A journey toward healing fraught with pain, irony
| Saturday, Nov 14 2009 08:36 PM
Last Updated Saturday, Nov 14 2009 08:36 PM
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For 10 years, Franzisca Nzau gazed upon the face of African chaos. Widowed mothers, orphaned children, raped girls, tortured men: a continent paralyzed by catastrophic dysfunction seemed to assemble at her humble doorstep daily. She was not equipped to offer much more in response than meager rations of food, soothing words and barbed-wire sanctuary.
But by 2004 Nzau was too sick to care for the refugees of Kakuma. Her lupus had become unmanageable; her doctor, who lacked the technology and background to treat the incurable auto-immune disease, urged her to leave the adobe-and-tent city of 73,000 in northwestern Kenya. For nearly half her adult life, she had cared for the persecuted and malnourished refugees of Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Burundi, Uganda and the Congo, but the mission of the United Nations Commission on Refugees would have to be left to others. She had a life to save: her own.
She arrived in the United States in June 2004 on a medical visa, landing in Southern California. Doctors at UCLA directed her to Bakersfield's Kern Medical Center, with whom they have a working relationship. At KMC, physicians tried an assortment of treatments and medications in their ongoing attempts to control the disease's periodic flare ups and pervasive joint damage.
And by 2009, their work seemed to have paid off. Nzau was beginning to see results. In September she decided she was well enough to work while she continued treatment, and she landed a job as an independent consultant selling Mary Kay Cosmetics.
"Women of all complexions, too," Nzau says. "Caucasian, dark skin like mine, everyone. And I would tell them about God. I would work on their inside and their outside -- the holistic approach." On occasion, customers even joined her at Garden Community Church.
She was walking to a morning consultation appointment at about quarter till 9 on Oct. 19, when she came to the intersection of M Street and 23rd Street, at the spot where 23rd transitions into a freeway -- eastbound Highway 178. The road was clear as she stepped into the crosswalk. California Highway Patrol Officer Lenny Dehart, turning east from M Street onto 178, didn't see her in the blinding morning sun. The impact of his cruiser meeting Nzau's hips cracked both sides of her pelvis and snapped her right clavicle.
A month later, she is still recovering at the Health South rehabilitation hospital in Bakersfield. Her attorney, Milt Younger, says that the CHP has been helpful and cooperative thus far, but that Nzau will need extended care and therapy, in part because the broken clavicle may prevent her from using a walker.
Dehart, Nzau says, has visited twice, including once with his family.
Few will miss the irony of a 44-year-old woman surviving the nonstop turmoil, danger and disease of lawless northeast Africa, followed by the ravages of an often-fatal disease, only to be struck down in a crosswalk by a symbol of order and authority. A good man, too, by all accounts: "He is very nice, and he prays for me," Nzau says.
Bitterness? Clearly she has no time for it, a fact her minister at Garden Community Church notes with some awe.
"It's remarkable, all the joy she has, given the fact she's been exposed to difficult personal days and the suffering of the world," David Goh says. "I appreciate the giving heart she's had in serving others ... and her ability to retain a personal glow despite all of this."
"All of this" started even before she went to work for the United Nations Commission on Refugees, even before she attended the University of Nairobi, where she earned degrees in counseling and theology, in addition to a teacher's certificate.
Nzau grew up in the town of Machakos, Kenya, the fourth of 10 children. She lost two of her brothers and both of her parents while she was still young -- three of them to disease or illness and one to an auto accident. "Most of the illnesses that kill in Africa don't kill people here," Nzau says. "If I had experienced this accident in Africa, I would be dead."
Her mother was a city councilwoman. As for her father, she's not sure -- the family didn't talk much about him. But together they ably farmed 10 acres, supplying their own table and then some, and they kept 40 goats.
Nzau was still a university student when she went to work for the U.N. in 1995, focusing on women, unaccompanied children and torture victims. The goal, in most cases, was to prepare refugees for eventual repatriation to their home countries. To effect that, Nzau introduced children to the encamped elders of their own respective ethnicities, so that when they were finally able to leave the concertina wire-enclosed city of huts, "they wouldn't be strangers" in their own countries.
One such boy was a 12-year-old Ethiopian named Mandela. The boy's mother, a schizophrenic, had committed suicide and his older sister had disappeared somewhere among the 2 million residents of Nairobi.
"We became very close," Nzau says. "But one day he disappeared, and I learned he had gone to Nairobi to look for his sister, who worked as a housekeeper. I went to the Ethiopian community there to look for him. And I found him."
She visited Mandela in Nairobi, some 250 miles away, as often as she could, utilizing the U.N.'s frequent flights between the sprawling camp and Kenya's capital city. Eventually, Mandela moved to Norway and was adopted by a Norwegian family.
"He is very driven, and he wants to be a doctor," says Nzau, who has not communicated with the boy -- now a young man -- since she came to the United States. "I believe him. I believe he will be a doctor."
And when he does, Nzau will have made another contribution to the healing she seems intent on bringing to this world.
Now, if she could only heal herself.
E-mail Robert Price at rprice@bakersfield.com.
