Love in the Driest Season

Adopting a new way of life in the field: Journalist's story of finding abandoned child in Africa reads like a thriller

Reviewed by Isabel Vincent - March 29, 2004 Monday

When I was 26 and dispatched on my first assignment to the interior of Peru as a foreign correspondent, I met a little girl at an army base who has haunted me ever since.

Her name was Adelia, and she must have been six years old. According to the Peruvian military commander at the base, she had been found by a patrol in a remote village. Her parents had been killed by Shining Path guerrillas. The soldiers who found her were not sure if she had witnessed the slaughter because Adelia, who was painfully thin with large dark eyes, refused to speak. When I met her, several weeks after the incident, she was frightened and withdrawn, engrossed in opening and closing the top of an old shampoo bottle as the commander tried unsuccessfully to get her to speak.

At that moment, I considered adopting Adelia on the spot even though I knew such things were considered unprofessional when you were working in "the field." Foreign correspondents are supposed to remain dispassionate in the face of suffering, but even the toughest journalists seem to crack when it comes to small, helpless children.

"Something happened to me inside the orphanages," said James Nachtwey, one of the world's most famous war photographers.

Something also happened to Washington Post journalist Neely Tucker. While stationed in Zimbabwe for the Detroit Free Press in the late 1990s, Tucker and his wife, Vita, decided to volunteer at an orphanage on the industrial outskirts of Harare just as AIDS was decimating a continent and turning hundreds of thousands of infants and children into orphans. The experience of holding one of those orphans for the first time changed Tucker's life.

"Keep moving, I had told myself time and again," writes Tucker in his recently released memoir, Love in the Driest Season. "But when the child's fingers closed over mine, some long-forgotten part of me seemed to stir. I didn 't know what it was. I just felt something."

Tucker didn't stop to think about that something. At that moment, as he held on to the tiny three-month-old girl named Chipo, he decided to take her home.

The decision changed his life and is the subject of his new book, which describes in excruciating detail the difficulties of adopting an abandoned child in Zimbabwe -- a country where more than 500,000 children have lost both parents to AIDS but continues to have some of the world's most difficult foreign adoption laws.

But Love in the Driest Season, which began as a newspaper article for The Washington Post's Style section, is not just a book about the adoption of one child.

The book works on several levels, as a story about AIDS in Africa and Tucker 's own experiences as a foreign correspondent and a white man from Mississippi married to an African American and living in Africa.

"In Africa, the extended family is supposed to take care of children in crisis," said Tucker, 40, in a recent interview. "In Shona society you don't pray directly to God, you pray to your ancestors who intercede on your behalf. If you are an orphan, you cannot communicate with God."

The Tuckers learn that Chipo was abandoned by her mother the day she was born. She was found in a garbage can in the Zimbabwean highlands. Patches of dried blood and placenta streaked her body, her umbilical cord was still attached and wild ants swarmed over her and began to eat her right ear before she was found by a passerby who took her to a nearby police station.

Chipo, emaciated and her lungs filled with fluid, was soon brought to the orphanage in Harare -- a place ill-equipped to look after children in life-threatening situations. At the Chinyaradzo orphanage "diapers are old washclothes folded in triangles" and there is barely enough food or medication for the dozens of abandoned children arriving every week.

Chipo is so ill that when Tucker's wife, Vita, takes her to a private physician in Harare, he immediately signs a requisition authorizing the Tuckers to become her foster parents -- a highly unusual occurrence in a country where a minor bureaucratic procedure can take months to complete. The physician realizes that doting U.S. expatriates who can afford private health care in Zimbabwe are the child's only hope for survival. Sending her back to an overcrowded orphanage would be like signing a death warrant, Tucker notes.

The Tuckers nurse Chipo back to health, but it is a long and nerve-wracking process of sleepless nights and seemingly endless feeding sessions where "Chipo would ... chew and chew and eat until she passed out on a cereal high, slumped over her bowl."

It's a testament to Tucker's abilities as a journalist that this book, with its dozens of pages detailing Chipo's almost daily health condition and the ins and outs of the adoption legislation and bureaucracy in a Third World country, reads like a thriller. The prose is spare and economical, bringing the horror of Chipo's condition into sharp focus: "By noon, the ants found the girl-child," reads the first line in the book. "Left to die on the day she was born, she had been placed in the tall brown grass that covers the highlands of Zimbabwe in the dry season, when the sun burns for days on end and rain is a rumour that will not come true for many months."

In the end, things seem to work out marvellously for the Tuckers. They find out that Chipo does not have HIV, and they get through the horror of the adoption process in Zimbabwe just as black militants begin to take over white farms in the country and the dictatorial government of Robert Mugabe begins a ruthless campaign against foreign journalists.

During the entire adoption process, Tucker refuses to write about events in Zimbabwe for fear that his work could jeopardize Chipo's adoption. So when dozens of foreign journalists arrive to cover stories on AIDS in the country, Tucker remains silent and in the process nearly commits career suicide. He takes on other assignments in sub- Saharan Africa, but he can no longer stand to be away from his daughter for long periods of time.

After seven years on the road, Tucker is now a Metro section reporter with the Washington Post. How is he dealing with a much slower pace after the adrenalin highs of working on some of the world's biggest stories?

"Now I realize that I am the father of a child that has been abandoned once," he says. "I am not about to present myself at a checkpoint manned by a drugged-out 16-year-old. This is my only child and I love her with the ferocity of my being."

And Chipo?

"She is a perfectly wonderful normal healthy and self-confident little girl," says Tucker, who now lives in the Washington suburbs with his wife and five year old daughter.

According to her father, Chipo always has a suitcase packed in anticipating of going on a sleepover with her friends. She has dreadlocks and loves to pretend she is a princess.

And as her father proudly notes, the only framed picture in her toy-cluttered room, is a map of Zimbabwe.