Instead, what I find there is how to be me.
I have been in Mexico about nine months when my boyfriend of several years calls from his home in California to say that he cannot see our future. It is a short phone call, and it ends it all.
We had started the year in Mexico together—in a sense. When I said that I wanted to move to San Miguel, he had found an opportunity in a different city nine hours away by bus. But as Mexico grew on me, it withered for him, and he eventually retreated back to California.
The relationship had its fatal flaws, of course, but my twenty-three-year-old self sees none of those, and that night I cling to the years of broken plans we had made.
I am inconsolable, and the next morning I drag myself to see the woman who has been teaching me about plants and homeopathy and how bodies can heal. I came to her when I first arrived in Mexico, ill and bedraggled from working too hard in college and graduate school. I had not been healthy for a long time, and she helped me regain my footing over the course of the year. With this setback, I need her more than ever.
She writes me a list of what I need to do. Eat almonds. Drink smoothies. Sleep. Be kind to yourself.
In those rare moments when I am able to pick myself up off the cool Mexican tiles, I find myself scanning flights to far-off lands. Where do I want to go? I think. And that is the thought that makes me happy.
Soon I am on a long plane ride to South Africa with Lara, a dear friend. It was a sudden, perhaps absurd, decision, one that lacked any planning at all save a phone call to guarantee we actually booked ourselves on the same flight. Since leaving Stanford the year before, we had thrown around the idea of traveling to Africa together several times but never formalized it so much as to actually open a guidebook or look at a calendar. She has just ended a relationship of her own, though, and convinces me the timing is perfect. We buy tickets and leave a few days later. “It’s just what you need,” she says.
And she is right.
We spend a month driving along the garden route, a picturesque coastline that reminds me of both the Caribbean and Nantucket—places I have only heard described and have never actually set foot on—and in that month we live a life of pure excess. Having scones with clotted cream at every single meal and staying up until all hours of the night, developing theories about life and how love can thrive in our lives.
Mostly, though, the energy Lara brings with her, and the energy of the country we are in, encourage newness. And so I do things that I believed I could never do. I skydive one day, the instructor marveling that he has never jumped with anyone who does not scream.
We call the national parks, ask for a safari recommendation, and end up at a lovely but down-at-the-heel establishment, where we see more animals before breakfast than we have in our entire lives. And then we ask for more.
On our homegrown safari drives, the eleven-year-old son of the proprietor proves the main font of information for our endless questions about the workings of the species we see: “Do all zebras have stripes?” “Is the rhino really the fastest?” “Who would win in a fight between a rhino and a lion?” “Who’d win between a tiger and a leopard?” “What about if there was an elephant there too?”
We are children in a candy store of wonder at Africa. This boy has no idea where he has the luck to live, we think. The trip is a pilgrimage and will remain one of the best trips of my life—because it almost didn’t happen, because of all that would later come to pass in Africa, and because of Lara.
We had met the first day of our freshman year at Stanford University, where we lived across the hall from each other, and she immediately intimidated me with her designer clothes from Boston, a worldly story of being born in Egypt and growing up in Saudi Arabia, and a brand of confidence I had rarely seen. She didn’t like me either in the beginning, and her singular memory of me in those first few months was of me running off to teach Sunday school and attend Christian retreats. Could she really ever be close to someone who was so very Christian? she thought.
But we did become friends, and our group of girls spent the college years building a strong and lasting bond. Lara and I studied together in Italy for six months, and over the years we shared in most of the things that make you grow up when you are twenty and learning it all. But even so, when the rest of our friends heard we were traveling together to South Africa, they had cautioned her, “Are you sure you can handle Claire alone right now?”
My sadness was a bit glaring, I suppose.
On our last day on the Western Cape, we do one of the things that a guidebook we bought in South Africa recommended. Joining many others, we take a crowded ferry to Robben Island, where one of the most symbolic prison complexes under apartheid opened its doors as a museum in 1995. Amazingly, the tours at Robben Island are given by the political prisoners who spent years of their lives confined in these suffocating rooms.
We see the toilets, the mess hall, the dog cages, and the garden, where men dug things for no reason at all eight hours a day and where Nelson Mandela hid his famous manuscript in the dirt. Throughout the afternoon everyone keeps pushing the question of our guide’s own story—phrasing new questions that will encourage him to reveal anything at all. How was it a decade ago in this room when you were here? What was the food like, in your opinion? What was your experience?
And finally, toward the end of the afternoon, he leads us into a long dormitory room where some forty men slept on bunk beds. The beds are pushed against the back of the room now, and while a few tourists sit on the worn mattresses, the rest of us gather on the benches that have been nailed into the walls. He looks at us, smiling, and begins to tell us his story.
For the first time that day, the acoustics are good.
He was fifteen, or fourteen, or some age at which men should be worried about the aftershave they should buy or the girl they want to impress. Instead, he was living in the midst of political misery and the emerging dissidence that sought a way out. This landed him in jail, imprisoned for the rest of his foreseeable days. He was sixteen then and saw no way out. Although the details of his story are hazy, the outline is clear: dissidence for good cause, questionable means, unjust incarceration.
When he finishes his story, there is shuffling and a few coughs, and I look around the room at the tourists alongside me, leaning against the concrete walls. A teenage boy peers over the ledge to see the garden beyond.
Finally, an African American woman from the United States asks him, “How do you”—and by you she reiterates you South Africans—“forgive? How can you possibly forgive what happened here?”
He looks at her thoughtfully and nods his head. He hears that question often, this suggests. It is a question many are confused by, but there is no bewilderment in his voice. For him it is simple.
He says, “For us to pursue revenge would destroy us.”
On the ferry back to Cape Town that day, everyone is jostling for pictures and glimpses of Robben Island from afar. I feel a bit happy to escape, and the relief translates into last shots of the island’s penguins, mixed with silence. Lara and I watch a man sitting toward the back of the boat, his demeanor the only thing that appears to distinguish him from the tourists around him.
Looking at him—and determining he must be a guide—Lara says, “He’s not turning back.” I think about what she has said and wonder why the man doesn’t look at the island as he floats away. Because he will see it in the morning? Because he will see it every day? Because it’s in his dreams?
That night, our last in Africa, the man clouds our minds, and we talk about the ways that individuals can overcome such atrocities. The sheer enormity of the healing that has taken place is incredible, and I marvel that two decades ago the man in that cell could never have dreamed he would one day be called on to lead tourists from all corners of the globe through what was once his brutal reality.
I think about this, about forgiveness, about God, and about how we learn to accept the new changes in our lives.
&n
bsp; And I see new dreams.
Sammy
Chapter 3
My mother has still not returned, and soon our neighbors start making food for us. It feels good to see that people are there who care.
My brother and I know we have to learn how to live alone, even though I am barely ten years old, and more importantly, we know we need money to do so. First, we start selling some stuff in the house to make a few shillings. Then I come up with the idea to start a water project. I take water from the neighbors’ water tap and put it in plastic bags, which I seal shut with fire. I then sell the packages of water at the school for a shilling. It is a good day when I sell five or sometimes ten, and we can buy a doughnut for my little sister, and Muriithi and I can share another one. There are times, though, we can only buy the one doughnut for Bethi, who is now five. On the worst days there is nothing even for her.
Then one day we get kicked out of our house, and all our belongings disappear.
Luckily, we run into one of my mother’s new friends, one of the well-dressed ones, Mary. When she sees us, she gives us each fifty shillings and then tells us not to tell our mother. But we say we don’t know where our mother is anyway, and we ask if she does. We tell her about our mother’s new job in Nairobi and how she said she would come home to us on Wednesdays. Mary looks worried. She takes us to her home and calls our extended family.
When Mary tells them what we have told her, they say she should bring us to a family gathering in Nanyuki, the city in Kenya where my father’s older brother lives, where the whole family is getting together for an event. When we arrive, Mary begins talking to the adults, telling them what has happened and asking someone to take us. But no one wants to. There are three of us, after all, and we are not in great shape. My sister is malnourished and doesn’t walk well, and my brother has other problems. Two days later, though, my aunt Lydia Njeri agrees to take us in. She sends my sister to live with another aunt in Nairobi, and she takes my brother and me with her to Nyeri, a place far away where the people speak only Kikuyu.
Even though I was born of the Kikuyu tribe, I haven’t had much practice in the language, and that is just one of the things about this place that surprises me. We immediately go from the white Nakuru dirt to the red dirt of Nyeri, and I smile in wonder at the green, green, green. There are trees and farms everywhere.
The house we are taken to is small and wooden and has two bedrooms and a living room. There is a kitchen outside and a smelly pit toilet where four cows walk in and out. The yard in front has banana trees, flowers, and a grassy area with a sugarcane plantation.
Many people are living there already—my aunt and her husband, my aunt’s daughter, two other cousins, and four other kids. And there is even a new little boy, Xavier, for me to be a big brother to. Most interesting of all, the house is near a beautiful place I have never heard of—a big mansion of a house called Imani Children’s Home. Sometimes as I walk along the road to my new school, I look at that place and wonder what happens inside.
Life at my aunt’s home is hard. There are many people living in the small space and too many mouths to feed. To help, my aunt decides to ask Imani Children’s Home if we can come and eat lunch there during school days. The orphanage agrees, but even after a few months of that I can see my aunt is still having money troubles. She begins to ask us if the kind ladies at Imani have ever invited us to stay the night. It would be good for us, she says, to sleep on beds and have food every day, and I begin to think Imani must be a kind of paradise. A heaven, I think, where kids eat all the time and have free, clean clothes and no one ever gets a beating.
And then it happens.
One day at Imani, while I’m eating lunch as usual, the secretary calls me outside, where I find my brother waiting as well. I worry we have done something wrong, and I whisper to him, “Did you do something bad? Are you in trouble? Am I in trouble?”
The secretary, wearing a red dress and elegant high heels, says kindly, “How are we doing?” She asks me about my clothes.
“This is the only shirt I have for school,” I say.
And then she asks us, “How would you like to live in a big house?”
“What big house—your house?” I ask, confused, because I have seen her family’s house from the road when I walk to school.
“No, Sammy, you are not going to live in my house. Tomorrow you and Muriithi are going to come to Imani.” I think this is a funny joke and start giggling. But she is serious. “Tomorrow you will have to bring all your clothes and everything you have with you when you come to school. After school, you will come here to Imani to live.”
As soon as she says those words, I cannot express my happiness. It feels like the biggest wall in the world has just been taken down. It is like a door that has finally been opened with just one tiny push. And I think for a small moment that maybe if I am this happy, it will help me forgive my mother for what she has done.
I go back inside to eat my food, and I have a huge grin on my face.
People ask, “What happened? Why are you so happy?” And I tell them I have been invited to join Imani Children’s Home. Some of the students are not pleased because they have not received their own invitations, but in that moment I don’t think about that, because I am happy beyond control.
My brother is excited too, but he is also a little worried. At nearly fourteen, a couple years older than me, he still has health problems, and he worries what will happen when he lives in the big mansion house with all the other kids and what they’ll say about him.
As I walk home, I am jumping with excitement, taking rocks and throwing them on the ground, watching for the little bumps as I might when I skip pebbles on water.
When I reach my aunt’s, she has just gotten off work, and my uncle is also there. Joy fills my heart when I realize I will not have to face my uncle and his beatings anymore. In that moment, I know that I will never again fear going home at night. (Even today I remember that feeling.) As I look at my aunt, though, my heart sinks down inside me. It is sad to imagine having to leave the woman who has taken care of us. Even though she had many other kids in the house, she took in two more. All I want to do is give her a big hug and tell her, “Thank you.”
That day my uncle and I walk in the field, and he calls me to his side. He tells me, “Sammy, I believe in you. I know I might have acted in strange ways, beating you and getting angry, but I do believe in you. When you go to Imani, I want you to be the best that you can be. One day I want to see you walking in step with the great Reverend Mathu, the founder of the orphanage.” He smiles. “No matter what, I want him to like you, and I want you to be a good kid. I know you will be.”
He is my uncle, so I take his advice and keep it in my heart.
Later that night I ask my aunt, “How are we going to bring our clothes tomorrow to Imani?” So she gives us two store plastic bags, even though plastic bags are very valuable. One is for Muriithi and one is for me. I take my one pair of shorts and the other two shirts I have and put them in the bag. I then take my other little boyish things—the stick and grass toys I made in the field—and put them inside as well. That small bag is not very full.
This is when I feel it in my heart that I am not going to come back.
When I go to bed that night on the couch, I know that a chapter of my life is closing and another one is about to start.
The next morning is a different kind of morning. I can feel it. It is a Wednesday, and all good things that have happened to me in life have happened on a Wednesday.
The birds wake me, chirping, and the sound feels so sweet. The sun outside is just showing its light and shining golden on the fields, and I think that everything is more beautiful than it has been in a very long time. When I go outside to wash my face, I don’t use the water from the well like I normally do, but I use the morning dew I find on the ground. I suppose I know this day is different from any other.
I go back into the house and pick up my school shirt and my schoo
l shorts and put them on. Then I realize that my brother has already gone to school and I am the only one still in the house. I drink my Kenyan tea and put the Blue Band margarine on my bread. It tastes delicious, and I eat it slowly.
As I walk to school, I think about the fact that it is the last day I will be walking this road, so I look at all the details as I go along. I walk carefully, and only after I finally arrive do I realize how late I am.
I am very late when I finally arrive at school, and the headmaster gives me two beatings with a cane and tells me to clean around the school.
But I am still happy.
When I look back now, I know that day was really not all that special. Instead, it was just a day like any other day. But that was not how it felt. Sometimes people wait for the best things in their lives, and they are surprised when they happen on a normal day. That normal day was one of the best days of my life.
At lunchtime, I go to Imani to eat as I normally do. As I eat the delicious ugali we always have on Wednesday—a thick, hard gruel of maize meal, milk, and water that you eat with a spoon—the secretary comes in and asks if I am ready.
I remember something I read in a book once and decide to use it now. I look up with a smile and say, “I am as ready as I will ever be!” After I say it and she looks at me funny, I realize it doesn’t sound good in Swahili, and I remind myself not to say it again unless I am speaking English.
She tells me that as soon as school is finished, I am to come straight to Imani. And so when school gets out, I walk quickly to the orphanage gates and am directed to the matron’s office. When I enter, she greets me cheerily.
“How are you doing?” she booms with her loud, happy voice.
Hope Runs Page 3
