Chapter 15
Timos had turned four just two months before we arrived in Uganda. And with every passing moment it became very clear to Garen and I that Timos was the most UN-Ugandan Ugandan we had met. In fact, we laughed about it every single day. Multiple times a day, until we got a greater understanding of what that had meant for our Mini-est Miller.
Ugandan children are generally very compliant. If they get too rowdy or too loud or too insistent, they just accept that someone will strike them. With their fists or more often a stick. Happy, mischievous, engaging, but fully understanding their place in grander scheme of things, most of the children go about their days living up to the expectations placed on them. And are quite content.
Not so with Timos. Timos so badly wanted MORE that he simply couldn’t be okay with anything less than the destiny he could sense. This search for justice, this rejection of being treated badly, was seen as defiance and he was kicked out of home after home, until his Social Worker was despairing over Timos’ future. In desperation the Auntie suggested a white family. Surely a white family would be okay with a precocious child. And about that time Aggrey got a call from a lawyer in Kampala who had seen Timos’ picture in the paper, proclaiming him to be eligible for adoption. She was the one frantically searching for a “real orphan” for us. And the connection was made.
So now WE had the precocious child. And I was immediately in love with his Strong Will. We recognized that his Will is what had protected him, and we were so grateful for it. But remember, our foster papers could be revoked by ANYONE for any reason. So, when our four-year-old child balked at being patted down for weapons by a soldier, and the soldiers surrounded him and threatened to beat him, all we could do was act thankful for their intervention, grasp Timos firmly by the arm, sternly tell him to behave himself and walk through the checkpoint, quickly. Once alone I knelt down, took Timos’ face in my hands, and told him he had to obey us, or he could be seriously hurt; that we had to pretend to be okay with being told what to do. That we would pretend together.
I told him stories about America where we could be free. Always practical, Timos saw this as a means to an end and was better at controlling himself in public. All he needed was an ally. Someone to know what he REALLY thought about it all. And that is how we began to communicate with looks. Someone would be telling Timos to behave himself, he would look at me, my eyes would go big, and I’d make a funny face, and that gave him the strength to “obey”. Suddenly he was surviving WITH someone, not alone.
We were all just trying to survive the strangeness. Going to the mall for a coffee was a major ordeal. The car was searched for bombs, we were patted down at gun point, all for a hazelnut latte. But between you and me it was totally worth it. Those lattes were amazing.
I was in constant fear of being shot. I think Garen heard me ask, “Do you think it will hurt to be shot?” about a million times a day. There were teenage guards with machine guns everywhere. Our whiteness gave us some protection, but at the same time I knew our whiteness would cause us to stand out if something went wrong.
At the courthouse, for our appointment to see the judge about Timos’ guardianship, we were told to wait in the car, again. Suddenly, several soldiers were shoving a man who had clearly been severely beaten. This man’s head had been wrapped in bandages that were now bloody. He was placed in a big metal box-room-thing in the parking lot. I was visibly shaking.
Then we were being rushed from the car and going through security. I just intuitively knew what to do and went into auto-drive. I began babbling in bad Lugandan to the soldiers and they thought it was so funny. They turned to talk to Garen, and I just laughed and told them he couldn’t speak Lugandan, he was Mizungu. Everyone thought that was hilarious. That was good. If they were laughing, they weren’t thinking about beating us. They didn’t even frisk us. Just waved the funny Mizungus through the door.
Garen and I now better understood what roles to play up to get people to want to help us. We weren’t being disingenuous, just playing up our natural rapport with one another. In America no one really cares if a husband and wife are bantering and playing off one another. But Ugandans love to laugh. Something Garen and I share in common with them. So, we made it bigger, we entertained with our natural relationship.
That helped us out of many risky situations. Like when the police pulled our driver over to shake-down the Mizungus. Garen kept saying “weebalee”, which means “thank you”, it’s the only word he really knew. So the officer kept telling Garen to give him money, Garen kept thanking him and I laughed and joked with the officers in my broken Lugandan until they finally just let us go. At the health department going through the checkpoint there, hardened, jaded soldiers were yelling and screaming, and I just smiled and joked around until we were waved through by chuckling men.
In so many situations the soldiers would remember us from the time before, we would be waved to the front of the line and joked around with and waved through. Looking back, I see how God’s favor went before us and protected us. The Holy Spirit was leading us, whispering to us how to behave in incredibly foreign moments. At a time when the only familiar thing was a God, fifteen years distant to us, we instinctively clung to His guidance.
And I never felt closer to Garen. We have always understood one another. We have this uncanny ability to communicate with subtle body language, and I mean entire conversations. But this was on a cosmic level. In a constantly changing environment, that we didn’t understand to begin with, we had to be on guard every moment. And we flowed with it in such way that it formed an even deeper bond. Which is why it hurt so much more when that bond would be badly broken in just a few short months.
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