B009G3EPMQ EBOK (6 page)

She found to her surprise that the phenomenon somehow struck her at the core of her being. It was as if her bones resonated with the desperation of the families ripped apart by it. Nothing in her life up to that point prepared her to stare into such a pit of misery, and her own natural empathy staggered in the attempt to visualize what such lives could be like. News photos left her sputtering in disbelief. She waxed so indignant people at school began to notice and comment about it. Oddly enough, nobody seemed to object.

Thus, instead of causing some sort of social backlash with her concern for faraway children, she found that as the daughter of an independent furniture craftsman she was expected to behave like a latter-day hippie. Her schoolmates just rolled their eyes and
smiled. In this way the stereotype protected her by establishing a handy identity. It freed her to explore her social concerns on a number of topics without whipping up a backlash amid the hyper–image consciousness of other teenaged girls.

Whenever she studied Africa, the media obliged her curiosity with a fountain of stories covering the full range of human misery, but the worst always ended with the child victims. She came to realize no end to child warfare was in sight. Too many attempts to snuff it out succeeded only for the cameras, without lasting effect. It was as if the purveyors of child labor and child soldiers followed the cockroach rule and for every one you saw, a hundred more hid deep in the walls.

She kept active enough to maintain friendships outside of cultural interests, and the good news in that year was Jessica was also having the much happier experience of feeling her self-consciousness about her height go away. Until then, the growth spurt that left her standing nearly six feet tall early in the sixth grade had caused her to fear a forced career in the circus.

But now, at fourteen, something very interesting indeed seemed to be happening to everybody around her. Instead of mocking her for her gawky dimensions as they had in the past, they suddenly perceived her as fashionably tall and model-thin.

The change in perception brought her first real chance to test her personal limits as an emerging young woman just prior to a school dance. Jessica had mixed emotions about going, and while her father drove her to the event, she talked with him about a book she had just finished reading. It was a true story about a girl who lived a life of great social service and made a real difference before her own untimely death. Jessica was as moved and stirred by the story as any idealistic teenager is capable of being. She confessed to feeling troubled because she couldn’t see any life path that made room for her as she wanted to live, in the middle of the world’s struggle to humanize itself.

She had no idea how to visualize her own future. A conventional domestic lifestyle had no attraction to her at all; neither did a life in the business world. She liked the idea of being a teacher, but she hated the thought of the conventional life that went along with teaching, if she remained in her own familiar society.

The dance that evening soon faded in her memory, but the conversation with her father stayed with her. John Buchanan didn’t expect his daughter to go into his business, he just encouraged her to ignore the world’s baser temptations and choose a life of service. For him, the details of her life choices were not as important as the attitude she brought to the world and the honorable state of mind she maintained there.

Her mother, Marilyn, was determined to keep Jessica from feeling as if she needed to live just down the road and encouraged her to follow any honorable dream that appealed to her. A dilemma over her future arrived soon afterward with the local newspaper’s call for teenaged girls to appear as models in print and television ads.

Jessica showed up at a large open audition with a few of her school friends. They attended as a group of bored local girls looking for something to do, but the “adventure” turned out to mostly involve waiting. Once each girl got in front of the casting board her moment in the sun was brief. The board members knew in a glance if they were looking at workable talent. Most of the girls in the room passed by without causing anyone to blink.

Then it was Jessica’s turn. She watched their eyes light up when she strolled in at five feet, eleven inches tall. She quickly discovered she was what they were looking for. In this uniquely attractive teenager they saw a thin body to drape with couture garments and a face whose lines and angles would mold themselves to countless combinations of color and shade.

At first, their enthusiasm for her swept her up on a warm wave of social approval. It felt appealing and frightening at the same
time. But once they began to send her out on auditions, the real nature of that world blossomed in front of her. These were environments where she received automatic approval just for entering the room looking as she did. It was bizarre to recall the catcalls she had drawn over her awkward height since the age of twelve. Now there was this surreal experience of walking into the modeling world to see coiffed strangers light up at the sight of her and hurry over to greet her.

Everyone seemed to assume the attention delighted her. She could tell plenty of other young women loved everything about it. Many of them found the payoff worth the stress and sacrifice.

But Jessica discovered that the prospect of receiving automatic success via the DNA lottery was about as satisfying as trying to quell real hunger with cotton candy. New faces beamed back at her, but their gazes stopped at the pores of her skin. She imagined herself in a line of work based on promoting the material world’s fascination with consumer goods. That image was bleak. Rather than picturing a set of exciting opportunities, she felt herself repelled by the odor of slow death in a pretty box.

A wordless message settled in: Her emerging identity didn’t matter in those places. For them, this semihippie, with her childish dreams of doing something for the downtrodden of the world, was of no consequence until she helped them sell something. Those sensibilities prevented her from finding any satisfaction in the prospect of a career as a clotheshorse.

She knew many other women would consider her arrogant and ungrateful for failing to appreciate easy offers of legitimate modeling work. But their approval wasn’t enough to justify that life to her, and neither could their disapproval be allowed to steer her off course on something that felt so vital. Her life up to that point was spent watching her mother’s and father’s charitable service to all sorts of organizations, leaving Jessica immune to the sneers of those who saw such service as a foolish waste of time.

The delayed outcome of that ride to the dance with her father finally arrived when she realized that the world’s easy benefits, such as they were, had little attraction to her. She listened to people obsess over their houses and their cars and it felt like listening to alcoholics obsess over their choice of drinks.

Even if it were presented to her on a platter and tied with a bow, a life lived for the camera wouldn’t stem her growing desire to get involved on a direct personal level and do something in the humanitarian field, to work with real people, hand to hand. She quit the audition process in its early stages and never went back.

At that point Erik and Jessica had developed a connection. Neither one could feel it at the time, but it was already pulling them onto the same ground.

Jessica:

It was June 2006 when I first stepped off the plane in Nairobi, ready to experiment with living another life in Africa. After spending my late teens and early twenties abstractly concerned about the dreadful phenomenon of child combat soldiers, I’d become convinced much of the deprivation on that continent would be eliminated only through education. My field of study was in general education for children, but my concern was the neglected girls of Africa. I had already cut my teeth on teacher training in America and Guatemala, and at the age of twenty-seven I felt fully charged for the task, having finished clearing away the mistakes of my early life. My three-year marriage to my high school sweetheart had collapsed into an abusive slog that ended with him abandoning our relationship altogether. For me, getting married had felt like a natural and expected life step, something I was supposed to do. Once inside the marriage it quickly became apparent that in getting married both of us had done what we thought we were supposed to do, but neither one had thought through what our lives were supposed to actually be like together.

I guess the trauma of the failed marriage left me numb to
thoughts of spiritual life for some time afterward. In spite of my Christian upbringing, I wasn’t in Africa to do missionary work. I needed to make changes in the world that I could see and feel, among people I could deal with and come to know. Any thoughts I had at that time about my spiritual condition were pushed to the back of my mind. It all just felt like a realm I couldn’t understand.

Of course the divorce felt something like death at the time, but it didn’t take long before I saw it as an emancipation. The goofy nickname “Africa Jess” had been bestowed on me by college acquaintances in their attempt to help explain my obsessions, but it also represented their unspoken recognition of a force that has driven me from an early age. By the time I was ready to actually make the trip, “Africa Jess” felt like a built-in part of me. Why I cared about children in Africa was an irritating question I could never answer well. So there I was, standing in a foreign airport, knowing my individual efforts would be a drop in the bucket but no less determined to get started.

The air was pleasantly warm and made the transition to this new climate feel easy. It was neither the location nor season for any of Africa’s famed desert heat or jungle steam. The arrival was sweet.

I was met by my friend Susan, who had originally hailed from Texas and was there to pick me up with a middle-aged expat named Larry. They were cheerful companions, and I was glad to have no romantic encumbrances to inhibit this journey. At this point in my life the only romance interesting to me was the one I planned to have with this new adventure.

After my husband left I’d avoided the dating scene and taken a couple of years to finish classwork for my teaching degree. The phrase “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” can sometimes have a positive meaning. When my ex threw away our marriage as if it was worthless, his betrayal freed me from the guilty shackles binding me to a conventional life that had come to feel no more authentic to me than it must have felt to him. The bathwater may
have evaporated, but the baby had just stepped onto the tarmac in Nairobi, Kenya.

Soon afterward the airport was behind me, and I found myself jolting along in Larry’s beat-up Land Rover while he cheerfully narrated our passing surroundings. “Yup,” he said, grinning, “nice to have new people arriving. After being here for the last twenty years, it helps me see this place with fresh eyes! Look out across there—termite stacks as tall as a man! Yucca plants as tall as a tree! Got anything like that at home? Ha!”

In every direction were striking and strange reminders of how far I’d ventured. It was odd to still be under the same sky, in a place so alien. We plunged down the road passing those giant yucca plants and termite stacks, along with massive anthills the size of guard towers.

Larry drove us past a particularly dilapidated neighborhood. I later learned it’s one of the poorest in Nairobi. Video journalists like to use it for backdrops to their stand-up pieces. It makes whatever they say sound important. It’s so bad, the sight of it glues people’s eyes to the screen.

Nothing prepares a person for a sight like that, pornographically degraded “housing” sprawled for acres in hand-built shanties of scavenged boards and plastic sheeting. This was no refugee camp, but a permanent residential district. Public sanitation was nil; the place itself was a sewer. The shock of that sight hit me like smacking my head into an overhead branch.

Susan and I had originally intended to go on this trip with a group from her master’s degree program, but they canceled due to security concerns—a theme I didn’t yet appreciate. We had already been making preparations and raising funds, so we decided that just because the group canceled didn’t mean we had to.

We bought ourselves a ride on a tiny puddle jumper that looked as if it should have been retired back when my mother was a girl, both deciding that things like absurdly obsolete aircraft were just
going to be part of life here. We took off for the Republic of South Sudan for my first bout with volunteer work in Africa, and I felt confident I could handle anything, with her along. She’d already been coming down to Africa to volunteer for several years.

Giving in completely to the idea of flying in such a tiny old plane made the turbulent flight fairly easy to tolerate, and we landed ready to volunteer at an orphanage called Shekinah Fellowship Children’s Village, run by a man named Sam Childers. What I knew on that day, as opposed to what I assumed, was that the Childers organization specialized in reclaiming child soldiers who had been kidnapped and pressed into combat—boys and girls who were stolen from their families while the families themselves were often executed by the kidnappers. The working goal of the place, stripped of slogans, was to provide the orphans with some semblance of a chance for a productive life. Education was paramount. Without some form of practical education, few of them could avoid becoming criminals, with drastically shortened life expectancies.

I didn’t doubt this was the time and place to begin the life I’d dreamed of leading for so long. Walking away from that chattering prop plane and into these new surroundings, I saw most of all that this was the time for me to attempt to become the person I hoped, but had not proved, I could be. The question was whether I could grapple with the harsh ways of this world, deal with them honorably, and keep my heart intact. I’d already met too many jaded expats and had no desire to become one myself. If the end result of a life of humanitarian work was a personal outlook of bored detachment and ironic disdain, it seemed like a waste of time and a poor excuse for an adventure.