Children Are Diamonds Read online

  When I went to visit him the next day, we struck a deal about direct deposits to my bank account if I stayed awhile (I tried to wangle some term life insurance as well), although Ruth, on the radio, deferred her okay to my extended presence till she met me again. I didn’t expect to stay anyway, but we loaded the Protestants Against Famine Land Cruiser with the standard fortified nutritional preparations, as well as spare stethoscopes, blood-pressure cuffs, tourniquets, penlights, tongue depressors, tendon hammers, antimalarial amodiaquine, acetaminophen, antibiotics such as amoxicillin, co-trimoxazole, ciprofloxacin, and doxycycline, mebendazole for worms, water purifiers, tetracycline eye ointment, paracetamol and ibuprofen, bandages in quantity and tape and nylon strapping, syringes and needles, scalpels, antiseptics for sterilizing, insecticide-treated mosquito netting for many people besides ourselves, IV cannulas, stitching needles and thread, umbrellas and tenting for the sun and rain, white coats for each of us to wear to give us an air of authority, and as much plastic sheeting as I had room for to shelter families in the coming rainy season.

  Al is a sandy-haired Scotch-Irish Bible believer, but funny (he’d now begun calling me “a diamond in the rough”), who said that children are diamonds, too, and knew so from the front lines, having witnessed the successive Ethiopian and Somali famines and the Sahel droughts of the Kababish country in northern Sudan; he knew that you can be nearer my God to Thee without sectarianism. One Christ, many proxies. In fact, he’d snatched his beautiful wife from the Somali furnace and adopted the starveling child she already had, shelving his image of himself until that time as a semicelibate freelance man of the Lord, for uxorial piety.

  Chapter 4

  • • •

  ONCE THE LAND CRUISER WAS LOADED, EVEN BEHIND THE PAP’S compound walls it was a sitting duck for robbers. Since we couldn’t leave it long, I got in at dawn and set off, steering for Limuru, past streaming crowds of people walking to work, with buses and matatus swerving over to pick up those who had any extra money. That momentum carried me along for many miles, past Longonot’s little mountain and Lake Naivasha, to Gilgil and Nakuru—looking down at the flocks of pink flamingos and the pretty acacia forest, where the tourist vans turn off. But the Mau Escarpment rises behind Molo and Londiani, the traffic sporadic but perilously fast, with hell-bent lorries and crusty pickups, while herders switch at zebu-horned cattle and nosy goats in a different time frame alongside. A brief swatch of industry appears at Kisumu, with railroad sidings, a bus station, outdoor market, manufacturing and office buildings of minor height and consequence, two hundred miles out, plus the sweetening scent of the Kavirondo Gulf of Lake Victoria nearby to moderate the tempo of violence implicit in such a place, if you stopped. As per my usual custom, though, when driving toward Uganda and Congo, I continued without pausing to an empty resort hotel on the shore a little beyond. Lovely spreading mango trees, an unmown grassy lawn, a large, wraparound, white-columned porch, and the lake’s grand skyscape and glistening waters, plus delicious crispy fish and rice and curry the Indian owner’s wife makes herself, because so few guests stop by anymore. Although their property is on Kenyan soil, when Idi Amin kicked the Asians and Europeans out of Uganda it wrecked their business for a while, and they haven’t advertised aggressively along the road to try to snag some customers back. They seem a little too old and disheartened by the terror of the Amin years, but, on the other hand, unfretful, as if they glean enough income elsewhere, maybe by assisting the tobacco smuggling that goes on by boat across the international boundary line. The lakeshore breeze, so savory, reminded me of that gambit as I dawdled, giving myself a headache from the noonday wine.

  Maseno, Luanda, Butere, Mumias, Nambare, and Busia. At the border at Busia, I got a visa without the sort of dragging wait that would have been required at Uganda’s consulate in Nairobi, or even paying a bribe, because the elderly immigration official in the little tin hut had a soft spot for “missionaries.” He just came outside to confirm that the contents of my vehicle jibed with my story. Then I hired a young college-educated fixer to speed my paperwork through customs so that I could get clear of the crowds at the barrier and on through Bumulimba, Buwaya, Bugiri, Busowa, Iganga in time to reach the city of Jinja, at the falls that launch the Nile and power Uganda’s industries, and then twist on through wicked Mabira Forest, which expands in the imagination because it’s still the haunt of bandit gangs and rebels, as well as the memory—the ghosts—of thousands of tortured corpses who were dumped there by Idi Amin or his bloody successor, Milton Obote, and finally reach, by dusk, the security and greenery, of the lush, red-soiled, hilly outskirts of Kampala.

  Traffic is not crazy to thread through in Kampala, or the crime comparable to Nairobi’s, with all the banana trees around to eat off of, nor people terrified by their current ruler, Yoweri Museveni, and I moseyed past the university, the general hospital, and the Bugandan king’s palace, over various humpy hills, to my hotel, where I’m known, and enjoyed an immediate drink out on the terrace, with much of the winking city spread out below me. I’m not widely acquainted in Uganda, so seldom bother phoning anybody if I’m leaving early next morning anyway. The Sheraton, the Nile, the Speke, the Fang, the Fairway, with their bars and terraces, are where you go to chat up the passing parade of World Bankers, Monetary Funders, agricultural and AIDS experts, and business hustlers, if you have some time. I did call the offices of a couple of NGO groups that have outposts within striking distance of Ruthie’s place in the Sudan—the Catholics’, the Norwegians’—but they were closed for the night, and when I phoned our trucker’s local dispatcher, he could confirm the sorry news that no delivery of foodstuffs was in the pipeline for either them or our agency as yet.

  Food is so central that you can’t exaggerate the issue. My waitress, for example, was hungry for protein even though she worked in an expatriates’ hotel. There was a pot of gruel in the kitchen for the help, but it wasn’t nourishing enough for a lactating mother, and the chicken parts and fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables the guests ate were exactly inventoried each night to compare what remained in the refrigerator with the restaurant’s orders. Nor did she eat leftovers off of people’s plates, because she’d heard that AIDS could spread by saliva. And, although she wouldn’t be robbed at night once she reached her bus station, she said to get to it she needed to use her tips to take a taxi because men with clubs waited next to a corner between here and there. The other waitresses, not being nursing mothers, could sleep on the floor behind the bar until broad daylight. They hadn’t a lot of customers anyhow because of an Ebola scare up near Masindi—northward, on my trip tomorrow—so that the tourists and other nonessentials had been clearing out of Uganda altogether lately. I’d paid no attention to that matter except for planning not to pick up any hitchhikers along my route. But I felt a pang of startled grief because that Bible-preaching pilot, Ed, who flew for missionaries and had trained in Iowa and justifiably prayed so very loudly on takeoff, following the scrawl of lakes underneath his wings with his finger on the map in his lap, had just crashed, they’d told me at the desk when I arrived. The news was raw. In the Congo. So what I did now, after I finished supper on the terrace, was order a room-service chicken platter to go on my bill and, when she delivered it, had her eat it then and there, as if perhaps in Ed’s memory, which she did with evident, unsmiling, quick, efficient hunger. Then I handed her the equivalent of a couple of bucks to catch her bus safely, at least tonight, while she wiped her mouth with the napkin and prepared to return the tray to the kitchen.

  “Thank you so much,” she said, waiting watchfully for a counterrequest. But I shook my head and opened my palms to indicate that she could go. She wasn’t sure of the signal, however, pausing, then coming quietly to kiss me good-bye. At the same time, feeling lonely, hardly thinking, I regretted my generosity and changed the signal by wiggling my fingers as a summons. She wasn’t going to stay and keep me company, with her six-month-old waiting to be fed, and so we stared at each other. Quizzica
lly, still poised to kiss me on the cheek, she decided I wanted proof she hadn’t been lying and uncovered her breasts, wetting each of my forefingers with her milk and moving them to my lips.

  “Tastes good?” she teased, buttoning up again, leaving me to get to sleep as best I could, though after a bit I began to wonder if AIDS could be transmitted through a mother’s milk.

  I slept late, after waking first with the hadada ibises that roost in the trees in the courtyard and cry their name a hundred times at sunrise before they flap away to feed. Then I pigged out on fresh eggs and melons—last chance for that—and checked with a Kampala office or two that might know the latest conditions up in Ruthie’s particular neck of the woods, as well as Al in Nairobi again. No good reason to cancel my trip?

  “No, no. She says she’s baking a banana pie for you guys!” Al laughed.

  “Who?”

  “You and the spook,” Al told me. “You have a party going up there with you, like last time. From Gulu, probably. He flew there from Kinshasha or Kigali or someplace to see what’s up. Was supposed to go in to Ruth’s with Ed, but Ed was flying the Ebola people from the Congo to Masindi, the poor guy, to investigate the outbreak. He doesn’t sound as dorky as the average minister, when I talked to him on the phone, so I suppose he’s a spook. I get my funding and my orders from America just like you.”

  I said okay, not really sorry about having company on this particular bungee jump. Mine was the hair-shirt hotel, for the nonprofits, and several gangly young Caucasians of both sexes in the dining room were en route to study the disappearing bongo antelope or dispense hearing aids and tuberculosis drugs to the destitute, with nary a Herbert type with many passports in his fanny pack among them. He would have stayed at the landscaped Sheraton, up on the president’s own palace hill.

  I cleared the string of tatty, red-dirt, banana-plantation villages surrounding Kampala, where no one looked either rich or hungry because the equatorial abundance of rainfall and vegetation meant they probably had something to eat no matter who they were. But there weren’t the roadside truckers’ fleshpots, either, like those decorating the east-west route, because this was no longer the fabled “Cape to Cairo” artery from South Africa toward Khartoum and Egypt—a jaunt that had been throttled first by Idi Amin and now choked off again by the war in the southern Sudan. Beyond the city’s suburbs, indeed, signs of human occupancy almost disappeared in the elephant grass and regrown jungle, because for the next eighty or a hundred miles all of this had been a triangle of death, incinerated in Uganda’s own civil wars:Amin’s eight years of butcheries, and then when he was overthrown, Obote in an ostensibly saner manner had killed just as many, till Museveni upended him. So many clanking tanks, half-tracks, and fearsome assault platoons had crawled up this road, mowing down anything that moved, that even in the peace Museveni had established, nobody wanted to take the chance of living anywhere that might be visible in the forest. Sunbirds, bee-eaters, secretary birds, reedbuck, dik-diks, spitting cobras, and black mambas were about, but the people who had somehow survived on-site or returned afterward were not going to trust the neighborhood of the road, except for bicycling quickly along the asphalt. And then the trick was to vanish imperceptibly when you reached your destination: with no visible path to a hidden village that soldiers rumbling by in a grisly truck would notice. Settlements had been scorched, torched, eviscerated horribly, the skulls piled up from the massacres. And women still sometimes flinched—broke into a run for the woods—at the sound of my motor.

  Near Lake Albert and the quarantined town of Masindi, nervous soldiers manned a checkpoint. But they were nervous about catching Ebola, not shaking down a traveler. Since I was headed north toward Gulu, not turning into the epicenter of this minor epidemic, they waved me through with no inspection. I thought of Ed, with that Iowa-flying-school Adam’s apple but less than a year in the air in toto, because he had crashed while landing just across the lake from here, at Bunia in the Congo—his passionate, tenor-voiced prayers, as you sat next to him in the cockpit—who had probably questioned God in his last moments because he wasn’t solo, being that kind of man. But no wonder Al said Ruthie’s poor partner, the Australian lady with the panic attacks, had been hard to fly out. Ed had been sent to collect her, and made it safely back to Nairobi, “and no straitjacket!”

  Past Masindi, the countryside had been less blasted during the seventies and eighties. In the hamlets there were shops, canteens, and wide-boughed village conference trees in whose generous pool of shade everything from school to market day to court proceedings and old folks’ confabulations could be held. Consequently, I sped past thousands of pedestrians (the luckiest had bikes) with basins, baskets, or bundles on their heads, and sticks in hand. Cassava, sesame, yams, millet, groundnuts, and oil palms grew. There was commerce, or simply a relative to visit—all the usual hubbub and bustle. Last time, going with Herbert, we’d ridden in the trucks, so for this trip I would have filled the passenger seat of the car in Kampala with additional goodies for Ruth’s clinic, if I hadn’t been warned about the spook. Traveling at a mile a minute, passing countless individuals trudging, the empty space beside me felt funny, until the crowds thinned for another war zone around the roar of Karuma Falls, where the Victoria Nile swings west to join Lake Albert and become the Albert Nile. A machine-gun emplacement and five jittery soldiers guarded this bridge. I had to stop, but they were correct and polite. West Nile Democratic Alliance guerrillas (Obote holdovers) operated in the national parklands close by; and I drove even faster. Then, nearer Gulu, the landscape opened out again, with cultivated plots, and old folks under a banyan tree in front of provision shops built of sheet metal or thatch and mud. I stopped at one such, the Happy Hour, at the town of Bobi, which had once belonged to the family of a friend of mine in Nairobi who were now Canadian citizens, after Idi Amin had kicked all of the Indians out of Uganda. He made his living drawing wild-animal T-shirt designs that were sold in Vancouver but had asked me to look in and find out what was left of the place, what it might be worth, and whether he should chance the risk of coming back and filing a claim for its return, as the new government permitted “Asians” to do, as long as they were physically present, not merely acting through a lawyer. Would he be a guinea pig if he did, and get macheted?

  What could I say? The African family who, through no violence of their own, had taken over lived in a wattle shack adjoining the establishment and had created a tiny center for gab and pleasure—of which there is little enough in northern Uganda. Nice, conscientious people: what happens is you then feel sorry for them. I looked in on the proprietor without revealing my mission and bought a bottle of banana gin from him. My friend’s father similarly had not been a counter wallah in a spotless tan safari suit but, rather, a down-to-earth man who loved traveling the side roads on buses as a peddler, for the adventure of it, besides running this store at Bobi—and he had died as a democrat, crushed underneath a bus that he was trying to help the driver fix. It had broken down in a dry streambed near Atura, and the jack calamitously collapsed.

  Sharing a drink with the Acholi gentleman who owned the store, to brace myself for encountering the intelligence operative just ahead, I listened to him complain, as other Acholis did, that the troops billeted upon them in Gulu were Ganda from the capital region who disliked northerners such as the Acholis on principle, and especially so since both Idi Amin, a Kakwa, and Obote, a Lango, had been from tribes here in the north. But the Lord’s Resistance Army, multiplying the problem, was itself an Acholi rebel movement that had gone completely bonkers; it kidnapped children and turned them, by terror, into robots, he said, who ran out on the flanks during a battle and rattled the bushes to draw the fire of Museveni’s troops, so that their bosses, in safety, knew where to shoot.

  At the Gulu Hotel, always half empty, I was remembered, given my same room, with no one else’s bags in it or messages. Maybe I could just go on alone tomorrow. I rested, then sat outside by the paddleball court with a
Pepsi watching some officers’ kids, privileged teenagers, whack at the game. There was also an exercise bicycle, with a white man, well-knit, well-kitted out, pumping on it, timing his sprints. Good pecs and abs. “God bless!” he called after a while, and I knew I’d found my man.

  When I asked if he went to gyms much in the States, he said he had “tried out for the Steelers once, but they flunked me. They gave me five thousand dollars for signing—which was a helluva lot to me right then; I had debts—and flew me to Arizona. But they put the starters against us, wearing shorts and sneakers, and us candidates all suited up for training camp in full uniform, trying to outrun, outfeint them, and catch a pass. No contest! Round-trip ticket!”

  Not faceless like pale Herbert, who could be in academia, Craig grinned, introducing himself. He showered; said he was “church-affiliated,” when he came back, “a consultant on delivery systems. Angola. Burundi. Goma.” Didn’t mention where he had flown in from, or who with. No, hadn’t known poor Ed, or Herbert. “Maybe a voice sometimes on the radio.”

  “You consult for the Baptists?”

  “I have my divinity degree.”

  Al could have quizzed him on theological matters if he’d wanted to, but my knowledge of the Bible is spotty. Craig agreed that his accent was Texan, when I asked. The town of Liberty, in the oilfield salt marshes near Houston: so heat and bugs were not a problem for him, and the cattle here were similar, he noticed, to the Brahman breeds that could survive in that hardship country. Texas Tech, in Lubbock, had educated him.

  “I thought you were from Mossad,” I said, to startle him out of pretending to be a hick.

  He laughed. “You’re giving me more credit than is due. I don’t even have an Uzi.”

  “Well, you’re with somebody. They used to fly in Kalashnikovs, not Uzis. Herbert had three passports.”