by Neely Tucker
“We’re missionaries, a group called Harvest Field,” whispered Blanchard. I called their director, a man named Jonathan Wallace, in Indianapolis. A deep voice came over the line. Wallace explained that they were a tiny group, no more than a dozen families, whom he said God had led to work in southern Congo beginning in late 1996. The mission had once had more people in the region, including women and children, but the others had gone home and the three arrested had been wrapping up their work. Congo had gotten too dangerous, he said. He denied the three had machine guns but readily admitted they had weapons for personal security and hunting.
This didn’t seem too convincing, especially when Wallace didn’t know what a 501(c)(3), a tax-exempt corporation, was or how it worked. But if they weren’t men of the cloth, it was even more obvious they were not some CIA hit squad either. Their “highly sophisticated” weapons were outdated relics; there wasn’t a modern, high-priced weapon in the lot. The “map of State House” turned out to be nothing more than a sketch of downtown streets, including State House as a landmark, sketched out for the trio by a local man who was giving them directions.
Out of public view, the serious charges against the men were quietly dropped. By the time the case came to court, they would be charged with nothing more than what they admitted from the beginning—that they had guns without permits.
Of course, this really wasn’t the point. Their arrest was a godsend for Mugabe. He dramatically told his nation, over and over again, that the racist superpower was bent on exterminating him, the heroic defender of African independence, and he would defy them at every turn. This set off a carefully orchestrated campaign of anti-American propaganda, marches on the U.S. embassy, and a roundup of foreign correspondents in Harare, who were mostly American, British, South African, or Australian nationals. One by one, the Information Ministry called us in “so that we can verify your information.” After talking with several others who had been summoned, I went down to Liquenda House. I parked in the garage next door, showed my passport, and signed in at the sagging desk downstairs, then walked up to the Information Ministry office.
“You guys looking for me?” I said, showing my credentials.
The man behind the desk smiled broadly, laughing with a colleague.
“No, no, my friend, it is just that we like to see you,” he said. “You journalists. So busy, sure. You never come to talk to us.”
I forced a shared laugh, then put my work permit, passport, and press accreditation on the desk. He studiously wrote all these down. He asked for my phone number and address. Then he said I could go. “Our files are just old,” he said. “Don’t worry. It’s just a paperwork task.”
I didn’t buy it—they were making sure they knew where to find us in a hurry. But despite Mugabe’s constant attempts to whip up anti-American rancor, most people didn’t seem interested. I can’t remember a single case of an American being harassed or beaten, much less deported. Outside of the ZANU-PF-sponsored marches at the U.S. embassy, which never drew more than a couple of thousand, Zimbabweans were friendly, warm, and welcoming. And now that I wasn’t traveling for the first time in six years, we spent afternoons with Bill and Dumi, or with Steve and Heather, soaking up the sun and the quiet. We went on picnics in national parks with Audra and Nevio, who ran a popular restaurant in town, chatting until dusk and the evening chill set in. Then we would drive back to town with the headlights on, Chipo sleeping in her car seat.
But I had a sinking feeling this peacefulness wasn’t going to last, and Vita and I started looking for any help we could find to speed the adoption along. Surely other foreign nationals had adopted; those Germans had breezed through in eight months. We must be doing something wrong, we thought.
First, being Americans, we checked with the lawyers. There had to be a few who had handled international adoptions and thus could guide us through the process. We never found one.
I remembered that in Kenya, during the embassy bombing, an aid worker mentioned that a colleague in South Africa had adopted a Zimbabwean child. I now called the man back, got the name, and e-mailed Alisa, a New Zealander, who was then living in Cape Town. The same day the American missionaries/mercenaries appeared in court, I got a note back: “Yes, in 1994, I adopted a beautiful little girl named Chloe,” she wrote, and I let out a whoop. Then enthusiasm sank with the next sentence. “She’s from Lusaka [Zambia]. This was after a host of abortive attempts in Zimbabwe.”
I picked up the satellite phone and called her at home.
“There were so many restrictions in Zimbabwe, so many bureaucrats who get in your way,” she said. “They weren’t very friendly, to be honest. They thought it was very strange that I was a white woman and wanted to adopt a black child. They took my paperwork, but it was clear it wasn’t going anywhere.”
She had given up and gone to Zambia, where the need was just as great but the process straightforward, she said. After officials cleared her paperwork, Chloe had been in her home within two months. But, Alisa said, she knew of an American couple in Harare who had adopted a Zambian child from the same home as Chloe. She couldn’t remember if they had adopted a Zimbabwean child or not, and she passed along their phone number.
This turned into another dead end. Kelly and Diane too had tried to adopt in Zimbabwe but had also found the Department of Social Welfare to be a quagmire. They eventually gave up and went across the border to Zambia. Like Alisa, they quickly adopted there. “Zimbabwe was just impossible,” Diane said over dinner. “They’ve got more orphans than they can keep up with, the conditions are terrible, and when you show up they act like you’re the problem.”
I went back to Alisa’s first e-mail. She had mentioned a Canadian named Roger. He had worked at the High Commission in Harare but had now rotated back home. She was sure that he and his wife were adopting an older child, a teenager.
It took two days, but I tracked him down in Canada.
“It just didn’t work out,” he said. “The boy was fourteen or fifteen when we got involved with him. He was a street kid. He was getting into some trouble and didn’t have anywhere else to go. We brought him into our home, and everything seemed to be working out. But Social Welfare just wouldn’t process the paperwork. I would go by there and go by there, and nothing would happen. He finally got to be seventeen, which meant he couldn’t be legally adopted, which I think the department knew, and then it all sort of collapsed.”
“Did they ever tell you they just weren’t going to approve it?”
“Oh, no. They just kept asking for this or that piece of paper, and then somebody who had to approve it who wasn’t there, and so on.”
“Do you know of anybody else who adopted?”
“No.”
By now, Vita was working closely with Stella on a grant proposal that was aimed at lowering Chinyaradzo’s infant mortality rate. There were long hours getting it ready for submission to the U.S. embassy’s “self-help” funding program. Vita often used the time to ask Stella if there were any other couples like the Germans who had adopted from Chinyaradzo. She said she couldn’t remember any. Then Vita tried a couple of faxes to something called Bethany Christian Services, an international adoption agency out of Michigan, our last legal residence in the United States. They listed their services in nineteen sites in thirteen countries, from India to Costa Rica. Not one was on the African continent. “I don’t know that we’ve ever handled a case out of Africa,” the head of the agency faxed us back.
I went back to my source in the Social Welfare office, who said there wasn’t much to be said.
“Listen, we only do a handful of adoptions in our branch each year, even if the adoptive parents are both Zimbabweans,” the source said. “It’s always relatives who take in children for adoption, not what you might call strangers. It’s just seen as odd here. And foreign adoptions? Maybe twice a year. I’m sure some Americans adopted at some point, but there’s no way anybody is ever going to tell you about it. There’s no record kept.”
We turned to searching the Internet at night. Africa and adoption didn’t bring a lot of hits on the search engines, except perhaps from Ethiopia, which had a somewhat established program. Then we hit on All as One, a California-based company that specialized in African adoptions. It was an oddity in the field. We had ordered several of those international-adoption books found in the specialty niches of bookstores, the how-to kind of book that lists regulations in country after country. For us, they were of no use. American couples fan out all over the globe to adopt children from Russia to India to China, but Africa is scarcely on the tour. There were only a handful of agencies that work on the continent. The All as One site showed them working in Sierra Leone, Ethiopia—and Zimbabwe.
“Voilà!” Vita shouted.
The site showed they had fifty-five children up for adoption in Sierra Leone, the world’s poorest nation, which had been ripped apart by a vicious civil war. I clicked on the Zimbabwe page and, while waiting for an image to appear, figured we were home free. If they could work in Sierra Leone, then Zimbabwe was child’s play.
“There are no children presently available for adoption in Zimbabwe,” read their Web site. Vita and I let loose with the same expletive at the same time. I checked the time differences, then called Deanna Wallace Cox, the agency director, at her California office. It took a couple of days to hook up, but I finally got her on the line. She was the adoptive mother of several children, including some from Ethiopia, and she knew the ropes, all right. She’d traveled to Zimbabwe several times. She knew the players in the department, she knew Stella, she could recite the Zimbabwean legal statutes.
She also had given up and moved on to other countries.
“They just don’t want it to happen in Zimbabwe,” she said. “They will never tell you no. They smile. They tell you they like you. They never said they were rejecting my proposals. But they just lost my files, canceled meetings, and wouldn’t show up when we did have them. They’d never return my phone calls. It’s not a question of a bribe. It’s not a question of race. They just want you to go away.”
Such was the uneasy détente in which we found ourselves in the early months of 1999. We had Chipo and weren’t giving her up. The department had the paperwork to make her ours. They weren’t giving that up either. It was difficult to know what to do next.
“What happens if we just pick her up and go?” Vita said one night after we had put Chipo to bed. We were sitting in the dark of the patio, the lights in the house turned off, sharing a bottle of wine. It was at least the thousandth time we had done this—pictured scenarios for getting Chipo out of the country in an emergency, fought and argued and quibbled and planned all over again.
“We get across the border fine and then have problems getting in somewhere else,” I said. “Ever try getting into the United States without a passport?”
“A lot of people do,” she said.
“I just never pictured it that way.”
“Yeah? Gimme your take of life on the lam.”
“We get to Cape Town or Rio, live on a houseboat, and I write seedy novels under an assumed name.”
“How attractive.”
“Steamy stuff, bodice rippers. Heaving breasts, broad shoulders, the smooth Panamanian who seems a little too well informed, the caustic Senegalese olive importer with the seductive Lebanese mistress.”
“Wouldn’t the Lebanese import the olives and the—”
“Rewrites, rewrites,” I said, waving a hand.
“Do you have any serious idea of what we should do?”
I listened to the breeze come through the jacarandas. The dogs were wrestling in the grass, rolling over each other. The pool was still. It was quiet a long time.
“No.”
Another pause.
“I’m going to bed,” Vita said, and was gone.
I let her go. Day by day, our relationship was eroding. We had once hosted parties for dozens, even a hundred people at a time. But now, falling ever deeper into the adoption struggle, everything else seemed to fade away, as did our sense of humor and affection. Other than those occasional afternoons out with another couple, we didn’t go out much, and when we did, it was mostly dinner alone, another of those endless strategy sessions. When we stayed at home, in front of a fire in the chill of late evenings in the dry season, the hours no longer seemed peaceful but nerve-racking. Sitting on the patio, I remembered an older female friend once counseling me that as long as there was laughter in the bedroom, then your relationship was probably doing fine. The problem was, outside of our delight in Chipo’s steady growth, there wasn’t much laughter anywhere in our house.
It was particularly frustrating because there was no clear obstacle. The department still would not give a checklist of all the documents it needed. The goal seemed to be to lead you into a thicket of petty bureaucratic entanglements so deep that you could never hack your way through to the other side. Further, investigations that constituted proper social work got lost in bureaucratic ineptitude, apathy, suspicion, and sullen hostility. I backed off the offer to provide the department with a copy machine, which they sorely needed, for fear Kaseke would twist it into “evidence” of some sort of a bribe. We were left to guess, and guess again, at what might work.
A couple of months earlier, with our citizenship appearing to be a major issue, we had gone on a three-week tour of the real estate market. We planned to use our life savings to buy a house because, as property owners, we could then apply for residency. With that in hand, we hoped it would show good faith of long-term plans to keep a residence for Chipo in Zimbabwe, and thus clear some of the resistance toward foreign nationals. We eventually negotiated a price on the house we were renting with the landlord, who was ready to close the deal right away. I called my brother and asked if he would loan me a few thousand to complete the deal. He said sure. While we were mulling it over before signing on the dotted line, I was hospitalized with that arm infection, and then Mugabe made his televised declaration about journalists being state enemies, and that plan went out the window.
We finally decided on a simple idea designed to push the process forward, to get the department to grant more paperwork while stopping short of adoption. The plan was based on a company perk called home leave—a return trip to the United States paid for by the company, that I was technically entitled to once every eighteen months. I was due for it now. We had no desire to go to the United States, but such a trip offered several benefits. First, we could portray it to the Social Welfare office as a professional obligation that required us to leave the country. Second, and far more importantly, we would just be asking to take Chipo on a trip, not to adopt her—but if they okayed the travel, it meant they would have to do the paperwork for her birth certificate, national identity number, and—the magic wand—a passport.
Finally, there was a bottom-line advantage: We would have copies of the state authorization needed to legally take Chipo out of the country. If need be, I could make a copy of that paperwork and change the date, and we could cross the border in an emergency with no hassle. I had never forged documents, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know how. I hadn’t spent three months researching a story inside a Florida maximum-security prison, two days walking through the foothills of the Italian Alps with a couple of Romanian clandestines, and six years working in conflict zones without picking up a little something.
“At the end of the day, you’re right,” I told Vita. “There are a couple million illegal immigrants in the United States. I’d hate to think they’re all smarter than us.”
15
“SHORTCUTS”
EACH MORNING there would be a steady stream of people walking into the complex of buildings at the Social Welfare office, workers and citizens gathering outside the chain-link fence with vendors hawking peanuts, roasted corn, and soft drinks. I would park on the street out front in the early shade, where it never failed that a young man between the ages of twelve and twenty-five would materialize at my
door before I could put the thing into park. The kid would tell me he would watch my car, then walk off before I could say yes or no. He’d go back up the street, sit down, and go to sleep in the shade of an overhanging tree until a friend woke him up to tell them that I was returning. I never really minded—at least they waited until you returned to an intact vehicle before collecting—so I always said okay. Then I would walk past the vendors and turn left to go past the drop-down gate at the entrance to the staff parking lot, which was on packed-dirt areas that ran alongside a narrow stretch of asphalt. Just inside the left-hand entrance to the building there was always a cluster of people sitting in an unlighted expanse of hallway, waiting, waiting, always waiting. I never knew for what. I would nod and say hello, which rarely garnered a response, turn left down the gloomy hallway, turn right into the next corridor, and rap on a door on the right-hand side. Most of the time Aaron Munautsi, our new social worker, kept the door ajar.
It was a small, open room with a concrete floor. Hundreds of files and papers cluttered his desk, the floor, the top of sagging file cabinets. There were one or two straight-back chairs facing his desk. A square window, with a heavy grate to block out the late-afternoon sun, was on the western wall. A fixture with a couple of fluorescent tubes was overhead. Sometimes it was on, sometimes it wasn’t. As I sat down, I surveyed the wall behind him. Among other things, it bore a sign that rested just behind his head. Cast in heavy type, it read:
I’M BLACK-
WHAT ABOUT IT?
