Unfortunately, they were wrong. As the life expectancy in Botswana dropped into the low thirties by 2001, it was clear that Botswana’s lack of medical infrastructure and the reluctance of the population to agree to be tested and undergo treatment were major roadblocks to the control strategy. Government officials and public health experts alike weren’t sure what to do next, and even as more organizations pledged to help, it was clear that the problem wouldn’t be solved anytime soon.
In Maun, if people weren’t talking about the Zimbabwean refugees, they were talking about HIV/AIDS. Tour companies were losing employees at a rapid rate, and those who weren’t sick were taking time off to attend the funerals of friends and family. Though the government’s impressive education campaign about HIV and how it spreads made it pretty easy for people to understand how to keep themselves and their partners safe, it seemed like many people had a sense of inevitability about the disease: If everyone is getting it, then I’m going to get it too, and why should I change my behavior now? HIV is also a disease with a long timeline compared to something like malaria. Since it often takes years for the infection to manifest into full-blown disease, it was harder for public health experts to explain the relationship between infection, illness, and death in a way that was easy to understand.
Our beloved, beat-up Hilux posing in Maun
Press had recovered well from the leopard attack, but was understandably not in any rush to come back to camp. When Dawn and Jim visited him in the hospital after the attack, he said he was fine and would like to keep his job at Baboon Camp, though he wouldn’t be going out with the baboons anymore. They totally understood, and we were relieved to hear that he had sustained no long-lasting injuries from the attack, though he would likely always walk with a bit of a limp.
We didn’t talk about HIV with Mokupi or Press. Dad had tried to on many occasions, and we even bought a big bag of condoms in Maun to keep in the kitchen in case Mokupi or Press wanted to take some. Ever the scientist, Dad made a heroic effort to explain how cellular infection occurred and why it often took years for HIV infection to turn into AIDS, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t that Mokupi and Press didn’t understand; they just didn’t want to hear it. Illness, in all its forms, was to Mokupi a generalized malady he called “the poison of Botswana” and it was all caused by some unnamed force that was out of his control. He didn’t differentiate between flu, giardia, a cold, or HIV; it was all the poison of Botswana. No other explanation was possible. He refused to hear any different, and eventually Dad stopped trying.
Maun itself was more crowded than it had ever been too. When we first arrived in 1992, there was one supermarket that received a shipment of food from South Africa once a week. If you happened to be in line when the truck arrived, you could get fresh fruit and vegetables. If not, you were out of luck until the next week and had to make do with boxed and canned goods. There were no fast-food restaurants, no pharmacies, and only one bank, but its doors were broken and cows often wandered through. When cars got stuck in the deep sand on the unpaved parts of the road, they were often abandoned until the tow truck could come by, and goats often climbed on them to reach the leaves of the mopane trees.
By 2001, Maun was completely different. Trucks and cars (some only two-wheel drive!) roared through the town on paved roads. There were six traffic lights, three grocery stores, and half a dozen Indian big-box stores where you could buy things like plastic flip-flops, beach umbrellas, and cheap, mass-produced dolls that were only somewhat anatomically correct. Though cows still often hung out in the bank, they now shared the parking lot outside with shiny BMWs and Mercedes brought up from South Africa that looked fragile and delicate next to the Land Rovers and Land Cruisers of the locals. Overlander trucks passed through regularly, taking budget backpackers between Cairo and Cape Town and decimating the grocery stores like locusts descending on a cornfield. Though there was still no real doctor to be found, a few shady clinics sprang up on the outer reaches of town, run by immigrants from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia who advertised their abilities to treat conditions like “not being liked at work,” “misfortune,” and “misunderstandings.” South African pop music blared from the shops and when driving through town my overwhelming sense was that of noise, noise, and more noise. Driving around town with Mom and Dad before Dad went to talk to Press, I was absolutely astonished at how quickly the town had changed, and how much I had missed in always bypassing Maun to go straight up to camp.
Tim and Bryony sold their ostrich farm that year and were leaving about the same time we were, to head back to the UK. Bryony had family in Wales, and while they wanted to be closer to them, they also admitted that the peace and quiet that had originally attracted them to Maun was gone. They didn’t like the noise, the people, or the crime. When a friend of theirs had her house broken into while she slept, Tim and Bryony decided it was time to go.
These crises seemed far, far away as I lay on a striped couch from Pottery Barn in our living room in suburban Philadelphia, watching the oak leaves rustle in the wind. My face throbbed but I knew I would be fine; I had been treated at a clean, well-stocked hospital and cared for by a doctor who had probably studied at one of the best medical schools in the world. That I had all of these incredible resources available to me only twenty minutes away by car gave me a sense of security and, I had to admit, guilt. I imagined what kinds of conditions someone like Dr. Blake would see on a daily basis: probably ear infections, broken bones, accidental injuries, and maybe flu or pneumonia in the winter. Never what the health-care workers in the Maun hospital faced, or the diseases I knew Mokupi’s friends and family dealt with under the umbrella of “the poison of Botswana.” Schistosomiasis. Malaria. Tuberculosis. And, of course, HIV.
I closed my eyes and ran my finger along the tight, neat stitches that followed the arc of my cheekbone across my face. Dr. Blake had done a good job, and she said there likely wouldn’t even be a scar. Then I ran my fingers across the smooth, rounded dome of scar tissue that still covered my left elbow from my horse injury. Here was the proof of what health care could do; I was a living example of it, and scars or lack thereof were the physical proof. What if I were in Botswana and caught something like tuberculosis? My parents would fly me down to Johannesburg or back to the US and I would likely survive. It was painfully unfair that the people I knew and had grown up with did not have access to the same kind of medical treatment, and I felt deeply, horribly guilty that I was able to take care of myself in a way that most of them were not.
It bothered me, too, that all anyone in the US seemed to know about Botswana were the statistics on HIV. Just as Botswana had been heralded on the international stage for implementing a model program for disease control, the eyes of the world had still been on Botswana as the plan faltered and, ultimately, failed.
“I can’t believe you’re still going back there,” our friends and family said. “You’re going to catch HIV and die!” Well, no, I patiently explained over and over again, you don’t just catch HIV from being around people that have it, and we didn’t even know if the guys that worked for us had HIV and we had no plans to ask them about it. Also, we didn’t live in town. Baboon Camp was four hours away from town by car or boat, and the nearest human settlement to camp was the village where Mokupi lived and even that was more than an hour away. It’s pretty hard to catch diseases from other people if you never see anyone, I explained. No mosquito carrying malaria would ever be able to make it to our camp. So we were fine.
And that’s what struck me the most, sitting there on the Pottery Barn couch on a hot September day. I said I lived in Botswana, but I really didn’t. Not at all. Not in the least. I lived in a world of campfires and tall trees and the scent of dust on the wind, where elephants shuffled quietly beneath palm trees and genet cats came out at night to eat figs, where the baboons sunned themselves on the cold mornings and fought over the wild mushrooms that grew on termite mounds after the rains came. That might have been �
��Botswana,” at some point. But it wasn’t anymore. Real Botswana was the tinny sounds of South African pop played on scratchy tapes in the mall in Maun, the roar of cars on the tarmac, and the ladies with perfect balance carrying jerry cans of water on their heads. It was goats standing on cars to eat leaves, kids running home from school in yellow-and-blue uniforms, and people selling carved hippos at roadside stands. I liked that world, what little I knew of it, but I had no claim on it, not the way I had on Baboon Camp. I had no more business saying I was from Botswana than someone who stumbled through the wardrobe into Narnia and had the audacity to say, “Oh yes, I love it here. This is now home! I am now Narnian.” Because at the end of the day, whatever else happened, I was still a white girl born in the US, still the same girl that Masaku said shouldn’t get a beating back in Amboseli because I was different from my friends—a white, American girl whose real home was far away from the elephants and the hyenas.
I took a sip of ice water and opened my eyes. Baltimore orioles called from the trees outside the window. Though they looked the same as the Okavango orioles back at camp, their calls were completely different. How strange that two species half a world away could look the same but be so fundamentally different? Idly I wondered whether there were orioles in Narnia, and then I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 20
I Am American
It was a bright, sunny morning in early September 2001 when Mom dropped me off at school. I was running a bit late that day, as we were coming from yet another doctor’s appointment. The cut on my cheek had healed (though I started my senior year with a dramatic black eye), but I still had to go to several appointments with a dermatologist. Somewhere along the way in Baboon Camp I had picked up a nasty HPV virus and had thick, painful warts cropping up on my knee and forearm. Though the dermatologist burned them off with liquid nitrogen, the virus was proving to be stronger than the strains he usually saw in the US and I had to go back every few days to have the warts burned off again. Finally, it appeared that the treatment was working, but since the dermatologist was now effectively spraying liquid nitrogen onto raw scar tissue, it hurt tremendously. When Mom dropped me off at school after my appointment, both my knee and forearm were wrapped in gauze. Between that and my black eye, it looked like I had just left fight club on my way to study hall.
I headed down the carpeted hallway to the school library, where I planned to either get a jump on my homework or find a quiet corner to read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tales from Earthsea. Since people mostly ignored me at school these days, it didn’t feel so unsafe to bring a book anymore, and I was very much looking forward to losing myself in a world of mist and runes. Turning the corner into the library, I saw a bunch of kids clustered around a television set. I’d never seen it turned on in the library before and it made me pause. The TV was usually stored in the front of the library and borrowed when we watched documentaries in history class.
“What’s up?” I said to a small boy in my class named Dave, who was standing in front of the TV with his arms crossed. Dave stared ahead at the TV screen.
“A plane hit the World Trade Center in New York,” he said. I looked at the TV and saw a thick column of dark smoke rising from one of the shiny towers. The anchors on the news were silent, and my first thought was how odd it was that there was no commentary to go along with the smoke. My second thought was, Wow, that was stupid. Cessna pilots should know better than that. The pilots who flew tourists back and forth between the game lodges and Maun were constantly getting in trouble with their tiny, six-seater Cessna airplanes, whether the engines were overheating or having pieces of their wings ripped off by baboons on the runway. The summer before, a pilot from a camp on the other side of the delta was just taking off when he ran into a giraffe as it suddenly crossed the runway—the giraffe and plane collided when the plane was twenty feet or so off the ground. The plane was completely totaled and the giraffe died. Though I knew, of course, that people weren’t likely to be flying Cessna planes around New York City, the crash with the giraffe was the first thing that came to mind. There had been a lot of smoke then too.
The Cessna/giraffe crash
On the screen, the smoke grew thicker. Against the sunny day and cloudless blue sky, the tower looked like a birthday candle someone had just blown out, only somehow awful in a way I felt deep in my stomach but couldn’t identify. And then, as I stood in the library with my classmates, I watched as a second passenger jet flew into the other tower, bursting into an explosion of flames and smoke and shrapnel.
First, there was nothing but silence. And then, someone screamed, and someone else began to cry. Dave’s face turned pale and he looked away from the TV.
“I have to call my mom,” he said. Vaguely, I realized that I had just watched a lot of people die, live on TV, right in front of me. One second they were there, and the next they weren’t, just like that. I’d watched animals die before: lions killing buffalo, wild dogs hunting impala, and even the baboons, sometimes, when they found mice and other small animals. Most people thought baboons only ate fruit and seeds, but they were very proficient hunters and often ate smaller animals alive when they caught them. I hated it when they did this. Even with my hands over my ears, it was impossible to block the sounds of the dying animals and the crunch of bones as the baboons tore them apart. But, even though it was horrible, it was still part of the natural cycle of things in the delta: baboons hunted to eat, just like lions, wild dogs, and hyenas. Every animal had to get food from somewhere, and every animal had babies to feed that were just as cute as the babies of the animal they killed.
Not this though. This was different. There was nothing natural or cyclical or necessary about any of this. This was gratuitous and cruel. This was barbarism. This was watching hundreds of people die on TV live in front of me in study hall on a sunny Tuesday morning in fall, and it was not something I knew how to process. Around me, my classmates sobbed and one of the commentators on TV began to cry. The scene in front of me felt right next door and another world away all at once. I longed to find a tree to climb so I could get upwind of the danger, but instead I just stood and stared.
The bell rang for second period and no one moved. The crowd around the TV had grown larger, and when I felt someone at my shoulder, I looked up to see Brooke standing next to me, her face ashen.
“Doesn’t your dad work in New York?” I asked gently. She nodded and gestured with the silver cell phone clutched in her hand.
“I can’t get through,” she said. “Everything is down.” She was too tall for me to hug properly, so I reached out and squeezed her hand. She didn’t move away.
The PA system buzzed. A voice said that classes were canceled for the rest of the day and that we should all go home immediately. The crowd around me began moving toward the doors, some still crying and others whispering to each other to find rides to wherever they were going. The usual noise and jostling in the hallway was gone and everyone moved quickly and quietly. Brooke and I were pushed to the side by the crowd leaving the library, and I grabbed the straps on my backpack and began to think about my next move.
Okay, I thought. I’m scared, but I’m okay. What do I need to do when I’m scared but okay? I can handle this, if I think clearly. Though Lucy was still in middle school, I knew she’d meet me by the car in the Upper School parking lot. That was our plan in case something urgent came up and we couldn’t find each other. Neither of us had cell phones anyway; Mom and Dad said cell phones were useless things that no one really needed.
Brooke punched a number in her phone and watched helplessly as the number rang out.
“It’s not working,” she said.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I said. “It takes a couple of hours to get to New York from here. Maybe he hadn’t even gotten there yet.”
She nodded numbly. “Yeah.” The crowd streamed around us and I hitched my backpack higher on my shoulders so I wouldn’t get knocked over.
“I gotta go get my sister,” I said.<
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“Wait!” Brooke said, clutching at my hand. “Can you give me a ride home? My brother took the car today and I know you live near me.” I blinked, wondering if I’d misheard her. She was talking to me like a normal human being?
“Sure,” I said. “Come on.”
Together, we pushed through the crowd of students in the hallway outside the library and climbed down the stairs to the main floor. Everywhere students were hunched against the walls, cell phones clutched to their ears, either trying to get through to someone who wasn’t answering or crying to someone who had. A couple of teachers stood in the doorways of their classrooms, alternately staring into space or encouraging packs of students to disperse and go home. As Brooke and I exited the science wing and crossed over to the parking lot, I found myself distracted, ridiculously, by the thought that our field hockey game that day would probably need to be rescheduled.
Lucy was waiting at the car.
“Are you okay?” I asked, and she nodded, her blue eyes hard. Tougher than tough, my little sister.
“This is Brooke,” I said. “We’re giving her a ride home.”
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