One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [107]
“I can look for another taxi if it’s a problem for you,” I told him. I had hired him for the day and not yet paid. He stood to lose some serious money.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “I will take her to the edge. She may walk from there. I will not go in. It is not safe.”
We drove through the city, past the university and the shopping areas, past the offices of international NGOs, past tall shining buildings and ramshackle lean-tos housing shoe repair stands, Internet cafes, odd assortments of clothing and cell phones for sale, and we arrived at the edge of Kibera. Rebecca got out of the car.
I wished her luck and gave her my card with my number written on the back and my personal e-mail address, told her to write me if she needed anything. She nodded, though in the space between us it was clear that there was nothing she needed that I could provide. The U.S. State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the United Nations held her fate in their hands now. She thanked me anyway and turned to walk off toward the dirt and mud streets of the Kibera district.
She looked back to wave as we drove off, and I knew that was the last I would ever see of her. The road I imagined her heading down was not a pretty one, but it was well trod by girls just like her, centuries of girls just like her, lost girls in vast slums all over the world. Too many girls whose lives ended at sixteen, too many girls who had no choices left, no doors open, no other paths. Patience and Charity and Hope with those crazy pseudonyms I gave them to try and tell their stories without ever really knowing their lives. Or Melanie or Nora or Thinzanoo, all these girls penned in by history and culture, by violent men, by entire governments with policies intended to erase them. I did not like the path I saw ahead for them or for Rebecca, who chose her pseudonym herself because it was a Christian name. I looked back for as long as I could, as if my seeing her would protect her, but I lost her in the crowd and we drove back to the hotel.
However, Rebecca’s story did not end there.
“You hear this?” the voice on the other end of the phone exclaimed. Joseph. Rebecca’s cousin. Reunited. I remember smiling, a smile that nearly knocked me over. “She will start school only one year behind her age. She is working very hard to speak English better now.”
It would be almost two years before I spoke to Rebecca again.
“I am waiting,” she said over the phone with street noises behind her, her English confident. “I am waiting for my registration paperwork so I will attend college.” She lived in a small town in the Mid-Atlantic and was excited for all the opportunities ahead of her. She lived with her boyfriend, who would help support her as she went through school, though mostly it would be as it had always been for Rebecca: she would get by on her own.
Rebecca arrived in the United States in 2004, barely speaking a word of English. She was terrified and could not imagine going to high school, but she knew she had to do it to make something of her life, of the chance that had been given to her.
“I lived with a foster family and completed high school. It was strange, coming to America. I have a new life now. I experienced so many hard things, it was easy to give up, but God has something in store for all of us, I think.”
She did not yet know what she would study, but she was thrilled to have options. She had made a transition, across the seas. She carried the lessons she learned through “disaster, pain, and difficulty”; she carried her faith and courage, and some hard-won street smarts. These were the sum total of the wealth she brought with her to make a life in America. I picture her on a college campus. The leaves are falling from the trees in browns and yellows, the same shades as the desert floor. She tosses her textbooks into a backpack,