by Jessica Yu
She pressed her lips into a satisfied smile, then gave a nod. “We’ve seen our boy. Yes.”
AFTER THEY HAD signed the visitors’ ledger, snapped a round of pictures, and exchanged phone numbers, they headed for the car.
“Don’t fight with the other kids, okay?” Gladys told Trevor, trying to catch his eye. “I want you to behave well.”
The boy recognized a goodbye when he heard it. His lower lip protruded like a baby’s. The protest was scrawled across his wounded brow: After all this waiting, I’m again left behind? Without a word, he turned and shambled off.
She watched him as he approached the stairs. One foot on the bottom step, chin lowered to his chest, as though he were ascending the gallows. A few steps across the veranda and through the door, and the sea of kids would again swallow him up.
She could hear the doubting voices. Three hundred kids. Why care for this one, who does not even bother to say goodbye?
For nearly three years this boy had disorganized everyone who tried to help him, Gladys most of all.
Even if the boy survives childhood, what will become of him? What kind of life can he possibly have?
Gladys could not say. No one could. But it was the child’s life, and he had a right to it.
“Trevor,” she called after him. “Come to say goodbye.”
His bare foot halted on the second step. Then he turned and rushed back, as though he had only been waiting for her word. His small face crumpled as he reached her. She sheltered him like an ancient tree, enfolding him in thick branches.
“Don’t leave me here.”
Didn’t he know?
“Trevor, Trevor.” She bent her head to his and spoke the words a child needed to hear. “I’ll always come back for you.”
Epilogue
To Ezra, the gardens looked most beautiful at daybreak. As he rose each morning before dawn, he witnessed the light returning to the land, touching down on the earth and the plants and the roof of the house. The honeyed hue of that first light was so lovely it even had its own name—akalenge.
Each day he faced was full of activity. There were rooms to be tidied, grounds to be swept, fields to be tended, chickens to be fed. But Ezra liked to start with the pigs.
The piggery had been occupied for almost a month now, by one fine sow in one stall and two weaned piglets in another. He tended to hover over the sow, who would soon give birth. It gave him satisfaction to watch her snuffle at her feed, and at the greens he gathered for her in the afternoons.
Although he had not done it for long, caring for the pigs made Ezra feel that he was capable of anything. The penciled sketch that he had presented to his mother Gladys a year ago had become a reality. Here the structure stood, rendered in timber and concrete and pink bodies and twitching ears and contented grunts. Soon all five stalls would be filled with pigs, generating income, biogas, and fertilizer.
Since Ezra had begun living at Perseverance Gardens, there had been many developments. For one thing, the thefts that had plagued the garden had ceased altogether. During the day neighbors could see the young man working in the fields; in the evening they could see the smoke from his cooking fire. No longer could anyone stroll onto the grounds and simply take food, tools, materials, what-what. The place had someone.
Through study and trial and error, Ezra had learned many things: how to inspect leaves for diseases and pests; how to root out the lumbugo and other weeds that could choke his crops; how to time his plantings so that harvesting could take place before the rains; how to keep tabs on the going rates for produce in the local markets. As occasional workers were hired on for various projects, he had grown comfortable with delegating responsibility.
There were still challenges, of course. The current drought had sucked the life out of most of the recent crops, the soil was tired, and his new fieldhand sometimes indulged in drink. The gardens’ yields were modest, but there was some surplus to sell.
Most of the sales were small, made to locals strolling up the path with a few shillings for cassava or matoke for their family’s needs. But there had been a few large transactions too, to wholesalers coming by with small trucks. Those ones would buy an entire harvest to take to the town markets.
Large or small, any sale excited Ezra. It charged him up to think that this seed he had planted in the ground had grown into something that others wanted to buy, that his own sweat had produced a tangible financial result. Just imagine, he would marvel. These are just the few small crops we’ve got now. If we can expand, the sky is the limit for us.
LONELINESS HAD PLAGUED him in his first months at the garden, but these days the place was lively. Construction workers had begun digging a well. Victor and Jeremiah stayed for a month of school break. And over Christmas there was a big celebration. Gladys invited several family members, including her own children, Timothy and Sarah; Esther brought her son and nephew. Every room was filled with chatter and laughter. And how well they ate! Chicken, rice, matoke, cassava, squash, watermelon, pineapple, mango, and a thick round cake with white frosting.
Among those sharing the cake were two new faces: a young mother, Monica, and her five-year-old daughter. From what Gladys had told him, Ezra understood that this little girl had been born with a terrible defect: she had emerged from the womb with her insides outside of her body. Certain that the newborn would die in a day or two, the delivery nurse declined to waste a vaccination on her. But Monica wrapped her baby in cloth, held her, fed her, and gave her a name: Kudhura. Year by year, she managed to keep her daughter alive.
When Gladys met Kudhura, the three-year-old was delicate but stable, the membrane of her abdominal sac having thickened over time. Gladys ran several articles that sparked the interest of surgeons from Turkey, Germany, and the Netherlands, who offered free services to the indigent family. After two years it appeared that Kudhura would finally be given her chance. But after months of examinations and hospital visits, all the doctors concluded that it was too late to operate—the surgery should have been done before the child reached her first birthday.
Monica was a strong young woman, but the stress of raised and dashed hopes had worn her down. Gladys had some ideas about how to support the family and keep Kudhura healthy, but in the meantime she invited mother and daughter to stay at Perseverance Gardens for a couple of months. Monica, Ezra was told, should be expected only to rest.
But when Monica saw the gardens, she did not want to rest. The aborted surgery plans had left her feeling helpless, and idleness only deepened her mood. She proposed planting a sweet potato patch, and Ezra agreed. Kudhura loved to tag along as the adults worked, making everyone laugh with her questions and funny remarks.
Ezra doted on Kudhura, although his affection was tinged with sorrow. When he first laid eyes on the pretty child with the shocking protuberance pushing out the front of her dress, he immediately flashed back to his own past, to his thirteen years of suffering with his swollen face. Ezra returned every one of Kudhura’s smiles, but in private he shed tears. How cruel it was, to have help arrive too late.
For Ezra, help had arrived just in time. With the chance he had been given, he would someday help others like Kudhura. Whatever time I have on earth, he told himself, I must use it well.
IT WAS THOUGHTS like these that prompted Ezra not to pursue his secondary education. He could not claim to have excelled in his primary leaving exams, but he had done his best, and that was enough schooling for him. He braced himself for Gladys’s reaction, but she did not protest. It was his choice, she said, as he was a man now.
In truth, at Perseverance Gardens, Ezra did feel like a man. He was making decisions that would shape the future not just for himself but for many others like him.
“Hey! This boy is really a powerful boy, here!” Gladys would crow when he showed her some new project, like the recycled-water-bottle drip system he had set up for the eggplant patch. “He is getting to be so powerful.”
In the afternoon, at rest between d
uties, Ezra would meditate on where he had started and where he was now. His mother never failed to thank him for what he was doing. But he knew: It is really me who should drop to my knees and thank her.
One day, he vowed, this project would be far bigger than his mother had ever imagined. The trees would be tall and the fields dense and green, the pigs and chickens would be joined by goats and cows, and Gladys’s children would share a large compound as one family. In the evenings they would gather to discuss important issues, like behavior and money and faith and goals. No one would want for anything, least of all a home.
He was not abashed by his idyllic vision, though it was drawn in bolder outlines and more glowing colors than the stained glass in a church. After all the miracles that had come his way, how could he succumb to doubt?
AS MUCH AS he loved planning the future, Ezra could not keep his thoughts from imagining what his life would have been if Gladys had not entered it. The exercise fascinated him, because every route without his mother led to an empty space. Without her, there was no existence at all. His health, his sustenance, his education, his community—everything was blank.
Ezra could never repay her. It was out of the question. Gladys was truly his mother, and how would one pay back a mother? He could only honor her by continuing down the path she had begun to clear.
Every morning, when he opened the door and saw the golden light unfolding, he was flooded with a sense of peace. The rooster from Douglas’s grandma always crowed, in loud appreciation of finding himself ruler of the roost rather than fodder for the pot. And as the sun warmed the earth, it lit up Ezra’s heart.
Life contained such difficulty, such possibility. You just had to give all to what you were given.
And so he faced the morning with fire and hope. I will give everything, he would tell himself. Let me go and meet the akalenge.
Author’s Note
While the stories in this book are rooted in my observations and Gladys’s shared insights, their order reflects a few shifts in chronology. Given the sensitivity of circumstances surrounding a few of the children’s cases, characters in some stories have been given pseudonyms and some identifying details have been changed, like the invented name Young Hearts Orphanage. Additionally, Byron is a pseudonym for Gladys’s relative.
The chapter epigraphs are from Gladys’s “Lost and Abandoned” column in Saturday Vision, published by Vision Group. In one instance, names and details in the column text were altered.
The events in the book span the nearly four years I spent following Gladys and her work, during which I returned to Uganda usually twice a year for a couple of weeks at a time. In the interest of transparency: I did not give Gladys any direct financial support during this period, but I supplied transportation and minor provisions as needed. Also, on a couple of occasions I acted as the go-between for donations made to her by individuals. There was no attempt to solicit such support by either Gladys or me.
Acknowledgments
This book owes its existence to the early encouragement of my irreplaceable friend Greg Critser.
I first met Gladys Kalibbala in March 2013, while working on a documentary on population issues called Misconception. I’d like to acknowledge Participant Media for having provided that opportunity, and my friend and producer Elise Pearlstein for her moral support.
I must also express my deep gratitude to:
· The indispensable Michael Wawuyo, for his good humor, invaluable insights, and fortitude on our many long journeys throughout Uganda with Gladys.
· Esther Bwekembe, Ezra Muzamiru, and all the children and families in the stories.
· Gladys’s colleagues, who welcomed (or tolerated) my presence, including her coworkers at New Vision Media and all the hardworking police officers, social workers, probation officers, and children’s home staff members who make up an essential part of her support structure.
· My editor, Deanne Urmy, and my agent, Jin Auh, for their warm and wise counsel, for taking a chance on an untested writer, and for embracing Gladys’s story so fully and immediately.
· Timothy Farrell, my English teacher at Gunn High School, for teaching me to appreciate the beauty of a well-constructed sentence.
· My mother, Connie Young Yu, for her idealistic spirit, and my father, John Yu, for being the only Chinese American parent I know of ever to deter a daughter from going to law school.
· My dear husband, Mark Salzman, for his unflagging support and for cheerfully holding the fort during my frequent sojourns to Uganda, and my daughters, Ava and Esme, whose curiosity about the world and compassion for its inhabitants provided me with the motivation to pursue this book.
· And finally, Gladys, for throwing open the doors to her world and letting me enter so freely. Such rare trust is a gift and a responsibility. Like so many others I’ve met over the past four years, I am forever thankful for her kindness and generosity.
About the Author
JESSICA YU is a prolific filmmaker known for both her scripted and nonfiction work, which includes the Academy Award–winning short Breathing Lessons. Her documentaries have focused on art, social justice, and the environment. She lives in Southern California, and Garden of the Lost and Abandoned is her first book.
Learn more at www.jessicayu.net
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