My Green Rubber Brick, and what that has to do with The Pearl of Africa

Uganda was never really in my vernacular. I mean, I knew the word—a country in Africa—but whether it was north or south, east or west, big, small, repressive, free…

I was joined at the big map in the Chambers Street station by a dark-skinned young man with a strong accent.

“I am trying to go there, as well,” he said, noting my finger on the World Trade Center. He turned and smiled at me brightly. “We can go there together, then spend the whole day seeing New York.”

“Cool,” I said. “Are you Indian? You remind me of some friends at my old work.”

My old work: Twenty-seven different employee groups, eight regions, two statutory jurisdictions, and two failed attempts at building a new computerized pay system that could handle it all. Out went a new, worldwide tender. In came ten fresh-faced programmers from India, and me, their hot-off-the-mold administrative assistant.

I ordered a small black notebook for each programmer to take to their meetings. I made name plaques and posted them at the entrances to their cubbies. I connected their phones, and I worked with IT to set up their email accounts.

I memorized the spelling of everybody’s names, and made sure to pronounce them correctly. The youngest in the group presented me with a list of all his names, printed out neatly in pencil.

“Oooh,” I said. “Don’t know if my tiny brain can handle five names. Maybe…pick your two favorites?” That broke the ice.

My team kept to themselves, at first, and spoke quietly and respectfully. The timestamps on their emails told me they worked into the night, despite having to report with the rest of us each morning. Some of them, I came to learn, had left spouses and children behind; others were leaving their parents for the first time.

I greeted them fondly every day. I never passed them at lunchtime without asking what delicacies they were enjoying, and before I knew it, I was learning how to eat rice with my fingers. I invited one of them to my house on the way home, and smiled, the next day, as he recounted this to his associates. I taught them how to make popcorn in the office microwave.

I admired family photos on their desks, and learned how many hundred, or thousand, guests attended each of their weddings. I brought my own wedding pictures for them to see, and took it on the chin when they swore the lady in the gown could not possibly be me—she was far more beautiful. I learned that asking two of them to Thanksgiving dinner meant I should expect five. I grew to love their endearing way of inviting themselves along.

I assigned myself as their cultural ambassador. I took them bungy jumping, ice skating, kayaking. I fielded inquiries from the office regulars, even from my own friends and family, as to why I went to these extremes, to this expense. “Because they like it,” I would say.

My company profiled everyone for personality. You followed a link and answered some questions, and a week or two later a big envelope containing your profile and four small, colored rubber bricks came back. You read the report feeling like someone had gazed into your soul, then you stacked the bricks on your desk according to your strengths.

My dominant color was green, meaning I led from the heart. I turned my green brick over, reverently, in my hands. Show Me You Care, was written on its side. My secondary color was blue, Give Me the Details, an appropriate assessment, I felt, of the world’s most thorough and meticulous clerk. The other two rubber bricks were yellow, Involve Me, and red, Be Bright, Be Brief, Be Gone.

I arranged my bricks on my desk. Red and yellow went at the bottom, then blue. I crowned the stack with my green Show me You Care brick.

I rolled my chair back from my desk and nodded. After never really feeling that my actions were endorsed, here was this acknowledgement, this permission, this encouragement to go on being me.

We can spend the whole day seeing New York…

Gawi wasn’t Indian, he was Ethiopian. A student at the University of Toronto, he was treating himself to a New York junket for the Labor Day weekend.

We saw the World Trade Center together, as he had suggested, and then we saw Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. We had drinks at the Dead Rabbit, and we gorged on Chinese food. We howled at three stand-up comics in an underground club on a dark, noisy little side street; we giggled as a guy sprinted towards a cheese-side-down pizza on the sidewalk, peeled it off, and chomped into it with a look that said, Maan…this is my lucky day.

That evening, Gawi and I shook hands and said goodbye. We’re still friends on Facebook.

After the universe dropped my friend, Gawi, onto the doorstep of my life, and long after my Indian buddies landed there, I came to know Pato.

Pato is young, college educated, and hungry. When I first met him, he was working as a tour operator. When he wasn’t out in the field, he was systematically pillaging social media for clientele.

“Would you like to come to Uganda and look at gorillas?” he asked me, in our first conversation.

I would rather die, I thought, but I couldn’t surf away: I was intrigued by the notion of gorillas; more so, by the concept that tour guides thought old ladies wanted to hack into the jungle to see them.

“Won’t they bite me, and tear out my throat?” I asked Pato.

“Why would they do that?” he asked back.

We continued to message. I learned about his life, his family, his country.

“Madam,” he said, one day, “Uganda…is the pearl of Africa.”

“Never call an old white woman, madam,” I said. “That is what you call old, white, women brothel owners.”

“It is my dream to marry a white woman,” he said back. My eyebrows raised themselves. Later, when I told him I had three daughters, he got straight to the point and asked if one of them might want to marry him.

I found a TV show about an Olympic wheelchair basketball champion travelling across Africa. Afff-ri-kaaa, he says, is the most exciting continent on the planet.

Basketball guy was cool, so I watched the whole series. In the last episode, he visits Uganda and interviews Bobi Wine, the slum-rat-turned-rapper-turned-leader-of-the-opposition-turned-presidential-candidate, in the streets of a Kampala slum. Rap was my favorite music, so I added Bobi Wine to my list of topics for Pato.

I went to You Tube for whatever I could find by and about Bobi Wine. In one of his music videos, I listened to him use Nelson Mandela’s words to describe Uganda. I wondered which was truer: Bobi Wine’s call-it-like-it-is-skunk-of-the-world portrayal, or Pato’s more optimistic representation. I felt my heart squirming, and wondered about the reality of my friend’s life, there, in the pearl of Africa.

Once, Pato pushed me too far and suggested I endorse his tour company publicly and solicit my friends as customers.

“First,” I messaged back, “we don’t do that here. And, second, am I just a business contact? I thought we were friends?”

I heard three pings that night: three voice recordings apologizing for overstepping. The last one said, I love you…I love you…I love you. His voice was repentant, and hurting. My stomach twisted.

Show Me You Care…

I put my faith in my green rubber brick, and kept messaging.

I learned that Pato’s education came to him by the grace of his late grandfather, a man Pato loved. As I got to know Pato, I learned, also, that his late grandfather’s benevolent spirit was still alive.

For his twenty-seventh birthday, I sent Pato a hundred dollars to take his friends out for beers. I found out later that this represented half a month’s wages. Pato could have bought his friends one round, then kept the change; instead, he made good, and took them out for lunch, and dinner, and beers.

“What are your dreams, Pato?” I asked him, one day.

His dream is to own a farm, a thriving operation with livestock, and trees that produce fruits, and nuts, a farm where he can employ one hundred youths. He said he managed, once, to save a few hundred shillings towards his farm, but ended up giving the money to someone who needed it more.

I wrestled with myself. In the end, I offered to help Pato buy his farm.

We started with a house—all the farms were out of our reach. It’s a small house, brick, with a corrugated tin roof. A beginning.

I tried to send more money so Pato could make the house livable. The wire service cancelled the transfer. You can’t do this, they said. You don’t know this man.

I thought of Pato, of all his pictures, of all his words, of all his stories. I waited until the shift turned over at the wire service office, tried again, and the money went through. The house turned out beautifully, and I felt every bit as proud of it as Pato did.

COVID crash-landed, and Pato’s job disintegrated. We reviewed our plan, and decided we’d try for a second house. He could rent it out, and save the rent money towards the farm. I found the funds. The transfer was denied. These scammers, the wire transfer guy reiterated, they know how to play the long game.

Again, I held fast to my green rubber brick, waited until midnight, and resent the funds.

We bought the second house, and Pato moved into the first. Shortly thereafter, he took in a boy who needed a guardian.

The second house required extensive repairs to make it rentable, so we put the renovations on hold while I saved more. It was just as well: the rains came hard, and washed away the road outside Pato’s first house. I diverted what we had on hold and we rebuilt the road, this time, with drains.

I forwarded a picture that had come across my feed, of a gorilla that lives in a zoo in Japan. The gorilla’s name is Shabani. I looked this up. It means, cool guy, or, handsome fellow.

“That is me,” Pato said. “I am Shabani.” I realized I was falling in love.

We had drained our funds, but we continued to add Pato’s dreams to the list: his dream of setting his brother and himself up in their own motorcycle parts shop for income; his dream of one day seeing to the education of five children; his dream of having a refrigerator, and something to cook on that wasn’t a fire out in the yard.

“Do you think that will ever be possible?” he asked.

I felt my heart sinking. For everything on the list, we needed twenty thousand dollars.

“We’re running out of time,” I said. “I’m retiring soon, and my income's going to drop. I won’t see serious money again until my mom dies. Pato, I think it may be time for you to take measure of what you have, and choose your best options.”

I shook those words from my mind, put the letter on the table, and picked up the check again. Twenty thousand dollars. Never, ever, had I dreamed I’d see this.

I got up, filled the kettle, and leaned against the counter while I waited for the water to boil. I stared through the ceiling, then through my shoes. I looked at the clock. He’d still be awake…

I filled the teapot and sat down at the computer.

“Shabani,” I typed, “are you there? Get your list. I have your twenty thousand.”

“Madam,” he came back. “I hope your dear mother is not late?”

“No,” I said. “But years ago, I loaned money to someone. Today, they paid it back.”