Grace’s Story

As preoccupied as I was with the heat, the rain, and all of the new diseases, it was the women here, both staff and refugees, who took notice of my insecurities and tucked me under their collective wings. They began by calling me “sistah,” not in the slick and almost meaningless way we so often hear at home but in the honest, sincere, and deep-from-the-belly way of African women. Hearing “sistah, sistah” ring like music through the air always made me smile and made me feel a real part of this place.

One among them—Grace—became a good friend.

It was at the camp’s pediatric hospital—a large, open-ended burlap tent, the dirt floor lined with metal cots and cribs, where the most malnourished and sickliest of the children were housed—that I first met her. She guessed her age at about thirty-four, though she couldn’t be certain, and it didn’t matter anyway. There were no age-related health screenings, no pap smears, no mammograms. The camp provided only the most basic health care, and only when you were sick. There were neither the resources nor the staff to offer anything else.

Grace, a widow whose husband had been killed in the vicious civil war in South Sudan, had been pregnant, with three small children and a mother in tow, when she’d arrived in Kakuma the year before. She’d had something of an education in Sudan; she could read, and she spoke some English, all of which set her apart from so many of the other refugees who could neither read nor write and often spoke only their own pidgin dialects.

Tragedy seemed to follow Grace, but at almost six feet tall, she carried herself, as her name suggested, with an easy grace and quiet calm despite the chaos swirling about her. As a Dinka, one of the tribes of Sudan, she adorned herself according to their particular customs. The women, and sometimes the men, cut their faces in fancy lines and patterns intended to produce decorative scars. She’d become a mother and then a refugee before she’d had the opportunity to follow that custom, and as a result, her skin, the deep black of a starless night, was smooth and unlined. Her teeth were long and almost stark white, the latter the result of vigilant cleaning with small sticks of wood. Her fingers were long and tapered, her hair close-cropped, but it is her voice I remember best. She spoke in an almost whisper, her words spilling out in a rush when she was excited, or slipping softly from her lips when she felt unsure of herself.

Each day, she wore one of the two dresses she owned. Her dresses were old and well scrubbed, and in another time they might have been worn by the Beaver’s mom—June Cleaver without the pearls. The dresses had been donated, and she was lucky to have two; one to wear and one to wash.

Not long after arriving in Kakuma, Grace gave birth to twins, whose date of birth, unlike their mother’s and siblings’, had been officially recorded and would always be known to the exact minute. The twins, a boy and girl, were never really healthy; they suffered from chronic malnutrition and were enrolled in IRC’s supplemental feeding center based in the pediatric ward. Here in this established camp, nutrition programs were available for starving babies and children, and I was overjoyed at the prospect, assuming that all babies would be saved.

It was there that Grace’s babies received nutritional support and medical care for their repeated bouts of pneumonia and malaria. They’d just been hospitalized with pneumonia when I met Grace and her babies. Just six months old at the time, the boy was always sickly and irritable, the tiny girl the polar opposite. Even when feverish and barely able to feed, she craved attention and cuddling, and cooed with delight when anyone picked her up.

Grace’s older children were dressed in literal rags, clothing so worn and ragged, their bony frames poked through. Her oldest daughter had acquired a discarded man’s wool blazer, torn and fraying at the seams, but even on the hottest days, she never removed it, worried that if she did someone would snatch it from her. Even though this tiny girl was lost in the jacket, it gave her an air of authority, which she wore with a charming pride and a wide smile.

Once Grace and I met, I often sat with her as the babies were weighed and measured before the precious supplements were doled out. After one particularly long wait to be seen, Grace sought me out. “Will you come home with me today?” she asked, her face drawn, her shoulders sagging. She’d asked me before, but I’d always seemed to be in the midst of a hectic day and had never been able to find the time. But today she was different—subdued, less energetic.

“Is everything okay?” I reached for her hand, her fingers curling up tight against mine. She sat up straighter and nodded. “I’d like you to see where I live, and maybe share some tea. Yes?”

I nodded. “I’ll finish up in an hour, but will you meet me?” I knew the area where she lived, but I had no idea which of the hundreds of look-alike huts was hers. We decided to meet at one of the little refugee-run kiosks that sold soda, sweet biscuits, gum, and cigarettes, along the camp’s main road. I searched in my pocket for the loose change I seemed always to have and smiled. It would be enough to buy at least a packet of biscuits.

Grace was waiting for me that afternoon, one baby in her arms, the other lashed to her back in a kind of sling. She raised her hand when she spied me on the road. “Sistah!” she shouted as I approached. We stopped to buy a small packet of vanilla biscuits, then I followed her through the paths between the huts to the one she called home.

“Here,” she said, motioning me to one of the thousands of look-alike shelters that filled every available space in the camp. Hers was tiny—a windowless, grass-roofed mud hut with a sheet of plastic billowing from the entrance. Two lawn chairs, a large cooking pot, and a container of water were arranged out front. She smiled, pulled back the plastic sheeting, and invited me to have a look.

“See,” she said proudly as I peered inside, squinting to adjust my eyes to the dark. The quarters, though tiny, held two small beds pushed together. “My mother, my sister, my babies, and I sleep on the beds,” she said, pointing to the measly straw mattresses covered in simple cotton ticking. Her three older children, she explained, slept on the ground outside, but in the hut, every square inch of the floor was covered with their belongings, clothes, bowls, and food, some pushed under the beds so that you could make your way in. It was there, on the floor, that a puddle of water caught my eye. I looked up and saw a tiny bit of sun poking through the flimsy roof. If the sun seeps through, surely the rain did as well. I looked back to Grace, who answered me before I had a chance to ask.

“The rain comes in,” she said, nodding her head. “I try to catch it in my pots before it makes everything wet. See,” she said, placing a pot just so on the mattress. “And, if we collect enough here, the children won’t have to haul so much from the tap.”

I knew that Grace and the others collected water twice a day in great pots and plastic cans from tap stands located throughout the camp. I’d seen her balance those containers on her head, her older children at her side, lugging the heavy jugs, their stick-thin arms dragging the heavy containers along the road.

Food was rationed and distributed every two weeks in fifty-kilo burlap bags, rice or corn meal, tea, sugar, and cans of oil, which she and her children dragged home or, when they were lucky, piled into a borrowed wagon and pulled home. It was, at best, a meager existence that required daily drudgery simply to survive. Latrines were also placed in areas throughout the camp, although many refugees just squatted anywhere.

Setting first one sleeping baby and then the other on the bed, Grace motioned me to the plastic chairs just outside her little hut. She sighed and sat heavily next to me. “What is it?” I asked.

She threw her arms wide. “I want to go home,” she said softly. “I want to smell the clean air, feel the sweet soil under my feet, and sleep under the stars. I want my children to know that, to run free, to know a place where they belong.” Here in the camp, children were restricted to playing just outside their huts; to venture further was likely not safe. Even in a refugee camp, there was crime. When people have nothing to lose, everything is fair game.

But Grace was realistic about starting life anew in Sudan. “It was never easy, there was always work to be done, food to cook, mouths to be fed,” she remembered, “but it was home, at least it was that. Here, there is nothing, and I have nothing.” She threw her arms wide. “The UN owns all of this, and they are the ones who decide where we’ll live, what we’ll eat, even what we wear. We are prisoners here.”

I could only nod. She was right. It was the first time I’d realized that being a refugee meant that even the smallest decisions about one’s own life were taken away. She lived where they assigned her, ate whatever they provided, and wore what they gave her. She’d traded one kind of misery for another—a life of absolute dependence.

She clasped her hands together. “I don’t mean to be ungrateful. I just want to go home. You know?”

There was nothing I could say or do. Just as with Asma and her longing for her home in Afghanistan, I was powerless to help. I gripped her hand. “I know,” I lied, though I really didn’t know at all. Wherever I volunteered, it was for a specific time frame, and in the end, I would always go home—to a familiar place, to good food, warm baths, clean clothes. It was the first time I began to understand what it must be like to face the prospect of never going home again.

Right before Easter, fighting broke out among the young Sudanese men, many of whom were from competing tribes. The unrest erupted, we learned, in the same small area where Grace lived with her children. Aid workers and staff were not allowed into the camp once the fighting escalated, so the refugees—all of them, not just the Sudanese—were deprived of vital services. There were no clinics, no food distribution, no garbage pickup, nothing. The UN staff thought the fighters were perhaps “plants” sent in by the Sudanese government to create chaos and enmity among the Sudanese refugees and thereby dull the rebels’ war efforts against the Sudanese government. Though it was only a theory, the result was cruel torture of one another and indirectly of all of the refugees throughout the camp, whose very lives were so affected during the turmoil.

One young Sudanese refugee worked with an animal husbandry program and was very concerned that his small rabbits would starve. He left his own mud shack in the dark of night and went secretly to check on his rabbits. He was caught by a rival tribe and tortured mercilessly with machetes and spears until finally his throat was slashed. His body remained in the road where he had died, since no one could get in to move him or give him a proper burial. His was one of fifteen eventual deaths reported to the UN over the next days, all horrific. The fighting and killing raged for four long days. Word trickled back slowly, and every day, I listened for any word of Grace, but there was none.

It was days later, as I sat in the small van that delivered staff to hospitals and clinics scattered throughout the camp, that I spotted Grace on the road. She carried one baby in her arms and the other on her back, and she walked with a stooped, almost defeated posture so unlike the tall, confident woman I’d come to know. But she was safe, and at that moment, that was enough for me. I cranked the window open, pushed my head and arms through, and called her name. “Grace!” I shouted. Her head popped up, and when she saw me, she smiled and waved. My arms flailing about, I waved wildly back. “I’ll come by later. Okay?” She nodded. I watched from the window, craning my neck as we rounded a curve, until she faded from sight.

Later, she told me that the fighting hadn’t really touched her family. “We knew about it. We were warned to stay close to home and we did. But we knew the trouble would pass. Here, there isn’t so much to fight for. You know?”

Within days, calm had descended on the camp and life returned to what passed for normal, but each of us still silently held on to a bit of unease about how quickly things here could spiral out of control. One afternoon, as we sat outside her hut, Grace, who’d been cradling one baby while her eldest held the other, cleared her throat and shooed the children away. She leaned toward me, her bony knee brushing my own. “Please, when you leave,” she said haltingly, “take her with you.” She slid her baby into my arms. “There is nothing here for her; you can see that for yourself. With you, she could have a better life and grow into a strong woman.” Her back seemed a little straighter as she spoke.

The baby cooed softly in my arms, her eyes sparkling as though she knew what her mother was proposing. I pulled my own eyes away and locked my gaze onto Grace’s. “Oh God, Grace,” I said, my voice cracking, “I would love to take care of this baby for you, but I can’t, and what she needs most isn’t me. It’s you.”

Grace paused and took a slow, deep breath before nodding her understanding. My heart broke for her as she squeezed my hand, stood, and walked away. I sat there for a while rocking the baby, lost in my own thoughts, wishing I could bring this fragile baby home with me. Grace returned not much later. “I had to ask,” she said softly, and she never brought it up again, though the thought lingered between us, an unspoken promise that maybe one day . . .

That one day never came, but once Grace had asked, many other mothers approached me with the same request, each hopeful that I would change my mind, and with each request, my heart broke again.

Before I left Kakuma, Grace presented me with a delicately hand-embroidered bedcover, “So you won’t forget me,” she said.

Tears rimmed my eyes. “Oh Grace,” I sighed, “I will never forget you, never.”

Peace and independence finally came to South Sudan for a time when the country gained its independence in 2011. Many Sudanese left the camp for home, but fighting, drought, and starvation found their way back to that brittle piece of land. I often wondered if Grace managed, even for a time, to feel the sweet soil and breathe the clean air of her beloved South Sudan, but there was no news, no way for me to know how things had turned out for her and her family. The best that I could do was hope.