Regine Dubono

Regine Dubono was raised by her crippled grandmother, whose bed she shared at night. The reason for that was that her mother found her too difficult to live with as she did not like to take directions and instructions, and also because her grandmother needed personal care. So Regine escorted her every day to the kitchen where she cooked delicious meals for any visitor on a coal stove, which Regine helped light and vent. Her grandma, Aziza, had asthma and Regine learned how to apply inverted round glasses with a lit cotton to her back. ANd when Aziza had an absess the visiting MD entrusted her with cleaning and filling the wound with sterile cotton.

She formed in her mind a very special image of the MD, as a friend who came to his patients in their own homes, a creative and kind person, a real healer. She aspired to be an MD.

Her grand mother's home was also the home of one of her sons, uncle Babe (Albert) who paid the bills, and to whom Aziza used to cry to every time she needed some extra money to help someone else, like the distant cousin who came every lunch to cry over the treatment she received from her new lover. And Regine learned that a woman had to lie down near her fiancé when he wanted her to. It was her duty, just to lie there quietly.

Regine was a truant in school, taking excuses such as "My cat had a fever" to skip class that day, and experiencing the laughter of the entire class when the teacher read the excuse note which she had signed in the name of her grandmother.

Things changed drastically when her family moved to Nice, France. France had conceded Tunisia her freedom, and the new government took all her father's properties, including the magnificent round mansion, with 5 foot thick stone edges he had built as a vacation home in Kheredin, and where regine had run her puppet theatre for the kids on the beach, using the money collected from tickets to reward the audience with free candy, every summer, and which the Tunisian government annexed as a national library.