Love in the Driest Season (19 page)

For as long as we were in the country, Vita oversaw the implementation of the project. She picked up Dr. Paz and drove him down for sessions with the staff once a week. He was delighted with how eager the young women were, once they got over the nervousness of asking him questions. Vita haggled with contractors, most of whom were polite, professional, and happy to do work at the home. She also cracked heads with the few who tried to inflate prices or manipulate her into endorsements for more work at the embassy. Inflation was so severe that once she got a quote for a major appliance and the embassy approved it, the price had gone up, meaning the process had to start over. I had to get unpleasant once or twice with male contractors who had trouble being respectful toward a woman giving them orders. Stella did yeoman’s work, overseeing the daily work at the orphanage, juggling the rehab work with the daily load of caring for all of her young charges, not just the infants.

When it was all done, the quality of care for the infants had improved and the facilities were upgraded. The place looked very fine. But the bottom line, at least in the short term, was dispiriting. The year we brought Chipo home, eighteen infants died. The next year, after more than $12,000 in supplies was brought in, the facilities modernized, and the staff trained by one of the best pediatricians in the country, seventeen infants died.

I
T WAS ANOTHER
gloomy morning in the Social Welfare office, and Munautsi was glowering at me. I had stopped in, once more, to check on the progress of Chipo’s birth certificate. In an office with few typewriters, even fewer computers, almost no transportation, and bad phone lines, Munautsi had to fill out forms applying to Chipo’s home region to get the document. Before he could do that, he had to explain the circumstances of her birth, prove that she was indeed found in that area, and provide police verification of all of the above. He also had to go through all of our paperwork to make sure that we qualified as parents. This was one of hundreds of cases on his desk. I really had every sympathy for the man. What I couldn’t understand was why he viewed me as some sort of threat.

He was muttering something about shortcuts, me doing something wrong, papers not in order.

“You are trying to complete this process without all of your papers,” he said. “You think you can take shortcuts.”

“What shortcuts? What’s not in order?”

“You have no references,” he said. “You must have references from many people. But you have not submitted any.”

“Not subm—Mr. Munautsi, I’ve given the department more than a dozen reference letters. From my bosses, from a priest, from long-term friends in America, from friends here in Zimbabwe.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Yes—” And then I caught myself. I didn’t want to get into a third-grade did-not, did-too debate, which I was just about exasperated enough to do.

“You’re saying the file has no reference letters?”

“That’s right.”

“Then I’ll bring copies in tomorrow. But you’re attributing motive that’s not there, and I have to tell you I don’t appreciate it. If you have a question about something, if there’s a document that we haven’t supplied, then it’s from some sort of miscommunication, not deviousness.”

This sort of Americanized formality approached the inane, I knew, but I couldn’t see any alternative. I didn’t have any threat to bully him with, and blowing up at him was only going to make things worse. Bottling up this anger, morning after morning, bounced my blood pressure into the stratosphere. There were many days, including that one, when I left his office as pleasant as you please, and by the time I got back into my truck I would be pounding the dashboard in anger, cursing out loud with what I had wanted to say. Which startled the street kid looking for his tip, but not much else. I still had to go home, make copies of the reference letters, and bring them back the next morning.

He wasn’t there.

This game of catch-as-catch-can continued for two days, until I finally did what I had done with the previous social worker—I took a book, sat down in the hallway, and read. An hour or so later, Munautsi rounded the corner and I gave him the copies. He said thank you and opened his door. I started to follow him inside, but he quickly turned. “There is no need for you in here!” he almost shouted. “I am busy! You must leave!”

I apologized and left, shaking my head.

A few days later, it got worse. This time he was really worked up.

“
Shortcuts!
” he bellowed. “I knew it! I knew you! You are trying something!”

By now, he had thrown me out of his office so many times, like an umpire tossing a batter after a disputed third strike, that I scarcely paid attention. But this was different. He was shaking his finger, truly furious.

“You were never vetted by police! You did not do the criminal check! And yet you have a child! This is against the law! I knew it!”

I was startled. We
had
been checked by the police. We had been fingerprinted that day at the precinct with the prostitute. I tried to calm him down, assuring him that I would bring those copies in within the hour, for this was serious. If he pressed the matter, he could go to a judge to have our foster custody revoked.

I rushed home, got the copy of the fingerprint form—Vita kept on file five copies of each document related to Chipo’s custody—and drove back. He wasn’t there, of course, and didn’t return for the rest of the day, but I caught him the next morning. I pointed out the date, the precinct stamp, and the signature of the officer. He was only slightly mollified. We had been printed, he agreed, but nobody from Social Welfare had verified with the police that we were not wanted criminals. Or, if they had, they had lost the paperwork. He handed me back the copy. The police couldn’t run a check with that.

“You must be fingerprinted again,” he said.

The next day, Vita and I were back at the precinct, once again rolling our fingers across the ink pad. This time, I drove the still-wet form to the police headquarters myself. The receptionist let me walk it back to the detectives. I begged the lady at that desk to investigate us, explaining the situation and the urgency. She was very nice and called back a week later. I drove down immediately. I picked up the form, complete with police sign-off in red ink, made six copies, had them notarized, then took them back to Munautsi.

He grunted.

Then, out of the blue, the birth certificate came through a few days later—but only, it turned out, because Stella happened to be traveling in the region where Chipo had been found and stopped in the local Social Welfare office on business. She saw several forms waiting to be mailed back to Harare, one of them with Chipo’s name on it. She drove all of the forms in personally.

The next week, our entire file went missing, and we began to understand what the theory of “actively discourage” meant in practice.

“
Lost
it?” I said to Munautsi. This time I was the angry one. “How can you lose the entire file? Don’t you keep a copy of
anything?
”

Munautsi said he had sent our case to the file room and now they couldn’t find it. Without the file, there was nothing he could do. He didn’t seem too upset about it.

When I asked him what I should do, he said, “Wait. Maybe we’ll find it.”

This was disaster, absolute pinwheeling disaster. Without a file, our case went back to square one. We had a notarized copy of our foster custody papers, and we had copies of the whole sheaf of papers we had submitted—marriage license, our birth certificates, proof of employment, work permit and so on—but the department was not bound to accept any of it. They had no copies of our home studies or of her birth certificate. Really, there wasn’t any legal proof that Chipo even existed.

We had to get that damn file back. We put Chipo to bed, as she could sleep through the night now, and sat up for hours, yet another bottle of wine on the table between us. The situation in the country was getting worse. The U.S. embassy was of no use with something like this; their involvement would only make things worse. I couldn’t ask friendly government officers in Zimbabwe to make a phone call for fear it would backfire. My source in the department couldn’t intervene, at risk of being charged with taking some sort of bribe.

We discussed strategy, even argued about it heatedly. We considered personalities within the department. We discussed the names, races, and genders of the best lawyers in town, and how those might come into play for or against us, should we choose to retain them in a lawsuit.

In the end, we cut to the chase. We hit ’em with Vita.

She walked into the building the next day, avoiding Munautsi’s office, and talked to the female clerical staff. It is a social stigma in Zimbabwean society for a woman not to be a mother. Vita, childless in her forties, was a figure of great pity. She wasn’t Zimbabwean, but with her short physique, full figure, and dark skin, she could have passed for Shona. When we had first moved to Harare, women would ask her about her children, and she would reply that she didn’t have any. They invariably sighed, dropped their eyes, and said, “Shame, shame.” So when she went into the office that day, she played the last card we had.

“I can’t have a baby,” she told the women quietly. “I only have Chipo. But now her file is lost.”

Moved, they took her behind the counter and down the aisle, where they threw open a door. The file room.

Some of it was organized. Most of it was not. Thousands of folders were dumped on the floor, strewn over shelves, stacked on counters. There were still file folders marked “Property of the Rhodesian Government.” They located the most recent years, sat down, and handed a stack to Vita. Together, they all started sorting through files. Hundreds of folders went by, then thousands. Vita was in jeans, on her hands and knees, going over stack after stack of files. They searched all morning with no success. They picked it up in the afternoon, and again wound up with nothing. Late in the afternoon of the next day, a woman called out, “Eh-Eh! Mama Chipo! Eh-eh!” She was smiling, delighted. She held Chipo’s file. Everyone let out a cheer. Vita hugged them all. Then she left.

One of the women waited to make sure Vita was gone, then took the file to Munautsi’s office. She placed it on his desk, front and center. The next day, I stopped in and asked, with a furrowed brow, if that darn file had ever turned up.

“Yeah,” he said.

He didn’t appear to be particularly thrilled. I didn’t particularly care.

I walked out of the office, turned the corner, and gave the air a double pump with a clenched fist. “Boom, baby!” I shouted.

It felt as though we were in some sort of tennis match, a duel of serve and volley, and we had just laced a cross-court winner. The bribery allegation, the delays in getting the emergency placement order, the lost references, the lost police clearance, the lost file—whop! bap! slice! We returned them all and were still in the match. Perhaps it sounds silly, but these sorts of battles consumed our lives, a roller coaster of political tension and bureaucratic drama. Getting that file back, whether Munautsi meant to lose it or just did, felt like we had just won a set point at center court. The resulting burst of energy sent us bouncing around town as though we were in some sort of pinball machine. Munautsi allowed me to make a copy of Chipo’s birth certificate, of which I again made five copies and had each notarized as a “true copy,” signed by the department head, Tony Mtero, himself. I returned one of those to Munautsi and kept the original. He didn’t notice, and we had one more point in our favor. With the original birth certificate I could apply for Chipo’s passport on my own. That office, in the same complex of buildings as the Social Welfare office, worked like a dream. If you paid the service fee of $75—a whopping amount in local terms—you could have your passport in forty-eight hours. Vita took Chipo to the photo studio, held her steady on a high stool, and ducked out of the way when the flash went off. I took that portrait of a startled Chipo, a completed application, and the cash to the passport office on a Friday morning. Monday afternoon, I was holding a green Zimbabwean passport, complete with a national identity number. Now we had the documents necessary to file a request over at the U.S. embassy, just a few blocks away, for her visa into the United States.

It was in the midst of this, when the Southern Hemisphere brings the midwinter chill of June and July, when the air grows cold after dark and you need a sweater to keep warm, that we got our biggest break yet. We heard of a foreign national, a Canadian, who had just adopted. Somebody mentioned this to Vita at one gathering or another, but all they knew was her first name and that she worked at the Canadian embassy. Vita was on the phone the next morning, asking at the switchboard for anybody named Beth. A moment later a woman’s voice came on the line and, after an apology for prying into her personal affairs, Vita asked if she was adopting a child. Yes, she said, a little startled to hear the question from a stranger. Vita explained our circumstance, and Beth agreed to meet her after work.

“You just wouldn’t believe the hassles,” Beth said when they sat down together. “They stonewall, stonewall, stonewall. They seemed to act like I was some sort of criminal. And then I just got sick of it. I told them my posting was coming to an end and that I was leaving. They got busy then, and actually started to do the paperwork. It just got approved. I’m out of here.”

Beth had a couple of advantages we didn’t—her status at the embassy gave her a diplomatic cachet we lacked, and she had not been declared to be an enemy of the state. Still, hers was the only success story we knew, and it greatly influenced us to push deadlines whenever possible.

The date for our scheduled home leave was within days, the one Munautsi had told us would be “no trouble” reaching, and we still had no approval letter from the department to make the trip. Morris Thompson, Knight Ridder’s foreign editor, wrote a letter to the department assuring them of our return to the country. It landed with a thud. The date for departure came and went. We rebooked the tickets and I went to see the provincial magistrate, Mr. Mano (I never knew his first name). I offered him my assurances that Chipo would be returned, handing him copies of the letters from my editors. I even offered to put up a cash bond.