Deep South Sudan

May 20th

You touch the boy’s face to try to get his attention.  He presses his temple into your palm and he looks up and he flashes a smile.  This is the closest thing to a hello that he’s given you since you arrived in the TB ward fifteen minutes ago.  Your teenage daughters laugh and say his name.  He doesn’t look over your shoulder at them.  He’s almost looking at you, almost looking at death, sitting patiently in a corner of the long rectangular room. 

His smile is as fragile as a first poem and you’re afraid it might disappear.  He’s still very far away, his eyes focusing and blurring.  The surface of a lake that calms down for a moment, then shimmers and stirs with the wind.  So you say his name over and over.  And you caress his face and tickle his ears and tell him to eat the food that’s been cradled in his fingers for over ten minutes.  He’s not eating these days and he’s not talking.  You’ve been away for two weeks and in that time he’s grown imaginably thin. 

In high school a student teacher once told you not to compare anything with the victims of the holocaust, the skeletal black and white bodies in history books.  It was such a singularly horrific event that the people who suffered and died cannot be paraded out in the present for a mere simile or metaphor.  All these years later you still feel the righteous heat in the teacher’s sentiment, and you feel you ought to find another, more politically correct comparison.  But there are none. 

You met Opoka Joseph about a month ago.  Some missionaries from across town asked you to go and see him at the hospital, and you said you would.  You ran into the two Americans on the dusty highway that hollers through town.  It was Mandela Day, and the namesake of this particular 24 hour period was walking beside you with a camera strapped around his neck.  The day had nothing do to with the former South African president.  It was all about Mandela Joseph, the Houdini of Cornerstone, always disappearing and making you hold your breath for days (or weeks).  He was newly arrived after a long absence from home, and you wanted to express to him how much you loved him so you were taking him out to lunch at one of Nimule’s finer dining establishments.  You told the missionaries that it would be easy to remember the name of the sick boy in the hospital, because your kid – this cameraman here with the big grin – happens to be graced with the same name.

You’ve noticed these repetitions in your life before and they’ve always meant something, or you believed they must mean something but you weren’t able to put the significances into words…

A week passed and you caught wind of the missionaries departure for the States.  Now that you had no one to impress with your good deeds, you finally made the time to visit the boy.  He was in a ward full of adults, white bandages across his birdlike chest and smaller bindings taped to his lower abdomen.  His eyes stared through you like twin portraits of lost wolves.  His mouth was slightly open and you imagined all the light and color of the world diminished into the act of breathing, the lungs straining against a wounded chest.  What did it feel like to be him?

You met his caretaker, Moses, who isn’t related to the boy, but lives near the boy’s sister.  Moses knew how the family of the wife’s husband feared the boy, his abscesses, his constant coughing – how they were certain Joseph would eventually infect his sister’s children.  And so he took it upon himself to bring the boy to the hospital and to stay with him night and day.  The hospital in Nimule is so understaffed that the relatives and friends of patients will sometimes remain with their loved ones throughout an illness, feeding them and sometimes bandaging them, doing the work of the nurse, because the nurse has twenty other patients to attend to…

By the time you met Joseph he had already spent a month sleeping on a forest green mattress in the middle of a childless ward.  He’d been staying with his sister, because both of his parents had passed away.  The story you were given by the Moses and the sister was simple:  Joseph’s mom and dad grew very thin and very sick, and then they died.  The day after you met the boy, the pieces of his family’s history came into brutal, unchangeable alignment; Joseph’s bloodwork showed he was infected with HIV.  Though his parents were never diagnosed with the virus, all the details of their deaths screamed its letters.  

Jospeh was also found positive for tuberculosis.  The test results were revealed to Moses and the sister on Friday, April 17^th, and when you came that day to visit the boy you found his bed stripped of it’s sheets.  Your imagination didn’t have the time to consider the worst possible scenario, because a sick old lady smiled at you from her place of convalescence (or eventual departure) and she pointed you in the direction of the TB ward.  You found him there, still the only child in the room, still coughing, and still wonderfully and fearfully made.  Sometimes you can see the beauty of God’s creation more strikingly in the weakness of a child’s body than in its strength and health.  You are torn apart by the fact that no child should ever have to suffer such pain, you touch the gulf between what should be and what is, you see the immense value of life when that life is verging on death.

Somehow you managed to live in Africa for almost four years without coming face to face with a child living with HIV.  And then Joseph presented himself, and you were delighted to have the opportunity to bring him food as the sun set each day.  Your haphazard heart, divided by so many obligations and emotions at any given moment of any given day, felt at peace when you were with him in the evenings.  You discovered his love for mangoes; he sucked on the things for several minutes even after all the edible parts appeared to be gone.  You discovered his need for contact; he liked holding your hand for interminable spells and saying “how are you” every now and then.  It was the only English he knew.  One night he surprised you and greedily pulled your hand so that your palm rested on his face.  You could feel his smile against your lifeline.  Some of your girls, Jane and Janet, were there and they asked him in Acholi what he was trying to do.  He didn’t answer, but just sighed and laughed a little.  You knew this was dangerous.  You knew you were falling in love.

Oftentimes you went to hang out with Joseph and found him drugged up and half asleep.  On one of his pharmaceutically challenged days, you went to see him with the other Joseph, the magician with the unpredictable disappearing act.  He volunteered himself and you were glad to take him along.  At the hospital, in the two-tone ward (blue and grey), you laid your hands on the boy’s head and prayed for him as he drifted in and out of consciousness, and Mandela Joseph stood beside you, his hand on the boy’s arm, his mouth also issuing an amen when “amen time” arrived.  

Then you left for a holiday of sorts, and asked Pastor Santos to keep sending the girls with pots of nutritional support to Joseph.  You went to Adjumani in Northern Uganda to see a dear friend say goodbye to the place that she and her husband poured their common heart into for the past seven years.  Then you traveled to Kampala to meet Pastor Juma and Mandela Joseph.  You were finally taking the magician to see a child psychologist – a plan you meant to enact almost two years ago, but were persuaded against.  To make a long story short, you were wrong to wait and worry that there wasn’t enough money.  Now everyday is Mandela Day, because the kid hasn’t escaped from the home since he got back from his time abroad.

And when you finally returned to Sudan you had to attend to new visitors from America and dive back into all the random and not so random tasks of running a children’s home.  You had all these excuses and you kept yourself from visiting the hospital until today. 

You are still touching his face when his smile starts to fade along with the friendly sparks in his eyes.  He seems to lose all awareness of you, his pupils like analog TV screens shutting down.  The sorghum posho remains forgotten in his hand and it hangs halfway off his fingertips until Moses takes it away.

You tell your daughters and the nearby TB patients that you’re going to pray now.  They fall silent and you talk to God, asking him to stop by the ward this afternoon and fill up the kid’s devastated body with light.  Then you say amen and stand up straight and gently say to the girls, “It’s time to go.”         

The days rush by like crowds of unruly children at a summer fair after dark, and I don’t make the time to tell you about the some of most remarkable moments that occur in the hours between sunrise and sunset.  But let me try to tell you at least one thing that is worth remembering, worth pondering.

Last week I saw Christine for the first time since I returned to Nimule.  She came with her uncle and her mother, a decent old mom who happened to willfully deceive the original caretakers of our home into believing that she was an aunt.  A common trick among the families who come seeking our help, but a trick that we have nonetheless grown wise toward.

In times of struggle – in times of heartache – the true familial associations tend to reveal themselves.  When Christine began to suspect that she was pregnant last November, she didn’t tell us.  She ran to her family’s home in the neighboring village of Mugali; she ran to explain herself to the very woman who had brought her into this world.

Christine’s face looked thinner than it did nearly four months ago, and her eyes seemed weary with thoughts and questions beyond resolution.  She wore a black skirt and a loose white blouse dotted with tiny clusters of red, blue, and grey.  For most of her visit she leaned slightly forward on the couch, and no stranger would’ve been able to recognize that she was pregnant.  Only when she leaned back did the bulge above her waist become unmistakable. 

To our surprise, she and her family had come to receive our blessing.  The family had decided, in stark contrast to our presumptions, to give Christine to the father of her child.  In fact, they intended to go to the father’s home right after our benediction.  Whether or not Christine had agreed to be handed over to the man, I don’t know and I didn’t ask. 

Betty, her mother, had fallen ill shortly after we met in early December, and she only recovered her health a week or so before she came see us, again.  We were the bookends to her sickness, and in her temporary infirmity she decided not to let her daughter go.  Maybe she knew her weakened heart couldn’t withstand the loss.  Maybe she knew she needed all her motherly strength to witness her daughter’s final transition into womanhood.  Whatever the case, the intervening months gave the family enough time to set aside a bit of money and a put together a domestic start-up kit of sorts (pots and pans, baby clothes and bedsheets).  They didn’t want Christine walking into her new life empty-handed.  They wanted her to have something to show besides the evidence of her fertility.

Pastor Juma spoke to the family for several minutes, encouraging them and offering Christine a few tips on living in a polygamous household.  Pump water and cook and help the other wife whenever and wherever you can.  This way she’ll be easily persuaded that you are a woman who will give, and not just take.  I flinched inwardly at his use of the word woman.  Sitting there on the couch, as quiet as a landmine sewn in an abandoned schoolyard, Christine didn’t look like a woman.  She looked like a sleepless girl, a child on the edge of a dizzy spell.

When Juma finished speaking he asked if I had anything to add.  I told Christine that we still loved her.  I think I told her that.  And I said that she and the husband, and by extension her husband’s other wife, would always be welcome at our church.  You have nothing to be ashamed of anymore.  You are still our daughter.

After I spoke we prayed together there in the hard, almost accusatory morning light that came in through the open door and curtainless window.  Then Christine, her mother and her uncle stood up and left, each of them passing through the light saturated doorway, each of them finding their own method of descending the unreasonably high steps to the ground.  Christine skipped off the final step and landed with a impressive amount of grace for someone in her condition.  I wanted to follow her out and stand on the veranda and watch her walk away, but I didn’t move.  Instead I stared at the vacant air that she had briefly traversed as if I was trying to see the currents left in the wake of her tiny, conclusive, and terribly endearing hop. 

A few days later, I sat through a somewhat muted worship service and only afterwards did I realize that Christine hadn’t been there.  It was Easter Sunday, and looking back on the day it seems that in the moment I raised my hand and thanked the Lord for all he gives to this loathsome, lovely world and to my own private enigma (the spirit he put in my chest), I found I was touching the cold circumference of what was missing, the residual shape of a child’s life, the limits of a deserted country. 

How strange to praise him even with this grieving and vacant shell at my fingertips…

The other day one of the new girls, Dorine Kide, is there hanging out in my office when in walks Fred Iyaa with some mangoes and he hands two of them over to me, because, you see, Fred Iyaa and I are very, very tight.  The mangoes are shamefully small and light years away from ripe, but I take my little homegirl by the hand and we walk outside and we take a seat on the church’s dilapidated veranda and we start peeling off the green skin of the fruit and chowing down on the stringy, sunset orange insides.  Storm clouds are pasting themselves across a baby blue paper sky.  An evolving collage of crumpled up black and white photos.  Shapeshifting origami animals made of newsprint.  Silent movie star faces projected heavenward over and over again until they’re all mixed up – abstractions now rather than celluloid images.  This is what the clouds are like, isnt’ that right Dorine?  She is sitting beside me – the sweetest creature in all the world – and she shakes her head in agreement.  Then the wicked, demon-possessed monkey, Johnny Cash, comes running around the corner and spoils our moment.  Dorine jumps up and lets out a minor shriek.  Johnny gets his weird humanoid hands on one of the discarded mango peels, sniffs it like person inhaling the steam from a bowl of stew, and then proceeds to do the chowing.  Dorine and I look at him sitting there and going to town on the leftover mango and we look at each other and we smile.  I tell her the painful truth:  Monkey is Monkey.  You’re going to have to know and understand that if you’re going to survive Cornerstone Children’s Home. 

—

According to our report, Dorine’s father was fatally poisoned on March 21^st, 2006.  The same fate befell her mother on November 17^th of the last year.  The word “poisoned” may be misleading.  Poisons do exist in this culture and they are used to murder people from time to time, but this is also a place where things like typhoid, cholera, malaria, and dysentery (to name a few) are regular corporeal visitors – or squatters – who slip in through the backdoor and do their damage without ever being identified.  Of course, the uncertainty of the perpetrator doesn’t change the consequence. 

Dorine and her six brothers and sisters were divided and placed in the care of relatives, who were already overburdened with other orphans from other familial tragedies.  I was in the States when Dorine’s relatives asked the pastors for help, so I can only speculate about how Juma and Santos resolved to take her in.  Nevertheless, I imagine that they checked and rechecked her story, investigated her living conditions, then took a good long look at her, paused for about a half second, and decided to accept her.  And I’m sure their final decision had nothing to do with those big, faintly mischievous eyes.   

—

We stomp our feet on the steps, then go into the dining room to escape the rain.  Johnny Cash and a parade of kids join us.  The windowpanes fell out of the double doors months ago and there’s been no money to put in new ones, so in the space of a few minutes a reservoir of rainwater spreads itself over the floor tiles.  Johnny performs acrobatic feats from one end of the dining room to the other, which everybody enjoys, except for me.  And maybe Dorine, too.  Eventually we all sit down, even Monkey, who finds a pleasant spot in one of the empty window frames.  And we talk and laugh and make funny faces and find all sorts of ways to pass the time. 

When it’s shining through the veils of clouds and rain then the afternoon light almost feels like moonlight.  Time could shift itself around in this kind of illumination; time could even take a good look at us and decide to conclude its endless march.  This is enough, it might say.  This is as far as I needed to go.    

I watched Matt take off last week and felt the same old feeling crackle and spin like a pawn shop record.  I’m the constant roommate in Sudan, though the room is often empty save for me (and the cockroaches, the skeeters, and the occasional scorpion).  I’m glad Matt got to spend some time with me and the countless creatures of darkness with whom I share my hut.  He was a kung-fu warrior when it came to Microsoft Excel, a revered New Testament scholar when it came to Bible Study with the kids, and an encyclopedia when it came to Will Ferrell’s oeuvre .  One of those attributes proved somewhat useless at a Christian home for marginalized kids and in an office without a single business degree, but no place is perfect.     

Another of my transitory hut-mates, a fellow by the name of Seth, said to me once that it must be strange to mark your time by arrivals and departures.  I couldn’t deny the peculiarity of my condition.  Someone’s time is always coming to an end.  A bed is always getting stripped of it’s sheets.  A plane is always vanishing into a spaghetti western horizon.  And I’m always returning from the airstrip to a home that, at least for a spell, is quieter, more contemplative, as if our rambunctious children’s habitat  has been temporarily exchanged with a 19^th century German library.  During that post-departure time I find myself a chair and a shady place, and I lean back in order to fully experience what I can only describe to you as the precious and sorrowful absence of Americans.  Though I may search, I will not find any such life forms in any of the rooms or any of the latrines or any of the locations where they tend to be, to exist, to occupy.  So what do I do?  I have no choice but to eat the beef jerky or Oreos that my fellow countrymen leave with me, read their books, and discover anew my capacity to keep on keeping on.  I know the resilience that I find in myself is also present within the hearts of the kids.  I can readily imagine what will happen when I leave later this year, when my leaving marks the end of my 24/7 ministry.  The home might feel somber for a few hours or a few days, but soon enough the kids will be playing soccer and rehearsing Gospel songs, getting into fights and forgetting their manners, shouting, crying, laughing, and exceeding expectations.  The way they know how to throw you for a loop or two… 

I try not to think about missing two or three years with them.  Though I plan to come back to this area, maybe even this town, those years still appear to my mind like naive boats, drifting toward the place where the ocean drops off into nothing and so distant that they’re already unrecoverable, already gone.

March 2nd

Why don’t you want to play music in the church?  Everything is there for you – keyboards, guitars, mics, everything!
He’s leaning back on the couch as I ask the question.  One of his hands is covering his mouth and he mumbles something through his fingers.  Whatever it is it causes the teachers and pastors in the room to chuckle.  Awi translates for my sake.  (While I can grasp Arabic to a certain extent, I only know greetings in Mandela’s tribal language, Madi.)
It’s like he saying that there are already musicians in the church.
He thinks there’s no space for Lucky Boy?
Yeah.
Tell him there’s plenty of room for him, too.
Awi explains this to him, and he responds with only a syllable or two, but it elicits more laughter from what has quickly become his audience.
Awi grins and gives me his response:  Unknown.
He might as well of told me to piss off, so I probably should capitulate, but I don’t.  Instead I say, The songs you’re singing in town aren’t songs about God.  Do you not want to sing about him?
More translation, more mumbling and more ricocheting laughter from the crowd in the dining room.
He says he lost those songs.
Well, I’m sure he can find them again.
Mandela just shakes his head and looks away after Awi decodes my English.  Other conversations start up as attention moves away from Mandela and my feeble attempts to open up his mind.  I glance around the room and realize this isn’t the right place to be saying these things to him.  Awi fetched him from the market in the morning and he’s only been home for a few hours.  Perhaps he’ll soften up after a few more…
Awi found Mr. MIA hanging out in a dusty sheet metal kiosk that is the Nimule equivalent of a Kinkos.  One of Mandela’s musician friends was lounging in the shop and Awi asked him where our man had been sleeping the past two nights.  The guy said he didn’t know, which was strange in light of the fact that Mandela’s explication of the last couple of days involved him spending the night at his friend’s hut/crib.
Though I feel I’ve been defeated by the wit of a stubborn teenager, I decide to say one more thing.  You didn’t lose the songs; you lost yourself.
He hears Awi’s translation, then says he’s not lost.  He just went home.
Now I’m utterly confounded.  Did he go to his friend’s home, to his grandmother’s place, or is he sleeping on barroom floors?  And I feel like Jack Black’s dad at the beginning of “Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny.”  So what if I used to be Meat Loaf, because now I’m a super sucky Christianist dadhole who won’t let my son rock!
Later on I relate the details of my devastatingly unsuccessful exchange to Matt.  He says it sounds like Mandela and I were talking around each other or past each other.  I think about his words for a long time afterwards, and my heart plummets under the weight of their truth.
When did I become this cartoon character who always ends up in mid-air and tightly fastened to a 500 pound anvil?

March 3rd

The boy walked into the dining room today, wearing his white Kololo Primary shirt and singing one of his songs.  I registered him in the school last week, not because I have any faith in the institution’s ability to teach him anything, but because he’s happier there than when he’s stuck with me at home.  I’ll still work with him one-on-one in the evenings, and I’ll still pray constantly for his tempest mind and tethered heart to find peace and escape in the Lord.  I don’t want him to become some kind of diluted version of himself.  I don’t want him to stop singing.  I want him to realize that his identity will ripen into its truest form when he offers it into the hands of a certain highly skilled and eternal vinegrower.
Mandela was filling his cup from the new water cooler when Akera asked him where the buttons were for his shirt.  (Last week I gave the kid a spare Kololo shirt that we had lying around, and unfortunately the tailor who made it slept through the lesson on sewing buttons.)  The boy glanced at me and said that it wasn’t his problem, because The White Man gave him the shirt, so if anyone wants to know where the buttons are then they shouldn’t ask him.  They should ask The White Man.  Akera had to translate this extensive and illuminating response to me, and I must admit that it hurt to hear it.  I probably could have hobbled together a response in Arabic, but I asked Akera to tell the kid to not call me The White Man.  He can call me Baba or Ross Kelly or just about anything except The White Man.  (For some reason the kids and even the adults prefer calling me by both of my names, and when they do it sounds like one word:  rosskelly.)  Upon receiving this information, Mandela took a sip from his cup, rested his shoulder against the doorframe, and said that calling someone a white man is a way of telling him that he is a very important person.  In other words, it wasn’t a derogatory label; it was an accolade.  I’ll have to think long and hard about that one…