The Bite of the Mango (10 page)

I said my line and wept in the HIV/AIDS play. We got a standing ovation for our skit on forgiveness and reconciliation. The event ended with us all together onstage again, arm in arm.

Sulaiman and Mariatu found me after the performance. I was giggling with Mariatu and a girl named Memunatu, who had lost one hand during the Freetown invasion.

Sulaiman gave me a big hug. “I am so proud of you,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye. “I’m going to miss you when you move to this place called Canada!”

“Don’t worry, Sulaiman,” I said. “I’m not moving anywhere.”

How wrong I was.

“So, what do you think about going to England?” the young woman in front of me asked. Yabom was her name, she’d informed us.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “Do I have to give you an answer right away?”

Marie glared at me.
Wrong answer
. We had been talking a lot in the evenings about the prospect of my moving to Canada, and about how moving away would be the best thing for me and for the family financially. The youth who had gone to other countries sent their families as much as 300,000 leones, or $100, a month and mailed them items we’d never heard of, like chocolates. Now, out of nowhere, another woman who’d shown up at the camp was offering me England instead.

“All right,” I said as enthusiastically as I could. “England sounds great.” I did want out of the camp, badly, but Adamsay’s program in Germany had fallen through, and I wanted her to leave before me. Adamsay was always doing nice things for me, like holding me in her arms when I had a bad dream at night. She deserved it.

“We’ll start organizing the paperwork tomorrow,” Yabom
replied. “You need a birth certificate and a passport.”

“But she doesn’t have any of these things,” Marie jumped in to say.

“I know,” said the woman. “I’ll help Mariatu apply for her papers.”

“Fine,” I said, forcing a smile. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

We’d been living at the camp for close to two years now. Marie, Abibatu, and Fatmata’s days were almost always the same. They’d sit around talking to each other and waiting for my cousins and me to return from begging with money or food we had bought at the market. The women, including Fatmata (who, with Abdul, was now living at the camp full-time), did the cooking. Marie, more than anyone, longed to return to a village, any village. Like Mabinty, she needed something active to do. Marie and Alie had high hopes we’d get one of the houses under construction for the amputees, and they knew they’d need money to make the move.

About four months had passed since Bill and I had talked on the telephone. He had sent a package with some Western-style clothing, including T-shirts and pants two sizes too big for me, and about 150,000 leones ($50). According to Comfort, he’d promised that another package was on the way. But he had never indicated that he wanted to bring me to Canada, which upset Marie and Alie.

“It’s too bad what happened to you,” Marie had said. “But you must see the positive in everything. Right now the positive for you is finding someone in a foreign country who will take you in and give you the education you need to get a job; and for you to be able to send us, your family, money when you have it.”

I wanted to make Marie happy. I wanted to do the right thing.

Yabom said she was a social worker, like Comfort, though I’d never seen her at the camp either. Her initial approach had been a lot like Comfort’s. “There is this man,” she said. More than anyone I had met so far, Yabom talked with her hands. They flew through the air, accentuating her every word. I followed her hands for a while, then focused on her shiny, smooth skin and big round eyes. “This man lives in England, and he has raised money to pay for your flight to London so you can have some medical treatment.”

“What kind of medical treatment?”

“Well, this man, David, wants you to go to a hospital where the nurses and doctors help people who have lost limbs in car crashes or farming accidents,” explained Yabom. “He wants the hospital to fit you with prosthetic hands, which he will pay for. Do you know what prosthetic hands are?”

“No,” I replied. The word meant nothing to me.

“Well,” Yabom continued, searching for the words, “David wants to give you … how should I explain this … fake hands. They are hands you can use just like real hands, to eat and write, do all the things you used to do.”

Fake hands? I couldn’t picture it. A few kids in the camp who’d had parts of their legs chopped off by the rebels had fake legs. They attached these wooden contraptions, like big logs, to the remaining part of their leg with long pieces of tape. But the logs always seemed to be falling off. The kids actually got around better when they hopped on one leg than when they tried walking with two. I couldn’t imagine wooden hands and
fingers being of any help. But for my family’s sake, I knew I had to give it a try.

On our first day together, Yabom took me to one of the government offices near the presidential building. As we stepped inside the front gates, I stopped to look at the Sierra Leonean flag flying on a tall pole. Our flag is simple: blue, green, and white stripes. I had only seen the flag a couple of times before, always in Freetown.

“Do you know the history of Sierra Leone?” Yabom asked as we stood side by side, gazing up at the flag.

“No,” I replied. “I don’t know much at all, just what I’ve heard about the war at the camp.”

“Well, then,” she said, leading me to a bench at the side of the building.

It was quiet inside the front gates, not busy and noisy like the street outside. Birds were chirping, a sound I had not heard since Magborou. Usually their songs were drowned out by Freetown’s constantly honking minibus and car horns and the chatter of many, many people.

“Back in the 1500s, a Portuguese explorer was sailing the West African coast,” Yabom began. “When he reached what we call Freetown today, it was storming. The thunder echoed against the mountains, and the sailor thought the noise sounded like roaring lions. He named the area Sierra Lyoa, or Mountain Lion.”

She glanced up at the flag. “For much of our modern history, Sierra Leone belonged to other people. We were a colony of England, where you are about to go, which means that the
British, or the English, said Sierra Leone belonged to them.”

The British had built homes in Sierra Leone and mined the country’s resources, Yabom explained. They had tried to modernize Sierra Leone and make the country run like a modern European nation.

“What happened?” I questioned.

“It’s complicated,” she replied, pausing to search for the words. “You see, Europeans saw Sierra Leoneans, as well as other African people, as a source of, well … as slaves.”

Yabom described how, in the slave trade, people from Africa were forced onto ships and sent to North America to work for free. “Many people died on these ships, and those who survived endured long hours of terribly hard work and separation from their families. Babies were taken from their mothers. Husbands and wives were torn apart. When slavery started to be condemned, many of the freed slaves returned to Freetown. That’s why the city is named as it is. These former slaves were from not only Sierra Leone but all over Africa. They didn’t speak Temne or Mende. They spoke Krio, which is a broken form of the English they had learned in the West.”

Yabom put her arm around me. “My dear, Sierra Leone only gained its independence from the British in the 1960s. That’s likely just before your mother was born. Sierra Leone became a recognized country ten years after that. There was much corruption among government officials. Look around you,” she said, waving her hands in the air. “We are a rich country, full of resources, from diamonds to bauxite. But we’re also very, very poor. Money from the sale of our resources doesn’t reach the average person. Liberia, which borders Sierra Leone
to the east, was already engaged in a civil war when war broke out here. A man named Foday Sankoh launched the Revolutionary United Front from Liberia in 1991, when you were only four or five. Sankoh said his goal was to end the abuse of power by Sierra Leone politicians. He felt they were stealing the money they made from selling our resources abroad. But Sankoh was worse than any of the politicians he accused of thievery. You know the old saying, when you point a finger at someone, there are probably three fingers pointing back at you?”

I nodded. Marie often used a version of this expression to discourage us from telling on one another for things like taking too much food. “Child,” she’d say to the boy or girl who had lodged the complaint, “if you’re accusing someone of doing something bad, you’re probably thinking of doing it yourself.”

“Sankoh should have looked at his own fingers,” Yabom said. “He started mining the diamonds, trading them in Liberia for weapons to fuel the war. He encouraged boys to become soldiers. These boys had broken spirits by the time Sankoh got to them. Sierra Leone is so poor that, without schools and jobs, there were few things for these boys to look forward to. So they were easy prey for him. Mariatu, we are one of the poorest countries in the world. You will see soon enough when you move to England. You’ll see the Londoners’ clothes, their expensive houses, the food they eat, their theaters and museums. We have our beautiful sandy beaches, but that’s about all Freetown has that England doesn’t.”

We sat outside talking for about an hour. The Sierra Leone flag stopped flapping when the warm morning wind died.

“We must go inside and fill out your paperwork,” Yabom
said, looking at the position of the sun. “It’s early afternoon, and if we don’t get this done, you’re not moving anywhere!”

I had to answer a bunch of questions before the government could process my birth certificate. In a first-floor office, Yabom and I had been seated across from a woman who wore the uniform I now identified with business: a white blouse and a straight beige skirt with high-heeled black shoes.

The first few questions were easy. “Where were you born? Where do you live now? What is your mother’s full name?” the woman asked me.

Then, “What is your date of birth?”

That question stumped me. I looked first at the woman, then at Yabom. “I don’t know,” I shrugged.

“You’re not alone,” the woman said. “In most parts of Sierra Leone, children’s birthdates are not recorded. But we have to put down something. Can we take a guess?”

“What time of year do you think you were born?” Yabom asked me.

I thought long and hard. “My father told me it rained the day I was born. But the way he told the story, it sounded like it wasn’t supposed to rain quite yet. So maybe at the end of the dry season?” I speculated.

“Let’s write May,” Yabom said. The woman scribbled down the month.

“Do you have a favorite number?” the woman asked next. “We need to write down an actual day in May.”

I’d only learned about numbers once I moved to Freetown and started begging. I’d discovered then that leones come in many denominations. “I don’t know. I like twenty-five,” I said.

“May 25 it is, then,” said the woman.

Even though I’d never celebrated a birthday, I knew I’d been alive for 14 years. So May 25, 1986, became my official date of birth.

At the end of the questions, the government official said she needed me to sign my name.

“I don’t know how to write,” I told her.

“The government requires official documents, like your birth certificate and passport, to have a signature. Since so many people have lost their hands in the war, it’s permissible to sign with your feet. So we will take a toe imprint.”

Yabom bent over and slipped off my right flip-flop. She cleaned my big toe with a dry towel, then squished it into some blue ink. She pressed my inky toe down on several different papers.

“Good,” the woman said when we were done. “You should have your birth certificate in about six weeks.”

“And that will be six weeks closer to the time you leave for England,” Yabom said to me as we got up to leave.

Many times since we’d met, I’d decided to tell Yabom about Bill. But I’d always had seconds thoughts. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Yabom. Quite the contrary: her soft manners reminded me of Fatmata, who did so much for me but never asked once for anything in return. I worried, though, that the trip to England might not happen if I told Yabom some other Western man was interested in me too.

The women in my family had started to collect Western-style clothes for me. I’m very tiny; when I came to live in North
America, I learned that I am about a size four. Since most of the clothes donated to the camp were larger, Fatmata and Abibatu solicited Father Maurizio’s help. Soon afterwards, he passed along some Italian-style jeans, which were slim-fitting and hugged my body like a bathing suit. The T-shirts he’d found were snug too.

When I first tried on a pair of jeans, I shrieked. “How can women walk in these!” I exclaimed. I couldn’t even bend my knees.

Fatmata laughed. “You can see every bend and curve of your body.”

Soon there was barely room to turn around in the tent. The walls of our rooms were already lined with our spare clothes, pots and pans, bags of rice, and other food supplies we’d set aside to last us through the rainy season. Added to that was a big black suitcase Yabom had bought me. I packed the clothes from Father Maurizio inside.

One night Marie, Abibatu, Fatmata, Adamsay, and I sat alone by the fire. The men and boys were at the mosque. Usually when we women were together, we’d all talk at once. But that night everyone was quiet.

“Mariatu,” Marie said, poking the fire with a stick, “I am sorry I didn’t listen to you that day you had the bad dream about palm oil.”

Her apology surprised me, and I didn’t know what to say.

“None of us may ever see our homes again,” Abibatu commented. “This war, it’s been going on too long, with too much suffering. But you, Mariatu, you have a chance. You have a chance to make something of yourself.”

“I wish I could go,” Adamsay said in a small voice. Her face was covered in tears. I wanted to fold her into my arms and say to her: “You go instead.”

“You remember how, after Manarma, it took me a week to find my way out of the bush?” she said.

I nodded slowly. By the time Adamsay got to the Port Loko medical clinic, the flesh around her wounds had rotted and was full of gangrene. Doctors had to finish what the rebels had started by cutting off a large portion of her left arm.

“You’re smarter than me, Mariatu,” Adamsay went on. “You’ve always had a sense of direction, and you are good at figuring out people’s motives. Will you use your mind for me, get very smart in this place called England, and show me how to find my way?”

“You’re our hope for the future, Mariatu,” Marie said. “Take that medical treatment, go to school, and get a job.”