CARIMAC Times 2016: The JREAM Edition Journalists Reviving Awareness of what Matters | Page 35

T

he children are alive with the energy
of youth. On their playground of
sand, they run and leap, they slip
and stumble, they fight and fall.

This is why this interviewer did not
question the web of cuts etched into 14-yearold *Christina Mallory’s hands. But one day,
she took the knife and cut her hands as she
casually continued her conversation with the
chef, until he turned, saw, and snapped at her.
Mallory’s action signified much deeper wounds.
For her, and many other children at Strathmore,
they bear the internal scars of abuse, aggression,
and neglect.
Christina Mallory’s story
When I asked Marvia Sterling**, a supervisor
at the children’s home for 14 years, what she
thought of Mallory, she scoffed and said:
“Mallory only care about man and baby.”
However, Mallory cared for many things, but
school was not one of them.
“On weekdays, while the other children attended
school, I would find Mallory lying down inside
the girls’ dormitory or outside, sitting and
chatting with other girls her age who claimed
to be sick or too tired for school.
“She doesn’t love school, whenever you send her
to school, she go[es] and rest[s] her head on the
desk and she tell[s] you that school is boring,
and she can’t bother,” Sterling continued, “so
even if she go[es] into the classroom, she’ll sleep,
sleep, sleep for the whole day and do nothing.”

Sterling said Mallory came to Strathmore for
various reasons, but she refused to reveal
them. Without expression, Mallory said she
was placed in the home because gunmen had
broken into her house and raped her.
Most of the time, Mallory bristled with energy.
She loved to sing and dance and dreamed of
becoming a singer.
Like all the children, she was fascinated by
phones, which are only given for specific
and approved purposes. Mallory requested
to borrowing this interviewer’s phone. She
scanned Facebook profiles of girls who shared
her name, commenting on their attractiveness,
their fashion choices, and their posts.
But the women Mallory admires the most are
the ones in her family. Her face became excited,
her pitch high, and the rhythm of her speech
fast as she showed profiles of her foster mother,
birth mother, and grandmother. She boasted
of how youthful and attractive her family looks,
especially her biological mother, whom she
claimed is 25, and has four other children, of
whom Mallory was the oldest.
But on other days, Mallory bitterly said she
hated her mother, adding that her mother
does not care for her. In the one rare moment
she mentioned her father, but there was little
resentment in her tone. Just minutes after
saying her father had raped her mother, Mallory
expressed the desire to see him.
“Just ‘cause ah rape don’t mean mi ago mek
[let] that ruin mi relationship with mi father,”
she said.

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