Love in the Driest Season (17 page)

14

T
HE
P
APER
T
RAIL

D
ESPITE MY FRIEND
’
S COUNSEL
to spend several months away from the adoption process, there was really nothing to do but wade right in. If social workers got angry, then we’d just have to deal with being the ugly Americans. Besides, there was no guarantee social workers would do their work any more rapidly half a year hence, and what I had seen so far did not bolster my confidence.

So we got an official adoption application. It was four pages long. There were twenty-four questions and any number of subpoints. The form had blank spaces for our names, address, phone number, nationality, race, date of arrival in Zimbabwe, if we owned or rented, date and place of birth, religion, the name of any church attended regularly, employment, salary, if we had children, if we were physically able to produce more children, the particulars of a child we wanted to adopt, and information on our physical and mental health. Affidavits from a minister and a physician, testifying to our spiritual and physical health, were required. At least three professional and three personal references were also obligatory.

We completed the forms, got the letters, and took the batch of papers into Florence Kaseke’s office. I knocked on the door, opening it halfway, and she motioned us inside. Vita and I sat in the chairs pulled up to her desk. All smiles, I told her that we wanted to file the official adoption paperwork. We had thought it over for the seven months Chipo had been living with us, and we had no doubt.

“Absolutely,” Vita added.

“How wonderful,” Kaseke said, looking less than overjoyed.

Then I pushed it.

“I know you think there is something improper about Chipo coming to live with us,” I said. “So beginning next month, I am taking three months off from my job to work with you on this. I will answer any question at any time. I have a vehicle, so I can drive your workers on their rounds, if that will be helpful, on my case or any other. The department has no copy machine. I will be pleased to donate one. I’ll be happy to work as a volunteer, a kind of support staff, for any or all of your social workers, because I can see how busy they are. I’ve got three months, and I’ll be happy to assist the department in whatever way I can.”

She smiled then, gave a slight laugh, and looked anywhere in the room but at me.

“That is so kind. We do not have that many vehicles here. It is very difficult for us. Our workers are not so well paid. But all our files are confidential. I could not let anyone but a worker handle them.”

“I understand. It was just a friendly offer. As far as Chipo’s paperwork goes, just let me know.”

I left for Nigeria the next day, as that nation was holding democratic presidential elections after years of military dictatorship, a monumental event in the world’s most populous and potentially powerful black nation. For ten days, I trekked around the country, hopping plane flights and long taxi rides, talking to people thrilled to be emerging from years of a military dictatorship. It was swamp-hot in the delta, and pleasantly cool in the inland capital of Abuja, but the hope in people’s faces was a tangible thing that gave energy to the campaign trail. Meanwhile, the infection I had in Harare wasn’t finished with me yet. By the time the ballots were counted, with former general Olesegun Obasanjo the victor, another abscess had developed—this one exquisitely located on the inside corner of my lip. It swelled with pus to such a painful degree that it pulled my lips away from my teeth. I couldn’t close the left side of my mouth. I looked like Quasimodo with a hangover and felt worse. A doctor in Lagos did an expert job of lancing it in his clinic, but the medication and the painkillers were so strong that they left me hallucinating when I got back to my hotel room—which was located on the seventeenth floor. In the midst of lights flashing and visions that I was flying soaring through my head, I moved a desk and a chair in front of the balcony doorway to keep me from staggering onto the ledge. I was still dizzy two days later when I boarded a South African Airways jet for a flight to Johannesburg. A tropical thunderstorm blew in, leaving us stranded on the Lagos runway. The pilot announced that the crew was having an argument with the control tower. The pilots thought it was okay to take off. The control tower said the rain and winds were too high. “So we’re going right now,” the pilot said, and the plane jerked forward before anyone could protest. We rose into the storm, and the winds hit—the plane pitched from side to side and the wings bounced up and down. Several overhead cabinets clattered open. Things fell to the floor and rolled down the aisle. We wobbled, and the bottom seemed to fall out from under us, a dip so sudden that a book in my lap floated past my head, where I caught it. The woman next to me screamed, making me nearly jump out of my seat. “Lady,” I growled in the jolting aftermath, “the nose of the plane is pointing up. When it starts to go down,
that’s
when you scream.”

I was ready to kiss the ground when I got back home to Harare, and then I pretty much literally did, leveled by a kidney stone attack. I lay on the bathroom floor for a week, out of my mind on more painkillers and antispasmodics, waiting for the damn stone to pass. My immune system was so ragged that now the doctors were testing me, not Chipo, for HIV. Dr. Paruch, a Polish immigrant and our physician, said I didn’t have that virus, but my body was worn out.

“Your immune system is beaten to little bitty pieces,” he said. “You are only what, thirty-five years old? You look terrible.” This was almost the verbatim assessment of my physical appearance the Italian physician had given in Nairobi. I thanked him for the confirming opinion.

“What did he say?” Vita asked when I got back home.

“That I look like hell.”

“Did we have to pay for that?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. She gave me a kiss, always good medicine, and I hobbled over to the couch. Chipo held her hands out and giggled, the sign she wanted me to pick her up, and I did. “And what did you do today, Miss Thing? Did you go to Harvard? Are you the new Brandy? Or Whitney? Could you please be a singing sensation at thirteen so your momma and daddy can take an early retirement?”

She leaned over and bumped her nose against mine, once, twice. She giggled.

There were only a few days until my leave started, and I was ready to sleep for three months. I padded out to the driveway early one morning in March to retrieve the daily
Herald.
Herbert, the security guard, was thumbing through it. He handed it to me and smiled. “Ah, you Americans are in trouble, sure.”

I flapped open the front page. He wasn’t kidding.

“Three Americans Held over Arms” was the headline stripped across the front page. The article, accompanied by a photograph of police looking over a flatbed truck with an array of rifles at the side, said that three unnamed U.S. nationals had been arrested at Harare International Airport attempting to board a Swissair flight to Zurich. One man had an empty pistol in his pocket, police said, and it set off metal detectors. Disassembled weapons were found in the luggage, and dozens more in false panels of their truck parked outside. The men claimed to be missionaries, but police recovered three AK-47 assault rifles, a light machine gun, two sniper rifles, five shotguns, six telescopic sights with infrared lenses, nineteen pistols, and more than seventy knives. Their truck bore license plates from the Shaba province of Congo. The main city there was Lubumbashi, a notorious hub for illegal diamond markets, gunrunning, and, during the Cold War, covert operations by the CIA.

The article’s second paragraph said the men “appeared to be highly trained military personnel” and would be charged with espionage.

“You have absolutely got to be kidding me,” I said out loud.

It was all too obvious what was coming—a burst of government-sponsored anti-American propaganda. The idea that, as an American journalist, I would not be under the same scrutiny as local reporters, or even expats from Britain, evaporated before I got back inside with the paper.

Mugabe’s administration quickly said not only that the men were spies, but that they were a three-man hit squad, somehow out to assassinate Congolese president Laurent Kabila and then Mugabe himself. Security officers said the men had a map of State House, the Zimbabwean White House, to facilitate their assassination of Mugabe. I went to see Didymus Mutasa, a senior member of the Politburo, one of Mugabe’s closest advisors, and probably the fourth or fifth most powerful man in the country. We had a good working relationship, as he thought the stories I filed had always been fair. But he was guarded about this matter, not even offering much off-the-record guidance. “We don’t know what kind of game these men were playing,” he said, “but believe me, we will.”

This was not a story I could ignore—besides, this was one the government
wanted
reported—so on the final days before my leave, I was standing outside Harare’s criminal court with a gaggle of other reporters when police brought in the three suspects. They were identified as Gary G. Blanchard, Joseph Wendell Pettijohn, and John D. Lamonte, all in their mid-thirties. They were a motley crew from Indiana, dressed in checked shirts and heavy trousers. They were charged with terrorism, espionage, and contravening the Law and Order Maintenance Act (the same offense as Mark and Ray), as well as unlawfully holding arms and attempting to load dangerous weapons onto an aircraft. They faced a possible life sentence if convicted.

“We’re missionaries, a group called Harvest Field,” whispered Blanchard. I called their director, a man named Jonathan Wallace, in Indianapolis. A deep voice came over the line. Wallace explained that they were a tiny group, no more than a dozen families, whom he said God had led to work in southern Congo beginning in late 1996. The mission had once had more people in the region, including women and children, but the others had gone home and the three arrested had been wrapping up their work. Congo had gotten too dangerous, he said. He denied the three had machine guns but readily admitted they had weapons for personal security and hunting.

This didn’t seem too convincing, especially when Wallace didn’t know what a 501(c)(3), a tax-exempt corporation, was or how it worked. But if they weren’t men of the cloth, it was even more obvious they were not some CIA hit squad either. Their “highly sophisticated” weapons were outdated relics; there wasn’t a modern, high-priced weapon in the lot. The “map of State House” turned out to be nothing more than a sketch of downtown streets, including State House as a landmark, sketched out for the trio by a local man who was giving them directions.

Out of public view, the serious charges against the men were quietly dropped. By the time the case came to court, they would be charged with nothing more than what they admitted from the beginning—that they had guns without permits.

Of course, this really wasn’t the point. Their arrest was a godsend for Mugabe. He dramatically told his nation, over and over again, that the racist superpower was bent on exterminating him, the heroic defender of African independence, and he would defy them at every turn. This set off a carefully orchestrated campaign of anti-American propaganda, marches on the U.S. embassy, and a roundup of foreign correspondents in Harare, who were mostly American, British, South African, or Australian nationals. One by one, the Information Ministry called us in “so that we can verify your information.” After talking with several others who had been summoned, I went down to Liquenda House. I parked in the garage next door, showed my passport, and signed in at the sagging desk downstairs, then walked up to the Information Ministry office.

“You guys looking for me?” I said, showing my credentials.

The man behind the desk smiled broadly, laughing with a colleague.

“No, no, my friend, it is just that we like to see you,” he said. “You journalists. So busy, sure. You never come to talk to us.”

I forced a shared laugh, then put my work permit, passport, and press accreditation on the desk. He studiously wrote all these down. He asked for my phone number and address. Then he said I could go. “Our files are just old,” he said. “Don’t worry. It’s just a paperwork task.”

I didn’t buy it—they were making sure they knew where to find us in a hurry. But despite Mugabe’s constant attempts to whip up anti-American rancor, most people didn’t seem interested. I can’t remember a single case of an American being harassed or beaten, much less deported. Outside of the ZANU-PF-sponsored marches at the U.S. embassy, which never drew more than a couple of thousand, Zimbabweans were friendly, warm, and welcoming. And now that I wasn’t traveling for the first time in six years, we spent afternoons with Bill and Dumi, or with Steve and Heather, soaking up the sun and the quiet. We went on picnics in national parks with Audra and Nevio, who ran a popular restaurant in town, chatting until dusk and the evening chill set in. Then we would drive back to town with the headlights on, Chipo sleeping in her car seat.

But I had a sinking feeling this peacefulness wasn’t going to last, and Vita and I started looking for any help we could find to speed the adoption along. Surely other foreign nationals had adopted; those Germans had breezed through in eight months. We must be doing something wrong, we thought.

First, being Americans, we checked with the lawyers. There had to be a few who had handled international adoptions and thus could guide us through the process. We never found one.

I remembered that in Kenya, during the embassy bombing, an aid worker mentioned that a colleague in South Africa had adopted a Zimbabwean child. I now called the man back, got the name, and e-mailed Alisa, a New Zealander, who was then living in Cape Town. The same day the American missionaries/mercenaries appeared in court, I got a note back: “Yes, in 1994, I adopted a beautiful little girl named Chloe,” she wrote, and I let out a whoop. Then enthusiasm sank with the next sentence. “She’s from Lusaka [Zambia]. This was after a host of abortive attempts in Zimbabwe.”