“Oh,” I said. “Is Canada safe?”
“Yes, it’s safe there. And it’s a rich country. It’s also very cold. For half the year, it snows.”
I had never heard this word snow. Comfort explained that it was like white salt that falls from the sky when it is very chilly. I pictured in my head a cool Sierra Leone night in spring, with white salt falling all around me.
“It’s colder than the coldest night here!” Comfort said, as if she could read my mind. “Don’t compare it to any day or night you’ve felt in Sierra Leone.”
“So, this man Bill, is he taking me to Canada?” I asked.
“No. But if you pray for it, maybe he will.”
I told Marie and Alie about Bill when I got back to the camp. They were happy for me, and also for themselves. They talked about all the food they would buy when this man’s money started coming in.
“But I want to go to Canada,” I said. “I want him to bring me to this place.”
“We’ll get some fruit, pineapple and coconut,” Alie continued, ignoring me. “We haven’t tasted such sweetness in a long time!”
Marie and Alie also mentioned the new houses a nonprofit group from Norway was building for amputees. Alie said we would qualify for the program, because four of us in the family were amputees and we didn’t have a home. The rebels had destroyed most of Magborou, including Marie and Alie’s hut.
“Money from Bill,” Alie continued, “will help us in the move to the new house.”
“You’ve done really well,” Marie exclaimed, patting me on the back.
I left Marie and Alie still talking about Bill, and headed straight to the camp mosque. A few men were praying in the men’s section at the front of the large blue tent. I was the only female in our section at the back. I knelt. I put my head on the floor, and I whispered over and over again: “Thank you, Allah.”
A week later, I was back in Comfort’s office. I sat nervously on the other side of her desk, waiting for Bill to call on the telephone. I was scared that maybe he wouldn’t like me. I didn’t speak English, and I worried he would move on to another girl who could communicate with him better. A few girls at the camp had been to school and learned some words of English there.
I knew what a telephone was from the medical clinic in Port Loko. There was only one doctor on staff at the clinic, treating more than a hundred patients a day, so the nurses often used a telephone to call Freetown, seeking advice from the doctors there. But I’d never seen a telephone. We didn’t have them in our village. We didn’t have electricity in our village either, or even a generator. Many people in Freetown used generators when the electricity was out, which happened frequently because of the war.
After a few minutes we heard a ringing sound. “Here he is,” Comfort said, picking up the top part of the telephone.
Comfort talked to Bill for a while. Then she cupped the telephone receiver in her hands and spoke to me. “Bill doesn’t speak Temne or Krio, so you won’t understand each other, but at least you can hear what he sounds like.” She held the phone up to my ear.
“Hello,” I said in Krio.
“CHA CHA … CHOO CHOO CHOOO,” Bill replied. At least, that’s what his English sounded like to me.
“My name is Mariatu. Thank you for helping me. I am very grateful,” I said in Temne.
Comfort took the phone back. While she continued her conversation with Bill in English, I looked around the room at the diplomas and certificates. I had seen similar framed papers in the hospital in Freetown. The diplomas said that so-and-so had completed her training, the nurses told me. I had asked one nurse what school was like. “Sometimes it’s very difficult,” she said. “But going to school opens new worlds for girls. When you go to school, you can do important things and help other people. You don’t have to stay in your village and have baby after baby.”
I’d thought at the time: “I’d like to go to school one day.”
Comfort hung up the telephone and gazed over at me. “Bill says he’s putting a box of clothes in the mail for you, and some money. It should be here in a month. I’ll come and get you when the package arrives.”
The next few weeks were a whirlwind. I eagerly awaited my package from Bill.
At the same time, we were practicing for our performance at the soccer stadium. The theater troupe now met not only on the weekends but also a few nights each week. Often we ended our rehearsal early to make posters announcing the event. Those who knew how to write and draw designed the posters. The rest of us helped distribute them throughout Freetown.
Victor had given me a line in the HIV/AIDS skit. “Yes, she was such a good woman,” I was to say about the lady who had died from the virus. I was scheduled to be onstage several other times to dance and sing.
The morning of our performance, Victor handed out costumes that his wife and some of the other women at the camp had sewn for us. For the HIV/AIDS scene, I would put on an orange Africana outfit. I’d wear a skirt made from rice bags cut into strips when I danced and sang.
I was more nervous that day than I had ever been. Victor had hired some minibuses to take us to the stadium, and we gathered in the main section of the camp about an hour before.
“Are you scared?” Mariatu asked me. We’d folded our costumes into the same black plastic bags we used while begging.
“Yes,” I replied. “What if I trip and fall off the stage?”
“If you don’t fall on your own,” Mariatu teased, “I’ll push you off.”
“You be careful,” I teased back, “because I plan on pushing you off before you get to me.”
We laughed at the picture of the two of us brawling onstage. “That’s exactly what the government will want to show the foreign nonprofit people,” Mariatu chuckled. “Two girls wrestling each other!”
Victor interrupted our giggles. Posters had been tacked on bulletin boards, the sides of buildings, and gates all over town, and he’d heard that about a thousand people were expected to attend our performance, including the heads of the charities that helped us at the camp.
My fear that I would humiliate myself crept in again.
“Victor,” I said, pulling him aside. “You should go ahead without me. I am not of the same caliber as the others, who know how to act, sing, and dance.”
I could hear the minibuses approaching, and I was hoping he’d say there wasn’t room for me after all. Instead, he reassured me. “I’m very proud of you, Mariatu. You’ve come a long way with your healing. You’ve suffered so much, and look at what you’re doing now—about to go onstage and perform.”
“But aren’t you afraid I’ll make the theater troupe look silly?”
“No,” Victor responded. “Quite the opposite. We are doing really good work here, through theater, to help the amputees. Having you onstage will help the charities see how important theater is and get them to support theater programs in other parts of the country. Besides,” he said, tenderly rubbing my shoulder, “we can’t go on unless you are with us. We are a group, a family, and we won’t be separated because you’re nervous. It’s natural to be nervous. If you weren’t, I’d think there was something still wrong with you.”
I peeked out from behind the curtains once we’d arrived. Nearly every chair assembled around the stage that had been set up in the stadium was occupied. I peered at all the faces, recognizing no one, although Sulaiman and his wife, Mariatu, had promised to be somewhere in the crowd. Many of the men wore suits, and some were white-skinned, like the journalists. The day was hot, so the ladies in their crisp Africana dresses were fanning themselves with the posters we had made.
Some of the boys in our group assembled themselves onstage and, with the curtain still drawn, began to drum. That was the sign that we were about to begin. The first part of the performance involved us all being onstage, singing a song about the war that Victor and the troupe had written. Because I was short, I’d be in the front row.
Victor pulled the curtains back. Just as it w
as my turn to go onstage, I hesitated. But Mariatu, right behind me, gave me a shove. The bright spotlights startled me for a moment. I must have looked like a wide-eyed deer. Somehow I managed to find my spot, though, and I began singing along with the rest of the group. I soon forgot I was up in front of all those strangers. We sang and danced just like we had done in practice back at the camp.
I said my line and wept in the HIV/AIDS play. We got a standing ovation for our skit on forgiveness and reconciliation. The event ended with us all together onstage again, arm in arm.
Sulaiman and Mariatu found me after the performance. I was giggling with Mariatu and a girl named Memunatu, who had lost one hand during the Freetown invasion.
Sulaiman gave me a big hug. “I am so proud of you,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye. “I’m going to miss you when you move to this place called Canada!”
“Don’t worry, Sulaiman,” I said. “I’m not moving anywhere.”
How wrong I was.
CHAPTER 14
“So, what do you think about going to England?” the young woman in front of me asked. Yabom was her name, she’d informed us.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “Do I have to give you an answer right away?”
Marie glared at me. Wrong answer. We had been talking a lot in the evenings about the prospect of my moving to Canada, and about how moving away would be the best thing for me and for the family financially. The youth who had gone to other countries sent their families as much as 300,000 leones, or $100, a month and mailed them items we’d never heard of, like chocolates. Now, out of nowhere, another woman who’d shown up at the camp was offering me England instead.
“All right,” I said as enthusiastically as I could. “England sounds great.” I did want out of the camp, badly, but Adamsay’s program in Germany had fallen through, and I wanted her to leave before me. Adamsay was always doing nice things for me, like holding me in her arms when I had a bad dream at night. She deserved it.
“We’ll start organizing the paperwork tomorrow,” Yabom replied. “You need a birth certificate and a passport.”
“But she doesn’t have any of these things,” Marie jumped in to say.
“I know,” said the woman. “I’ll help Mariatu apply for her papers.”
“Fine,” I said, forcing a smile. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
We’d been living at the camp for close to two years now. Marie, Abibatu, and Fatmata’s days were almost always the same. They’d sit around talking to each other and waiting for my cousins and me to return from begging with money or food we had bought at the market. The women, including Fatmata (who, with Abdul, was now living at the camp full-time), did the cooking. Marie, more than anyone, longed to return to a village, any village. Like Mabinty, she needed something active to do. Marie and Alie had high hopes we’d get one of the houses under construction for the amputees, and they knew they’d need money to make the move.
About four months had passed since Bill and I had talked on the telephone. He had sent a package with some Western-style clothing, including T-shirts and pants two sizes too big for me, and about 150,000 leones ($50). According to Comfort, he’d promised that another package was on the way. But he had never indicated that he wanted to bring me to Canada, which upset Marie and Alie.
“It’s too bad what happened to you,” Marie had said. “But you must see the positive in everything. Right now the positive for you is finding someone in a foreign country who will take you in and give you the education you need to get a job; and for you to be able to send us, your family, money when you have it.”
I wanted to make Marie happy. I wanted to do the right thing.
Yabom said she was a social worker, like Comfort, though I’d never seen her at the camp either. Her initial approach had been a lot like Comfort’s. “There is this man,” she said. More than anyone I had met so far, Yabom talked with her hands. They flew through the air, accentuating her every word. I followed her hands for a while, then focused on her shiny, smooth skin and big round eyes. “This man lives in England, and he has raised money to pay for your flight to London so you can have some medical treatment.”
“What kind of medical treatment?”
“Well, this man, David, wants you to go to a hospital where the nurses and doctors help people who have lost limbs in car crashes or farming accidents,” explained Yabom. “He wants the hospital to fit you with prosthetic hands, which he will pay for. Do you know what prosthetic hands are?”
“No,” I replied. The word meant nothing to me.
“Well,” Yabom continued, searching for the words, “David wants to give you … how should I explain this … fake hands. They are hands you can use just like real hands, to eat and write, do all the things you used to do.”
Fake hands? I couldn’t picture it. A few kids in the camp who’d had parts of their legs chopped off by the rebels had fake legs. They attached these wooden contraptions, like big logs, to the remaining part of their leg with long pieces of tape. But the logs always seemed to be falling off. The kids actually got around better when they hopped on one leg than when they tried walking with two. I couldn’t imagine wooden hands and fingers being of any help. But for my family’s sake, I knew I had to give it a try.
On our first day together, Yabom took me to one of the government offices near the presidential building. As we stepped inside the front gates, I stopped to look at the Sierra Leonean flag flying on a tall pole. Our flag is simple: blue, green, and white stripes. I had only seen the flag a couple of times before, always in Freetown.
“Do you know the history of Sierra Leone?” Yabom asked as we stood side by side, gazing up at the flag.
“No,” I replied. “I don’t know much at all, just what I’ve heard about the war at the camp.”
“Well, then,” she said, leading me to a bench at the side of the building.
It was quiet inside the front gates, not busy and noisy like the street outside. Birds were chirping, a sound I had not heard since Magborou. Usually their songs were drowned out by Freetown’s constantly honking minibus and car horns and the chatter of many, many people.
“Back in the 1500s, a Portuguese explorer was sailing the West African coast,” Yabom began. “When he reached what we call Freetown today, it was storming. The thunder echoed against the mountains, and the sailor thought the noise sounded like roaring lions. He named the area Sierra Lyoa, or Mountain Lion.”
She glanced up at the flag. “For much of our modern history, Sierra Leone belonged to other people. We were a colony of England, where you are about to go, which means that the British, or the English, said Sierra Leone belonged to them.”
The British had built homes in Sierra Leone and mined the country’s resources, Yabom explained. They had tried to modernize Sierra Leone and make the country run like a modern European nation.
“What happened?” I questioned.
“It’s complicated,” she replied, pausing to search for the words. “You see, Europeans saw Sierra Leoneans, as well as other African people, as a source of, well … as slaves.”
Yabom described how, in the slave trade, people from Africa were forced onto ships and sent to North America to work for free. “Many people died on these ships, and those who survived endured long hours of terribly hard work and separation from their families. Babies were taken from their mothers. Husbands and wives were torn apart. When slavery started to be condemned, many of the freed slaves returned to Freetown. That’s why the city is named as it is. These former slaves were from not only Sierra Leone but all over Africa. They didn’t speak Temne or Mende. They spoke Krio, which is a broken form of the English they had learned in the West.”
Yabom put her arm around me. “My dear, Sierra Leone only gained its independence from the British in the 1960s. That’s likely just before your mother was born. Sierra Leone became a recognized country ten years after that. There was much corruption among government officials. Look around you,” she said, waving h
er hands in the air. “We are a rich country, full of resources, from diamonds to bauxite. But we’re also very, very poor. Money from the sale of our resources doesn’t reach the average person. Liberia, which borders Sierra Leone to the east, was already engaged in a civil war when war broke out here. A man named Foday Sankoh launched the Revolutionary United Front from Liberia in 1991, when you were only four or five. Sankoh said his goal was to end the abuse of power by Sierra Leone politicians. He felt they were stealing the money they made from selling our resources abroad. But Sankoh was worse than any of the politicians he accused of thievery. You know the old saying, when you point a finger at someone, there are probably three fingers pointing back at you?”
I nodded. Marie often used a version of this expression to discourage us from telling on one another for things like taking too much food. “Child,” she’d say to the boy or girl who had lodged the complaint, “if you’re accusing someone of doing something bad, you’re probably thinking of doing it yourself.”
“Sankoh should have looked at his own fingers,” Yabom said. “He started mining the diamonds, trading them in Liberia for weapons to fuel the war. He encouraged boys to become soldiers. These boys had broken spirits by the time Sankoh got to them. Sierra Leone is so poor that, without schools and jobs, there were few things for these boys to look forward to. So they were easy prey for him. Mariatu, we are one of the poorest countries in the world. You will see soon enough when you move to England. You’ll see the Londoners’ clothes, their expensive houses, the food they eat, their theaters and museums. We have our beautiful sandy beaches, but that’s about all Freetown has that England doesn’t.”
We sat outside talking for about an hour. The Sierra Leone flag stopped flapping when the warm morning wind died.
“We must go inside and fill out your paperwork,” Yabom said, looking at the position of the sun. “It’s early afternoon, and if we don’t get this done, you’re not moving anywhere!”
The Bite of the Mango Page 10
