by Neely Tucker
Downtown Norton was a dusty street with a few scattered concrete-block shops and a farm supply outlet, with trucks parked out front and men lounging in the shade. It might have been a small Delta town from my Mississippi past. Then the road turned to gravel and twisted along past a row of small houses. There was a turn to the left, another to the right, and then I rolled through a row of shade trees and parked in front of a small rectangular building. Several dogs rousted themselves from the dust and sniffed my feet, tails swishing cautiously. This was the Ngomi Community Hall, with bench seats and a small stage at the front. Behind it was a tin-roofed addition, a single room with a concrete floor that served as the local branch of the social welfare office. There were five chairs, two desks, four filing cabinets, one typewriter, one telephone, and one employee. E. W. Matinyadze rose and shook my hand with a smile. He was a serious man, and he quickly told me what had happened.
Norton had several large trash bins set on the edge of town. Three days earlier, someone tossed in their garbage and heard crying. They peered over the edge of the bin and there, halfway buried in the trash, was a squirming newborn child. His umbilical cord was still attached and he was crying at the top of his lungs.
“The doctor said he’d been there five to seven hours, judging by the exposure problems he had, the big number of ant bites,” said Matinyadze. “But good for him to be wriggling around! To be making that noise at that time! What a lucky chap. If he’d been sleeping and someone had tossed a bag on top of him, I doubt we’d have heard from him.”
They had taken the boy to a hospital. Social workers had named him Ferai, a popular name that translates as “happiness.” I stopped by the hospital to see him, explaining to the curious nurse that Matinyadze had said it was okay. She brought a white bundle of cloth, and deep inside was a sleeping little boy, his fingers as tiny as anything I’d ever seen, his eyelids so thin you could see the veins in them. I held him for a few minutes, thanked the nurse, and drove home.
“What do you think about a little boy?” I said to Vita, telling her about Ferai. We were exhausted with Chipo, but his circumstances were so jarring that it seemed cruel to say no. Vita took a deep breath, and then she laughed. “You know I would love to have a little boy,” she said.
We waited for Ferai to be transferred to Chinyaradzo. We would do his paperwork by the book, we resolved, instead of Chipo’s dramatic circumstances, so that no one could later accuse us of Western arrogance. When he didn’t appear after a couple of days, I drove to the orphanage and asked Stella when he was coming. She made a couple of phone calls.
“Oh,” she said. “Ferai, he died.”
I looked at her.
“Yes, in the hospital there. It is very sad.”
I did not know what to say. I left her office and got in the truck. I felt nauseous, fingers tapping on the steering wheel. He had been in my hands. Should I have taken him to the Trauma Center, as Vita had done with Chipo? Should I have gone back to see him each day? Well, of course, I could see that now. But they hadn’t said he was sick. Just a bit of exposure, they said, and now he was gone, dead and buried.
“But I had him,” I kept saying out loud.
I scarcely knew how to tell Vita. I pulled into the driveway and switched off the ignition. I sat in the quiet for several minutes.
I finally went inside. Vita was cooking dinner.
“Hey,” she called out, with a half look over her shoulder.
I leaned against the refrigerator. “Ferai didn’t make it,” I said. “He died at the hospital. Never got to Chinyaradzo. Stella told me just now.”
Vita stopped, perfectly still. She was looking straight ahead. Sliced onions popped and hissed in the skillet. The clock on the wall ticked a long time. Then she looked back at the stove and stirred the onions. Her jaw was set into a grimace. I left.
We never talked about it again. It was too depressing, too much of a reminder of Chipo’s delicate hold on life.
But over the next several days, my sense of sadness and guilt intensified. If I had acted promptly, the boy would have lived. There was no getting around it, and the thought came to me unbidden, in the shower or in the middle of an interview or the first thing when I woke up in the morning. I could shake neither the sense of failure nor the sorrow that fluttered along behind it, like a whisper in the breeze.
We kept working at the orphanage, though, and soon we were drawn to a bright, happy little girl named Erica. She was nine months old. Her head was shaved so close she was almost bald. She had a lopsided grin, which she flashed all the time. She was light-skinned, likely biracial, and she too was completely abandoned. We applied for permission to bring her home. Stella looked up her paperwork, and weekend visits were approved.
Erica came home on a pleasant weekend in late September. Vita took her to the bathroom, undressing her as she had Chipo that first day. Erica was much healthier, but still underweight. Vita wrapped her in some new clothes and took her into the kitchen, warming up some formula. Her health problems were quickly apparent. She was wracked with some sort of intestinal disorder that turned her waste into foul-smelling diarrhea. We treated this and tried to fatten her up with steady meals and bottle after bottle of formula, something she couldn’t get at the orphanage. Vita rocked her back and forth on the couch, Erica tucking her head against Vita’s neck, and they would both drift into a nap. In the afternoons, we put the two girls on a play mat together. They were small enough to sleep in the same crib. There wasn’t much rest on those nights, as one of them was awake, or the other, or both, or all of us, but Erica came home with us for another weekend, and then another, and then they started fussing over the same bottle.
“They’re already acting like sisters,” Vita laughed.
Then the orphanage took Erica back.
There was a German couple that was adopting Erica, Stella explained over the phone, and they would be coming into Harare from the provinces the next day. We needed to bring her back right away. We were speechless. No one had ever mentioned this couple—and they were adopting her after we were told that was virtually impossible? All this talk about cultural ties and taboos, yet this couple we’d never seen at the orphanage was blowing through to pick up their child.
We let the girls sleep through their nap. When they awoke, we numbly dressed Erica and took her back to Chinyaradzo. We were glad for her to have a home, but we had thought she might have found one with us. Somewhere between sad and furious, both Vita and I smelled a rat.
I called the man when he came to town, and asked how he had done it. He said it was all pretty simple. He was working for a German nongovernmental organization in a province outside Harare. He said they went into the local Social Welfare office, filled out the adoption forms, were directed to Chinyaradzo, and picked out Erica. Then they returned to the province and completed the paperwork. It took about seven months, maybe eight, he said. He was very nice, he was entirely sincere, and said he would love to meet us but they were leaving the country the very next day.
I hung up, flabbergasted. We had been told time and again about the depth of bonding that was needed before adoption, that you had to foster first—probably for at least two years, a social worker had recently informed us—before you could dream of adoption. Chipo had been with us four months now, and the only custody we had was a series of those two-week emergency placement orders. Foster custody? Months away, if we were even approved. Adoption? Beyond the horizon. Yet this couple had wrapped up the process and would be out of the country before Monday. Worse, it appeared Stella had known this but concealed it. She watched us take Erica home time after time and develop a bond with her, and she didn’t say a word.
“What happens if there’s something like that about Chipo?” Vita said.
It was a problem that we could not solve and a fear that we could not fight. The people who would help us couldn’t; the people who could help us would not return our phone calls. The only thing to do was sit tight, make no mistakes, and push
forward, ever so slowly, on the fostering paperwork.
THE EXHAUSTION AND depression I had felt coming on during the Kinshasa rebellion and the Nairobi embassy bombings were deepening now into something I could not articulate. Chipo was sleeping better. Her weight had tripled. Vita was buoyed by her turnaround, by being with her all day, every day. But I was traveling constantly, and my worries for Chipo began to eat at me. I woke up in hotel room after hotel room in the middle of the night, automatically looking to see if Chipo was all right, but there was no one there but me. When sleep would finally come, nightmares wrecked it. I’d dream that Chipo had stopped breathing while I slept. I would wake up and she would be dead—just as Ferai had died while I tooled around town. Vita could endure these trips, relying on Mavis for help during the day, but they were wearing at her on the home front too.
When I was in Harare, Vita slept deeply, catching up on the time she missed while she had been handling everything. I woke up three or four times a night, drenched in sweat, no more at ease now that I was at home than when I had been on the road. Chipo now slept in a crib set next to our bed. Every time I woke up, I went to the crib, leaned over, and touched her cheek, her neck, her wrist, checking her pulse, her breathing. Then I would lie back down, telling myself to get a grip—and wake up again, ninety minutes later, in the same sweat. Nothing seemed very certain anymore. I began to feel so disoriented that writing a simple story became a migraine-inducing marathon. I had a brace on my knee from the thrashing I’d taken in Kinshasa, my weight dropped, and I was still bouncing around the continent, knocking out one story after another. I soon found myself in southwestern Nigeria, stepping onto a small boat with a group of violently discontent young men who were kidnapping Western oil company workers and seizing oil platforms belonging to Chevron and Texaco.
There were two groups fighting in and around Warri, a grimy but important riverside town in the Niger Delta. Young men from the Ijaw ethnic group, probably a majority in the area, pointed out that their bayou homelands were terribly polluted while the government and the oil companies took the riches for themselves. They began seizing oil platforms. I called home from Lagos, the Nigerian financial capital, the night before I headed down to Warri, finding Vita in an exuberant mood. She had seen the most beautiful little boy, just brought into Chinyaradzo.
“His name is Robert,” she said down the phone line. “He is so beautiful, baby. His little feet and hands—and you should see his eyes!” She busted into a laugh. “Big brown things!” She was smitten, and it was infectious even on the other side of the continent. He was, like Erica, Ferai, and Chipo, completely abandoned, Vita was saying. “We waited too long to tell them we were interested in Ferai and Erica. I’ve already told Stella we want to bring him home as soon as you get here. I can’t handle Chipo and him by myself. But this is the one, baby. This is going to be our little boy.” She pronounced the last three words slowly, like water dripping on a rock.
“Okay, okay.” I laughed. I couldn’t imagine taking care of two infants at this stage of exhaustion. But we wanted another child, and it wasn’t as though Robert could wait. The memory of Ferai still gnawed at me. “I’ve got this one story already lined up. Let me knock it out and I’ll scratch the rest of the trip.”
“Just get here, baby,” she said, “as soon as you can.”
TWO DAYS LATER, my colleague Peter Cunliffe-Jones, from Agence France-Presse, and I stepped onto a small boat with five young men, compatriots of the hostage-taking activists. A man sat down behind us and pull-cranked the Yahama outboard engine. He had a pump-action shotgun across his lap. The four other men carried three machine guns and a hunting rifle.
We moved out into the narrow bay, passing long rows of rusted-out oil tankers, and then the river widened into a broad channel, the landfall all undergrowth and bayous. The Atlantic Ocean was only a few miles ahead when the boat turned into a tributary that was maybe fifty yards wide. A dugout canoe was in a narrow turnout among the tangled mangrove roots, two young girls looking at us without smiling. Then, fast, we turned into another of the serpentine creeks, swinging out wide, the men alert at the bow, a muddy roll of water washing out behind us. I leaned over and shouted over the wind into Peter’s ear, “Remind me why they’re not going to take us hostage, too.”
“Because they know our bosses wouldn’t pay to get us back,” he yelled.
We pulled into the Batan Flow Station, a small steel platform at the edge of a wooden jetty. Run by Shell on a lease from the government for more than thirty years, it was very clean and very modern. It was next to a village of wood-and-thatch huts called Diebiri, which was not. The people there had no electricity, no lights, no school, no clinic, and no running water. The tour continued through the bayous and backwaters, heavily armed teenagers meeting us on each jetty, the hostages never in sight. It was late in the afternoon when we docked back in our little bay. Before we could step out, the drivers were at the waterline, shouting and waving their hands. “There’s been a terrible oil fire in Jesse,” they said. “Hundreds are dead.”
We ran to the car then, without pausing, speeding through Warri’s jumbled traffic and onto a narrow highway. A towering column of oily black smoke loomed in the distance. Miles later, at the side of a road that ran along a heavily forested section of undergrowth, there was a path going back into the woods. We learned the details from local residents as we walked to a small clearing, approaching a thick column of flame that roared thirty feet into the air.
Two nights earlier, thieves had come to the clearing to tap into a fuel manhole station that serviced the nation’s largest gas pipeline. They siphoned off a tankerful to sell on the black market. They left without closing the valve. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline gushed into the underground chamber, overflowed, and spilled outside, forming a shallow lake of high-octane gasoline. Since this was a rare and expensive commodity in Nigeria, hundreds of people from nearby villages along the Ethiope River rushed to scoop it up with cans, buckets, even pots and pans.
Then there was a spark.
No one still living knew where it came from. There was speculation it was a cigarette, a backfire from a cranked motorcycle. Whatever its origin, the spark turned the lake of gas into a river of fire. More than twenty-four hours later, flames from the ruptured pipeline station billowed in the twilight, illuminating dozens of corpses that were too close to the fire to be hauled away. One woman’s body still had her baby on her back.
By the time we arrived, a bulldozer was digging a pit a few hundred yards away. There was a huge mound of charred bodies already in it. Bare-chested workers, sweat pouring from the heat of fire and the Nigerian afternoon, covered their faces with surgical masks and their hands with red rubber gloves. They loaded each corpse into a wheelbarrow, rolled it to the edge of the pit, then thrust the handles up. The body spilled out, rolling to the bottom.
Toward the river, less than a hundred yards away through the underbrush, low branches held the occasional scrap of cloth. There would be another scrap a few yards beyond, then another, and then a burned body lying in the weeds, fallen after stripping the burning clothes away. People had run for the river, thinking in their desperation that water would extinguish a gas fire. Some made it. They plunged in the water, but gas had seeped into that too. They flared out like matches. Their disfigured bodies lay in the tangled weeds and vines at the water’s edge. Some had been split open by the heat.
I had to stop taking notes in pen. Rivers of sweat were running down my hands and onto the page, smearing the ink as soon as I wrote. I pulled out a pencil, scribbling down notes from a doctor at the scene. At least eight hundred people, perhaps more than a thousand, had been burned alive. It was the worst oil-related accident in Nigerian history.
Just after nightfall, a fierce thunderstorm descended, lashing roads with sheets of rain. There were maybe ninety minutes before deadline. I set my portable computer on my lap in the backseat and wrote as the car swayed back and forth, tapping
keys by the light of the computer screen. By the time we reached the hotel, the rain had stopped. I pulled a chair and the satellite telephone into the hotel’s courtyard. I aimed the flat satellite dish toward a satellite hovering over the Atlantic and hit the command keys to send the story to a computer line in Washington, where it would be relayed to my editor’s desk.
The connection wouldn’t go through. Not on the first try, not on the fourth. I tried a different connection in the States, a line that was based in Mississippi. In my travels, I had used it as a last resort and a good-luck charm. That failed too. Cursing, I moved into a clearing of palm trees and turned the dish in the other direction. This time, I was aiming it in search of a sister satellite to the east, all the way across the continent and hovering somewhere over the Indian Ocean. I hit the series of keys again. Nothing. Second try. Nothing. Third try—this time the little circular lights in the upper left of my computer screen happily blipped back and forth, the sign of a solid connection. I sat back, dizzy. I watched the story go through, then turned the computer off and leaned back in my plastic chair. I had not eaten in twenty-eight hours. My shirt, pants, socks—everything was soaked through and stinking with sweat. By now, the restaurant of our grimy little hotel had long since shut down and the driver was gone. It wasn’t as though there were restaurants open in Warri at that hour, anyway. I locked the computer and satellite phone in my room and walked through the moonlight to the hotel bar. I ordered two cold Star beers, the Nigerian brand that came in big green bottles, and some peanuts. A heavyset prostitute, displaying a frightening amount of cleavage and a gap-toothed smile, sidled up next to me while I was waiting on the change.
