The Bite of the Mango (6 page)

I knew that when our bandages came off and were replaced with thin plastic strips, or big Band-Aids, to keep the wounds clean, we would have to leave the hospital. I thought we’d be returning to Magborou, which frightened me. The rebels! What if they were still prowling the countryside? The hospital staff worried about this too. They told Abibatu that we could move to a camp called Aberdeen, set up in Freetown to accommodate people injured in the war.

It wasn’t safe to return to Port Loko either, so Fatmata helped Abibatu make the arrangements for our move to Aberdeen. She agreed to live with us for a while and help me when the baby arrived. I was excited. I looked forward to the move and the chance for us all to be sleeping under the same roof.

One rainy day, as Adamsay, Mohamed, Ibrahim, and I returned to the hospital from begging, a young man with a wide smile and a chubby face met us at the front door. He looked familiar, and for good reason: he was Mohamed’s uncle Abdul. Mohamed jumped right into his arms.

Abdul lived in Freetown, and he explained that he’d seen Mohamed’s name on a Red Cross list of people displaced from
their villages that was posted on a billboard in the center of Freetown. When he learned his nephew was in the hospital, he dropped what he was doing and hurried right over.

Abdul reminded me a lot of Mohamed. He told similar jokes, and he was always in a good mood. He started to do for the boys what Fatmata and Abibatu did for me, including preparing their food. He also took them for long walks when Mohamed and Ibrahim weren’t out begging.

Abdul was a proud, happy man. He held his head high, with his chest out, and he walked and talked with confidence. When Fatmata was present, though, his eyes stayed downcast, his body slumped, and his speech was sometimes slurred; he always seemed nervous, too, rocking slightly from side to side. Yet when he did manage to look Fatmata’s way, the loveliest smile came across his face. Fatmata’s personality also changed around Abdul. She was no longer calm and collected. Instead, she became super chatty, talking about everything from the rain to the horrible conditions at the hospital, where many children slept in the hallways because there weren’t enough beds. Abdul and Fatmata were falling in love, I realized with a start, and I began to take great interest in this spectacle unfolding in front of me.

One night, after Fatmata had helped me into bed, I snuck out and followed her through the halls. It wasn’t difficult to stay hidden, since the hospital was crowded at all hours of the day and night. Abdul was waiting for her near the main entrance. Shyly, they took each other’s hands and went out into the Freetown twilight.

Love has a way of being infectious. Watching them, I forgot about my problems for a minute. But as I turned to go, I saw
some girls sitting on the floor, their backs up against the wall, their hands amputated like mine. I thought of my own hands, of Salieu, and of the baby growing inside me.

Our impending move to the amputee camp was in the air. Abibatu collected our begging money to buy supplies, including pots, pans, bedding, pepper, and rice. She also used some of the money as bus fare for Abdul. He’d agreed to travel to Manarma and Magborou in search of Marie and Alie. It was a dangerous mission, and Fatmata pleaded with him not to go. None of us had heard anything about my aunt and uncle since the night of the attack. Their names never came up when people in the hospital who’d been caught in the rebel raids on the villages compared stories.

“What happened to Ya Marie and Pa Alie?” I would ask. But no one had an answer. I feared they were dead.

I was overjoyed when my fears proved unfounded. Within a week Abdul returned, bringing Marie and Alie with him. They were dusty and dirty, and much thinner than they had been, but their bodies were intact. We crowded around Mohamed’s bed after dinner one night as Marie and Alie explained that they’d hidden in the bush during the attack at Manarma. Afterwards, Alie had gone from village to village, risking his own safety, trying to find out where we were. When we didn’t appear, they were scared we’d either been killed or taken into the bush to be soldiers along with the rebels.

At one point during the evening, Adamsay whispered to Marie that I was pregnant. Marie began to wail, her cries echoing through the boys’ ward. She cried and cried. Later, I helped
her walk back to my ward to spend the night in my bed.

“If I’d only believed you when you told me about Salieu the first time,” she sobbed, after I told her about the rape. “If only I had paid more attention. Mariatu, will you ever forgive me?”

I wiped away Marie’s tears with my bulky bandages. “Abibatu says we’re moving to a nice new home,” I consoled her. “Just wait and see: our luck will change.”

Just short of two months after I’d arrived at the hospital, we moved to the Aberdeen Amputee Camp. It wasn’t what I’d expected. The camp was filthy with litter and with laundry that had fallen from the clotheslines hanging everywhere. There were dogs, and people of all sizes and skin tones, speaking an array of Sierra Leone dialects. The smell of garbage, dirty bodies, and cooking food was sickening.

Our new home was a big tent divided into eight rooms by canvas doors. It housed about five families, and each amputee was assigned one room. I shared mine with Abibatu and Fatmata, who had been living in Freetown with a distant relative. We looked right across at Adamsay’s room, where Marie and Alie were also going to sleep. All of the families shared a fire pit outside to cook food. The supplies we got from the camp were bulgur, cornmeal, cornstarch, palm oil, and beans—that was about it.

There was little for anyone in Freetown at the time, let alone us injured kids. Due to the war, farmers could not bring their produce into the city to sell. Meat, cassava, beans, and fresh water were increasingly difficult to find. That responsibility soon fell to the kids. We became the breadwinners in our families through begging.

There was a central place in the camp where everybody would congregate to hear news of the war. We learned there that rebels had crept many times into the camp at night and stolen the scant food that was available. “Be careful,” a woman who shared our tent warned us. “Don’t travel around the camp alone at night, and sleep with lots of people beside you. If you have a knife or a gun, keep it handy.”

I knew that no one in my family had a weapon.

A few people at the camp had tried to grow a garden, we heard, but the rebels had dug it up. There were rumors that the rebels had even invaded the medical supplies storage room and taken all the bandages, pills, medical equipment, and IVs. The rebels sent letters, according to some of the people at the camp, threatening to return. No one was sure if the rumors were true, but it scared us all to hear of the rebels’ words. One day someone at the camp read aloud a letter supposedly written by a rebel.

We’re coming to get you. We’re coming back to finish you all off. The government isn’t helping us, but they’re helping you, taking care of you. So we are going to come back and chop off the hands of anyone who still has theirs, including the hands of the people looking after you. Why? Because you don’t deserve the help from the government, the money they are giving you, the clothes and food. But we do
.

The letter chilled me to the bone, reigniting all my terrible memories. In fact, the words were a lie, because the government wasn’t helping us. There were more than 400 of us at the camp who didn’t have hands. At least four times that many people,
mostly family members like Abibatu, Marie, and Alie, had moved there to look after the injured. The camp wasn’t really big enough for all of us—it was about the size of the soccer stadium in Freetown.

Our relatives cooked for us and fed us. The camp received a shipment of flour once a month that was doled out to the first few hundred people in line. Our family had to show up early or we got nothing. The begging money my cousins and I collected paid for most of our food and clothes. On the days we didn’t earn much by begging, we ate nothing, or just a few spoonfuls of rice. We were starving.

About a month after we moved to the camp, Abdul appeared one evening after dinner. Now that Mohamed and Ibrahim had Alie to help care for them, Abdul had settled back into his old life, running a small shop in Freetown. He said he wanted to tell the family something special and asked if we could gather the following night.

Marie tried to prepare a nice dinner for Abdul. She collected the few leones we kids had saved from begging and went to the market to buy some fish. We all suspected we were about to have a celebration.

After we had eaten our meal, Abdul told us the news. He was sitting beside Fatmata, and he stroked her hand as he spoke. “Fatmata and I are getting married!” he announced. Fatmata lowered her head shyly as Abdul kissed her on the cheek.

Everyone jumped up. The women hugged and kissed Fatmata. The men patted Abdul on the back and shook his hand. Their faces radiant with happiness, they told us of their plans to hold the ceremony at Fatmata’s uncle’s home in
Freetown. It would be too dangerous for us all to travel to Port Loko, where Fatmata’s family lived. They wanted to marry right away, that week if they could.

But as we learned after Abdul and the other men had left, there was one problem.

“You’ve been waiting your entire life since your Bondo initiation for this day,” Abibatu said to Fatmata with a big smile.

Fatmata lowered her head again. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But I have not been initiated.”

“What!” exclaimed Abibatu. “Well, you can’t marry until you are. We will do it immediately, here at the camp.”

Most of the Sierra Leonean girls I know have been initiated in what we call the Bondo Secret Society. I had my own initiation when I was about nine. In the week leading up to it, I was forbidden to go to the farm or to do any chores, including helping Marie to cook or clean.

“Just relax,” Marie told me. “Bondo happens only once in a girl’s lifetime. Go for walks, braid your hair with pretty beads, and take long naps in the afternoon.”

The Bondo is seen as a rite of passage for young girls, and boys and men are banned from coming near where the Bondo initiation takes place.

The day before my initiation, Marie prepared some elaborate rice dishes with fish, goat, beans, and spices that she made only for special occasions, such as Eid.

The next day, she took Adamsay and me to the river, where we joined a group of about eight other girls. Accompanying each girl was her mother or auntie. We were each handed a
new bar of white soap. That was very unusual, as we always shared soap among the family. I’d never been given a bar of soap especially for me. “Wash better than you’ve ever washed before,” Marie instructed us.

After a long soak in the river, Adamsay and I donned matching Africana outfits. We headed into the bush to join the digba, the woman who leads the initiation, who was already there waiting for us.

A hut had been erected especially for the other girls and me, and it would be our home. We’d be allowed to leave it only to use the toilet, and before we went outside, we had to paint our faces and bodies in white, chalky paint. The paint was to symbolize our purity, and the transition from child to girl or woman. Until the end of the initiation, we could only be seen in public covered in this paint. Living in the hut was fun, like summer camp for girls in North America. We stayed up late into the night, gossiping and telling stories. The secret society made us as close as sisters.

There was only one part of the Bondo that I disliked, and it happened on our first night in the bush. After we’d eaten the delicious dishes prepared by the women, I was told to lie down on the dirt floor on a piece of cloth. Despite the fact that there were older girls being initiated with me, the digba had identified me as the karukuh, the girl with spiritual powers, so I’d been chosen to go first in the initiation. My skirt was lifted high over my waist. Some of the aunties and mothers held down my feet and arms while the other women there, including Marie, drummed and sang. A cloth was placed over my eyes.

I felt the digba cut my vagina. The pain was excruciating, and I screamed as I struggled to break free. I even bit one of the women as she held me down.

When the Bondo, or cutting, was done, I had to sit in a chair with strips of cotton between my legs to stop the bleeding. I watched as Adamsay and the other girls from my village went through the same ordeal. We were all in pain for days afterwards, but at least sharing the experience let us laugh about how awful we felt.

During the four months we lived in the hut, the women from the village taught us homemaking, including cooking and sewing. We learned how to cook meals that would cure certain ailments, and how to use herbs to treat coughs and fevers. At the end of our time there, we returned to the village for a great feast, during which all of us danced.

Fatmata’s Bondo initiation happened not in the bush but in one of the rooms at the camp. The ceremony lasted only one night, as Fatmata already knew how to cook, sew, and cure illnesses. In the West, this practice of cutting, known as female genital mutilation, is highly criticized. But in Sierra Leone, girls and women who are not initiated are considered outsiders.

The wedding was held about a month after Fatmata’s initiation. An imam offered the blessing and read a sura, a passage from the Quran. We celebrated with a nice dinner of rice and goat. And that was it—Abdul and Fatmata were married!

Fatmata was so happy that day, which made me happy too. She was like a gift from God to me, coming into my life at one of my darkest moments, caring for me in Freetown until my family arrived. She had become my mom, my sister, and my
friend from the first moment fate brought us together in the back of that army truck in Port Loko.

I was sad after Fatmata’s wedding. I even cried a little. I wanted to celebrate her marriage for days, weeks if I could, like we did when couples wed back at Magborou. But I guess that’s what happens during a war: occasions that make people feel happy aren’t as frequent.