Garden of the Lost and Abandoned

by Jessica Yu

  The children turned to look at the boy, who reflexively lowered his blistered face. If he had dared to meet their eyes, he would have seen that their curiosity was simple, not morbid.

  Most of the students had homes and supportive families who paid their fees, but some, primarily the ten who had been brought by Gladys, lacked both. The school was their home, the staff and classmates their family. Here the tall teenager with the lopsided face was a leader, the little girl with the hunchback an ambassador. Not knowing all this, Junior kept his head bowed as he shuffled to the front of the classroom.

  “This is Victor.” Agnes took the new boy’s hand and briefly explained his past on the street. “He was there eating in those rubbish places. And sleeping outside. For a long time. Finally he went to police, and he was burned by something. Now Auntie Gladys asked if he could come here.

  “Many times I’ve said, ‘I don’t want any more children in the school, I have enough! I don’t have posho, I don’t have beans. And now you are bringing in more.’ But this time, when she told me Victor’s story, I said, ‘Let him come.’ Here he can rest, and have peace. So he has come to us. We can’t send him away.”

  A few of the children stood. Agnes pointed to one boy.

  “I will give him clothes,” the boy said. The kids all clapped.

  “I will buy him something to eat,” offered another student.

  “Who else among the boys wants to give him something?” Agnes called out.

  One said he had a pair of shoes that might fit Victor. A girl raised her hand, saying that she would like to donate her 100 shillings for a haircut.

  “Thank you very much,” Agnes said.

  Deborah stood up. “I would like to give him one of my shirts,” she piped up in her high, musical voice. It was hard to image that anything small enough for her frame would fit a boy of eleven or twelve, but Agnes smiled and thanked her.

  “As you can see,” she said, addressing the whole of the class, “we are here on this world to give.” She looked down at Junior and spoke quietly in Luganda, relaying to him what his classmates had pledged. “So don’t take what’s not yours. When you were living on the street, when you were hungry, you had to eat some horrible things. Still you need not take what is not yours.”

  The boy looked up at the rows of expectant faces. He swallowed, then said in Luganda, “Thank you for helping me.”

  “You need to speak up,” Agnes urged. “They have not heard anything.”

  The second attempt was only marginally audible, but Agnes took pity and released him. Junior sank onto his bench. If the flood of goodwill had buoyed him, he lacked the certainty to float along; he seemed still to struggle with the current.

  He stared blankly at the words Agnes had written on the blackboard: Wisdom is the application of knowledge. With so many bodies in the classroom, the air had grown warm. Placing an elbow on the desk, he rested the good side of his face in his palm. For a moment he looked like any other boy in a stuffy classroom at the end of a long afternoon. A hand rose to his mouth just in time to cover a yawn.

  Silver Sandals on the Yellow Line

  NAKINTU MISTREATED

  Nine-year-old Olivia Nakintu was born with a swelling on her back. She was found loitering the streets and is currently at Kawempe Police Station. She claimed her mother, Agnes Mbabazi, had been mistreating her and she revealed a big scar where she reportedly burnt her with a hot knife.

  In tears, she said her mother discriminated against her because of her disability, so she had decided to look for her father, Misuseera Sebutali of Ndegi village near Lukaya town.

  In some of Gladys’s cases, all the names were known. Each star in the family constellation had been identified, along with its location in the galaxy: child, mother, father, village. On the surface, the reconnecting of kin in such cases should be a simple matter.

  But as with many things in life, particularly life in Uganda, a matter was rarely simple. Even when Gladys knew the names and village of a child’s relatives, reunion was no certainty. Maybe the family members had moved. Maybe they lived in a remote area where no one could read English or afford the newspaper. Maybe the parents had moved on to new families. Maybe they were dead.

  While she could continue to publicize the children’s existence through “Lost and Abandoned,” the fact that Gladys lacked the means to chase down every lead meant that children might languish in police stations or children’s homes or some other limbo for weeks and months. Sometimes, as in the case of Olivia Nakintu, years.

  GLADYS HAD FIRST encountered Olivia two years before, when she was making her rounds at Kawempe Police Station. Passing by the recycled shipping container where kids were held overnight, she saw an image she could still vividly recall: a girl in a light-blue school uniform, the hump on her back giving her the profile of a question mark. She appeared to be around ten years old, although she was shorter than average because of the compression of her spine. Her face was wet with tears.

  “What is the matter?”

  “I’m trying to get back home.”

  Gladys placed a hand on the trembling shoulder. “Come, my dear. I want you to tell me everything. Tell me the story from once upon a time to the very end.”

  Indeed, the story was like the hardship in a fairy tale. Her mother had stolen her from her father’s home and had brutally mistreated her. The girl had run away to look for her father. “Because he used to love me,” she said simply. “And my grandmother too.”

  Florence, the Child Protective Services officer on duty at the time, told Gladys that Olivia had been picked up on the road. She told the police that she was trying to walk back home to her father’s village somewhere around Lukaya—a town over sixty miles away! There was no way that a child, particularly one with a malformed spine, could make such a journey on foot.

  The other children at the station were eating the single daily meal of posho the police could provide, but Olivia had arrived too late to share in the porridge. Who knows when she last ate? Gladys fretted as she crossed the street to buy her some matoke and meat.

  After finishing her other interviews at the station, Gladys went to check on the girl, only to discover that other children had eaten her food! Maybe it was a misunderstanding, or maybe they had taken her food because she was small and misshapen and weak. Whatever the situation, Officer Florence told Gladys not to worry. The problem of the girl was solved. By a stroke of luck, a policeman who was coming by the station happened to be going in the direction of Lukaya, the town the girl had been walking toward. “We’ll just give her to this policeman,” she said, “and he can drop her there on his way.”

  That was not right. They were just going to dump her in Lukaya somewhere? So the girl could be stranded there instead of in Kampala? The child had already spent several nights in a couple of police stations, and she was terribly stressed. You couldn’t just pass her along like an empty bottle for someone else to dispose of.

  “No,” said Gladys. “They are not taking that girl and leaving her like that.”

  “Then where do we keep her?”

  “Don’t mind. Give me one day, and I will find a way for her.” In convincing the policewoman, Gladys had trapped herself. Now that she had made the promise, it would somehow have to come true.

  Since that day Gladys had done everything she could for Olivia. She had run her profile in the paper repeatedly, but no relatives had come forward. That was not so surprising, as the father’s family lived in a remote rural area. Gladys managed to get Olivia placed in Early Learning School in Entebbe and contributed to as many of the girl’s expenses as she could afford.

  As with so many of the displaced kids at the school, Director Agnes promptly rechristened her. Olivia would now be known as Deborah.

  Under her new name, the new girl blossomed. In this alternate world, Deborah’s infirmity was an identifying feature but not a negative one. Every visitor to the school remembered the winsome, hunchbacked little girl with the brilliant
smile; she became the school’s unofficial ambassador. It amazed Gladys that Deborah was always the first to greet her when she stepped out of the car. How could the girl spot vehicles before anyone else? With her shortened body and her little legs, how could she consistently outrun the boys?

  The hump on her back seemed to cause her no awkwardness as she chased friends around the yard or offered one of her frequent affectionate hugs. If anything, the way her shoulders bunched up gave her an attentive air; she seemed permanently oriented forward, like an eager student leaning on a desk.

  Her voice was honeyed, flutelike. In the school chorus, her clear soprano shimmered like the iridescence on a rooster feather. She was also bright. The teachers reported that Deborah was the most frequent user of the library. In contrast, Ezra had not once been spotted inside its door.

  Gladys had entreated Deborah to assist Erza in learning English, as his progress was achingly slow. The girl saw nothing odd in leading the teenager to study after class, although she was half his size and age.

  Other children might have felt jealous of the attention she drew, were it not for her generous nature. A fellow classmate could always turn to her for a share of food or a spare garment or a turn in a game of jump rope. She was in all ways a charming girl.

  Deborah was happy in Entebbe. But Gladys knew she still longed to visit her father’s home. The problem, as so often, was transport. The expense was a problem for everyone; even the police did not have access to vehicles. How many times did Gladys come across a case and think, Surely such a child can be resettled, only to realize with a sigh, But now how can I take the child there?

  It would take a half day just to get to the town near Deborah’s village. With new obligations to new cases landing in her lap every week, Gladys could not place such a costly journey at the top of her priority list.

  So Deborah waited. She smiled, she sang, she studied, she played. But Gladys knew she waited. And how the father and grandmother must miss their girl! Where might they have looked for her? Were they still looking? They must have endured restless nights worrying over how this child, a born victim in the eyes of the world, had survived. Or did they assume she had not?

  THROUGH HER OWN scrimping and some donations, Gladys finally had the means to take Deborah home. Gladys’s dress reflected her sunny mood: a long sheath of blue-green with a gold trim, in a light and airy weave.

  This time when Gladys reached the school, Deborah was not alone in greeting the car. Friends held each of her hands, and an entourage of well-wishers trailed in their wake. Knowing Deborah’s story, they were excited that she was getting her turn. Some looked on a bit wistfully. Little Rose, who longed for family attachment, peered into the car as though scouting for a place to stow away.

  Deborah slipped into the back seat of Mike’s Volvo. She wore a neat black blouse with white polka dots, a black skirt, glittery silver sandals, and the irrepressible smile of one who has won an unexpected prize.

  “Pray for us!” Gladys called to the children out the window. “We are hoping for a successful outcome!”

  The car headed west on the Kampala-Masaka Road. It would be a long drive, about four hours. As Esther chatted with Mike in the front, Gladys took advantage of the rare opportunity to talk to Deborah alone.

  “I don’t know if you still help my boy as I asked you to,” Gladys said.

  “I do,” the girl chirped.

  “You do? You take Ezra to library? But how come he has not learned English well, like you?”

  With Zam at the garden, Gladys had concocted a way to light two candles with one match. Ezra needed money for school expenses; Zam needed help with digging. If Ezra spent the month of holidays working under Zam’s supervision, he could make his own money. The boy was certainly up to the task, having endured his difficult childhood through his practical and hard-working nature. But Gladys sought reassurance that his studies would not suffer.

  “He talks English when we are at school.”

  “He talks English now? But he still has a problem of writing it. He doesn’t know the tenses.”

  Deborah did not refute the point but answered patiently. “Every time he’s in class, I give him my book. He studies it, and every word he doesn’t know, I help him.”

  “He points out the words he doesn’t know?”

  The chatter eventually petered out, and after a while Deborah started to feel ill. Unaccustomed to long car rides, she was nauseated by the start-and-stop of the traffic and the smell of exhaust. Gladys patted the girl’s shoulder and encouraged her to sleep.

  With her head lowered over her folded arms, the scars on Deborah’s scalp were clearly visible, lines and patches where hair would never grow. Given her sweet and sunny nature, it was easy to forget that she had been so injured.

  Some children wore their hardships like shackles. Alex, for instance, whose ability to smile had died along with his tubercular mother. But Deborah possessed unusual buoyancy. She did not behave like a child who had lived through hell.

  UNLIKE SOME CHILDREN’S stories, Deborah’s had not changed since that day at Kawempe station two years ago. As she had explained to Gladys, her mother, Agnes Mbabazi, left home when Deborah was a toddler. She did not reappear until Deborah was about eight. It was school break, and Mbabazi announced that she wanted to take her daughter to Kampala with her. The family agreed, but when the break ended, she did not bring Deborah back.

  In the city, Mbabazi’s decision to repossess her daughter quickly corroded. She complained that people were mocking her for having a deformed child. Her humiliation sparked an escalating cruelty, as Deborah’s scrapes and bruises were soon followed by cuts and burns. “Why don’t you go back to your father?” she would yell at Deborah. “He’s the one who produces disabled people like you.”

  After Deborah was seen with stab wounds on her head, neighbors reported the mother to the police. For a few days Mbabazi was held at Wandegeya Police Station. When Deborah was taken to see her, she was greeted not with remorse but with hot bile. “I wish I hadn’t produced you, you bastard,” her mother hissed at her. “Why did I have to produce a lame one like you? I wish I had known what I was producing. I would have killed you before you came out.”

  That night Mbabazi escaped from her cell. She headed straight back home to beat Deborah again, hatred guiding her blows in the dark.

  The next day Deborah started off in search of her father. Instead she ended up meeting Gladys.

  “I THINK THIS girl may need some fresh air,” Gladys told Mike. Deborah’s eyes were closed, and in her lap she clutched a kavera in case her stomach turned over.

  “I know—it is a long journey,” Mike sympathized. “But we will soon reach a place to take a break.”

  They entered a shopping area where the signs seemed bold and bright, where vendors swarmed a parked bus like ants on a dead grasshopper. Mike pulled up in front of a green-roofed building, beside a billboard with UGANDA EQUATOR LINE RESTAURANT stenciled over a drawing of a roasted chicken. Closer to the road stood a twenty-five-foot-tall ring fashioned of cement, like a thin slice of a road tunnel, emblazoned with the words UGANDA EQUATOR.

  “As I said, it is a long journey today,” Mike said, eyes twinkling. “It has even taken us to the other side of the world!”

  Gladys, Esther, and Deborah followed him into the restaurant, where they purchased cold drinks. Mike, who could not walk ten paces anywhere in the country without running into an acquaintance, heartily greeted one of the employees, a man named Kalungi.

  Kalungi pointed down at a painted yellow line leading out the door. “That yellow line is on the equator. It is at zero latitude. Come, I will show you what that means.”

  The yellow line ran right through the center of the cement ring. About twenty yards to the left of the line, a metal basin stood atop a stand. It was painted yellow, with a white spiral leading to the drainage hole at its center.

  “On this side of the line, we are standing in the Northern Hemisphere,�
� Kalungi explained, filling the basin with water. He floated a small white flower facedown on the surface and unplugged the drainage hole. The group shadowed the basin, watching the flower spin around along with the water.

  “See here, it is spinning clockwise, yes? That is because the north is pulling.” The observers nodded, then followed him back across the yellow line to a second metal basin twenty yards on the opposite side of the ring. Kalungi produced another white flower and repeated the experiment.

  “Eh!” Gladys remarked. “It is now going in the other direction.”

  “Yes, counterclockwise,” confirmed Kalungi. “The south is pulling the other way.”

  At a third basin, positioned directly on the yellow equator line behind the cement ring, the water sucked the flower straight down, like a lizard gulping a butterfly. Deborah yelped in delight, her motion sickness forgotten.

  “Ee-ee!” exclaimed Gladys. “It could not rotate.”

  “No, because both the north and south are pulling.”

  “Is it true?”

  They wandered back and forth between the hemispheres, their heads spinning along with the flowers. Could the two halves of the world really act so oppositely, existing side by side?

  Kalungi walked them to the concrete ring, where they could take a picture of themselves under the UGANDA EQUATOR sign. “You can stand with your right foot in one hemisphere and the left in the other,” he suggested.

  While the others played at straddling the waistline of the earth, Deborah set her shimmery shoes neatly on top of the yellow line, a beatific smile on her face. It was as though she felt the pull of the earth running directly through her body, a tree anchored by its roots.

  BACK ON THE ROAD, it was impossible to shake the feeling that they were indeed crossing over to the other half of the planet. As Mike drove through the Rift Valley toward the Katonga River, the roadside vendors shifted from selling charcoal to sponges to fish, both smoked and fresh. Men stood with one foot on the tarmac, brandishing their wares. In the heat of the day, fishermen dipped their biggest silver perches in water and jostled them like puppets, trying to make them look “fresh from the net,” or at least “not dead yet.”