by Jessica Yu
“Me? I can’t make a mat,” Mary retorted. “I’ve never made a mat in my life.”
“This one . . .” Gladys’s aside was in English, so she did not lower her voice. “She expects me to buy mats and bring them to her.”
“Gladys wants me to stop asking for things,” Mary went on, as though she had understood. “But she had better start looking out for my children for Christmas!”
All three women burst into laughter. They rocked back and forth on their heels as though sharing an unsteady boat.
“She’ll not stop asking!”
“Better get shoes for our children!”
“Better stop complaining!”
AFTER MORE DISPUTE over the house’s condition, the group wandered out onto the small veranda to take some much-needed air. For a moment the only sound was the gaudy song exchanged by a couple of birds, a territorial squabble or a love duet.
A slight, delicate-featured man in an eggplant-colored shirt lingered nearby. He looked both uninterested and sulky, like a man dragged to a party he could not leave.
“Is this the husband?” Mike asked.
“This is the husband, George,” said Esther. “Who first ran away after Mary gave birth to the quadruplets.”
She spoke to George in Luganda, the widely spoken Bantu language. “Isn’t that true, you ran away?”
“Yeah, I did,” George answered plainly. “I took off.”
“But when the house went up, you came back.”
George had disappeared for a year and a half, leaving Mary and the nine kids dependent on Gladys. Upon his return, Gladys had asked him to explain his desertion.
George had replied, “I left to find work.”
“So where is the money?”
“Well, I failed to find work.”
Mike looked out at the pasture, where distant cows’ horns spiked the green like white thorns. George and Mary were Bahima, traditionally a nomadic cattle-herding tribe. “How many cows do they have?” he asked.
“None. He collects others’ cows from the village and looks after them,” answered Gladys.
“So he is paid in milk.”
“Yes. Then he sells it to make some money. But the problem is, he sells it and drinks. There were times when he’d come back in the morning fully drunk. One time he didn’t close the paddocks fully and the cows broke out and ate people’s food. He had to work for three months that brought no pay. I was annoyed!” Gladys looked at George, nearly succeeding at keeping her expression neutral. “Now he says, ‘Gladys, I am saved. I no longer drink.’ I don’t know whether that is true.”
“Gladys, you see the clothes I’m wearing?” Mary jumped in. “When you come to visit, you should bring me new clothes to wear.”
Everyone laughed, the joke still ripening.
“I don’t fear Gladys,” Mary boasted. “I’ll always tell her what I need to tell her. When she comes, she should bring me clothes.”
EVENTUALLY MARY AGREED to take Gladys and Esther to see the quadruplets at their school. In this she mined a new vein of complaint, criticizing Gladys for her failure to visit the school of the other five children as well. But Gladys did not rise to the bait, as she still had another set of quadruplets and another George to visit that day.
When they walked back toward the van, they found Mary’s George sitting on the ground, staff in hand, his back to the path and his eyes on the cows. He could remain in this posture for hours, lost in the green vista and its dots of brown, unaware of everything else: his wife’s complaints, his children’s belly growls, the ruts deepening in his road, the cracks growing up his walls like thorny vines.
George seemed to pine for another time, the era of his grandfathers and great-grandfathers, when a man’s role was to count his cattle and his children. George was poor in cattle but rich in children. He had been able to depend on the birth of a new child every year or two to add to his family stock. But now it appeared that that well of pride had run dry as well.
When George returned home after his eighteen-month disappearance, Mary worried that she might get pregnant again. With the quads getting healthy and their house under construction, the family was afloat. But their load was still heavy, and a tenth child could sink them. Enlisting Gladys’s assistance, Mary visited a clinic to get fitted with an IUD.
All was well for about a year, until it dawned on George that his wife was not getting pregnant. Why was she failing to give him more children? He threatened to throw Mary out of the house.
It was unimaginable! With nine children and no steady work, he was going to punish his wife for not producing more babies? Gladys stormed, vowing to take the little man to court if he dared to chase his wife away from the house that her supporters had built. George quickly deflated. While he might have suspected that Gladys’s presence had something to do with his wife’s sudden infertility, he lacked both the leverage and the energy to fight.
For her part, Gladys tamped down her indignation. It did not help the children for her to become an enemy of their father. To be effective in such cases, she had to be a friend to the family—the whole family. Even George.
At least the man seemed sober this morning. Perhaps he really had stopped drinking; he looked miserable. The question was, did he look more miserable than usual?
“Let us get a picture with you and George,” Gladys said to Mary.
“My husband is right there.” Mary shrugged. “You can take his picture.”
“Take a picture with your wife,” Mike said to George.
“No, I am sitting here.”
After more coaxing, Gladys prevailed, and George grudgingly rose to his feet. Standing six inches shorter than his much heavier wife, he looked more sullen child than husband.
“Mary is so fat,” George grumbled. “Huge.”
“Gladys always takes pictures,” Mary grumbled. “But she never gives us copies.”
“Gladys is not a photographer!” Gladys retorted. “And you have no email.”
George then insisted that Gladys join the picture. “You are so fat,” he said to her as he stood sandwiched between the two women. “You are bigger than my wife now.”
“That is a classic faux pas.” Mike shook his head, incredulous. True, Bahima people appreciated large women, but this was the twenty-first century. “Don’t call a woman fat, ever!”
George walked with the group the rest of the way to the van, observing Gladys’s attempts to navigate the puddles and mud traps. Tiptoe, tiptoe, stretch . . .
“How do you like my road?” he asked her pointedly.
. . . tiptoe, step to the side, tiptoe . . .
“Can you make for me a road?”
He expects me now to make him a road? Gladys fumed inwardly. As if I am the head of the home. Or the head of the state!
She did not answer George. She had come to a point in the path where she had a choice between traversing low, wide puddles where her shoes would surely get soaked and crossing a potentially unstable mound of earth and grass. Taking a deep breath, she stepped carefully on the slick mound. Her heel sank in a bit, but the ground held. She placed her other foot down, shifting her weight onto the slope, and—
“Ma ma ma! Aaahhhh!” Gladys slipped, losing a shoe and falling to one knee in the mud. “Ma mamamama ma! Whoo-oo-oo-oo!”
“There is not safe,” Esther commented, somewhat unnecessarily.
Mike sprinted over to help Gladys, who was attempting to minimize the mud on her hands as she pushed herself upright. One foot and its wayward shoe were planted squarely in the mud, and there were brown streaks on her knee and on the hem of her dress. George, who had drifted a few feet away to the edge of the cow pasture, made no move to assist.
“I’m used to our flooding,” Mary commented mildly, walking past Gladys to the van. “This mud is no problem for me.”
THE SCHOOL WAS two tiny brick buildings and one rickety classroom made of mud and branches, all of which emptied of children on the arrival of the big white van. A crowd of eighty
students created a flowerbed of color: the girls in bright pink jumpers, the boys in yellow shirts, with other bright shades mixed in from those not in uniform.
Gladys greeted the children as they surrounded her. “How are you today? Can you say ‘good morning’?”
“Good morning!”
Once she had extricated herself from the sea of curious faces, Gladys was able to lead the quadruplets to the shade, where she could take a good look at them.
“Banange! Goodness! Don’t they look cute?”
But no, they were more than that. At five years old, they were beautiful. The two boys were an identical pair, as were the two girls. All four had slender oval faces with gentle eyes that shone bronze in the sunlight. Their skin was light brown. How Gladys had laughed when, upon seeing pictures of the four babies, some of her New Vision colleagues had asked, “Are they Indians?”
The girls smiled sweetly at Gladys as she asked them about school and quizzed them on their English. The boys stood by, waiting their turn. Their father’s placid expression, so infuriating on an unresponsive adult, was winsome on their smooth faces.
Mary watched from a nearby bench, chin in hand, petulant as a vendor watching a shopper squeeze her produce.
The children seemed healthy, Gladys concluded, waving goodbye. As she recalled their precarious beginnings, each as fragile as a petal and as tiny as a piglet, a swell of pride lifted her heart.
Too soon, though, her bubble of pleasure was pierced by Mary’s needling.
“Why don’t you at least get some bags of cement?” Mary persisted as they dropped her back home. “That way it will be ready for when you come back to fix my house.”
AS THEY DROVE away from Kiboga, Gladys brushed at the dried mud on her skirt. “I am not worried about that house,” she remarked. “That is not a place that is falling down anytime soon, like she was telling us.”
Esther and Mike agreed. The house needed repair, but it was no lost cause.
“By the way, do you know how she has been complaining? ‘The wall will be falling on us at any time!’ When I didn’t have money and could not even reach the village. What am I supposed to do? And she kept on beeping. ‘When are you coming to check on it?’ I got so annoyed, I told her, ‘Okay, if the house is falling, let it bury you, and tell the neighbors to call me when you are dead.’”
Gladys was venting now, and she did not care. “Mary is running me mad, surely, with her demands. My God. You know those people who always ask for more? They are just beep-beep-beeping until you can’t stand it and you call them. Then they tell you their stupid stories and ask for money.”
“‘The beans are finished,’” Esther piped up, imitating Mary’s petulant drone. “‘You need to drive from Kampala with more beans.’”
Gladys, laughing, also channeled Mary: “‘I have no sugar, the children refuse to eat porridge because it doesn’t have sugar.’ Eh!”
“‘What about Christmas? We will be looking for our presents!’”
The mention of Christmas dampened Gladys’s mood a bit. She knew it wasn’t her responsibility to provide the family with presents, but she recalled the kids’ delight in the clothes and shoes of Christmases past. At the moment she lacked the money to buy anything for herself, let alone for a family of eleven. And she could not ask her friends for help, now that the quadruplets were big and healthy and no longer teetering on the brink of survival. No dose of logic would reduce the fever of Mary’s demands, though, and Gladys could only brace herself for the barrage of beeps.
Am I not doing enough? Gladys lamented.
Mary’s answer would be No! Where are my beans?
Gladys let loose a chuckle. “Some of these people are so annoying!” she announced to the car. “They make me annoyed and make me laugh at the same time. If I didn’t laugh, I could not continue helping.”
“You can’t stay annoyed, because that’s the way they are,” Esther said. “You just have to choose how you are going to help them.”
Gladys nodded at this wisdom. “My urgent issue is to see those kids go to school. I keep telling Mary, ‘I’m looking at the education of your children, not your feeding.’ I need to encourage them to plan for the future. Surely I have struggled with the Kakuru family. Surely I have struggled. Oh my Gooooddd . . .” Gladys’s sigh was half shudder. “People ask, ‘How much money did you get out of it?’ I get none out, I only put in! Then people ask, ‘Are you related to them?’ Can you imagine! They don’t understand.”
“To be honest,” Mike said, “I don’t understand.”
The comment was not made lightly, and Gladys thought for a moment before answering. “I can only tell you, when I find such people in a fix, this feeling automatically comes to me. Though I complain at times, I can’t just ignore them. It is the way I was made.
“These four babies, they looked so bad. I just felt sympathy, and I decided to follow them. And after seeing their home, there was no way I could abandon them. Because if I had run away, I don’t know whether those children would have survived.” She beamed. “Don’t you think they look nice now?”
THE ROAD AHEAD of the white van was empty save for a solitary boda boda wobbling oddly in the middle of the lane. As Mike cautiously passed the motorcycle, the head of one of its two passengers lolled to the side.
Esther glanced back. “Eh, they are waving.” The boda had stopped, its driver signaling frantically with one arm as he tried to keep his motorcycle vertical. His two female passengers appeared on the verge of falling off.
A few minutes later there were two more women in the van. One of them was ill, and the other was trying to get her to hospital. The sick woman was so weak she had lacked the strength to sit up on the boda seat. The nervous driver had entreated Mike to take the two off his hands.
Gladys knew the way to the hospital well. It was Bukomero Health Centre, the same place she had taken both Mary and her kids to on the many occasions when they had fallen ill. There was the time when the youngest daughter had stayed in the hospital for two weeks. The time when Mary had started bleeding. The time when one child had been bitten by a snake. And so many other crises.
“The woman is shivering,” Esther reported. She was always level-headed in situations like this. “She has a cough. Probably malaria.”
They pulled up in front of the hospital. Mike, Esther, and the sick woman’s companion assisted her from the van. As lifeless as the woman appeared, with her closed eyes and listless limbs, odds were she would recover fully now that she had reached a clinic.
Again, getting to a place was half the battle. The women had been lucky to catch the attention of Mike’s van. Transportation was limited out here in the villages. In an emergency, a chance encounter with a passing stranger could mean the difference between life and death.
As Gladys watched the sick woman disappear through the door of the clinic, she remembered how Mary had appeared when she had first seen her. Having lost an alarming amount of weight after the quadruplets’ birth, she looked as feeble as her scrawny babies. It was her desperate condition that had cemented Gladys’s determination to help.
So too a chance encounter had made all the difference for Mary. Just look at her now, so big and noisy. Gladys cocked her head up toward the roof of the van. Was it possible for a person to be too healthy?
George the Second
As the van turned north again, in the direction of Kyankwanzi, Gladys’s thoughts turned to the day’s second set of quadruplets.
A week after giving birth, the mother of these quads had died of a suspected pulmonary embolism. George Rwakabishe and his wife had been married only a year. Now he was alone with four newborn babies.
Some neighbors had read Gladys’s articles about Mary Kakuru’s quadruplets, and they urged George Rwakabishe to make contact with the reporter. Gladys wrote about the young widower’s situation and appealed to her readers for help. Having learned from her experience with Mary and the first George, what she aimed to get these quadruplet
s was not a house but a livelihood for their father. Like the first George, this second George was Bahima, and a herder. He hoped to start a cattle business.
Donations came in totaling 800,000 shillings, enough to purchase two cows. A Bukedde TV story showed George Rwakabishe receiving the funds at the New Vision offices.
Camilla, the New Vision receptionist, marveled: “Gladys, you are a very lucky person. Every time you write something about a needy person, someone will come up to assist. You know, not every story brings assistance. That’s why other reporters are complaining. They don’t want to write such stories, because they write them and people don’t turn up.”
Gladys knew it was a matter less of luck than of persistence. Sometimes you needed to run the story multiple times. And if people responded, you had to follow up and show the results. That was part of the reason she kept following these cases, even when they were in far-flung places.
George Rwakabishi and his quadruplets lived in Kyankwanzi, eighty miles west of Kampala. The distance from Bukomero was not so great, but the journey took time, as the family lived in an outlying area. Gladys and her companions would arrive late, but how late, one could not say. Working in the field meant that Gladys frequently ran behind—operating on what everyone wryly called “Uganda time.” With a destination like this one, an appointment time was a mere daydream.
The Toyota van lost steam as it transitioned from tarmac to macadam, from macadam to dirt, and from dirt to scrub. Finally the van rumbled into an area that seemed to have no road at all, only bush. Mike slowed to a crawl as Gladys peered about, getting her bearings.
“Okay,” she said finally. “I think we go here.”
Mike looked through the windshield, dubious. The van idled hesitantly in front of a wall of green.
“What is this place called?” he asked, perhaps wanting reassurance that the place had a name.
“Rwebitoomi.” Meaning “muddy place.” Tourism evidently was not the area’s mainstay.
“So where do we pass through?” Mike asked.
