Love in the Driest Season

by Neely Tucker

  I appreciated the attitude but wondered about its relevance. In the months I had been coming into the Social Welfare office, I had seen maybe two other white people. I mean, I couldn’t help but wonder who he was telling.

  He was in his mid-forties, I guessed, had a growing paunch, and wore a rumpled suit and tie. He had a husky voice, rarely smiled, at least at me, and accepted my paperwork with a harrumph. He said, “I have heard about you.”

  “Favorably, I hope,” I said with a smile.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said absently.

  I paused, then quickly recapped our case, explaining our wish to adopt. It was in the early days of March 2000, and I explained that I was due for home leave in July. I asked if that would be possible.

  “July?” he laughed. “Why are you telling me this now? That is many months away.”

  “Well, I know that you’re busy, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a problem. I didn’t want to come to you at the last minute.”

  “That is no problem. We have plenty of time.”

  “Terrific. My company pays for the tickets, and they have many other correspondents to schedule as well, so if I can give them a specific time, it helps everybody’s planning.”

  “You can leave my office now,” he said.

  Well. This wasn’t going to be warm and fuzzy. I quickly repeated the offer I had made to Kaseke, that I would shortly be on leave and was around to be of any help on any case.

  “I don’t need any help,” he said.

  I came back a week later. He seemed surprised. I had a letter in hand from Joyce Davis, my editor, which I had requested she write. She informed him of the home leave and was kind enough to mention the dates I had chosen—my bosses didn’t really have to see me in July—and he nodded. I told him it was simply written confirmation of my request, an American business habit. He said fine. Then he told me again that I could leave.

  March turned into April, and I heard nothing. Another couple of weeks passed, and I was suddenly six weeks into my leave, halfway through, and hadn’t gotten a damn thing done. We took Chipo on day safaris to see lions and hippos and giraffes, but my nerves jangled like a pocketful of nickels. I kept an eye on the charges against the three Americans, on Mugabe’s increasing rhetoric, feeling as though a clock were ticking down while we were putzing around at Victoria Falls.

  A week later, I stopped in Munautsi’s office again. He stood up, not looking at me, and went to his door. He held it open. “You must leave my office. I do not want to see you anymore. I will call you when I have something to tell you.”

  “I appreciate that, Mr. Munautsi,” I said, standing, “but it’s been my experience that social workers are too busy to call us.”

  “I will call you when I have something to tell you.”

  I went home and told Vita that perhaps it was a race thing, particularly given that sign in his office. “Maybe it’s his one chance in life to push a white guy around and he doesn’t want to miss it,” I concluded with a shrug. “Let’s see how you do.”

  Vita went down there a few days later. He refused to let her in the door. “That son of a bitch,” she came home fuming. “Acted like I was some little woman he couldn’t be bothered with.”

  But ticking off Munautsi was not going to do us any good, so we turned our attention elsewhere for a few days. There didn’t seem to be any other option. I was idly taking care of paperwork in the office one morning when Vita shouted from the living room. There was an urgent tone to it, and I leaped from my chair and bolted into the living room, ready for anything. What I saw instead was Vita standing perfectly still, holding out a pencil. Halfway across the room, Chipo was wobbling on her hands and knees, a look of concentration on her face. Then she put her weight on her feet, bent her knees, and pushed back with her hands. Her upper body moved up, up—and somehow, she was standing upright, both hands out to her sides.

  “Well, I’ll be—”

  “Hush!” Vita hissed. “Now watch this.”

  She leaned over and twitched the pencil, back and forth. “Come get the pencil, baby,” she said.

  Chipo was wobbling, a huge smile on her face. She was wearing a green pair of zip-up pajamas, complete with little footies. She held out both her hands, tilted her right shoulder forward, then swung her right foot a few inches in front of her. Then, teetering, she hunched her left shoulder and swung out that foot. Then the right. The left. She was walking, a kind of slow-motion Frankenstein stagger, but walking. She made it all the way to the pencil. Then she sat down with a plop on her bottom, giggling so hard she couldn’t stand up.

  We laughed and hooted and cheered so loudly that the two Rottweillers came running, thinking something was wrong.

  “My little baby is a biped,” Vita crowed, swooping her up in a hug.

  We were delighted on days like this—I took an entire roll of film of Chipo walking six steps—but it was always muted when we went down to Chinyaradzo. Infants continued to die at the orphanage on a pace of one every three weeks. Both at the orphanage and in phone calls that stretched late into the evening, Vita and Stella talked for hours about how to slow this procession of deaths. Vita, from her contacts at the U.S. embassy, knew that Ambassador Tom McDonald oversaw a program that offered funding for small projects. It was described as a self-help program, the sort of grants and loans that development agencies call microenterprise. It’s designed for an enterprising farmer to get new tools, for women pooling their resources to open a small store, and so on. Vita and Stella, trying to identify the biggest threats to infant life at the orphanage, focused on little things that might eradicate the opportunistic germs and illnesses that triggered more serious health problems.

  They put together a plan to refurbish the kitchen, including putting in a refrigerator and running hot water and modern cooking equipment, in order to make sure the children were getting safe and nutritious food. In the changing room, they wanted to install a new machine to clean diapers, provide a changing table, and bring in other amenities.

  More importantly, they wanted to train workers in basic child-care issues, such as recognizing the onset of colds, viruses, and the flu so that they could be caught early. There were other simple proposals, such as staggering the feeding hours, so that three workers were not trying to feed fifteen infants at once. As it was, if the infants didn’t eat rapidly, they didn’t get a chance to eat at all, a factor contributing to sickness and malnutrition and, we thought, one reason why Chipo nearly starved to death. Finally, Vita went back to Dr. Paz’s office. She explained the project, saying that she would like for him to visit the home for weekly lectures on health and hygiene. He could deliver these talks in Shona, increasing the comfort level for the young women asking questions.

  There was no salary, Vita said. And there was no need, Dr. Paz replied—he would be happy to do it for free.

  None of this sounds like a sweeping overhaul of the place, particularly in light of the mortality rate, but many of the health problems were either caused or intensified by simple human error. While some of the more mature women did backbreaking work, most of the younger workers were merely teenagers from the home. They had scant supplies, little training, and no experience in caring for special-needs children. They were sincere and they cared, but they were also desensitized to the orphanage’s conditions to a degree that was almost beyond reach. Robert’s death was a staggering example—how do you train a worker who will let a child die on her back because she’s too timid, or too apathetic, to ask a doctor for help? These were far more serious and overlapping social issues, something a Nancy Reagan–esque “Just speak up” campaign was not going to cure. Nor was there anything Stella could do to upgrade her staffing, as the home’s pauper status left no funding to hire professionals.

  Once, shortly after my leave began, I happened to stop by on a day when the place was short-staffed. There were only one or two young workers around. They were busy feeding children at lunch. I went to pick up a crying child who, it tu
rned out, was so soaked with urine that it seeped through the washcloth/diaper and gave me a handful of the stuff as well. I went to change him, but I had to clear an edge of a table in the changing room to do so. When unpinned, the triangle of rough cloth that served as his diaper spilled open with diarrhea. The child’s hips were coated with it. I looked around for a cloth to clean up the mess. There was none. There were no paper towels. I finally held the wailing little boy beneath a stream of running water from the faucet, letting the excrement run down the drain. I grabbed an old rag out of a closet and used that to wipe him clean. Then there was no lotion. So I pinned him back up and looked for a pail to throw the soiled diaper into. There wasn’t one. Not in this room, not in the next. I finally slung the soiled thing in a corner on the floor. There wasn’t any soap to wash my hands, either.

  I was fairly disgusted. We had donated pails, garbage cans, cases upon cases of lotion and baby cream, thousands of diapers—and no matter how much we bought, it all disappeared in weeks. The Australian nurse who sometimes visited had to lock away the vitamins we donated because they vanished at such an extraordinary rate. Some of the workers, or perhaps the older children, apparently were taking them either for themselves, for children in their homes, or to sell on street markets. I could understand their need, but it still didn’t excuse the fact that the supplies were not being used for Chinyaradzo’s children.

  As I walked the little boy back to his crib, several infants were crying. The other worker was busy with one of them. So I set the first child down and went to get another. He howled the minute I set him down, so I turned around, picked him back up until he quieted down, then returned him to the crib. He howled again. This time, I kept going. The child in the next crib was soaked too. I cleaned her off in the same manner as the little boy. In fact, every child I picked up was soaked or soiled, no more workers were coming, and the din of so many children wailing was like fingernails on a chalkboard. All of them had diarrhea. The stench of it was so putrid, and the ventilation in the changing room so poor, that it almost made me gag.

  This was what the proposal targeted—not just an infusion of supplies, but a better-trained staff to raise and maintain the level of care. Neither Vita nor Stella had any experience writing grant proposals, and the format of the thing was U.S. federal government bureaucracy—different from the Zimbabwean variety, but its own particular headache. When the day came to submit it, they were nervous, for the competition for grants was intense, and they had come to believe the project was a life-or-death matter for the orphanage’s children.

  Several weeks dragged by. Vita and Stella talked again and again about tiny details they should have included.

  In the end, when the phone call came, they needn’t have worried. The embassy staff approved the project for the maximum amount the program allowed—U.S. $7,000, or about 275,000 Zimbabwean dollars. Vita and Stella whooped and laughed on the phone for an hour, celebrating. When Ambassador McDonald signed on the dotted line, it became one of the largest grants in Chinyaradzo’s history. At the awards ceremony, Vita and Stella signed their part of the contract, then talked excitedly with the three dozen other recipients, who were beaming just as much.

  The next day, the Child Protection Society called Vita. They were the board that oversaw the home. The president and chief officer were quite excited.

  When, they asked, would they get the money?

  “Well, they don’t exactly cut a check to anybody,” Vita explained. The project worked on a voucher program. You presented bills for the supplies in your project, and the embassy paid the company or the contractor directly. There was no cash flow.

  Oh, they said.

  The new executive director called a couple of times, mainly about the need to include the CPS in future projects, but they quickly lost interest. After taking credit for the grant in a CPS newsletter (they said they had won the contract with an assist from Vita; actually, they were not mentioned in the grant at all), they seemed to disappear. No one ever looked in to see how it was going. No one said congratulations to Stella, who had worked so hard to make it happen.

  For as long as we were in the country, Vita oversaw the implementation of the project. She picked up Dr. Paz and drove him down for sessions with the staff once a week. He was delighted with how eager the young women were, once they got over the nervousness of asking him questions. Vita haggled with contractors, most of whom were polite, professional, and happy to do work at the home. She also cracked heads with the few who tried to inflate prices or manipulate her into endorsements for more work at the embassy. Inflation was so severe that once she got a quote for a major appliance and the embassy approved it, the price had gone up, meaning the process had to start over. I had to get unpleasant once or twice with male contractors who had trouble being respectful toward a woman giving them orders. Stella did yeoman’s work, overseeing the daily work at the orphanage, juggling the rehab work with the daily load of caring for all of her young charges, not just the infants.

  When it was all done, the quality of care for the infants had improved and the facilities were upgraded. The place looked very fine. But the bottom line, at least in the short term, was dispiriting. The year we brought Chipo home, eighteen infants died. The next year, after more than $12,000 in supplies was brought in, the facilities modernized, and the staff trained by one of the best pediatricians in the country, seventeen infants died.

  IT WAS ANOTHER gloomy morning in the Social Welfare office, and Munautsi was glowering at me. I had stopped in, once more, to check on the progress of Chipo’s birth certificate. In an office with few typewriters, even fewer computers, almost no transportation, and bad phone lines, Munautsi had to fill out forms applying to Chipo’s home region to get the document. Before he could do that, he had to explain the circumstances of her birth, prove that she was indeed found in that area, and provide police verification of all of the above. He also had to go through all of our paperwork to make sure that we qualified as parents. This was one of hundreds of cases on his desk. I really had every sympathy for the man. What I couldn’t understand was why he viewed me as some sort of threat.

  He was muttering something about shortcuts, me doing something wrong, papers not in order.

  “You are trying to complete this process without all of your papers,” he said. “You think you can take shortcuts.”

  “What shortcuts? What’s not in order?”

  “You have no references,” he said. “You must have references from many people. But you have not submitted any.”

  “Not subm—Mr. Munautsi, I’ve given the department more than a dozen reference letters. From my bosses, from a priest, from long-term friends in America, from friends here in Zimbabwe.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Yes—” And then I caught myself. I didn’t want to get into a third-grade did-not, did-too debate, which I was just about exasperated enough to do.

  “You’re saying the file has no reference letters?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then I’ll bring copies in tomorrow. But you’re attributing motive that’s not there, and I have to tell you I don’t appreciate it. If you have a question about something, if there’s a document that we haven’t supplied, then it’s from some sort of miscommunication, not deviousness.”

  This sort of Americanized formality approached the inane, I knew, but I couldn’t see any alternative. I didn’t have any threat to bully him with, and blowing up at him was only going to make things worse. Bottling up this anger, morning after morning, bounced my blood pressure into the stratosphere. There were many days, including that one, when I left his office as pleasant as you please, and by the time I got back into my truck I would be pounding the dashboard in anger, cursing out loud with what I had wanted to say. Which startled the street kid looking for his tip, but not much else. I still had to go home, make copies of the reference letters, and bring them back the next morning.

  He wasn’t there.

&nb
sp; This game of catch-as-catch-can continued for two days, until I finally did what I had done with the previous social worker—I took a book, sat down in the hallway, and read. An hour or so later, Munautsi rounded the corner and I gave him the copies. He said thank you and opened his door. I started to follow him inside, but he quickly turned. “There is no need for you in here!” he almost shouted. “I am busy! You must leave!”

  I apologized and left, shaking my head.

  A few days later, it got worse. This time he was really worked up.

  “Shortcuts!” he bellowed. “I knew it! I knew you! You are trying something!”

  By now, he had thrown me out of his office so many times, like an umpire tossing a batter after a disputed third strike, that I scarcely paid attention. But this was different. He was shaking his finger, truly furious.

  “You were never vetted by police! You did not do the criminal check! And yet you have a child! This is against the law! I knew it!”

  I was startled. We had been checked by the police. We had been fingerprinted that day at the precinct with the prostitute. I tried to calm him down, assuring him that I would bring those copies in within the hour, for this was serious. If he pressed the matter, he could go to a judge to have our foster custody revoked.

  I rushed home, got the copy of the fingerprint form—Vita kept on file five copies of each document related to Chipo’s custody—and drove back. He wasn’t there, of course, and didn’t return for the rest of the day, but I caught him the next morning. I pointed out the date, the precinct stamp, and the signature of the officer. He was only slightly mollified. We had been printed, he agreed, but nobody from Social Welfare had verified with the police that we were not wanted criminals. Or, if they had, they had lost the paperwork. He handed me back the copy. The police couldn’t run a check with that.

  “You must be fingerprinted again,” he said.

  The next day, Vita and I were back at the precinct, once again rolling our fingers across the ink pad. This time, I drove the still-wet form to the police headquarters myself. The receptionist let me walk it back to the detectives. I begged the lady at that desk to investigate us, explaining the situation and the urgency. She was very nice and called back a week later. I drove down immediately. I picked up the form, complete with police sign-off in red ink, made six copies, had them notarized, then took them back to Munautsi.