OrphanAid Africa. - Who knows tomorrow: a memoir of finding family among the lost children of Africa

Who Knows Tomorrow

Copyright 2014 by Lisa Lovatt-Smith

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ISBN: 9781-60286-271-5 (e-book)

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First edition

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This book is dedicated to my mother, Margot, who dared to dream of a different existence from the one she was born intowhose bravery, tenacity, and uncompromising honesty I have happily inherited.

I wrote this book for my five children:

Sabrina, her love made me into a mother and the injustices done to her made me into a warrior.

Fatima, who, like me, cares for other people more than she does herself, and finds herself in the process.

Mensah, who has looked after me more than any other man on earth and saved me time and time again, particularly from myself.

Beliratu, my little fighter, an inspiration who turned her life around with sheer willpower, the lulu, our Lulu.

Ernest, my naughty little Buddha, twelve-year-old poet and philosopher; our familys resident wise man and teacher.

I love you so much; you are my whole life.

But dont be satisfied with stories, how things

have gone with others. Unfold

your own myth, without complicated explanation,

so everyone will understand the passage,

We have opened you.

Rumi

This is a work of nonfiction. I have changed the names of some places and individuals and modified identifying features, including physical descriptions and occupations, in order to preserve their anonymity. Occasionally, timelines have been compressed in order to further preserve privacy and to maintain narrative flow. The goal in all cases was to protect peoples privacy without damaging the integrity of the story.

Contents

T he complicated thing about living in the African bush is wateror rather the lack of it. Sure there was a stream, but it was in a snake-prone bamboo grove and the local fetish priest had bewitched the water so that it killed dogs (or so everybody in the village believed), and I wasnt about to chance it. Fortunately we actually had piped, honest-to-goodness government of Ghana water, which was bloody unbelievable considering we lived three miles from the nearest settlement on the main road.

So somehow we got our own tap at home. You turned it on and piped water came out. Sometimes. In the capital city of Accra, three hours drive and a whole different lifestyle away, the water flowed once or twice a week. Here it arrived maybe once a week and for some unfathomable reason, usually at midnight. Because you are up a hill, the bespectacled water guy confidently informed me. Anyway, you filled your bucket and took it into the outdoor bathhouse, on your head gracefully and as if you were wearing a particularly odd hat if you were my daughters, or huffing and puffing and poking your arm out lopsidedly if you were me.

Still, we had never thought it was even a remote possibility to have water coming out the tap in our forest home, however intermittently, so whenever it did flow it was a big deal. Which was why I came to be standing in the middle of the tropical night holding a hosepipe thinking about my foster fathers death... and the flight back from the funeral the day before yesterday... and how the flight attendant wouldnt let me sleep on the floor of the airplane, which was the only thing I felt like doing after he was gone.

I was filling the water tank under the tropical night sky, which because we lived so far from any form of electricity was full of the shiniest stars. I was doing all this in the complete darkness and with no shoes on, wrapped in a scrap of African cloth, because that is how we lived. Tanks were assiduously filled up, no matter what time of day or night the water started to flow.

Our tank took a long time to fill. My eyes were itching and the dried sweat on my forehead was irritating. So after a while I jammed the hosepipe into the top of the tank and held it down with a biggish rock, checked on my two children, and snuggled down beside my husband, Kweku, for a rest. I fully expected to get up again to turn the tap off, since after many years of water shortages our ears had become finely attuned to the different water gurgles, especially the tank is full and precious water is splashing over the top type of gurgles.

Except that night. Worn out from the week and my daughters thirteenth birthday party the day before, and the funeral and the flight, I fell sound asleep. With the bedroom door unlocked.

Akan proverb of the Ashanti people, Ghana

A snake climbs the raffia palm tree.

(You can achieve the apparently impossible.)

M y story starts with Italian tomatoes; apparently they were directly responsible for my conception. My curvy, tiny English mother, who had dyed her blond pixie cut brown to downplay her gorgeousness, was having trouble getting pregnant. The market women in Lerici made her success their own personal quest.

Pomodori, signora, deve mangiare gli pomodori... di piu, di piu.

The village of Lericis claim to fame is that the British Romantic poet Percy Shelley drowned there in the blue Mediterranean while returning from a visit to Lord Byron. Sunny, beautiful, Italian, and romantic. And it had tomatoes. So thats where I was conceived while my mum and dadEnglish like Shelley and his wife Mary, who wrote Frankensteinlived in a rented house. My parents were temporary visitors, just like they were.

Mum and Dad were both from the North of England, and had married in London, where the bride wore a dark-purple mini (it was the sixties, after all). My fathers family disapproved, since my mum was a grocers daughter from Scunthorpe, and thus was considered common. My dad was a lanky blond art student of no fixed ambition who excelled at the Royal College of Art. He was raffish and apparently not common at all.