Clara was shy and kept to herself no matter how much I tried to engage her in the hopes of using more of my Swahili. I’d hired her to come every day to make breakfast and lunch, do the shopping, clean the house and wash clothing as needed. I paid her three times what she asked, which didn’t amount to much but elicited the first and only smile I could coax from her. She turned out to be an excellent cook. Every morning she made fresh fry bread, and for lunch she prepared a perfectly seasoned lentil stew that was so delicious I’d have her make it every day for the entire nine months I lived in Shinyanga.
I was thrilled to be out of the compound and in my own place. The first night in my new home I was awakened from a deep sleep by a strange noise. I turned on my flashlight, which I slept with, to discover to my horror that my mosquito net was covered with thousands of insects. Some were as long as my hand. Many I’d never seen before. The noise that woke me up was the buzzing of thousands of pairs of wings. I’d made the mistake of not closing my window completely before going to bed.
Since the hoard was not able to get past the netting, I simply turned off the light and went back to sleep. By morning the mosquito net was clear. The only evidence that the insects had been there at all were the dozens of crispy corpses ringing my bed.
Insects were not my only uninvited house guests. I also shared the premises with several geckos. They hung out primarily in my bathroom and bedroom, slithering across the floor and up the walls whenever I happened upon them. When I told Ruth about them, she surprised me by telling me I was lucky to have them. The geckos, she told me, eat insects and therefore will keep their numbers down in the house. From then on, I saw the slithering little beasties in a new light. Sealing the windows and hosting the geckos, however, did very little to mitigate my insect issue. Daily I found insects in my hair, in my shoes, in my food. I’d even occasionally find one or two in my underwear. I eventually had to come to terms with the fact that I was in rural Africa and simply had to get comfortable living up close and personal with wildlife.
It didn’t take long for me to acclimate. After a few weeks I could blithely pick insects out of my hair and undergarments without first issuing a blood-curdling scream. I knew I had totally gone native, however, when after a hard rain millions of locusts swarmed the area, causing everyone to retreat indoors for at least an hour. I sat inside with Clara, listening to the sound of thousands of locusts slamming into the windows of the house like so many pebbles. After the majority of the swarm had passed, Clara grabbed a plastic tub and headed outdoors. I followed, curious. She started picking up the dead and injured locusts that covered the ground like a living, writhing carpet.
I could see other people up the road emerging from their homes and doing the same. Birds and small mammals were also about, snatching up the locusts as well. I thought, “What the . . . ?” Clara returned with the tub filled with the still wiggling locusts. It wasn’t until she deposited the basket on the counter in the kitchen that I realized what was about to go down. I watched fascinated as she meticulously cleaned each insect, removing the legs, wings and head before placing them in a colander. She then rinsed them in cool water, fired up the propane stove and grabbed a frying pan. When the pan was hot, she poured in a heap of bugs, added a bit of salt and cooked them as if it were a stir fry. When they were done, she placed about a handful of them in a small bowl and handed it to me.
I daintily picked one up, irrationally expecting it to wiggle even after being dismembered and roasted. With Clara watching me closely, I closed my eyes and held my nose with one hand, as if I were about to jump into a pool, and popped the roasted locust into my mouth with the other. I chewed it slowly and deliberately. It was delicious—crunchy with a nutty flavor. Clara and I sat companionably on the kitchen floor and finished the first batch together. She made a second batch for me to eat later and carried the bulk of the still wiggling locusts home to her family.
• • •
My boss was a retired physician who, after a visit to Tanzania, decided to start a health-oriented nonprofit. I’d met briefly with him and his wife in the States and found them both to be open and sincere in their desire to help the people of Tanzania. I would be working solo to reopen an office in the town, and create and implement a health outreach program centered around conveying to the community the importance of childhood and maternal immunizations. I was worried that I wouldn’t have the language skills or community ties to carry out the project, but he reassured me that my language would improve and he’d find local people for me to work with.
I tried to be optimistic about the project, but I felt as though I’d entered into an experience similar to the months I wasted in the old U.N. office in Morocco. Within a few days, the doctor returned to the States. I was left alone again. As promised, I cleaned out the office, washed the floors, cleared away cobwebs, replaced the faded posters with shiny new ones the doctor had brought, using them to cover the larger holes in the walls. Workers from the surrounding offices would come over to chat while I cleaned. They wanted to know who I was and what I’d be doing in Shinyanga. They had no idea what our organization did and had never seen anyone occupy the office I claimed was our headquarters. I could tell they didn’t know what to make of me. After several weeks, I decided I would not sit in the office any longer waiting for an opportunity to do something. Shinyanga is crawling with nonprofits doing amazing work. If the one I worked for wasn’t going to give me work to do, I’d find one that would.
Though everything did not go as planned in Tanzania in terms of my job, I did make fantastic friends in Ruth and Mercy. I also made up for lost time by visiting with several local NGOs. One of the highlights was visiting the homes of local people who take in and care for children orphaned by AIDS. I visited local people making progress in their efforts to reverse the devastating impact of deforestation caused by decades of land misuse and mismanagement. I’ll never forget the theater troop of young Tanzanians entertaining while educating their people about many public health issues and how keeping women illiterate only serves to amplify the nation’s poverty levels and negative health outcomes.
In the end I came to believe that many of the world’s ills cannot be solved solely by outsiders who believe that their wealth and degrees make them the most qualified. The most respectful, practical and efficacious approach to improving the lives of others is for wealthy nations and individuals to use their resources to empower people to help themselves. Years after leaving Tanzania, I would have the chance to put this theory into practice.
CHAPTER 12
I RETURNED TO ATLANTA in 2000 somewhat discouraged that I hadn’t accomplished the work I’d signed on to do. I wasn’t totally disheartened, however. By way of our family foundation, I was able to make a well-deserved grant to one of the local nonprofits to continue their good work in Tanzania.
While I was uncertain where my next professional step would lead me, I knew exactly where my romantic life was headed: long-term commitment. I’d spent most of my adult life running away from commitments, particularly professional and romantic ones. I usually kept jobs and boyfriends for an average of two years before moving on to something new. I thought it would be the same with Andy. But he showed more initiative than my old boyfriends, who were smart enough to see my cross-country or cross-Atlantic moves as a clear sign that the relationship was over.
Not Andy. Though we were separated for nearly nine months and by more than eighty-three hundred miles, our relationship had managed to progress, mostly because he e-mailed me daily and even made the occasional phone call while I was in Shinyanga. When I saw Andy off at the end of our stressful safari, I had no real plans to get serious with him, but I’d soon learn that the old adage about the heart and absence is not completely unfounded.
When he called one day to tell me he’d lost another job, instead of seeing it as yet another sign that I had no business getting serious with this guy, my savior complex kicked in and I saw him not as a loser but as someone who despera
tely needed me. My response to his firing was to ask a dear friend who worked at Turner Enterprises to help him get another job, which she was kind enough to do.
So by the time I returned to Atlanta, my boyfriend was gainfully employed. He picked me up at the airport and we returned to his basement apartment, where he proposed and I accepted. I was not in love. There were other factors that led to me accepting the proposal of marriage. I was in my thirties and living in the South, where women are usually well into their first decade of marriage with children by then. Also, I knew my parents’ relationship was strained. Jane had written to me in Tanzania to tell me that she and Ted were talking about divorce. I had called the Turners family for nearly ten years. The thought of a split made me heartsick. The thought of creating a family of my own gave me a sense of stability in the midst of uncertainty.
The prospect of my mom divorcing was also troubling because I was very close to Ted. Unlike Tom and my birth father, he was a true father to me. When he learned of my engagement to Andy, he approached me and asked if he could give me away. The thought of that relationship being threatened by divorce was more than I could think about. So I didn’t.
I was relieved upon returning to Atlanta to find my mom and Ted still together, married but clearly not the infatuated lovebirds I’d last seen. While Ted was his usual upbeat self, my mom was greatly diminished physically and emotionally. She’d lost a lot of weight from her already tiny frame. Though she continued to put up a front that screamed “Everything’s fine!” I could see things were not. Emotionally, she was shutting down. Her marriage was eating her alive. There were times leading up to and even after the divorce when she wanted to share with me some of the things Ted was doing that destroyed their relationship, but I refused to listen. I knew that if she shared with me anything hurtful that he had done to her, my feelings for him would change. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be privy to the darkest inner workings of my parents’ relationship and I told her so. She respected my request. Because we had shared everything in the past, I felt that by refusing to hear the details of their breakup I was somehow betraying her. But I didn’t know how else to handle it.
Though they were discussing divorce, we continued to socialize as a family in public. Sometimes I’d watch my mom and Ted sitting together, looking shiny and powerful in their dress-up clothes and celebrity personas, and I knew. I knew but I refused to accept that our days as a family were numbered.
I began to occupy myself with my new life with Andy. My friends and family never understood my attraction to Andy. They didn’t believe that being a decent person was enough to sustain a lifelong relationship. Though I knew we had very little in common, I was attracted to Andy because I felt physically safe around him. He was a big guy who if need be would defend me. He was also an amazing father to his child and I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t be wonderful with our own child. Growing up without a father, and feeling vulnerable most of my life, I found these qualities in Andy extremely attractive. So when my mom offered to buy us a home, I accepted and Andy and I spent all of our free time searching for just the right place. And not surprisingly, Andy and I held very different opinions about what constituted the perfect house.
While Andy wanted something big and showy, I wanted something small and simple. I had my heart set on a renovated bungalow in one of Atlanta’s older, diverse neighborhoods, which he called “the hood.” Andy wanted a big home in as fancy a neighborhood as possible. In the end, we compromised on something big in the hood: a large, contemporary home on an acre in sketchy East Atlanta, which the folks in my mom’s office quickly dubbed the Manse on Bouldercrest. I resented having to compromise at all.
After the purchase, my mom stepped in with an interior designer to help furnish and renovate. In the end, it was a beautiful home that I absolutely hated because it symbolized the beginning of the loss of me. After moving into the home, I found myself slowly morphing into what I thought Andy wanted me to be. On the weekends I was always up for a hike or a bike ride, but Andy was happier with a bowl of chips and the football game. So I stopped hiking and riding and joined him on the couch.
It annoyed him when I read while he watched TV, so I put my books aside. I started to drift away from the things I enjoyed and toward the things that interested him—particularly his number one obsession: television. The television went on from the moment we got home until we went to bed at night.
For Andy, when it came to television, the bigger the better. Soon after we moved in, he purchased a huge television that had to be hoisted over the balcony in order to get it to his man cave located on the second floor. There was no such thing as too many channels, either. He was willing to pay for hundreds despite the fact that his taste fell toward ESPN and Jerry Springer. Oh, the hours of my life I have lost watching Jerry Springer! Over the course of our relationship, I gained about thirty pounds and lost an equal number of points off my IQ score.
Once settled into the house I directed my energies toward finding a job. I knew I wanted to remain in social services, and when I came across an opening for a program counselor working for the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement agency in Atlanta, I could not have created a better position for myself. With my traveling days behind me, I thought working with refugees would feed my need to be with people of other cultures while utilizing my experience working in social service. I was ecstatic to get a position as the volunteer and resources coordinator, which tasked me with connecting newly arriving refugees with volunteers and essential items such as donated clothing, furnishings and other household items. I got to meet and assess the needs of nearly every refugee who passed through our office.
While my work with homeless women was intense, my new position was a lot more emotionally challenging. It’s hard not to feel a personal connection to the extreme suffering of another. My clients came to me at their most vulnerable and confused, still healing from the physical and emotional scars left from experiences the average American could only imagine: human trafficking, war, genocide and persecution based on ethnicity, religion and gender. Though they came from diverse regions of the world, spoke different languages and believed different things, they all shared the title of “survivor,” and it was my job to make sure they got the best shot possible to remake something of themselves.
They made my job remarkably easy. Having experienced what it’s like to truly have nothing, they received the support from us as bounty and fully exploited it. Though it was mostly their hard work and determination that led to them prospering in the States, I couldn’t help but take pride in learning that a client of mine got employee of the month or successfully completed a GED or was admitted to college. For the first time I was completely fulfilled professionally.
While work was going well, I began to develop a dislike for Atlanta. I had not lived in the same town as Jane since Los Angeles, where being the child of a celebrity is not a big deal to many people. In Atlanta, however, I often felt singled out. Atlanta was relatively new to being a place where celebrities lived and mingled, and I felt it difficult to make sincere friendships because of my parents. The circles I found myself in made Atlanta feel like a very small town, and in short order I felt I had no anonymity. To many, I was just an extension of Ted and Jane. Sometimes I was in the opposite position. When I attended sporting events at CNN Center or Turner Field with the entire family, I was often singled out by black security guards to show my ID or somehow prove that I was legitimately with my family and not some hanger-on trying to get access to the good seats (white security guards usually gave me the benefit of the doubt). Sometimes—but not always!—I could avoid being singled out and interrogated if I held my mother’s hand. But woe unto me if I got distracted and found myself bringing up the rear.
Compounding this problem with the city was that many in the African-American community still held fast to a lot of ideas I found antiquated and offensive. Once I went to Piedmont Park with a young black woman I had m
et at an event; we got along fine and seemed to have a lot in common. I suggested we put a blanket down on the grass and relax in the sun; she looked at me stunned and said, “Let’s go over to the shady spot instead. I don’t want to leave here looking like a field slave!”
I threw myself into my work and my relationship, trying to convince myself that I’d be happy if I tamed my wandering spirit and molded myself into the perfect worker, the perfect fiancée. Though I had few examples of couples actually experiencing fulfilling careers and long-term matrimonial bliss, I couldn’t help believing that I could achieve it. So I went to work early and left late. I began to tuck away all those aspects of myself Andy found annoying or intimidating like frayed cuffs on a fancy dinner jacket. And for a while it worked. I’d managed to work and tuck myself into a zombielike state where I became accustomed to feeling nothing. No matter that I’d given away my life in exchange for weekends, ten days a year vacation time and a warm body to sleep next to at night.
But something deep inside refused to allow me to give myself away completely. I could not bring myself to agree on a wedding date. No matter how much Andy pressed, I made excuses. One of the best was telling him we could set a date when he got himself out of debt. Andy was buried in so much debt I knew it would be a while before he could get out from under it. Months went by, then a year passed since our engagement. Then another and another.