Because I am a Girl

by Tim Butcher

  The healing process was long and tedious; it took from dusk until dawn. Dara and Chinda were not allowed into the room, so they stayed in the yard under their three pathetic palm trees. Dara drank beer from the bottle, which fell and broke when he heard his daughter screaming in the house.

  After the healing, the girl became quiet, or rather silent. She looked hurt, her huge, dark eyes hidden in her trimmed, short hair. Her head seemed heavy and loose on her shoulders. She was like a lion struck by the forest thunders, suddenly surrendering her wild temper to the lightning. Dara’s wife kept her faith in the Buddha and continued to teach the girl to walk and to dress. Two days after the spirit healer left, the family was surprised to see that the girl could stand on her feet, and slowly, she began to walk around in the house. Her back was still hunched, like someone who had been living for a long time in a small cave. To Dara, it felt like the softest and saddest moment in his life.

  In June, the monsoon rains flooded everybody’s houses and Dara had to move everything upstairs. But compared with a month ago, the family felt calm. One morning, the rain stopped and the sun began to shine. To Dara’s surprise, the same American psychologist appeared again in front of his house, accompanied by a local doctor. Dara’s wife greeted the two men once again with lime-juice. In a very direct manner, the local doctor suggested that he could take the whole family to a car, then drive them to the Phnom Penh hospital to do a DNA test, and after the DNA test, the psychologist said, he would be more than happy to assist further with the patient. The old policeman listened, finishing a whole bottle of Angkor beer before opening another.

  For a while, the three men sat under the shade of the banyan tree in Dara’s yard. The old policeman carried on drinking his beer, showing clearly that he wouldn’t leave the house. With the help of the local doctor’s translation, the American psychologist explained further what would work best in the case of the jungle girl, but once again, the American didn’t use the word ‘daughter’. Dara seemed not to be listening anymore; he just gazed at a green-skinned lizard lying underneath his rotten Yamaha in the sun. It didn’t appear to move all afternoon. The American psychologist went back to the jungle girl’s room, where he talked to her strangely and made his peculiar hand gestures. Eventually the sun sank towards the west, and the lizard also disappeared. The two men were about to leave but, once more, they asked if Dara would bring the girl and come with them. Dara shook his head.

  Nothing else could be said. Now the old policeman and his wife accompanied the two doctors to their car, which was parked near the house. The doctors gave Dara their business cards, which Dara had already received on their first visit. Unsatisfied, they drove away. The old policeman stood still like a palm tree, watching the car disappear. He appeared thoughtful for a few minutes, as if he was making some difficult decisions. But in the end he shook his head, sat back under his banyan tree, and drank the rest of his beer.

  The next morning, Dara and his wife were woken by a dog’s loud barking. He got up and walked into Bopah’s room – she wasn’t there. Hastily he searched every corner of the house, including the back and the front yards, but his daughter was gone.

  The search for the jungle girl went on for about two weeks. Nobody had seen her. The couple spent their days on the motor bike, searching up and down the streets of Siem Reap. When they left the city, they went down to the provinces, to those floating villages around the lake of Tonlé Sap, and then on to the mountains at the northern border. They rushed back to the area where the girl was first found and they stayed in the village of Khna for a while, but no one had seen a feral human being. Dara wandered in the jungles for days, amongst small monkeys and endless bushes, but he found no trace of the girl.

  *

  Time slipped away; as quietly as the white hair accumulating on the old policeman’s head. The monsoon season was over – the streets and the roads became sandy and dry again, and the green papayas started to ripen and rot. Every day, as the old policeman drove his Yamaha up and down the street, he heard rumours about his jungle girl. Someone said that the last time they saw her, she was selling some finger bananas on a small road towards Angkor Wat, while others said they had seen her squatting on a boat in Tonlé Sap lake two months earlier. Some said they met her one night in front of a night club in Phnom Penh, and that she looked like a prostitute. Dara also heard that she had died in a traffic accident; that she hadn’t stopped for the cars. But amongst all the talk, the most convincing story was that the jungle girl went back to the jungle. The jungle of the vast Lacustrine Plain, where the forest, the lake, the mountains and the rice fields had lain every century, every year and every day beneath the poisonous tropical sun.

  After his wife died of lung disease, the old policeman lived the rest of his life in a temple in the north of the country. He still kept his Yamaha but he had returned his gun. Sometimes, as moonlit bats flew through the night, he tried to think of his past; to untangle those knots in his heart. He no longer wished for his past to be like a handful of weightless dust falling into a black hole. He wanted to keep it with him, every bit of it, like warm ashes resting in an incense burner before the old Buddha, each quiet, passing day.

  Change

  MARIE PHILLIPS

  Marie Phillips was born in London in 1976. She studied anthropology and documentary making, and worked as a TV researcher and as an independent bookseller. Her first novel, Gods Behaving Badly, was published in 2007.

  ‘SO, DID IT change your life?’

  We were sitting in a meeting room in one of the Plan International offices in Kampala, Uganda. I had stopped crying by then, but the four Plan workers were still looking at me with a mixture of concern and panic in case I started again. My face was sticky with the dust of a three-hour drive from Kamuli district, now distributed by tears into orange-red rivulets down my cheeks: attractive. But then probably also a good match for my sweaty clothes, mud-clogged Crocs, hair frizzed-up by rainy season humidity, dehydration-reduced physique, and general aura of exhaustion.

  ‘Did it change your life?’

  This was the only man in the room, a white American – perhaps Canadian. I hadn’t taken in what he did for Plan, though he’d been there for years – perhaps decades – and was present for the debrief with The Writer (me) so I guessed it was something important. It seemed to matter to him, whether my life had been changed by visiting Uganda, and it was just a shame that I didn’t know the answer yet because I was still there and the only thing that had sunk in was the grime into my skin.

  But I know now, in case he’s still interested. And the answer is yes, yes it did. But probably not in the way that he had in mind.

  It wasn’t my first visit to Uganda. I’d actually been twelve years before, when my sister was living there, working for an environmental charity. So at first it seemed familiar. Arriving in the hot, crowded airport, the anxiety over what awaited me – or not – in the toilets (paper? soap? water? – one out of three ain’t bad), the anxiety over whether my luggage awaited me at all and whether it would have everything in it that I had packed at the other end, the anxiety over whether the customs people would be feeling friendly or not and what they would make of my visa (visiting writers are never exactly embraced by third world immigration officials), anxiety over which of the jostling cab drivers was likely to have a functional vehicle and a non-fatalistic attitude to driving: anxiety, basically. And then bursting out into the wave of heat and noise, and my heart lifts, here I am, I’m in Uganda, and I’m probably not going to die on the way to my hotel. Probably …

  Uganda is an unforgettably colourful place: bright red earth, lush dark green vegetation and a bold blue sky when it’s not raining. The international airport is in Entebbe, about a half-hour drive from the capital Kampala, although it’s hard to see where Entebbe ends and Kampala begins. The road between the two is lined all the way with shops, some no bigger than cupboards, painted the lurid colours of drinks company logos and emblazoned with slogans: ‘Liv
e on the Coke side of life!’ ‘Cadbury’s tastes as chocolatey as it looks!’ ‘Africa’s official drink of having a drink!’ Mobile phone shops are everywhere – twelve years ago nobody had a mobile phone, but on this visit my phone would work better even in the most isolated villages than it does in most of the southern counties of England.

  Also everywhere: people. On foot, on bikes and motorbikes, in cars, trucks and matatus, mini-van taxis covered in stickers swearing allegiance to Premiership football teams or Jesus (similar levels of fervour here) and stuffed insanely full of passengers. As a dignitary of sorts, however, I was being driven in a brand-new NGO pick-up truck, of which football and religious preferences were unknown. We spent most of our time in and around Kampala in gridlock. There had clearly been a population explosion since I was last there, but I felt encouraged: it’s a population who can afford cars; it’s a population who shop in all these eye-wateringly bright stores; it’s a population, if the adverts on the pick-up’s radio are anything to go by, who spend at least as much time trying to figure out the cheapest phone deal in bundles of texts and minutes as we do.

  At the airport and the hotel, the people I met were lovely, friendly, open, and, as often as not, laughing. This is the joy of Uganda. On my previous trip, my sister took me to the Kampalan nightclub Ange Noir with a group of her Ugandan friends. Everyone was so relaxed that people cheerfully danced facing their own reflections in the mirrored walls, unafraid of embarrassment. I taught them the Macarena to great enthusiasm, and if they still dance the Macarena in Kampala it’s thanks to me. (‘Thanks’ may be the wrong word to use here.) Uganda was the most welcoming place I had ever visited, and so far on this trip that welcome was as warm as ever.

  But then the work of the trip began. On my last visit, we went to the Impenetrable Forest to track gorillas. First stop of this visit was the Moonlight Stars project, to meet a group of prostitutes. The first sign that as a tourist in Africa, no matter how frequently you visit, you’re going to miss a lot of the ‘real’ Africa.

  At Moonlight Stars – named after the sex workers’ own term for themselves – we were led into a large tent pitched in front of a sexual health clinic, where a group of women in their early twenties were waiting for us. They sat on plastic garden chairs, their arms folded tightly in front of them. Their eyes were hard and they didn’t smile. Everything about their body language was angry and untrusting. We were not welcome there.

  This I had not expected. The Plan brochures I had been sent, the images on the website and the brochures in the London office had all featured pictures of smiling children, grateful for what Plan calls its child-centred community development. ‘Children are at the heart of everything we do,’ says the Plan UK site. ‘Children are our future. They carry our hopes and dreams for the world.’ I had mentally put myself into those photographs with the happy kids, bringing them glad tidings from the West. Instead I was in a tent full of angry – and adult – prostitutes. If this was the reality of Africa, it was also the reality of NGO work.

  Looking at my notes from that meeting, the first word I have written down is ‘rape’. These women were raped before they became sex workers and they have carried on being raped ever since. One by one they told stories of being raped as teenagers, getting pregnant, being thrown out of home, and finding themselves unable to support themselves or their children. Enter a helpful friend who introduces them to the sex industry. ‘Who looks after your children while you are out selling sex?’ I asked. Answer: nobody. They leave them locked in their homes.

  The streets of Kampala are not a safe place to sell sex. The women complained of rape from clients, rape from the police who periodically round them up to clean up the streets. Then there are the other risks, notably from HIV and AIDS. Condom use is not popular amongst johns in Uganda, and even if the prostitutes insist on it, it’s easy to get around the issue by insisting on sex in a dark corner and then lying about the condom. And anyway, as one pointed out: ‘You can get a man to use a condom but you are still a sex worker.’ These are not happy hookers. The only time anybody laughed was when my Plan chaperone mentioned the Dutch model of legalised and regulated brothels, which reduced the entire group to hysterics.

  The Moonlight Stars project aims to provide sex workers with healthcare – AIDS tests, condoms and so on – as well as training and financial support to help them set up their own businesses outside the sex industry, such as baking or hairdressing. But the funding has run out. So while Moonlight Stars aims to provide healthcare, financial support and training, what it actually provides is ‘outreach’. I asked the women what outreach is. They told me that it’s going out and telling other prostitutes about what Moonlight Stars aims to provide. Its not my last encounter with ‘outreach’ in Uganda. This is probably the right place to mention: outreach is cheap.

  Before we left, the women asked us to give them money for the project. We explained that it doesn’t work that way, that we have to report back to Plan in London who make the funding decisions. They were not impressed. In my notes I have written: ‘I felt as if they were thinking: who the fuck are you and what are you here for if you’re not going to give us any money?’

  That night, my Plan chaperone and I ate our dinner in the hotel dining room while at the other tables, much older men sat with beautiful young women who were absolutely, definitely just there for the conversation. On the stage at the front of the room, a girl sang the Tracy Chapman song ‘Fast Car’. ‘You’ve got a fast car, I’ve got a plan to get us out of here …’ A fast car isn’t going to help much in Kampala. It’s gridlocked.

  The next day we did the three hour drive to the Kamuli district, where one of the communities Plan is working with is based. It was the kind of place I’d driven through on my last visit to Uganda, on my way to somewhere more interesting. An area 4,383 kilometres square with a population of 712,000, it is so devoid of interest to outsiders that it wasn’t even in my guidebook to Uganda. Without ever giving it any proper consideration, I had somehow assumed that everywhere on earth is featured in a guidebook to somewhere or other, that there are no places that some intrepid tourists – the type who would deny actually being tourists – do not wish to visit. But of course the world is full of such places, places with no tourist ‘attractions’, with neither the landscape nor the culture to draw in holidaymakers, but just mile after mile of flat scrubby bush, built up with nondescript mud huts, divided by nondescript fields. This is where everybody else lives, the people who are not worth meeting in the places that are not worth photographing. This is the real lonely planet.

  Aside from the roadside toilets, of which the less said the better – just imagine – actually don’t – the drive up was as bland as a Ugandan biscuit, and left me feeling similarly as if I’d eaten a mouthful of dust. (Ugandan biscuits are a travesty of the word, and when I handed out some all-butter shortbread I’d brought from home, the locals could not believe how delicious it was.) At one point, though, we passed an enormous billboard with the photograph of an African man in late middle age. ‘You wouldn’t let this man …’ begins the slogan, but at first it was obscured by a tree. I tried to fill in the blank. Sell you a used car? Run your country? We passed the tree. ‘You wouldn’t let this man go with your teenage daughter, so why do you go with his? Cross-generational sex stops with you.’ As we drove past I amused myself briefly thinking about what that poor man might have done to deserve being the least welcome daughter-shagger in Uganda. What I didn’t realise was that this was the first and last attempt I would see to address older males’ sexual behaviour in a region where the sexual pathology was about to be painfully revealed to me.

  I didn’t notice our arrival in Kamuli. The word ‘community’ had led me to expect some kind of recognisable village, with edges, and a centre, a Ugandan version of an English village green. But to my eyes it was just a sprawl, with no way of distinguishing it from anywhere else we’d passed. How did anybody know where the community started and stopped? Did ever
ybody here know each other, or did they just get on with their lives more or less in isolation, like we do at home? The Plan workers I’d met in London had told me that the community got together with Plan and set their development priorities together, but I couldn’t see how or where that would happen. It certainly couldn’t be the way I’d pictured it: everyone turning up one morning to talk things over under a tree. There are thousands of people in this community: it would have to be a pretty big tree.

  Our first stop in Kamuli was the Plan regional office, where we met the local team, all Ugandans, who greeted me with warmth, enthusiasm, and a total lack of knowledge of who I was and what I was doing there. Word had reached them that a visitor was coming from Plan UK to be shown around the Kamuli project, but not who or why. There were too many levels of communication between Plan in the UK and Plan here, and everything had got distorted along the way. I hoped that this didn’t happen when they had something to discuss which actually mattered.

  Over the coming days, I would learn that although the Plan Kamuli team live locally, most of them have left spouses and children behind to be there, and may see their family only every few weeks or even less often. They work long, demanding hours, with time off barely delineated as local people will come to them with their needs day and night, seven days a week. But the head of the team welcomed us into his office with huge smiles, and waved the latest addition to his workload: a letter from a local school of 1,250 children, all of whose latrines have collapsed under recent heavy rains. Can Plan help?

  Apparently this wasn’t a decision which could be made by Plan Kamuli, and would have to be referred upward. I looked at the letter. ‘All the latrines’ meant, in fact, five latrines. The headmaster was hoping for a grant to build eight new ones – one for every 157 children, rather than one for every 250.

  From here I was taken to visit one of the other local primary schools – this one with functioning latrines at least – to witness some sex education training that was going on there.