Children Are Diamonds Read online

  “Do I look Jewish?” he joked. He was a funder, he claimed, out to “witness firsthand” how the money being generated in church collection plates in the U.S. was being spent by Ruthie. Just as the spooks do, in fact, who fund the Sudan People’s Liberation Army guerrillas, who we were feeding, and who were fighting Khartoum’s army and militias. Mossad arms them, too, off and on, when we don’t, in order to bleed the Arabs.

  Herbert kept calling us Baptists Against Famine, instead of Protestants Against Famine, but he prayed like one of those missionary pilots you have to fly with, if you can’t go by truck. My friend Ed prayed very loudly before he took off, and he flew his Cessna with one finger on the map in his lap, peering downward to see if the lakes that the plane’s shadow crossed were the same shape as the cartographer said they ought to be, being fresh out of a flying school in Iowa where people who feel called upon to become missionary pilots train.

  “Shortest name you can pick,” Ed liked to say of his. “Been to the Holy Land, but not Africa before this. But it’s more biblical here. That is, Christ would surely have his work cut out for him.” Ed, with an Iowa Adam’s apple, who sometimes flew Al to Ruthie’s, was flabbergasted at how “biblical” this setting could be. The ancient illnesses, like polio—people crawling around on all fours right into adulthood as a result—and yellow fever, bladder prolapse, and the numbers of the blind, each one led about by a small child with a stick because there was no cataract surgery or treatment for glaucoma or trachoma. And leprosy: grandchildren caring for grandparents with hands or feet eaten away. Babies dying simply from diarrhea. He’d been dumbfounded at how any corn kernels that leaked from the floor of a truck or the seams of a GIFT OP THE AMERICAN PEOPLE bag onto the dirt road were snapped up.

  Herbert wasn’t bogus enough to pretend to be surprised, but he admired how Ruth had strings of Christmas tinsel hanging in the wind year-round to twist and throw off reflections of a spectrum of colors. We sat underneath a banyan tree, watching how huge the stars grew after dark, hearing a hyena giggle, a lion grunt. Herbert was gray-haired, which the local people understood as indicating in a white man (a khawaja, or a mzungu, in Arab-speaking Sudan) power as well as age, the power demonstrated in obtaining emergency deliveries of food. With his fine boots—when they were barefoot—one aged man asked him the following day if he was a king, and maybe had he walked from America? Or was he the leader of the United Nations—because, I supposed, of his imposing, professorial bearing, due to shuttling from the Third World to Washington, D.C., which he hardly attempted to disguise. Could he therefore save their lives? Several told their children he could, and dozens soon ran to surround him, until tears filled his eyes. A mortar shell had gone through the roof of the defunct church in whose rectory we were sheltering, but this rendered it somehow more austere—did not detract from its dignity. In the right light, it was lovely, like old stone spiritually imbued. Herbert had not been told by either his office or ours about Ruth’s ordeal, so that she could avoid gratuitous comforting, but when we were alone, I did ask her if she was okay.

  “An old bag like me? A tough old bird? All right,” she answered flatly, her challenging gaze not letting me escape the suspicion that my question was partly prurient. She wouldn’t give an inch toward satisfying the office’s curiosity as to what had happened to her when the Nuer seized her. The Nuer, who were former allies of our Dinkas, were now fighting them on behalf of Khartoum’s Arabs, after, by their account, being betrayed by the Dinkas. And all three wore “biblical robes,” as she pointed out, remembering our Ed, who amused her. “Over the shoulder, like Jesus and the prophets,” she said. The Nuer had different forehead scarifications than the Dinkas and were being executed by firing squad by the Dinka commander at Loa when they were captured, which angered her.

  My drivers slept late, before starting the mammoth drive back to the coast of Kenya. The Catholics had work for them next. But wherever they delivered it, they usually held out a little extra corn or sorghum for the women who slept with them on these overnights; and so they were likely to come to the trucks stretching and yawning luxuriously. Even a feminist like Ruthie worried mostly that they were bringing AIDS from the cities to camps such as this one, which were so isolated the new diseases were slow to approach. What you had to remember before yelling righteously at them was the chance they ran of being blown up by a mine, machine-gunned, grenaded, mortared, shot, or just pistol-whipped, or having their arms deliberately broken at a rogue roadblock when passing through the territories of guerrilla groups that we weren’t bringing any food to, like the Lord’s Resistance Army, which Khartoum armed in exchange for the Lord’s Resistance Army’s attacking our relief convoys. The Nuer, in fighting our Dinkas, were being fed, oddly enough, by the U.N., though armed by Khartoum. And then there was the so-called West Nile Bank Front, in northern Uganda, which was fighting Kampala and didn’t mean to attack us but sometimes mistook our trucks for the Ugandan army’s, and who were supplied by dissidents in the Congo.

  In the dispensary, at sunrise, laying out her replenished supplies, with a line of patients already waiting outside, Ruth glanced at her watch ironically. “Long night for your boys?” Hunched, obsessive, workaholic, she’d touched me from the start of our acquaintance, and, seeing my softening expression, she softened, too. They had a dangerous drive ahead of them. After we’d been tending the ailing side by side for a while, and after our pale, brainy Herbert had woken up, breakfasted, and then mysteriously been escorted off to meet with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army’s military folk, she took a break and led me out a side door and to a basketball court-sized patch of elephant grass into which—I hadn’t noticed—she’d tramped a continuously whorling, puzzling path. She needed to explain it was a labyrinth because I’d never encountered one before: a helix, or a double helix, or an ear-like, snail-shell scroll to walk assiduously around during a crisis or merely a meditative time. “The archangel” had helped her plot its nine levels, she confided to me. “It saved my life.”

  I nodded as well as shook my head to indicate a promise not to blab about her in Nairobi. She must have sensed I had no intention of doing that, because she also showed me that she kept a regular Roman Catholic rosary to help her out, and Greek worry beads, as well as a North American Indian “spirit stick,” chest-high, that she’d scratched angel or Celtic figures on, with a crescent-shaped quartz crystal suspended in the wooden circle at the top, plus a “gazing globe” of a blue mirror material, set on a pedestal, that witches supposedly couldn’t look into. It all seemed quite as logical as the cruel anarchy hereabouts, with the Dinka and the Nuer tribes split apart from an effective alliance that had previously been winning both of their homelands back from Khartoum’s army, and some of the nearby hill-country Acholi tribesmen fighting alongside the Dinkas but others joining the lunatic Lord’s Resistance Army—who specialized in kidnapping children and who cut people’s lips off if they’d ever bad-mouthed them. The similarly disaffected local Baris were now enlisting in what they called the Equatoria Defence Force, to protect themselves against our Dinkas, and the Arabs, and everybody else. (The Kakwas, who were interspersed among the rest, sometimes got the West Nile Democratic Alliance to fight for them.) And, piercing this dismaying mess, Ruth’s duty was to do her best for the hungry children, the civilian injured, the helpless bystanders, of which I saw more complexities later on. If she was cranky about keeping to her office hours, it was mostly because to work round the clock wouldn’t have answered the immediate needs. The kids were trawling about for minnows, insects, rodents, songbirds—three or four would light a twig fire under a tin can to boil these, with leaves and grass, to share out the fluid. Ruth splinted bones and bandaged gashes, peered at earaches, festering sores, malarial sweats, and gravid bellies.

  Meanwhile a large Arab garrison was being besieged by the Dinkas in the city of Juba, the regional capital, about an hour’s drive in peacetime up the road from where we were. The siege was a loopy one, however, because
the Arabs were equipped with tanks and armored personnel carriers and the Dinkas were not, and the Arabs held the airport, too, for resupply, so they could probably break through at will; they were probably biding their time. Not for the first time, they could blitz through to the Uganda border, then withdraw to the bastion of Juba once again, because of the constant sniping along their supply line. No doubt Herbert and his masters in Washington would keep the Dinkas undersupplied for real warfare.

  Cryptic Herbert returned from his meeting and we bade Ruth good-bye and got back to Nairobi safe and sound, except that I had to tell our Kenyan driver, halfway, that I’d heard over the radio from headquarters that a brother of his had been shot in a political quarrel, Luo versus Kikuyu, in Kitale, his hometown, and killed. Herbert soon flew on to Joburg, and I returned to my storefront, with some side jobs occasionally up at Lokichoggio or Kakuma, or down at the port facilities in Mombasa, for World Vision or Catholic Relief Services, whose country directors were acquainted with me. I could have applied for a regular post, but I preferred the knockabout role—bringing authentic Congolese masks across the border and through Uganda to the classier specialty shops that high-end tourists stop at after their fly-in safaris. I did some fly-ins also, because sometimes the outfitter has to hire a personal guide for each family for them to feel catered to. “That is a giraffe,” I will say. “Oh, how graceful!” they remark. “I didn’t know they were so graceful.” Then the gap-toothed Masai spearman who is hired to come along, in his warthog-hide sandals and red toga, with a sword in his scabbard, ocher makeup, beads, amulets, and neck bands, tells them that giraffe flesh is “the sweetest” of all meats, to add a frisson of life’s ambiguities to the trip.

  As before, I stayed at the Arab’s otherwise, paying him a reduced weekly rate, and resumed tipping a few key service people at the New Stanley, across the street, so I could frequent its rooftop swimming pool, street-level café and bar, etc., as if they really belonged to me. When my Arab landlord happened to hear I’d been in the southern Sudan, I told him I’d worked for the Lutheran World Federation, who were known to be flying food to the populace of Juba, on the Arabs’ side, and over the Dinkas’ siege. That pleased him.

  You meet many travelers in a venue such as the New Stanley—businessmen with attaché cases full of banknotes to persuade the bureaucrats in Government House to sign onto a certain project scheme; ecologists on a mission to save the chimpanzees; trust-fund hippies doing this route overland, now that you can’t go from Istanbul into Afghanistan; specialists from one of the U.N.’s many agencies studying a developmental proposal or transiting to the more difficult terrain of Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Somalia, then resting for a spell on the way back. The New Stanley’s taxi stand was busy from sunrise to pitch dark, and the pool on the roof was patronized by African middle-class parents, some of whom were teaching their kids how to swim, as well as KLM airline pilots and Swissair stewardesses, the Danish or USAID water-project administrators waiting for permanent housing, and bustling missionaries passing through. It was so spacious high up, overlooking the central city, with Tiny Rowland’s few Lonrho skyscrapers standing about on the same level, while the savage street dangers were segregated twelve stories below—so terraced and gracious, with iced drinks, potted trees, a luncheon grill, umbrellas over the tables to buffer the midday sun—that I could retreat there for a respite whenever I had ten or a dozen dollars to burn.

  Nonetheless, I didn’t forget Ruthie: her exposure, of course, yet especially because she had trusted me at the end, not with the secret of whether she had been physically abused, but her solace in the occult Labyrinth, and with the spirit stick and witch-foiling gazing globe, which would have been anathema to the Pentecostal preachers employing her, if they had known. I remembered her at poignant moments at the storefront, when a particular bony child seemed as baffled as her hungry Dinkas were and we were salving his skin sores. Even at the pool I was reminded incongruously of her by an unusual scene. A customer had brought a prostitute up for a sandwich and a drink after transacting their business below: a kid in her late teens, and he seemed like a decent fellow—blond, Dutch, fortyish, probably in humanitarian work, treating her as a comrade, not a servant (and taking the chance of being spotted by a gossipy colleague). But the girl was so enthralled by the sumptuous buffet and lofty view, the light, the sky reflecting in the blue seductive pool, that when he had to leave, she wanted to stay, and couldn’t unless someone else official-looking took her under their wing. So I let her shift to my table, while she watched not just the airline stewardesses swimming laps, then rubbing sunblock on their legs, but Kenyan white-collar fathers teaching their small daughters how to swim. This, she could hardly bear: not to participate, like a girl, and have it happen to her. After watching her frustration, I did get in the shallow end with her, in her underwear, when the respectable lunchtime crowd had mostly departed, and held her up, at the middle, just as a father would have, while she hooted and flailed. It was a precious moment to her—not least because she’d never been in a swimming pool before, but also perhaps to pretend she actually had a father. However, the waiters were displeased because she was in her underwear, not having brought a bathing suit, which mildly scandalized their white customers who remained, and their black ones were more seriously worried because of the notion that AIDS could spread through sharing any water. I’d have had to persuade her to get out, except she already knew the game was up. It was too late to pretend she had a prosperous father who was teaching her to swim. God knows if hers had had more than the fifteen children he acknowledged, living in Kibera, which, by rumor, is the largest slum in Africa. She toweled herself, pulled on her blouse and skirt, and wolfed down the chicken fingers left on my plate before she needed to descend again to the boiling street. Wistfully, holding the menu in front of her face, she bluffed for me that she could read and was only deciding that she had had enough.

  Moments like this, on the roof of the city, when you did want to teach this poor girl—who deserved so much better—to read, made me think of Ruthie, who, out of the blue, I’d heard, had lost her assistant, the Australian lady with the panic attacks, who’d remained in her room a good deal while Herbert and I were there. She’d finally gone bonkers, been evacuated by Ed in his shaky Cessna; so Ruth was holding the fort alone. I thought of her when guiding hot-airballoon safaris for Japanese magnates or Swiss honeymooners, as one of Nairobi’s Euro-American floaters. Because Africa is more interesting than America or Europe—substituting geography for personality—we feel more interesting, too. And newcomers do depend upon us, pump us for excitement, information: the size of the crocodiles that live under Victoria Falls; how dangerous is Zambia for a backpacker; and do we know Jane Goodall? Or else you go out with somebody’s clients to the game-viewing lodge at a water hole and lecture them: “We’re lucky, we’re seeing an aardvark, or an aardwolf. And here come the small fry, the duikers and the dik-diks. Yes, elephants are matriarchal. Will you have another gin and tonic? No, the bandits only hit the campgrounds. There are soldiers in back of this building guarding us.”

  But you have to pay your dues, and I ran into a couple of gaunt, drained Maryknoll nuns, who had trained on the Hudson at Ossining in New York, recuperating on a two-week Christmas holiday from their current post at Chukudum, in the Didinga Hills of borderline Sudan, where a pretty waterfall burbles down the rock bluff behind the garden of the priory and Khartoum’s Antonov bomber wheels over every morning looking for a target of opportunity, although they mostly dealt with emaciated refugees, not rebel fighters. These nursing sisters, in civilian clothes, were lunching at the Thorn Tree Café but reminded me of Ruth—who, they said, was about a week’s walk west of them. They knew the distance because an X-ray technician, a Dinka, after Ruth’s machinery had broken down the year before, had walked all that way, crossing Acholi, Latuka, and Dodoth country, to their dispensary, hoping for work in spite of their having told Ruth over the radio that they had no equipment either—a measure of his
desperation, and he’d traveled carrying only a stick. The Didingas disliked the Dinkas as much as they did the Arabs, now that the two sides had fought over their fertile valley several times and the Dinkas driven the Didingas onto the ridgelines. But he wasn’t killed because Dinka forces were in control, and simply drafted him to carry a rifle.

  The Maryknolls are seasoned heroes. They’re deep-dyed. You meet them on the hairiest road, coming from or going to a posting, and they don’t wilt. They actually don’t believe that God is dead. In Nairobi, too, they were wary but unflappable. We didn’t chat long because they didn’t permit it, but as if by telepathy, the phone at the Arab’s soon rang and it was Al, sounding me out about another trip to Ruthie’s to resupply her with medical kits, toddler formula, cornsoya blend (CSB), her Christmas mail, and spare treats like chocolates and canned crabmeat. The bad news was that a World Food Program delivery of bulk grains was going to be late, and she might like to think about either leaving temporarily or else keeping me for protection and company till it came.

  “Put your money where your mouth is,” Al joked when I hesitated, being, like me, a sort of knockabout—a specialist in drilling boreholes for far-away pastoral peoples like the Kababish, a low-salaried idealist “watering camels in the desert” before he’d married an African, had children, and settled here in town, still was low-salaried, of course.

  “They have gold there in the Kit River, near Opari, you know,” he added, as if that should be an incentive to me. I was startled—glad we were on the phone so he couldn’t see my face. Had one of the drivers told him I was smuggling a few diamonds when I had the chance?