Vain (The Seven Deadly 1)

“Karina teach me,” she answered brokenly.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

She touched the middle of her chest with her remaining hand and answered, “Mandisa.”

“It’s-It’s nice to meet you, Mandisa,” I told the baby girl, awkwardly tripping on my words. I was so unaccustomed to talking to children, let alone an amputee.

She smiled at me and picked up the hand I had resting on my leg. I began to pull the hand back but something in her eyes told me it was okay, that she was just a human girl, and a beautiful one at that.

I tentatively squeezed her little hand and she giggled, sending a warm, tingling sensation up my arm and into my heart.

“Have you eaten, Mandisa?” I asked her.

The smile dropped from her face and she ran off, disappearing behind the kitchen doors.

“What did I say?” I asked the air in front of me, stunned she’d fled.

“She doesn’t eat,” I heard a voice say from behind me. Dingane. My blood began to boil once more.

I turned toward him. “What do you mean she doesn’t eat? How does she stay alive?”

“She drinks. For days after she first arrived we couldn’t even get her to do that.”

“Why?” I asked him as he sat across from me.

“We thought it was because she was recovering from the loss of her arm but later discovered it is because she misses her mother.”

“What happened to her mother?” I asked, exponentially afraid to hear his answer.

His eyes met mine for the first time that morning and his lips tightened, his shoulders shrugged in answer and my stomach fell to my feet.

“We supplement milk with all sorts of proteins and vitamins, but she’s still not gaining weight the way we need her to.”

Dingane turned from me and spotted a child who needed help. I have no idea how he saw but he did. He stood and helped a little boy who couldn’t reach his chair to sit with only one leg. I watched him. He didn’t put the boy in the chair like I assumed he would but helped him discover how to do it on his own.

“What happened to them?” I asked Dingane when he sat down again.

“There is an incredibly evil man named Joseph Kony who roams south Sudan and northern Uganda in search of children to create his child army called the LRA or Lord’s Resistance Army. He invades innocent villages, takes young women for obvious reasons, attempts to kidnap their children. If the children refuse to come with him, they chop off a limb to prevent them from being able to grow into a useful soldier that can oppose him later. He kills their parents and we’re sent the orphans who survive, broken and damaged and all alone.”

I swallowed down the lump that had grown in my throat. “Why does he do it?”

“I don’t think he even knows. He claims to fight for peace and security in Uganda as well as for the impoverished. These are his proclamations, but he just works for the devil, in my opinion. He is the ultimate in evil.”

I examined the tiny faces that surrounded me and felt so incredibly sad for them and their fates. I wanted to respond to everything Dingane had revealed to me, but I couldn’t. There was nothing to say.

After breakfast, Dingane told me I needed to follow him.

“The children usually retrieve their school things right now. Karina, Kate and I teach them from eight to two in the afternoon while Charles and occasionally I make repairs or preparations for the day’s activities. Wednesdays, I’m in charge of doing some sort of outdoor activity with them during school hours. Unfortunately, you’ve been assigned to me at Karina’s insistence, so you’ll be accompanying me all day every day.”

“Yes, so unfortunate,” I spit back sarcastically.

Dingane stopped short between the baobab tree and our huts. “I don’t like you. Is this such a surprise?”

“Frankly, yes, it is,” I told him candidly. “You don’t know me.”

“Ah, but you see, I do. I know you quite well. I know you’re here because you were caught with cocaine twice. I recognized immediately the type of person you were before you even arrived.”

“I was caught with cocaine. I admit it, freely. I’m not proud of it, God knows, but I also knew coming in here everyone would be aware of why I was forced to be here—”