About a month before, she had gone into the warehouse and grabbed the first book she found, a copy of
Where the Wild Things Are
. She took the choice as a sign. All the books she could have picked, and she’d come up with one she remembered. She took it to the front gate and stood outside reading until a boy wandered over to listen to her. Since then she’d come out every day, picking a different book each time. Some days only a couple kids showed up. Some days, twenty or so. Only one, a tiny boy named Joseph who had the whitest teeth Gwen had ever seen, understood more than a few words of English. He had taken upon himself the role of translator. Gwen figured he was adding his own commentary, because he often had the kids laughing at stuff that wasn’t supposed to be funny.
—
“How about you?” Owen said, back in the canteen. “Any big plans today?”
“Joseph gonna be helping you with your reading again?” Scott said. “He told me last week that you got through
The Cat in the Hat
all on your own.”
Gwen didn’t bother answering. Scott had come by her trailer two nights before for a quick-and-dirty. She hadn’t been in the mood. Since then he’d been snippy. Guys like him hated being told no.
“Such a dick,” Owen said. “By the way, happy birthday.” He reached into the messenger bag he always carried, handed Gwen an oversize envelope.
“Seriously?” Scott said. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been carrying that for three months to give to her. That’s weird, man.”
Bringing a card for her all the way from the United States did verge on weird. But Gwen wasn’t giving Scott the pleasure of hearing her say so. “It’s called being thoughtful,” she said. She wrapped an arm around Owen’s shoulders, kissed his cheek. She was surprised to feel the muscles in his upper back. Three months unloading trucks had toughened him up.
“Of course he remembered,” Scott said. “You’ve been talking about it for weeks. I wanted to pretend that we’d forgotten just to see what would happen, but your hero here wouldn’t dream of it. Bet he’s got a poem for you in there. ‘The White Rose of Kenya.’
She walks through the camps like a stripe on a skunk. With every step, she makes refugee hearts leap. Too bad it’s their stomachs that are the problem.
”
Despite herself, Gwen laughed.
“Or would it be a limerick?
There once was a girl in Dadaab. Whose mouth I want on my—”
“That doesn’t rhyme.”
“‘Knob’ doesn’t rhyme?”
“‘Knob’ is a really gross word in that context.”
“Corncob. Baby, Owen will make it rhyme. He’ll make sweet love to you Dadaab-style. Pour surplus cooking oil all over your body and lick it off.” Scott going on like Owen wasn’t even there. Managing to mock Owen and Gwen and their work all at once.
“Such a dick.” But even she could hear the flirty undertone in her voice. Scott was arrogant and cruel. But he was also hilarious, sometimes even at his own expense. Whereas Owen just stared at her with those deep brown eyes.
I love you,
the stare said.
I’ll be good to you forever if only you’ll love me back.
Why didn’t men understand that unrequited love was a bore? She was half afraid to open his card.
Owen walked out, not quite slamming the door.
“Poor baby,” Scott said. “I think I hurt his feelings.”
“Sooner or later, he’s going to kill you in your sleep. And half the girls in Missoula will cheer. What are you doing today?”
“Talking to my uncle, and then I think Suggs and me are going for a drive.”
Suggs was a Kenyan who worked as a fixer for WorldCares, part of the cost of doing business for Western aid agencies and journalists in Kenya. If a food convoy ran into a roadblock, fixers negotiated the “toll” to free it. If the police claimed that WorldCares needed a permit for an electrical generator, fixers found out whether they wanted a bribe, were enforcing a real law that no one knew about, or both. If a refugee showed up at the compound claiming to be a tribal leader, fixers found out how important he was. WorldCares had three fixers. But Suggs was the best. He handled the trickiest jobs. He had a big belly and what seemed like an endless supply of brightly colored polo shirts. Kenya’s version of Tony Soprano.
“A drive?”
“To Witu. See what’s happening over there.”
Witu was a satellite camp that had sprung up about fifteen miles from Hagadera. Its growth had taken the Kenyan government and the aid agencies by surprise. Thousands of refugees now lived there. Gwen had never seen it, but from what she had heard, the place was a mess, run by Somali gangs.
“I thought we didn’t deliver there.”
“We don’t. The guys who do, you know how they do it? The drivers don’t even turn off their trucks. They park at the edge of the road and the guards toss food off the back. Like they’re feeding sharks or something.”
The fact that aid workers could be attacked by the people they were trying to help was something else Gwen hadn’t realized back in Montana. “So why go?”
“I wanted to check it out myself. Anyway, we’ll be ready.” Ready being code for armed.
“Any excuse to carry a gun like a real man.” Agencies like WorldCares hired armed guards to protect their trucks, but aid workers weren’t supposed to have weapons.
“Actually I’m hoping they capture me, rough me up. Work me over, you know what I’m saying? It’s not gay if you’re a hostage.”
“All you frat boys are a little bit gay. Why you hate women so much.”
“Use and hate aren’t the same, beautiful. Happy birthday. I don’t have a card for you, but I can give you a present when I get back. You’ll have to unwrap it yourself.”
“Such a charmer.”
Scott gave her his usual toothy pleased-with-himself grin and walked out.
—
She spent the morning emailing everyone who had sent her birthday greetings. It was noon when she walked out of the WorldCares compound. “Going to read,” she said to Harry, one of the gate guards. The guards hung out in a wooden shed with a screened window and a rough painted sign that said “STOP HERE!!” They looked friendly enough in their white short-sleeved shirts, but Gwen knew they had rifles tucked under a blanket.
“Yes, Miss Murphy.” She couldn’t get him to call her Gwen no matter how often she asked.
She crossed the dirt road separating the compound from the camp. The refugee families had lit fires for their midday meal, and a sour diesel odor lay over the tents. Firewood was hard to find around Dadaab, so most refugees used scraps of trash wood soaked in diesel. During her first weeks at the compound, Gwen’s throat had been scratchy and sore. Now, for better or worse, her body seemed to have accepted the smoke.
Moss had warned her against going alone into the camp. So she read beneath an acacia tree just a few feet from the road, its knobby roots running almost to the edge of the first row of tents.
Only a couple boys were waiting for her. Joseph wasn’t among them. Gwen wished he would show more regularly, but she couldn’t make him. She didn’t even know who his parents were, much less where they lived. He seemed to understand that she had no real authority. Gwen had no way to test him, but he was clearly smart. Besides his command of English, he was a natural ringleader. The other boys looked to him for guidance. In the United States he’d be in a gifted program. Here he had Gwen reading him children’s books.
Growing up, Gwen had never had to share a bedroom. Her parents had given her a Nissan Pathfinder on the day she passed her driving test. Used, but still. She knew she was lucky, that she had a head start over the kids who lived in the trailer parks north of 90 and worked night jobs to help their families pay the rent. But even those kids had winter clothes and three meals a day. Unless they got pregnant and dropped out, they were guaranteed twelve years of school, a chance at college. Everybody back home had at least a chance to live a better life.
Now she saw with her own eyes that millions of people, some crazy number, had no shot at all. She didn’t have a head start over Joseph. They weren’t playing the same game. He would never be anything but a refugee. He’d be lucky to learn to read. Doubly lucky if Somalia ever calmed enough for his parents to take him back to the village where he’d been born. More likely he would remain on the streets of this camp until he joined a gang and disappeared. Gwen wondered if she wasn’t being mean to him and the other boys by showing them books about the United States when they would never have a chance to go.
Today she had brought a thick comic book that she’d pulled at random from the warehouse. It was called
Maus
and looked like it was about cats and mice. As she reached the tree, more shoeless, stick-legged kids came running over, chattering at her. Her regulars. Even after a month of reading, she couldn’t keep them all straight, though she knew that the littlest one called himself Guster, and the tallest Nene.
“I brought a good one today,” she said. “Lots of animals.” She sat against the tree, folded her long legs underneath her. She loved this moment, the feel of the rough trunk against her back, a book in her hand. The noise of the camp faded and the kids circled up and she read. But by page three, she had a sinking realization that
Maus
wasn’t about mice at all.
Not that it mattered. The kids weren’t paying attention. Without Joseph to translate, they were losing focus, arguing. Guster got up and ran around the tree, yelling. She snapped the book shut. “I’m leaving unless you behave.” They ignored her, and she knew the language barrier wasn’t the reason. They didn’t care. “You know, this is why you’re never going to amount to anything.”
She was joking, but she wasn’t. Another lesson of the last three months. She felt terrible for these refugees. Especially the kids. Yet she felt something else too, the feeling she tried to keep down. She hated the way they lived, the dirt and smoke. The way they bred kids they couldn’t support. The fact that instead of standing up for themselves, they had run away from their own country to this place, where they depended on handouts from white people to live. Would Americans have done that? Did the refugees even want to go home? Or were they content to live here, helpless as baby birds chirping for their next feeding?
Then she’d remember Joseph, and her anger would turn to shame. She’d had every chance. They’d had none. Now she judged them. She couldn’t square her feelings, this anger and heartbreak jumbled up. The kids circled around her and the tree. She stood. The sun was high now. Her face flushed under her hat. The heat and the smoke dizzied her. “All of you. Enough. Enough.” They kept running, spinning around her. She reached out, clenched her hand around Guster’s skinny arm, pulled him close. “Listen—” She saw at once she’d grabbed him too hard. He yelped and looked up at her with such hatred that she felt an almost electric shock tear through her. She let go and he tore off into the mess of tents and disappeared as the other kids shouted at her.
She spent the afternoon in her trailer. She plowed through
Maus
start to finish and then tried to distract herself with
Cosmo
and
Elle
and
Yoga Journal
. She had the magazines stuffed in her backpack like a twelve-year-old’s porn stash. She shouldn’t have lost her temper. She should have let the kids run themselves out and then gone back to her stupid reading. She just wanted to help and she didn’t know how. She couldn’t deliver a baby or dig a well. She couldn’t even unload the trucks. A forty-pound bag would knock her over.
Where was Hailey, anyway? Her best friend had deserted her. On her birthday. She lay on her cot, buried her face in her pillow until she heard footsteps enter the trailer.
“Gwennie? Happy birthday.”
“I have a headache.”
“No, you don’t.” Hailey tugged at her legs. She had no choice but to sit up. She fake-swiped at Hailey’s face and Hailey responded with a long hiss. In the bars in Missoula, they made a striking pair. Hailey’s dad was black, her mom white. She was tall and light-skinned, with big brown eyes. Guys liked her. Lots of guys. Hence Hailey the Heartbreaker.
“Where have you been?”
“Taking care of cholera patients. Which basically spells cleaning bedpans. I told you I’d be at the hospital today.” She held a canvas bag.
“You did?” Gwen felt stupider than ever.
“Come on, tell Dr. Hailey.”
“I can’t even.” But she did.
“So you grabbed his arm,” Hailey said when she was finished. “Trust me, that kid’s been through worse.”
“It’s not that. Do you know what this is?” She held up
Maus
.
Hailey flipped through it. “The Holocaust, right? The mice are the Jews and the cats are the Germans.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know, some world history class I took freshman year, maybe.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Gwen. I don’t know how to say this straight out without sounding condescending, but you are not dumb. You just never bothered to study.”
“It’s the same.”
“It’s not. If you were dumb, you wouldn’t be upset about any of this.”
“This place—”
“Look, we’re not the Army or anything, we’re not even getting paid. We’re volunteers, we’re doing our best. If nothing else, we’re witnesses.”
“Witnesses to what? I can’t even get anyone back home to understand what’s going on here. They send these dumb emails like
God’s work, keep it up,
and that’s all they want to know.”
Hailey unzipped her bag. “Time to put the pity party to bed. Guess what I have in here.”
“Hailey, I’m serious—”
“You want your birthday present or not?” Hailey reached into the bag and pulled out a bottle of Patrón and a jar of margarita mix. “Do not ask what I had to do to get these.”
“Tequila?”
“Come on. Let’s drink our sorrows away. Just like real aid workers. And if Owen or Scott stop by, I’m telling them to get lost.”
It was a fun night. The next morning, Gwen’s head was screaming, but even so she felt better. She came into the canteen, choked down a glass of water. Owen and Scott sat at the center table spooning down oatmeal, a replay of the day before. Neither looked glad to see her. She liked that.