Beneath the Tamarind Tree

by Isha Sesay

  On the sunbaked tarmac, two tall, dark-haired South Africans with thick Afrikaans accents were waiting, the pilot and the paramedic. Both looked to be in their midthirties, and when they introduced themselves, I was struck by how gentle they seemed. Mum’s stretcher was carefully lifted into the turboprop aircraft.

  I was only half-listening to the pilot. His words barely registered until he said, “. . . and the journey will take five hours.” Alarm bells went off. The typical flight time of no more than two hours had all of a sudden more than doubled due to the slow pace of the type of aircraft transporting us. I did the calculations. By the time we touched down in Lagos, twenty-four hours would have passed since my mum’s stroke.

  Before long Freetown was a tiny speck below us. Mum, meanwhile, lay motionless on a stretcher, hooked up to numerous monitors and oxygen tanks. She was so close I could reach over and touch her from my seat. As we flew, the temperature in the plane dropped, and soon I was shivering in my short-sleeved T-shirt. I stared at Mum’s still form, worrying she might be cold too.

  Every time a machine beeped, my heart bounded, but I was assured repeatedly by the paramedic that everything was okay. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes. I was too afraid. So I just stared at her and hoped she knew I was present and found the strength to keep fighting.

  It was dark by the time Lagos came into view. The lights of the megacity twinkled below, and I’d never been so happy to see Nigeria in my life. When we finally landed, the medics immediately lowered Mum onto the tarmac via an opening in the belly of the plane, while I bolted down the steps at the front.

  I stood in the balmy heat surrounded by the sprawling Murtala Muhammed International Airport, searching the darkness for the lights of an ambulance. Nothing. Five minutes later, I felt panic stirring.

  A slow-moving figure approached the plane.

  The pilot shouted to the man, “Where’s the ambulance?”

  Though the man’s flapping badge indicated he worked for the airport, he was confused by the question.

  “An ambulance is supposed to be here!” the pilot insisted. “Where is it?”

  “It’s coming,” the man mumbled, but offered no look of recognition or urgency. Another five minutes went by.

  “Where is it?” the paramedic again yelled at the man, who now got on his cell phone while the pilot pulled out his walkie-talkie to repeat our location to air traffic control.

  “The ambulance is on the other side,” the airport official announced.

  “What!?”

  Inexplicably, we’d been given permission to land on the international side of the airport when we should have been at the private aviation terminal on the domestic side.

  “She’s running out of oxygen!” screamed the paramedic.

  This couldn’t be happening . . . after everything it’d taken to get her to Nigeria. My mum couldn’t die here on the tarmac. I kept looking around frantically, as if I could will an ambulance into existence.

  Both medics were screaming. “Why can’t the ambulance come here?”

  “It cannot. You have to go over to the other side.”

  “We have to get back in the plane and go over to the other side of the airport?”

  “Yes.”

  “If something happens to my patient, it will be your fault!”

  The pilot and paramedic rushed to put Mum back on the plane and I ran up the stairs. Less than five minutes of oxygen remained on the tank.

  The moment we were all on board, without waiting to close and secure the aircraft door, we were moving, taxiing to the private terminal guided by air traffic control.

  The moment we stopped, I heard ambulance sirens approaching, and I whispered a prayer of thanks.

  The South African duo leapt from aircraft immediately. “We need oxygen!” they shouted. Several Nigerian paramedics ran across the tarmac toward us carrying a tank.

  I began to sob uncontrollably and gasp for air. I was having an anxiety attack.

  “It’s okay. She’s okay, Isha,” the paramedic spoke softly, wrapping his arms around my shoulders.

  But I knew it wasn’t okay. I’d battled time and lost. His words couldn’t stop my tears. I said goodbye to the South African crew and took off in the ambulance.

  I’ve been to Lagos countless times, but I was still shocked by the amount of traffic on the roads as eight o’clock approached on this Friday night. We were headed to a hospital in Apapa, one of the most densely populated areas in this city of twenty-one million. Our vehicle drove between and around cars in the unending, multilane bumper-to-bumper traffic, while pedestrians and street hawkers shared the leftover space on the roads.

  “Move out of the way!” yelled Dr. Raji, a dark-skinned, high-spirited anesthesiologist from Lagoon Hospital who’d come with the ambulance, speaking over a loudspeaker and activating an earsplitting siren. For all his noise, though, it didn’t make much difference. A car or two would inch out of our way only to reveal more lines of stationary traffic.

  It was ten fifteen by the time we passed through the gates of the hospital. By eleven, Mum was in surgery.

  Before disappearing into the operating room, the neurosurgeon, Dr. Tayo Ojo—a tall, thin man with glasses who was not given to unnecessary displays of emotion—informed me the procedure would go on throughout the night.

  I was left alone in a doctor’s office. The room was sparsely furnished, with only a desk, a couple of uncomfortable-looking chairs, and a black leather examination table. I dumped my bags in a corner and climbed onto the table.

  My pulse never stopped racing. I alternated between half sitting and half lying down, too restless to remain in any position for more than a few minutes. My worst fear had come to pass: something had happened to my mum. Lord, please save her, don’t take her away from me.

  My prayers stopped only when Dr. Ojo suddenly came to the room three hours into the procedure.

  “Everything is going according to plan. Only a couple more hours,” he explained.

  I could only nod before I found my voice to thank him for the update. I was on my own once more.

  During those long hours I leaned on my faith, and it held me together while my mother lay on that operating table. Born to Muslim parents, I’d been allowed to chart an unregulated religious path while growing up in Freetown. I was allowed to eat pork, went to drama classes instead of Qur’anic classes, and spent my first two years of secondary school attending Saint Joseph’s convent—a decidedly Catholic place of learning. As with so much of my life, my mother had allowed me the freedom to experience different things and make my own decisions. She often said, “As long as you have a relationship with God, that’s all that matters.” So in America I attended Passion—a heart-expanding church in Atlanta led by Louie Giglio, while still being mindful of important dates in the Muslim calendar like Ramadan—the month of fasting and the joyous festivals of Eid. Mine is a faith that is deeply personal—enriched as much by imams as by pastors, unencumbered by the rigid, separatist lines of Islam and Christianity.

  That night I prayed, with Christian praise music blaring through my headphones, when the office door opened again. It was four a.m. Dr. Ojo, still wearing his green operating scrubs, came in, his face unreadable. He took a seat by the examination table. It felt like an eternity before he spoke.

  “The surgery went very well. I managed to stop the bleeding.”

  My heart and stomach somersaulted.

  “We are now moving her to the ICU. She should be waking up soon.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you, Dr. Ojo! I am so grateful!” I just kept repeating the same words.

  When he left the room, a surge of adrenaline and joy swept through me, forcing me off the examination table. I leapt up and down. “Thank you, God!” Minutes later I called my brother. “Hello, Mamud! Surgery went really well . . . she’ll be awake in the next couple of hours.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  MORE THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER MY MOT
HER’S SURGERY, her eyes still weren’t open. The only thing keeping my emotions in check was faith. She was supposed to be awake. That’s what Dr. Ojo said would happen when he’d finished draining the blood on her brain in the early hours of Saturday, December 3.

  So then why was she still lying unresponsive in ICU?

  Dr. Ojo ordered another scan that confirmed my worst fear. Her failure to wake wasn’t due to a delayed recovery from the operation’s anesthesia, as we’d all hoped. There was more cerebral bleeding; another emergency surgery was needed. When she was wheeled out of the operating room the second time, I waited and prayed for her to open her eyes. Instead, she slipped into a coma.

  In her curtained-off cubicle in the ICU, she lay under the white bedcovers with just the tops of her bare caramel-colored shoulders showing. The face I’d known and loved all my life was different, disturbingly bloated. Tubes ran into her nose and mouth, both of which were swollen and raw looking. My mum always took pride in her long, beautiful hair. Now it was mostly gone, shorn down to less than an inch on her scalp. A small piece of gauze rested gently over the deep indentation on the right side of her head, a remnant of the surgeon’s efforts to save her life.

  Days went by and then weeks. Time merged to create one unending nightmare. There were moments when I became convinced that she was just in the deepest stage of sleep rather than a coma. I shook her forearm gently and called out “Mum” with the childlike belief that I would somehow be able to wake her. Her inert body rocked from side to side, undisturbed by my actions. She was off somewhere else, far beyond my reach. I wondered what she was doing in that other place, whether she was in the sunshine or troubled by shadows. Did she feel at peace, or could she sense the grief of her two children, who were utterly lost without her?

  My days quickly became carbon copies of one another. Mornings and afternoons were spent at the hospital, then I was back in my hotel room by early evening. Most nights I cried and agonized about what to do next before falling into a fitful sleep.

  My mum had been in a coma for a couple of weeks when I got a tip. It was December 19, and Eric, a well-informed friend from the United States who just happened to be in Lagos, stopped by to see me. He mentioned that the twenty-one girls were going to Chibok to spend Christmas with their families. “They are demanding to go home,” he said.

  My eyes grew wide.

  He waved me off. “But don’t go asking questions. If you do, the government will know the trip plans leaked out and they might scrap the whole thing.”

  I nodded, feeling a bolt of excitement. The girls were finally going back to their long-bereft and beloved community, and at such a special time of year!

  Once he left, I tried to push the news to the back of my mind, knowing there were far more pressing things to deal with, given my mother’s medical situation. But I couldn’t let it go. I needed to know if the trip was actually going to happen. So I made some discreet inquiries. The next morning I got my answer. The girls were leaving for Chibok shortly.

  I have to go with them.

  The thought flashed through my mind, then it was gone almost instantly. I felt ashamed that I’d considered leaving my mother’s side, even for a few seconds. I busied myself with her care. But before long the thought was back.

  I should take them home. The world should see this homecoming.

  My mind was moving fast now, already considering how long the trip to Chibok would take. Could I do it in two days? I reached out to a contact in the Nigerian government and floated the idea of a CNN crew traveling to Chibok with the girls. I got no response.

  While I sat in ICU that day, I kept asking myself if it was appropriate to even contemplate leaving my mother to travel to Chibok. Was I interested in going only because of my ego, wanting to be the journalist who got the story? What if something happened to her while I was gone? What if something happened to me out on the road? Each question produced more guilt and brought into focus my selfishness. I felt wretched and sank deeper into inner turmoil.

  But then another question arose: What would my mum say if she knew about my opportunity to take the twenty-one girls home and exclusively bring the world the story? I heard her voice crystal clear in my head. Go! You should be the one to tell this story!

  Mum had always been my biggest advocate. As a sixteen-year-old, I’d decided I wanted to stay behind in London instead of returning to Freetown with her and my brother. I harbored teenage dreams of becoming an actress. Not once did she undermine or call into question my youthful ambition. “If this is what you really want, then okay, you can stay. I don’t want you to ever look back and say I held you back because your dad died young and I was afraid of being on my own.”

  When I was thirty, I called her from London and announced without warning that I intended to quit the city and move to America to work for CNN.

  Her response was characteristically pragmatic. “What’s the plan?”

  Her encouragement allowed me to move through the world with a fortified confidence, rooted in the knowledge that I had her unfaltering support.

  Now, as I wrestled with the guilt of wanting to accompany the twenty-one girls to Chibok, I feared how others might judge me. But deep down inside I could hear her voice. I may be in a coma, but life has to go on. These are your sisters. No one else should tell this story. You’ve been covering it since the beginning, you have to make this journey home with them.

  With her words guiding me, I contacted my boss Mike McCarthy in Atlanta to tell him about the girls’ return to Chibok and the possibility that CNN could go with them. Given the dangers associated with travel to the region, Mike alerted senior executives. The network’s security consultants were placed on standby.

  By December 21, Christmas was within touching distance and traffic in Lagos seemed to have increased exponentially overnight. Nigerians coming home for the holidays flew into Murtala Muhammed Airport and then spilled out onto the megacity’s already gridlocked roads and bridges, making getting around an ordeal from sunup to sundown.

  In fact, when I got word that the Nigerian authorities had agreed to my proposal of traveling with the girls to Chibok, I was trapped in an overcrowded Lagos parking lot, unable to leave because of a broken-down vehicle. The girls would depart from Abuja the very next morning. I would need to fly to the capital that night.

  I was thrilled that my bid had been successful. But then I felt anxiety. I was about to leave my mother without knowing what lay ahead. I would have to get to the hospital to say goodbye and pray with her before getting on any flight. I also needed to inform CNN that the trip was on. I made call after call. I discovered that the network’s concerns for the crew’s safety in northern Nigeria were even greater than I’d initially understood—so much so, that a security consultant was en route from London to Abuja right then to oversee the trip.

  At this point, we had approval to travel only as far as Abuja. Tony Maddox, CNN’s international’s executive vice-president and managing director, wanted many more details about the security and logistical arrangements settled before he’d sign off on the crew moving farther north into Boko Haram–blighted territory.

  Now there was just one other problem: I didn’t actually have a crew. I still needed a producer and someone to run camera. I contacted Stephanie Busari, CNN’s Lagos-based digital producer. I explained the assignment and we divided tasks. She would track down a camera operator and I’d get details on flights from Lagos to Abuja. Call after call, I still sat in the same choked-off parking lot. I dialed the number for Adeniyi (Niyi) Adekoya, a close personal friend and a longtime CNN security contractor, who sprang into action coordinating flights, hotels, and cars. He immediately sent his car to rescue me from the parking lot where the broken-down sedan continued to create a bottleneck and tempers were fraying. Along with Niyi’s car came some extra protection in the form of the burly Mel, who, just as in 2014, was assigned the job of watching my every move.

  I still needed to get back to my hotel to p
ack a bag, get across town to the hospital in Apapa, one of the most congested parts of Lagos, and then turn around and make it to the airport by five p.m.

  It was chaotic on the roads, which only intensified the stress I felt about leaving my mother. Her condition was unchanged; she was still in a coma. Since her vital signs were all good, though, the chances of something medically happening to her during my absence were low. But I also knew I was taking a huge—some might say unacceptable—risk with my own safety by venturing into northeastern Nigeria. Life for people living in the states of Borno, Yola, and Adamawa remained fraught with tension, as the fear of Boko Haram attacks remained ever present.

  Back in my hotel, I threw clothes, notepads, pens, chargers, and toiletries into my worn duffel, thinking of ways that I could minimize the attention drawn to myself. My standby baseball cap wouldn’t be enough, so I settled on wearing an abaya and hijab. I’d worn the long, flowing gown and a headscarf many times during reporting assignments in Saudi Arabia, and I asked Mel to help find a plain black abaya and headscarf before we touched down in the north. He agreed but was far more preoccupied with keeping us on schedule.

  “The traffic is very bad. We have to leave the hotel this minute if we are to catch our flight.”

  Niyi called. The traffic was so bad, he suggested I abandon the effort to reach my mother before heading to the airport. I refused.

  “You have less than fifteen minutes,” Mel stressed when we arrived at Lagoon Hospital. The driver was still inching forward when I opened the door to jump out. I headed straight for the stairs, taking them two at a time. While I disinfected my hands and carried out the other safety protocols, I went over things with the nurses and begged them to take extra care of my mother in my absence. I couldn’t bring myself to explain why I was leaving or where I was going. I was afraid they’d think I was heartless or irresponsible.