TABAN GABRIEL
A creased black micro skirt barely covering her bottom topped up by a vest, Diana Kade steps out of a mud grass-thatched house to a dark world of whistles.
The clouds are heavy. A soft drizzle comes down on her.
Sikisiki. A boy, a cigarette in one hand, seated on a heap of sand by the dusty road outside Diana’s hut whistles after Diana.
Diana turns around. “Don’t be stupid like this in the morning,” she tells the boy off.
A verbal exchange ensues, attracting a woman from the next compound. “Mschew,” the woman jeers at Diana.
Another woman exits the compound across the road. “Eh, eh, eh,” the second woman mocks. “Why should God even give children to such women who can’t cater for them?” The reference implies Diana’s mother abandoned Diana’s grooming.
“Eh! You idlers lack what to do!” Diana responds. “I’ve both my parents alive. They have never abandoned me.”
NO SCHOOL FEES BECAUSE YOU’RE A GIRL
Diana, in fact, has parents, parents she has not visited in years. One Sunday, 17-year-old Diana, angry at her parent’s failure to pay her school fees because she was a girl – the only one in a family of boys, walked out of home.
She has long wanted to return home.
She fears to return. The parents, she says, disowned her after she left home.
“I have stayed alone with friends for three years because I fear returning home,” says Diana.
MISSING MY FRIEND
One Thursday night, at Diana’s favorite pub, people are rowdy, but Diana, unlike her friends, is nowhere to be found.
Cissy, one such friend, strikes another person’s billiard ball on the pool table and the opponent shouts, “Two knock!”
Cissy roars. “Aha, I wish my friend Diana was here.”
Cissy and Diana were good friends in tough times. “We were called names, such as prostitutes, lost girls, unfortunate beings, and so many others, just because we are not staying with our parents,” says Cissy, shaking her head while biting at her index finger in apparent disgust. .
Cissy, 22, wishes her parents were alive just as Diana’s are. She would waste not a single minute to rush back home to rejoin them, she adds.
Diana is away because she is busy at work. Last April, two months after we last talked, Diana linked up with a friend. The friend introduced her to a restaurant owner in Juba. There, she got a job to wash dishes. “I hope that with the new job Diana got,” Cissy says, “she will make efforts to go back to her parents because life is not easy these days.”
It’s not easy to find Diana. Sissy doesn’t know the restaurant. Diana has also moved houses. Finding her takes a 2-week search.
ON THE MOVE AGAIN
One day at the restaurant, Diana enters through the kitchen door – the second time she is doing so after she first served another customer a minute ago.
She picks plates off the table.
With a soft smile spread across her baby face, Diana asks an old man, presumably 60 years old, going by his physical look and who still has a half plate of soup untouched. “Are you done eating?”
The customer nods to indicate that he’s done. “Bring me a bottle of water,” he asks as Diana lifts plates off the table. For the first time in the last three hours, the expression on Diana’s face suggests fatigue or discontent with the new
job.
Moments later, when Diana walks back with a small bottle of water, the customer asks Diana whether her mother owns the restaurant. Diana nods. “No, I am just a worker,” she says.
Diana’s boss, seated next to the counter, interrupts, breathing fire. “Hey, young girl, collect those dishes quickly!” the boss roars. “Why do you talk long to customers? Don’t you know what to do?”
Irritated, Diana picks other plates off the tables very fast, walks past the boss and exits through the back door to ferry the dishes to where other women are washing them.
The following day, the restaurant is busy as usual. Diana is not here. “Diana didn’t come back,” a friend who linked her to the job, says. “I think she was tired of this job. And sometimes our boss is rude.” Two months later, Diana has still not returned.
