I Am Not Your Slave

by Tupa Tjipombo

  But I was determined to know more about the so-called Jackal and redoubled my efforts the next day. I had begun to realize that my ignorance was one of the greatest barriers to actually doing something about my situation. My lack of knowledge was more than just frustrating; it was deeply annoying. I had always seen myself as an intelligent and inquisitive learner and had taken a great deal of pride in figuring things out. I needed to become that person again. But everything that had happened to me combined with the daily routine of cleaning the Kassab house had put me in a mind-numbing trance. Endurance and resistance were important, but they were nothing without action. And action required knowledge. That was the next step.

  Early the next day, a van arrived for Almaz, Madam Dua, and me. As we drove into the city center, we passed buildings that were increasingly tall and intimidating. The streets were neat and meticulously cared for. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before; it felt like we were winding our way through a narrow river gorge set between mountains of glass. Even the photos my uncle Gerson once showed me of Namibia’s capital city—Windhoek—looked nothing like this. Everything here was glass and metal and hard surfaces with sharp angles, as if it had all been created just yesterday; it all seemed so modern and new. As I stared out the tinted window of the van, I realized that I had never really understood what a city was, and it made me wonder if I could ever comprehend its inhabitants and what they were capable of.

  We arrived at a soaring building of twisted glass and burnished metal. Pulling around back, we exited the van and hurried to keep up with Madam Dua, who led us briskly past a security guard and through a maze of concrete hallways to a freight elevator. I had never ridden in an elevator before and felt a funny, bubble-like sensation in my head and stomach as we climbed forever upward. I prayed I would not get sick. Almaz must have noticed my queasiness—she smiled reassuringly.

  The elevator doors opened to reveal a plush hallway lined with rich, deep carpets and brilliant chandeliers. There were mirrors everywhere. We followed Madam Dua silently down the hallway to a set of massive, elaborately carved doors. Producing a key from the folds of her robe, the old lady unlocked the doors to reveal a luxurious room of immense proportions. The general interior and furnishings seemed to mirror Dubai itself, consisting mostly of glass and bright metal objects that reminded me more of a perfume section at a department store or some kind of museum than someone’s home. The far wall was lined with gigantic floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the city. As with the Kassab house, I wondered how we were expected to clean a place that already looked so perfect and immaculate. Madam Dua stepped inside and Almaz followed, but I stood silently by the door, feeling a little overwhelmed as I tried to absorb everything that lay before me. I eyed the windows on the opposite side of the room uncertainly, conscious that I had only been above the second floor of any building once or twice in my entire life. I tried to remember if Opuwo had any buildings with more than two floors.

  Madam Dua gave Almaz some last-minute instructions before leaving us for the day, informing us that she had to run errands and would return later that evening. “Do not leave this place,” she warned us. “Do not go into the hallway. Do not let residents see you—not even your shadow. It disturbs them. Lock this door behind me.” As she was leaving, she gestured toward me and said to Almaz, “You are in charge of this one. Make sure she knows her job.” I closed and locked the door behind Madam Dua, glad to be rid of the old lady for a day.

  As we prepared for work, Almaz noticed my reluctance to go near the windows. She laughed and said, “I was also afraid to approach these windows when I came here for the first time. We are very high, but it is safe. You can see all of Dubai and even the sea from here. We are like birds.” She stood by the windows and motioned me over. “Come,” she said. “You will not fall.” Carefully, I made my way across the room to stand beside my friend. I laughed nervously and felt a small rush of excitement as I gazed out across the city to the water, which joined with the horizon in a whitewash of haze and wispy clouds.

  “Where does this water go?” I asked Almaz.

  “It goes everywhere,” she replied. “It connects with everything all over the world. Big ships come and go from Dubai all the time.”

  “To Africa?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. Even to my home, to Ethiopia.” Almaz pulled me close and lowered her voice to a whisper. “We must work now,” she said. “In this place, there are cameras everywhere watching us. So you must always show that you are working. Even if something looks clean, you must clean it anyway. Come and I will show you what we must do.”

  Almaz led the way to a small room off the kitchen filled with cleaning supplies. Sitting on a bench, she said, “There are no cameras in this room, so we can be free here, but we cannot remain long.”

  “This man is wealthy,” I observed quietly.

  Almaz nodded her head. “Oh yes. The Jackal is very wealthy.” She paused and leaned back against the wall, looking very tired all of a sudden. “He is also a very bad man,” she said, sighing. “I have been sparing you this because it is always much better when he is away on business. But I must tell you about the Jackal now. You see, he loves women. How should I say . . .” Almaz narrowed her eyes, fixing her gaze on the opposite wall as she searched for the right words. “As I told you before, he loves to . . . collect women . . . from all over the world. And show them to his friends during parties and . . . special events. Sometimes he buys and sells them . . . or just trades them . . . their visas and passports. If he likes you, then you remain.” She added, “That dress . . . or costume . . . you have been making . . . it is for the Jackal. If he wants a woman from your tribe, he snaps his figures and makes it so. I am sure it is why you are here now. He wanted a . . . a . . .”

  “Himba girl,” I offered.

  “Yes,” Almaz said. “It is the same with me. He wanted me because I am from Ethiopia.”

  Over the past few weeks, I had put most of the pieces together already. Even so, it was good to finally confirm once and for all that this man—the Jackal—was the one responsible for my entire ordeal. It was he who had been on the other end of the line when Ming was describing me on the phone; it was he who had requested the photos and the video. I was the Jackal’s “special order,” and Dubai was the “special place.” It was strange to think that after everything I had been through I was now standing in the apartment of a man who could simply stretch his arms across all of Africa and snatch up a young girl from the deserts of the Kunene. But it was him, I knew that for certain now.

  “Are all the girls who work with us in this . . . position?” I asked.

  “It is all different,” Almaz said. “Some are just servants . . . just in their jobs. Some are here sometimes and making money in other ways at other times. Some are just making money at special events by sleeping with men. It is always different, always changing. Many come and go.”

  “And you?”

  “Ah. I am a beautiful woman, like you. So we are together. For now. Until his tastes change. It is not in our hands.”

  I considered these words for a moment. “We must find a way to make it in our hands,” I said.

  Almaz eyed me curiously for a few moments. Finally, she shrugged her shoulders and smiled. “For now, we must work.”

  * * *

  Over the next several days, I badgered Almaz for more information about Dubai and possible ways we could free ourselves from the grip of the Kassab family. I even approached Almaz’s friends, the twins, and peppered them with the same questions. Although the twins worked for the Kassab household as part-time maids, they commuted in from one of the labor camps near the city center, where they shared a room with a group of other women. While they worked at the eldest son’s special events, they also did sex work on the side. They explained that while the risk was greater, their “outside jobs” were also more lucrative because they were able to keep most of their earnings. They worked for the Jackal only because he was also th
eir sponsor under the kafala system. I asked them if there was anybody in the labor camps who could possibly help me return home.

  “You can run away and hide in the camps,” one of the twins answered. “Many women do it. But then you are an illegal in the country, so you must be smuggled out somehow. There are many who will take you to Djibouti, but their services are very expensive. How will you make that money unless you sell your body? But you are beautiful; you will make a lot of money very quickly. And it is not so bad.”

  I emphasized that I did not want to sell my body. In fact, that was one of my main reasons for wanting to escape.

  The first twin laughed in response. “Then you have a problem. I do not know a way,” she said.

  But the second twin interjected, “There is Dr. Mal. He will help you go anywhere in North or East Africa. But you must pay with your body.”

  I opened my mouth to protest again, but she cut me off. “No, not like that. Not sex. He will take your . . . what is it? What is the word? Here.” She placed her hand on her abdomen, then, looking uncertain, slid it across to her back.

  “Kidney,” said the first twin.

  “Yes, kidney. He will take your kidney. That is his price. And for that he will make a deal with you. He has helped runaways before. I know this because they have the big scar here.” Again, she traced a line on her body, angling up from her waist and around her side toward her back. “Very ugly scar. Men will not like that . . . in case you wish to sell your body in the future.”

  Seeing the confused look on my face, the first twin said, “People here want strong kidneys. Their own kidneys are not so good. It is because they are fat and lazy. They have bad kidneys. They pay big money for a nice one. Dr. Mal will do the cutting for you. But it is dangerous business.”

  “But this way you are not selling your whole body,” the second twin offered, giggling. “Just the parts.”

  * * *

  I deliberated for some time over the twins’ suggestion to sell a kidney. I asked Almaz why kidneys were so valuable. She told me that it had something to do with the high rate of diabetes among the Arabs in the country. She had heard that many Emirati traveled the world in search of kidneys. More recently, however, they had begun to tap into the country’s large population of migrant workers, who were increasingly seen as a local solution to the problem. After all, she explained to me, it was easier and cheaper to bring the kidney to you rather than travel around the world in search of one. She had even heard that some people hired domestic servants with the intention of coercing them into donating their kidneys. Repeating what the twins had said, Almaz believed that kidneys were in high demand because the Arabs had ruined their own by being fat and lazy. “You see how we do all the work for them,” she argued. “Now they do nothing but eat their pizzas and hamburgers, drive their cars everywhere, play their video games, and watch their TVs.” She waved her arm dismissively. “Eh, they are just like Americans.”

  As far as the mysterious Dr. Mal and his clinic were concerned, Almaz was unable to dig up any details about the man or the procedure. She warned me that it would be risky; not only was the surgery illegal if performed by someone like Dr. Mal, who was not officially registered as a doctor in the UAE, but also even talking about it was considered taboo. More importantly, she stressed, were the health risks. There were whispers of girls dying shortly after the doctor performed the surgery.

  But the more I turned it over in my head, the more plausible it became. How important could a kidney be? Even if a handful of girls died, many others lived and presumably gained their freedom. I decided that it was at least worth a visit to Dr. Mal’s clinic. The twins agreed to arrange a meeting. However, they first had to find out the clinic’s exact location, which turned out to be as much of a mystery as everything else.

  Finally, the opportunity presented itself at the end of December 2007. Madam Kassab, exhausted following an extended shopping trip to London and in the throes of what the staff referred to as one of her “long headaches,” made the extremely rare decision to kick everyone out of the house for two days. With nowhere else to go, Almaz and I made plans to stay with the twins, who were able to track down Dr. Mal. They learned that his clinic changed locations on an almost continual basis, so it took a full day of furiously working their connections to find it. Finally, they traced its current location to an old tenement building in the densely populated Al Satwa district. We made plans to visit the next day.

  The building was located on a narrow, busy street crammed with discount fabric shops and cheap restaurants. From the moment we entered the neighborhood, I felt a sense of foreboding. My anxiety grew as we explored the building itself, finding Mal’s clinic only after passing through the greasy kitchen of a run-down Palestinian restaurant, navigating a narrow alleyway crisscrossed with drying laundry, and climbing a flight of dingy stairs to the third floor. Once there, we had to squeeze past several old men who sat on the landing smoking a hookah, which filled the stale air with an acrid, tarry odor.

  After some additional exploring, we located a door with a crude handwritten sign on it that read simply MAL. We stepped inside to find a large room skimpily furnished with a handful of plastic chairs and a folding table. Hanging on the wall above the table was a faded poster with the words UNDERSTANDING THE KIDNEY. There was a complicated illustration of what was presumably the kidney itself, including its approximate location in the human body. I noted that it was roughly where the twins had said it was, at least based on the scars they had seen on other women. Two girls who looked to be patients sat stoically in the plastic chairs while a third sat behind the folding table, lethargically thumbing away on her cell phone. An oddly familiar odor permeated the room, but I could not place it.

  The girl behind the table glanced up as we approached. “Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?” And then almost as an afterthought, she added, “Welcome to the Mal Clinic.”

  Exchanging uneasy glances with Almaz, I responded, “We are here to ask about the operation”—I motioned toward the poster—“to remove the kidney.”

  The girl sat up a little straighter. “Yes, it is an unnecessary organ if you are healthy,” she offered without prompting. “Dr. Mal will remove it for you—and even pay you a great deal of money to do it because it is needed by sick people.” She launched into a long explanation about the kidney and why it was so prized, confirming Almaz’s explanation that diabetes—type 2 diabetes, to be exact—was, in fact, the reason. She discussed the high rate of type 2 diabetes in the UAE and emphasized how an increasing number of people—children, in particular—suffered from it. With what almost seemed like a sense of pride, she raved that the UAE was among the top ten countries in the world with the highest rates of diabetes. “Many experts place us as high as number two!” she gushed, practically jumping out of her plastic chair. She repeated that many children suffered from the disease, though this time she contorted her face into an exaggerated expression of pity that prompted a loud snort from Almaz.

  When she was finished with the first half of her pitch, the girl eyed me sharply. “How would you feel,” she asked, “if you could pay off your debts and purchase a plane ticket home all on the same day?” Without bothering to wait for an answer, she asserted that offering up a kidney would allow me to do just that. “And go home with a pile of cash!” she beamed. She seemed to easily anticipate my situation, even mentioning that it would take years working as a domestic servant to make as much money as I could by selling my kidney.

  Satisfied with her effort, the girl sat back and concluded with certainty, “So when can I schedule you for the operation? You can come and go on the same day. It is a very simple procedure. Can you come Tuesday?”

  Throughout the girl’s speech, I had felt a growing sense of unease. Before coming to the clinic, I was not sure what to expect—maybe a nurse or a doctor to explain things in a certain manner, like the way the doctor did when I broke my ankle as a little girl and had to visit the hospital in Opu
wo. I remembered thinking at the time how the doctor spoke with the same authority and respect as a Himba headman. I liked that. But something was not right here. Dr. Mal was nowhere to be found; it was strange that he did not examine or even talk to potential patients prior to operating on them. Instead, he left everything to a silly girl in an empty room whose only job was to deliver a high-pressure sales pitch to anyone who walked in off the street. There was something unseemly about it. Not only that, I felt a creeping sense that something was being hidden from me. Almaz’s warnings of all those girls who had died after a visit to the invisible Dr. Mal came flooding back.

  Suddenly, I realized that the strange odor I had been struggling to identify was, in fact, blood. It had been difficult to distinguish at first, especially against the mix of pungent smells wafting up from the Palestinian restaurant on the bottom floor, as well as the clammy stench of hookah smoke that percolated into the room from the hallway. But now I was certain. I turned and stared at the two girls sitting behind me and realized that what I had thought were looks of quiet composure were actually expressions of anxiety bordering on outright fear. I felt a rush of nausea as I tried to tune in to the conversation between Almaz and the girl behind the desk. Their exchange had become heated as Almaz expressed shock at the idea that the price of a kidney was negotiable.

  I grabbed Almaz’s arm. “Let’s get out of here,” I whispered. Almaz, needing no further prompting, nodded her head in agreement. With a parting grunt aimed at the girl behind the table, she quickly ushered me out. When we left the building and turned into an alleyway, I ducked behind a dumpster and got sick. I started to apologize, but my friend cut me off. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “You do not have to explain. There is an evil there. I do not know what it is exactly, but there is an evil.” She took my hand and squeezed it. “As your friend, I will never bring you to such a place again. God as my witness, I will never do that.”