by Neely Tucker
The young officer had disappeared, and as I had pretty well plucked the front yard clear of grass, I roamed around the jacaranda trees, snapping off twigs, balancing them on a finger, then thumping them across the yard. Forty-five minutes later, the young officer emerged from the room with the noisy manual typewriter. He called to me and extended a single sheet of brown pulp paper.
It had the precinct address at the upper right, followed by the date. It was addressed to “The District Social Welfare Officer.” The subject line read: “Re: Abandoned child Chipo.”
“Madam,” it began, and three short paragraphs followed. Each was numbered in the style of court documents.:
1. Please be advised that this matter was investigated by Police.
2. Efforts were made to locate and arrest the accused/ mother of the abandoned child with no leads.
3. Matter is now closed undetected.
It was signed by the member in charge.
I let out a long breath. I stopped back in the older officer’s office. He was still on the phone. I clapped my hands softly three times, the Zimbabwean sign for gratitude. He nodded with a wave of his cigarette, still talking.
I sang out loud in the truck all the way back to Harare, an off-key celebration that matched my mood. Now we were getting somewhere, I thought.
I cheerfully took the file back to Tsiga the following Monday, but she seemed busy, distracted. Vita went down to her office; she was too busy to see her, too. This continued for a few days, and I resorted to the tried-and-true stakeout. I plunked down on the hallway floor outside her office early one afternoon, notebook and cell phone in hand, and settled into an afternoon of phone interviews and note-taking.
At 5:30 she finally called me in. The offices were all closed; she was again the last one there. Her eyes were tired, the skin on her face lined.
“This can be a very sad job on some days,” she said. She opened a dusty manila folder on her desk. “Here is a nine-year-old girl. She is being sexually abused by her father and, I think, by her uncle. Here is a case”—she picked up another file—“of a child the mother and father are fighting over. Neither loves the child; they are trying to humiliate the other. Those”—now she pointed to a stack five or six inches high on an adjacent table—“are sex abuse cases. The ones next to that are orphans, or those that have lost one parent. Sometimes the father wants the child if the mother died, sometimes he does not. And here,” she continued, picking up another brown file on her desk, “is Chipo’s file.”
I felt a wave of guilt coming on, as if I had been a well-heeled Westerner whining that his latte has grown cold. She was really very nice, doing a yeoman’s work, and here I was, another obnoxious and demanding client. I was beginning to mouth some face-saving apology when she raised a hand. She pulled out a few pages that had been stapled together. She slid it across the desk toward me.
“And what I see in this file is a happy little girl with two happy parents. There are things that are complicated, and things that are not. You will excuse me for thinking I have better things to do.”
I looked at the top of the stapled-together pages she had tossed me.
This was typed across the top:
APPLICATION TO THE MINISTER TO DISPENSE WITH CITIZENSHIP REQUIREMENTS IN THE MATTER OF AN APPLICATION BY NON ZIMBABWEAN CITIZENS TO ADOPT A ZIMBABWEAN MINOR IN TERMS OF SECTION 59(7) OF THE CHILDREN’S PROTECTION AND ADOPTION ACT (CHAPTER 5:06).
The following six pages were facts, figures, a case summary and chronology, and so on. I was reading every word when she clicked her fingernails on the top of the desk, tap-tap-tap. I looked up.
“This says I have approved your adoption,” she said, smiling broadly. “If the minister agrees, you will be free to go.”
I didn’t quite know what to say. I looked at the file. I looked back at her.
“Have I ever happened to mention what an absolutely gorgeous, scintillating, stunningly attractive woman you are, Mrs. Tsiga?”
“No,” she laughed. “But you can start.”
20
WEST TOWARD HOME
THE DAY AFTER Margaret Tsiga approved our file, it was December 1, World AIDS Day, and the rest of the planet began to get an idea of the orphan crisis that was sweeping over the continent. In New York, the United Nations reported that in the eighteen years since the disease had been identified, more than eleven million children had lost one or both parents to AIDS. At least 95 percent of those children were in sub-Saharan Africa.
“The traditional African family is breaking down under the unprecedented burden of the pandemic,” read the report. Dr. Peter Piot, head of the UN program on AIDS, acknowledged that the previous years’ reports had emphasized the growing number of infections, not their social implications. In an interview with the New York Times, Piot said that orphans were “the most forgotten aspect of the AIDS epidemic.”
In the odd way in which international journalism sometimes works, the report and Piot’s press interviews crystallized what had been a sprawling morass of an issue spread over dozens of countries. AIDS in Africa wasn’t a new story, but the full impact of the loss of millions of parents had not yet been fully understood—nor had the implications for the future been so stark. In some of the world’s poorest countries, the social implications ten or fifteen years down the line when all these four-year-old orphans reached adulthood were unknown but troubling. As a number of studies had reported, these children would be left outside the all-important network of the African family. They would receive less schooling and fewer opportunities for work, and they would be far more vulnerable to social, economic, and sexual exploitation. In Harare, I knew the situation from the reports by aid organizations that outlined the country’s orphan crisis, documents that had been forwarded to the UN to form part of their worldwide report. I knew the matrons of the orphanages and dozens of the children themselves. By my count, I had held at least three children who would die within days; Vita, in her work at the orphanage, had known many more. One of the last children I had helped care for was a toddler named Ferai, just like the infant we had lost. He was at Chinyaradzo when I took Joyce, my visiting editor, on a tour of the place. He was twelve or thirteen months old at the time and already had the shrunken frame and visible ribs of a body in the throes of full-blown AIDS. The skin on his face was pulled back so tightly you could see the shape of his skull. His lips were pulled away from his teeth, and his large brown eyes, the only things he moved with ease, glinted with a sharp focus. I wondered what I looked like through his eyes, what it felt like to be held, what the long hours in the crib held for him. I wondered if the shadows of darkness and impending death were anything that he could recognize. Joyce was shaken and wanted to know what she could do. I was holding Ferai in his shroud of blankets, rocking him back and forth, and I explained that this little guy was too far gone. She insisted, and I finally said that, short of trying to adopt him, the best thing would be to provide a steady supply of vitamins to boost his immune system. So she bought vitamins and I delivered them. Ferai somehow rallied. He really did get better. He perked up. He held my hand when I picked him up, gripping my fingers. I laughed, thinking I had underestimated a child’s astonishing capacity for recovery, and then one day he died. Just like that. Fat folders sat in my filing cabinets, documenting the larger issue of AIDS and abandoned children with statistics that went off the charts.
The UN report, filled with such data, put the issue before the Western world.
“10 Million Orphans,” screamed the cover of Newsweek’s international edition a couple of weeks later, the words printed over the shrouded face of a Zambian child. “The AIDS epidemic in Africa is leaving a generation of children without parents,” read the subhead. Inside were photographs of bodies in morgues and coffins being lowered into graves. There was one of an HIV-positive mother and child, lesions covering the infant’s flesh. Another was of a wailing infant in an orphanage, so emaciated that the veins in his stomach were showing.
&nbs
p; Time dispatched legendary conflict photographer James Nachtwey to shoot a photo essay on AIDS in Zimbabwe. The cover shot, in black and white, showed an older woman and a sad-faced child. It was run so large that the picture blocked out all but the last letter of the magazine’s name across the masthead. “This is a story about AIDS in Africa. Look at the pictures. Read the words. And then try not to care.” That was the headline.
On they came in the ensuing months, a phalanx of some of the best reporters and photographers in the American and European press corps, from newspapers and magazines and television stations and networks, all documenting the toll of AIDS on orphans in Africa, fanning out from South Africa all the way to Uganda. By late spring, even Scientific American had a lengthy story about it. “Care for a Dying Continent” ran the headline. The story was based almost entirely in Zimbabwe. The first full-page photograph was of the survivors of the Gombedza family in the eastern city of Marondera—six children. Both parents had died, as well as their grandmother. They were now all living with a thirty-year-old unmarried aunt, who had a child of her own, in a home with no water and no electricity. The magazine reported they were one of 107 families of orphaned children in Marondera’s townships alone.
So it came to be that one of the most momentous stories of our time fell into my lap, there at the end of the world, the tale of an entire generation of abandoned and dying children, and I knew it to the bone. I had the sources, the data, the feel of daily life in an orphanage at the heart of the problem, exacting detail that none of my colleagues could ever match, and the record will show I never filed a single story. I took a dive. Punted.
The fact was that the millions of children on the continent did not have my heart. One of them did. I still needed the national minister of public service, labor, and social welfare, Florence Chitauro, to authorize Chipo’s adoption. I could write no story about Zimbabwe’s orphan crisis that did not implicitly or explicitly criticize Chitauro’s ministry and the administration of which she was a part. Such a story would be a red flag to the same people who would consider our adoption request, and I was already well aware that any slight misstep could result in Chipo being taken back to the orphanage.
Perhaps I could have written stories that, by their detail and close reporting, might have led nongovernmental organizations or private individuals to designate lifesaving help for any number of children. I could have demonstrated how the government’s decision to spend tens of millions of dollars to send troops to fight in another country’s civil war affected its own orphaned children—that was the type of hard-nosed reporting on which I thrived. But there was no point if it endangered the life of one child, one who meant more to me than all the others. I had broken the first rule of Journalism Ethics 101: Never get personally involved in a story you are assigned to cover. I threw my notebook in the air. There was nothing to do about it now.
With the orphanages filled to overflowing and the country falling apart, I filed a story on elephant poaching.
Then I turned in my resignation, put four new tires on my truck and sold it for a song to my friend Nevio Prandini. I made plans to fly to Nigeria for one last story on a charismatic young Yoruba separatist leader who was wanted by police. I would drive around Lagos with him for a week, come back, and quit.
FOR A WHILE, the adoption paperwork seemed to fly along. It had taken the department six months to approve us as foster parents and another ten for them to forward it across the hall. By contrast, Tsiga completed her report in just twenty-three days. She sent it to Tony Mtero, the department director, who signed it in four days. He passed it along to Mr. Soko, the provincial magistrate, who signed it three days later.
Then it disappeared into the ether of the national ministry, headquartered in a charmless building downtown known as Compensation House. It was ten days before Christmas.
I drove down there each morning, crisply dressed in suit and tie, looking to talk to anyone who would listen. The problem was that the department was spread over several floors in different wings. I had no idea of what staffers worked in what divisions, of who actually set the paperwork in front of the minister. Mrs. Tsiga didn’t know either, as foreign adoptions were not something she did often enough to be familiar with, and our roller coaster screeched to a halt.
It was a situation that would leave any Capitol Hill lobbyist reaching for the whiskey cabinet—deadline for a big bill to be signed and zero access. I did at least manage to learn that the person who handled adoption cases for the minister was a Mrs. Dhlembrewu. I once waited for six hours to see an aide to her chief aide. Nothing. Vita and I went back the next day and got a brief audience with a different aide. The man politely explained he was not aware of our case at all.
I had to leave for Nigeria then, and Vita went back a few days later. She avoided the aide to the aide and went straight to Mrs. Dhlembrewu’s office. She was surprised to come across a parent in her reception area but agreed to see Vita for a moment. Vita explained the situation, tactfully omitting my status as an enemy of the state, but it still left Mrs. Dhlembrewu unamused.
“I’ve never seen your file, and I don’t like it when social workers expect us to work miracles,” she said. “Have one of them explain this to me.”
Vita rushed home and tried to reach Tsiga, Soko, anybody. No one was in. She went to their offices two days running. No luck.
I wasn’t getting much done in Nigeria, calling home twice a day for updates, and I was relieved to (a) not get shot or arrested with my young separatist friend and (b) knock out the story and head for home. I was nervous boarding the Kenya Air flight that night, though, as I had developed a case of the shakes about flying. My nerves were shot, and I had an unshakeable bad vibe, an intuition that I was going to be in a plane crash days before the end of my posting. I wouldn’t mention such guff to anyone, of course, but it had been unnerving me for several months.
When freelance photographer Malcolm Linton and I had been in Sierra Leone, we were to fly on a tiny turboprop to Liberia. A heavy thunderstorm blew in. I stood on the tarmac, cursing my nerves, getting soaking wet, until Malcolm said, “You think driving there is going to be any better?” which prompted images of mud-track roads and machete-wielding rebels. I got on the plane.
But I still had the jitters, bad enough to cancel a flight Malcolm and I had scheduled within Nigeria. The tickets were $130 each and nonrefundable. I ate the expense rather than fly.
The overnight flight back to Nairobi, where I would catch my connection down to Harare, was uneventful. But when the landing gear came down and we emerged from the rain clouds above Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, I nearly jumped out of my seat. We were maybe two hundred feet above the tarmac and were flying across the runway. The pilot jerked us back up into the clouds. We were in a holding pattern for fifteen minutes, and then we were going down, down, until we broke free of the clouds and the runway loomed below us at the same cross-eyed angle. Back up, back down—by this time everybody was wide awake and staring out the windows—and now we all saw a third botched approach as we came out of the clouds.
The pilot jerked the plane up again. As we bounced through the turbulence, he announced we had just enough fuel to fly to Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast. An hour later, we touched down in bright sunshine. They refueled. By now, my feet were twitching. Then we were airborne, flying past Mount Kilamanjaro and then down, down through the clouds once more, finally gliding onto a very wet runway. The passengers broke into a spirited round of applause as we coasted to a stop.
The footnote to the story is this: Kenya Airways’ tiny fleet only made that Nairobi-Lagos-Nairobi run twice a week. Two months later, the flight to Lagos crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing almost everyone on board. I do not know if it was the same craft and crew I flew with, but it had the same flight number, and it was likely. I watched the wreckage recovery on television, the shattered bits of the airplane bobbing in the waves, and wondered if my bad vibe had been so silly after all.
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nbsp; DOCTOR’S VISITS, more home studies, more fingerprints, visas, all for Chipo’s U.S. adoption certification and citizenship. We did little else in the crazed first weeks of the new year. It actually seemed pretty easy.
“You know how bad it’s been,” Vita said, “when the Immigration and Naturalization Service looks good.”
She was looking at a stack of paperwork from the U.S. embassy that explained what we would need. Most of the documents were in hand. But the consulate in Harare was small, and they did not process applications for adoptions by U.S. nationals. That was at the regional headquarters in Nairobi—no, no, it turned out, that office was still in disarray after the bombing. A temporary office was operating in Johannesburg.
We flew there to be fingerprinted for a required FBI check of our backgrounds, filled out a stack of forms, turned around, and came back. Now Vita took Chipo to Dr. Paruch for the medical documentation of her health. (We already had this from Dr. Paz, but he wasn’t on the list of doctors approved by the U.S. embassy, so we had to do it again.) Dr. Paruch plopped Chipo down on the examining table. He poked and prodded and listened. Her lungs were clear; her heart, sight, hearing, speech, and teeth were all fine.
He took a pen and began filling out the form. Under race, he wrote “A,” which gave Vita pause until she figured out that it meant “African.”
“Is the minor well nourished?” the form asked.
He playfully poked Chipo in the stomach, his finger disappearing into her Buddha belly, like she was the Pillsbury dough girl. She collapsed in giggles, leaning over his hand. Then she looked down, waiting for him to do it again.