Ben

Ben was one of the first people I met when I arrived in East Africa. Nineteen years old, naive and hopeful and full of energy, I went to a country I’d never been to before, to volunteer for a nonprofit for just under a year. Ben was older than me, in his late twenties, I assume. He sometimes grew a beard, and when he shaved it, he looked immediately ten years younger. His thin brown hair often grew long enough to cover his eyes. When he went to the States for a fundraising furlough, he came back with a haircut, and while he looked very nice, I preferred the long hair. He had a wide smile. He laughed at himself, and at me, quite frequently. There are a lot of details I don’t remember about this time in my life, or about Ben, but I do remember what he was like.

One of my first memories of Ben is the time he came to the house I shared with my teammate, Emma, to lend us his French press. Our armed guard greeted him and let him through the gate, where he carried a green, heavy, stainless-steel thing that could probably put a dent in a wall, up the dirt hill to our house. I was surprised to see him; though he had mentioned that he would lend us his French press, I hadn’t actually taken him seriously. It seemed like such a kind thing to do, to concern himself with our coffee needs. I had never made coffee in a French press before, and Ben gave me a quick lesson in its simple operations. I kept it a few days until I could acquire one of my own. The one I bought was made of glass, much prettier, but far less sturdy, and I had to replace it at least twice while I was in the country.

Ben had been in the area for a while. I don’t remember his exact history, but I believe he was a child of American missionaries, and if he hadn’t grown up in Uganda, it was another African country nearby. He went to the States for school, where he studied English literature and taught for a short time. Now he was operating as a teacher to the children of expats in the area. I was planning to study English after my stay in Uganda, and we immediately bonded over literature. I had worked at a library throughout high school, the most glimmering of opportunities to book people like us, and we talked about what I had read and which books I had not yet, but would certainly encounter in my future studies. Around the time of my arrival in the small city, a school Ben was affiliated with was offloading much of the contents of its library to anyone who would pay a few dollars. I walked away with a pile of classics by authors like George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, and William Golding, carefully lining up my treasures on the shelf in my bedroom, along with the paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird I brought with me on the plane.

Ben and I shared a love of stories, and talking to him made me feel at home in a way no one else did. He seemed to know exactly when to listen earnestly and when to laugh at me, when to suggest that I may be taking myself a little too seriously. It was this time in my life when I started writing regularly, a blog to keep my friends and family updated on my life and work. We talked about books and movies a lot. We talked at length about the new movie 12 Years a Slave, which had unnerved me and left me with questions about the ethics regarding depicting Black suffering in film. I never got the sense that he was judging me or dismissing my ideas as naive, though I’m sure they often were.

It was Ben who introduced us to the movie guy, a man who operated a small shop that carried pirated DVDs where you could buy films for a dollar and entire seasons of television for two. I bought every season of Breaking Bad, which is what I watched while recovering from a mild case of malaria. I was standing in the school office one day, when suddenly my entire body turned to jello, as if I had just completed some great physical feat like the New York City marathon, except that I hadn’t, and I was suddenly sweating and aching, and couldn’t remember what I was doing there. Emma knew what it was immediately, took me home and put me in bed, where I washed down malaria medication with caramel-flavored milk, and slept for nearly three days. When I woke, but was still bound mostly to my bed, I watched Walter White, a high school teacher who cooked crystal meth, from beneath a white mosquito net that reminded me of the princess canopy I had when I was little.

Ben dated Emma for a time, and he began to spend a considerable amount of time around our house. I never minded having him around, though I think he would have preferred I were around less. Ben was there when I tried liquor for the first time, laughing at my horror as the white rum trickled like lava down my throat. “I hate it”, I said, but I did not hate it forever, and not long after, I learned to add it to Diet Coke. After my first major heartbreak, I sat on our couch, which was covered in cushions of brown canvas fabric, sipping a rum and Diet Coke. Ben warned me gently about the dangerous path of blending alcohol and heartbreak. I have never forgotten this advice.

Ben was one of the few people I knew who owned a car; most of us got around on a boda, a motorcycle taxi, which I learned to ride sidesaddle to accommodate the skirts I wore most days. His car was a luxury he shared generously, and I was rescued by him on more than one occasion: from a sudden rain shower or a strange woman following me home from the bank. After I showed up soaked from head to toe at a group viewing of Breaking Bad at Jack’s house, Ben offered to pick me up on days that promised rain.

One weekend, I went with Ben, Emma, and Jack to the capital city for the weekend to do some shopping. Leaving our small town for the big city felt thrilling and grown-up. We drove for hours, through massive tea fields that seemed to stretch on forever. As Ben and Jack changed a flat tire, I got out of the car and drank in the sight of the rows and rows of tea. On the way home, we got pulled over by a police officer, who asked Ben for a few thousand shillings before he allowed us to continue home. It was common for officers to expect money from mzungus (a term for white people used in East Africa). The expats I knew spoke often about how to avoid getting swindled by mzungu prices. I, myself, had become adept at negotiating a fair price with boda drivers. But Ben didn’t seem fazed by it. He later told me about a professor he had back in Bible college; she suggested that being taken advantage of did not seem to worry Jesus, and so it need not worry us.

Ben was there the night we got sent home. A few hours earlier, the head of our organization called to inform us of a potential threat to our safety and that the board had decided we should get out of the country as soon as possible. We would leave at first light. I started preparing then, packing all of my belongings into the suitcases which had been stored in a wardrobe, untouched for the last eight months. I made decisions frantically, what would I take, what would I leave behind with my friends. Ben walked down the hallway of our house, stopping at my open door. He opened his arms wide to me, and I fell into his embrace. I don’t know if I’d ever hugged him before. “This is like a movie,” he said. “This doesn’t feel real.” So much of my life in Uganda did not feel real. I experienced some of the most beautiful things, magical things, heartbreaking things, infuriating things. It would have been much easier to pretend it was a movie.

There was little time to make decisions, to say goodbye. It was already dark, and a trip to the village to see the kids was out of the question. I wrote letters, frantically trying to say everything I needed to say to them. To Abigail. And Lydia. Oh, God, who would tell Lydia? There was no way to tell them, truly, deeply, everything that they meant to me. The power went out, and I packed my things with a small flashlight. Laura remembers other things from that night. She says that I talked to my mom on the phone and that I screamed and repeatedly struck a door with my open palm. But I don’t remember any of that. Atop my mirror, I placed the Batman figurine candle my mom sent for my twentieth birthday celebration, to watch over my bedroom. He was still there when I came back six months later. I slept for a short time. Early the next morning, I wandered into the kitchen where the forgotten minestrone sat on the counter. Soft morning light filled the room. This was the kitchen where I learned to make coffee in a French press and washed a thousand dishes in a plastic tub and said that I loved him out loud for the first time. I ate a bowlful of minestrone and cried.

Ben was there the night we got sent home. After so many of my friends had come and gone. Jess. Olivia. Jack. Alexis. Hannah. Elizabeth. Tom. I met and loved so many people, and each one had returned home. They had reentered the places of their births, places with paved roads and reliable electricity and far too many kinds of peanut butter. They had each left this place as if it were a fantasy land, this otherworld of rich earth and beautiful people and want and loss and red dirt. All of them were gone. But Ben was still there.

I can still see him walking towards me, carrying that heavy French press up the hill to my house. Welcoming me to this place, which would rip my heart to shreds and put it back together with all the power of thirty-three pairs of perfect brown hands. Ben was there at the beginning. And he was there at the end.