OTEKA
The limbs of the night commuters were stiff and the chill from the ground had to be shaken from their bones. But as soon as their eyes opened, the children were up and walking.
Oteka, especially, had good reason to leave Gulu quickly and walk the ten kilometers back to the camp where he now lived. The medicine man had said that it would cost one hundred thousand shillings to have his question answered. The two five-thousand shilling notes that were folded tightly in his hand, added to the ninety thousand shillings he had hidden in his hut, would at last be enough. Begging, selling, working—it had taken him almost a year to collect this princely sum.
Pink-headed and pink-tailed lizards skittered back and forth across the dusty road. Oteka paid them no mind as his walk turned into a jog and then into a slow run. The morning sun turned the air a buttery yellow and the red road underfoot was dry. Soon the rains would come and the road would become a ruby river.
Every kilometer or so the white man’s mutoka honked, and Oteka had to pitch himself into the tall grass by the roadside to avoid being hit. These Jeeps carried the munu to and from the Murchison Falls game reserve a hundred kilometres down this same road. Hippos and crocodiles, lions and leopards, giraffes and birds of all sorts lived on the reserve. Oteka knew all about the park. His grandfather had been a guide to white hunters many years ago, when it was still possible to hunt great game. Oteka would have liked to see a lion—just once.
The hum of the camp was welcoming as he approached—a morning song of blended voices, of women greeting the day and each other, of roosters crowing and babies wailing.
“Oteka, Oteka.” An old woman sitting on a kolo outside her mud and cow-dung hut called to him.
Oteka crouched down and smiled into the old woman’s milky eyes. “Adaa, I am back.” It might have been a silly thing to say—after all, he was right in front of her—but Adaa’s eyesight was failing. Besides, it was their custom to greet each other this way. Oteka had no family and Adaa had no family, so they had become each other’s family—the fifteen-year-old boy and the seventy-year-old woman.
“What happened to your family?” Oteka had once asked Adaa the question, but she could not respond. She could not speak the names of her son and his family for fear of crying. So it was another woman, an old friend of Adaa’s from the same village, who had shared Adaa’s story with him.
Adaa had once lived with her son, her daughter-in-law, and their three children on a small farm. To see a son well married and prosperous and her grandchildren strong and healthy—it was a good life. Adaa was a gifted weaver and could support herself and take care of her grandchildren while her daughter-in-law tended the garden. They grew maize, cassava, and vegetables of all kinds. Her son took care of the chickens, pigs, and goats, and they had enough money to send the two oldest boys to school. Such blessings she had!
“Many in the village envied her,” said Adaa’s old friend. “Perhaps someone put a curse on her, someone who was jealous, because one night the LRA descended. There was screaming, and rounds of bullets made silver streaks in the night sky. There were long, sharp knives too.” The old friend paused. “We heard the screams. Later, it was said that Adaa’s son and daughter-in-law fought off the LRA with their bare hands while Adaa sheltered the children with her body. The screaming stopped suddenly, and Adaa was cast aside like rubbish, not even worthy of killing. All three children were taken by the LRA, along with the goats, the chickens, the food stored up for the rainy season. Everything—gone. Adaa was left alone with her dead son and daughter-in-law.”
The story made Oteka shake with anger, and he had promised himself right then and there that he would not leave her. How could he, when she reminded him so much of his own grandmother?
Oteka, too, remembered what happiness felt like, what it meant to be safe, to have a future, to have a family.
“You will go to the university and become a doctor.” His father would repeat these words often as he rubbed his son’s head.
“Perhaps I will drive a truck like you,” suggested Oteka.
“That may be,” nodded Father. “We do share a gift, my son. We always know the right path to take.” On a continent with few road signs, having a keen sense of direction was a true blessing. “And you will play football!” Father threw up his hands and laughed. His father was very smart, spoke five languages, and drove trucks for a big company in Kampala. The money was good, but it took him away from home for weeks—sometimes months—on end.
Oteka’s mother was tall and slim and could read and write. She did not hit her children, which caused the neighbors to say that her children would misbehave and grow up crooked. They were a small family, just Oteka, the oldest, Ocira, only four years old, and baby Esther. They had four cows, a goat, a dozen hens, and one rooster, which crowed mid-afternoon and sometimes in the middle of the night. Once, after having been woken from sleep once too often, Mother went after the rooster with a knife. She chased him around and around. He was old but slippery. Oteka begged his mother to spare the old rooster, but it was hard to beg and laugh at the same time! In the end, the rooster lived to wake them up another night.
Their farm was a tropical garden of banana, mango, palm, and tamarind trees, and coffee trees too. Oteka loved it best when the flowers on the coffee trees were in bloom and cool air blew through their leaves. The grass was long, and the stream that ran through their farm was clean. Collecting the water from the village well was his job. Even as a very small boy, Oteka hauled two buckets every day, one for washing and the other for cooking. Water was used sparingly.
They ate twice a day, although, like everyone else in the village, only once a day during the dry season. Oteka went to school. He had many friends. He had sandals. They lived in paradise.
Then one day his father came home from his travels a sick man. His sickness was called twoo jonyo, or kisipi, or cilim, the slimming disease. It had many names. A white nurse who came to the village to give needles called his father’s disease AIDS. She was not kind or sympathetic. After a few months, Father’s eyes began to bulge, his cheekbones stood out, and diarrhea ran down his legs like brown water dribbling out of a rusted pipe. Father went to the foreign doctors for a cure. When they had none, Mother called in the medicine man.
Father disapproved of witchcraft. “I have been to many countries in my truck—to Botswana, Somalia, Rwanda, and South Africa, and all the places in between. Witchcraft is false. Accept the Christian God and His stone saints as the Big God,” said his father. The whole family walked to church twice a week. It was far away and it took hours to reach it. Mother was Catholic too, and so she went to the medicine man only when the Big God did not help, only when necessary. When Father became too sick to walk to church, she felt that it was necessary.
The medicine man came and used his jogi and spear to find the poison around the home but Father did not get well.
A second medicine man said that the house was cursed and many hens, goats, and even a cow had to be sacrificed. A third medicine man said that a lajok, a witch doctor with great and evil powers, had put a curse on Father for having four cows, a goat, and chickens. Mother sold the cows and the goat and used much of the money to pay for the medicine men. Then she walked the many kilometres to church almost every day and put more notes and coins into the box. She prayed to the Big God until her knees, her legs, and her back were so stiff and sore it was hard to stand.
One day an auntie came and offered to care for the children. She looked each child up and down through narrow, nut-hard eyes. Oteka was too big she said, and baby Esther was too small. She picked Ocira. Auntie lived near the Sudanese border. The Lord’s Resistance Army was near. It was dangerous but Auntie said not to worry about abduction, it was better Ocira lived away from twoo jonyo AIDS. Auntie took Ocira’s hand and left. Mother cried, “Soon, soon we will be together again.”
Father died. The priest would not come to give him funeral rites. He had a big Jeep but said that travelling to their village was too dangerous. The LRA were in the area. The men of their village would not bury his father. “Don’t touch, don’t touch, the disease might spread,” they whispered one to another. Never mind that tradition told them that those who denied anyone a proper burial would be haunted until the day they too died. Never mind that those who shirked their duty risked offending the gods.
An uncle took pity on Oteka and, using a dry wooden pole, pushed the body of his father into the grave. Dry wood, he said, would not transmit the disease. His father’s body was wrapped up in a gunnysack. There was a thud and a gust of dust as his father’s body fell into the hole.
“Father,” Oteka whispered above his grave, “Forgive me.” Then Oteka hid behind their hut and cried.
His father was buried in a field far away. The elders of the village decided that Father’s grave could not be near their huts, where the disease could worm its way up through the soil. Without his father’s grave nearby, Oteka would not feel his father’s fortifying presence and would not benefit from his father’s goodwill and strength.
When Oteka’s baby sister, Esther, died of twoo jonyo AIDS, Oteka alone buried her.
As his beautiful mother grew weaker and weaker it was Oteka who bathed her and dripped water onto her parched tongue. People remarked, “He has a strong spirit.” They admired him, but they would not go near him or his mother.
Then a man from Auntie’s village arrived. He said that four-year-old Ocira had died of malaria. The news left Oteka breathless. “Ocira, Ocira, my brother,” he cried. But Oteka had no time to think, no time to grieve.
When dirt fell over his mother’s wasted body, he pleaded with any god who would listen, big or small, “Do not leave me here alone. Take me too.” But he was strong, and so he lived.
Oteka stayed with his grandmother until he was fourteen years old, but then a year ago, before the rains, she too had died.
And so Oteka and Adaa adopted one another, with each doing what they could for the other. Adaa was too old and now too blind to do the cooking, although she prepared the vegetables. Oteka did the grinding of the corn and most of the cooking. The other boys laughed at him for doing “woman’s work” but he shrugged them off.
Oteka cooked cassava and sweet potatoes, steamed maize and do-do harvested from the garden. Sometimes they ate pumpkin mixed with shelled groundnuts, but mostly they ate cassava. Other times they ate the mush the people from the United Nations doled out in great, bleached bags with blue stripes down the side. Occasionally the women in the camp took pity and invited them to share in a tasty meal of rat, boiled, rolled in nuts, and baked over an open fire. In return, Oteka became an expert at preparing chickens to cook: a chop to the neck to kill them, drain the blood, dip the chicken in boiling water, pluck it while still warm, remove the giblets.
Despite all his skill in finding and preparing food, Oteka was always hungry. But his belly was not bloated, and the tips of his hair had not turned to rust—these were sure signs of malnutrition. He was healthy enough. But daily life, the gardening, preparing the food, the cooking, it took time—time not spent learning, time not spent in school. He would not be a doctor as his father had hoped. “I have enough money now, Adaa.” Oteka grinned as he held out his hand to show her the notes.
“It is good that you now have what you need.”
She smiled. Not for the first time, Adaa gazed at the boy through foggy eyes and admired him. He was a tall boy, so good looking. He reminded her of her own son, and that thought caused her as much pain as happiness. “Sit for a moment.” Adaa patted the ground in front of her.
Oteka took in a breath. As much as he cared for her, he had no time to listen to an old woman’s ramblings. Still, out of respect, he sat.
“All Acholi names have meanings, this you know. Do you know the meaning of the name your parents gave you?” Adaa’s old eyes narrowed.
“It means hero.” Oteka stared at the ground. He was embarrassed. He was no hero.
“That is true. It also means victory. I can tell by the name they gave you that your parents had great hopes for you. And so do I. Soon you will be off in search of your own path.”
“I will not leave you here, Adaa.” Oteka made the promise and meant it.
“Soon I will join my family in the world beyond reach. But listen carefully, Oteka. When I am in the world that cannot be touched, I will reach back and protect you with all my might. You see me now as old and weak, but inside I am young and strong. That is how it is with all people, no matter where they live, no matter where they come from. Now I ask you, do you believe in the medicine man, my son?”
Oteka nodded his head, but not vigorously, not with commitment.
The old woman paused, then reached out and gently ran her withered hands over his arms.
“You see these arms? They are strong—strong like the limbs of the great owii tree. Why have you reached such a height? Surely you are this tall and straight so that you may one day touch the clouds. But to be tall and rigid means that you may one day break. Like the great owii tree, you too must learn to bend and sway in the wind. And look at these arms. One day these strong arms will turn into wings and take you up to the Big God. And see these feet, look how they carry you. Look how swift you are, how powerful. Like the roots of the mighty owii tree, these feet are your roots, and your roots are your culture, and your culture is witchcraft. Go, my son, go and ask the medicine man your question.”
The old woman smiled as he leapt up and charged into his own hut, ducking his head but still clipping the straw that hung down from the thatched roof.
Oteka’s mud hut was cool and welcoming. A place was carved out for everything he owned. There was a rag ball made of plastic garbage bags and bits of twine, and a second shirt from the UN charity bags with the words Mont Tremblant embossed on the pocket. He had a scratchy blanket with UN stamped on the top and an old towel with the words Lion King sprawled across it.
Oteka flipped back the mat on the floor, then dug up a metal box hidden in a hole. It had belonged to his mother. He counted out the ninety thousand shillings and added the new ten thousand shillings he would use to buy a white hen. The medicine man might yet ask for a sheep, or even a goat, which made him nervous. Oteka could afford neither.
“I’ll be back, Adaa.” Oteka laughed as he ran past her. The old woman lifted a heavy hand, smiled, then looked up at the sun and wondered why it had grown so dark so early in the day.
It took less than ten minutes to negotiate with a farmer for the white hen. It took another ten minutes to race across the camp. Thousands now lived in the displacement camp. Many families starved, yet they could see their farms from this distance, their very own land and homes. And yet lurking about, often between them and their land, was Kony and his band of child soldiers.
Oteka ran past the bamboo shower stalls and communal kitchens. The smell of cooking palm oil was in the air. He raced past the women pounding cassava into flour and around an old storyteller who was welcoming home straggling night commuters. Even now, tired from their walk and with no food in their bellies, the older children were rushing to the schoolroom run by the United Nations. The women were off tending to the gardens. Young and old men were setting up chessboards, some on spindly tables, others on mats on the ground. In the distance he could see the hospital, a stark, cement building that harboured a dozen iron beds, paper-thin mattresses, and a lone medical assistant in a white lab coat. Beside it, and down a small hill, were the latrines.
Out of breath, Oteka came to a sudden stop several metres away from the medicine man’s hut. He calmed himself, inhaled deeply, and walked toward the medicine man with all due reverence and respect.
The medicine man—a man of fifty years or more with a shrivelled belly and tangled hair and six teeth (three up and three down)—sat cross-legged on a mat in front of his hut. Life in the camp had reduced his weight and his fortunes considerably, but still he sat with a regal bearing and surveyed the world around him. As Oteka approached, the medicine man took note of the white hen as he looked Oteka up and down.
“Medicine man.” Oteka bowed respectfully. “I need to talk to my mother.”