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ZURI POV

  I grimace as I rub the dry and cracking spots on my sore fingers. I am tired, but I won't complain. 

Coming to the big city was the best chance to make money for my brothers and sisters, but the work isn't easy. 

Every day I clean and scrub the boss lady's house until I can't find a dirty spot, but the next day I have to do it all over again. My boss lady is fair to me. She pays me good money and she gives me a small room. I am able to send a good amount of money home to my younger siblings. 

Other house girls don't have it as good as I do. Many of them have to share cramped living spaces and don't get paid as well as I do.

But that might be because I am an oddity among everyone else. 

My mother was from the dying Batwa tribe. I am abnormally tall for people from my mother's tribe, but that is because I am only half Batwa. My mother was pretty sure my father was a man from the Dinka Tribe. A group of people known for their height. So I am an abnormal person from a tiny tribe. Which makes me a rare find. My boss lady is also originally from Uganda and liked the fact she would be helping a member of my mother's tribe so she hired me. 

  My ancestral tribe lived primarily in the forests among the mountains of southwestern Uganda before they were forced out by the Government. Now they are a struggling group of people who barely have enough to eat.

The Batwa tribe went from having the forest to provide for them to having nothing. Even though my mother and I didn't live with the tribe she prayed to Nyagaasan to help them so many times before she died. 

  I sigh again before laying down on my small bed. I close my eyes and picture my siblings' smiling faces. They give me strength each day. They are the reason I keep going. I have been more tired than usual lately and my joints have been sore. My chest has also been hurting, which isn't normal. The work I do is hard on my body, but I am not unfamiliar with hard work. I have worked in fields my entire life. So these pains aren't normal for me. That's why getting up has been a struggle. But when I find I am having a hard time I just think of them. They motivate me. 

******

  I wipe my brows before leaning against the wooden wall. I feel dizzy. My hands can't seem to grip the broom well this morning. 

"Zuri, you okay," boss lady asks as she walks into the room. 

She is older and seems to have taken a big liking to me and not just because of my tribe's name.

In the six months I have worked for her now we have had many talks about about our families. I was very lucky I knocked on her door looking for work. Others had turned me away, but she didn't. 

I try to smile at her. I try to say I am fine, but my words get lost in my throat. Small black dots begin to cloud my field of vision and soon the room slips from view. 

*******

I groan as I begin to wake up. My body feels sore especially my chest and my eyelids are heavy like I have been sleeping for a long time. 

  "Zuri... Zuri can you hear me," a male voice says and I nod even though my eyes are still closed. 

I can hear him. He doesn't need to shout. 

"Ahh good. Good. Zuri, I am Dr. Dembe... Are you still awake," he asks and I force my eyes open. 

I don't find his face but after a few blinks I can focus on the room I am in. It isn't very bright, but it is big. There are many beds spaced out in it, around six or seven, with people who look sick in them. Dembe is a doctor he said... this must be a hospital. I've never been in a hospital before. 

"Zuri," he says drawing my attention back to the sound of his voice. 

I peel my eyes off the beds and the people to find a middle-aged man watching me from a chair next to the bed I am lying in. He doesn't look any different from a normal man, but he is holding a clipboard and his face looks serious. 

"Hello, it is good to meet you, Zuri. How are you feeling," he asks and I try to answer him but the dryness in my throat catches my words. 

  He notices the problem right away and picks up a small clear cup from a table next to my bed. 

"Here. Fresh water will help," he says and I take the cup. 

I drink it down slower than my body would like, but I want to give myself time to gather my thoughts. The last thing I can remember is sweeping at my boss lady's house and feeling dizzy. I must have passed out. She somehow got me to the hospital. 

When the water is all gone I give him my attention again. 

"I feel sore," I say to answer his question from before. 

He nods as if that answer is what he expected. He looks over my face with calculating eyes before saying anything else. 

"You have been asleep for two days. Your body was tired. You have been fighting an invisible sickness for a long time and it finally caught up to you," he says quickly and I grow scared. 

"What sickness," I ask and he clicks his pen. 

He looks down at his paper instead of answering me. 

"We will get to that shortly. Zuri, have you used drugs in the past," he asks in a no-nonsense way and I shake my head. 

"No. Never," I answer and he nods while writing something. 

"Do you have unprotected sex often," he asks and I shake my head again. 

"No," I answer. 

My mother died young from getting the sickness. She earned her money from sex. I was always too scared to do that line of work. I chose to be a maid instead. I earn my money through labor. I don't look down on my mother for her choice. She provided food for us while many of our people were suffering from malnutrition. 

My people didn't have many options after being forced from our home and she moved into a medium size city so she could earn money. She had me a short time after. Then she had my brothers and then my two sisters. She didn't stay with the tribe. She tried to make a better life for herself. She told us stories about where we were from and we visited her father twice before he died. She tried her best. I am proud to be her daughter, but modesty is important and many look down on her line of work. 

"Okay... well Zuri, I can't say this nicely so I will just say it. You have Aids. It's an incurable disease that makes you more susceptible to infection. It begins with HIV. We can treat HIV with medications and keep you rather healthy, but Aids is different. It can't be treated as well as HIV," he says and my eyes become blurry. 

  Warm tears slide down my face and a buzzing sound fills my ears. I got Mama's sickness. I will die young. I will die an unmarried virgin and my younger siblings won't have my help anymore. I barely got to live. What will they do without me? 

"My mama had that," I manage to whisper and the doctor sighs. 

  "She probably gave it to you during childbirth then. I am sorry, Zuri. We can give you medicine, but as it stands you have a virus in your lungs right now. The Aids is making it worse," Dembe says and I nod. 

I still can't see him. My tears are too thick. But I understand what he is saying. I am sick and I don't have much time left. All my hard work means nothing now. My brothers and sisters won't have my protection for much longer. I probably won't even see them again. They all work too. They harvest and plant the fields next to our small house. They sell food when we have enough to sell. They can't come all the way here. That would be a waste. I am hundreds of miles away from them. I traveled to South Africa for work. I will die here in this big city, alone. 

"Aids is common down here," I whisper and I faintly see Dembe shake his head. 

"It used to be an epidemic. But medicine has come a long way. If caught early many people go on to live long lives," Dembe says forgetting that isn't the case for me at all. 

  I have Aids. It wasn't caught early for me. The sickness everyone fears is in my body.