Love in the Driest Season

by Neely Tucker

  Thirteen infants were dead in six months, the worst mortality rate in Chinyaradzo’s history. There was little Mesikano could do but get used to it. There was no money to train her young staff. Many of them were teenagers or twenty-something girls who had been raised at the home and had nowhere else to go. They were officially known as trainees in a one-year course called “Elementary Hygiene and Child Care.” In reality, they worked for room and board and the equivalent of five American dollars per month. There was no money for medicine, except what donors happened to provide. As the AIDS crisis wore on and the death toll of young parents mounted, the numbers of abandoned children soared. Chinyaradzo was becoming something it was never intended to be—a dumping ground for unwanted children.

  “When I started in the nineteen-seventies, we just didn’t have abandoned children,” Mesikano said. “Now, ninety percent of the children we have are abandoned, no mother, no father. It seems impossible to me but it is true. Others have one relative, but who cannot care for them. We were set up to be a place for infants, a stopgap. Then the maximum age was raised to five. Then to twelve. Now, to be honest, we raise a lot of children. There’s no place else for them to go.”

  Chinyaradzo’s children were wards of the state, last in line for treatment, care, and medications in the nation’s slowly deteriorating health care system. With no money for vitamins, tests for HIV were out of the question, and for more than financial reasons. There was no way to treat it. The fear attached to the disease was almost literally unspeakable. The scale of death was something lifted from the realm of Poe; the denial approached the world of Kafka, and still there were no guidelines for health professionals or caregivers to be tested for their own HIV status. Mesikano not only had no idea which of her infants was HIV-positive, she had no way of knowing if any of her young workers had the disease either, and thus was helpless to monitor the spread of the disease through the ward. The bitter truth came at the end of such calculations—even if Mesikano could have had every child tested for HIV, she knew in her heart that she would choose not to do so. The tests used in Zimbabwe, the ELISA and Western Blot, were outdated, and often gave false results, either positive or negative. Mesikano knew that for a child to test positive was to condemn the toddler to a quick death—the stigma was so deep, and the ignorance of how to handle AIDS patients so profound, that she was certain that any child who tested HIV-positive would be left to die.

  The deadly cycle of ignorance, fear, and disease did not take long to run its course. Rejoice Neshuro, her name so pretty but her body so contorted, died in the hospital of dehydration. Then Nyasha Dziva died of pneumonia and dehydration. Workers were helpless to stop Abigail Mazviona’s diarrhea. A few days later, she began vomiting. They didn’t know how to stop that either. She spit up until she couldn’t anymore, and then she died.

  Sixteen children were dead in seven months.

  The calendar turned to midwinter in Zimbabwe, when the temperatures drop into the low forties at night. In Harare, at more than four thousand feet above sea level, the chill can go to the bone. Chinyaradzo had no central heating, like most places in Harare. Its concrete-block walls and tiled floors held little warmth after sundown. The infants would be bundled into layers of heavy knit clothes and tucked under blankets, but the chill worked its way into their lungs.

  In crib number two, lost in a green knit outfit and bonnet, the girl-child did not thrive. She began to turn away from her milk. One day, she threw up. Then again. Then over and over, crying and wailing as she spit up whatever was in her stomach. No remedy could stop it. Her bowels turned to diarrhea. The hospital van came for her, and she was rushed to the hospital’s intensive care unit. She was badly dehydrated and had lost nearly a pound since being brought to the orphanage. She spent seven days in the ICU.

  Then she was returned to Chinyaradzo.

  She took a little milk. She did not cry so much. But neither did she smile or giggle. She scarcely responded when touched. Workers noticed this and tried to coax a grin from her, but they had little time for just one child, given the poor health of so many.

  Then one morning the child stopped eating altogether. Her temperature soared to 104 degrees. She labored to breathe. She would open her mouth to cry out but no sound would emerge. She was rushed back to the hospital and again placed in the intensive care unit. Again she stayed for seven days.

  The doctor wrote one line across the top of her dismissal papers: “Feed this child!” Her weight had dropped to four pounds, twelve ounces. Her growth chart, plotted on a grid, was supposed to gradually head up, like an incline. Instead, it plunged downward like a ski ramp.

  Upon her return to Chinyaradzo, her lungs expanded and then expanded again, trying to draw in more oxygen. They became infected with a virus that would lay undetected until it developed into full-blown pneumonia. Her bronchial tubes became infected and inflamed. Her heart, weakened by severe malnutrition that was turning to marasmus, beat ever faster.

  Marasmus describes a condition in which the body, starved of food, begins to take molecules of protein from muscle tissue and use it to fuel other bodily functions, burning a sort of emergency gas tank. The condition had stripped her emaciated frame to four pounds, three ounces.

  In short, her body was now eating the only thing it could: itself.

  4

  FITTING IN

  BEFORE I LEFT the United States in 1993, I had known a couple of friends of friends who had died of AIDS. In Zimbabwe, it seemed everybody I met had lost at least one, if not several, family members to the disease. By 1997, Timothy Stamps, the nation’s health minister, said five hundred Zimbabweans were dying of AIDS each week in a nation of just eleven million. He likened it to “the crash of a jumbo jet each week, every week.” There were more than sixty thousand children who had lost both parents, and more than half a million who had lost at least one.

  Vita and I had heard these stories, initially thinking they were gross exaggerations. The country seemed too peaceful, too complacent for such waves of death. Zimbabwe was poor and had its problems, but on balance it was one of the most developed, least troubled nations in sub-Saharan Africa. This earned it the informal sobriquet “the Switzerland of Africa,” which European diplomats counted as a compliment. Their counterparts from West Africa said it with a sigh; many of them privately considered Zimbabweans to be some of the most boring black people on earth.

  But that was of little consequence. Zimbabweans had walked a hard road from oppression to independence, and in just two decades they had succeeded in carving out a solid future for themselves. Harare looked just like what it was—a small town built by Rhodesian colonialists, a kind of ersatz British transplant—but it had a sleepy charm. A few modern office buildings and hotels formed a modest skyline. Outside of that ten- or twelve-block area, few buildings were more than three stories. The light industries were all on the south end of town, along with the poorest townships, which were now politely referred to as “high-density suburbs,” although they were all within the city limits. The “low-density suburbs” were to the east or north of the city center. Most of the houses were one-story, ranch-style places. They had been built in the 1940s to 1960s—the older ones tended to have tin roofs—and realtors cheerfully advertised they had been built with asbestos.

  There was an enclosed mall downtown, next to the Meikles, Harare’s best hotel. Across town, low-slung strip shopping malls featured ice cream shops, pizza delivery outlets, and chain grocery stores, including a French franchise called Bon Marché, where you could pay with a swipe of your credit card. There was the corner post office, a sprinkling of good restaurants, churches, hospitals, golf courses, tennis courts, and a health club or two. Two shopping centers featured terrific movie theaters, as nice as or nicer than most in the United States.

  The most expensive neighborhoods, the ones with houses big enough to include personal living space for us as well as my office, unfurled in towering groves of eucalyptus and pine and jacarandas. The pl
ots were half an acre or larger. And, we discovered, every single one had a set of small, concrete-block buildings at the back of the property where the domestic staff lived, usually set behind a boundary wall from the main house. Servants were paid a pittance, were expected to work long hours, and were not to come onto the main property after working hours. We toured twenty or twenty-five houses, looking for one that didn’t have such an arrangement, for we neither needed nor wanted live-in help. We looked at smaller houses in different neighborhoods. They all had some sort of domestic arrangements too.

  We finally gave up, since the only solution seemed to be taking a house and then firing the staff, which hardly seemed a blow for social progress. We settled into a house that was someone’s idea of a Spanish-style hacienda. It had vaulted ceilings, arched doorways, stone floors, and big glass doors that swung open onto a patio. I set up my office in a large room off this end of the house, not thinking that the owners might be concealing a tin roof behind the red tile façade. They were. In a rainstorm, the din was so loud that I had to go to the back of the house, under more solid construction, to conduct interviews on the bedroom phone, balancing a laptop computer on my knees to take notes. There was also a small swimming pool, complete with a fountain and a palm tree by the side. It rented for the equivalent of $1,400 per month, which included the residence and salaries of the husband-and-wife team, Mavis and Judah Ganuka, who tended the place. We doubled their salaries, which delighted them, but it still only amounted to about $100 each per month. Judah celebrated each month by drinking up his extra pay as soon as he got it; Mavis saved hers to build a small house on her family’s land in the rural areas.

  We made a flurry of new friends; Charity, who worked in the local film industry; Angus and Chris, my colleagues at the Associated Press and Reuters, respectively; Bill, who was a senior officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and his wife, Dumisille; Patrick and Yvonne, an African American architect and his wife who had come to work for a while in Harare; Adam and Sekai, an Australian television journalist and his wife, a Zimbabwean writer; and Heather and Steve, another interracial couple. She was a Zambian clothes designer, he a Canadian airplane mechanic.

  My work assignment also changed. My paper’s parent company, Knight Ridder, took over several foreign bureaus from its member papers. The Africa bureau was one of them, leaving me with a new set of bosses in Washington, not Detroit.

  Harried by these personal and professional changes, the usual travel (I averaged about two hundred nights a year on the road), and lulled by Harare’s drowsy demeanor, it was nearly a year before it became apparent to us that the raw numbers of AIDS deaths were fact, not hyperbole. We thought we might volunteer to help out in one of the orphanages, maybe even take some children into our home on occasion. We had mulled over the idea of adopting in the past, and considered that possibility here. We thought such an overture would be welcomed, considering the vast numbers of orphans. We were quickly and politely put in our place by Tony Mtero, the director of the Harare office of the national Department of Social Welfare.

  Tony was a slender, soft-spoken man who had spent a decade studying in the United States. He was also the fiancé of one of Vita’s friends in town, Gloria, a fellow African American expatriate. We met them for dinner one night in one of Harare’s nicer restaurants. When the drinks and appetizers came, and Vita said that we wanted to volunteer in an orphanage, perhaps even adopt, Tony nodded and stroked his mustache, as if considering a complex problem of algebra.

  “Well, you can’t adopt,” he said, between nibbles on the food spread before us. “The law does not allow adoptions by foreign nationals.”

  “Oh,” Vita said. Her voice fell half an octave as she said it, a change in timbre that I knew mirrored a drop in her hopes.

  “Well,” Tony said, “there’s one way, but that requires the national minister of social welfare to personally approve an exemption, and let me tell you, that doesn’t happen. Maybe once, twice a year.’’

  “Oh,” I said this time, looking at Vita across the table and raising my eyebrows half an inch, a gesture that said, This isn’t going the way we thought.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Tony said, putting a hand on Vita’s arm. “People would be suspicious, though they will not tell you that. They will wonder why Americans would want a Zimbabwean child in their home.” He turned to me, smiling to ease what he considered to be a blow. “And they’re going to particularly wonder why you, Neely, would be interested in a black child. A boy or girl, it makes no difference. It’s seen as something very odd here. I know that in the United States there is that controversy about whites raising blacks. But this is different. White men who want to be around black children . . . well, the perception is there is something unnatural there. Some sort of sexual abuse, likely. Perhaps more importantly, even before adoption by a white person would be considered, there is the matter of ancestral ties. There are totems, the symbols of something you might call family clans. A child without a totem—well, such a child would be considered to be lost. He or she would have no way of communicating with their ancestors. You are not African”—now he turned back to Vita—“nor are you, in this context, and therefore you cannot know how an African child should relate to these ancestral spirits. It is one of the most elemental staples of life.”

  He laughed, perhaps uncomfortable to be discussing such issues. Gloria said, “But there’s fostering. There’s volunteering.”

  “Oh, yes,” Tony said, his tone lifting. “I do not mean to paint such a gloomy picture. I believe you might become foster parents to a child while you are here. In particular, we have a program for volunteers to take children out of the orphanage for the weekend to let them spend some time with a family. That would be a huge treat for them.”

  We ordered dinner then, laughing about Tony’s time in the United States—he had been in Minnesota and had not known the world could be so cold—but came back to the topic at the end of the evening.

  “We’ll be delighted to foster, to bring some kids home for the weekend, at least for the weekends I’m in town,” I said. “The house we’re renting has a big yard and pool. The older kids will love it. But just out of curiosity, with the AIDS situation being what it is, why is the law on foreign adoptions so restrictive? I mean, from everything I read, there are more orphans than anybody knows what to do with.”

  Tony gave a gesture that was half nod and half shrug.

  “It’s a matter of debate within the field. But the general policy is to actively discourage adoption by foreigners. The matrons at the orphanages will be delighted for you to take children home, because they have too many kids and too little money to care for them. Social workers, though, are the ones who make the decisions about a child’s permanent status. They have caseloads in the hundreds. They don’t even have cars to make their rounds. They have to be in court often. And there is what I told you before—it is against the social norm. Even among Zimbabweans, adopting a child not related to you is very uncommon. We see only a few such cases a year. The social workers know all this, and they know that, ultimately, their decision will have to go all the way to the national minister of social welfare.” He rapped his knuckles on the table to emphasize the last few words. “That is the presidential cabinet. It is the same as if you had to get a piece of paper into Bill Clinton’s White House. No social worker wants to approve a case only to have it rejected from higher. It will look like they made a mistake.”

  “You mean it will look like they took a bribe,” Vita said.

  Tony glanced at her, then Gloria, and smiled.

  “Exactly so.”

  After dinner, we went into the restaurant parking lot, still chatting, and Tony shook my hand. “Don’t be misled—we welcome your offer of help. I will call the matrons of the orphanages to let them know you will be coming, so they will not be startled.”

  We went the next morning.

  The first stop was Harare Children’s Home. Establish
ed by the Methodist Church in 1923 as the Rhodesian Children’s Home, it catered to white children until independence. Now almost all black, the tidy campus was run on a series of bequests and trusts. The superintendent gave us a glossy brochure and a tour. We made a modest donation, and she walked us through the Gwen Ward Memorial Hall, the Underwood House, and so on. We entered one room where children were looking through glossy Western magazines, cutting out pictures, and pasting them onto brightly colored pieces of construction paper. One little girl with braids said I could help her. She was pleased to inform me that she was five years old. Her name was Elizabeth, but she said I could call her Beth if I wished. I started cutting out pictures and told her that my mother’s name was Elizabeth too.

  “Your mother has my name?” she asked with a smile. “So can I go home with you?”

  “Well . . .” I was stuck. It suddenly dawned on me that I was not here as a reporter, dutifully taking notes and moving on. I was here as someone who might actually do just what she said.

  “I just got here, Beth,” I said, trying to get myself out of this. “We’re visiting today. That lady over there, that’s my wife, and we’re just sort of looking around and cutting out pictures and things.”

  “So you’re going to leave me here?” she said. I stammered out some sort of reply, tried to smile, and said I had to go look at some other parts of the home.

  The older children showed Vita and me to their quarters, where they slept two or three to a room. After two hours, several children were asking us to take them to our house. Elizabeth stuck close to my right leg, smiling impishly, making sure I had not forgotten who was first in line. The superintendent called us into her office and closed the door.