by Jessica Yu
“Gladys,” Mike announced when they were back on the road, “I can’t take any more!” He chuckled without mirth. “That girl . . . the baby . . . really, Gladys, I want you out of my car!”
Gladys’s laugh was simpler; she had heard such sentiments before. “That is what my boss Cathy tells me sometimes. ‘Please, Gladys. Not today. Spare me today.’”
Life spared no one, though, so one had to savor the small triumphs whenever they came.
Like this one: their return to Old Kampala Station to retrieve Junior Godfrey. Mike could not sit back to enjoy the moment, as the roadway was even more congested than usual. While he muttered under—and over—his breath, Gladys relished the sight of Junior sitting in the front passenger seat. He was finally leaving the police station. From now on this boy would ride in vehicles, not sleep in them.
In his lap the boy clutched a small plastic bag of pills. In addition to his white T-shirt, his blue pants, his slippers, and the checked hankie Mike had given him, this was all he owned in the world. Gladys knew she could not take him to Early Learning School with so little. She did not have money to buy him a mattress, but they could find him a cheap blanket on the way to Entebbe.
“Godfrey, how do you feel, leaving this place?”
The boy didn’t answer.
“Godfrey?” He turned and blinked at her. “Don’t forget your name now. You are Mugerwa Junior Godfrey. I want to know, how do you feel being taken away from this place now?”
“I feel so good, leaving here.”
She offered him a biscuit, which he accepted with a clear “Thank you.”
“Eh!” Gladys uttered. “You know some English.”
He reverted to Luganda. “I know a little. I hear how people greet each other.”
“Have you ever been to school?”
“No. Never.”
She had feared as much. “What do you want to study? What kind of work do you want to do?”
“I want to be a policeman.”
“Eh! Like Officer Rebecca.” This was an uncommon aspiration for a street kid. Most boys his age dreamed of becoming football stars. “What you must know: to be like Rebecca, you must study. You must study very hard. Because you’ve never been to school, you will find yourself in a class with very young children. So you will be bigger than the others. But you should not worry about that. Just study. Do what you have to do.”
Junior nodded. This one was not too old to catch up, she thought. Not like poor Ezra. When she had taken Ezra to Early Learning School, he had been about seventeen years old. In a class with seven-year-olds! And unable to count to fifty. He had made progress, but the gap between him and his peers still loomed large.
This boy, though, seemed primed for the challenge. His hands were small and his voice high, but there was a hard seed of resolve planted in that soft ground. Although he had been living the street life, he identified less with his peers than with the police. Perhaps he had, as Rebecca had suspected, taken the name Mugerwa after Officer Mugerwa.
“Why do you like the idea of becoming a policeman?” Gladys asked.
The young voice answered swiftly. “I want to stop instability in this country.”
Mike released a snort of admiration. “That is a very sophisticated answer,” he said in English.
“I wouldn’t expect such a one to give me that reason,” Gladys agreed.
Mike glanced over at his small passenger, following up in his language. “How do you judge ‘instability’ in your own mind?”
“When people like to fight each other. They kill each other, they torture each other. That’s what I want to stop.”
“Where have you been seeing that?” Gladys asked.
“The street. They have been beating the weak people. Or even beating their friends. To the extent of killing them.”
“Okay.” Gladys absorbed this with a sigh. “That’s good reasoning.”
“What did you experience on the street,” Mike pressed, “that made you want to leave?”
“Wherever we slept, people came in the night and beat us, chased us.” The boy worried the corner of the checked hankie, which he wore knotted about his neck. “So it was a very difficult life.”
“Who was beating you?”
“The city authorities. And other children, of course. The bigger street boys. They move with sharp objects in the night, and they stab you when you are sleeping.”
“Why would they stab you?”
“Because they want your money. If you have anything, they stab you and take it.”
“How did you get money?”
“We would collect water bottles, or mop and sweep people’s homes. Wash their porches. Or if someone needed us to carry something, we would get a few shillings.”
Mike waved at a taxi driver to let him into a traffic circle. “How much money have you ever held in your hand, since you’ve been on the street?”
“It might be a thousand shillings,” answered the boy. Then, recalculating, “No, three hundred shillings.”
A paltry sum, Gladys thought. “I think he would only be able to buy a cup of porridge.”
“It takes five hundred shillings for a cup of porridge,” Mike said. How many verandas would the boy need to wash for that cup of porridge?
The matatu ahead of them abruptly slowed, jerking toward the side of the road. “Ah!” Mike muttered as he hit the brakes. “These idiots don’t want to live.”
The taxi conductor leaned out of the open door and began waving and shouting at a potential customer. Another matatu had stopped to hunt the same game, and soon the two conductors were waving and shouting at each other. As the Volvo pulled past, the motto on the back of the second taxi was revealed: JESUS FIRST.
“The street. You can’t believe the street.” Mike made it sound like the name of an incurable disease. He knew that many boys entered the life giddily, enticed by the thrill of freedom and unruliness. Sooner or later the street would hit them back, hard. “You see those boys becoming hardcore creatures in order to survive the street.”
Mugerwa Junior Godfrey, though, did not seem the least bit hardcore. Somehow his vulnerability remained visibly intact. Most street kids developed a leathery exterior—weather-beaten faces, reptilian skin—to match their callused natures, but Junior’s skin was still smooth. There were white-line scars here and there, perhaps from the nighttime knife attacks he had mentioned, and there were those bloodshot eyes. But there was a sweetness to that round face, an underlying softness.
This presented a bit of a puzzle. Gladys had seen how the street divided its inhabitants into predator and prey. Junior said he had been on the streets for many years. If he had not crossed into the predator category, how had he survived as prey?
“Well,” Gladys said, “let’s give this one some new life. And see what comes out of it.”
WHEN THEY REACHED Entebbe, intermittent showers began to fall, so that Mike had to keep switching the wipers on and off.
“Can you see Lake Victoria?” he asked Junior.
The boy turned to look. Here, with the road running close to shore, the beaches stretched across the expanse of his rain-dotted window. The big blue field of water went on and on. The boy stared and stared.
“Have you seen it before?”
“No. I have never seen a lake before.”
The grownups laughed, enjoying the boy’s astonishment. His life was about to open up. He would be living in a new city under a new name. His past would become a place visited only in bad dreams.
But still Gladys wondered. There must be some trace of that past he could carry into his future. “If you were to meet your parents, would you remember what they looked like?” she asked him.
“No, I can’t remember their faces.”
Gladys gave a sad, heavy sigh. “Is there nobody in your family you remember? No relatives?”
“No,” the boy said plainly. He was still transfixed by the lake. “I am alone.”
Imagine, Gladys though
t, forgetting the faces of your own parents. How could a child of Uganda have no relatives? In this country, where a woman typically gave birth to six children, a child’s world should be filled with siblings, cousins, aunties, and uncles. How could this boy have no one?
Well, she mused wryly, he was not completely alone. He had gained Mommy Gladys.
“You know,” she remarked to Mike as they turned onto the dirt road to the school, “maybe this burning accident was a blessing in disguise.”
Mike’s eyes flicked up at her in the rearview mirror. She nodded, realizing how improper it sounded. “I had not wanted to take this one on. But it made me change my mind. I felt so sorry for him. With those burns, and just left there like that.” The corners of her mouth drooped, pulling her face down with them. She added softly, “I felt so bad.”
THE LAND WAS flat and open near the school. They could see small figures jump up at the sight of the car and run back toward the compound like termites retreating to their mound. By the time the Volvo pulled into the driveway, the self-appointed sentries had reemerged, bringing Agnes with them. The school director wore a white-and-red damask blouse, a pearl-gray skirt, and a knitted brow.
Agnes rounded the front of the car and opened Junior’s door. As soon as he stepped out, she enveloped him in a hug that was warm, tight, and a threat to his open wounds. If the boy was startled, no one could tell, as his face was trapped against Agnes’s breast. After a long moment she released him, keeping one arm around his shoulders and her head lowered to his.
“How long have you been on the street?”
“I don’t remember. I think since I was four years old.”
“Where did you stay all those years?”
“I stayed in unfinished houses.”
Agnes’s interrogation was gentle but direct. As Junior responded, his index finger wandered toward the car door and began picking at a chip in the dark-green paint.
“Were you stealing?”
“No.”
“Are you lying?”
“No.”
“You must not lie.”
“Yes.”
Small kids crept up on either side of the car, hoping for a glimpse of the new boy. Agnes shooed them away with a quick wave of her hand.
“How did you end up at police?”
“A security guard who was Indian escorted me to the police. He told me they would help me,” Junior answered, flicking away another speck of paint.
By the end of the interrogation, the bare spot on the car door was the size of a cashew. “Well, I’m glad to see you here,” Agnes said finally, holding him a moment longer. “It will be okay.”
She waved over an older boy who had been standing a polite distance away. He was perhaps fifteen, stretched out tall and skinny by adolescence. “See this boy? This is Dennis. His mother died, and he was on the streets for over three years. He’s here, and he’s well behaved. He doesn’t steal. Children here don’t steal, do you understand? They don’t fight. And they know God. Have you ever been to church?”
“No,” answered Junior. “I am too dirty for church.”
Agnes’s face crumpled, her eyes welling up instantly. “You have got a home now. You will never have to sleep outside again. You will sleep under this roof.” Then she asked, almost as an afterthought, “And what is your name?”
“Junior. And now they call me Godfrey.”
Gladys came around the car with Junior’s medical record and papers authorizing the boy’s placement at the school. Agnes scanned the letters from Community Services and the Kampala CPU. The heading of the probation officer’s letter read:
RE: TEMPORARY PLACEMENT FOR MUGERWA JUNIOR (11 YEARS)
Agnes gave a throaty chuckle. “You know, in this letter here, the police say ‘temporary placement.’ But the police never come back!” The two women erupted into cackles.
“They don’t know English!” said Agnes, snorting.
“None of them!” Gladys roared.
“They say ‘temporary placement’ and they stay away forever!”
It took them a full minute to regain their composure. They patted their chests and wiped their eyes as the children stared at them.
“It is always a ‘temporary’ issue, but no one from police comes.” Agnes sighed. “No one there ever checks on these children again.”
Gladys placed a hand on Agnes’s shoulder, feeling such affection and appreciation for her colleague. How would she have managed, if not for Agnes? It was a never-ending struggle for Gladys to produce the money for school fees and expenses for the children she had brought to the school, but she knew that Agnes would never kick them out for lack of funds.
What did Agnes think of her, she wondered, bringing another boy to the school while there were already several at the home with unpaid fees? Here was another needy child lacking clothes, a mattress, what-what. Gladys did not have much, but she contributed what she had. Surely Agnes recognized that?
Well, she could not say for sure what Agnes thought of her. But she knew what Agnes’s husband thought. He was not happy with her at all. When he saw these two women together, his face grew as stony as that of a father watching his teenage daughter touch hands with a boy. He knew something bad must be taking place. That Gladys woman was probably leaving a basket of quadruplets on his doorstep! The school was a family business, and nonpaying orphans did not help with the bills. No doubt he viewed Gladys as an ever-heavier weight sinking his bottom line. And really, could she disagree?
Two boys appeared, bearing clothing for the new boy. “Hold them up, let me see.”
Junior Godfrey posed with the two shirts, his wardrobe effectively tripled. He did not smile; he wore the slow, stunned look of someone who has just awakened from a dream.
“His eyes are so red,” Agnes commented. “Is it from the fire?”
“No,” said Gladys. “They were that way when I met him the first time. It may just be a result of living outside.”
“I don’t like it,” Agnes said suddenly.
“What do you not like?”
“Godfrey is not a good name for him.” Agnes was very opinionated when it came to names. “He needs another name. A strong name.”
Gladys waited. She had her own opinions of Agnes’s practice of changing students’ names, but it did not seem appropriate to voice them now.
Holding one open palm flat, Agnes began to shrug her shoulders up and down, as though she were trying to catch the tempo of a song played at low volume. “Like . . . like . . .” She bounced an invisible ball on her palm, conjuring up the name. “Like Victor. Victor. That is a good name for him. It means someone who wins.” She was in a groove now, bobbing in place. “‘I’m a winner,’” she chortled, trying it on for size. “‘I’m Victor!’”
“That’s fine,” Gladys acquiesced, her voice neutral. So on top of the new city, the new school, and the new home, the boy had another new name. “Victor.”
Ezra, who often acted as a kind of student captain, offered to show the newcomer the sleeping quarters. The boy would have to share a bed with another student, as he lacked his own mattress. Still, it was a step up. When was the last time this one had slept in any kind of bed? Had he ever?
Gladys was quite certain he had never celebrated his birthday, as he could not even confirm his age. Of course, he would be included as a guest of honor at the Early Learning birthday party. It was a pleasurable feeling, to think of the good things in store for one who had endured so much.
Gladys watched him shuffle off behind the other boys. Although he was now Mugerwa Junior Godfrey Victor, she would still think of him as Junior. And for the first time she felt that she was leaving Junior in safe hands.
AFTER VISITING THE DORM, Junior-turned-Victor followed the other students to class. Over sixty bodies packed the room, filling every bench. He sat next to his new friend Dennis, by the wall near the back. In the light of the window, his pink wounds fairly glowed.
The chorus was summoned to the fro
nt of the classroom to perform the Early Learning School song, which Agnes loved; she was fond of saying that its lyrics contained all her aspirations. Even if Junior Victor did not understand the English words, the song was an important part of the welcome ritual.
The boys and girls of the chorus assembled in two rows. Ezra was the tallest of the bigger kids in the rear; Deborah, his size by half, stood front row center. Right hands raised to chins, fingers pointing up, the singers began:
The aim is helping learners realize their skills and
Developing confidence in pupils, and make them accept themselves.
Encouraging each child in areas where they can excel later.
What the lyrics lacked in cadence they made up for in sincerity. The children’s pure voices lifted them with the agility of roots growing around rocks.
Helping children to be law-abiding citizens who respect their land
By protecting their environment and community.
To help those who have missed parental love and care . . .
As the students around him swayed to the music, Junior bobbed along intermittently, then gave up. By the third verse, his eyes began to glaze over.
Our mission statement tells us to bring up children who will change this nation through love,
And who will excel in all areas of their lives.
God bless Early Learning School!
God bless Early Learning School!
Now and forevermore!
The singers took their seats, and Agnes resumed her place at the blackboard. “We have a new student,” she announced. “Come, Victor.”