Meeting Fatuma

She was standing alone at a temporary bus stop on Hazen Drive in Concord, N.H., waiting for the shuttle that would take her downtown for a rally featuring President Barack Obama and former president Bill Clinton. She looked very young, very black and very beautiful and she stood shivering in jeans, stylish boots, a shirt and blazer, in weather only in the 40s. I describe myself as an independent voter, but with a rare chance to see two presidents at once, I had come to the same bus stop with a group of friends to attend the rally and we struck up a conversation with the shivering young woman. My friend Miriam offered to lend her a spare down coat, which she gratefully accepted, donned and pulled tight around her body. Her name was Fatuma, she said, in perfect but accented English, and she was originally from Uganda. Only as we stood together in the interminable line to get in to the rally did I learn the rest of her story. She had been in the country for five years, and had been a citizen for one. She was 27. She had come from a small village in Uganda that was so insular some people never left it, but she had gone on to university and had graduated with a degree in communications and journalism. She went to work for a publication where she had done a major story on corruption in Uganda and the aftermath had forced her to leave the country – and everyone she knew, including all of her family. Supporters had provided her with some money and, along with some of her own savings, she took it and headed for America, alone, with only the name of a friend of a friend who might be willing to provide her a place to stay. The friend of the friend did provide a place, but along with it came travails she was reluctant to discuss, and she ended up having to leave. She was now living on her own in an apartment in Lowell, working for Visiting Nurses and hoping to go back to school to become a nurse. She was also working her heart out as a volunteer for people she believed in, like Obama and Democratic Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. She wanted to support people who believed in women’s rights, she said. She stood slightly in front of us at the rally, which turned out to be so large (14,000 people, the largest political rally ever held in New Hampshire) that none of us ever actually saw the two speakers. But we could see her – all five feet or so of her – and how she held her smart phone above the crowd to capture the scene and the important words coming through the speakers and how she jumped with enthusiasm at a phrase that captured her hopes and how she held up her small arms and waved her support across the masses of people between her and the speakers. After the rally, when a shuttle dropped us off at the same parking lot, we all hugged her goodbye, smitten with her youth, her courage and her conviction. I plugged her cell phone and email address into my phone and told her we would have her for dinner. She said she’d love that. But not as much, I think, as we will love having her.