Diary of an HIV-positive woman (25)

By JEZEBEL KAMBO
Published December 23, 2009

Hi. My name is Jessica but my friends (who are very few) call me Jezzie while my enemies –a constituency of them – call me Jezebel. I am 25 years old and HIV-positive. I am a mother of 4 -year –old twins – David (Didi) and Terry (Titi). This is my continuing story.

Week 4

Thursday

Didi and Titi have been scratching their hair endlessly for the last couple of days. It is worrying as I see some lice crawling out of Titi’s hair. Lice! It must be those darned Jonah’s kids who spent the whole of Tuesday at my place. The father does not even have the decency to come and thank me for organising a community display of neigbourliness towards him. I know he even has more than he had before the fire.

I speak to my maid, “Mwikali, do you really change the children’s beddings as instructed?”

“Yes!” she meekly replies. These housegirls never deny anything.

“Do those Jonah kids share clothes with my kids?” I ask, well aware that the closeness between Jonah and my housegirl is getting too comfortable to my liking.

“No!” she replies, her eyes downcast.

“Mum, they are itching!” Titi complains as she furiously scratches her dreadlocked hair.

The journey to school is a solemn affair with the children preoccupied with their hair.

“I have lice,” are Titi’s first words when she alights from the car. Trust the honesty of kids, but Sister Elizabeth looks shocked if not horrified.

“Please wait here as I talk to your mum,” the nun tells the kids. She turns to me and firmly tells me, “Please keep them at home until all the lice are gone, or shave their hair!”

Now, Sister Elizabeth is a nun I greatly admire and respect. Her decisions are always very sound. But shaving my children’s two-year-old dreadlocks is out of question.

“Why sister?” I ask rather too stubbornly, taking the stance any mother worth her salt would take.

“Because they will spread the lice to the other pupils,” she tells me firmly.

“But they got it from the school,” my defence is a poor one, but a defence all the same.

“Are you sure?” she asks. “The kids talk of a Makeba, Gadaffi and Hitler, neighbours who hardly bathe!”

I am stunned and quickly tell the kids to jump into the car. Again the scratching starts furiously in the car. It is then that I make the painful decision to shave off their hair. I drive to a salon, determined to carry out the inevitable.

Didi is elated by his new look. “Smooth. Now mosquitoes and houseflies can use my head as a slide,” he pipes.

 I laugh only to realise that Titi is in tears.

“Everyone will laugh at me,” she wails. “I am not going to school until all my hair grows!”

Poor girl, at such an early age, she understands what hair means to a woman.

I am too tired to argue with the kids, so I drop both of them at home and drive to work. The first phone call as I am taking the stairs to the office comes from my kids’ father, Shida.

“What?”

“You either compensate me for the accident or I unleash the law on you,” he threatens me. He still cannot believe that I actually walked away from the scene of the accident, leaving him and his bicycle in the trench. He is very lucky that he was not on the road; otherwise I would have gleefully run him over with the car.

“Bring it on!” I tell him. “And if you have nothing apart from the kids to discuss please don’t call me.”

“You will be hearing from my lawyers very soon!” He shouts, and then hangs up.

Good riddance! I let out an expletive as I open the office door to be met by a pitiful sight of Susan at her desk, dreamily gazing at the roof.

Somehow the entries of Mr Kombo that I went through last night seem to be taking shape, though I do not want to jump to any conclusions. Of particular interest was the entry: “how do you define or justify emotional incest?” This was followed by a graphic description of his encounter with the mysterious XY.

I hate this and feel awful about it. Susan is not talking. Mr Kombo has gone to Nairobi to source for more funds, though I feel that he is running away from something.

“Come let’s talk,” I tell Susan as I lead her to Mr Kombo’s office. Teresia is busy giving us side looks. I give her money to go and shop for the office’s groceries. She seems unhappy, but I am glad to shake her off.

“Get it off your chest, girl!” I tell Susan. “Otherwise it will kill you!”

“Maybe I am better off dead, just like my mum, than be this unhappy,” she whispers before the dam bursts, and she hysterically breaks down, bawling like a four-year-old, who has lost a toy. It takes almost five minutes for the girl to get some measure of composure.

“Not here. Let us go out where I can talk freely,” she says. I am reluctant to leave the office closed, but I have no choice. This is a matter of life and death.

We move to the café above our offices. It is a deserted place and the waiters are lethargic. I order two bottles of mineral water, and we settle down. Susan lets a long sigh, opens her bag and hands me a letter. “It was written by mother before she died,” she says.

I look at the letter, and before reading it I ask, “Where did you get it from?”

She hesitates, and I see a pained look on her face. “Mr Kombo gave it to me yesterday!” she replies.

Did she say ‘Mr Kombo’ and not ‘my dad’? I ignore that comment and start reading the letter.
It takes me almost five minutes to read the handwritten four pages of foolscap. I reach the end and start again. At the end there is an uneasy stint of silence, and I finally gather the guts to speak.

“So, if Mr Kombo is not your real dad, then who is?”

She does not reply, but the pain on her face convinces me that this is not only about her paternity problems. There is more to this than meets the eye.

To be continued.

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