exclamation rose sharply, as though she herself had been burned. It was outrageous, the negligence! But it would not do to rant and rave. To assist the boy, she required the cooperation of the police.
Mugerwa Junior gazed into space while the adults talked over his situation. He seemed frozen, as if even the movement of air on his skin might bring pain. There were grooves of fatigue under his bloodshot eyes. Those red eyes had been another reason that Gladys had originally declined to place the boy. Perhaps it was irritation from living out in the elements for so long, but it could also be a sign of drug use.
Another officer, a young man also with the family name Mugerwa, tried to assist in getting more information from the boy. “Junior, is Mugerwa your father’s name?
The boy’s voice was barely a whisper. “No.”
“Yes, but if your name is Junior,” said Esther, “then you must have your father’s name.”
The boy shook his head. He did not know it.
“How can he not know his father’s name?” Gladys wondered aloud. He claimed he had been on the street for so long he could not name his father or his mother, nor any place he had lived. How could she resettle such a child? Whose past contained no A to B but only endless wandering?
“Has he been given any medicine?” Gladys asked.
“Yes,” responded Officer Mugerwa. “We gave him some pills at the clinic.”
The boy produced the plastic bag he had been given. The adults held it up in the sunlight and took turns squinting at the three types of pills inside.
“Amox . . .” muttered Gladys, recognizing the antibiotic. “This one?” She pointed to a second group of capsules.
Officer Mugerwa shrugged.
The third medication was Panadol. “Eh, Panadol is no longer issued to people,” Gladys noted, clucking. There had been a move to ban the painkiller because of safety concerns. But the police clinic was little more than a desk and a couple of boxes of supplies; it provided what was on hand.
“Has he taken his medicine yet?” Esther asked.
“I don’t think so,” Officer Mugerwa replied. “He is supposed to take it on a full stomach.”
Gladys suppressed her dismay. Of course the boy couldn’t swallow medicine. There was no breakfast at the station. No food was available until the afternoon, when the maize flour was mixed into kawunga. And there was no guarantee that a street boy would get a share of the porridge, especially if Rebecca was absent. Eh! The clinic just tossed these pills to the boy, never questioning how he would achieve “a full stomach.”
Junior confirmed that he hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day, so Mike took him to a nearby food kiosk. As they waited in line, the boy maintained his still posture, eyes unblinking, his blistered arm held slightly away from his side. There was a sense of vigilance about him, as if he were monitoring a radio frequency too high for anyone else to hear. A black-and-white kitten crouched by the kiosk, meowing loudly, its cries histrionic next to Junior’s stoicism.
When they returned to the bench, soda and cake in hand, Gladys had already sprung into action. She held one phone to her ear while she pressed the keypad of a second one on her lap. “The Mango lines are down . . . Esther, can you try the number on your phone? Do you have MTN or Mango? Try MTN. Why isn’t Rebecca picking up? Eh! I’ll try Caring Hands now. Okay, it’s ringing.”
Gladys finally reached Dr. John Mundaka, a physician associated with Caring Hands, an NGO that offered support to critically needy patients at Mulago, Uganda’s largest hospital. “How come I can’t reach you?” she cooed into the phone, her voice mock flirtatious. “You do not love me anymore!”
Pleasantries, even brief ones, were important to maintaining such relationships. When you turned to someone for help, it would not do to burst in with your demands. A moment of friendliness showed appreciation and smoothed the way. It was like Junior and his pills. You had to give a bit of food before the medicine.
“So the reason why I am calling you today is that I am in urgent need,” she began. “I have a boy at Old Kampala who was involved in some kind of an accident. I can’t explain it right now. He needs to go to Mulago, but I don’t want to dump him there and leave him on his own. That’s why I wanted to alert you.”
A boy of eleven or twelve could not navigate Mulago Hospital by himself. In that crowded place, how would he know where to go? Which line to stand in? How would he understand what the doctors said? Plus he had no money for food or medicine. He might wander off into the street again.
Dr. John told Gladys to take the boy to the social worker at Mulago Hospital. Gladys scribbled in her notebook and again attempted to reach Officer Rebecca. Neither she nor Esther had any luck on their phones.
“What do I do?” Gladys mumbled, rubbing her chin. “I do not want to make all my decisions while Rebecca is not here. But her number does not go through.”
Beside her on the bench, Mugerwa Junior nibbled at his large square of yellow cake, a bottle of cola held between his knees. The lap of the camisole top was littered with crumbs. Flies hovered around his uncapped soda bottle. One landed on the seeping burn on the back of his right hand. Junior tried to wave it away with his left, and his finger grazed the wound. He inhaled sharply and quivered, as though someone had slapped him awake. It was his first visible acknowledgment of pain.
“Can he take the pills now?”
“The soda takes some time to settle,” Esther said.
“He should have had water.” Gladys shook her head reproachfully. Of course a child would choose soda.
At last the call went through. “Ah, Rebecca. I’ve been at your place here for an hour and I’m about to leave,” Gladys said. “I couldn’t leave without talking to you and making some decisions. The burns are turning to sores now. The boy needs to be checked.”
After a brief discussion, Rebecca authorized the young Officer Mugerwa to stay with Junior once Gladys got his situation cleared up at Mulago Hospital. Gladys hung up and gave a satisfied laugh. Good. She had arranged the first step of the plan.
And now it was time to rearrange her original plan. What appointments would she fail to make today? “Now this is the problem with Gladys,” she said, staring down at her keypad again. “My schedule of work keeps changing. ‘You said you would be here at noon!’ she mimicked in a high, irritated voice as a ringtone sounded in her e
ar. “Oh my God . . .”
MULAGO HOSPITAL, a challenge to navigate under regular circumstances, was undergoing major renovation. Trucks and workers weaved through paths already congested with regular hospital activity. Departments were temporarily relocated, sending disoriented clients from building to building. Traffic entering the complex was redirected through different gates, the route changing constantly.
“We’ll have to go through the back,” Mike said. “Through the mortuary side.” It was hardly an auspicious sign, entering a hospital through the mortuary.
“No, that way is also blocked,” Esther disagreed.
While Mike and Esther quibbled over where to enter, Gladys thought about the impending meeting with Faith Karamagi, the principal medical social worker at Mulago. She had not worked directly with this Faith before. It was the social worker’s job to assist patients with challenging issues; no doubt many cases landed on Faith’s desk each day. Even in that stack of files, surely Junior—with his physical trauma, his youth, and his abandoned status—warranted particular attention. Gladys would do her best to press his case, but one never knew what to expect. Would she find a like-minded ally or someone who could not be bothered?
THE MEDICAL SOCIAL WORKER’S office suggested an orderly inhabitant: the walls were free of posters, the floors uncluttered by boxes, the desk tidy, with files lined up in three straight stacks. Faith was about Gladys’s age—early fifties—a neatly composed figure in a beige business suit. She greeted her visitors, her manner courteous but watchful. Along the side wall, two coworkers sat quietly in observation.
Gladys introduced herself as a journalist from New Vision and Mugerwa Junior as a boy whom she had profiled. “You see, I put those missing children in my column.”
Faith rested her hands on her desk. “I know. I have been following your column for some time.”
“Thank you!” said Gladys, encouraged. “Now, I published this one’s story, but no relatives have appeared yet. And then there is this accident.” She waved at Junior, who was standing stiffly by the door. “Come closer!”
All eyes fixed on the boy as he made his way to the empty chair centered in front of Faith’s desk. Junior sat down gingerly, careful not to touch his arms to the chair’s arms. He tucked his bare feet under the seat as though to hide them.
Faith’s brow furrowed as she looked him up and down, perplexed by the lacy camisole top. “It’s a boy,” she said finally.
“Yes, it’s a boy.” Gladys briefly explained how the three boys had been injured in the chemical fire. “The other two were burned badly. I’m not a doctor, but I think this boy is also burned badly. Police are now asking me who will be caring for him. I told them, if we get in touch with these people at Mulago, they have been so good to us whenever we have taken a child over there.”
The social worker gazed steadily at Gladys, her expression unreadable. Gladys pressed on.
“Dr. John at Caring Hands advised me to get in touch with you. He told me, ‘She will work it out for you.’”
“You have to go to Acute, and they will probably refer you to Burns,” Faith said.
If this was a note of dismissal, Gladys chose not to receive it as such. “Ah, so Burns may be another department,” she said, taking this as the pertinent information. “Of course I would like to turn him over to someone directly.”
“We are not the ones who admit the patients,” the social worker clarified. “With these cases, sometimes they need you to get in touch with the police office.”
“Madame Faith. I understand what you are saying. In fact, a police officer who has been involved in this case will be meeting us here later. I was able to get him out of the office briefly.”
“Which one?”
“Officer Mugerwa of Old Kampala.”
“But he’s supposed to come with the child.” Faith gave a skeptical chuckle. “It is not ‘getting him out of the office.’ He’s supposed to bring the child.”
Gladys had overplayed the point, and she laughed too. No sense in trying to cover.
Another worker entered the office then. He frowned and gestured at the child. “So he is a boy?”
Everyone tittered.
“Yes,” Gladys said. “This is Mugerwa Junior.”
“Junior?” questioned Faith.
“It seems he must have the father’s name, but he doesn’t know it.” The answer dissatisfied Gladys even as she offered it. The boy needed a proper name. He could not just be the “junior” to a man whose name he could not recall.
“Call him Godfrey,” she added, impulsively offering the name of her own beloved brother who had passed away. “Godfrey Mugerwa.”
“So he does not know his parents.”
Gladys shook her head. “He told me that he only recalls one time that he was moving with his parents. They reached the park and he needed to relieve himself. So instead of telling his parents where he was going, he just—you know, as a small boy, he could just sneak out and do his thing. But by the time he came back, he couldn’t see them anymore. And you know, with such a place, the more you keep running around to look for someone, the more you get lost.”
The social worker nodded. This happened often in Kampala. A child could disappear in a city crowd quicker than a pebble in a sack of beans.
“So that’s how he parted from his parents. When you ask him how long ago, he says, ‘I don’t know, I’ve been here for so long.’” Gladys imitated the boy’s small voice. “‘I don’t remember how many years, but I’ve been on the street all the time.’ On reaching Old Kampala Police Station, he told them, ‘I’m tired of the street. I want to go to school.’ That’s why they called me.
“At first I was hesitating. I don’t trust street children. But for the more than three weeks he has stayed at Old Kampala, the in-charge, Rebecca, has confirmed that he has not been behaving like street children. You know how those street children always appear there? Within three days they disappear again.”
Faith nodded. “Here, after you treat them, they will run away.”
“By the way!” Gladys agreed. “That’s what the in-charge was telling me. So she was trying to study this one. She knew that within a week, if he was not serious, he would run away. He has not. And it’s coming up to a month. So I’m now trying to see if I can get him treatment and then take him out of police hands.”
“I understand,” Faith said, her tone neutral. It was hard to gauge the impact of the boy’s story on her. She did not chime in with affirmations or exclamations; she did not even straighten files or fiddle with a pen. She only listened and watched.
“I think he would be better off if I can get him in a boarding school. My suggestion would be Entebbe Early Learning School. I need him in a friendly environment. And the director there is so friendly. I have not taken there any children from the street . . .” Gladys gestured at the boy. “But this one needs love. He has not been loved for so many years. He missed that age, you know, where your mom pampers you.” The half smile that had softened her face was shaken away by a confident nod. “If he gets cured, I can connect him to Early Learning School.”
Faith allowed a short pause to confirm the end of Gladys’s testimony. Then she unfolded her hands and placed them on the desk, as if to push herself up. “Let’s get him to Acute. And let them advise us what we are going to do.”
“Okay,” agreed Gladys, inwardly rejoicing at the social worker’s use of we. “We will follow you.”
AS GLADYS, ESTHER, and the boy trailed Faith to the Acute Care Unit, the disruption from the hospital’s renovation became more evident, as their way was blocked and rerouted around construction materials, vehicles, obstructed entrances, and makeshift waiting areas.
When they crossed from one building to another, a man in a lab coat spotted Junior and did a double-take. He nudged his companion and gestured. His companion gasped audibly as the burned boy passed.
Entering a courtyard, Faith led them along a dispirited line of people snaking do
wn a very long hallway. Junior Godfrey started at the wild-animal squeal of a passing gurney. A young man in a bloody shirt was sitting upright on the gurney, pointing in different directions, trying to help the orderly navigate.
“The main building is being renovated,” explained Faith, “so almost every corner is turned into a treatment area.”
As they walked alongside the queue, more battered gurneys rattled by, full ones going in, a couple of empty ones coming out. The line terminated in a knot of people pressed up against a glass reception window. Above a doorway was taped a handwritten paper sign: CASUALITY UNIT.
“This is our emergency room,” Faith said.
Watching Faith move to the head of the queue to speak directly to the man at the desk, Gladys felt a surge of relief. Thank God the social worker had agreed to assist them. All around, clusters of people lined the walls: women and babies, grandmothers, a man curled on the floor in a fetal position. Some might have been there since seven in the morning. They might spend the whole day waiting in line, in all levels of distress and pain and hunger and fatigue.
This is why Gladys had begged. Her approach had been light and respectful, but really she had begged. Junior Godfrey was just a boy. You could not send a boy to a hallway like this and tell yourself you had helped him.
NOW THAT THE boy would be examined here, they would need to enter his name on the admission forms. Names were a concern for Gladys, as her editors always demanded proper identification for the people she wrote about. That was not always possible for, say, a nine-month-old baby found by a roadside or a teenager with mental deficiencies. Given that Mugerwa Junior Godfrey was clear of mind and at least eleven years of age, she was irked by the lack of clarity over his true name.