The Bite of the Mango (14 page)

On Monday morning, Kadi drove me to my first ESL class. “Most of the people there will be adults, and they come from countries where English is not spoken,” she told me as we waited for a set of traffic lights to change. “All these people will be new to Canada too, and some have suffered greatly. Many countries have had wars, and many people escape those countries by coming to Canada. You’ll see.”

She was right. My classmates were young Asian women, grandmothers from the Middle East, and men from southern Africa. No one spoke English. The class was for beginners.

Kadi stayed with me for the first two days, sitting beside me at the back of the room. As we drove to the school and back, she followed the same route as the public buses, pointing out the bus stops along the way.

Over dinner at the end of the second day, she announced: “I have to go to work tomorrow!” Kadi also worked for the government, at a different location from Abou. She thrust some bus tickets into my pockets. “Just follow the directions I’ve been showing you and you’ll be fine.”

I gulped. “But Kadi, what if I get lost?”

“Then you get lost,” she answered matter-of-factly.

Toronto is a big city. The population of 5 million is nearly the entire population of Sierra Leone. I imagined myself hopping on the wrong bus and ending up at the other end of the city, not knowing the telephone numbers of people to call, stranded, shivering in the cold.

On a blank piece of paper, Kadi wrote down the name of the bus I had to take to school and the street at which I needed to get off. On another piece of paper, she did the same for the return trip home.

“Show the piece of paper to the bus driver when you get on,” she instructed. “He’ll make sure you’re on the right bus and let you know when to get off.”

I was so nervous that first day I had to find my way all on my own. I dressed in a pair of Haja’s snug jeans and a pink sweatshirt, then pulled on my purple ski jacket. I donned an oversized wool hat and wrapped a big wool scarf around my neck and face. All that showed were my eyes! I had taken the double-decker buses in London many times, but I’d always been with Yabom. Now I was alone.

I stood motionless at the bus stop, watching three buses slow down and then speed by, before I gained the courage to step forward, indicating to the bus driver that I wanted to get on. My arm shook as I gave him Kadi’s instructions. The driver grunted “yes” and pointed to the seat directly behind him.

I was so afraid we were going in the wrong direction, I couldn’t look out the window. After a while, though, the bus driver motioned for me to get off. As I stood up, I breathed a sigh of relief. There in front of me was the school.

The teacher just smiled as I sheepishly entered the class a half-hour late. She pointed for me to take a seat in front of her.

From that moment on, I listened to my teacher more closely than I have listened to anyone in my life. My mind would churn over the English words long after class ended. During breaks, I would spin around in my chair and practice talking to the person behind me. At first we communicated mostly through gestures, but soon we were saying English words to each other, and within a few months we were forming sentences.

At night, I’d read the children’s books I’d checked out of the library. Soon I’d advanced from individual letters to identifying entire words like
the
,
and
,
girl
,
boy
,
doll
, and
sneetches
. I learned how to write these words in class. One of my proudest moments came when I wrote my name, MARIATU KAMARA, in a workbook with a pencil held between my arms.

I had come to Canada on a six-month visitor’s visa. One Saturday afternoon I approached Kadi and Abou and told them I wanted to remain in school. “Maybe I’ll go home when I can speak English,” I said. They were so happy. That night we had a party with Kadi and Abou’s entire family.

I applied for refugee status, eventually becoming a landed immigrant on humanitarian grounds; that meant I was a victim of war and had a better chance of a good life in Canada than back in Sierra Leone. My sponsors were Kadi, Abou, and a man named Alimamy Bangura from the Sierra Leone Immigrant, Resettlement and Integration Centre in Toronto, which Kadi and Abou had helped start.

On a muggy June evening 10 months after arriving in Canada, I graduated from my English as a Second Language
course with a diploma. Our graduation ceremony took place in the school auditorium, and all of the students contributed potluck dishes for the feast afterwards. I made rice and fish with peppers. I couldn’t wait to sample the Middle Eastern rice dishes and Cajun chicken from the West Indies.

Before we got to the food, though, each student had to give a short speech in English, on any topic he or she wanted. When it was my turn, my eyes scanned the audience until I found Kadi, Abou, and the nieces. “Thank you for giving me a home,” I said, “and accepting me as one of yours. You are my sisters. I will always love you for the fun you bring to my life. I wouldn’t be here, on this stage, getting my ESL diploma if it weren’t for all of you.” I thanked my ESL teacher and all the friends I had met in the class too. “Canada is a very nice place to live,” I ended. “I’m glad it turned out to be everything I expected, and more.”

When September rolled around, it was time for high school. I wasn’t alone this time. KK, Umu, and Mariama, Umu’s sister who had just arrived from Sierra Leone, accompanied me on my first day, and it turned out that KK was in three of my four classes: English, science, and math.

I liked high school from the moment I stepped into the main foyer. The long, narrow hallways were lined with lockers and students of all nationalities, sporting cell phones, Walkmans, fashionable jeans, and purses. I seemed to fit right in. KK and I were the eldest in our grade nine class, though we are both so tiny that nobody guessed. Many of the students spoke English like me, with thick accents from foreign places.

Because of my disability, the school assigned me a special tutor. She sat beside me in every class, taking notes and working with me one-on-one to figure out math equations, define English words, and explain the procedures in biology class. I liked science and math best. I had a natural ability to count things out in my head, I learned—perhaps, I mused to Kadi one night, from my two years of begging in Freetown. If Abibatu needed four peppers for dinner, I knew I had to earn
at least 500 leones while begging to pay for them. I don’t like the sight of blood, but I wasn’t squeamish in biology class when I had to dissect a frog or look at graphic pictures of the human body, probably because I had seen so much in the hospitals in Sierra Leone.

My tutor was very patient as she taught me cursive writing, with a pencil or pen held between my arms. Just like when I learned to print, my first major accomplishment was writing my own name:
Mariatu Kamara
.

My teachers gave me extra time to complete tests and examinations. I think I may have failed the first semester. While the other students received report cards with marks and written comments, my teachers merely said I was doing well.

But by June, I did get a report card, and I’d earned Cs across the board.

“This is a computer,” said the resource center instructor, an older woman with glasses and short black hair. We were sitting at her cluttered desk, full of papers and computer parts. She had cleared away some of the debris to make room for a black laptop—my laptop—that the War Amps of Canada had bought for me.

It was winter 2004. I was still living with Kadi and Abou, but all five of us young women had moved upstairs into Ameenatu’s bedroom, so that she and her family could take over the basement. While the nieces and I fought over the bathroom in the morning, we also shared clothes, boots, jackets, and purses.

I knew what a computer was, since the nieces used an older PC to do their homework in the living room. Several students brought laptops to school, too. The teachers forbade them to use their computers during class, but on break they’d sit by their lockers or go to the school library and type away. I couldn’t help but watch as their fingers flew over the little keys. I wished I had fingers that could do that.

“This laptop,” the instructor went on, “is designed for people with disabilities.” The mouse was shaped like a big ball, so that I could easily maneuver it with my arms.

I watched the icons for Word and Internet pop onto the screen. I moved the ball, and the instructor showed me how to hit the little arrow on the blue W. A blank page appeared on the screen.

It was hard at first to hit the keys. Even though the keyboard was big, it was not easy to master hitting one letter at a time. An hour later, when the instructor said our time was up, all I had on my screen was a mismatch of letters and numbers.

That evening, when the nieces were downstairs watching a movie, I sat on my mattress and played with my new computer. It took some experimenting, but I finally managed to spell out a complete sentence:
My name is Mariatu Kamara. I live in Toronto, Canada, and like it here very much
.

Once I became proficient on the laptop, the instructor taught me how to connect to the Internet. There was so much to explore, including websites that talked about the war in my country and chat groups where I could communicate with Sierra Leoneans living all over the world. I started sending emails, first to the nieces, but soon to friends I had met at school.

One day, Kadi gave me Bill and Shelley’s email address. “I haven’t heard from them in a long time,” she said, “but you might as well try.”

Hi Bill and Shelley
, I wrote.
You may remember me, it’s Mariatu Kamara. You helped bring me to Canada
.

I didn’t hear back for about a month. When I did, their email made me very sad.

Richard, they told me, had been killed in a car accident.

Bill and Shelley also explained how they had come to know about me in the first place. They wrote that on a sunny Sunday afternoon, they were driving in the countryside. Shelley read aloud a newspaper article about the war in Sierra Leone. That article featured me. Afterwards, Richard had turned to Bill and asked him to do whatever he could to help me, including bringing me to Canada if he could.

Bill and Shelley also told me that Comfort hadn’t wanted me to stay in Canada. They said that they had been fighting with her from the moment we arrived. Comfort, according to the email, wanted to remain in Canada too, and had threatened to take me back to Sierra Leone if she didn’t get her way. That’s how, Bill and Shelley now revealed, I had ended up with Kadi and Abou. Bill and Shelley wanted me to stay in Canada and have a shot at life, which they felt I wouldn’t have in Freetown.

When I finished reading the email, I closed my laptop and thought about sweet Richard, who had walked in the hills with me, introducing me to chipmunks, squirrels, and even a deer with a fluffy white tail. He was responsible for bringing me to this country, and now he was dead. Bill and Shelley had written that Richard was in heaven, smiling down on me. Maybe he was with Abdul and Santigie. Maybe they were all smiling down on me. I hoped so.

And then I thought about Comfort. If what Bill and Shelley said was the truth, then she had lied to me.

“Hmmn … Whatever the truth is,” I thought as I went to sleep that night, “I’m here, in Canada, getting an education. Bill, Shelley, Richard, and Comfort all did a good thing.”

It was late spring 2005, and I was seated in the library of G.L. Roberts Collegiate and Vocational Institute. I was hiding my shaking knees under a big round table, afraid to look up into the eyes of the journalists who were waiting to talk with me.

In a few minutes, in the auditorium down the hall, the famous Canadian rock band Sum 41 would take the stage, along with some lesser-known bands, in a benefit concert to benefit, well, me. The students at my high school, working with the students at G.L. Roberts, had organized the event.

Kadi, as always, was beside me.

“I’m scared,” I whispered to her as the first journalist approached.

“Don’t be,” Kadi whispered back. “You’ve talked to the media a thousand times before. You’re an old pro!”

I’d met with journalists many times, that was true. But I was more nervous this time than ever before, and for good reason. These would be the first interviews in which I answered the questions myself, in English, without a translator telling most of my story. My mind had run through all the possible answers I could give to the questions I thought would be coming. And
not one of those answers felt right to me.

Every so often a student at my school had mentioned reading a newspaper article about me. I’d never read any of the articles myself, so I would just nod and thank them for their interest.

Then one of these students suggested to our World Issues teacher that we discuss the articles in class. The teacher checked it out with me, and I said yes.

As the teacher read the first article out loud, I wanted to melt in my seat.

After she read a second one, I wanted to run right out of the room.

When she had finished reading the articles, the teacher asked if I wanted to share anything else about my life experience with my fellow students.

A knot formed in my throat. “No,” I croaked.

The students clapped. The bell rang. Class was over.

I dashed out of the room, even though several of my friends were waiting to talk to me, and ran straight to the washroom, where I was sick to my stomach.

Some of my classmates had followed me. They thought I was upset because I was reliving the bad things that had happened to me. A girl pulled out her cell phone and was about to call one of the nieces when I managed to say, “I’m okay. I just want to be alone for a while.”

I was traumatized that day because I had learned for the first time that much of the information written in those articles was wrong. The most glaring mistake the journalists had made was stating that the rebels had raped me.

After my confession to Yabom in London, I never spoke of Salieu’s assault on me again. Like many people who experience violence, I wrongly believed I had brought it on myself. I would say to myself: “If only I’d left the house that day Salieu came! If only I’d agreed to be his wife, he wouldn’t have touched me until we were married!” I never wanted to utter Salieu’s name again, let alone have to think about him, so I had shut him out of my head.

That day in school, I realized that a big lie had formed because of my silence. And now I didn’t know what to do. Part of me wanted to correct the mistake while I had the chance. Another part of me felt it would be easier to say nothing. I swallowed hard as a reporter from the
Toronto Star
sat down opposite me.

“Hello,” the woman began. “Are you excited about the concert?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“You must be pleased to know that your dream of prosthetic hands will soon be a reality?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, more hesitantly.

That was the other reason I didn’t want to talk to journalists: the benefit concert was to raise money to help buy me prosthetic hands, and I was still uncertain that I wanted them. The only people who knew of my concerns were Kadi and Abou, and they had encouraged me to give prosthetic hands another try.

Abou had explained that some prosthetic devices are attuned to your nerves and can move accordingly, meaning if I twitched a muscle as if to pick up a pen, the way I would if I
had fingers, the prosthetic hand would sense this and pick up the pen. The prosthetic hands I’d received in England didn’t do that.

“Please don’t tell me they’re made out of metal,” I had moaned.

“No,” Abou had replied, laughing. “They look just like real hands.” He showed me a photograph of them on the Internet, and sure enough they did. But the hands cost nearly $30,000.

Kadi had asked my tutor whether I might do better at school if I learned to write my examinations along with the other students, using prosthetic hands. I was still mostly pulling in Cs, and Kadi felt I could do better. The tutor, who thought it was worth a try, told the principal how much money was needed, and the principal told the student council. The students had pulled together this event.

I was scared that if people knew the truth about my rape or my dislike of prosthetic hands, they would abandon me. I didn’t want to let them down, either. Everyone seemed so proud of me.

Just a few weeks earlier, I had completed reading Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
for my grade 11 English class. I cried tears of joy when I put the book down. I was finally at the same level as my peers.

After I’d told my drama class about the theater troupe at the camp, my classmates wanted to know more about our performances. Our drama teacher didn’t like us chatting, but behind the curtains I’d whisper to my friends about HIV/AIDS and the part I’d played of a mourning village woman.

“I wish
we
could do a play about our lives,” one of the boys said.

“We could do plays about cutting and violent boyfriends and dieting,” said one girl.

“Instead, we have to put on this boring stuff that only adults want to watch,” another added. We all started to laugh.

“QUIET BACK THERE,” the teacher yelled.

Everyone seemed happy that I was part of their lives. But I worried that could change in an instant.

None of the journalists in the library that afternoon asked questions about the war or about Abdul. I was relieved at the time, though afterwards I wished I’d been able to tell everyone the truth.

Before the concert began, I had to go onstage to say a few words. I was really nervous about that too.

“Hello, everyone,” I said into the microphone. There was standing room only in the audience. “Thank you so much for doing this for me.”

Beside me stood some of the band members from Sum 41. I hadn’t done enough public speaking to risk making a joke. But I was thinking of one, something like “All you girls should come and meet these cute boys after.” The girls in the front row already had their eyes glued to the band members’ every move.

The concert was fun. I didn’t feel like dancing, so I stood off to the side and watched. In between playing songs, some of the band members spoke about the impact of war on children and called for world leaders to do more to end the conflicts. I hadn’t known until I came to Canada that there are wars all over the world, and that today children are the number one casualty. In many countries there are children like me, maimed by guns and knives.

As I was leaving the stage, a teacher I knew came up to me. “You should write a book,” she said. “I’d make sure every one of my students read it!”

I mulled over the teacher’s comment as we drove home that evening. She wasn’t the first one to suggest a book about my life. I couldn’t imagine many people would want to read such a book, even if I could figure out how to write it. At least, though, I fell asleep thinking, a book could dispel the myths that had built up around me.

On a warm April night in 2007, writing my book became a reality.

Kadi had announced a few days earlier that a journalist who’d interviewed me after I arrived in Canada wanted to do a follow-up story. Now the journalist, whose name was Susan, sat across from Kadi and me, asking questions about how I liked high school.

“Have you heard of Ishmael Beah?” Susan asked near the end of our conversation.

“No,” I replied.

Ishmael was a former child soldier in Sierra Leone, Susan said, and he had published a best-selling book about his experiences.

“Best-selling book!” I exclaimed. “People in the West want to read about Sierra Leone?”

Susan nodded. Ishmael was going to be in Toronto the following week, she told me. My story would run beside his in a national newspaper, the
Globe and Mail
.

As she was leaving, Susan turned to me. “Mariatu, would you like to meet Ishmael?”

I gulped. I thought of the boy soldiers who had cut off my hands. “I’m not sure,” I replied. “Can I think about it?”

Many, many times I had thought back to those boy soldiers. Kadi and Abou kept me pretty sheltered from Sierra Leone politics, but I had learned through the Internet that a special court had been set up in Freetown to investigate some of the soldiers, including the leaders who had ordered rape, murder, and the amputation of people’s hands.

What would I do if I was in that courtroom and had to testify? I asked myself. What would I do if I ever saw one of those boys who had hurt me?

At first I felt only anger. I wanted those four boys dead. I hoped the special court would order them killed.

But the anger made me feel sick, and over time I saw that taking a life was not the solution. They were kids, like me, who’d got caught up in something beyond their control. Maybe in the bush they’d thought of their parents and sisters, and felt alone and scared like I had.

There was nothing I could do, I realized, even if I wanted to. Even if those boys were right in front of me, I wouldn’t be able to hurt them, not with my words or with my body. They might spend some time in prison, but there was no way I could allow myself to make them suffer. Instead, I imagined those boys standing before me as I said to them: “I hope you’re very sorry for what you did to me. But I forgive you.”

Susan called over the weekend to make sure I had seen her stories in the newspaper. At about eight o’clock that Sunday night, as I was sitting alone in my bedroom, I punched in
Susan’s telephone number on my cell phone. If I didn’t reach her, I vowed I’d take it as a sign not to go through with what I was about to ask.

Susan picked up.

“Hi, it’s me, Mariatu,” I said. “How was your weekend?”

“Good, and yours?”

“Fine. How are the girls?” She’d told me about her two young daughters.

“Good,” she replied. I could sense she knew that I was procrastinating. “Everything okay, Mariatu?” she asked.

“I want to meet Ishmael!” I blurted out the words before I knew what I had done.

“I think I can arrange that,” Susan said.

Three days later, I was standing in front of a big old church in downtown Toronto with Abou, Kadi, and Susan. Ishmael’s publicist had said we could have a private session with him before his speech and book signing.

When I saw Ishmael, I breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t look at all like any of the boys from Manarma. He had a broad face, a high forehead, and curly hair. I instantly felt I had found a friend, odd as that seemed with a former child soldier.

Abou opened the conversation with Ishmael by talking about Sierra Leonean food. “I miss those cassava leaves and hot peppers,” he joked as he bit into a coffee-shop sandwich.

Ishmael asked if I knew any Sierra Leoneans in New York City, where he lived. I did. Some of the kids from the refugee camp had moved there, and we discovered we had some friends in common. Next we talked about music. He likes rap, I prefer hip-hop.

“I want to write a book,” I said to Ishmael as his publicist signaled that it was time for his speech to begin.

“What do you want to call it?” he asked.

“Hmm … Maybe
Never Give Up on Your Dreams
. Is that a good title?”

“I think it’s an excellent title.” He smiled, then moved to give me a goodbye hug.

“Do you think anyone will want to read a book about me?” I asked.

“Yes,” came his reply. “Yes.”