Memories from childhood whirl down like autumn leaves. There’s one I’ve often caught from the time I was very young and it’s always the same. My parents pick a letter out of our postbox at the bottom of our drive. Cries of delight. “Matthew has written, Matthew has written.” Hugs and leaps. My mother enacts an idiotic dance, a whirl of celebration. I see the jagged dark shadows of the rhododendron leaves on the tarmac road, her legs flashing, and the sun suffuses everything gold. I know that Matthew is important, that he looked after me for several years when I was a baby in Africa.
Years later I hold that letter in my hands. The animal stamps ripped in half by that first eager tearing. I pull out a photograph. A solemn young man with wide eyes stares out. Matthew says he has a new job as an immigration officer. He’s married. He has a baby daughter called Charity. He asks about us all.
I ask my father if they ever wrote back. “No”, he says, shaking his head. “We wanted to write that we had got somewhere. We were struggling so much. Then time moved on and it seemed too late. It was a bad thing, that we didn’t write.”
I became a development worker largely because of my mostly unremembered childhood in Africa, where I spent my first four years. I knew that I’d spent years under African skies and that my first words were in Matthew’s language.
One day I got the chance to work in his country as a consultant. The plane flew lower, flat plains stretching to every horizon. My heart thudded and my breathing constricted. I wondered if I’d meet Matthew at passport control. Would he recognise me? But when I stood at the desk and asked after him, the woman returned with lowered eyes. “I’m sorry, he has died. I’m sorry.”
Local colleagues helped me track his family down. I make contact with Matthew’s son. We arrange to meet the evening before I go home – at that time I was living in a capital of another African country. I wait long beyond the appointed meeting time in the hotel lobby. Eventually, he comes with another man, his half-brother. I’ve spent hours typing up my mother’s letters about Matthew. My mother was a superb writer and she wrote well about him. I’ve reprinted the few photographs we have. My father asks me to give a substantial financial gift to the family in Matthew’s memory. I set up a phone call between the son and my father. He tells my father that they share a name. Matthew named his firstborn son after the Englishman he was never to see again.
I’m hungry, but the son and his half-brother urge me to go to a bar. A meagre amount of wine is poured into my glass. I glance up. “Fill it up, fill it up,” shouts the son. “This is a special occasion.” The young waiter shakes his head and frowns. “I don’t want to,” he says. The son grabs the bottle. “Come on,” he urges, “this is a really special day.”
I wonder at the strange conduct of the waiter for a moment, but the son asks me to drink up and soon I am showing photographs of my parents, the bush, the Africa of then. I drink very little, but suddenly things start to whirl. I have no memory of leaving the bar, but I remember stumbling and almost dropping my computer just outside. I recall entering the hotel lounge. Then I’m sitting on the bed. “I feel very ill,” I say. The half-brother looks down at me, unsmiling. There’s a gap in time till I am conscious of my trousers being pulled down, my shirt removed, my bra unclipped. The brother has vanished. I cannot speak nor lift my arms nor move my legs nor turn away. The son lies heavily on me, and so the night passes. Over and over he rapes me. He licks my nipples, and pushes his tongue into my mouth. I can’t even move my head to the side. In-between times he lies back and chats companionably about his work. He talks of his European wife. I am totally unable to move, and feel a huge ball of urine swelling. I am longing to go to the toilet but I can’t lift myself up. Around five the son looks at the clock and says he has to get to work. He showers and leaves. Dimly in my mind is the thought that I have to get to the airport. With immense will I manage to get up, use the toilet, and somehow pack, and go through all the motions necessary to leaving a country. I feel I have no bones, it is just determination holding me up.
I remember nothing about arriving at the airport in my host country, but I remember my regular taxi driver speaking angrily. “I called your name again and again,” he says. “You walked right by me.” My husband and children are not at home because it’s Christmas and I have to unlock the house. I stand within, knowing my husband has locked the interior doors, but I cannot remember where he put the keys. I have to call him in Europe and hear the amazement in his voice. With the keys in my hand I stand before the bedroom but I cannot open it. All I can think of is the absolutely necessity of lying down. In the end I call the guard to open the door. “But it is unlocked,” he says. “And anyway there is no key for this door.” I sleep for hours.
Over the next few days, I realise that a “date rape” drug was put into the wine. I understand that this is why the two men took so long to come to the hotel; they were looking for a bar with a corruptible manager. I remember the strange reticence of the young waiter. I feel the son must be a serial rapist.
I take an HIV and other tests at the clinic. It is all very expensive and time consuming. The rape has left another lasting legacy. I’m afraid to be touched. I don’t like people hugging me. However, my husband and I draw even closer. Without his love I don’t know how I could have managed.
I didn’t report the rape to the police because I had to leave the country straight away. After I finished the counsultancy, I reported it to the agency I was working for. (The delay was because I wanted my work to be judged on its merits alone.) In response, the agency revised its written advice for employees and visiting consultants. Now it warns them about the dangers of spiked drinks and, if the worst should happen, the importance of getting an immediate HIV-prevention kit. My contact, a woman, spent a lot of time talking to me. This meant the world to me. I believe development agencies should always have at least one person briefed on country-specific advice about how to protect oneself and what to do if a sexual assault should happen: doctor’s names and contact details, named police officers and named agency staff. This should be provided in a clear written document to all employees and consultants.
The image I caught so often in my hands, delighting in my mother’s ridiculous prancing, isn’t golden anymore. It seems to already lie on the ground. The edges have curled up and the colours seem brownish now, like a tea-stain is spreading across it. I still see my mother’s legs whirling among the shadows on the sunlit road, and I know she is calling, but for some reason the sound is switched off. I know now what it means to peer through a glass darkly; I can’t rub away the dirt.
I remember Matthew called his daughter Charity. I remember he gave his first born son my father’s name. I remember my mother loved Matthew. I am not the only one betrayed. The son has betrayed my father and mother, his sister, and his father’s loving heart.
Matthew’s name has been changed.
Do you have a secret aid worker story you’d like to tell? You can contact us confidentially at globaldevpros@theguardian.com – please put “Secret aid worker” in the subject line.
Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow @GuardianGDP on Twitter.
