Thank You for sending me here. Thank You for Lyla and Falla and for Dr. Sams who goes out of his way to be nice to me. He says I am the fastest and neatest bandager he has ever seen, although I really doubt that’s true. Everyone here is so good to me, and I’m glad I came.
My love to everybody up there. Give John safe travels as he returns from Kenya, and the people who are running from Mr. Amin. I’ll be glad to see John. I hope he will take me flying again.
After that, the days flew by so fast Sally Beth hardly noticed their passage. She got over her awe of Lyla, falling back into the comfortable joking and teasing relationship they had begun, and their friendship deepened over the children. They dallied under the sun; they gamboled across the courtyard and sang songs. It was the highlight of Sally Beth’s day when she got to hold a baby or play horsey-ride with a one-year-old bouncing on her knee. Lyla had a playful streak, and together, she and Sally Beth kept the children laughing. In the evenings, Sally Beth talked the staff into playing games with them. She got pretty good at soccer out of necessity; she could not really get them interested in either basketball or softball. When John found out about these after-dinner games, he started returning earlier so he could join the fun. Before they knew it, September had evaporated, and they were facing the month of October, wondering how it could have gone by so fast.
October 1, 1978
Sally Beth was just putting on her hat to go to church when someone knocked at her door. Opening it, she saw John’s large form framed in the doorway, looking rugged, yet fresh, like he was well-rested and happy in his element. She was so glad to see him she let out a little gasp of pleasure.
He was wearing a cowboy hat that he had bought the last time he had been to Nairobi. The moment it caught his eye, he had found himself chuckling over the image of Sally Beth and her cowboy hat with a rhinestone crown and bejeweled sandals, bandaging up bloody wounds in the heart of Africa, chattering to patients in her West Virginian drawl, totally unaware of the image she made. He had bought it just because of that happy reminder of her. Today, when she greeted him with her bright face, so full of joy, whether at the sight of him or just the fact of the day, he could not say, he felt a little bubble of happiness rise to his chest and pop like a balloon full of confetti. He took off his hat and swept it into a low bow.
“Milady,” he said. “Do you care to go a-flying with me today?”
“You mean now? It’s Sunday. I was just going to church.”
“Never mind. Most of the Americans skip out whenever they can, and you’ve been a very good girl up ‘til now, so you get to take a day off. Pastor Umbatu understands, and I think he pretty much expects it. These services can be a bit much for us Westerners. And I’ve got lots to show you today.”
Sally Beth bit her lip. She hated to insult Pastor Umbatu, but to be honest, his sermons were a little tiresome, at least after the first hour, and those seats could get mighty hard. The idea of spending a day with a relaxing, undemanding old friend who shared her roots seemed an easier choice. She grinned at him. “Let me get my canteen. And my purse.”
It was a glorious day. They headed straight east into the morning sun, out over the vast, blue waters of Lake Victoria. After about half an hour, John turned slightly and lowered the nose of the plane, bearing toward the southern shore. Flying low over a cluster of huge, white stones jutting out of the water, they disturbed a flock of white and silver birds that spiraled up in noisy song under the shadow of the plane.
“Mwanza Rock,” he said, pointing. “And this is the city of Mwanza. It’s the second largest city in Tanzania.” He pushed the plane’s nose upward again, skimming along the eastern edge of the lake. Presently, he circled back and dropped altitude, settling into the water and skating into a sandy beach.
“We’ll stop here for a break,” he said. “I’m hungry, and besides, I want the sun to get a little higher before I show you some things. I would say it’s time for brunch, milady.”
He pulled a cooler out of the backseat while Sally Beth spread a blanket on the sand under the cool shade of the baobab trees that grew along the shoreline. He laid out a basket of fruit and bread and handed her a cup filled with mango juice. Leaning back against one of the huge trees, Sally Beth looked out over the blue lake and into the western morning sky, blue and white and as clear as a gemstone, and found that she couldn’t stop smiling. Just a few months ago, she had never even been on a plane before. How impossible it was that she should be here, sitting on the sand beside a vast African lake, drinking fresh mango juice and eating oranges. It took her breath away.
“The weather has been perfect the whole time I have been here,” she remarked. “Of course, it’s always perfect at home in September, but I expected it to be hot here.”
“I know, it’s remarkable; it’s nice all year round, even in the rainy season. We’re so close to the equator and so high up, especially in Kyaka, that the temperature is really very consistent and mild.”
“Is it high? I see mountains that are higher from there.”
“Yes, believe it or not, the elevation is a lot higher than it is in Tucker, but there are much higher mountains all over Africa, Kilimanjaro being one of them, of course. It’s the highest freestanding mountain in the world—over 19,000 feet, and where you are at the mission is close to 4,000. Tucker is at more than 1,000 feet below that. One day I’ll take you over the Rift, and you’ll see just how high it is. The land falls away for thousands of feet.”
Sally Beth looked northward across the water. “Is Uganda that way across the lake?”
“Yes. Uganda is in trouble, and the mission is in an uncomfortable place, being only a few miles from the border. There have been some border skirmishes, but thank goodness they always leave the church alone. Uganda and Tanzania have not been friends for some time now, since ’71, I believe, when Idi Amin overthrew Obote, the President of Uganda then. Obote came to Tanzania, and he is still here. The rumors say that he is planning to take back the country someday.”
“Who do you think those people were who came to dinner last month? They seemed—well, odd, I guess. That girl was so young, yet she acted like she was in charge, and who was that Lakwena she said is giving orders?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Pastor Umbatu seemed to imply they were hiding from Idi Amin. He’s a brutal man—some say the worst since Hitler and Stalin. He’s responsible for the deaths of thousands of Ugandans. He even murdered the archbishop of the Ugandan Anglican Church, among others. Rumor has it that he eats the livers of his enemies, and he keeps the heads of some of his victims in his freezer.” He shook his head. “The people of Uganda have had it tough for a very long time. Obote was pretty bad, too, I hear.”
She breathed a grateful prayer for her own safe home back in Tucker, then sat back to let the peace of the lake and the bush land around them seep into her soul. She tried not to think about Mr. Amin or the terror clawing its way through his country. It was hard to believe that this peaceful place bordered such horrors.
After a few comfortably silent moments, John stood up. “Come on,” he said. “There’s lots more to see.”
Back in the plane, they traveled southwestward, over the great Serengeti, where herds of wildebeests, elephants, giraffes, and countless other creatures ran beneath the shadow of their wings. Sally Beth watched the sun arc over the bulge of the earth: gold, blue and green sailing below her. She delighted to chase filmy clouds, darting in and out of them like a dragonfly through a spring mist. Everywhere she looked, there was beauty and wonder and more splendors. She prayed aloud as much as she talked to John, and always the theme of her prayer and her conversation was Thank you! Thank you! Thank You!
Again, he pulled the nose of the plane upward, and as they rose into the morning sun, lifting high above the land, John pointed straight ahead.
“Look, Sally Beth,” he said.
She squinted into the glare. John changed angles slightly until she could see, and she breathed a long, “Ohhh
hh.” In front of her, distant but dazzling in the sunshine and cool, bright air, stood Mt. Kilimanjaro, its snowcapped peak rising above a golden cloud.
She could not speak. She had seen pictures of this sight dozens of times, sitting by her daddy’s side, thumbing through the worn pages of his National Geographics, but nothing could have prepared her for the grandeur, the awesomeness of this natural wonder. “Oh, John,” she sighed, her eyes brimming with tears. “Thank you.”
He could not help but be moved by her simple gratitude, her childlike wonder. “I take it you know what that is.”
“Oh, yes. Daddy always said he would love to see it. I imagined it standing over the Serengeti, with elephants in front of it, but never from the air like this. It’s… it’s… magnificent! She believed it might have been the first time she had ever used the word, and she was glad she had saved it for this moment, for it held all the weight that it should as it formed in her mouth. Then she burst out laughing, and John, caught up in her joy, was so delighted with her delight he wanted to show her everything at once. He hoped the time was right, for he knew about a secret place that bloomed with flamingos at some point during the spring months. Murmuring his own hopeful prayer, he headed farther east.
Before long, they came to a bowl in the plains, and to his delight, and to Sally Beth’s, the bowl was filled with crimson-winged flamingos sailing through the air, thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of them, darting in and out, flying in formation, breaking, and reforming again in great waves of scarlet and pink. Below them lay a crucible filled with fire—a deep red lake, and in this lake floated hundreds of what looked like pink icebergs. On these floating islands were thousands more flamingos, dancing and strutting across the water in their elaborate mating dances.
“Oh—what is it?” shouted Sally Beth.
“This is about the only breeding ground for scarlet-winged flamingos. The water is red because of an algae that blooms here. The flamingos eat it, and that’s why they are so pink. They’ll stay that color until the rains come again and dilute the water.
“They build their nests on those floating islands. They’re made of salt, basically, or rather sodium carbonate, and it’s so alkaline that nothing can live here except for a very few species, the flamingos and the red algae being two of them. That makes for a safe place to raise their young. I don’t want to get too close and disrupt them, but if you were to be down on one of those islands, you’d be amazed at how hot it is. It can get up to over 140 degrees. The flamingos build up the nests out of that sodium carbonate that are more than a foot or two high in order to get up out of the heat. It’s brutal, and it’s an amazing feat of nature that they can even live here, let alone breed and thrive.”
He turned the plane south. “Up ahead, that’s Ol Doinyo Lengai, ‘Mountain of God’ to the Maasai. It’s an active volcano, but with a different kind of lava than other volcanoes. It doesn’t erupt, but is always seeping lava made of sodium carbonate, called natron. It’s what causes the chemical makeup of the lake, what makes it so caustic. This is Natron Lake.”
Sally Beth looked out at the moonscape of the volcano below her. The ground was completely barren, rugged with jagged peaks, burned black, but crusted over with white sodium carbonate. It was miserably, horribly lifeless, but behind her, she could still see the cherry-colored cloud of flamingos, wheeling and dancing their seductive, sensual dance, making ready to mate and start their families.
“Amazing. Out of this dead-looking mountain comes all that glory.”
“Yes,” he said. “You have it exactly. This is where the legend of the Phoenix comes from. The scarlet-winged flamingo is the inspiration for the myth of the Phoenix.”
They flew all the way to see Kilimanjaro up close, then stopped to refuel and returned to the shores of Lake Victoria where John once again landed in the water and skied up to a resort where they had a late lunch on the veranda before heading back to Kyaka.
The mission came into view under the afternoon sun, which sat at the perfect angle to fix a glow upon the church spire, turning it snowy white against a field of green and gold. As they left the plane to head back to Sally Beth’s room, her soul felt deeply satisfied and peaceful, and John, too, felt that the day had lifted a burden from him. Flying was, indeed, liberating, and the beauty of Africa and Sally Beth’s simple appreciation of it was just the thing he needed to put things in perspective.
Loving Geneva had been complicated. He had never quite known how to relate to her—she had been changeable and unsettling, and he had always felt slightly off balance around her. Of course, that had been one of the things he had found so attractive about her: her restlessness as well as her recklessness and her desire to take hold of everything within her reach. She had seemed to constantly be grabbing and embracing things, including himself. While it was exciting to feel her reaching into him to take possession of everything he was, it was also scary to know that she was capable of it. Being around Sally Beth was the perfect, healing antidote. She was the reverse of Geneva: undemanding, always giving. It wasn’t exciting to be around her. She did not have the fire and gusto that Geneva had, but she was a good place to rest when he was weary. He watched as she walked across the meadow, wishing he could be happy with someone like her, but deep in his heart, he was certain he never could. He needed Geneva’s intensity, her veneer of sophistication, not Sally Beth’s softness and simplicity. His heart would grow fat and lazy in Sally Beth’s easy embrace, and that was not something he ever wanted.
As they made their way past the church, Sally Beth’s thoughts dwelt on other things: how the beauty of this place existed alongside the pain being borne just across the border twenty miles away. She wondered what Alice Auma had meant when she said the country would be purged from sin and evil, and if there was something she could do to help. If only people let others exist in peace, if they did not try to grab from others and try to overpower, the world would be better for everyone.
They both were so absorbed in their own thoughts that they hardly took notice of each other, until she thought of how happy she was that John had revealed such beauty to her this day, and then, suddenly, when he slowed to give her time to catch up to him, she became aware of his physical presence. She had always thought of him as a nice man, someone she felt sorry for because he was so hopelessly in love, and hopeless in his love. But now, as she drew close, she saw the bits of pale stubble on his chin that the razor had missed and the light brown hair curling out from under his hat, and she had a sudden urge to take the hat off and ruffle the curls. She slowed her pace, willing herself to look at the path ahead of them, not the expanse of his shoulders or the way he strode so confidently across the yard.
When they reached her door, she was filled with gratefulness for what he had done for her today, a gratefulness that was mixed with a desire to feel the strength of his arms around her. But she reminded herself that no matter how kind he was to her, John’s heart was closed to anyone but Geneva. Looking into his beautiful green eyes and wanting him to know how grateful she was for all the beauty he had given her today, she settled for squeezing his arm and saying softly, “I don’t know how to thank you. It was the best day of my life.”
He smiled down at her. Sally Beth was a beautiful girl, sweet, and honest, and for a moment, he had a wild urge to lean to her and kiss her pink lips, but a vision of Geneva laughing into the sun and leaping into his arms swam before his eyes, and he felt a great, cold hand clutch at his heart. He tipped his hat and bowed before he walked away.
Lord, I am still stunned from today. You made all this! Your imagination knows no bounds; Your Glory is greater than even this. Oh, Lord, I love You. Please protect this land and the people in it. I hold them up to You, Lord. Please keep them in Your hands.
Thirteen
October 2, 1978
The clinic was short-staffed because Francine was suffering from a stomach bug. As soon as Sally Beth sat at her station at the admitting desk, two young men were bro
ught in with severe burns. One had fallen into a charcoal fire pit, and his friend also had been burned while trying to get him out. The two physicians, Dr. Sams and Dr. Davis, were tending to them, and Janie, the only nurse on duty, was busy with another young man with scalp lacerations and a possible concussion. As Sally Beth sorted through a throng of people with less severe ailments, a young black woman with an American accent came into the clinic with a moaning child in her arms. Sally Beth motioned her to the front of the line when she saw the state of the little girl.
“Your names?” she asked, pen poised over the lines of the admitting register.
“Alethia Bagatui. This is Mara Anihla. We need to see the doctor right now.”
“Can you spell that? And what’s wrong with her?” Sally Beth asked the woman as she labored over the names.
The young woman looked grim. “B-a-g-a-t-u-i. They know me here. Never mind the baby’s name. You can get that later. She has infection.” Her eyes glared, her lips were pressed into a thin line. “Excisement and infibulation.” She seemed to fairly quiver with rage.
Sally Beth had no idea what that was. She struggled to write it all down. “How do you spell that?” she asked.
“E-x-c—.” The woman’s impatience got the best of her. “Just put down FGM.”
“Triage is right around the corner here, there is a long line, but she looks pretty bad…” Sally Beth stopped. The woman had hurried around the corner, carrying the child and yelling, “I need someone here, please! I’ve got a baby with a really bad infection from FGM!”
There was a flurry of activity. Dr. Sams rushed from one of the examining rooms with Janie following close behind. He turned to her. “You need to stay with him. I think concussion is evident, and you need to stop the bleeding. Go ahead and stitch him up.” He turned to Sally Beth.
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