Love in the Driest Season

Not Without Our Daughter

Reviewed by Jeanine Amber - February, 2004

The first time Vita Tucker cradled tiny Chipo in her arms, she knew that she had found the one. This child is a survivor, she thought, listening to the story of how the infant had been discovered, less than a day old, under a bush in Zimbabwe almost a mile from the nearest village. Her body had been covered with patches of dried blood, her umbilical cord still attached. Ants had crawled over her face and body, biting into her flesh. Hours had gone by before anyone had heard her screams.

Vita started to cry as she held the child in the orphanage. Her husband, Neely, led her outside to the courtyard. There was something about Chipo that had claimed his heart too, but he wanted Vita to think about what it would mean to adopt her. The child was very ill; she was listless, her skin was ashy, and her belly was distended from malnutrition. There was a very good chance she had AIDS. "There is no reason for you to think otherwise," Neely said. "That means this kid is going to die, and we are going to have to put her in the ground."

Vita was furious. This was the child they were going to help, no matter how sick she might be. "We made a choice, regardless of what happened," Vita recalled recently. So the couple began to make arrangements to take the baby home. And that's when their troubles began.

A COUNTRY IN CRISIS

Vita, 50, is a sister with an open smile and a contagious laugh. Neely, a White journalist 11 years younger than she, wears his long hair in a ponytail. The two became neighbors in Detroit 14 years ago, drawn together in part by their southern roots (her family is from Alabama, his from rural Mississippi). They married four years later, and when Neely was asked to cover Africa for the Detroit Free Press in 1997, the couple headed for Zimbabwe.

The Tuckers found a comfortable house in a suburb of Harare, the capital. Neely's work as a correspondent kept him traveling most days. Vita, who had been a paralegal and research librarian in Detroit, was unable to obtain a work permit, so she did volunteer work. The couple were so preoccupied with adjusting to Zimbabwe that it took them nearly a year to fully understand just how much the country had been devastated by the political and economic crises under the 24-year rule of Robert Mugabe -- and by AIDS.

In 2002, one in three Zimbabweans between the ages of 15 and 49 were HIV-positive, one of the highest rates in the world. By 1998, 600,000 people in Zimbabwe had already died of AIDS, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of orphans. The "lucky" ones were taken in by family members. But by the late 1990's even this informal system was breaking down. Scores of infants were being abandoned -- left at bus stops, discarded in garbage pails, found in sewers -- many of them HIV-positive themselves.

Vita and Neely were reminded of the crisis almost daily. Rarely did they meet a Zimbabwean who had not lost a family member to AIDS. The Tuckers knew of the many children who had been left without parents, and they decided to volunteer at an orphanage. The couple, who were unable to have children of their own, even talked about adoption. "There were these thousands of orphans," Vita says. "It seemed like a very simple matter of our being able to offer something a Zimbabwean family might not be able to."

One night over dinner, the couple raised the adoption idea with a friend who worked for the department of social welfare. Adoption was out of the question, he told them. The country places the utmost importance on keeping children connected to their totems (or family clans), and adoptions by foreigners were virtually unheard of. "The law," he said, "does not allow it."

Vita was disappointed but still determined. Many orphanages allowed couples to take children home for the weekend to help ease the burden on staff members. So the next day, she and Neely visited three children's homes nearby. Vita had done fundraising for orphanages when the couple lived in Europe, but nothing prepared her for what they saw in Zimbabwe. At each stop, kids clamored around their feet, begging to be taken home. Many of the older children were clearly ill, so listless they barely seemed alive. "I had never seen such poverty and devastation," Vita says. "It was like looking at kids in a concentration camp. These children were hardly being fed, their clothes were in tatters and they were covered in scabs and lesions."

Vita kept thinking, This can't be happening. This is impossible. "And you knew these children had no other future but this place."

The place where Chipo lived, Chinyaradzo Children's Home, is drastically underfunded, like most Zimbabwean orphanages. The women who work there do what they can, but need surpasses resources. Medicine is scarce or nonexistent. Neely and Vita walked slowly from crib to crib that day in 1998. At the back of the ward was the girl who had been found under the bush.

THE MYSTERY CHILD

No one knew where the child had come from, where her mother was, or who her people might be. In Africa, one can sometimes determine a person's heritage by the set of her eyes, the color of her skin, the shape of her nose. But this child's mix of features -- the small nose, the downy hair -- made her ancestry unclear. The matron named her Chipo, which means "gift" in the Shona language, adding, "She is a child of Africa."

Neely saw Chipo first; she was the smallest and sickest child in the ward. He picked her up and she clasped his little finger and slowly blinked. He stared back, then called to his wife, "What about this little one?" Vita picked up the girl. "Her eyes spoke for her," Vita remembers. "She couldn't say anything but there were such sparkles in her eyes. I could sit and look at her for hours." And so it was that Chipo chose her parents.

The Tuckers took the baby home that weekend, bathing her in the tiny bathroom sink, feeding her with a syringe and putting her to sleep in an infant cot on the bed between them. She woke up often, fighting for breath. On Sunday they reluctantly took her back to the orphanage.

The next morning, Neely had to fly to Congo to cover its political unrest. Vita took him to the airport, told him to be careful, and then drove by the orphanage to check on Chipo.

The baby's condition had worsened. Vita picked up the child and barged into the matron's office. "I need to take her to the trauma center," she said. "She 's not going to make it." The matron agreed.

A pediatric cardiologist diagnosed severe pneumonia; Chipo's heart and lungs were failing. She would have died within hours if Vita had not helped. She was placed under an oxygen tent, and Vita stayed by her bedside for days, quietly urging her to breathe.

One afternoon, the doctor pulled Vita aside. Chipo was ready to be discharged, he said, but she was still very ill. She would require more care than the women at the orphanage could provide. "If I send her back to Chinyaradzo," he said, "I am signing her death warrant." The doctor asked Vita if she would be willing to care for her. If she agreed he would recommend to the department of social welfare that the Tuckers be allowed to adopt the child. He assured her that regulations would be relaxed for a child as ill as this. Vita said yes without hesitation.

In a matter of days, Chipo had gone from a weekend visitor to the child the Tuckers were going to adopt. Vita tried to call her husband, but he was enmeshed in his own crisis. While Chipo lay in intensive care, the United States embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, had been bombed. Neely was frantically trying to get from the uprising in Congo to another crisis half a continent away. Vita took the baby home and fell into a grueling schedule of feedings and administering medication and therapy, which included thumping Chipo on the back to loosen the phlegm that filled her lungs. The child didn't sleep for more than an hour at a time.

Vita had been told by the doctor that his recommendation would make the adoption process a mere formality. She had been told the same thing by the various workers from the orphanage who came by her house to check on the baby. But they were not the ones who had the authority to grant an adoption.

For an adoption to take place, the Tuckers had to work their way through social workers, police investigators and various officials from local and national social welfare offices. In a country that had spent nearly a century under colonial rule, officials weren't eager to help the Tuckers adopt a child. In fact, foreigners wanting to adopt often aroused suspicion.

"We had naively thought that Vita's being Black would give us an edge," Neely says. But it didn't matter.

The Tuckers say that critical documents disappeared mysteriously. Fingerprints were lost, police reports were lost, background checks were lost. Neely spent two days obtaining proof that Chipo was an orphan; that document was lost as well. The couple started keeping extensive notes and five notarized copies of everything they were asked to produce. Then came the accusations: The Tuckers were bribing social workers; they were trying to buy a baby.

"There were so many outside things clawing at us," Vita says. Still, the couple's bond with Chipo -- and with each other -- grew stronger. "That," says Vita, "cemented our relationship."

A FRANTIC ENDING

Chipo grew healthy as she lived with the Tuckers, even grew fat, "like a bowling ball with legs," Neely says. At five months she smiled and giggled for the first time. And when she was seven months, just weeks before Christmas, they got the results of the AIDS test Chipo was finally old enough to take. It was negative.

By the time Chipo was a year old, Zimbabwe's political and economic free fall was hastening. With public support declining, President Mugabe's administration declared foreign journalists "enemies of the state." To avoid the kind of attention that might derail their plans for Chipo, Neely resigned from his job. By January 2000, the Tuckers were getting desperate: Money was running out and still there was no adoption.

Neely spent days camped out in the corridors of the adoption department, trying to reach the person who could push the approval through to the minister's office. Finally he met with a worker, Margaret Tsiga, a tireless woman whose job it was to oversee all the orphans in the district. They spoke for hours, and then Neely said: "We have to leave Zimbabwe now. I have to have my baby." She told him to meet her the next morning. Tsiga brought with her the adoption paperwork, stamped and approved. After almost two years of battle, the Tuckers finally had their child.

Today Vita, Neely and Chipo have settled in Washington, D.C., in a home decorated with Masai oil paintings from Kenya and a giant teak dining table they brought back from Zimbabwe. Vita has found a new career working for World Vision US, the humanitarian organization, where she specializes in children's issues. Neely, now a reporter for The Washington Post, has written a book about the struggle to adopt Chipo, Love in the Driest Season, to be published by Crown this month.

And Chipo is all smiles and giggles, with a gorgeous heart-shaped face and eyes that really do sparkle, just like her mama said. There are thousands of orphaned children in Africa, and there are many ways to help them. Vita Tucker recommends donating money to nongovernmental organizations or faith-based groups that promote community development. If you are interested in adopting from an African country, it's best to find a licensed agency that works closely with the host country. Americans for African Adoptions, for example, places children from Mali, Ethiopia and Liberia (8910 Timberwood Dr., Indianapolis IN 46234; [317] 271-4567; africanadoptions.org).

- Jeannine Amber is a contributing writer at Essence.