They herded us all into the cafeteria and shut the door.
“Mutabikh! Mutabikh!” The calls had echoed as I joined the flow of feet moving toward what we called the “kitchen”, too late to turn back to grab a book.
Women squatted on the benches around tables or leaned up against frigid tile walls to wait, perhaps for an hour or so, or perhaps all afternoon. Whenever this happened, none of us knew how long we’d stay in there or why.
Abby and I found each other near the back, around a corner, and settled on the floor to wait. Abby, my Kenyan bunkmate, carried one of the Filipino babies with her.
The kitchen with it’s tiles and metal tables and closed double door magnified all the voices into a clamor of meaningless babble in multitudinous languages. Baby Noah fussed, and Abby started to rock him, singing, “There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder working pow’r…”
I joined her, softly at first.
Back and forth flew Noah. “…in the blo-o-o-d of the La-amb, there is pow’r, pow’r, wonder working pow’r…”
As usual, Abby speeded up with each verse until our tongues tripped around the words.
Wouldyou-o’erevil-avictorywin? There’s pow’r-intheblood-pow’r-intheblood…
Our voices grew louder, and our bodies swayed with the swinging baby.
There’s wonderful power in the blood.
No one minded us. Distant construction noises, banging and drilling, joined with the clang of metal and the reverberations of hard women’s voices mixed with soft voices, voices arguing or complaining, laughter, and the occasional male shout heard from outside the door.
There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder working pow’r.
I felt the women around me shift slightly, leaning in toward the door, and I stopped singing to tune my ears back to the frequency of the room.
I heard her before I saw her—the bang of the door opening and shutting, the harsh voice, rolled over us like a bowling ball, heavy on the ears, knocking over any noises in its way—“Girls! Listen!”
Mama Lela, the policewoman, stepped up on a bench to demand our attention, a diminutive but formidable form in a blue jumper, her face framed impeccably by her black head covering, her police cap on top. Her disproportionately large voice bounced around the room, first in Arabic, then in English.
“Starting this week, no ziara. NOT ALLOWED!”
She paused for impact.
“No visitors. Clothes and cigara only. Food NOT ALLOWED. Other things NOT ALLOWED. Visitors, NOT ALLOWED. Family only!”
I cringed with every “NOT ALLOWED”.
No visitors? I held my breath as fears crash down in waves. I’ll lose every last connection to outside. I can’t. I can’t.
Next to me, Abby grimaced and shrugged. “Anyway, Alisha is family.”
Alisha, my small group leader from church, regularly visited my Kenyan friend, connected through phone calls and delivered supplies. Abby called her “Mum”. A Kenyan herself, Alisha could possibly pass for family.
But it’s not so simple for me, I thought. How would my friends, with their Mexican, Canadian, German, South African passports, convince the guards that they were family? None of them looked remotely like me.
I shivered, suddenly cold on the tile floor.
The room buzzed with questions, asked and unasked.
“NOT ALLOWED! NOT ALLOWED!” The words pressed in like the drilling emanating from the other side of the door. I remained glued to the spot, dizzy with fear. No visitors. Cut off from the outside world.
There is power, power, wonder working power. Abby picked up where she left off rocking Noah, singing with grim determination and affected non-chalance. Beneath those words rumbled her resistance, “Who cares what they say? God decides.”
I inhaled, threw back my head, and joined her— in the precious blood of the Lamb.
I began to breath again. The song melted into the din of the kitchen. We’re stuck, we don’t know what to do, but who cares? We’ll keep singing.
Suddenly, Mama Lela barged into the room again, her voice preceding her, but this time, she had someone behind her, someone pulling a rolling suitcase, someone whom—to my horror—I recognized.
It was Alisha.
I sat up, tense, every receptor in my body alert, working at deciphering the situation, making quick mental calculations. What is she doing here? I noted her suitcase with a sliver of assurance. Surely, she wouldn’t have a suitcase if they had arrested her. They would’ve strip-searched her and sent her in with just the clothes on her back like the rest of us.
But what is she doing here?
Alisha stood quietly behind Mama Lela, a patch of blue sky behind a tornado.
I couldn’t read her face.
If she saw me, she did not reveal recognition.
I held my breath.
“This is Mama Kenya, girls. She is coming to teach you something. Girls, you listen to Mama Kenya.”
Abby beside me had stopped rocking Noah. The air between us pulsed with the unspoken question: Is Alisha okay?
Alisha’s calm, confident voice reached our corner, “Do you want to earn money?”
With one sentence, she had captured the attention of every woman in the room. She knew what she was doing.
Alisha opened her suitcase. “I will teach you how to make these.” She held up beaded necklaces. “Then I will sell them on the internet. See? You can earn money, not just sleep and worry about your family.”
Lela interrupted her, reiterating everything five times louder with the addition of exclamation points.
“Do you want to earn money, girls? Tomorrow morning Mama Kenya come. She teach you everything. You make money, girls.” She barked this like an order, her stern face small in it’s tight circle of fabric. She seemed pleased with herself.
Done, she marched out the room, motioning Alisha to follow.
“I’m going to talk to her,” Abby thrust Noah to me and dashed toward the door. The two Kenyans exchange smiles and a few words, perfectly natural in that context.
I held back, wary of arousing suspicion with any familiarity. Instead, I tried to make my eyes speak across the chasm of the kitchen the thanks I longed to say, even as I blinked back tears of gratitude and wonder.
Through multiple closed doors, present and future, she found a way in— just when I needed it most.
When they finally let us out of the kitchen that afternoon, I did not carry the weight and fears of all the “not alloweds”. No letters? No visitors? No nothing? No problem.
I know One who will make His way to me.
Photo credit: David Clode (Unsplash)
*Names have been changed to fictional names