Children Are Diamonds

by Edward Hoagland

  The guards, a grumpy pair, remembered the minor relief their supervisor had felt yesterday, when I hadn’t delivered a whole carload of damaged kids but just the one Wild Man from Borneo. Now why were we back? I sat in the car till the Ugandan director was called, then got out and asked him to bring the Dutchwoman over, please. The little boy would be less fearful of her: “The LRA doesn’t have any Europeans.”

  He laughed, and she did appear, in work boots but an expensive Indian scarf, and swiftly recognized the hunger in my eyes and face, but also the reality of little Otim’s plight. We each took one of his hands, with Ya-Ya accompanying us, because of course he was used to her, and her Madi language, in any case, was linguistically close to his native Acholi. Several barracks stood about but also a special reception shack with battered toys on the tables, donated clothes in a pile, and a winking TV to watch. We led him to a corner where he could sit securely on the floor with Ya-Ya, choosing his playthings. Oryean, the Wild Man from Borneo, in a new outfit, though shorn of his locks and deloused, was fetched, so Otim could see that nothing terrifying had happened to him. They shared some USAID surplus cheese, an intriguing taste.

  “My husband will come,” the Dutchwoman said. “It’s what you call nepotism? He’s the doctor. We stay six months.” Registering my disappointment, she touched my hand sympathetically. “You’ll be in Nairobi soon.”

  He did come in—the usual brisk good guy in the early echelons of a medical career—bringing crayons and a sketchbook, and examined our child with an expert’s lack of intimidation while showing Otim the colors and how freely he could use them. He glanced at Ya-Ya also, who was interested in the crayons, but she fell outside of these people’s authority because she hadn’t been a prisoner of the LRA, or anyone else’s sex slave, either. They often got child warriors who had been traumatized by serving in Congo’s surreal militias, as well.

  “She’d like it,” he remarked, giving her an extra coloring book. “In Amsterdam I have a friend . . .” he added wistfully, referring to Ya-Ya’s strabismus.

  “Anybody closer?” I said.

  “No, we’re new. Try Doctors Without Borders. They’re in Kampala.”

  While Otim was engrossed in drawing, alongside his wife and Ya-Ya, the two of us walked back to the car, where he could look at the rest of the kids. “My friend could, in one morning ...” he intoned ruefully, of the other problem eyes and the cleft palate. The burned girl and the boy with pelvic problems “should be flown to Europe,” he said. We stared at each other, talking of inoculations and the Ebola outbreak in Masindi, down the road. Okay, so she had a nice husband: so I’d be watching CNN again tonight. We drank coffee as Oryean, Ya-Ya, and the Dutchwoman led Otim to a play area outdoors, fenced next to a barracks, where he could view other Lord’s Resistance Army captives who had been freed in recent military operations by the Ugandans or else had escaped on their own, in case any set off a terrified reaction in him. He didn’t recognize any of them, however. Neither had Oryean, the two probably having been marched farther north by their units.

  “All for the best,” murmured the woman, whose practice in Holland focused on childhood abuse. The morning warmed into a civilized interlude of considerate conversation; earnest although dead-end radio inquiries about Ruthie and the Norwegians, whom they vaguely knew; and some playtime for my carload of remaining kids. We settled Otim into what we hoped might become a healing phase of his young life, with minimal tears. Not that there could have been many of those. Crying had brought a death sentence in the LRA, unless perhaps it was amusing the adults.

  I wasn’t dealing with gross evil, like the Dutch couple and the half dozen African counselors and staff members at this center. Just walleyes and cross-eyes, thank god. And the cryptic note of worry transmitted in the Norwegian surgeon’s voice was no longer a frontburner anxiety of mine. But back at the Hotel Gulu, I felt lonesome, even dilettantish, and rather sorry I’d stayed over for this spare day though I did accomplish a swim in the pool, play handball with somebody or other with substantially cultivated biceps, then conquer my constipation, and tilt a few beers with another British bloke with the agenda, I suppose, of sounding me out—while letting my entourage enjoy the miracle of hot running water and moving pictures on the TV in my bare room. They’d need to sleep in the car again, after all, and would seldom eat as well, ever after. In the evening the same ingratiating man snapped my picture who had done so with Craig. That smile you might later see from your dungeon cell.

  We got safely past the bridge over the roaring Victoria Nile at Karuma Falls, and beyond the turnoffs to Atura, Lira, and Masindi, with additional roadblocks, by afternoon. Ya-Ya’s errant eye pinwheeled at the spectacle, the tiers of scenery. With Margaret gone, she and the Dinka girl who had the same problem sat next to me in front, and the two mothers, with the four other children, behind. Not one of them, now, I shared a language with. Nor did the soldiers at roadblocks, once we left Acholi land. And my passengers didn’t know Luganda or Swahili, the capital’s lingoes, apart from English. At the green-andred outskirts of Kampala—tilty hills, tilty shacks, gaudy billboards, kids who brandished bananas, not the poignance of a rib cage—I named our destination to the police as Mulago Hospital, the big one by the university. This was convincing but not true. Yet as we continued, I remembered that I did have Felix’s friend there to look up, Betty Something, the Rockefeller Foundation’s favorite, a doctor I, too, had tippled with at a hotel bar when she was with some visiting firemen one time, NGO medical people, and she had told them the hilarious, high-pitched story of being flown by the Rockefellers from the furnace of central Africa straight to their conference retreat, a most gorgeous and ancient palace overlooking Lake Como, at Bellagio, near Milan’s airport, in Italy. The confab was to discuss Third World emergencies, and she had been assigned—this simmering, stocky, put-upon woman whose hands most days were emptying ambulances—a room in a Renaissance castle with a hundred-foot drop-off out her window, then hundreds more from the nearest cliff face down to the azure water, and a billion-dollar vista stretching straight toward the snow-tipped Alps, to reward her for the anguish of her ordinary job. Some passing expatriate must have noticed her here and put her name on the list, maybe somebody in this group I had fallen in with in the Fairway’s lounge.

  But she’d cried out in a strangled voice, that night I’d met her: “Didn’t those Rockefellers know you can throw yourself out of a window, like that, when you go right cold-turkey from here to there? I was up all night shivering!”

  Betty was a Batooro from Fort Portal, near the Zaire border, and dubious about all figures of authority, black or white—Amin had killed two of her brothers—with a likeably strident voice and no interest in money beyond the necessities. Consequently, she was a ward doctor, not in private practice. As we wound through the suburbs—past Makerere University’s invitingly arboreal hill, with the squat, unlovely hospital at its base—I remembered that, yes, Betty had been the name she went by with whites, whatever her African persona was with other friends. So, making a U-turn, I negotiated the gate by wielding the name “Betty” with a subtle tilt of the head to indicate my passenger load. Next, parking in the staff lot as if I were an expatriate doctor, I got everybody out of the car in order to employ a full-court press. The combination of their obvious infirmities and my officious white skin afforded us entry to the huge, untidy hodgepodge of a public ward of AIDS, TB, dysentery, and malarial sufferers, and every other kind of dying person, where Betty worked.

  Peremptorily she accosted me, nevertheless, but paused as I assured her that she recognized me from the Fairway Hotel, and from Protestants Against Famine, and the organization in Germany that funded Felix, near Atiak, and the Dutch twosome in Gulu, and the Maryknolls, and Father Leo, and Norwegian People’s Aid, which staffed the SPLA’s battlefield hospital, and Norwegian Church Aid, which cared equally much about the southern Sudanese but had pulled out in political disgust at the SPLA’s leadership. Maybe, I suggested, her own f
oundation funders had a program for reparative surgery such as the burned Dinka girl and orthopedic boy needed. I pulled out lots of stops, to her evident amusement, but the weightiest was probably that the mothers of these two kids were next to me. Not that she didn’t have to turn away dozens of desperate parents in any given week; but these moms could nurse their kids themselves—that was the pressing shortage—and scrounge up food for them to eat, in conjunction with my pledge to somehow produce some white funding eventually for the operations.

  “I know where you stay, if I have to come after you,” she told me, and instructed the two Dinka women via sign language to scrub all around and make up two adjoining cots at an extreme margin of the ward where charity patients were stashed. Ya-Ya showed them how to do that, from her experience at wrestling with sheets at my little hospice in Loa. They themselves would sleep on the floor next to their children’s beds and earn their keep in the kitchen. The bubble and boil of a two-hundred-bed ward didn’t overly disconcert Ya-Ya; and Betty, being a pragmatic workaholic, noticed this and gripped the girl’s chin in both hands with a disarming smile to study the awry cant of her bad eye. She then examined the other girls’ eyes as swiftly, too.

  “If you weren’t a nice guy, I wouldn’t give you the time of day. You think I’m not busy?” she asked, swinging her finger across an arc encompassing a continent of beds. She pretended to kick my butt, but changed her mind as I now presented the harelipped boy.

  “I know somebody who can sew him up tomorrow, if I twist his arm. We’ll bill you for it,” she said.

  The boy being confused and scared, she stroked him. We laughed, clearing it up because the two Dinka mothers had now achieved their toehold in Kampala, and had each other for company, though no common language with Betty or anybody else around. The boy, although a Bari, knew pidgin Dinka, so we signaled that he should stick close to them. And Ya-Ya hugged him, speaking in Madi, which may be about as close to Bari as Norwegian is to Swedish, while touching his mouth, which Betty was magically going to heal. Betty herself pointed at a slot on the floor vacant enough to accommodate a half-grown person such as him—whereupon he seemed to understand that, though still scary, this might be the culmination of why he had been transported so far.

  Pulling out of the hospital compound, I felt like a con man, to have cleared the back of my car so efficiently, courtesy of a hero lady, which was what she was. We had both known, however, that the Dinkas of the SPLA, just as they had the power to kidnap and murder deserters here, could prevent the pair of women I’d delivered to Betty from falling into harm’s way in Kampala, if I never saw them again. Only the three barely pubescent girls with crossed or truant eyes were left. I bought them take-out suppers before we got to my hotel, so they would be content to stay in another parking lot for the night while I lived it up, as I intended to do, after tipping a security guard to watch out for them. Whereupon—reminding the bellhop that he had a cousin who knew me (like her, he was a university graduate)—I bathed, handed my laundry to the chambermaid, and went to the bar, then the dining room. As a long shot, I did ask the desk clerk whether any expatriate medical types or foundation bigwigs had registered who I ought to chat up. But we were a mid-price place where Africans and front-line NGO personnel stayed, not the folks who wrote checks. A waitress slept on a mattress behind the bar during the wee hours instead of going home, in case of a room-service call, so the management wouldn’t need to pay a night shift. That informality meant less gloss, lower prices, and permitted me to park my refugee children on the premises but off the books. More important, you didn’t feel the reverberations imbuing some of Kampala’s best hotels, which Idi Amin had used as torture chambers during his reign, when part of his insanity was that he wished foreign businessmen and diplomats visiting his country to hear the agony of his prisoners being sliced, burned, electrified, or having their fingers, toes, and teeth torn out, all night long, on the next floor down.

  Remarkably soon, the bellboy’s cousin appeared at my table, in time for the soup. On a previous visit I’d given her a cell phone, and now paid what her taxi had cost. Small-boned, delicately featured, from a tribe that was brown-skinned, she was wearing a maroon blouse and lavender slacks and had been fashioning ceramics for a living for the tourist stores, except that, with the latest Ebola scare and Uganda’s general reputation, there weren’t enough tourists. Recently, therefore, she’d begun painting logos on Toyotas, according to whomever the dealer managed to sell a vehicle to. But he hadn’t enough volume, either. And rustling up a marriage was ever trickier because AIDS had heaped nieces and nephews upon every breadwinner, making them more skittish about formalizing any relationship, even when they were already contributing to the support of their blood offspring, and still more prone to marry in a direction where money lay. That’s what the father of her own son had done, Angela said, as—fastidiously but thoroughly—she ate everything that was served. His other principal girlfriend’s family had lost fewer adults to “slim,” so he’d married her, after some dithering, because Angela was the person he loved. Angela’s parents had died, leaving her just their house, to be shared with brothers and sisters, and no cash on hand or salaried prospects, and lately, although he was a white-collar junior executive, money from him to spend on their boy had dribbled to a halt.

  No paper trail of paternity existed. In her lateish twenties, and while planning to have no other kids, she still needed school fees and clothes for this one, not to mention her youngest sister, not much past Ya-Ya’s age. Sadly, she smiled, with an adorable crimp to her mouth that expressed intelligence. Buying a new blouse like what she’d put on to pique the jaundiced libido of an itinerant like me subtracted from his wardrobe. “And that pains me.” I said she needn’t have, squeezing her hand. She moved it under the table to rest on her knee and asked why, if clothes weren’t important to me, I wasn’t with the chambermaid? But prettiness was oddly irrelevant in this age of HIV. To be lucky was not whether you turned heads, but whether you had contracted the virus, and by limiting her outings to foreigners she met in the hotel gift shops that carried her pottery, she hadn’t really tipped into prostitution yet. They admired her crafts, bought a piece, and entered into respectful conversation, offering the niceties of a date, under a protective roof where she had friends, in case the guy turned ugly.

  I did bring her outside to meet my girls, to be sure they hadn’t locked themselves out of the car, or snuck off downhill toward the dangers of the city. She was amused, yes, yet too accustomed to the doomed importunities of Kampala’s myriad street children to be as charmed by Ya-Ya and company as I could have wished. I suppose if she’d been more touched—Uganda has been scalded by so many massacres that its people are cauterized—I might have been the candidate she was scouting for: the mannerly white man ten years older, of no settled residence, who in exchange for the privilege of playing with her small, comely, coffee-colored breasts and a daily hand job, would support her and her son.

  I had gazed at her dimply, equivocal smile, adorable throat, and attentive eyes—her hair tempting my fingers to reach out and tangle themselves in it—over our dinner dishes, until with a widening grin she gained enough confidence to mention a kiln she needed for her business, knowing where just the right one was for sale, and also how a friend of hers had gotten an exhibition of her art financed at a gallery near the Sheraton for only a thousand dollars or so, put up by an Englishman she was living with. I was noncommittal because I wanted her in my arms as soon as possible for a lengthy bout of safe-sex frottage.

  The next day, I drove to the Doctors Without Borders compound, on another hillside overlooking the town. It had an unpretentious staff of one expatriate and one in-country administrator, both female, plus a guard and driver. I led my girls straight into the office and told them Betty needed help, too, with the three other children I’d left at the hospital yesterday.

  “This is a post office. Our doctors are in the field. With the Ebola, the cholera, the cataracts,” the Eu
ropean woman said. But she did step from behind her desk to shake hands with each of my girls and called up Betty, whom she knew, to register her moral support. “I’ll put on my thinking cap,” she told me. A team was operating in Masindi, another at Mbale, at the moment; not a help. I wanted to start for Kenya. I was antsy. She kindly called the office there, but the knowledgeable person was out.

  “We’re in the field. We don’t work in the capitals,” she explained, rummaging through her assistant’s desk for a list of orphanages in both cities that NGOs supervised, where attention might be paid to such solvable problems as an awry eye.

  I wanted to unload my gold, as well. Not as dicey a commodity as diamonds, but the girls might be useful in the room to distract a dealer who was considering strong-arming me. Probably I had a pound of nuggets distributed in the money belt underneath my baggy pants, around my groin, and I double-parked outside a couple of the leading jewelry shops to tell the owners to come to my hotel room with cash to get a gander at it. They weren’t smugglers but would fashion baubles, keeping the natural shape of the gold I’d secured, for the carriage trade. Meantime, I’d enlisted the chambermaid to buy the girls changes of clothing, while they washed in the staff’s bathroom. Thus they looked nice and spruce when the dealers, like two stooped usurers, showed up. I spread my nuggets, one by one, on the table. Mzei, the senior and more curious of the men, sniffed and tasted each bit of conglomerate the gold was embedded in. I hadn’t tried to knock it loose because I knew from a jeweler’s standpoint the geological setting might add to the aesthetics. Instead, I swayed my finger fetchingly to indicate how such a gnarly, natural artifact might hang down in some slinky young woman’s cleavage. He smiled; kept a “panther” around his shop to model his wares. He knew I was an NGO freelancer who shuttled food to conflict areas, but he quizzed me as to where these placer deposits were. I only returned his smile.