Free The Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara

terrible injuries. The only consistent thing in begging was that very few people dared to look me in the eyes. I learned to fix my gaze on the ground until someone dropped some leones in my black plastic bag. Then I’d raise my eyes to say thank you before quickly lowering them again.
    Ibrahim, Mohamed, Adamsay, and I used whatever money we collected to buy a bottle of water from the market to share. Mohamed, being Mohamed, always looked at the bright sideof our lives.
    “You remember that woman in front of the bus station who talked to you, Mariatu?” he said one day.
    I nodded. A tall, skinny woman wearing a navy blue skirt and white blouse had asked me, “Where’s your family? Where do you live now? Why did they cut off your hands?”
    Like I always did when someone posed these questions, I had thought to myself, “Why do you want to know? It’s not as if my story is any different from that of all the other girls in Freetown with no hands because of the war.” But I still answered the woman.
    “My mom is back in our village,” I said. “I live at the hospital now, with my cousins. I don’t know why the rebels cut off my hands.”
    The woman put 25,000 leones into my black bag. It was a fortune, the most money I had ever made in one day by begging.
    “I think she wanted to adopt you,” Mohamed said now, winking at me. “I know you will be the one, Mariatu,” he added. “I know it will be you.”
    Mohamed meant that I’d be the one among the four of us to be taken in by a rich family. We’d been in the hospital for about a month, and rumors circulated everywhere that there were wealthy people, both in Freetown and in far-off countries, who adopted children who had been injured in the war.
    At first, I hadn’t known what this word
adoption
meant. But Mohamed explained that it was no different from the way my mother and father had sent me to live with Marie. I allowed myself to daydream a tiny bit about what life would be like as a daughter in another family, a wealthy family: nice clothes, foodwhenever I wanted it, safety, and sleep-filled nights—all the things we had in Magborou.
    Then the horrible words I was greeted with at least once a day broke into my thoughts.
    “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU, BEGGAR GIRL?”
    A minibus called a poda-poda was speeding by. A couple of teenage boys leaned out the window, taunting me.
    “Can you even feed yourself?” one called out.
    “Guess you were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the other yelled. “Now someone will have to look after you for the rest of your life.”
    I kept my head down, pretending I couldn’t hear. But the words were like a knife stabbing into my heart. A thick knot filled my throat. I wanted to kill myself again.
    “Why did this have to happen to me?” I raged inside.

CHAPTER 9
    I knew that when our bandages came off and were replaced with thin plastic strips, or big Band-Aids, to keep the wounds clean, we would have to leave the hospital. I thought we’d be returning to Magborou, which frightened me. The rebels! What if they were still prowling the countryside? The hospital staff worried about this too. They told Abibatu that we could move to a camp called Aberdeen, set up in Freetown to accommodate people injured in the war.
    It wasn’t safe to return to Port Loko either, so Fatmata helped Abibatu make the arrangements for our move to Aberdeen. She agreed to live with us for a while and help me when the baby arrived. I was excited. I looked forward to the move and the chance for us all to be sleeping under the same roof.
    One rainy day, as Adamsay, Mohamed, Ibrahim, and I returned to the hospital from begging, a young man with a wide smile and a chubby face met us at the front door. He looked familiar, and for good reason: he was Mohamed’s uncle Abdul. Mohamed jumped right into his arms.
    Abdul lived in Freetown, and he explained that he’d seen Mohamed’s name on a Red Cross list of people displaced fromtheir villages that was