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Wondertime is proud to present an excerpt from award-winning journalist and novelist Melissa Fay Greene's newest book, There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Africa's Children (Bloomsbury). Greene candidly unfolds the story of Haregowoin Teferra in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Following the death of her husband and young daughter, Haregowoin begins to care for hundreds of the more than 12 million children orphaned by AIDS in Africa in an unofficial orphanage in her home, providing each with a second chance at childhood.
— Lexi Walters


There Is No Me Without You
By Melissa Fay Greene

So, on one side, contagion, deformities, horror, secrecy, stigma, shame, killings, and panic. A new elite world class of disease experts. A new world underclass of untouchables. Another reason for Africa to founder. A human landslide.

And, on the other side, two little girls.

Within a few days of each other, Selamawit and Meskerem were dropped off at Haregewoin's house. The first to arrive — a round-faced, large-boned girl — had been distracted, by hunger, from the business of throwing herself into life and ferreting out everybody's gossip and news. For Selamawit's first year with Haregewoin, whether it was getting close to mealtime and what was on the menu were her chief concerns. With a full tummy, she was a jolly girl, fearless and honest, sociable and silly. Haregewoin marveled, she was another Suzie!

Selamawit had been shuffled about from place to place for a long time, but she held on to memories of her mother.

"I had happy times with her, especially at holidays," Selamawit told Haregewoin. "We had fun, danced, and ate popcorn. I took care of my mother when she got sick, such as feeding her and making coffee for her, while neighbors and relatives would not come close to her."

Having had her prospects ruined at a young age, with the death of her mother, Selamawit had bravely accepted whatever small kindnesses fell her way. Out of bits and pieces of transient attention, she had pieced together what felt like a supported life. If someone knit springy braids all over her head, she wore them; if not, she banged back her thick hair with a hairbrush. She felt full-hearted interest in other people, assumed others felt the same toward her, and met them more than halfway. At night, in her dreams, her late mother visited and reassured Selamawit that she no longer felt pain.

Later that same week, Haregewoin saw six-year-old Meskerem for the first time, alone and forlorn on the ripped leather seat of the Catholic charity van. Thick black eyebrows had been sketched as if in charcoal upon the classic oval Ethiopian face; huge round eyes midface were full of intelligence and melancholy. The girl was encased in filthy sacklike clothing, which she picked at with long, elegant fingers. "Come to me," Haregewoin said, opening her arms, and Meskerem stooped to exit the van and allowed herself to be hugged. So thin! Over Meskerem's back, Haregewoin raised her eyes questioningly.

"She was living alone with her mother when her mother died," said the MMM staff woman. "She moved to her father's house, but she was very unhappy. Her older half brother brought her to us."

It was early evening. Slender and tentative as a fawn, Meskerem tiptoed into the house and peered around, but then her grief drowned out her curiosity; her brown lips trembled and turned down at the corners; she threw her arms across her face and wailed. Genet, flipping through an old magazine in the front room, was bored by the display, as if she couldn't believe she was supposed to spend her evening listening to this.

Selamawit's first impulse was to pick up Meskerem and give her a grand welcoming hug; but the thinner, grief-stricken, same-age girl would have none of it and fought her way free. Meskerem was newly orphaned and was holding on to a tiny bit of hope that her mother, Yeshi, would recover and come find her. Everyone and everything else in the world — Haregewoin, Selamawit, Genet, the house, the car, the compound — screamed to her that they were not Yeshi and had never belonged to Yeshi. They didn't exist for her.

Haregewoin drew Meskerem into her own bedroom, dressed the child in a flannel nightgown, tucked her into her own bed, and brought her a hot cup of tea. Genet loudly sighed with restlessness every time Haregewoin hurried past on missions of mercy for Meskerem. Selamawit bounced in and out of the room, excited to have been given a new friend. "What happened to her mother?" she asked loudly.

"What happened to her father?
"Why coudn't anyone else take care of her?
"Is she going to stay here forever?
"What's wrong with her?"
"Genet!" called Haregewoin in desperation, and the sullen older girl drew Selamawit away from the bedroom.

Finally Abel came home and the two teens made themselves something to eat in the kitchen, with plenty of laughter and cigarette smoke. Selamawit now annoyed them: "Are you boyfriend and girlfriend?...Are you going to get married?...Who's older, him or you?"

In the night, Meskerem woke up missing her mother. She began crying before she was even awake, a high nasal sound like a siren in the distance. Her anguish woke up Haregewoin and made the old lady cry, too. In the darkness she found and stroked the child's head. Meskerem's hair was a glossy and tangled mass like seaweed. Haregewoin pushed herself up against the wall and took thin Meskerem into her arms; she rocked her there in the bed, singing softly to her. She could smell on the child's breath the sweet grapes she'd eaten at dinner and the sugar she'd dumped into her tea. When Meskerem relaxed back into sleep, Haregewoin rolled her onto the pillow, but was left wide-awake. Carefully, so as not to wake Meskerem and Selamawit, and not to disturb Genet on the bedroll on the floor, she slipped off her bed.

She pulled her cotton shawl from a chair and wrapped it around her, then stepped out the front door. She breathed in the mountain air and closed her eyes. "Thank you," she said to the universe. Hadn't God, hadn't Atetegeb [Editors' note: Haregewoin's daughter], sent her these children? Another Suzie, another Atetegeb? A replica of the daughter she had, a replica of the daughter she had lost?

Meskerem had entered straight into her heart of hearts, her holy of holies. Meskerem looked to her just like Atetegeb.

Suddenly there were errands to run, pencils and notebooks to buy for school, and socks and sneakers and toothbrushes. Meskerem and Selamawit rode with her in the car.

"Call me Amaye," Haregewoin urged both little girls.

Selamawit complied immediately, with a huge smile.

But the request made Meskerem's eyes fill with tears. The word amaye belonged only to Yeshi; she would never speak that word again unless to her own poor mother.

My lungs are filling with air again, Haregewoin thought. She grew rotund again. She used a hair dye to restore a shiny blackness to her head, befitting a mother of young children. She visited the neighborhood school, introduced herself to teachers. She chatted with other mothers in the lane. She bought knickknacks, doilies, dolls, to make the little house cheerier. She started over. Like any proud new mother, she invited her friends, "Come see my children!"

Nervously, fearful of catching AIDS, fearful of finding Haregewoin in too pathetic a state, the old friends and colleagues crept to the door of the compound and peeked in. Whatever grim scenario they'd imagined — perhaps a black-draped woman weeping beside ghastly waifs — was not what they found. They found Haregewoin invigorated, planting a vegetable garden, while Meskerem and Selamawit jumped rope on the driveway.

"You see?" Haregewoin said, laughing.

Well-reared girls, Meskerem and Selamawit politely extended their hands to shake hands with Haregewoin's friends. Most of the women laughed nervously and found ways to avoid skin-to-skin contact. One clapped her hands together, enthusing over the garden, and turned away; another rewarded the outstretched little hand with the gift of a mango. No one, on a first visit, would accept a bite to eat at this house.

"Are they sick?" someone asked bluntly.

Haregewoin knew the prim questioner meant "Aren't you worried they'll infect you?"

The question rattled Haregewoin terribly from the moment it was asked. Not because she feared for herself! She feared for the children. She tried to unhear the question, to forget that she'd heard it, but she could not. They didn't look sick.

That's what she kept returning to: how healthy they looked. They bounced out of bed in the morning; they peppered her with questions — about people, about birds, about dogs (could they have a puppy?); they were eager to have uniforms and to start school.

She assumed their mothers had died of AIDS; it couldn't be known for certain. Could the virus be snaking through their veins at this very moment, while they sat in the sunshine playing jacks with small stones and laughing?

And if they were infected...oh, God, it meant she had taken leave of her senses to love them; she had moved far too quickly and had placed herself at risk. She should have listened to her friends, not for their reasons (they believed that orphans of AIDS were dangerous to your health), but because if Meskerem and Selamawit were sick...well, she didn't think she could go there again.

She'd been joyously captured by the little girls; were they now going to haul her, their willingly captive new mother, to places she never wanted to see again?

In 2000, there were no anti-AIDS drugs in Ethiopia outside the black market.

If Meskerem and Selamawit were infected with HIV in 2000 in Ethiopia, they were going to die of AIDS.

The hospital clinic phoned for Haregewoin to come in and receive the results of the children's blood tests. It had been three months since their arrival at her house. As she edged forward in a slow line into a packed waiting room, which overflowed into an outdoor courtyard, she joined the truly wretched of the earth.

Waiting in a clinic for the result of an HIV blood test, or for a child's blood test, is the archetypal experience of modern Africans.

The patient waiting for results may imagine that the outside world — the industrialized democracies of the West — once alerted to the terrible situation here, will ride to the rescue. Because how could people know and not help?

A few may suspect that the outside world has been fully informed, for there is no shortage of experts. In fact, extensive documentation has been collected and collated, graphed and disseminated.


***
Stephen Lewis calls the voluble hobnobbing of experts on the subjects of global health and orphans "speakathons"; they "give credence," he writes, "to the proposition that if you talk about something for long enough, the illusion will be created that progress is being made...And I suppose there has been some progress in the world of reports, analyses, figures, tables, diagrams, and at least a thousand PowerPoint presentations, not to overlook throbbing intellectual rumination, but very little progress that's discernible in the lives of orphaned and vulnerable children on the ground."

The African patient, waiting for test results, discovers that the outside world, while not completely indifferent, is not going to intervene in time to save his or her life, or the child's.

Around the world, a few fantastically popular television shows strike me as bizarrely playful versions of contemporaneous darker scenes.

On American Idol and its many knockoffs, singing contestants wait for verdicts issued by seated judges. "Yes, you go on to the next round," they may hear; "See you tomorrow," or "No, your competition is over," "America has voted," "Your journey ends here." Viewers phone in votes for their favorites. In other shows, individuals fight for survival on island expeditions until they are voted off the show, off the island, by their erstwhile comrades. The last man or woman standing is crowned "the survivor."

These programs are "reality shows."

In Africa, by the hundreds and thousands and millions, but one by one, a person sits in a clinic waiting room, jumpy or still, feeling fine or feeling nauseous, coughing or not coughing. Or she squats outside in the dirt yard, holding her head in her hand, occasionally looking up and calling to her children not to wander too far. Each waits to hear his or her name called. Inside the examining room, a doctor or nurse or nurse’s aide examines a slip of paper and looks up. The eyes speak first.

Negative: You advance to the next round. See you tomorrow.
Positive: America has voted. Your journey ends here.

There are no television cameras.

No viewers at home are cheering or weeping. No viewers at home phoned in their individual votes. Most never knew anything was at stake.

"I have heard there are treatments," a woman will whisper.

"Not in our country," the doctor will say with a sad smile.

"Does it mean I will die soon?" a man will ask.

"Yes, I'm afraid that is what it means."

"I thought perhaps I just had a cold."

"No, I'm afraid not."

"Some say...well, I am not a believer, but I have heard...that there is holy water which is effective?"

"No. That is a myth."

"As I supposed. Thank you, Doctor."

Driving to the hospital, Haregewoin was now beyond thinking "Why did I put myself at risk like this again?" and "Will my house turn into a hospital ward again?" She was numb. She shuffled forward in a long line, until it was her turn.

The nurse opened the file, read the results, reread them, and looked up from her desk.

"Selamawit is negative," she said.

She closed that file carefully, methodically picked up and opened the next one.

"Meskerem is negative," she said.

Benevolently, Haregewoin continued to structure Genet's and Abel's lives with kind discipline. But her second life as a mother began with Selamawit and Meskerem.

She was again, miraculously, a middle-class woman with children.

Click here to purchase There Is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Greene.

Learn more about Melissa Fay Greene, her books, and her adoption resources at www.melissafaygreene.com.

Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury USA