by Jessica Yu
And what of Trevor? The boy needed everything. He lost clothing constantly, or perhaps other children stole it from him. He was always hungry. Recently he had walked off with a sack of pounded groundnut flour from the school kitchen, hunkered down behind a classroom, and eaten the whole thing. An entire kilo! From what she had been told, the boy would eat anything, even plastic bags. How could she possibly let herself become discouraged when one of her children was found chewing on kavera?
Chunk. The hood shut. Mike turned the ignition over, and the car puttered back onto the tarmac.
Theft, deception, pilferage—they were a nuisance. Dust in the air filter. In Uganda, what person moved forward without running into a few crooks? One had to sift out the corruption and press on. What mattered was down the road.
Passed Along
“Where is the girl?”
Gladys surveyed the patch of muddy ground: a sewage canal on one side, on the other a large tree with plastic sheeting hanging from its branches, an array of cooking utensils and frayed sackcloth spread around its trunk. Nearby, tarps spread with millet dried in the sun, the seed to be distilled into strong, low-cost waragi. A couple dozen children of the slum wandered over to scrutinize the visitors. None of them was the one Gladys was meant to meet.
Two officers from Kampala’s Kitintale Police Station, one male and one female, had led Gladys, Esther, and Mike there to review the case of a poor old man and a mysterious disabled child who had been dumped at his door.
“Madame, where is the girl?” Gladys asked again.
“She is inside there.” The policewoman pointed at a shack to the right of the tree. It was a perilously ramshackle structure, with some walls of brick, others of wood, and some of mud, the long cracks between the sections stuffed with old clothing, cardboard, and wadded up plastic bags: a standing chronicle of its owner’s declining fortunes. A sheet hung over the doorway in lieu of a door; Gladys pushed it aside and peered in.
The room had no windows, and it took a good ten seconds for her eyes to adjust. Eventually she discerned a tight space lined with cardboard, scattered bedding, a dusty bicycle, and the tiny, spindly figure of a girl. She was hunched on the ground, legs folded up so compactly that her head was framed by bony knees.
“Ehh . . .” breathed Gladys. “She is here.”
For a moment the girl lifted her face, her huge pupils contracting in the encroaching light. The beam of a cell phone seared the darkness, and she quickly pulled herself into a tight ball, as though she were a knot in a rope that had been yanked at both ends.
It felt bad to stare down at the child. It was like witnessing some secret shame. Not the shame of the blameless girl but the shame of the people who had allowed her to descend into this wretched state: helpless and cowering in the dark. The image could have been a child abuse prevention poster on a police station wall.
“Hello.” Gladys’s voice was loud but gentle.
The girl did not respond.
How old was she? Ten? Thirteen? It was hard to tell. “Is she squatting?” Gladys murmured. “Can she stand?”
The old man explained that the child could not stand or walk or speak or feed herself. Could she have cerebral palsy? Gladys wondered, having written about the disorder before. Or polio?
“Can’t we bring her outside? Into the light.”
“Yes,” said one of the officers. “But she has soiled herself. Let them clean her up first.”
AFTER A FEW minutes the girl was carried from the shack. Her whimpers culminated in a low squeal when she was placed on the ground. She stayed crouched in the loose woman’s dress they had put her in, her body like a fist wrapped in a handkerchief.
“Mm-mm-mm,” uttered the girl, blinking at the sunlight.
The mzee, the old man, sat on a stool behind her. When he removed his cloth cap, his head glowed with its halo of receding white hair. Two white tufts of mustache framed his mouth, giving him the look of a mournful walrus. His name was James Opoki.
“The child appeared at midnight,” he said. “A neighbor woman found her lying on a bedsheet under that tree and called me outside. That was the first time I ever saw her.”
Several neighbors nodded in confirmation of his account. They suspected that the mother of the child had targeted the old man, who often cared for his six grandchildren during the day.
After three weeks with no one coming for the girl, the old man went to the police station for assistance. For a week he waited from morning till afternoon. When the officers offered him lunch, he politely declined. James Opoki was a principled man. He was not seeking charity, only a solution.
The old man’s dignity spurred the police into what little action they could take. They contacted the Probation Department, only to be told there was nowhere to place the girl. Even Naguru Reception Center refused to take her. So the police called Gladys.
“Mzee,” Gladys asked, “what do you want to be done for you?”
“I have finished one month with this child. I don’t have any assistance at all.” Opoki cradled the blue cap in his hands like an empty bowl. “I used to be a mechanic. But I’m seventy-eight years old now, and I don’t even have money for food. Yesterday I only had two pieces of fried cassava to share with this child. And you can see, every day she must be cleaned, because she has constant running tummy. She cannot clean up after herself.”
Gladys glanced down at the girl, at the circle of flies around her head, the running mucus under her nose. She turned to Esther. “These people need some Pampers. They can’t keep cleaning such a big girl all the time.”
Pampers, soap, panties. All those things were expensive. How to get them? Rifling through her mental files, she began to compile a short list of places to approach.
“I am grateful to the police for trying to help with the situation.” The old man’s voice quavered with apology. “But the government needs to find a place for this child. Because me, at my age, I can’t do it.”
HALF THE SLUM stood by to watch Mike turn the car around. The Volvo worked back and forth on the thin strip of land by the sewage canal, making incremental shifts like a spider at the nexus of a web.
“Now that I have seen the situation, let’s team up and see what we can do about it,” Gladys said, bidding farewell to her police colleagues. “Effendi, if you do locate the girl’s mother, do not beg her to take care of her child. It is the child’s right. The girl did not ask to be born. She did not fill out an application for birth.”
They drove on to their next appointment, Gladys fuming. A mother dumping her own daughter under a tree. What was she supposed to eat? Leaves and bark? Of course life was not easy. It was hard for a poor woman to raise a disabled child. But how much harder was it for the disabled child, once abandoned?
Gladys found her thoughts turning to Trevor. These days she was always thinking about Trevor. Smiling, limping, quiet Trevor.
“After seeing this disabled girl in Kitintale,” she remarked to Esther and Mike, “what it shows me is that Trevor’s parents were aware of his state when they separated from him. And they felt relief.”
Gladys had never run a child’s profile in her column so many times. Was it twelve? Fifteen? While Trevor may have grown over the past two years, his face looked much the same: there was either the detached half-frown or the carefree smile. Trevor’s photo had been seen by millions of readers; Gladys had been praying that his family members would be among them.
Now, she realized, maybe they had been. Maybe the parents had seen their boy in the paper hugging Director Agnes, and that was fine with them. Maybe they had wanted to be rid of that troublesome one who would not listen to orders or clean himself or fetch water or show proper respect. Wasn’t their impatience imprinted in Trevor’s harsh utterances? I will beat you! I will whip you! One had to conclude that parents who taught their son these words might well have thrown up their hands. Like the mother of this Kitintale girl, they had passed their child along.
And now Trevor was
being passed along again.
“YOU KNOW, GLADYS, we have a problem with Trevor.”
“Again?”
These days every conversation with Director Agnes began this way: it was always trouble, and it was always Trevor. Smiling, limping, confounding Trevor.
“Now what has Trevor done?” Gladys asked.
Agnes sighed. “You need to look for a place to take him.”
“Agnes.” Gladys’s voice dropped placatingly. “Where can I take Trevor? What has he done now?”
The child’s exploits at Early Learning had been escalating to the point where every time the school director mentioned his name, Gladys winced. Recently, when Trevor had spotted his football in a locked classroom, he had taken a rock, thrown it through the window, reached through the broken glass to retrieve his ball, then skipped off as though nothing had happened.
Another time he had thrown a heavy stone at one of the younger boys, knocking him almost unconscious. Agnes called Gladys from the hospital, blasting her: “Look now at what your boy has done!”
The list of crimes grew longer and longer. Even with all their years of experience, the two women did not know what to do. Agnes still eschewed the traditional punishment; she would not beat him. “That’s not the way to treat children,” she would say. “The way to treat them is to talk to them.”
But no matter how much she talked to Trevor, his behavior did not change. “You stupid woman!” he would bark at Agnes. “I will beat you!”
Early Learning School had given the boy space to recover from childhood trauma. But the tactic had backfired. He did not learn to swim at his own pace; he merely drifted further and further away. After two years the teachers had given up any hope of Trevor studying at a desk. The boy entered and exited from classes with impunity, stepping out to play with his ball whenever he felt like it. And now he was roaming off the grounds all the time. The school lacked a fence, so it was easy for him to wander.
Gladys wished Trevor could explain his motivations. If he could tell her, You see, Auntie, I went away because of such and such, then Gladys could suggest some changes. Improve the situation. But this was a boy who could not even tell you where he had gone. He would only offer that distant smile, saying, “I’ve been somewhere there.”
This latest time, Agnes gravely informed Gladys, it was bad.
How and when he had slipped away from school, they didn’t know. But somehow he got all the way down to the Nakumatt market on Berkeley Road. According to the boda-boda man, the one who saved Trevor’s life, the boy was in the middle of the road, that busy intersection in front of the shopping center, playing with his ball! All the cars in both directions were skidding and honking and stopping in a traffic jam while the boy ran blithely across the lanes, pretending to be Ronaldo or whoever. The boda man had jumped off his motorcycle, run into the road, and pulled the boy to safety.
After such an incident, Agnes would not entertain talk of giving the boy more time to adjust or of renewing efforts to find his people. The closeness of the disaster had wicked away such palliatives. Both women knew it was only by sheer luck that the boy had not been injured or caused an accident. What if the blame for such a tragedy fell on the school?
Trevor’s banishment from Early Learning was not an easy decision for Agnes. While she was undoubtedly weary of his wandering, his bed-wetting, and his shouts of “I will kick you! I will stone you!” her soft heart did not easily give up on a child.
Gladys did not beg for Trevor to be given another chance, but she asked for more time. It was no minor task to find placement for any child, but doors swung open more swiftly for the newborn abandoned in a bin, the housemaid burned for breaking a dish, or the helpless Kitintale girl shut away in a stranger’s hut. That one had been welcomed into an NGO for special-needs children with medical issues. But a boy who cursed, threw rocks, and chewed on plastic bags?
GLADYS OUTLINED her dilemma to Mike and Esther. “Agnes tells me, ‘You know, Trevor needs a place where they can care for those mentally retarded children.’”
“Yes, he can’t be in a mainstream school,” Mike said. It was no glib comment; one of Mike’s grown daughters lived in a private facility for people with cognitive disabilities. She had been deprived of oxygen at birth because of a medically botched delivery.
“But he doesn’t really have mental retardation. Don’t you think he can get worse in such a place?” Gladys protested. She had visited several facilities where the children were very badly off; many had severe physical problems as well as mental ones. One could not coop up Trevor with such vulnerable types. What if he were to take out his frustration on those around him?
Some considered the boy mad. Gladys was not sure what they meant by madness, but she did not think that Trevor was acting senselessly. His behavior reflected some disarranged internal logic. They needed to figure out what was disarranging him.
But how? Right now she could not even figure out where the boy should sleep. She only knew that she did not want him to end up in the one place that would take him.
“If he is sent away from school, Probation will have no alternative. They will dump him in Naguru. And what will happen to him in Naguru?” Gladys shook her head. Allowing the boy to be sent to that overcrowded warehouse was tantamount to giving up. “I’m disturbed.”
Esther and Mike said nothing. Gladys gazed out the window at a procession of marabou storks on a rubbish pile, as downcast as mourners at a burial.
“Just give me some time and I’ll sit down and see what I can do about it.”
SHE DID NOT get the chance. Agnes called Gladys to report that she was pushing the unruly fledgling out of the nest. The school could not accommodate Trevor for a single day longer. He would be taken to Entebbe Police Station.
Gladys begged for leniency. Entebbe Police had nowhere to keep a child, and Gladys could not safely keep him in her own tiny place, as she and Esther were always out.
Agnes would not budge. The boy had mental problems. He had to go.
If only the garden project were further along in its development, she lamented. Maybe someday Trevor could be looked after in that place. But this was no time to indulge in “somedays” and “if onlys.”
Gladys reached out to Bright Kids, a home in Entebbe that had previously accepted some of her charges. The director regretted that the home’s finances were far too tight already. Gladys called Officer Carol at Kawempe Police, who confirmed that the only option for the boy was Naguru Reception Center. In desperation, Gladys emptied every pocket of her memory. There had to be a name tucked away somewhere, the name of someone who could help her with Trevor.
It was then that she remembered a doctor, Robert Kironde, whom she had written about in New Vision seven years before. They had become friends, and although she had not seen him for a long, long time, she felt she could call on him.
Unfortunately, Dr. Kironde did not specialize in behavioral matters. Nor was he a pediatrician. So okay, he was a dentist. She had quoted him in an article titled “Do Not Let the Dentist Remove Your Teeth.” But he had been kind enough to give her advice on the frequency of her malaria, and she recalled his mentioning to her that before choosing a specialization, he had had to learn general medicine. Perhaps, she thought, he could provide some insight into Trevor’s case.
“Can I see this boy?” Dr. Kironde asked after they discussed taking him to the national mental hospital. “Can you bring him around?”
Gladys hastily arranged for Trevor to travel with her from Entebbe to Kampala. The day taxed her severely. She was recovering from typhoid, and delays forced her to wait in the rain for two hours. The scheduled eight a.m. meeting finally took place at one in the afternoon. Gladys watched anxiously as Dr. Kironde attempted to engage the shy boy in conversation, Trevor surrendering words like they were 10,000-shilling notes.
After a few minutes, Dr. Kironde smiled at Trevor and stood up. “All right. Let us go.”
“To the mental hospital?”
>
The doctor shook his head. “No, this boy does not need to go to a mental hospital. I know where we need to go.”
THE NAME OF the place was unpronounceable, like the sound someone might make in trying to suppress a loud yawn: L’Arche. It was a faith-based NGO founded by French people. The staff there described it as “a community of hope for people with and without learning disabilities.”
The doctor and a counselor listened as Gladys related Trevor’s traumatic history and his problematic behavior. The abusive language, the rock-throwing, the running away—she left out nothing. After some time observing the boy, the L’Arche staff came to a conclusion. Trevor had a developmental disorder, and they had a name for it: autism.
Gladys knew nothing about this autism. The term was new to her.
The doctor tried to explain. Gladys was right—Trevor was not mad, but he was not able to understand things or communicate the way other children did. One should not expect someone with autism to do what he was ordered to do. If one said, “Go in this classroom and do this exercise,” a person with autism might not respond. He might stay focused on one particular thing.
The staff showed Gladys a resident with autism whose sole concentration was the care of poultry. The chickens and their eggs. How many eggs were there? Where were they laid? And so on. Another resident was concerned only with the care of the pigs. He had to rush to see that the pigs were fed, otherwise he would become agitated. Once at the piggery, he could monitor the animals for hours.
For Trevor, Gladys knew, the “one particular thing” was his ball. If the boy had a ball that was his own to kick and chase, he could be content all day.
“Eh!” Gladys found herself saying again and again, and “Ahhahhh!” She was fascinated by this new knowledge. It was as if she had been struggling to decipher an unknown language and she had finally found an interpreter.