by Jessica Yu
“January first,” the older boy answered promptly.
“January first. Eeeh!” Gladys squealed with amusement. “He just came up with it!”
Ezra looked quite pleased with himself. And why shouldn’t he simply claim a date? His mother had not left him with one. Consider Trevor, standing off to the side, worrying the remaining button on his faded shirt. His profile had run in “Lost and Abandoned” half a dozen times, with not even one response. What chance was there that anyone on earth knew Trevor’s actual birthday?
One of the girls raised a hand. “My birthday was in September. But I did not have anything.”
“Nothing. Oh my God,” Gladys murmured, as though to herself. Was it worse not ever having a birthday celebration because one’s birthday was unknown or to know one’s birthday but feel its unmarked passage every year?
And then it popped out of her mouth: “I think what someone can do is maybe to pick one day and everybody celebrates on that very day.”
Gladys chuckled, and Mike and Esther joined in. But as the laughter dried up, the idea crystallized.
“Just combine it!” Gladys said. “You just gather all of them, get one cake, each one of them holds the knife, they cut! Everyone can blow out the candles together. Although it is for different ages . . .” She frowned, assessing the logistics on the fly. “People blow out their candles according to ages, is it right? What do you do when it is different ages? Okay, you put the candles there, ask Deborah to blow some, ask Rose to blow some . . .” How would a child blow a few candles without blowing out the others? And how many candles could one cake hold? Nine children—that could be a hundred candles. The cake would look like a miniature forest fire.
She erased the image with a shake of her head and glanced around. All the children were staring at her, eyes as shiny as roasted coffee beans.
“At the moment I can’t promise,” Gladys mumbled, although it came out exactly like a promise. How did she talk herself into these things? Her list of obligations was full, and here she was, scribbling in the margins. “It means that I have to find some money first. We will work out something, don’t worry.”
The kids did not look worried at all. Mommy Gladys is going to make a birthday party!
IT WAS WITH some relief that Gladys turned toward the sound of Director Agnes’s car pulling into the driveway. The kids dispersed en masse, the air flowing on the office veranda as suddenly as if a window had been opened.
“Oh, he is really running!” Gladys and Esther watched Trevor scamper ahead, his limp undetectable in his dusty scramble toward the car. “He will say, ‘Auntie Agnes, I need a bread. Auntie Agnes, I need a chapati.’ She must have some coins somewhere!”
Agnes emerged from her car dressed in a loose dress as red as a macaw. In fact there was a design of parrots splashed across the skirt. Evidently she had come from the restaurant and guest house on Lake Victoria that she ran with her husband. A woman of multiple occupations, she was also a trained dentist, a trade that came in handy for estimating the age of some of the orphans Gladys brought to her doorstep.
The children flanked her on all sides, skipping and jumping like flying fish racing a boat. Deborah darted ahead, announcing, “I was number one. Number one, I was number one!” On her heels, Rose waved something in her hand like a trophy.
“And that is Auntie Agnes’s purse? You’ve run away with her purse!” Gladys exclaimed. She could barely catch her breath for laughing. “Oh my God . . .”
The school director and the journalist held a glance that vibrated with the rueful recognition that they had only themselves to blame for getting into this boat, taking on too many passengers, and giving away their oars.
Gladys was grateful for such an ally. Out in the field she visited many schools and homes. Hearing of her children’s cases, the administrators at such places might cluck in sympathy, but only Agnes would burst into sobs, crying, “Bring the child here!”
And Agnes cried often, as evidenced by the number of Gladys’s charges she had accepted into her school. Their trampled-flower stories conjured Agnes’s tears no matter how many times they were recounted. Her willingness to absorb the pains of others had permanently creased her expression into one of bruised sympathy. Even in laughter—and she and Gladys found many occasions for mirth—her contracted brow and contorted mouth could, at a distance, be mistaken for grief.
The two women had met when Gladys was assigned an article about primary school leaving-exam results, and Agnes was the only school director in the region less interested in the scores than in the students. Some of her students were like the needy kids Gladys profiled in her column, and she felt that God had sent the journalist her way. Gladys felt similarly, especially when Agnes agreed to let Ezra attend the school as a boarding student. After all the boy had endured, neither woman could bear to let him languish at a rural school where a classroom might be the ground under a tree. Where a twig or a finger might be a pencil. Where one class might contain ninety pupils. Where an overwhelmed teacher might not have the time or the patience to teach a seventeen-year-old how to spell his own name.
At Early Learning there were classrooms, desks, benches, a library, dormitories. Everything. Even proper toilets. To Ezra it was yet another miracle. And it had been made possible because the school director and the journalist had agreed to split the boy’s tuition.
They were both middle-aged Christian women with great love for children, but that shared palette was shaded with contrasts. Unlike Agnes, Gladys hardly ever cried. This made her less womanly by some standards. People might assume she bore the emotional calluses of a clinic nurse or prison guard. In reality, Gladys’s heart was often touched, but she had never been one to sit and sob in the face of bad news. When had tears ever solved a problem?
Then there were philosophical differences between the two women. Agnes funneled her compassion for her charges into doctrinal molds. Under her care, classroom lessons often had biblical underpinnings and Muslim children were given Christian names. Little Evelyn’s original name was Aisha. Ezra’s was Muzamiru. Faith’s was . . . ? Gladys could not keep track. As if life were not complicated enough already!
After some time at Early Learning, Ezra had begun to talk about wanting to preach the word of God. Gladys inwardly grimaced. She would rather he talked about wanting to be a teacher or an engineer. But she held her tongue, as it was not her future to decide. What was the point in giving children opportunities if you did not give them freedom?
When Ezra asked her to take him to get baptized, though, she drew the line. Some might expect that as a Christian, she would be eager to see a Muslim boy be born again. But she had no desire to tamper with anyone’s religion. If Ezra wanted to get baptized, fine. But he would have to do it without her.
It was not Gladys’s place to challenge Agnes in the running of her school. But in Gladys’s opinion, the assistance offered to the students should not be clouded by anyone’s personal beliefs. For many lost and abandoned children, their names and their culture were the only inheritance they could keep from their families. It was not right to pry that away from them, however gently. Such young saplings did not require pruning, only water.
THE SCHOOL DIRECTOR took Gladys, Esther, and Mike for a stroll around the new vegetable garden. Early Learning had recently moved to this location, and the grounds were still being developed. As usual on these visits, Gladys and Agnes discussed all the news concerning the children. Ezra’s stalled progress in his classes. Douglas’s impressive performance in his. The HIV status of one of the girls. Trevor’s persistent and unsettling use of rude language. Gladys had hoped that after nine months at the school, the child might have settled into his studies; instead the acclimation had let loose an aggressive side.
“Your boy Trevor, he abuses me a lot,” Agnes reported. “He says things like, ‘You stupid woman, don’t fool around with me. I will beat you with stones!’”
This was disturbing news to Gladys, as Trevor was ver
y attached to his Auntie Agnes. The boy used terrible language around his classmates, but now he was talking this way to adults?
“I think as he was growing up, those are the words the mother used to use,” Esther speculated. “As his brain was growing, it was doing the opposite of what the mother wanted. So she would be saying, ‘Stupid boy! Stop doing that or I will beat you!’”
“And in fact that is how he talks,” Gladys agreed. Trevor barely spoke, but when he did, it was only to declare “I will beat you!” or “I will kick you!” As though those were the only phrases he knew.
The women moved on to the pressing question of the P7 boys, including Douglas, who would soon be graduating from Early Learning. Secondary school would cost a good bit of money, which no one had.
“Don’t you think there is some way these older ones can continue their education?” Gladys inquired.
Agnes shook her head emphatically. “I want them to learn life skills.” She pointed around the grounds at the school’s new water cistern, drainage system, and sturdy chicken coop. “You see, the ones working here, they are very clever,” she explained. “The plumbers, the electricians, none of them ever went to university. University students go and collect all the knowledge here for four years”—she tapped her temple firmly enough to hurt—“but all that knowledge does not come out.”
Gladys gave a noncommittal nod. True, higher education was no guarantee of success, but it seemed premature to trim a fifteen-year-old’s future prospects. It had been over three decades since she had had to drop out of school, and the loss still stung.
Douglas was clever with machines; Agnes reported that the boy could fix all kinds of phones and radios. And he had walked many miles—Gladys recalled how his poor legs were swollen like the fruit of the sausage tree—looking for a better life. Surely he deserved a chance to aim high.
But such a chance required means. Gladys had none.
“What we learn has to be applied,” Agnes was saying. Deborah, ever attentive, stood at her side. The director circled the girl’s rounded shoulders with an arm. “Deborah. When you came to school, you knew nothing. What did you get here?”
“I got knowledge,” the girl answered.
“And after knowledge?” Agnes prompted. “What did you get?”
“Understanding.”
“And after understanding, then what?”
“Wisdom.”
“And what is wisdom?”
“Wisdom is the application of what you have learned to do.”
The testimony stretched on, Agnes leading her young witness with a lawyer’s precision.
“And the Bible says that wisdom is much more than gold,” Deborah stated.
“If you do not apply your knowledge, do you need to be in school?”
“No.”
“No. If you do not apply it, you do not need to be in school. You should go home to the village and sit down and do nothing.”
“If you don’t apply it, you are . . .”
Agnes nodded her head encouragingly. “You are what?”
“You are foolish,” said Deborah.
“You are nothing,” said Agnes.
“You are George the First,” said Mike.
“Oh my God!” Gladys chortled. “You are George the First!”
“George the First!” Esther repeated, giggling.
“Eeeeeee!” Gladys doubled over, almost losing her balance on the bumpy path. The school director and the children looked on, bemused, as the band of laughter played.
Mike: “Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!”
Gladys: “Whoo-woo-woo!”
Esther: “Eh-eh-eh-eh!”
After a full minute, Gladys straightened up, wiping a hand across her streaming eyes. “Oh my God. George the First. Made my day!”
AS THE VISIT came to a close, Mike surprised one of the children with a gift. Though the tall man exuded severity, he had a soft spot for the quiet ones, the ones easily overlooked. The boy he singled out was an orphan who spoke so rarely that the adults had little occasion to use his name, even to remember it. Jeremiah.
“Boy!” Mike called, pointing him out with a raise of his chin.
Jeremiah made his hesitant way up to the front of the crowd, his eyes fixed squarely on Mike’s belt buckle.
A curtain dropped into his view. It was a shirt. Not the typical used shirt that made its rumpled way from child to child before disintegrating into thready cobwebs. This was a man’s shirt of thick, fine cloth, with long sleeves, buttons down the front, and a handsome pattern of traditional designs accented in egg-yolk yellow.
For a brief moment the boy seemed unsure whether Mike was giving him the shirt or just showing it to him. But then Mike shook it open for the boy to try on.
The shirt hung on him like a lab coat, but Jeremiah’s smile was huge, undimmable.
“Ah-hahhh . . .” Gladys cheered. “It looks niiiiice.”
“I just remembered it was in the boot of my car.” Mike beamed. “That shirt cost forty thousand shillings. I have not even worn it yet.”
Jeremiah’s narrow shoulders lifted as though a row of medals had been pinned to his chest. An inconspicuous child like this one, Gladys knew, could feel the brief warmth of a spotlight forever.
“Thanks so much, Mike, thanks so much,” she said.
The other children looked on, not so much in envy as in wonder. The shirt was so fine.
Gladys patted Deborah’s hand. “Next time it will be your turn. And Rose, and Evelyn. And Faith. We will try to get something. Okay?”
A delegation of girls, led by Deborah, accompanied the visitors to the car. Behind them, his happiness temporarily eclipsing his shyness, Jeremiah followed, hands clutching his lapels to keep the miraculous shirt from flying away. As Mike bent his angular figure into the driver’s seat, looking much like a praying mantis retreating into a knothole, the boy’s eyes fixed on him with something between awe and love.
Deborah used Gladys’s window frame to pull herself up on tiptoe. “Mommy Gladys,” she whispered, “we need pads.”
“Ehh! You don’t have?”
The girls shook their heads, and Gladys shook her head along with them, clucking in dismay. How could these girls attend school with no sanitary pads?
Pads were forever lacking. So were books, shoes, clothes, sheets, medicine, and soap! And secondary school tuition and, oh my dear, birthday parties. Oh, Gladys was in problems! The persistence of these needs was overwhelming, like raindrops that could bring down a hillside.
“I will try to get something,” she pledged.
The girls blinked expectantly. The tall man had magically produced that fine shirt; might Mommy Gladys also possess secret reserves?
But then the Volvo was pulling away.
“So, Mike, you see why I must escape.”
“I am driving the getaway car.” He laughed.
Gladys’s chuckle faded, the rattle of the last beans shaken out of a sack. “We may joke about things, but it’s bigger than I can handle. I don’t know. There are times when I just don’t know what to do.”
Three Acres of Shade
After every visit to Early Learning School, Gladys walked away with an empty purse and a full mind. Good Samaritans might help with a child’s initial resettlement costs, but long-term responsibility was another matter. How long could Gladys keep juggling her kids’ needs? Paying for this one’s medical expenses and deferring that one’s tuition and begging patience and seeking support and worrying about her own expenses . . . Sometimes it felt like she was in an endless drought, trying to water a garden with a leaky bucket. If she ran fast enough, she could splash each plant with a few drops of water, but it was not enough for any of them to thrive.
The persistence of her needs wearied those around her as well. At the New Vision offices, she occasionally let her colleagues know when a case required immediate assistance, when a matter could not wait for the next issue’s publication. “This girl has no money for transport,” she migh
t plead. Or, “This boy must have medicine right away.”
Usually her coworkers responded. One might donate 2,000. One might dig deeper in a pocket for 5,000. Another might grumble, “Ah, you with your children. I only have money for lunch. Just take this 1,000.” No matter the size of the contribution, Gladys would accept it with a smile. People gave what they felt they could give.
Recently, though, she had encountered a disturbing exception. The urgent case had involved a toddler with hydrocephalus named Mukisa. In Uganda, it seemed, a child was not named “lucky” for his or her circumstances but for having survived them. The baby’s condition was severe, his swollen head taut and balloonlike atop his spindly body.
Gladys had made contact with CURE, a children’s hospital in Mbale, close to the Kenyan border, that treated hydrocephalus cases. In order for CURE to help Mukisa, Gladys needed to find 25,000 shillings to deliver mother and child to the hospital. When she made the rounds with the story at the office, one particular woman, an editor, grilled her: “You want transport money to give to a needy mother? Where is she?”
Gladys said, “If you go downstairs, you will see there’s a woman seated in reception there. With a boy with a big head.”
The editor seemed unfamiliar with hydrocephalus, so Gladys explained the condition, the family’s situation, and how the boy needed to go to Mbale to see if the doctors could perform the operation to stem the accumulation of fluid in his brain.
Others in the newsroom had contributed generously to Mukisa’s cause, with several friends giving 5,000 each. The editor looked at Gladys, then at the bouquet of bills in her hand.
“But how sure are we that you are taking all that money to this woman?” she said.
Gladys was so shocked she could not move. It was as if the editor had thrown ice water and hot tea in her face at the same time. Did this person really see her as a charlatan? As someone who would use a poor woman and a sick baby to raise money for herself?
No one who knew her could accuse Gladys of self-indulgence, let alone corruption. Gladys didn’t even go to the canteen in the newsroom. A lunch of 6,000 shillings was an extravagance she could not afford.
