July 13, 2010
I won’t tell you exactly the circumstance to the last time that I got to spend an afternoon with Daphne, talking about everything in the imaginable world that we could conjure up. But, I’ll say it felt like running through a field and scaring snakes out of their holes and shouting, “WE’RE NOT AFRAID OF YOU!” Like, banging pots and pans while a lion sleeps and mockingly singing The Tokens: “HUSH MY DARLING, DON’T FEAR MY DARLIN’!”
When you sit with Daphne, it’s just you and her and the world isn’t nearly as big and scary as it was when you were seven, or as big and scary as it is when you’re honest. It’s because she’s brave. Brave like jumping from the top bunk without a pile of pillows. Fearless and awake.
It took me far too long to get to Daphne this time. She’s in boarding school in Mpigi, which isn’t the next neighborhood over from any where. You have to purpose to get there. And, after the two hours in the bus from the Old Taxi Park in Kampala, we arrived at her school.
The anticipation was palbable. Daphne is extremely dear to me, and I am also her sponsor in the FOCUS Child Project. I’ll admit, when I was first her teacher in 2007, we became quick friends. The picture below is the two of us brokering a deal after she chased me around the yard in pursuit of a Polaroid I took of her outside the classroom. She has the Polaroid that resulted from the deal, and I have the original in a frame in my bedroom.
We are seconds from a handshake deal
I have expected to find her miraculously the same size, in the same blue jumper that she always wore, smiling as broadly as she did every time that she saw me. But, it wouldn’t be that easy to find her.
Upon our arrival at school, and after a roundabout conversation with the administration, we learned that Daphne had taken her brother home to seek some medical attention, having fallen sick, and left just that morning. So, two hours West of Kampala, without a word of departing to the school, we gathered ourselves and made for another taxi to return to the city.
We sent a message home that we’d be arriving around midday, and after the long, dusty trek back to Kalerwe, we found Daphne at the office.
She was taller, of course, and carried a purse instead of the polyurethane backpack she used to. She was 17, now, after all. And, you don’t stay the same from 14 to 17, no one does. Her cheeks were fuller, even. She bore all the changes in resemblance you’d infer from growing for three years.
Mutually Buried in a Hug
But, when she wrapped her arms around me and I squeezed back, not a moment had passed between us. I was as ready to ask her about her P.7 exams as I was to make sure she hadn’t been talking to boys in the new boarding school. I felt like her older brother again, and the world disappeared around us.
But, the world that dissolved into the background has already taken its toll. Poverty fosters vulnerability and fear; no matter how brave you are, it breaks you every day. And, she has struggled through three years of coming-of-age in a circumstance that would break her every day. And, it broke me, too, to hear her say that she felt hopeless, directionless.
How loud do you have to shout to drown out something as overwhelming as poverty? I would have yelled until I was hoarse, “You matter! You inspire us all! You’re going to make it! Don’t listen to a word they say!” if I believed it would have been louder than the circumstance. Instead, we sat together; I listened.
We recalled memories. We had lunch. We looked at pictures on my computer.
Grown
We walked together through Kalerwe and Mulago toward Kifumbira and Kamwokya. And, I felt the memory in our footsteps, like walking to the house, down the driveway from my mailbox. It’s practically so engrained in my day that it happens unthinkingly. Each footstep with Daphne felt so much a part of who I am, it happened almost unconsciously. So, I can’t describe to you the steps, like the impact of my foot into the dirt would have been the downbeat to some well-paced, singsong revelation about being with a friend. It’s that her story and mine have so intertwined that it’s almost more fitting to walk the same way I would from my car to the mailbox and to the house as I would with her back to her home from the Child Project office.
Yes, it’s quotidian. Really, it’s liturgical. Everything is repeated, but it’s new in each utterance, spoken in a new point in time, walked in a different path each time. And, each repetition is revelation enough, a layer built on this friendship with each step, made deeper and more true while we walk.
