ADOPTED: A short story by Ogar Monday

        Imah was unusually happy that morning. Happiness was not a luxury she possessed: it seldom crossed her path. She had found solace in the busyness that work offered.

        She came to the camp four years ago, at the age of sixteen. She had just started form three--senior school--when the rebels invaded her village. That terrible afternoon, she was in school, quietly listening to a long talk from her Government teacher about the efforts of the nationalist towards the attainment of Independence, when she heard a very deafening sound, ‘Kaboom’ followed by a rising cloud of dark smoke that enveloped everywhere. 

      “It’s an air raid!!! Air raid!” a voice bawled, as dozens of military choppers began to drop explosives into the hapless town. The air darkened. People ran in different directions, as though running was the ultimate cure.  Imah and other members of her class  sallied out in a frenzy, unsure of where they were heading.

      The running, the hiding, and all the uproar in the town went on for two days. It was two days of ordeals, two days of hiding from the helicopters and armored personnel carriers that disturbed the overcast sky and patrolled the ground,  two days of surviving the killing kisses that onwardly went on between the Nigeria Military and the Biafra rebels;  two days of sleeping on tress, dreaming of snakes and scavenging for food.  At last, Imah and four other kids saw the big road with the sign, “Bienvenieu au Cameroon” written in bold. She could see the border post, and a few heavily armed military officers walking towards her direction. But she couldn't bear the sight for long. Tired, hungry, and dehydrated, she collapsed, and regained consciousness days later with a  headache. She felt the hardness of iron rod on her back. The room she was in smelt of disinfectant. Sitting next to her was a white nurse, who wore a big smile on her face, probably from seeing her wake up.

        Imah was later to find out that the Cameroonian Gendarmes had picked her and the other kids and had spread them across the refugee camps setup for people who were fleeing from the raging war behind them.

        She asked about her family and her village-Atimbo, and received different versions of what had happened to her village and where her parents were: none was positive. One day, one of the new entrants to the camp, a man in his late forties, made mention of her village. The man had a goatee beard richly sprinkled with grey and toes which were unkempt.

         Atimbo was one of the villages he had passed on his way to Cameroun: he said, and added that he came all the way from Creek Town, a town known for its fishermen and their love for the palm wine. When he passed Atimbo, he revealed,  what was left of the town was the carcass of decomposing corpses left behind by vultures who  themselves must have been shocked by the carnage. The man went on to suggest that if anyone was to survive the Biafra onslaught and the corresponding government incursion, the person must have been taken to Umuahia as a prisoner of war.

         Imah couldn’t sleep after that. The story had clung to her memory, playing themselves into vivid motion pictures at night, breeding frequent nightmares where she saw her mother holding out a poorly lit lantern and calling her name with a subdued tone. But whenever she tried to touch the woman, she disappeared, to haunt her again the next night.

        She wanted to go out and look for her parents, at least confirm the fact that they had died. She wanted to find their bodies and have them buried with a cross on their grave. She felt she owed them that much.  But the plan hardly went beyond just planning. The fact that the Government had ordered the shutdown of the Nigeria-Cameroon border didn’t make the task any easier for her. The last time she mustered enough courage to venture beyond the camp’s gate, she came back the next day, having lost her way, with no money and almost dying of thirst.

         From then onward, she confined herself to the safety of solitude, trusting no one and fearing everyone. She lived her life inside her head, playing out what her life could have been had things not gone this bleak.

                                                                                                  ***

       Until that day, Nurse Margaret the Matron of the camp’s clinic was attending to Ije, one of the other four girls who shared a room with Imah. Then, she noticed the young girl who sat by herself and constantly bit her fingers and upon enquiry she was told Imah’s story, which reminded her of her younger self. From that day Nurse Margaret took interest in the girl and visited her whenever she had the time.

        “Imah” the nurse had said during one of her visit, “you have loads of potentials, refugee camp not withstanding and I won’t want you to waste that potential thinking and clutching onto the past. My story is similar to yours. But, you see, I am making the most out of my life.”

         She went on to recount how her own parents, who were themselves nurses, had died during World War II.  She said she had made a commitment to saving lives after that. She spoke also of her experience in Vietnam, Angola, Zimbabwe and Cameroon and added that she would be ready to move to another country to continue saving lives, as soon as the Crisis in Nigeria subsided.

        She took out time to talk about the Adoption program where refugees could register their names and details and, if lucky, could be adopted by a family in Europe or America. She told Imah that monthly, kids were being flown to various part of the world from the camp to meet new families and start new lives, putting behind them their horrendous war experience.

        She didn’t fail to speak about the Whiteman’s land. Her description of this place reminded Imah of the land flowing with milk and Honey.  In this white man’s land, the nurse said, kids her age only thought about school and play. No one ever got hungry; and there was no need to stand in long queues to get water or food. In the end, she encouraged the girl to join the Red Cross—an organization committed to saving lives.

         The next morning, everyone was surprise to see the girl who had kept to herself all the while entering the camp’s administrative office. She filled the form for both the lottery and the Red Cross, hoping to be out of her present confinement shortly. Indeed, she would go to places with a large playground, she would play and play until her body, weak and weary, said no to further play.  

        Days became weeks, weeks crawled into months; yet, no one came to pick her, as she had been promised.  Whenever a UN-inscribed chopper came into the camp, all the kids who had registered for enrolment would scurry out to the open field where the chopper landed, to await the emergence of the  white man who had no tooth and whose long nose seemed to have been stuck to his face as some sort of  afterthought. It was he who did the calling of names.  Although he mispronounced most of the names, the children didn’t care.

          “Anantigha Udo!”

          What followed was by a shout of joy and someone jumping off a creaking bench and dashing forward, the other kids giggling with happiness for the lucky chap whose name had been called. Some other kids had been known to engage in a crescendo of weeping after hearing their names called, in which case they would go on and on to cry until they heard the penitent sobs of those whose names weren’t called.

         Two years past, and Imah  lost interest in the waiting exercise. She became more active in the Red Cross activities, helping in search and rescue operations around the border.  In spite of this, she was increasingly lonely. Aunty Margaret had died. At one point, she had hinted Imah of a minor fever; but the next moment, she was gone.  The doctors had called it acute Malaria. And Imah, hit hard by the pang of the loss, chose to drown herself in work, to muffle, even though momentarily, Nurse Margaret’s memory.

          “Where is the Nurse?”

          “Nurse Imah” a frantic voice cried out one evening when she was counting the treads in her ceiling—one of those helpful attempts at keeping herself away from painful memories.

         As she rushed out, she saw a member of the Search and Rescue team carrying a crying baby, about ten months old. And as if he was reading her thoughts, the man threw in, “They were coming from the war zone when the mother stepped on a land mine. She is dead but the baby is alive…he has lost so much blood. Please help!”

       She quickly hurried them to the make-shift clinic in the camp. All the European Nurses were out of town for the weekend. Two hours later the baby was snoring,  deep in sleep. She took another look at the baby, watching as his chest rose and fell. The baby gave out a chuckle.

       “Having a nice dream?” She said in a muted tone to the baby.

         It was then she knew, with a fresh realization, what she wanted to do—what she was meant to do.

       The next morning, Imah was beatific. She slept well and , for the first time in years, didn’t see her mum in her dreams.

                                                                           ***

           She was attending to a patient in the clinic when she heard her name.

          “Ibimitari Sakabo!”

            Her name! Unbelievable! She had forgotten how her father’s name sounded in her ears.

           “Imah?” the man repeated, with an outstretched hand.

         She nodded tentatively and motioned the strange man to sit down as she settled on the bed with the patient.“Yes, how can I help you?” Her voice was unusually calm.

          “We understand you applied for the Adoption Lottery Program three years ago. Well, you are lucky. A family in Pennsylvania has decided to adopt you. We will be leaving in the next hour”. The man stood up with a smile and left.

         Imah became dizzy. Her stomach started running. This was something she had desired since she heard about the programme, and now that it had finally come her way, she seemed completely at a loss.

         Two hours later, the stranger walked in.

      “Imah, why are you not ready? The chopper is prepped up and ready to move” he said.

       “Sorry sir,” Imah replied, grinning.“You came a day late. I have been adopted”.

        Surprised, “by whom?” the man asked.

        "By thiscamp. I am now a child of this camp. I won't trade that with travelling abroad.”

        The man left quietly but with a smile on his face.