by Jessica Yu
He grinned. “Didn’t I tell you? Tell me, how is it?”
“Fantastic.” The single quiet word conveyed more appreciation than if she had leapt up and hugged him. Gladys unfurled a hand toward the sign, with its colorful images of cabbage, mango, and orange, as though she were presenting a painting in a museum. “The fruits have made it lively! Yes. It has come out properly. You look at it and you feel like eating a mango. Except we don’t have mangoes in that place.”
“You’ll have mangoes,” the young man assured her. “I’m sure you will have mangoes!”
They drove toward the garden in high spirits, leaving in their wake an intrepid boda man, who ferried the sign under his seat, the two long metal poles protruding from the back of his motorcycle like spears.
Ezra and Douglas met the Volvo in the driveway, their sunny faces sheened with sweat. It was school holidays, and the boys were helping with the garden. Despite the rustic conditions, they loved being there. They enjoyed their liberation from their desks, the chance to work the land and their muscles. They savored the fresh air and the peace of sleeping in the quiet country.
And there was another thing. At school, everyone lined up in a long queue for meals. A student might glance up hopefully from the little portion on his plate to the matron doling out the food, but he would not receive more. At the garden, though, the boys handled the food themselves. If they found a jackfruit, they could eat it. If they picked maize, they could roast it. They could eat as much as they could gather and cook. To a child who had viewed much of life from the back of the line, such freedom was intoxicating.
News of Perseverance Gardens had been relayed from student to student. Ezra’s experience had attracted Douglas, which made Victor beg to be included, which made Jeremiah eager to join as well. When Gladys went to pick up the four boys, another one had looked on wistfully, asking, “Auntie Gladys, when is it my turn to go to the garden?”
At present, though, it was costing Gladys money to send a child to stay at the garden, and she could not take them all. If the garden became profitable, she could accommodate more boys, and eventually staff the place for girls to stay safely too.
A MAN FOLLOWED Ezra and Douglas down the driveway. He was her current hire to manage the gardens: her nephew Byron.
Gladys was a suspicious person now; at least, she was trying to be one. After Zam and Robert, she was determined to be more wary of outsiders. When she discussed the garden’s losses with her son, Timothy, he encouraged her to look for employees within the family. “If you need someone, why don’t you give Byron a chance?” he suggested. “He does not have steady work.”
After his mother had passed away, this nephew had lived with Gladys for a time. Now in his thirties, he had been in occasional contact with Timothy.
Upon his first visit to the garden, Byron had pronounced his willingness to start immediately. Gladys breathed a sigh of relief. In the hands of a blood relative, the project would surely be safe.
It was only Byron’s second full day at the garden, and he hung back on the unfinished veranda as Gladys handed Ezra and Douglas their sugar and soap, two mosquito nets, and a heavy stack of newspapers.
“I’m giving you these papers to look through,” she told the boys, pointing to the “Harvest Money” pull-outs which she had been collecting every Tuesday for several months. “The ordinary papers, when you’re finished with them, you can use for lighting fires. But not ‘Harvest Money.’ These sections here guide people in farming. They show how to cultivate, how to look after animals. Learn some tricks, get some ideas. I want you to be reading, not just looking at them.”
This last comment was directed toward Ezra, whose English skills lagged far behind those of his younger classmate. It was imperative that Ezra commit himself to studying over the holidays; his last marks had been dismal. Quick-witted Douglas, on the other hand, was primed to advance to secondary school, if only the fees could be paid.
The boys began browsing through the newspapers, Douglas reading the articles while Ezra examined the images of chickens and papayas and grinning farmers. One cover photo showed a woman in a “Harvest Money” T-shirt cradling a plump white rabbit. Gladys read the headline out loud: “‘How Rabbits Changed My Life.’”
She laughed heartily, hefting an invisible fruit the size of a melon. “You wait—within a few years I will be holding a big orange like this and telling you people how oranges have changed my life!”
Mike came over to inform her that the boda man had arrived, and the boys ran to help unwrap the odd parcel on the back of the bike. Gladys, who enjoyed surprises, had not told them about this new addition to the enterprise.
The boys gaped at the imposing green-and-yellow sign, with its precise, professional lettering. Ezra beamed his asymmetrical smile, then, in a flash, produced a shovel and a hoe. He and Douglas began clearing a section of weeds and hacking away at the gravelly dirt beneath. As they dug, birds chirped madly in the trees, cheering the boys along.
When the posts had been set and braced with stones, the group gathered for photos, Gladys clucking like a hen that has just laid two eggs in one sitting. It was quite a view: the boys standing at proud attention on either side of the bright rectangle against the picturesque backdrop of the house, some fifty yards back from the road.
Sure, it was a little bit like putting a frame around an unfinished painting. The house still lacked a full roof, the walls had not yet been plastered, and the crops were struggling, none yielding enough surplus to sell. But the new sign mirrored Gladys’s belief that toward the end of the project’s rocky first year, it was turning a corner. Give the gardens a month or two of proper care and surely they would have something beautiful. Her nephew was ready to work, the boys loved the gardens, and the skies had finally blessed them with good rain.
The sun was once again a friend, not an enemy. The sun had turned the gardens green. Yellow and green, they looked good together.
Gladys spoke to the boys and Byron. “We need to bring life back into these gardens. Be practical. That is the Uganda we need.”
“Yes, Mommy.”
“Perseverance Gardens,” Gladys said wonderingly, as though she were reading the sign for the first time. “That is what we have on the ground here.”
“Perseverance, yes!” Mike chimed in. “Just keep pressing. That’s the word: persevere!”
Lost Again
NO RELATIVES TWO YEARS LATER
Trevor Masembe was abandoned at Katalemwa Cheshire Home in March 2013 and taken to Kawempe Police Station.
A month later, the police failed to trace his family and handed him over to Good Samaritan Home in Matugga. The director of this place ran away after he had accumulated rent and disappeared with the children . . . The children were found stranded at a home in Rakai district and when the Police rescued them, Saturday Vision identified Masembe. That is how he came to be admitted at Early Learning School in Entebbe.
After a year at school, he developed suspected autism problems.
For a while the news of Trevor was good. Gladys’s dentist friend had grown fond of the boy and bought him books and many other things to make him feel at home. “If it is a matter of footballs,” he declared, “I will buy all the balls for him!”
This delighted Gladys, but she warned, “If he is chasing his ball outside, you must not take your eyes off him even for one second.”
Trevor kicked his football around the corridors of the compound during the day, and every evening Dr. Kironde had someone escort him to a nearby field to play.
Dr. Kironde tried to strengthen Trevor’s weak right hand by encouraging him to carry jerry cans. The boy still urinated in his sleep, so the doctor taught him to remove the soiled bedsheets from the bed and soak them in soapy water. The frequent wringing of the twisted cloth began to bring the limp fingers to life.
Sometimes the boy would wake up to discover that the sheets were dry. On those rare mornings he would run to the doctor’s room. “Come see, D
ad—I didn’t pee on the bed today!” he would announce.
The boy began to speak more, and what he said surprised Dr. Kironde and Gladys: “I want to go to school again. The children at home, they are all in boarding school.”
THEN TREVOR WENT missing.
Dr. Kironde’s housemaid sent the boy to take a nap after lunch, but he slipped out of his room and disappeared. The neighborhood launched an all-out search. The dentist even paid for TV and radio announcements.
Three days later, Trevor showed up at the police station. When Dr. Kironde went to retrieve him, the officers grilled him about his relationship to the boy. Did he have official permission to take responsibility for the child? Why was the boy running away? An unnerved Dr. Kironde sat Trevor down and warned him that this must never, ever happen again.
It happened again, a few days later: another disappearance, another frantic search. Trevor returned late at night, just as the gate man was locking up. Almost casually the boy stated that he had been moving around Kampala. He had even met some friends who had bought him groundnuts.
The report rendered Gladys speechless. How could the boy deliver such a report and fail to understand the agitation he had caused? To a man who had shown him nothing but patience and kindness?
It happened a third time. Again Trevor appeared at the police station. Again the dentist had to explain why his ward kept running away.
Gladys knew it was high time she accepted the reality of the situation. No one could expect a busy housemaid and a full-time physician to look after such a child. He was too active, too slippery, too stubborn. Trevor did not want anyone telling him what he should do, what he could not do, or where he should be. She had to find a place that could provide both freedom and constant supervision.
With private facilities priced out of her reach, what were her options? L’Arche would not accept him. It was oriented toward older, more sedentary residents, not nine-year-old escape artists. It probably did not help that the sight of the community’s more conspicuously disabled residents sent Trevor into wild giggling, as if he were watching a cartoon.
ONE SUNDAY, GLADYS called to check in with Dr. Kironde and found him at his wits’ end. Trevor had taken a filthy wet mop and flung it at a Muslim cleric. The man’s white tunic was stained all over with dirty water! It was only through Dr. Kironde’s pleading that the cleric, a leader at the nearby mosque, had been dissuaded from going to the police. Meanwhile the boy hid among the flowerpots, laughing and laughing about what he had just done.
It would have been the last straw, but Trevor saved the dentist the trouble of putting him out by running away.
This time weeks passed with no sign of the child. Gladys called the police constantly. Through malaria and deadlines and crises at Perseverance Gardens and the needs of all her other children, she worried about this boy. The boy who would chase a ball through a traffic circle. The boy who would not talk. The boy who would follow any hand waving a hot chapati.
A year before, she had not been able to comprehend how a mother or a father could walk away from a child without looking back. She did not excuse Trevor’s parents, but these days she often thought of them. What their lives must have been like before they got fed up and dumped their son. How they might have spent nights, as she did, wondering, Where is he sleeping? How is he eating? Is he safe?
“YOUR TREVOR is here!” Her colleagues at Old Kampala Police Station had called to report that the boy had been picked up along a nearby road.
When she arrived at the station, her relief curdled into dismay. It was as though she were suddenly transported two years back, to the church building in Rakai. A small, shabby apparition shambled toward her, preceded by the stench of sweat and urine. Clothes filthy, face wan, body streaked with grime.
Trevor. The sight broke her heart.
How was it that he had again sunk to such depths? It was not so very long ago that he had played in the courtyard of Early Learning School. What had happened to that boy? That boy was round-cheeked and healthy, with a football bouncing at his feet. This boy was blank-faced, shoeless, worn, like a discarded doll. He did not cry when he saw her. He was not eager to be rescued. Gladys sensed an inner contraction, a closing of some emotional aperture inside that thin chest.
Banange . . . This boy has gone through a lot, Gladys thought. The time might come that he doesn’t want to fight on.
How much longer would Gladys herself want to fight on? This was undoubtedly the question on the minds of everyone around her. They were all fed up with this one, this stinky, disruptive, thieving child who would not even look someone in the eye.
No one would blame Gladys for putting him aside. Why keep washing a cracked cup?
IT WAS HARD not to contrast Trevor’s fate with that of Alex and his sisters, who were now living with their new family in Nebraska. The Griffens had sent a photo of the siblings happily playing in a yard dotted with toys. There was no such happy option for Trevor, no well-to-do American family waiting to save the day. Gladys could not even get him admitted to a facility for the disabled. She had contacted a home in Jinja for kids with autism, but as it did not usually accept children from outside the district, there were endless bureaucratic delays.
As the weeks went by, Trevor made Old Kampala the base for his wanderings. Officer Rebecca did not like this. Whenever Gladys visited, the policewoman broached the same subject: “It’s time to think about sending the boy to Naguru.”
“No. Rebecca, no.” Gladys would argue or plead, depending on the moment. “It will be very difficult for us to monitor him there. And I need to be able to monitor him to see whether he will be able to change as he grows up. He’s young—maybe he fails to understand that people are helping. If he starts understanding, maybe we can continue helping him.”
The doctors had told her that autism was not curable. But she detected in the boy some potential to engage. Sometimes he would tell her that he wanted to go back to Early Learning School. Other times, when she gave him a 500-shilling note for a chapati, he would flash her the old happy grin before running off.
One rainy day as she was leaving the station she heard him calling to her. She walked behind the building, but she couldn’t see him at first. He was crouching inside one of the abandoned cars. His body odor stung the eyes, as he no longer bathed at all now. His clothes were ragged, the pants splitting at the seams like reused kavera. Gladys had stopped bringing him clothes from Dr. Kironde’s place, as other children always stole them.
It hurt. After rescuing him repeatedly, putting him in schools, settling him in homes, and buying him clothes and shoes and supplies and food again and again, here he was, squatting in the rusty wrecks behind Old Kampala. What dreams did he have, sleeping in those cars that would never go anywhere?
AFTER TWO MONTHS, even the grudging hospitality of the police station came to an end. The traffic officers caught Trevor red-handed at their piki-pikis, siphoning gas from the bikes’ tanks. Evidently he had learned to sell the fuel to street boys to earn money for chapatis. As Trevor met the spotlight of accusation with a sleepy smile, Officer Rebecca was shocked to catch the whiff of fuel underneath his he-goat smell. Like so many other street kids, Trevor was sniffing the toxic fumes to get high.
With this news, the police drew the line. Gladys could continue her search to find a better placement for the child, but in the meantime he must be confined.
What could Gladys do? She could not deny that freedom was a riptide dragging Trevor further and further into polluted waters.
And so the boy was sent to the place where boys like him were sent: Naguru.
Trevor was gone.
Seven Pieces of Cassava
KIBIRANGO IN SCHOOL
After Douglas Kibirango’s story was published in Saturday Vision a few weeks ago, explaining how he was stranded at Kawempe Police Station, Good Samaritans offered to help him.
The management of Early Learning Primary School, Entebbe, took Kibirango on and he is now enro
lled in the boarding section.
Kibirango left his parents’ home in Katugo, Nakasongola, citing mistreatment by his father, Fred Bogere, and stepmother, Zaina Nambirige.
Two years ago Gladys had discovered Douglas, a skinny, feverish twelve-year-old with swollen legs and feet, at Kawempe Police Station. He had run away from home with only the clothes on his back and walked over seventy-five miles south from his village near Nakasongola to Kampala. The journey had taken him six days. Nearly a week of walking barefoot, scrounging for mangoes, and drinking from ponds. When she interviewed Douglas, he revealed the cause of his flight: an abusive stepmother. Wincing at the scars he showed her, Gladys took him under her wing.
Douglas’s profile ran in “Lost and Abandoned” four times but generated no response. In the meantime the boy thrived at Early Learning. He was exceedingly capable and well-behaved. With his mild nature and easy smile, he made friends quickly. He achieved high marks in his classes, especially math and English. After two years he was a P7 candidate, preparing to sit for his Primary School Leaving Examinations—the first big step in his quest to become a mechanical engineer. He had never asked about the search for his family, and in the face of more pressing demands, it quietly slid down Gladys’s list of priorities.
In recent months, though, the question of Douglas’s family had resurfaced. The times he had stayed at Perseverance Gardens with Ezra, Victor, and Jeremiah, he had been no more than an hour’s drive away from his village. In escaping his vicious stepmother, the child had left behind other relatives, and he had the right to see them. If the stepmother made any trouble, Gladys was ready to fight fire with fire.
ONE MORNING GLADYS and Mike went by Early Learning to pick up Douglas and Jeremiah. Mike was driving a van today, as the Volvo was in need of repair. As the boys stepped in through the sliding door, Gladys announced that in addition to visiting Ezra at Perseverance Gardens, they would be taking Douglas to his village. “After all,” she asked him, “don’t you think those people back home are now missing you? Don’t you think they may have thought you died?”
