I opened the door and filed out in front of my audience of two.
Karina gasped. “Oh, dear Lord, Sophie. You scared me. I didn’t expect you to be up and ready so early.” She laughed. She eyed me and her hands came to rest on her hips. “Well, don’t you look a sight! My dear, you are a breathtaking girl.”
“Thank you,” I told her, knowing she was just being kind.
“Shall we?” she asked, grabbing my hand without asking. She started leading us to the second largest building on the property, just to the right of the main building, the center of the large half circle of buildings. To the right of the kitchens were the bathhouses. Just to the left of the main building and to the right of the remaining staff living quarters, was Charles and Karina’s house I deduced. I could tell because it was a bit more established-looking over the other residential huts, had a proper roof as opposed to the thatched roofs of the other buildings. To the left of their house was what I assumed was Kate’s and the other staff’s double hut and to the left of those was mine and Dingane’s. In the center of the property was the largest tree I’d ever seen in my entire life.
“What kind of tree is that?” I asked Karina, astonished that I was just then noticing it.
“It’s a baobab tree,” she smiled sweetly at me.
It looked like a giant bonsai, thick trunk, easily twenty feet around the base, and reached to impossible heights before its canopy shot flat and spread out to a radius of a hundred feet easily.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I know,” she said, patting its trunk as we passed by it.
“It’s always been here. Always.”
“Stalwart, is it?” I asked.
Karina smiled at me. “Yes, much like my Charles.”
I returned the easy smile and felt a little of my anxiety begin to melt away.
The kitchens were small and I wondered how they fed them all with such meager operations. I looked around me and saw tables overflowing with laughing children.
“How many are there?” I asked.
“Fifty-nine,” she said succinctly. “We’re only equipped to handle twenty.”
“How do you manage?” I asked quietly, taking in the expanse of children.
“We just do. Lots of faith, my love. It always works out in the end. Somehow. Somehow we turn thirty beds into sixty. Somehow we stretch our food to impossible measures. Somehow we survive on our impossibly meager income. Somehow we love them all equally. Somehow.”
I swallowed away my disbelief because there was proof in this pudding. Somehow they did it.
“Now,” she began brightly, “breakfast will not be what you are expecting, I’m guessing, but it’s food nonetheless and you’ll get used to it.” She looked at me then.
“I keep saying that, don’t I?” She laughed loudly. “Poor dear.”
“I’ll be just fine,” I told her sincerely as I watched a little boy with one hand try to steady his bowl.
Suddenly, Dingane came from out of nowhere. I hadn’t been prepared to see him yet and my chest felt like it was hit with the atom bomb. My veins ran warmly all over my body and my face flushed. I watched as he placed what appeared to be a little scrap of rubber underneath the boy’s bowl. It didn’t budge from its place and the boy looked on Dingane with a brilliant smile. I felt an incredible urge to hug both boys, maybe Dingane a little closer than was socially acceptable. My blood ran hot in that moment. What the hell is wrong with me?
“Sit, my dear,” Karina said, pointing to a chair at a table near the door. “That’s where the adults sit unless one of the children needs us, which is nearly all the time,” she joked. “I’ll bring you your plate this morning. At lunch, just walk up to the window and Kate will hand you your meal.”
“Thank you, Karina.”
I sat at the table and the little girl with the missing arm came up to me. “Hi,” she said sheepishly.
“You speak English?” I asked her, bewildered.
“Karina teach me,” she answered brokenly.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
She touched the middle of her chest with her remaining hand and answered, “Mandisa.”
“It’s-It’s nice to meet you, Mandisa,” I told the baby girl, awkwardly tripping on my words. I was so unaccustomed to talking to children, let alone an amputee.
She smiled at me and picked up the hand I had resting on my leg. I began to pull the hand back but something in her eyes told me it was okay, that she was just a human girl, and a beautiful one at that.
I tentatively squeezed her little hand and she giggled, sending a warm, tingling sensation up my arm and into my heart.
“Have you eaten, Mandisa?” I asked her.
The smile dropped from her face and she ran off, disappearing behind the kitchen doors.
“What did I say?” I asked the air in front of me, stunned she’d fled.
“She doesn’t eat,” I heard a voice say from behind me. Dingane. My blood began to boil once more.
I turned toward him. “What do you mean she doesn’t eat? How does she stay alive?”
“She drinks. For days after she first arrived we couldn’t even get her to do that.”
“Why?” I asked him as he sat across from me.
“We thought it was because she was recovering from the loss of her arm but later discovered it is because she misses her mother.”
“What happened to her mother?” I asked, exponentially afraid to hear his answer.
His eyes met mine for the first time that morning and his lips tightened, his shoulders shrugged in answer and my stomach fell to my feet.
“We supplement milk with all sorts of proteins and vitamins, but she’s still not gaining weight the way we need her to.”
Dingane turned from me and spotted a child who needed help. I have no idea how he saw but he did. He stood and helped a little boy who couldn’t reach his chair to sit with only one leg. I watched him. He didn’t put the boy in the chair like I assumed he would but helped him discover how to do it on his own.
“What happened to them?” I asked Dingane when he sat down again.
“There is an incredibly evil man named Joseph Kony who roams south Sudan and northern Uganda in search of children to create his child army called the LRA or Lord’s Resistance Army. He invades innocent villages, takes young women for obvious reasons, attempts to kidnap their children. If the children refuse to come with him, they chop off a limb to prevent them from being able to grow into a useful soldier that can oppose him later. He kills their parents and we’re sent the orphans who survive, broken and damaged and all alone.”
I swallowed down the lump that had grown in my throat. “Why does he do it?”
“I don’t think he even knows. He claims to fight for peace and security in Uganda as well as for the impoverished. These are his proclamations, but he just works for the devil, in my opinion. He is the ultimate in evil.”
I examined the tiny faces that surrounded me and felt so incredibly sad for them and their fates. I wanted to respond to everything Dingane had revealed to me, but I couldn’t. There was nothing to say.
After breakfast, Dingane told me I needed to follow him.
“The children usually retrieve their school things right now. Karina, Kate and I teach them from eight to two in the afternoon while Charles and occasionally I make repairs or preparations for the day’s activities. Wednesdays, I’m in charge of doing some sort of outdoor activity with them during school hours. Unfortunately, you’ve been assigned to me at Karina’s insistence, so you’ll be accompanying me all day every day.”
“Yes, so unfortunate,” I spit back sarcastically.
Dingane stopped short between the baobab tree and our huts. “I don’t like you. Is this such a surprise?”
“Frankly, yes, it is,” I told him candidly. “You don’t know me.”
“Ah, but you see, I do. I know you quite well. I know you’re here because you were caught with cocaine twice. I recognized immediately the type of person you were before you even arrived.”
“I was caught with cocaine. I admit it, freely. I’m not proud of it, God knows, but I also knew coming in here everyone would be aware of why I was forced to be here—”
“Forced,” he repeated, stopping me midsentence and closing in narrowly.
“Another reason why I’d be just as satisfied if you hopped right back on that plane. Every single soul here is present because they want to be. You’re only serving a sentence.”
My breath rushed in and out of me in heady anger. “All the same,” I gritted. “I’d appreciate it if you got off your self-righteous pedestal and came back down to earth. I’m here to work. So let’s work.”
That’s the moment I realized that my attitude about feeling like being sent to Masego was the most unfair punishment in the world had disappeared the second I’d laid eyes on Mandisa. It surprised me, shocked me, to be honest, but that didn’t mean I was going to enjoy my work at Masego. It only meant that while I was there, I wouldn’t feel as if a gross injustice had been performed against me. All I had to do was remind myself of Mandisa’s story.
CHAPTER NINE
“Come with me,” a pissed-off Dingane ordered. He led me to his side of the hut and I followed him inside.
His bed looked plain and barely able to contain him, but his walls were covered in an eclectic assortment of belongings from pictures the children had drawn him to an acoustic guitar.
He slid a large tub out from underneath his bed and grabbed a stack of papers I’d seen in the back of the jeep when he’d picked me up from the airport.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Worksheets. Any time I’m in town, I try to get as many as possible.”
We walked to the classrooms and my heart started to beat erratically. I was nervous, really nervous. I wondered if the kids would see right through me, if they knew what a fraud I really was, that I had no business helping them, as I was the worst person I knew.
The door opened and I saw twenty smiling faces, happy and giggling. They fell quiet as soon as Dingane and I entered the room. I gulped. Audibly.
“Students, you’ve met Miss Price—”
“Sophie,” I interrupted. “They can call me Sophie.”
Dingane narrowed his eyes at me for interrupting but continued, “You may call her Miss Price. Should we try to speak English today? To make her more comfortable?” he asked them kindly.
Oh, I see, I thought. They get Dr. Jekyll and I get Mr. Hyde.
“Yes, Mr. Aberdeen!” they all chimed in wildly.
“Good. I’ve brought the new worksheets from town and I’d like to start on these first. Oliver?” he asked a little boy in the front row.
The boy got up quickly and began passing the worksheets around.
Dingane closed the distance between us and I couldn’t help how much more nervous his proximity made me. Tried as I did, I could not get over how attractive I found him. “Think you can handle math?” he asked.
