Love in the Driest Season (18 page)

I picked up the satellite phone and called her at home.

“There were so many restrictions in Zimbabwe, so many bureaucrats who get in your way,” she said. “They weren’t very friendly, to be honest. They thought it was very strange that I was a white woman and wanted to adopt a black child. They took my paperwork, but it was clear it wasn’t going anywhere.”

She had given up and gone to Zambia, where the need was just as great but the process straightforward, she said. After officials cleared her paperwork, Chloe had been in her home within two months. But, Alisa said, she knew of an American couple in Harare who had adopted a Zambian child from the same home as Chloe. She couldn’t remember if they had adopted a Zimbabwean child or not, and she passed along their phone number.

This turned into another dead end. Kelly and Diane too had tried to adopt in Zimbabwe but had also found the Department of Social Welfare to be a quagmire. They eventually gave up and went across the border to Zambia. Like Alisa, they quickly adopted there. “Zimbabwe was just impossible,” Diane said over dinner. “They’ve got more orphans than they can keep up with, the conditions are terrible, and when you show up they act like you’re the problem.”

I went back to Alisa’s first e-mail. She had mentioned a Canadian named Roger. He had worked at the High Commission in Harare but had now rotated back home. She was sure that he and his wife were adopting an older child, a teenager.

It took two days, but I tracked him down in Canada.

“It just didn’t work out,” he said. “The boy was fourteen or fifteen when we got involved with him. He was a street kid. He was getting into some trouble and didn’t have anywhere else to go. We brought him into our home, and everything seemed to be working out. But Social Welfare just wouldn’t process the paperwork. I would go by there and go by there, and nothing would happen. He finally got to be seventeen, which meant he couldn’t be legally adopted, which I think the department knew, and then it all sort of collapsed.”

“Did they ever tell you they just weren’t going to approve it?”

“Oh, no. They just kept asking for this or that piece of paper, and then somebody who had to approve it who wasn’t there, and so on.”

“Do you know of anybody else who adopted?”

“No.”

By now, Vita was working closely with Stella on a grant proposal that was aimed at lowering Chinyaradzo’s infant mortality rate. There were long hours getting it ready for submission to the U.S. embassy’s “self-help” funding program. Vita often used the time to ask Stella if there were any other couples like the Germans who had adopted from Chinyaradzo. She said she couldn’t remember any. Then Vita tried a couple of faxes to something called Bethany Christian Services, an international adoption agency out of Michigan, our last legal residence in the United States. They listed their services in nineteen sites in thirteen countries, from India to Costa Rica. Not one was on the African continent. “I don’t know that we’ve ever handled a case out of Africa,” the head of the agency faxed us back.

I went back to my source in the Social Welfare office, who said there wasn’t much to be said.

“Listen, we only do a handful of adoptions in our branch each year, even if the adoptive parents are both Zimbabweans,” the source said. “It’s always relatives who take in children for adoption, not what you might call strangers. It’s just seen as odd here. And foreign adoptions? Maybe twice a year. I’m sure some Americans adopted at some point, but there’s no way anybody is ever going to tell you about it. There’s no record kept.”

We turned to searching the Internet at night.
Africa
and
adoption
didn’t bring a lot of hits on the search engines, except perhaps from Ethiopia, which had a somewhat established program. Then we hit on All as One, a California-based company that specialized in African adoptions. It was an oddity in the field. We had ordered several of those international-adoption books found in the specialty niches of bookstores, the how-to kind of book that lists regulations in country after country. For us, they were of no use. American couples fan out all over the globe to adopt children from Russia to India to China, but Africa is scarcely on the tour. There were only a handful of agencies that work on the continent. The All as One site showed them working in Sierra Leone, Ethiopia—and Zimbabwe.

“
Voilà!
” Vita shouted.

The site showed they had fifty-five children up for adoption in Sierra Leone, the world’s poorest nation, which had been ripped apart by a vicious civil war. I clicked on the Zimbabwe page and, while waiting for an image to appear, figured we were home free. If they could work in Sierra Leone, then Zimbabwe was child’s play.

“There are no children presently available for adoption in Zimbabwe,” read their Web site. Vita and I let loose with the same expletive at the same time. I checked the time differences, then called Deanna Wallace Cox, the agency director, at her California office. It took a couple of days to hook up, but I finally got her on the line. She was the adoptive mother of several children, including some from Ethiopia, and she knew the ropes, all right. She’d traveled to Zimbabwe several times. She knew the players in the department, she knew Stella, she could recite the Zimbabwean legal statutes.

She also had given up and moved on to other countries.

“They just don’t want it to happen in Zimbabwe,” she said. “They will never tell you no. They smile. They tell you they like you. They never said they were rejecting my proposals. But they just lost my files, canceled meetings, and wouldn’t show up when we did have them. They’d never return my phone calls. It’s not a question of a bribe. It’s not a question of race. They just want you to go away.”

Such was the uneasy détente in which we found ourselves in the early months of 1999. We had Chipo and weren’t giving her up. The department had the paperwork to make her ours. They weren’t giving that up either. It was difficult to know what to do next.

“What happens if we just pick her up and go?” Vita said one night after we had put Chipo to bed. We were sitting in the dark of the patio, the lights in the house turned off, sharing a bottle of wine. It was at least the thousandth time we had done this—pictured scenarios for getting Chipo out of the country in an emergency, fought and argued and quibbled and planned all over again.

“We get across the border fine and then have problems getting in somewhere else,” I said. “Ever try getting into the United States without a passport?”

“A lot of people do,” she said.

“I just never pictured it that way.”

“Yeah? Gimme your take of life on the lam.”

“We get to Cape Town or Rio, live on a houseboat, and I write seedy novels under an assumed name.”

“How attractive.”

“Steamy stuff, bodice rippers. Heaving breasts, broad shoulders, the smooth Panamanian who seems a little too well informed, the caustic Senegalese olive importer with the seductive Lebanese mistress.”

“Wouldn’t the Lebanese import the olives and the—”

“Rewrites, rewrites,” I said, waving a hand.

“Do you have any serious idea of what we should do?”

I listened to the breeze come through the jacarandas. The dogs were wrestling in the grass, rolling over each other. The pool was still. It was quiet a long time.

“No.”

Another pause.

“I’m going to bed,” Vita said, and was gone.

I let her go. Day by day, our relationship was eroding. We had once hosted parties for dozens, even a hundred people at a time. But now, falling ever deeper into the adoption struggle, everything else seemed to fade away, as did our sense of humor and affection. Other than those occasional afternoons out with another couple, we didn’t go out much, and when we did, it was mostly dinner alone, another of those endless strategy sessions. When we stayed at home, in front of a fire in the chill of late evenings in the dry season, the hours no longer seemed peaceful but nerve-racking. Sitting on the patio, I remembered an older female friend once counseling me that as long as there was laughter in the bedroom, then your relationship was probably doing fine. The problem was, outside of our delight in Chipo’s steady growth, there wasn’t much laughter anywhere in our house.

It was particularly frustrating because there was no clear obstacle. The department still would not give a checklist of all the documents it needed. The goal seemed to be to lead you into a thicket of petty bureaucratic entanglements so deep that you could never hack your way through to the other side. Further, investigations that constituted proper social work got lost in bureaucratic ineptitude, apathy, suspicion, and sullen hostility. I backed off the offer to provide the department with a copy machine, which they sorely needed, for fear Kaseke would twist it into “evidence” of some sort of a bribe. We were left to guess, and guess again, at what might work.

A couple of months earlier, with our citizenship appearing to be a major issue, we had gone on a three-week tour of the real estate market. We planned to use our life savings to buy a house because, as property owners, we could then apply for residency. With that in hand, we hoped it would show good faith of long-term plans to keep a residence for Chipo in Zimbabwe, and thus clear some of the resistance toward foreign nationals. We eventually negotiated a price on the house we were renting with the landlord, who was ready to close the deal right away. I called my brother and asked if he would loan me a few thousand to complete the deal. He said sure. While we were mulling it over before signing on the dotted line, I was hospitalized with that arm infection, and then Mugabe made his televised declaration about journalists being state enemies, and that plan went out the window.

We finally decided on a simple idea designed to push the process forward, to get the department to grant more paperwork while stopping short of adoption. The plan was based on a company perk called home leave—a return trip to the United States paid for by the company, that I was technically entitled to once every eighteen months. I was due for it now. We had no desire to go to the United States, but such a trip offered several benefits. First, we could portray it to the Social Welfare office as a professional obligation that required us to leave the country. Second, and far more importantly, we would just be asking to take Chipo on a trip, not to adopt her—but if they okayed the travel, it meant they would have to do the paperwork for her birth certificate, national identity number, and—the magic wand—a passport.

Finally, there was a bottom-line advantage: We would have copies of the state authorization needed to legally take Chipo out of the country. If need be, I could make a copy of that paperwork and change the date, and we could cross the border in an emergency with no hassle. I had never forged documents, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know
how.
I hadn’t spent three months researching a story inside a Florida maximum-security prison, two days walking through the foothills of the Italian Alps with a couple of Romanian clandestines, and six years working in conflict zones without picking up a little
something.

“At the end of the day, you’re right,” I told Vita. “There
are
a couple million illegal immigrants in the United States. I’d hate to think they’re all smarter than us.”

15

“S
HORTCUTS
”

E
ACH MORNING
there would be a steady stream of people walking into the complex of buildings at the Social Welfare office, workers and citizens gathering outside the chain-link fence with vendors hawking peanuts, roasted corn, and soft drinks. I would park on the street out front in the early shade, where it never failed that a young man between the ages of twelve and twenty-five would materialize at my door before I could put the thing into park. The kid would tell me he would watch my car, then walk off before I could say yes or no. He’d go back up the street, sit down, and go to sleep in the shade of an overhanging tree until a friend woke him up to tell them that I was returning. I never really minded—at least they waited until you returned to an intact vehicle before collecting—so I always said okay. Then I would walk past the vendors and turn left to go past the drop-down gate at the entrance to the staff parking lot, which was on packed-dirt areas that ran alongside a narrow stretch of asphalt. Just inside the left-hand entrance to the building there was always a cluster of people sitting in an unlighted expanse of hallway, waiting, waiting, always waiting. I never knew for what. I would nod and say hello, which rarely garnered a response, turn left down the gloomy hallway, turn right into the next corridor, and rap on a door on the right-hand side. Most of the time Aaron Munautsi, our new social worker, kept the door ajar.

It was a small, open room with a concrete floor. Hundreds of files and papers cluttered his desk, the floor, the top of sagging file cabinets. There were one or two straight-back chairs facing his desk. A square window, with a heavy grate to block out the late-afternoon sun, was on the western wall. A fixture with a couple of fluorescent tubes was overhead. Sometimes it was on, sometimes it wasn’t. As I sat down, I surveyed the wall behind him. Among other things, it bore a sign that rested just behind his head. Cast in heavy type, it read:

I’
M
B
LACK-

W
HAT
A
BOUT
I
T?

I appreciated the attitude but wondered about its relevance. In the months I had been coming into the Social Welfare office, I had seen maybe two other white people. I mean, I couldn’t help but wonder who he was telling.

He was in his mid-forties, I guessed, had a growing paunch, and wore a rumpled suit and tie. He had a husky voice, rarely smiled, at least at me, and accepted my paperwork with a harrumph. He said, “I have heard about you.”

“Favorably, I hope,” I said with a smile.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said absently.

I paused, then quickly recapped our case, explaining our wish to adopt. It was in the early days of March 2000, and I explained that I was due for home leave in July. I asked if that would be possible.

“July?” he laughed. “Why are you telling me this now? That is many months away.”

“Well, I know that you’re busy, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a problem. I didn’t want to come to you at the last minute.”

“That is no problem. We have plenty of time.”

“Terrific. My company pays for the tickets, and they have many other correspondents to schedule as well, so if I can give them a specific time, it helps everybody’s planning.”

“You can leave my office now,” he said.

Well. This wasn’t going to be warm and fuzzy. I quickly repeated the offer I had made to Kaseke, that I would shortly be on leave and was around to be of any help on any case.

“I don’t need any help,” he said.

I came back a week later. He seemed surprised. I had a letter in hand from Joyce Davis, my editor, which I had requested she write. She informed him of the home leave and was kind enough to mention the dates I had chosen—my bosses didn’t really have to see me in July—and he nodded. I told him it was simply written confirmation of my request, an American business habit. He said fine. Then he told me again that I could leave.

March turned into April, and I heard nothing. Another couple of weeks passed, and I was suddenly six weeks into my leave, halfway through, and hadn’t gotten a damn thing done. We took Chipo on day safaris to see lions and hippos and giraffes, but my nerves jangled like a pocketful of nickels. I kept an eye on the charges against the three Americans, on Mugabe’s increasing rhetoric, feeling as though a clock were ticking down while we were putzing around at Victoria Falls.

A week later, I stopped in Munautsi’s office again. He stood up, not looking at me, and went to his door. He held it open. “You must leave my office. I do not want to see you anymore. I will call you when I have something to tell you.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Munautsi,” I said, standing, “but it’s been my experience that social workers are too busy to call us.”

“I will call you when I have something to tell you.”

I went home and told Vita that perhaps it was a race thing, particularly given that sign in his office. “Maybe it’s his one chance in life to push a white guy around and he doesn’t want to miss it,” I concluded with a shrug. “Let’s see how you do.”

Vita went down there a few days later. He refused to let her in the door. “That son of a bitch,” she came home fuming. “Acted like I was some little woman he couldn’t be bothered with.”

But ticking off Munautsi was not going to do us any good, so we turned our attention elsewhere for a few days. There didn’t seem to be any other option. I was idly taking care of paperwork in the office one morning when Vita shouted from the living room. There was an urgent tone to it, and I leaped from my chair and bolted into the living room, ready for anything. What I saw instead was Vita standing perfectly still, holding out a pencil. Halfway across the room, Chipo was wobbling on her hands and knees, a look of concentration on her face. Then she put her weight on her feet, bent her knees, and pushed back with her hands. Her upper body moved up, up—and somehow, she was standing upright, both hands out to her sides.

“Well, I’ll be—”

“Hush!” Vita hissed. “Now watch this.”

She leaned over and twitched the pencil, back and forth. “Come get the pencil, baby,” she said.

Chipo was wobbling, a huge smile on her face. She was wearing a green pair of zip-up pajamas, complete with little footies. She held out both her hands, tilted her right shoulder forward, then swung her right foot a few inches in front of her. Then, teetering, she hunched her left shoulder and swung out that foot. Then the right. The left. She was walking, a kind of slow-motion Frankenstein stagger, but walking. She made it all the way to the pencil. Then she sat down with a plop on her bottom, giggling so hard she couldn’t stand up.

We laughed and hooted and cheered so loudly that the two Rottweillers came running, thinking something was wrong.

“My little baby is a
biped,
” Vita crowed, swooping her up in a hug.

We were delighted on days like this—I took an entire roll of film of Chipo walking six steps—but it was always muted when we went down to Chinyaradzo. Infants continued to die at the orphanage on a pace of one every three weeks. Both at the orphanage and in phone calls that stretched late into the evening, Vita and Stella talked for hours about how to slow this procession of deaths. Vita, from her contacts at the U.S. embassy, knew that Ambassador Tom McDonald oversaw a program that offered funding for small projects. It was described as a self-help program, the sort of grants and loans that development agencies call microenterprise. It’s designed for an enterprising farmer to get new tools, for women pooling their resources to open a small store, and so on. Vita and Stella, trying to identify the biggest threats to infant life at the orphanage, focused on little things that might eradicate the opportunistic germs and illnesses that triggered more serious health problems.

They put together a plan to refurbish the kitchen, including putting in a refrigerator and running hot water and modern cooking equipment, in order to make sure the children were getting safe and nutritious food. In the changing room, they wanted to install a new machine to clean diapers, provide a changing table, and bring in other amenities.

More importantly, they wanted to train workers in basic child-care issues, such as recognizing the onset of colds, viruses, and the flu so that they could be caught early. There were other simple proposals, such as staggering the feeding hours, so that three workers were not trying to feed fifteen infants at once. As it was, if the infants didn’t eat rapidly, they didn’t get a chance to eat at all, a factor contributing to sickness and malnutrition and, we thought, one reason why Chipo nearly starved to death. Finally, Vita went back to Dr. Paz’s office. She explained the project, saying that she would like for him to visit the home for weekly lectures on health and hygiene. He could deliver these talks in Shona, increasing the comfort level for the young women asking questions.

There was no salary, Vita said. And there was no need, Dr. Paz replied—he would be happy to do it for free.

None of this sounds like a sweeping overhaul of the place, particularly in light of the mortality rate, but many of the health problems were either caused or intensified by simple human error. While some of the more mature women did backbreaking work, most of the younger workers were merely teenagers from the home. They had scant supplies, little training, and no experience in caring for special-needs children. They were sincere and they cared, but they were also desensitized to the orphanage’s conditions to a degree that was almost beyond reach. Robert’s death was a staggering example—how do you train a worker who will let a child die on her back because she’s too timid, or too apathetic, to ask a doctor for help? These were far more serious and overlapping social issues, something a Nancy Reagan–esque “Just speak up” campaign was not going to cure. Nor was there anything Stella could do to upgrade her staffing, as the home’s pauper status left no funding to hire professionals.

Once, shortly after my leave began, I happened to stop by on a day when the place was short-staffed. There were only one or two young workers around. They were busy feeding children at lunch. I went to pick up a crying child who, it turned out, was so soaked with urine that it seeped through the washcloth/diaper and gave me a handful of the stuff as well. I went to change him, but I had to clear an edge of a table in the changing room to do so. When unpinned, the triangle of rough cloth that served as his diaper spilled open with diarrhea. The child’s hips were coated with it. I looked around for a cloth to clean up the mess. There was none. There were no paper towels. I finally held the wailing little boy beneath a stream of running water from the faucet, letting the excrement run down the drain. I grabbed an old rag out of a closet and used that to wipe him clean. Then there was no lotion. So I pinned him back up and looked for a pail to throw the soiled diaper into. There wasn’t one. Not in this room, not in the next. I finally slung the soiled thing in a corner on the floor. There wasn’t any soap to wash my hands, either.

I was fairly disgusted. We had donated pails, garbage cans, cases upon cases of lotion and baby cream, thousands of diapers—and no matter how much we bought, it all disappeared in weeks. The Australian nurse who sometimes visited had to lock away the vitamins we donated because they vanished at such an extraordinary rate. Some of the workers, or perhaps the older children, apparently were taking them either for themselves, for children in their homes, or to sell on street markets. I could understand their need, but it still didn’t excuse the fact that the supplies were not being used for Chinyaradzo’s children.

As I walked the little boy back to his crib, several infants were crying. The other worker was busy with one of them. So I set the first child down and went to get another. He howled the minute I set him down, so I turned around, picked him back up until he quieted down, then returned him to the crib. He howled again. This time, I kept going. The child in the next crib was soaked too. I cleaned her off in the same manner as the little boy. In fact, every child I picked up was soaked or soiled, no more workers were coming, and the din of so many children wailing was like fingernails on a chalkboard. All of them had diarrhea. The stench of it was so putrid, and the ventilation in the changing room so poor, that it almost made me gag.

This was what the proposal targeted—not just an infusion of supplies, but a better-trained staff to raise and maintain the level of care. Neither Vita nor Stella had any experience writing grant proposals, and the format of the thing was U.S. federal government bureaucracy—different from the Zimbabwean variety, but its own particular headache. When the day came to submit it, they were nervous, for the competition for grants was intense, and they had come to believe the project was a life-or-death matter for the orphanage’s children.

Several weeks dragged by. Vita and Stella talked again and again about tiny details they should have included.

In the end, when the phone call came, they needn’t have worried. The embassy staff approved the project for the maximum amount the program allowed—U.S. $7,000, or about 275,000 Zimbabwean dollars. Vita and Stella whooped and laughed on the phone for an hour, celebrating. When Ambassador McDonald signed on the dotted line, it became one of the largest grants in Chinyaradzo’s history. At the awards ceremony, Vita and Stella signed their part of the contract, then talked excitedly with the three dozen other recipients, who were beaming just as much.

The next day, the Child Protection Society called Vita. They were the board that oversaw the home. The president and chief officer were quite excited.

When, they asked, would they get the money?

“Well, they don’t exactly cut a check to anybody,” Vita explained. The project worked on a voucher program. You presented bills for the supplies in your project, and the embassy paid the company or the contractor directly. There was no cash flow.

Oh, they said.

The new executive director called a couple of times, mainly about the need to include the CPS in future projects, but they quickly lost interest. After taking credit for the grant in a CPS newsletter (they said they had won the contract with an assist from Vita; actually, they were not mentioned in the grant at all), they seemed to disappear. No one ever looked in to see how it was going. No one said congratulations to Stella, who had worked so hard to make it happen.