What Tears Us Apart

Chapter 2



December 9, 2007, Kibera—Leda

WHEN LEDA LOOKED out over Kibera for the first time, she thought of the sea behind her mother’s house, how it unfolded into infinity, unfathomable and chilling even on a sunny day. Leda stumbled at the top of the embankment, grabbed for the handle of her suitcase and stood tight until the rushing realization of smallness receded from her knees.

One million people, her guidebook claimed, crammed into a labyrinth of mud and metal shacks. It was a maze to make Daedalus proud. No Minotaur could escape from here. The slum was the Minotaur, gorging itself on fleeting youth and broken dreams.

Leda felt the dampness of her washed hair morph into sweat. She’d arrived the night before, had been ushered quickly into a cab and sped to her shiny white room at the Intercontinental in Nairobi. But now she stood on the edge of Nairobi’s secret, two terse sentences in the hotel’s welcome binder—the Kibera slum. Bounded by a golf course, towering suburban gates, a river, a railroad and a dam. Cordoned off. Now Leda saw what that meant—a place with no running water, no electricity, no sanitation system—the blank spot on the map of the city, officially unrecognized. A space smaller than her Topanga Canyon neighborhood, but thirty times the population density of New York City.

From where Leda stood, Kibera below was an undulating sea of rusted rooftops, ending at the horizon and the glaring morning sun.

Samuel, the guide Leda had hired to take her on a tour of Kibera and to the orphanage, stood likewise frozen, but unalarmed. More than likely he was used to the tourist gasp, had it penciled into his schedule.

Leda looked at him sideways, her eyes grabbing on to him like a buoy at high sea. Samuel was younger than her for sure, no more than twenty-five, but taller by a foot. His face was smooth, shiny in the heat. How did he feel? Awkward, as she did, embarrassed? Was he secretly seething?

Normally, Leda was good at discerning people’s thoughts and moods, a skill learned early in her mother’s house. It wasn’t a talent that brought her any closer to people, however.

She closed her eyes to the miles of dirt and metal, shut her ears to the clanging roar before them and the gridlocked traffic behind them, and tried to sense any irritation or ill will coming from Samuel. But his stretched posture and his even stare gave nothing away. If nothing else, he seemed dutiful. This was another Sunday, another customer.

Samuel sensed Leda’s searching, as people always did, and he turned. “Do you want to take a picture?”

Leda’s hand went into her pocket, wrapped around her camera. Right. A photographer should want to take a picture. But when she saw the men down the embankment staring, her hand let go of the camera. These were the kinds of moments that confirmed for Leda she wasn’t cut out to be a photojournalist.

“It’s okay. Let’s just go,” she said.

Samuel nodded and stepped behind Leda to pick up her sixty-pound suitcase. He hoisted it onto his back heavily, as though it was a piano, and started down the dirt hill.

The sight gave Leda a queasy jolt. “Wait. There’s no road?”

She’d looked at the pictures online, she’d seen the narrow alleys. But she’d also assumed there would be a way in, a way out. A road.

Samuel turned. He smiled.

Leda felt the sneer behind his smile. She looked down, her cheeks burning. She studied the orange dust under her boots. The color was due to the dearth of vegetation, she’d read. The iron turned the clay minerals orange.

Samuel was off and walking. Leda scrambled after him down the hill, feeling like a clown fish in a pond. She watched him start across a rickety footbridge arched over a brown swamp of trash, with sugarcane growing in thick clumps through the waste. Children waded in near the cane.

Leda followed, studying her shoes to avoid all the eyes on her.

The other side of the bridge landed Leda in a landscape that was more landfill than ground, and she nearly went down on the twisted path of plastic bags. She was grateful for her tennis shoes, but still furious at herself for the suitcase. Imagine if she’d brought her second one, instead of leaving it with the hotel. Underneath the ridiculous load, all she could see were Samuel’s sandals traversing the winding path over rock and drainage creeks. And all she could do was follow along, like a princess after a porter, trying not to trip. Her mother’s words blared in her head. Off to save Africa?

As doubt clogged her throat, Leda felt sure she would drown in the smell. Moldy cabbage, rotten fish, cooking smoke, but mostly it was the steaming scent of human waste that poured into Leda’s nose and mouth, saturating her as if she could never be free of that smell again. She opened her mouth to breathe, and gagged on the sweat that dribbled in.

Now the view of the slum had disappeared and they were inside it, weaving through narrow spaces and crisscrossed paths like an ant farm in hyperdrive.

Men with hollowed cheeks and yellowed eyes stared at Leda. Women—in the midst of tending children and selling and trading and gossiping and cooking and cleaning—their eyes flickered warily as she passed.

The children, however, were a different story. Schoolkids flew up around Leda like clouds of sparrows, waving their arms and chirping Howareyou? Howareyou?

Leda was grateful to them for their acceptance and she answered with the Swahili words she’d only ever spoken to her iPod. “Jambo,” she said, and they giggled.

“Present,” one boy shouted amiably.

Samuel stopped suddenly, and motioned for Leda to stand beside him. He shooed away the children, not meanly but firmly, and set down the suitcase, ready, Leda supposed, to continue with the tour he’d begun when they met that morning in the café in Nairobi.

“So, you are here to volunteer. What is it you do in America? Are you a teacher?”

Avoiding his question, Leda looked away. “Yes, I’m a volunteer. Here to help.”

Samuel nodded. “Do not give the children money. They do not understand it. In your country maybe you are a poor teacher, but here your money is a lot. This puts ideas in the children’s heads.”

Leda looked into Samuel’s face, at the sheets of sweat soaking his T-shirt. She moved closer and released the handle on the suitcase, demonstrating that she would pull it.

Samuel smiled again, the smile Leda hated and that she felt hated her. She nodded toward the children playing nearby. “What ideas?”

“The idea that begging is a job. Or that robbing you would not be so bad since you give it so easily.”

Samuel took a breath and walked a few steps. Now he resumed his script as he pointed here and there. “When the British left, they gave this land to the Nubians—Muslim Sudanese soldiers. But with no deeds. The Nubians became illegal landlords and the seeds of war were planted in this dirt. Muslim against Christian. Kikuyu against Luo. There have been many problems.”

“But then, technically, the government owns the land? They could help.”

They passed a beauty salon of women who stared at Leda struggling to wheel her suitcase through the trash. Samuel waited. Silently, he watched the trash pool around the suitcase wheels until Leda found herself dragging, not wheeling, the suitcase. His look more or less said I told you so.

“Yes, they could help,” Samuel said. “But it is more convenient for them to do nothing. As long as the slum is illegal, they do not have to provide what the city people have rights to.”

A man tripped over Leda then, for cosmic emphasis, sloshing water from a yellow jug. The dirt beneath her shoes turned to mud and the man looked at it and frowned. Leda’s skin burned under the man’s indignation. He huffed and walked on. How far had the man walked for that water? “Then how do they get the necessities?”

“Everything is for sale in Kibera. Water. Use of the latrine. A shower. People pay the person who steals electricity for them. They pay the watchmen, really paying them not to rob them. They pay thieves to steal back what other thieves stole in the night. Women who sell changaa, they pay the police a bribe. Women who sell themselves, they pay the bribes with their bodies. But still one must pay for charcoal and food and school. The hardest thing to justify is school.”

“How do people pay for everything?”

“They don’t.” Samuel pointed at the ground.

Leda lifted her right foot and a sticky plastic bag dangled from it in the dusty air. She considered anew the blanket of trash bags.

“When you can’t pay or it’s unsafe to go, then you do your business in a bag and—” Samuel’s hand carved an arc through the air that ended at her shoe. “Flying toilets.” He took the suitcase, now soiled from her dragging it through the refuse.

“We’re almost there.” He pointed ahead.

Leda was in shock. But before they moved on, she had to ask a question she thought she knew the answer to. “Do you live in Kibera, Samuel?”

It was the first time emotion crossed his face unfettered. “Yes,” he said, and heaved the suitcase onto his back as he turned away, a turtle putting his shell back on.

Leda followed him deeper into the slum, supplementing his practiced explanations about Kibera with the rushing things her eyes and ears told her. Kibera was an assault of objects, colors, smells and sounds, all suddenly appearing out of the dust inches from her face. As they ducked between mud/stick structures, colored laundry fluttered and dripped overhead. A volley of muffled chatter and music echoed from all directions.

Leda wondered what privacy meant in Kibera, if anything. How would any one of these people feel if they found themselves alone in a quiet house like the one she shared with Amadeus? Or in a mansion of marble, glass and sky, like her mother’s? So much space all to themselves.

People passed each other the way cats do, touching, brushing skin, sliding off one another in the sweaty heat. Personal space was an oxymoron and as soon as Leda put words to the thought it made her recoil, dodging this way and that to avoid contact in the swarming crowds. She saw she would have to form new habits in Kibera, new ways of moving through space.

Women streamed by in bright dresses, in business attire, in jeans and flip-flops. Men streamed past in athletic jerseys and ragged South Park T-shirts and button-downs. All on a mission, edging doggedly in one direction or the other.

Chickens and stray dogs darted through the two-way parade with a bravado Leda wanted to admire. But the smoke searing her eyes and the jagged rays of sunlight darting through the metal turned the path ahead, behind the bobbing suitcase, into an obstacle course of certain peril.

Eventually, the suitcase stopped.

It dropped to the ground and revealed Samuel heaving to catch his breath so he could announce the obvious.

“We’re here,” he said, and pointed at a small, hand-painted sign tacked to a towering wall of corrugated metal. Triumph Orphanage.

Most of the maze of houses and shops were single-roomed, and could be seen right into if the bedsheet doors weren’t drawn. But they’d passed several tall metal partitions, walled-off spaces, which the orphanage seemed to have, as well. Leda tried to get a sense of how big the structure was and poked her head around the corner.

The metal wall spoke to her. Rather, it laughed.

The hair on Leda’s arms stood up. The laugh was a sound like midnight thunder rolling across the sea. Leda shut her eyes. From the moment she’d entered Kibera with Samuel, winding through the dust, through the throngs of smiling children and scowling mothers, through the smells and jolting clamor, whenever it seemed too much to bear, Leda had blinked her eyes long enough to see the smile from the website. A smile full of calm and certainty.

Leda would bet her soul that the laugh on the other side of that wall and the smile were one and the same.

When Samuel banged on the door with his fist, the laugh snuffed out. Leda’s eyes shot open.

A section of the metal wall slid open.

And there it was—the smile that belonged to the laugh.

“Leda,” the smile said, wide and shining.

“Ita,” she said, feeling the grin tug at her lips, a sensation as rare as it was delicious. For once, she wasn’t politely mimicking—the smile sprang from inside, as though freed from a cage.

Samuel looked back and forth with a curious expression. “Have you met before?”

Ita smiled wider, shaking his head. “We have now.”

Leda laughed, enchanted by the simple confidence he radiated like a lightbulb. Feeling breathless, she looked down at her dusty feet and had another vision of standing by the sea—watching in wonder as the sand, the shells, her whole body was drawn in by the tide, magically pulled by the moon. Leda looked up and took another gulp of seeing Ita’s lit-up face. Then she turned to Samuel and held out her hand. “Thank you, Samuel. I wish you well.”

Samuel snapped free of the moment and nodded. “Good luck, Leda. Good luck in Kibera.”

Ita held out his hand, too. “Samuel. Asante sana.”

Samuel shook Ita’s hand, craning to peek inside the orphanage with the same urgent curiosity Leda felt. Ita stood firm with his smile, blocking the view. Samuel nodded once more. “Karibu. Kwaheri.”

Leda watched her guide disappear around a corner and then turned back, which left her and Ita alone across the divide of the entrance. She found herself close enough to be struck by the smoothness of his skin. It was flawless, reminding Leda of a hand-dipped cone. Imagining that it would feel like velvet to the touch, Leda lurched forward for her suitcase handle, letting her hair swish over her face.

“Please, let me help you,” Ita said. He took the suitcase from her and swung it through the doorway in one fell swoop, opening a new world to Leda. The orphanage.

Leda got a two-second glimpse at a horseshoe of shadowy rooms around a dirt courtyard, before the view filled with children, bumping like bees as they swarmed past Ita to greet her. Six boys, Leda counted—toddler to preteen—as they tugged her inside, chattering competitively in Swahili. One boy, the oldest, watched her intently, walking backward like a guard dog. Leda tried to smile at him.

Inside, she stepped into a battle of smells. To the left, cardamom and clove fought pepper and cumin for control of a stew. Leda sniffed the spicy smoke the same way she inhaled Amadeus’s fur after a grooming, but stopped short when she was bitten by Kibera’s sharp endnote of sewage.

The boys patted her clothes and skin as they tugged her toward a woven mat in the courtyard. Leda focused on not tripping over them. She felt woozy after her voyage through Kibera, as if she’d stepped off a merry-go-round. But now, inside the orphanage, if such a thing was possible, it was actually louder, more closed-in, more overwhelming. The kids swirled around her legs like water in a tide pool and Ita followed, the herder.

“We’ve been waiting for you!” he shouted over the tops of their heads. “They are very excited. We have prepared many things for your arrival.”

Leda swam in the most human contact she’d had in years. Maybe ever. Estella had renounced her past and whatever family it may have contained, so Leda hadn’t grown up in proximity to anybody other than her mother. She’d sat alone in school, then spent evenings watching children on television, trying to comprehend them in their freeness. Leda always felt as though she’d been born eighty years old.

Now here she was being mobbed by children, her breathing shallowing. Estella’s judgments rang in her mind—she was not made for this. Was she crazy to have come here?

And then, just as Leda nearly went down in the mosh pit, Ita saved her. His eyes met hers, a knowing look in them that made Leda feel as if she’d found a wall to lean against. His eyes, dark brown with golden supernovas, stayed locked on Leda as he called out in Swahili to the children. A series of commands, sold with a smile but sure as a sunrise. The children reacted like little soldiers. They took their places on the mat, sitting cross-legged with their hands in their laps.

Leda exhaled and Ita laughed.

“We’re happy today. To meet you, Leda.”

“Oh, me, too,” she rushed out, hoping she hadn’t just come across as rude. “Just tired, I think, from—”

“A tsunami of children? Yes. Cannot hear yourself think, is that it?”

Leda nodded, amazed. Yes, that was exactly it. Ita stepped closer. “Lunch is almost ready. Should I show you your new home?”

She looked around the orphanage, at the concrete walls crumbling to the dirt floors, at the open doorways and one wooden door. Shyly, she followed him as he walked briskly to the left of the courtyard. First, he pointed at a closed door, crooked on its hinges. “My office,” he said, and walked on. Then he turned, with a wink Leda might have imagined, and said, “And my bedroom.” The next room was open and Ita stepped inside, waving her after.

Leda didn’t understand what she was seeing. A closet? Shoes lined the edges of the room, in a square around another huge woven mat. She lifted her foot to step forward, but Ita put his hand on her arm. It was warm and soft.

“This is where the children sleep. You may sleep here or—” Ita stepped out of the room “—with Mary.”

Mary had been the other name on the website, but hadn’t been linked to a picture. Leda’s stomach burned with curiosity. “Is Mary here now?”

“Who did you think was creating that delicious smell?” Ita ducked his head under a wooden beam and Leda followed him into the kitchen. A wood fireplace formed the rear of the room, and the rest of it, apart from smoke, was filled with pots and pans and plastic bowls towering off the ground.

Bent over a cauldron that hung above a fire was a sizable woman’s backside, wrapped taut in a patterned sarong, brighter than a bouquet of flowers. At Ita’s voice, the woman straightened and Leda saw she was old, though to guess her actual age would be tricky.

Leda felt relief gush through her, and she laughed at herself when she realized why. When she’d read the listing online, she had thought perhaps the man and woman mentioned were married or a couple. Now, she knew she’d been hoping that wasn’t the case.

Did women shake hands? Leda wasn’t sure, so she said, “Hujambo. Habari ya asubuhi,” the words piling up in her mouth like cotton balls.

Mary smiled kindly, her face wrinkling like a cozy bathrobe. “Karibu,” she said.

Welcome. Leda did feel welcome. She’d never had anyone make such a fuss over her presence, or anything she did, really. Except maybe Amadeus.

Next, Ita showed her where the toilet was—toilet being a very loose term. There were two stalls with two hanging sheets. When Ita pulled back the first sheet, Leda’s eyes traveled down to the square of concrete. In the middle was a piece of wood with a handle on it, and Leda could only guess that underneath was a hole. The second stall was exactly the same.

“Shower,” Ita said of the second stall.

When Leda remembered to breathe again, she met Ita’s eyes and saw that they gleamed with pride.

So Leda looked again and tried to see it through different eyes. She remembered how Samuel had said everyone paid to use a latrine and to bathe. This was a luxury. An achievement. He should be proud.

“Awesome!” Leda said, and knew immediately she’d overdone it.

But Ita laughed at her effort, not wounded in the least, and led her by the elbow to the other side of the orphanage.

The ease with which Ita touched her—it was unnerving. Even more distracting was how her skin felt under his fingers—tingly, pliant. Usually, she grew stiff under a stranger’s touch. In her fairly limited sexual experience, Leda had always felt clumsy at best, but more often raw and exposed. But as she walked with Ita, she had a lightning-flash vision of Ita’s warm hands on her skin. She bet it would be different with him—gentler, yet sexier, urgent.

Leda’s head shot up, her eyes darting to Ita as if he’d heard her thoughts. She felt the blood stampede her cheeks. She coughed to try and combat a full-on blush.

Ita paused before the back wall of the orphanage. He looked at her strangely, and she wondered if she was hurtling pheromones at him so hard he felt it. Get a grip, Leda.

“There is a room behind here. It is our medical room, our secret hospital.”

He must have known how strange that sounded. But at the same time, she noted the same pride as before that lifted his chin. “Are you a doctor?” she asked.

Ita smiled. But when his eyes moved to the door, his confidence faltered. “No. I study.” Now he looked embarrassed. “Not like you have studied. Impressive, your education.” Leda had sent him her résumé, as if applying for a job. Now she felt stupid about it. “I want to know all about it,” he said as he walked past the room.

On the other side of the orphanage, the back half was a three-walled room with a metal roof and another identical mat spread out. “This is for study, and for eating when the rains come.”

The next room had a sheet drawn tight across it. “Mary!” Ita called across the courtyard, followed by a question in Swahili that Leda couldn’t understand.

Mary’s answer boomeranged back and Ita gently tucked the sheet to one side. “Mary’s sleeping space,” Ita said, but respectfully, he didn’t enter.

Leda hesitated.

“It is okay. You may look,” Ita said.

Leda ducked her head inside. This room was much smaller. A mat still covered most of the dirt floor, but this time sported a narrow strip of foam and a folded sheet on one half.

When Leda poked her head back out, Ita watched her expectantly.

“It’s...” Leda wasn’t sure what he wanted to hear, and her head was starting to spin with the dawning realization that these were her accommodations for the month. “Great.”

“So you will stay with Mary,” Ita said, satisfied.

Leda looked out to where the children sat, playing quietly, waiting for their lunch. She put a hand out, feeling for the wall, something solid.

Ita’s voice was different when he spoke next, with an edge of self-consciousness that was new. “I’m sure where you live is very different.” He remained with the sheet in his hand and straightened. “The bed might help you become accustomed.”

Leda realized he meant the piece of foam in the little room, but she could no more imagine stretching out next to Mary and having any hopes of sleeping there for an entire month than she could imagine coping with any of it—the toilet, kitchen, the sheets for doors. She would be surrounded at all times. Forget hearing herself think, she wouldn’t even be able to feel herself breathe. As if in response, her breathing came quicker.

But then she remembered the morning—traipsing around after Samuel through the maze—all the jagged metal, the haggard faces, the roar and the stench, heaps of garbage, the images leaping out like rabid dogs.

Leda forced herself to breathe from her belly as she looked at her feet. She saw now where she and Ita had walked carefully around the perimeter of the courtyard. The dirt in the interior was swept clean. The children’s sandals were lined up like ducks around the mat. The concrete in the bathrooms was new, the sheets clean. She remembered the touch of Ita’s hand, felt the lingering calm he exuded. She was safe. Leda felt sure of it. Inside the orphanage, she was safe.

But Ita noted her silence and saw how she looked at her feet. “I have an idea.”

He walked back to the room he’d said was a hospital. He slid open the metal that looked like a wall and waved Leda over. She was amazed to see a metal table, and walls covered in posters of anatomy and the periodic table.

“It is our secret, this room,” Ita said, looking at the stacks of medical supplies on a table in the corner, and Leda thought she understood. In a place like Kibera, where health services were rare and precious, a room like this would have to be kept secret lest the whole slum descend on it. “You would like your own room. What do you think?”

Did he mean the metal table? Leda could only think of blood and episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, until she pictured the foam on Mary’s floor and found herself saying, “Yes, if it’s okay, this is perfect.”

Ita nodded and smiled. “Good. I will bring the foam and blanket. Are you ready now to meet the children?” Ita looked past her at the kids when he said it, and the love that radiated toward them landed on Leda, too, like wrapping her hands around a cup of morning tea. She felt glad for the boys, then noted the lump in her throat.

As she gazed after them, Mary appeared out of the kitchen, struggling under the weight of the steaming pot.

“Michael, msaada,” Ita called, and the word was followed by more Swahili that Leda figured meant the boy should help Mary with lunch.

Michael, not only the tallest boy by a foot but owner of the only serious expression of the bunch, stood and grabbed the pot’s handles. He called out and two other boys obediently headed for the kitchen.

As she watched them go, Leda realized Ita wasn’t watching the boys, he was looking at her. She felt his curiosity digging into her again, and realized for the first time that she must seem as strange to him as all this was to her.

“Let’s eat,” Ita said.

The remaining children wiggled with excitement as Leda came closer.

“Karibu!” one of the middle-sized boys called out. He put his hand out like a little salesman. “Ntimi,” the boy said, indicating himself. He had a smile almost to match Ita’s—full of strong white teeth and a joy one can only be born with.

Leda sat next to him. “Leda,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Timmy.”

It was Ntimi who named the other boys, from Thomas to Christopher, ending with Michael. Then Ntimi scooped up a toddler and plopped him into Leda’s arms. “Walter,” he said, and everyone laughed as Walter tried to wiggle free.

Michael was the only one not laughing. Leda had a hunch he was a person she would have to win over slowly. “Thank you for having me here, Michael, for letting me into your home.”

Michael nodded with a solemn maturity that made Leda want to smile, but she held it back.

Ita, watching closely, doled out a look of approval that warmed her belly.

“Jomo,” Ntimi said as he pointed toward a sheeted room by the door, a room that hadn’t been on the tour. Leda took it for a guard post of sorts, or a storage space. She squinted. Did Ntimi mean a guard?

“He new,” Ntimi said in a quieter voice, just as Leda made out two skinny legs showing from under the hanging sheet.

Another boy. Boy number seven.

“Will he join us for lunch?” Leda asked, though the answer was obvious.

Mary handed Leda a yellow plastic bowl filled with murky water. Leda studied it, unsure what to do. Was it soup? “Wash,” Ntimi said, and Leda wanted to hug him.

She wet her hands in the lukewarm water, then passed the bowl around for the children to do the same.

Next, Mary brought her a bowl heaped with rice from the pot. She handed Leda a spoon.

Leda said thank you and waited for everyone else to be served. But Mary didn’t go for more bowls. They all seemed to be waiting and Leda wondered if guests ate first.

The first mouthful occupied Leda mind and body, with a collision of flavors she’d never tasted before. Sweet, salty, spicy all at the same time.

Suddenly Leda saw all the eyes on her. She jabbed her spoon back into the rice and felt her cheeks start to burn.

Activity commenced. Mary left and brought back bowls for herself and Ita. Then she set down the big bowl of rice on the mat, the boys huddling around it. Their little hands went to work, rolling little balls of rice and transferring them to their mouths fast as they could carry. Leda looked and saw Ita and Mary dig in with their fingers, too, employing the same technique.

Leda watched, thinking first of hygiene, then suffering a guilty replay of all the food she’d left on her plate or thrown away in her lifetime.

Leda looked at her spoon, glinting in the sun, and set it down on the ground. Watching Ntimi’s nimble fingers, she imitated him, rolling the food into bite-size pieces with her hands. Ntimi smiled at her.

Out of the corner of her eye, Leda saw the sheet flutter. She looked and saw that it was pulled just a crack to the side.

On impulse, Leda stood up and started over. Ntimi stopped and looked up in worry. Michael shook his head ever so slightly. But she went anyway.

Stopping in front of the sheet, she held out her bowl. “You like to eat alone, that’s okay,” Leda said gently.

No hand reached out for the bowl, but Leda could hear the boy breathing, with a slight wheeze of asthma that made her heart leap. Dangerous out here with no medicine. Lucky he has Ita, she thought, just as she heard Ita stride up behind her.

“How much English do they understand?” Leda asked, glossing over the fact that she still held out the bowl of steaming food.

“All Kenyan children learn English in school,” Ita said. He glanced at the sheet when he added, “But many of our children have missed much school.”

Leda’s heart sank. “So they don’t understand me.” Of course not. “Good way to practice my Swahili, I guess.”

Ita spoke into the crack in the sheet. When only silence followed, he spoke again in the same even, coaxing voice.

Nothing happened.

“They will understand some, if you speak slowly and use easy words.” Ita saw the look on Leda’s face. “Don’t worry, they already love you. They are so excited you have come all this way for them. It is hard for them to believe.”

Suddenly the sheet opened and a small, lanky boy stepped into the sun. He wore a WWF T-shirt, shorts and a scowl like a guerilla rebel.

Ita knelt down and spoke to him, as if he was explaining why the sky is blue or the dirt orange. Leda already loved this manner of his, a solid gentleness much like what she loved about the trees at home—cheerful but sage.

Jomo stood but he didn’t meet Ita’s gaze. Instead his eyes found something just off to the side and locked on. His face took on a blankness Leda recognized with a shiver. She looked down and saw what Jomo was doing with his hands. He picked and picked at the edges of his thumbs, beside the nail beds. Leda looked down at her own hands, similarly mutilated. It was an embarrassing habit, but one she’d never been able to conquer. Estella thought it was disgusting. Doesn’t it hurt? her school guidance counselor had asked. But the pain was the point. It grounded her. In public, whenever Leda felt anxious, when she wanted to flee or scream, the picking gave her something to do, something to keep her from losing control, something to control. The only other thing she’d ever found that calmed her, gave her a buffer against the world was—

“Hey, Jomo,” she said, reaching into her pocket and startling both Ita and the frowning boy. “Want to see something?”

Leda took the camera from her pocket. It was her favorite—small enough to take out and tuck away quickly, with the manual control to shoot without a flash. It put a lens between her and the loud crazy world, let her compose it, control it, record it from one step away. Cameras gave Leda a way to interact with the world without...interacting.

Jomo’s attention snapped toward the camera lying flat in Leda’s hand. His yearning was more apparent than he would have liked, she was sure. She set down the food and knelt across from Ita, close to Jomo, and turned the camera on. She didn’t press it into his hands; she just started to demonstrate how it worked. Zoom like this, she mimed, frame with the screen, and take the picture. She pointed the viewfinder toward Ita and snapped.

Jomo grunted, a small slip of amusement.

Ita watched the two of them studying the image of him and he laughed. She bristled and felt Jomo do the same. But it wasn’t Ita’s fault, she realized. He wouldn’t understand. He wasn’t daunted by life. He danced happily with the world. He wouldn’t understand the comfort of a camera on the sidelines.

But Leda also knew Ita wanted Jomo to be happy, he was ecstatic at the merest glimpse of joy in the glowering boy. She hoped Jomo would know this soon, too. She tucked the camera away, picked up the bowl and settled it into Jomo’s hands before he saw it coming. Then she stood up and walked pointedly back to the mat.

When Leda sat down, the children settled back into a ring around her. On Ntimi’s cue, they began clapping their hands and rapping on their knees, and while Leda watched, a little taken aback, they began to sing.

It was a song they’d planned, obviously, because everyone from youngest to oldest joined in at once.

Leda let the harmony wash over her and blinked her eyes. When she didn’t have her camera out, she would blink to record the memories she wanted to hang on to, to replay later for comfort. She’d had no idea what to make of her first day in Kibera, but just then she wanted to savor the warm feeling wrapped around her like afternoon sunshine on her porch in Topanga. It wasn’t the feeling of serenity she felt there with Amadeus, however. This was something new.

A loud banging on the metal door stole Leda’s train of thought and took the warm feeling with it.

The children stopped singing but sat obediently, not looking overly perturbed, though Jomo ducked back behind his curtain. Leda tried to calm herself—visitors to the orphanage must be common.

Ita walked over to the door and she heard the voice that filtered through, sounding more like a low growl than a man.

Reluctantly, Leda thought, Ita slid open the door. But he blocked the gap, so Leda couldn’t see who was outside.

She turned back to the boys, but the mood had shifted one hundred and eighty degrees. Leda glanced up to see if clouds had moved in. No, the sun was still beating down like a radiator.

The door scraped ajar and a tall, wiry man darted through to jab Ita and cackle. When the man’s yellow eyes scurried over Leda’s skin, she shuddered and averted her gaze. When he turned to converse with Ita, Leda looked again.

At first glance, Leda might have called him handsome, with his angular face and cat eyes, but beside Ita, she decided, definitely not. The man was a praying mantis, creeping along on folded pincers. Dreads snaked down his back, trembling as he shuffled closer. Dangling, bouncing from his belt, was a battered machete. When he sneered in her direction, Leda recoiled at two rows of stained teeth. Then she saw that his face was covered in scars, several of them burns like hers.

Her hand went to her scar while her mind filled with fifty thoughts at once. The man was clearly a gangster, yet seemed to be Ita’s friend. There was a word at Leda’s lips, a scary word. Mungiki—what the guidebook named Kenya’s vicious mafia and more or less warned to look out for dreadlocks. Mungiki ran the slums—extortion, female genital circumsion, beheadings.

“So, this is the volunteer?” The man stopped at the edge of the mat, close enough that he cast a shadow over Leda. “You the woman Ita can’t stop talking about, two weeks now?”

Ita’s face blanched. Wary? Or apologetic?

“Chege!” Ntimi jumped up. The other children greeted him with enthusiasm, too.

Chege turned to Ita and laughed his hyena cackle again. “She speak?” He looked down on Leda meanly, his eyes on her as he continued in a growl before she could answer. “Funny, nah? Here Ita been talking ’bout this educated white woman, smart, rich, talking up a summer storm.” Chege smirked, he flickered his eyes over to Ita then back to Leda. “Lot to live up to, this man a big dreamer. He dream big beautiful things. Like an angel come from America, come save everybody.”

“I’m not—” Leda said, but Ita interrupted.

“Kuacha, Chege,” he growled. He held out his hand to Leda and tugged her up to stand beside him. “This is Leda. She is my guest.”

“Leda,” Chege purred. “Welcome to Kibera, Leda.” He put out his hand and she took it reluctantly.

Ntimi interrupted. “You bring gifts, Chege?”

Ita shook his head and steered the boy back to the mat.

When Leda tried to retract her hand, Chege held tight and pulled her closer to him. She squeaked, desperate to escape his calloused grip, but he peered into her eyes and whispered, “Don’t tell him you no angel yet. American rich lady come save Africa, and have a little fun.” He nodded his head in Ita’s direction.

Leda’s eyes flickered over to Ita. Were those his words?

“But what if—” Chege’s voice rose, pulling Ita from the children into their huddle “—what if us Kikuyu brathas don’t need your help, Leda? Don’t need a volunteer—”

“Chege,” Ita said. “Stop.”

Chege laughed, his smoky breath hitting Leda in the face. “Okay, okay. I play nice.” He dropped Leda’s hand and slung down his knapsack. “Presents!” he called out.

The second he let her out of his grasp, Leda stumbled back and wiped her hand on her pants. She wrapped her arms around herself then, trying to still the wave of nausea and panic. Chege strode past her, chuckling, and crouched down among the boys.

Leda coerced herself into taking one clean, full breath.

Chege dug in his bag and brandished a coconut, winning “oohs” and “aahs” from the children. He untied the machete from his belt, its edge jagged, its blade sticky with congealed brown stains. Leda watched him swipe it across his jeans, telling herself firmly the stain wasn’t blood.

He split the coconut with a single, expert stroke. He sucked down the milk that came spilling out, letting it course over his chin before he dribbled it into the kids’ open mouths, like watering a ring of flowers. The children gulped the sweet juice and giggled. With the machete, Chege carved smaller pieces and handed them out.

Leda watched the whole process in a daze, until Chege ran his tongue over the white coconut flesh, one eye leering sideways at her. She looked away, her cheeks burning.

Ita couldn’t seem to tell anything was wrong. He looked over at her and smiled, the same pure, easy smile.

As all the children sat content with their treat, Chege stood next to Ita. With a flare obviously for Leda’s benefit, he pulled a bulging wad of money from his pocket. “Been a good month, brother.”

Ita looked at the cash and the smile was gone, replaced by steel. “No,” he barked, followed with daggers of Swahili, fervent hand gestures, and a look searing enough to ignite a forest fire.

For a fleeting moment Chege was surprised, he teetered backward on his spindly limbs. He recovered at the same moment Leda saw Jomo edge into the courtyard.

Chege saw him, too, and waved him over. Jomo hesitated, then jutted out his chin and walked over.

Chege peeled off a leaf of Kenyan shillings. “Ita say he don’t want any,” Chege said. “He don’t like where it come from. Ita always think money cares where it come from. Always. Even when we was you age. Course, then he had no choice.”

Chege took Jomo’s wrist. He thrust the money into the boy’s palm. Jomo’s eyes bulged as if he was scared to blink, as if the money might disappear. Now Chege looked up at Leda. “Maybe he think things be different now?”

Leda felt the nausea tip and pour back through her stomach. What had they said about her? What did they think of her here in this place?

“Chege, enough,” Ita said, but Chege put out his hand and knelt down next to Jomo.

“But this boy knows. Every hungry boy knows money have to come from somewhere.” Chege’s coiled stance made Leda think of a feral cat—watching, plotting, waiting. “And somebody always have to give something to get it.”

Leda could tell Jomo didn’t understand the words, but everything Chege did was a cartoon requiring no caption. Ita’s jaw was clenched so tight she wondered how words could possibly escape, but she could see them, piled up behind his teeth, being chosen carefully.

When he opened his mouth, however, Ita’s words were swallowed by banging at the door. Deep voices followed, so loud Leda jumped.

Chege laughed. “For me,” he said with a wink.

Ita’s frown was like a deep etched carving. “Go,” he said and strode quickly with Chege to the door. Leda stayed where she was, holding her breath.

When the gate opened, thugs huddled outside, their words like little firecrackers. Leda couldn’t understand any of it, but the men looked back and forth behind them as if they were being chased by the devil himself. One man took the machete from his belt and demonstrated a whack. With another glance behind him, he tried to dart inside the orphanage.

Which is when Ita started shouting. He screamed at the men, then at Chege, all the while trying to close the metal door on top of them.

But everybody, and time itself, stood still when Chege hollered into the air. With terse, measured words he spoke to the men, who lowered their heads and nodded. He pointed beyond the door and they left.

Chege turned to Ita. A look passed between them and Ita raised his chin. Chege slipped out though the doorway. But as Ita slid the door shut, Chege’s eyes found Leda and sent a chill all the way down into her shoes.

Leda backed away, air locked up in her lungs.

When she sat down on the mat, she found she was shaking.

All the children had scattered off, to their room or to the kitchen. Leda pressed a finger to her scar.

What in the hell had she gotten herself into?