CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Uganda—No Farther
Below -- "slippers" that carried Arketa's mom, Lucia, on foot through three African countries
In the summer of 2009 when Arketa and I first met, the contents of this book, her story, lay pressed down in her heart. She was a woman filled with knowledge and memory of Africa. I was an American familiar with a documentary or two about Sudan’s Lost Boys but little else about Africa. The location of Sudan within that huge continent was as unidentifiable to me as the capital cities of most New England states. “Nothing” is what I knew about her country or her suffering.
I had asked, “Do you have children?”
“I have five. Two is in Uganda, three with me in Arizona.”
“Why are the two not with you?” I asked.
“Ah,” she said, recognizing bafflement in my voice. “’Why dos boys are not with me? Dis is because of when my mom died in Uganda.”
° ° °
Central African Republic to Uganda – September-November 2001
In September, six months after it was posted in Phoenix, Lucia, in M’boki, Central African Republic, received Arketa’s letter instructing her to walk nearly one thousand miles from M’boki to Kampala, Uganda. There, she could secure papers for emigration.
Lucia boiled loaves of N’gabakutau, the softball-sized cassava bread. Then, before they were wrapped in soft leaves cut from the riverbank, she exposed them for a while to the sun to ward off the growth of fungi. Rightly prepared, this bread remained edible for months. After days of quiet busyness and shouted orders, Grandma Lucia said, “Time to go.”
Fifteen-year-old Angelo hefted nearly seventy pounds of bread to his head. Fourteen-year-old Rosetta tucked Grandma’s mat and the children’s rolled blankets under her arms. Twelve-year-old Timothy slung a water gourd, the calabash, over his shoulder where it hung by a braided animal skin strap. According to Lucia’s instructions, everyone wore slippers—rubber flip-flops. Among other essentials, Lucia carried the larger water gourd, her late husband’s spear, and tobacco.
Within hours of the second day, with no idea that he would be walking for weeks, Timothy jettisoned his slippers. This happy boy, a singer of songs, resisted encumbrances—he barefooted through the deep forest.Grandma ignored the chorus of children’s questions until finally, she wearied of, “Where are we going?”
“We are walking to be close to your mom.”
The small band of travelers zigzagged through the rocky, mountainous terrain of Central African Republic. They walked toward, but did not enter South Sudan; toward but not into Source Yubu where ten years before, six of their family members had been murdered. They forged deep valleys and entered a few village clearings where, if they were lucky, people shared food. More than once they rope-walked—toes and fingers clinched fast—swinging, swaying, across rivers swift and rivers still. They knew that if the rope broke, the river takes you and likely, the crocodile takes what the river first claimed. Once safely across, God got the glory.
Grandma called a halt at a hunters’ hut close to the Mbomou riverbank. Time to rest. She finessed fire from a wooden block and stick she had carved for that very purpose. She heated water in a clay pot they carried, bathed Timothy’s swollen legs and Angelo’s aching back. After a few days of rest, for the price of cassava bread, strong canoe paddlers carried them across the current-strong river that years before, Arketa crossed to find yams—those days when she crossed the river and crossed herself before God against crocodiles.
The forests of Rigua led into the open savanna lands near CAR’s eastern border. Now they moved at night, dodging killer heat. For twelve hours without a break they followed animal trails through the Banzangi grasslands, dodging turtles and toads in stagnant ponds, slapping away encroaching savannah grass on worn paths, watching for cheetahs and lions, racing the rising sun to reach the great Ubangi River. Across it, they caught sight of Democratic Republic of Congo’s high mountains and deep forests. They were headed there.
“Is my mom before the mountains?” Timothy asked.
“Did you smell the lions in the grasslands?” Grandma answered.
The children were not thinking about lions. Terror struck their hearts. Rather, they had talked about stories they heard from people in M’boki about Africa’s shortest, fastest, most vicious people who lived in the nearly impenetrable forest mountains of DRC.
“Eh!” shot Lucia response to spoken fears. “Rubbish.” She shushed children and hid the fears pounding in her own heart.
“How much farther, Grandma?”
“Did I tell you about when your Grandfather killed the elephant with this spear?” she asked, deflecting unanswerable questions.
“Did I tell you how many days that brave man walked in the deep forests of Sudan? Eh?
“Quiet now. Listen! Which is the bird of the sound we are hearing?” It was the Sudanese way, this distraction.
° ° °
“When you walk in dah jungle, dah head on your neck never stops snapping, dah shoulders going first dis way den suddenly, over dehr. It is terrible,” Arketa explained in one of our early conversations.
“Is dat the sound of the lion? Snap!Dah leopard? Dah hunter? So many things can stop a group of walkers in dahr tracks. No danger? Move again. Eeeiii!Brush dah scorpion off dah foot. Suck blood from dah finger cut by long grass pushed away from dah child’s forward movement. To walk in dah jungle is not easy.”
Arketa had been in America for several months when she bumped into the good fortune of securing a house through Homeward Bound but even before that—within a month of her arrival—she had written the letter urging her mom to walk to Uganda. She had no knowledge of when, even whether, the letter reached M’boki; when or whether Lucia began the walk across eastern Africa; when or whether she succeeded in reaching Uganda. Nevertheless, she secured an “Affidavit of Relationship” form required by the International Rescue Committee, “claiming a family relationship to persons overseas.” If she did hear that her family reached Uganda, she would submit the form and initiate arrangements for her family’s immigration.
Arketa listed all of them: Lucia Agora Zambakari, her mother; Timothy Zambakari, her son; Rosetta Raphael Zambakari, Angelo Raphael Zambakari; her orphaned niece and nephew and, having learned he was alive, she added her eldest, Elario Bazia Zambakari. The form warned that the completion of it did not “guarantee refugee processing or admission to the U.S.”
While Lucia walked, Arketa acquired her wonderful caregiver’s job yet fell into bed each night with concerns. She worried about affording to bring the family to Arizona. But she would manage. She had to manage.
While Arketa was still living in the refugees apartment building, she earned her caregiver’s certificate, sent her children to school on foot or by bus, met with her caseworker, learned about programs and opportunities for refugees, discovered that Elario was alive, sent a letter to her mother, started saving to buy a car, bought a TV and a computer “on time,” took an English class where she laughed at the complexities of understanding such things as their/there/they’re or whew/hue/Hugh.
And why was “gradjuwait” spelled “graduate,” she wondered.
She quickly caught onto bus routes. She enlarged her awareness of places and opportunities. She caught on to the use of money and the fact that nearly everything concerning her family’s immigration, had a price attached: fees for services, fees for filing papers, fees for producing essential documents.
While Lucia was dodging danger somewhere in Democratic Republic of Congo, Arketa had moved from the apartment to a house. She began saving money for the essentials her mother would need if she reached Uganda: the cooking pot, salt, food, and mosquito nets. Arketa did not buy jackets for the children in Phoenix. They had the sweaters given them by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in New York. “No complaining about cold,” she said as she complained about the cold 68° weather. Phoenix was supposed to be warm.
In the few months since their arrival in America, Arketa and her children had slowly shed the nearly daily expectation of violence that marked life in Africa. No neck snapping. Meanwhile, Arketa waited—waited to hear—to hear anything from or about her mother and the children.
° ° °
Caged in by jungle daytime darkness, sometimes tied together with vine against the fear of separation, Lucia and the children cut through the deep forests of Democratic Republic of Congo, and moved east, tucked under the border of her beloved South Sudan. They listened for birdcalls and for sounds of hunters, baboons, lions, or elephants. During the many days that the jungle canopy hid the sun, Lucia depended up her divining sticks and God—asking that the wind strike toward Uganda. They followed the wind. They sought the morning sun. At night, stones anchored large leaves pointing to the next day’s direction. They built a fire for warmth and protection. After torturous downpours they dried clothes and blankets on stakes set by a fire, when fires were possible. At the occasional villages they came upon, when none of her languages—French, Songo, Balanda, Zande, or Arabic worked—gestures sufficed.
“Uganda?”
They trusted the direction of pointing fingers. Somewhere along the way, somewhere in DRC, when the October sun rose for the fifth time, Angelo turned sixteen. Somewhere along the way, Lucia surrendered her jacket to an old man in exchange for directions out of DRC. Somewhere along the way she bartered for tobacco. Somewhere along the way it was necessary to forfeit the ancient family spear.
Villages. Towns. Heavy rain. Heavy forests. Wild animals. Mountains. Crevasses. Narrow footpaths. No footpaths. Broad savannah grasslands. Snakes. Oppressive heat. Cleared land. Scorpions. Stinging insects. They walked east, accompanied by bruises, cuts, sweat, swollen limbs, aching backs, hunger, and thirst.
Near Duku, DRC, where three countries share a forest zone, the Zambakaris settled in a hunter’s hut. For nine days, in an exchange for food, tobacco, and information, they helped nearby villagers with felling trees and making charcoal. Local people warned against trying to enter Uganda in any populated area where local officials demand travel documents—which the Zambakaris did not have.
They returned to the deep forest. They moved quietly, watching and listening for Arab rebels known to be trapped in the mountains and willing to kill without reason. They were warned against contact with Sudanese soldiers moving through the forest, hunting Arab rebels. The soldiers believed that anyone coming from CAR was allied with Arabs; and anyone allied with Arabs deserved to die.
“This is the time, children, to move like the leopard—with no sound. We can do it.”
Angelo, Rosetta, and Timothy followed their Moses. Like the wandering Children of Israel who longed for the cucumbers and garlic left behind in Egypt, the Zambakaris longed for the abundance of their M’boki garden. They fed on hard bread, hope, and ancient tales of Zambakari courage.
In early November a canoe carved from a coconut tree trunk ferried them across the narrow Kibali River in an unpopulated area of Uganda. They turned south, walking to the Sudanese-friendly town of Ingbokolo in the Koboko district of Uganda’s northwestern region. With the permission of Mr. Agabthus, the local catechist, they camped at St Joseph Teremunga church. A room with a door, a floor with mattresses! The children had been handed heaven. Everyone found ways to be helpful to the church community and after one quarter of the moon’s month, in a conversation with Mr. Agabthus about the Sudan and the fates of the Zambakari family, the name, Elario, was mentioned.
“Elairo,” said the catechist, “The name is familiar. I have heard a name as that. A student of the church in Homia.” He knew little more. He wasn’t even sure. But, there was no question of staying longer. Lucia asked about getting to Homia.
He wasn’t sure, but it was by the major road south from Aura. And at Aura, a large refugee camp was near a place where they could get water and information. He loaded them with both food and warnings—the territory between Ingbokolo and Aura held rebels and soldiers.
“Like a hive holds honey,” he said.
Thirty miles to Aura—some 60,000 steps by bare feet. Aura was the birthplace of Idi Amin as well as the place where, some months before the Zambakaris arrived, the Ugandan People’s Defense Force had gathered to begin a march into DRC’s Second War—the very war that a few months earlier trapped Christopher in Kinshasa.
They reached Aura safely and walked on from there to Rhino camp, a settlement of several thousand Sudanese refugees They rested—but not nearly enough to lessen the swelling of Timothy’s legs. They caught up on news, and filled water gourds. Homia, she learned, was s great distance away—as was Pakwach Road, the means of getting to Homia. Seventy miles of walking to reach it.
At some point between the Rhino camp and the highway, Lucia bartered for a lorry lift. Is this were she yielded the spear? The machete? Little was left but what she offered wasn’t enough for the driver. He spotted Angelo’s wristwatch, his first ever. It had been a gift from Mum Arketa before she left M’boki, a beautiful chronometer that showed days of the week, time, temperature, status of the sun, and an alarm clock—the only timekeeping piece among them. Yielding it up was part of survival.
° ° °
“Ah, dah watch,” Arketa said when I asked about it.
“Clothes come from all around dah world for dah refugees. Each Sunday, under dah mango tree is where people exchange for things. You have dah groundnuts? You measure for what someone wants for things like oil or choosing from dah pile of clothes.
“Dis watch, I find in dah pocket of dah dress I pull from dah pile. I think it is from Switzerland. I see all the moving things of it and hear it going kee-kee-kee, quiet. I give it to Angelo. Yeah.”
° ° °
The lorry driver was satisfied. He transported Lucia and the children 157 miles down country along the rutted Pakwach road. They sat in the back, high on a heap of hard avocados, grasping wooden rails while the lorry tossed its weight against an outrageously ruinous road. Angelo winced with every jarring motion of the vehicle, feeling the first effects of permanent damage to his bread-laden spine—miles of brutal bouncing but, no complaining—157 miles off their feet; 157 miles closer to Kampala, closer to America, and to Mama Arketa.
Not many hours of walking after the lorry driver dropped them off, Timothy dropped to a crawl, so great was his suffering. He was exceptionally weak. His swollen legs overwhelmed his small, skinny body. Everyone was tired. Lucia hadn’t had a smoke in days and she couldn’t shake a developing cough.
The months of September, October, and November swept by like the rivers they crossed: the Mbomou, the Ubangi, the Kibali and the Angbokolo in Uganda that led to the Bujumbura, where they found a few occupied tukuls.
Local people’s heads nodded. Yes. They pointed—Homia. Arms pulled back in the air as if shooting an arrow then pointed south. The Zambakaris walked until they found hunter’s huts.
“Stay here while I go find permission to spend the night,” Lucia said, settling children in a hut’s veranda. She looked toward people at a narrow slip of riverbank, a laundry site, surely. Indeed, the laundry site for Saint John Bosco seminarians. Homia.
° ° °
“Let me tell you,” Arketa said when she carried me into this part of her family story. “God is working. God doesn’t sleep.” She swept me along with her into the bush near Homia where her mother had settled the children.
Homia—November 2001.
Lucia walked toward people at the river. They noticed her refugee card and guessed she was from Congo. Ah! But this woman’s card was yellow; not the color of Congolese camps and as she neared, she shouted in French, “Central Africa! Central Africa!”
“You know what happened?” Arketa asked, stepping immediately off her rhetorical question into a story thick with joy.
Because she had talked to Elario in April, he knew to watch for the possibility of his grandmother and the children passing by. He spread the word throughout the seminary, “Watch for them.”
Elario was washing clothes at the river when young men started running toward him, shouting his name. He looked up. Stood up.
“The refugee is coming! The color of the card she wears is not from Congo. No.
Kakuma? No.
Gulu? No! This is not the color we see.
This card is yellow. Come with us.”
Elario ran.
“What is this?” Lucia wondered. A tall, skinny boy ran toward her. She began talking inside her head, saying in her own language, “Which boy is this who moves like my dead grandson who was called Elario? This tall, skinny boy is resembling him.” She watched the boy. She knew she knew that boy. She called his name. Straight up, he looked at her.
“Elario!”
“Grandma!”
The children watched curiously as Grandma raced back to the hut, crying and clinging to a lanky boy. Angelo jumped up.
“Eh! Elario!” cried Angelo.
Elario and Angelo tumbled together, tears and punches fell between them. Timothy was a baby when bombs shattered his family. Timothy didn’t know the boy, he didn’t know what he felt—fear? Not fear, no one seemed afraid. Everyone seemed a little crazy. Rosetta screamed, grabbed her brother Angelo, and began dancing about. She knew, she knew now. This was her cousin.
“Elario!” Rosetta cried.
Sobbing, settling to her knees, Lucia was rocking, holding tightly to Elario’s ankle. Elario bent over his Grandmother, touching, touching her. Touching his family. Who can describe such a blend of sorrow and joy?
Lucia told the children what happened. Grandma blubbered the story: She was near the well when she saw this boy coming. She talked inside her head. She called out his name, “Elario.”
Stories flew from one person to the next, words collided, pauses and sorrows were long, tears unchecked. They learned how Elario had suffered but dodged violence, starvation, and death as he moved through four countries over four years before reaching Homia.
Elario wept again over the deaths and hardship suffered by his family. They slept together that night, the five of them, guests of the seminary. Only Lucia remained awake.
“Through the night,” Arketa said, “my mom was holding Elario from dah head to dah feet, stroking his clean, course hair, saying his name again and again. She was not wasting time with sleep.”
“Dat was not an easy time,” Arketa said, remembering. Then, her face changed. Her eyes brightened.
° ° °
“Did I tell you dah first call from Elario with my mom?” Arketa asked. “Elario use dah priest’s cell phone to say to me, ‘Use the phone card. Call please.’”
“When I call I hear Elario instruct my mom how to hold dah cell phone.
“Not like the stick, out, Grandma,” he said. “But, she doesn’t know to put it up; she doesn’t understand speaking to only dah air or to be quiet for listening,” said Arketa.
“Where is the one to hear?” Lucia asked. By the third fifteen-minute phone card, conversation finally was possible.
“Mom, how many weeks are you walking?” Arketa asked.
“Six, maybe more? It is a long way. Elephant. Lions. Snake. Rebels. Thank God, we are alive but the leg of the kids are swollen because the slipper we have cannot make it. Everything for the foot was gone. This is why we stop a lot.”
“Ohhh,” Arketa said, “I hear dah voice of dah children and dah voice of my mom. That was a big crying day.”
° ° °
After a week’s stay as guests of the seminary, Elario and his family took the local bus through fifty-five dangerous miles from Homia to Kyangwali refugee camp—the first attempt at settlement. They were undocumented and in the camp documents were required but like many refugees, illegally, stealthily, they moved in.
Elario hoped, as was commonly practiced, a bribe might produce forged papers. He inquired and every inquiry called for money. Lucia and the children kept a sensible distance from places of authority within the camp. They built a small tukul. The children planted peanuts.
With permission from his school, Elairo hitched a ride to Kampala to retrieve funds from his mom. In the city he shopped for shoes, tobacco, a bed-sheet, mosquito netting, a cooking pot, cassava flour, rice and, if the dollars stretched far enough, beans. One rough day’s ride to Kampala, one full day back; one slow and dangerous day’s ride from Homia to Kyangwali camp through forests and tea plantations; through hideout territory of one of the Uganda’s most violent rebel groups. Elario didn’t dare do it often.
The schools in Kyangwali camp were inadequate, offering nothing for Angelo and Rosetta and because they were without documents, Lucia could not inquire at the camp clinic about her cough. In essence, they were squatters among a camp population that was edgy, unsettled, armed, and but for a walkie-talkie held by the camp administrator, without any means of outside communication. It wasn’t safe. It wasn’t good, and it wasn’t long before matters forced a move.
In the third month of their stay, the camp administrator passed a decree: “Anyone or any family not registered by the U.N. had four days to leave the camp or face arrest.” Elario had not succeeded in securing forged documents.
“Not by foot,” were they to leave Kyangwali. Uganda’s northwestern territory was extremely dangerous with fighting between the Alliance Democratic Forces against the Ugandan government. Elario arranged for transportation to Homia via Taxi,a vehicle licensed to carry fourteen passengers but in this case—as in nearly every case—twenty-four or twenty-five people piled into and onto the small van. Arketa sent money. Elario traveled to Kampala to retrieve it.
Arketa sliced her paycheck thinner and thinner. Her family in Arizona learned what they could live without in order meet increasing needs of family in Uganda. They could live with one meal a day rather than two. Rice. Rice was enough. They could do without shoes—flip-flops were fine even in Arizona’s winter.
° ° °
Kampala--2002
From Homia to Kampala, a seminary pickup carrying thirty-eight passengers in the truck bed, with four more people in the driver’s cab traveled at night to avoid being caught by dishonest traffic officers. In some countries bribes and robberies are avoidable through the use of back roads. In northwestern Uganda, all roads were back roads, and all routes risked violence. Lucia, Elairo, Timothy, Angelo, and Rosetta absorbed the rough road’s battering, squished by the pack of people—like a mosh pit without music,
In the district of Nalukolongo, in the Rubago suburb four miles from Kampala’s city center, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) held property where refugees in transit could stay for a week: 30 single rooms, 300 people, four pit latrines, and four outside shower stands. A room, a roof, regulations and representatives with clipboards—no question, this was an improvement over the camp.
Arketa’s nephew, Angelo, told me the story via email from his current home in Kampala. “Officially, we stayed for one week, eating the free meals.”
“Thereafter,” he said, “we slept there on a veranda for three weeks and fed ourselves with help from Mama Arketa before we moved to a rented house.”
In an unfamiliar city of more than a million people, Elario waited for funds and found the “house” that Arketa somehow managed to afford. The house (really just a single room without a kitchen, but with access to one outside pit latrine and a shower pipe shared by five other families), was in the slum district of Kisugu in a quarter called Namugongo—one of the biggest slums in Kampala—where crowded rooms were cheap.
Arketa worked “double/double; no days off, to raise money for rent, transportation, phones, and food. She bought a pre-paid cell phone for her mom. $100. She paid $200 a month for the Kampala rent and sent $100 a month for food. If she could, when she could, she sent money to pay for schooling.
“Our school was off and on,” wrote Angelo, “whereby when mom run bankrupt, we didn’t go to school because of fees. When she didn’t have money, when we don't have food, we used to stay hungry, sometimes for three days except for porridge with salt and water. When Mum Arketa could send us money, food was ugali (maize porridge) and psho ((fu-fu); sometimes little fish, or the rotten meat butchers throw out. We know if we cook it and cook it, it is not going to kill us. We had tea with honey for breakfast and if we could, we ate again at 4:30pm. We got used to it.”
Arketa worked as a caregiver, she worked as a med-tech at a hospital. She worked every day of the week. Two of those days she worked sixteen-hour shifts. In Kampala, Angelo, the eldest of the children, struck out at sunup, walked two miles to the Bishop’s compound where he slashed grass, climbed trees for jackfruit, and hoped the priests would contribute to school fees.
Angelo found odd jobs that earned milk or cassava flour, and if he was lucky, a few Ugandan shillings. At a Zero Grazing Dairy, he cut and carried green grass from the lakeshore. He sprayed off cows, milked cows, scooped dung and washed down corrals. Sometimes, he was paid. Sometimes, he was given a meal. Timothy and Rosetta scoured neighborhoods collecting scraps of firewood.
Arketa managed to cover expenses in both Arizona and Kampala. She could do it. She was strong and determined. She saved for three months for Kampala sleeping mats to roll out at night, roll up in the mornings. That was done. When she couldn’t send enough money, she explained her American situation where she and the children with her ate little more than rice and beans and fu-fu. She explained her work hours and the costs and complications of living in America.
She could manage because people of Phoenix were committed to helping refugees adjust, because her children were good. They studied hard. In her absence, they stayed in the house and out of trouble. She shopped at thrift stores and food banks. The children pitched in, cleaning and cooking.
She could manage. No one ate much. She could manage because she understood the greater suffering her family experienced every day in Uganda. She could manage for the months between the now of winter 2002 and the day she hoped her family would arrive in America. She had filed for their coming and the file was open. It shouldn’t be long. But the day of their coming never came.
° ° °
“We stayed shortly together with our Grandy before she fell ill one weekend,” said Angelo as we spoke by phone in 2015. He was, by then a successful 30-years-old living in Kampala.
Kampala, Uganda—February 2002
Lucia hadn’t been well. Angelo noticed in Kyangwali that his grandmother was unusually tired. She had a stubborn cough. Tracking through jungles and sleeping under heavy rain had taken its toll. She was refused treatment by camp doctors because she had no refugee documentation. She did work or barter for aspirin and Quinine. Malaria, typhoid, bladder infections, pain, and fevers were as common as flies in refugee settlements and treatment was equally common—quinine and/or aspirin. Whatever ails you—“take this.”
Lucia was quiet, even a bit distant, during the days between Kyangwali and the room in Kisugu. But then, as her grandchildren attested, “it was always hard to detect signs of unwellness on her.”
She kept going. She kept going until the end of January when, finally, she lay down, knowing by her gift of foretelling derived through her hands on small pieces of carved wood—the gift of asking winds to drive them in the right direction of Uganda, a gift that accurately predicted tragedy or good—the gift of knowing now predicted her death.
On the sixth of February, she would die. She knew that. On the eighth day of her illness she started giving Angelo advice. He was, she reminded him, named after her brave brother. He was her assistant. She prepared him for life without her. She warned him against weakness.
Angelo called Elario to come from Homia. They called Arketa, asking for funds to bribe their way into Kampala’s Mulago hospital where treatment required two things: the Luganda language and a bribe. The Zambakaris had neither. They called a local evangelical pastor for help with the first but not even he could muster the bribe. On Friday, February 1, 2002, they called Mum Arketa for money.
Five hundred dollars? Until the next paycheck, Arketa was about seven coins short of completely broke. She drove to a quick-cash business and borrowed $500.00. Its interest rate that could range from 391%-3733% annual percentage didn’t enter her mind; she would pay off this loan with her next paycheck. She explained to Homeward Bound that she needed to delay paying her February rent.
With cash in her hand and prayers in her mind, she wired the money. The transfer took less time than her drive home but unfortunately, her Arizona Thursday bled into Kampala’s holy Friday, and the Western Union office in Kampala remained closed on Saturdays and Sundays as well. And, oh—for reasons never fully explained to him, Angelo had to wait until Tuesday, February 5th to retrieve the money.
“No,” said Lucia. Under no circumstances would they waste money on a hospital visit for a woman soon to die. No.
For one of the few times in her life, her demand was ignored. Reverend Father Richard of the nearby bishop’s house arranged transport to Aura for free treatment at Rhino Refugee camp.
There, on February 6th, after telling Angelo that this was the day for her dying, Lucia Angoro Taban-Zambakari, who seemed that day stronger than the days before, asked for warm water to bathe. It was her time.
“No,” Lucia said, “My grandchildren will not, under any conditions, wash me.” She washed herself thoroughly.
The pastor of a small evangelical church came to pray and anoint her. Lucia lay down. She turned inward to visits with her late brother, her late husband and children. Within an hour of being bathed and blessed, Lucia took her last breath. She was buried in a plot for Sudanese refugees in Rhino Refugee camp. Within a day, Elario returned to Saint John Bosco Seminary. Angelo, Rosetta, and Timothy returned to their single room in a Kampala slum as now twice orphaned children.
° ° °
Phoenix, Arizona—2015
“I’m talking about all dah problem because you want to understand dah story, Barbara. Who was dehr for dah children? Nobody. Some of dah Ugandans was crying because dez small kids is by demselves. Elario explained to dem, ‘You guys have to know the situation. Mom cannot come. I can only come once in a while because I am a student under the care of the church far away. You have to be strong.’”
“Den? Oh, dis was hard trouble. While dah children was in Aura, burying dahr grandmother, dah team from Immigration Naturalization Services of dah United States Department of Justice came to Kampala along with representatives from dah Jesuit Volunteer Agency who worked with refugees living in slums. Unnnn.”
The file under the name Lucia Agoro, “Head of Family,” was called. But there was no response to the call. There was no Lucia Agoro Taban. There was no Head of Family by which these children could emigrate. No one was dehr.”
There was little but legal entanglement and undiminished confusion.
”From that time to the time you call about bringing Timothy to America,” Angelo said, “the process became a nightmare. The program hit a dead-end.” The children were undocumented and without evidence of any proven adult connection. Nothing budged bureaucracy. For lack of proofs, for lack of funds, for lack of time, for lack of the required Head of Family, the Zambakari file was closed.
° ° °
Lucia died in 2002. I met Arketa in 2009. By that time, Angelo, Rosetta, and Timothy had a handle on refugee life in Kampala; each found ways to survive. They scavenged for anything useful or edible, they worked at anything they could find to do. Arketa sent funds for food, rent, and when she was able, school fees. The children knew the stories of Arketa being beaten to a pulp by thieves who broken into her Phoenix house in 2006, her hospitalization and surgeries, months without income, her car totaled by an uninsured driver, Christopher’s broken ankle, bankruptcies, the likely foreclosure of the home she had purchased through a helping program.
They knew what I didn’t know when Arketa and I first talked in 2009, when I asked to hear her story. When she said, quietly, “It is difficult.”
Coming up: CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A Commitment Half Accomplished—2010
Arketa dropped a stack of documents onto her coffee table, evidence of earlier attempts to bring her sons to America. She wisely thought a bit of education might help me since recently, in glorious ignorance, I had said, “I don’t know how we are going to do it, Arketa, but we are going to bring those boys home.”
I only knew this—$470, oceans, continents, policies, paperwork, and a cheek swab had created the separation. I paid the $470. Arketa, however, knew I needed to know more.
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