Children Are Diamonds Read online

  “Fire me!” she exclaimed when she noticed this new man, Craig, dragging his duffel out of my Land Cruiser. “It’s the only way I’m going to get out of here.” She groaned with impatience as I fumbled to find her small packet of Christmas mail, overdue by a month. Tears welled in her eyes, but she didn’t forget to yell suddenly to the parents of a little girl who was being led away.

  “You have the stuff for her? I’m out,” she asked. I had forgotten this particular girl and what meds she required in the time I’d been gone, as anybody not a doctor would have, but for Ruthie, her emergencies, and therefore my presence in them, picked up as though from yesterday. “Insulin,” she prompted, clutching the letters and magazines I’d located next to the chickens and between the seats, while curtly greeting Craig with her free hand.

  “Sorry to drop in on you. Did you know I was coming?”

  She flipped through the envelopes she’d received, looking for what to expect, almost ignoring him.

  “Part of the cost of doing business. It’s called donor dinners in the States, isn’t it? You’ll find we’re pretty basic here. Life and death.”

  Then she laughed to dilute her rudeness and nodded her thanks to both of us as the squawking birds were unearthed and handed to the Acholi cook, whose name was Margaret. The whole load being uncommonly precious, of course, Ruth was torn between wanting to supervise the unloading of the dispensary’s supplies, checking special items she had radioed for, and going off immediately to pore over her holiday cards and letters, already offended that a stranger had seen her on the verge of weeping, and bristling (as I fathomed) that there might not seem enough of them.

  I mentioned how sorry I was about Ed, and how remorseful he must have been that passengers had died in the wreck. Was it quick for him, or in the hospital at Bunia? She said there’d been a fire, but no one knew whether he’d been alive in the fire. Al’s idea was that Ed’s “finest hour” had been evacuating Ruth’s helper who had flaked out after I’d left. Both of them high-strung and devout, they’d bolstered one another; he’d met the Cessna in Nairobi and stuck her directly on a plane legging toward Australia. “No, no,” said Ruth, scanning a hand-drawn Christmas card from her niece, proudly showing it. “What he did at Ayod was braver.” A Catholic lay sister had lost her leg during a food drop—hit by a sack, out on that spongy plateau where planes couldn’t land, trucks couldn’t reach, where the famine was most constant and most cruel, the vultures most insolent and overfed. A two-engine plane would buzz the drop zone once a week and guys inside kick fifty-kilo bags of grain out of the tail, before zooming off to the next site. She was a famine expert, new to Africa and so urgently invested in the food’s arrival—that no more kids would die—that she left the sidelines, her arms raised as if to signal the plane: that it not skip her people and pass overhead. And every nun in Nairobi was waiting to give blood for a transfusion if someone would extract her. Which fell to Ed, based in Gulu for that week, to pick her out of the largest swamp in Africa, a hamlet and an airstrip where he’d never been, and no surplus fuel for a mistake. There were scenes at Ayod worse than ours. Even a news photographer, after the assignment of tracking her, had killed himself.

  Ruth badgered me to find the insulin in the piles of supplies, also a box of powdered milk, before we were shown to our room by Attlee, the brusque Kikuyu, whose virtues included the fact that he felt no kinship with the locals. Then we were presented with a pitcher of water and a metal basin to wash in by Margaret, who was from Gulu but a sophisticate, having been married to a man from Entebbe and learned English and amenable Western ways, before he left her and died of AIDS. She’d returned to Gulu with her three children and now was supporting them, plus the orphans of several cousins, on her salary from Ruth of sixty dollars a month, which I’d delivered on my last trip down to the man who cooked a daily bowl of gruel for all of them. Guiltily, I couldn’t meet her eyes because yesterday, in Gulu, I’d been too preoccupied with Craig and other tensions or errands to remember to look him up for news of how they were doing to pass on to her, or to advance him more money. She had no way to get down there. Apologizing, “I will, I will,” I promised, thinking Ruth should have reminded me over the radio. But Ruth and I were childless. Tears glistened in Margaret’s eyes. I told her I hadn’t expected that she’d still be here, but I didn’t believe that myself.

  Attlee had families scattered about, in the polygamous tradition, but appeared more protective of Ruthie at present than conscious of his paternal responsibilities elsewhere. Being named for a British prime minister afforded him acerbic amusement. He was not unduly pro-white, but since Ruth was an underdog on the Nile, why not look out for her? He and Makundi, her Kamba houseman, were watching her mix the powdered milk, when I noticed a toddler clinging with both skimpy arms to her ample hip, malnourished, malformed—his head disproportionately large, because skulls can’t shrink—but closely watching the cup she would soon feed him the milk from, and her eyes, hands, and face.

  “My addition,” she said. Father Leo, the Maryknolls’ priest, had dropped him off. “So, meet little Leo.”

  After a nap, I wandered out and found myself staring upward inside the holey old church, reinforcing my memory that the mortar shell through the roof had not reduced its solemnity. The light let in was rather ennobling, so I knelt and prayed in this deconsecrated house of worship of a denomination none of us belonged to. It wasn’t even Irish, like Father Leo, but built by long-dead Italians in the era when this region was “the white man’s grave.”

  “Craig,” I hollered when I saw my companion walk by. He took a couple of seconds to turn, as if reminding himself that that was his current name; or was I too suspicious? He said he had tipped Attlee to walk him around the paths while I was asleep and had been “sobered and stunned” at the maze of children’s graves alongside many of them, each small mound of earth decorated with a scrap of clothing or a torn toy, for the life cut short to be remembered by. His lips were compressed and, being a doer, after only glancing inside the church, he fell to examining Ruth’s jeep, up on blocks. I’d brought a tire at her request, and we put that on the wheel that was flat, using a bicycle pump on the rest. Working together, out of breath, made us relax.

  “She shouldn’t be stranded,” he said, and asked about the waves of starvation that had swept through here, though not a neophyte who needed a lot explained to him. In the sixties, after independence from the British, it had been mainly these local forest tribes, such as the Baris and Acholis, who logically should have been part of Uganda to begin with anyway, fighting the Muslim government. Then in the seventies a new president of Sudan had made peace with them, with regional freedom of religion and cultural autonomy, until the eighties, when a fundamentalist sharia swing reignited the war, led now by the big plains tribes, Nuer and Dinka, pastoralists living between these mountains and forests and the vast Sahel of the Arabs. It was a more serious insurrection, with the southern black army officers defecting to command the rebels, and on the government side, the Baggara Arab tribes armed for lethal, devastating cattle raids against their neighbors, the Dinkas. The U.S. was allied with Khartoum for strategic reasons at the time—to harass Gaddafi on Libya’s flank—and discouraged transporting even food aid to the southerners.

  “So a quarter million starved; died,” I reminded Craig. “The survivors got to Ethiopia.” He nodded noncommittally. It wasn’t less humane than current American policies with regard to Mobutu in Zaire, or in Angola, but when the refugees were driven out of Ethiopia in 1991, with cannons firing behind them, the government having changed, Khartoum’s had also, in the sense of cozying up to Libya and other radical Arab states, and Washington began supporting these rebels it had shunned before. “So they starved, getting back to the Nile.”

  By his expression, he knew that, too. His question was about these past three years, when the revolutionaries were shrugging off the Marxism they had adopted when the West was neglecting them, or when the food in the pipeline wa
s interrupted by ship delays or pledges not met or diversions to half a dozen other crises, like Somalia’s, more publicized and just as bad. “I’m like you,” I said. “I’m not familiar with everything that went on. They killed some U.N. people along the way, these guys, which didn’t help their cause.”

  He nodded. The jeep had mechanical problems and Ruth hadn’t known which spare parts to ask for, so she was still stranded. He leaned under the hood, under the car. My Land Cruiser, packed to the roof with medical replenishments and food supplements, had been unloaded, and what was left were bundles of church-collected clothing we’d wedged in between. People at the post-and-wire gate, in the luscious twilight, were asking for that. I gave out an armful—Indiana barbecue smocks and incongruous suchlike—but when the crowd grew, Ruth and Attlee emerged, angry telling us to come to supper.

  “These guys aren’t angels either, these warlords, just because we’re helping them to bleed Khartoum. They torture and kill.”

  “Oh, I know,” Craig muttered. By a shaft of telepathy, I asked if it was like being in Vietnam. “I was in Laos,” he said, walking away.

  Supper was subdued, except that Ruthie enjoyed having her three-year-old on her knee, sucking the juiciest tidbits off the chicken bones, and we had a bottle of South African wine. The contents of her mail, or perhaps its scarcity, had not pleased her, but the little boy, still in starvation mode—wobbly-necked, not blinking much or twisting on her lap, and mainly drinking milk out of the cup in preference to solids, but imitating the grown-ups’ rhythms with their wine, because he was watching us—certainly did. Snatched from the crucible, Leo was going to live, and see Ohio someday.

  Father Leo had been radioed and managed to show up, livening us before it got too late. A shambling, white-haired Dubliner, he explained humorously as he wolfed a taste of everything that he was in Africa because he had “tired of counseling drunks.” He agreed to stay the night so he could speak with Craig, but in the meantime he enlightened our curiosity about the orphan, whom he had found on his last legs beside a foothill track near an Acholi village, Palotaka, whose inhabitants were in such straits they had decided not to feed him. He was not Acholi—his words probably Latuka. His parents, fleeing through, had been killed.

  “Leo’s a neutral,” I explained to our spook. “A man of the cloth. He and the Catholic bishop of this region were put under house arrest in a straw hut for three months because the Dinkas thought they weren’t favoring the Dinkas enough.”

  Craig glanced at Ruth. She said, “In the hill villages they’ll sometimes go ahead of him so if a mine blows up it won’t be him.”

  Leo changed the subject to Ruth’s jeep. I asked him what was wrong with the world. “The world is broken,” he said with a rueful chuckle, and reached to dandle his namesake.

  “Leo, the Lion!” I toasted. And then: “To Africa, our future and our past!” The baby gripped his milk.

  Craig asked about the calisthenic shouts we were hearing from a nearby rise.

  “They do it before they let them go to sleep,” Ruth said. “It’s a training camp. I block it out. They take a new batch up to the front every other week.”

  “But it’s some protection for you?” I suggested.

  “Nothing is a protection. They either draw the Antonov or they, the officers, get drunk.” She suddenly remembered that she ought to grab a flashlight and show Craig where the bomb shelter was, a short trench with log lumber laid over half of it, so he’d know where to jump in case of a raid. He knew Antonovs, the Soviet freight planes bought surplus by Khartoum for the purpose of bombing the south, since they had no regular bombers. It droned overhead, looking for targets of opportunity from eight or nine thousand feet up, and the crew might kick bombs out of the tail, much as the U.N.’s food plane crew kicked grain sacks out of their aircraft’s rear end for the food drop, only without worrying about a Stinger.

  The moon was rising, and we heard drumming and singing from the civilian quadrants of the landscape, as well as the drill sergeant yells in the military camp, with recruits chanting patriotic slogans as they did squat jumps and push-ups. Craig grinned.

  “Are you going to be able to help her?” I asked, after he’d chatted alone with Leo and was preparing for bed in the monastic cell we were going to share. He’d warned me to fall asleep first, because he snored.

  “How about you, if I were to ask you the same?”

  “Well, I’ll try. But we’re not in the same position.”

  “In war, yes. If a bullet had come through the windshield today, who would it have hit?”

  “I mean money.”

  “Can I raise some? This war has created four million refugees and two million dead. I’m a pastor from Bissonnet Street in Houston, and I can’t even fix her jeep.”

  I smiled, repeating how Herbert, in this same room a month ago, had opened his overnight bag and three passports from three different countries had tumbled out, and we’d then listened unwillingly to the poor Australian woman weeping in the next cubicle, through the plaster wall, as if she, and not Ruthie, had been captured and raped.

  “Five minutes,” Craig insisted. “I’m like a band saw.”

  Chapter 5

  • • •

  CRAIG AND FATHER LEO HAD GONE THEIR SEPARATE WAYS WHEN I woke, to a lovely morning sun and boundless rolling perspectives, after I climbed a viewpoint behind the church that overlooked the modest gorge of the Bahr al-Jebel, the “Mountain Nile,” flowing under the Imatong Range, Sudan’s highest, behind the ridges behind me, all downstream from the Victoria and Albert sections of the Nile, in Uganda’s lake country, but not yet joined by the Bahr al-Ghazal, the “Gazelle River,” from the west, and the Sobat, from the east, near Malakal, to form the White Nile. Then, at Khartoum, the Blue Nile from Ethiopia joins the White to constitute the famous Nile that flows to Shendi, Atbara, Wadi Halfa, Aswan, Luxor, Cairo, and the delta close to Alexandria: nowhere, though, more beautiful than around here. Beyond the gorge sat endless savannah grasslands, wood-lands, parkland in tropical, light-filled yellows and greens, where, although the hartebeest, kob, buffalo, and reedbuck may already have been eaten and the rhinos and elephants shot to buy guns with their horns or tusks, the vistas remained primeval because for decades civil war had prevented any other kind of development, like logging, tourism, or mining.

  I had a spear-length stick in hand, to defend myself afoot or keep the wildlife at bay, and to more appropriately remind myself of how the Dinkas, as a cattle people from time immemorial, had been able to protect their herds and pasturage from the Baggara Arab tribes whose homelands adjoined theirs, even though the Baggara domesticated horses as well as cattle and rode into battle, instead of merely running. A Dinka, who could run for twenty miles with six spears in his free hand, attacking from the reeds and rushes of every river crossing, every hyacinth swamp, was not a foe whose cattle could be rustled and women stolen with impunity. What had skewed the equilibrium of spear versus spear was when Khartoum had given the Baggara guns and sent its army in motor vehicles and helicopter gunships to mow down the lumbering cattle who escaped the horses, driving the surviving herdsmen off of their beloved prairies, steppes, and swamps and plains.

  Earlybirds had lined up at Ruth’s already, as we ate our oatmeal and Craig completed his customary jog. He was borrowing Attlee again, but I told him I hadn’t enough gas to let him take the Toyota. Ruth, when they left, called him “Captain America.” Sleeplessness had masked her eyes like a raccoon’s.

  “Is he or Herbert going to do more harm than good?” I asked.

  “No, no, they won’t harm a hair on his head.” She did an imitation of Makundi—who was laughing—mimicking the rotor blades of a rescue helicopter swooping in. “He’s not to be messed with, unlike you or me.”

  I mentioned the four U.N. relief workers the rebels had killed—and one of whom the Dinkas had also held under “house arrest” earlier, like Father Leo, but for trying to census their civilians to regulate the feeding p
rogram, a Filipino woman Ruth had known. She groaned.

  “More good than harm, though?”

  “I want them to have their bazookas,” she answered finally. “I want them to have their land back, and everybody else.” The problem being, of course, that these river villagers had been displaced by the refugees. She couldn’t stomach the firing squads, the killing of every prisoner on the battlefield, the torture of dissenters, who were kept in holes dug in the ground with a log laid on top and taken out once a day to be whipped and fed. She therefore didn’t encourage the SPLA to bring her soldiers with wounds or fever; they had Dinka doctors who had trained in Moscow or London for that. Also, closer to the Juba front, a Norwegian NGO operated a medical station where Scandinavian surgeons cycled in and out for three-month stints, which was about as long as anybody could stand the gaff: that is, eleven operations a day, often no electricity or window screens, no airlifts, ambulances, maybe no anesthetics or antibiotics. The patients might have been transported in a pushcart or rolled along on a flatbed truck empty of fuel or burned their final energies in stumbling along, hit several days before. You didn’t give transfusions or much food, and the scalpel was the principal anti-infection agent—just scraping with it before you sewed the patient up. The gatekeeper was a fierce young Irishwoman who seemed to think the SPLA was an offshoot of her own country’s IRA and had enraged Ruth when her nursing assistant had had to be invalided by Ed from the airstrip the Norwegians controlled—the Irishwoman asked whether she had obtained an “exit visa” from an SPLA commander “authorizing” her to leave. That a woman could become a “war junkie,” like a man, and so suspicious of “spies,” Ruth thought absolutely heinous.