Just a few minutes into the film, all hell broke loose. It opened with a violent home invasion in which a husband and wife are sadistically beaten and tortured. When the wife was violently raped with a dildo, I jumped from my seat and switched off the film. I was terrified that I’d offended my students, in particular a pair of teen sisters who wore the hijab.
After switching off the film and switching the lights back on, I apologized profusely. They didn’t seem to be fazed, not even the two girls. They thought I’d stopped the film not because it might offend them, but because it was offending me.
I finished up that first semester but did not sign on for another. Teaching wasn’t my strong suit. Before I left Morocco, Jane helped me to get an internship at the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Rabat. I was relieved not to have to go back to teaching English, but working at UNESCO presented a whole new crop of issues and it didn’t last long. Neither experience squashed my desire to work in Africa, however. Both made me want to get the skills necessary to get a job where I could be trusted to do the work. From Morocco I applied to graduate school and was accepted. I left believing I’d return, but life had other plans.
• • •
I invited Laila to spend the summer of 1993 with me, Ted and Jane at his Flying D Ranch in Montana. I wanted to share the experience of a home on the range where the buffalo really do roam.
In Montana we rode horses, square-danced in the barn, took fly fishing lessons and borrowed a ranch car to visit nearby Yellowstone National Park. We spent the days there exploring the hot springs and mud pots, and photographing wildlife. Laila could not get enough of Old Faithful.
Literally minutes after we returned to the ranch from our weekend at Yellowstone, Jane came into my room and hugged me fiercely before telling me my uncle Landon (who I had not heard from in years) had called her office to tell me that my sister Deborah had been killed. He’d also passed along the time and place of the funeral that was to be held within the week. I couldn’t speak. Jane told me I did not have to go, but if I wanted to she would arrange everything. I struggled to comprehend it all.
I took a moment to myself to process it. I was going back. Back to Oakland and I’d see my mother, my father and bury my sister. I was numb but I knew I had to go. I asked Jane to make the arrangements and asked her to include Laila in my travel plans. The next day we flew out to the Bay Area.
We had a Moroccan friend who was attending college at San Francisco State, so we crashed at his place. I left Laila with him the following day and I took BART across the bay to meet with Uncle Landon and Aunt Jan. They still lived in the big, homey bungalow on Coolidge Avenue where I had spent many pleasant evenings. The mood of course was somber. Uncle Landon told me that Deborah had been killed but did not go into details. I didn’t ask him to.
The funeral was the next day. There were lots of reporters and photographers, TV news cameras. My sister’s murder had been particularly cold-blooded and had drawn a lot of media attention. I saw my mother. She was wailing and beating her chest. “Why? Why? My baby!” she cried and my heart was ice. I wanted to tell the reporters that my sister was dead because my mother, my grieving mother, gave up on her. But I was tired. My head felt as if it weighed a ton. My body could not support it.
I went to my sister’s funeral full of anger at my mother for letting such a tragedy touch her child and convinced that my departure from her negligent care had spared me a similar fate. My big sister. If I could have shot flames from my eyes back then, my mother would have been a charcoal briquette. I sat at a distance observing her grief and thought, What right does she have to her tears? Her wails spiraled through the room like an ambulance racing toward a victim beyond saving.
I believed my sister dying like an animal in the gutter was all her fault. She failed my sister. She failed me. I spoke to Teresa and other family members at the funeral and at the wake. Polite conversations, brief and distant. With barely contained contempt I spoke briefly to my birth mother after the funeral and left the next day convinced that my choice to leave Oakland behind was a good one.
But I hadn’t left really. For the next few decades, I’d carry a heavy bundle of anger that lived in the center of my chest. Though it was a burden to carry and it prevented me from making true connections to people, it also protected me by keeping me safe from feelings of sadness and loss. My anger was both prophylaxis and sickness—a pathogen that flowed freely through my mind, blocking my ability to mourn my sister’s death or to see my mother as anything other than a monster for years.
I recall the rest of the day as if it were a series of snapshots, muted and dull around the edges. My grieving aunt and uncle. My brother a grown man holding the hand of a short, chubby, sweet-faced woman. His wife? My sister Teresa with a small girl. My niece?
After the funeral there was a gathering at the home of our paternal grandparents. Grandma Marie! Grandpa Rene! Kisses. Hugs. She gave me an old black-and-white photo of all six of my siblings. I was three in this photo. Deborah was nine and alive. Grandma told me to keep in touch. I kissed her soft cheek deeply. I did not linger.
I resurfaced back in Montana with Laila. I did not speak about the funeral. I had been there and at the same time I hadn’t. It was like passing through the Underworld. I mustn’t look back lest I get stuck there. In Montana everything was clear again. The colors were sharp; I was light in body and mind. I picked up where I left off as if I’d not gone back.
CHAPTER 10
AFTER MY PROFESSIONAL BLUNDERS in Morocco, I knew I had to improve myself academically if I had any hope of contributing anything useful to developing nations. This is what drove my decision to get a master’s degree in public health from Boston University. I chose public health because it seemed to be a degree most sought after by international development agencies, large and small.
I enrolled in an accelerated program and had my master’s in hand within a year. I then moved to Atlanta for a time to be near my family and to work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order to strengthen my résumé before applying for jobs abroad. Though I enjoyed my time at the CDC, I was frustrated by the government’s apathy toward gun regulation, which I felt was contributing to our nation’s death and injury rates, particularly in poor communities and communities of color.
After a year in Atlanta, I took a nine-month fellowship with the International Foundation for Education and Self-Help (IFESH), a nonprofit that places health and education professionals in service positions in developing countries. Through IFESH, I was assigned to a small mom-and-pop health NGO called Adventures in Health, Education and Agricultural Development (AHEAD). To go along with its big name, it also had a grandiose mission: to provide hands-on, people-to-people assistance and partnerships with rural catastrophically distressed communities to combat malnutrition, disease, extreme poverty, technological deprivation and other conditions that have an adverse impact on the health and welfare of people. My disenchantment with huge, bureaucratic multinational agencies like UNESCO had me primed to work with a “little engine that could” NGO like AHEAD.
I was thrilled that I would finally be living and working in sub-Saharan Africa. I would be the only expat working for the agency in Shinyanga, a city with a population close to ninety thousand located in northern Tanzania about three hundred miles from the country’s capital, Dodoma. After accepting the fellowship, I attended an organizational orientation at IFESH’s headquarters in Arizona and then was sent home with a month to prepare for my move. In that time I met and started dating an Atlanta native, a 6-foot-2 hottie named Andy. We met at one of Atlanta’s many young black professional gatherings. There were plenty of red flags at the beginning of our romance to indicate that we were incompatible which, of course, I promptly ignored. Andy, a year older than me, was a high school dropout who had a hard time keeping a job and was living in a basement when we met. He was also a single father who struggled to make his child support payment
s. I knew this because his ex-wife made a point of letting him know this during heated phone conversations I overheard and whenever their two-year-old was picked up and dropped off for his visitation with Andy.
I moved out of my apartment and moved into Andy’s rented basement apartment in order to save money for my move to Tanzania. Dating Andy was a sharp departure from what I was used to. Throughout graduate school I’d dated medical students and a sweet-natured Antiguan who was studying at the Berklee College of Music.
I found intimate relationships with men difficult because I found it hard to date and be myself at the same time. My relationships always started off intensely. I’d go from being a first date directly to being a serious girlfriend. I catered to my partners’ every need, sexually and emotionally. So much so that Mario, one of my boyfriends, when describing me to a friend, said with a grin: “She’s very Mario focused.”
Unfortunately for Mario, there was only so long that I could keep up the façade, and eventually the relationship would slide from blissful into nonexistent, usually when I moved somewhere so far away my baffled boyfriends couldn’t follow. Andy was the first boyfriend I let follow.
He managed to get time off from work and I booked both of us tickets to Tanzania two weeks before my assignment was to start in order to explore and enjoy the role of tourist before my real work began. Jane did not approve. Though she was kind to Andy and thought he was a nice person, she didn’t think he was a good fit for me and told me so. I ignored her advice and insisted we were in love and our relationship would work. Despite his lack of a formal education and his economic woes, he was a loving father, a good person, and our chemistry was instantaneous and undeniable. So despite our differences and Mom’s disproval, the relationship deepened quickly. But events transpired just weeks before our departure that threatened to change everything.
In the afternoon of August 8, 1998, I received a call from IFESH informing me that the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam had been bombed and I was given the option of being posted to another country, but I told my country representative that I’d like some time to decide what I wanted to do. I hung up the phone and turned on the television. It turned out that two U.S. embassies had been bombed. The other was in Nairobi, in the neighboring country of Kenya. Over the next few days I learned that hundreds of people were killed and thousands injured in simultaneous truck bomb explosions. The vast majority of the victims were local people. Many of the injured were blinded by projectiles created in the explosions. These people were rendered unemployable and the impact of these lost wages on the locals would reverberate for decades. I was unnerved and unsure of what my next move should be, so I called my mom for advice.
“Hey, did you hear the news about the bombings in Africa?”
“Yes! It’s horrible.”
“So maybe I shouldn’t go? I have the option of being reassigned.”
“Why wouldn’t you go?”
“Errrm . . . the bombings? The American-hating terrorists?”
“I think you should go.”
“What?”
“If you don’t go, then what about the people you were supposed to work with? The Tanzanians need support now more than ever.”
What she told me made perfect sense. We talked for a few minutes longer and by the end of our conversation, I was 100 percent recommitted to my assignment. I could always count on my mom giving me the pep talk I needed whenever I was unsure of myself. Besides, traveling to a country in which an American embassy was bombed must have seemed a fairly low security risk to a woman who fearlessly toured throughout wartime Vietnam. If there was anyone who was qualified to counsel me in this situation it was her. My mom and Ted threw me a marvelous African-themed going away party at an Italian restaurant in Buckhead, and the following morning Andy and I were on a plane bound for Africa.
More than twenty-four hours later, we landed safely at Julius Nyerere International Airport in the middle of a night hotter and stickier than any I’d experienced. It sorely taxed the little bit of energy I’d held in reserve. We quickly exchanged some U.S. dollars for Tanzanian shillings, threw our bags in the cab of the most aggressive of the two dozen cabbies who swarmed us as we left the airport, and headed to the budget-conscious hotel recommended by my supervisor. It was a flophouse in the middle of the city, with hookers in the lobby. Our hotel room door did not lock, so we ended up barricading it with an armchair and our luggage. The bathroom was a microenvironment for several species of mold and mushrooms, many I suspected not yet classified. As for the bed, the pillows and sheets were covered with long blond hair. I wasn’t too concerned because I figured you get what you pay for and the hotel was certainly dirt cheap. Andy, on the other hand, refused to enter the bathroom and would not lie on the bed without first covering it with his jacket and some towels he’d brought from the States.
The next morning I awoke to find Andy wide awake and rustling around in his suitcase. For the first time I saw its contents. Andy’s suitcase was nearly half full of cans of tuna and granola bars. When I asked him about it, he told me he was not going to eat any of the food in Africa. “I don’t trust it,” he said, never raising his eyes from his search. He went on to tell me that even when he visited his family in Jamaica he did not eat their food, preferring instead to eat at the local McDonald’s or eat food he’d brought with him from the States. When I told him something was seriously wrong with a person who trusted the food at McDonald’s more than a home-cooked meal prepared by his relatives, he dismissed me with a wave of his hand, still focused on finding something in his suitcase.
“You honestly expect to eat tuna fish and granola bars for two weeks?”
“Yep!” he replied, still rustling through his bag.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“I think I forgot my can opener.”
I laughed until I nearly gave myself an ulcer. Andy, however, failed to see any humor in his situation. We wolfed down a couple of granola bars for breakfast then got dressed. As we exited the hotel and beheld Dar es Salaam in the full light of day, I did not experience the feelings of peace and homecoming I’d experienced in Morocco. Dar es Salaam is not a pretty city. My ears were assaulted by the blare of automobile horns, backfiring buses and the bleating calls of street vendors. The streets were a hive of activity, with people darting in and out of traffic. There were beggars, vagrants and the gainfully employed all bustling around in a swirl of organized chaos that I irrationally feared would pull us to its core.
I was particularly astounded by the city buses. They were packed beyond capacity. I could see the passengers on board with their faces pressed against the windows. On the same bus there were more passengers attached to the bumpers and the sides, hanging on for dear life as the bus wove in and out of traffic and braked hard at stoplights and for jaywalkers. Outside for less than five minutes, I was already sweating profusely and I imagined hanging from the side of a moving bus was more amenable than being packed inside in the hot and humid weather Dar es Salaam maintains nearly all year-round.
As we strolled along the sidewalk, I wanted to duck into the stores with smiling shopkeepers and lively traditional music pouring out onto the street. I wanted to practice my few phrases of Swahili and buy postcards for my friends and family at home, but Andy was in a sour mood and wouldn’t let me linger long. As we approached another busy street, he was suddenly captivated by what he saw on the other side: a Sheraton hotel. It was a bright shiny spot in the middle of a grungy city. He dragged me across the street for a closer look. It was unlike any Sheraton hotel I’d ever seen in the U.S. The grounds were extensive, almost like a small park. The lobby was vast and air-conditioned and tiled in marble. Not a hooker in sight. We wandered over to the dining area and saw a delicious brunch buffet with fresh fruit, eggs, bacon, homemade bread, freshly squeezed orange juice. We sat down and ate a proper breakfast served by the most attentive and welcoming staff.
After we finished our breakfast, we rushed back to our
hotel, grabbed our luggage, checked out of the fleabag and checked into the Sheraton. Andy’s mood changed completely. He was grinning from ear to ear as he unpacked. He sang while he took a shower. While still naked and dripping wet from his shower, he threw open the curtains dramatically to behold a view of the golf course below before falling upon the gigantic bed that could easily accommodate a family of six. He writhed around under the freshly laundered sheets like a pig in mud before falling asleep with a smile on his face. Although I was happy to be away from our first hotel, I was distinctly uncomfortable with our newfound artificial bubble of western comforts. I did not come to Africa to look at a golf course and be waited on hand and foot by Africans. But, I rationalized, if it kept Andy happy, it was worth it.
A few days later we headed off for an overnight stay and safari in Mikumi National Park. Mikumi is a 47,000-square-mile tract of wilderness that stretches east almost as far as the Indian Ocean. It is home to elephants, lions, zebra, wildebeest, impala, hyenas, giraffes, baboons and buffalo herds. I hoped the trip to Mikumi would be a welcome respite from the crowded streets of Dar.
It was only after we left the kinetic chaos of Dar es Salaam to the horizon behind us that I felt truly wrapped in Africa. Gone were the bleating horns and the crowded humanity, in its place was profound silence and the infinite expanse of the savanna. Along the way, our guide, Joseph, told us that the landscape was similar to that of the Serengeti, which consisted of alluvial plains and savanna punctuated with acacia, baobab, tamarind and palm trees. We’d also see the flattened top of hundreds of towering termite mounds, some as tall as ten feet. He said we would also have great views of the Rubeho and Uluguru mountains.
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