unintentional research

“Rachel, doesn’t your husband get angry with you, spending so much time out here with us?” queried Rosemary.

I paused, smiled. “What husband would that be?”

“You aren’t MARRIED?” several women asked incredulously.

“No,” I replied. “I prefer to do what I think is important to me.”

“Well, but you MUST have CHILDREN,” came next among the murmurs.

“No children, not for me,” I replied.

Trying to puzzle it out, they looked at me. “But you are beautiful,” Rosemary stated, dragging out the beautiful like it was truer because of taking longer to pronounce. And as if being beautiful made sex and pregnancy inevitable.

It was all I could do not to break out laughing, but I didn’t have quite enough time. “How old are you?” someone piped up from the back.

This is my favorite inevitable question. “How old do you THINK I am?” I returned.

Quiet guesses, speculation bubbled up in discussion. Consensus rested around 24-25.

This time I did laugh. “I’m 33.”

“AH! But then you should have at least six kids! I’m 44 and I have ten!” came the assertion from one of the women sitting across from me. There was a lot of nodding in agreement. I think my uterus might have spasmed in horror at the thought.

I turned to the instigator. “Rosemary, how many kids do YOU have?”

“Two,” she stated, somewhat sadly. “But I want ten.” She emphasized the ten with a definitive certainty.

“Why ten?” I asked.

A glimpse of reality smacked me through her words. “One to fetch water, one to tend the garden, one to wash the laundry, one to look after the littler ones, one to cook, one to clean the courtyard, one to watch the goats…and a few to take care of me when I get AIDS and get sick and die,” she replied. It was as if she was telling me how to add two and two and get four. And sucking the air out of me in the process.

The prevalence rates for HIV in the Caprivi are 47.8% for people over the age of 25. Forty-seven point eight percent. Even the methodological arguments I have with the study that shows this are hardly enough to salve the feeling of creeping horror that comes in, walking around up here, looking at every other person. Every other person.

I’ve started doing some small quizzes in workshops to test local knowledge of HIV. Because if you listen to Bill Gates and lots of other do-gooders trying to fight HIV in Africa, you’d think it was simple. If people just KNEW and if condoms were easily available, a big part of the fight would be won. I wonder if this is really true. So in my own small way, I’ve started trying to find out.

The first time I tested this idea was at a two-day training on HIV for conservancy committee representatives. Their first responsibility might be conservation of natural resources, but around here you can’t really NOT talk about HIV. Sitting with the coordinator of women’s issues for the local conservation organization – marginality of these issues fully apparent – I floated a quick idea. “Why don’t we give them a quick quiz now to see what they know, and then repeat it after the workshop to see what changes?”

We handed out small sheets of paper to be filled out anonymously and ten questions were read out about HIV. Most of them were true or false, like, condoms prevent the spread of HIV. Things that, in my view, would be enough to protect yourself if you could answer them (and act on them) correctly.

I graded them, and later, we talked about the answers people had given. And the thing is, they were mostly right. Granted, I had to explain – welcome to a crash course in educational epidemiology – how an HIV-positive couple could have an HIV-free baby, but I think I managed well enough. Being me, though, I couldn’t help myself.

“It looks to me like we all pretty much know about condoms,” I stood up and said, in a workshop whose purpose was, in large part, to teach people how to use both male and female condoms. Complete with a dildo, a plastic vagina, and demonstrations. “So why don’t we use them?”

I’d taken a flyer, not expecting anyone to say much of anything. But a young man responded quickly. “Sometimes you see a beautiful woman, you want to make sex with her right away and get her pregnant so she won’t leave you,” he stated. Echoes of the certain feeling of two plus two equals four jingled in the space between us. I was stunned.

People laughed a little. They offered other localized explanations. Rumors circulated about condoms – they had worms, the lubrication on them wasn’t good, it sticks to your skin (someone told me this but I’ve never tired so I’m not sure). We don’t like to eat a sweet that’s wrapped in plastic, someone said. Women don’t feel anything when you have sex with a condom, a man told me. And how many of you are mostly concerned about what she’s feeling, I wanted so badly to ask.

The next time I ran the quiz, it was with a group made entirely of women. And the follow-up conversation shifted a great deal. It went from, “we don’t like…” to “the men don’t like…” Which made it that much more easy to realize that it wasn’t about knowledge, but power. Power to choose when to have sex, and with whom, and how. The women I sat with that day – even those who are illiterate – know about how a condom is supposed to work. They get it. They just do not have the ability to choose to use them, even if they understand. But they are curious and soon turned the tables on me, with fountains of questions that I answered simply and clearly. Did it matter? I have no idea.

The other side of this, however, is babies. Having children is one of the most important signs of culturally appropriate behavior one can offer. This is why so many of the women I work with are shocked at my childlessness. Because you can be poor, you can be unemployed, your husband or boyfriend can beat you, but you can have a baby strapped to your back. Without one, you are no one. A friend of mine recently reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver’s observation in “The Poisonwood Bible,” that babies are the only new thing anyone ever sees around here. An exaggeration in an area increasingly flooded with new shoes from China, perhaps, but an apt one nonetheless. So even women who are HIV-positive and get on treatment, well, the first thing they do when their viral loads drop is have a baby.

Which brings me back to Rosemary. HIV is increasingly seen as inevitable. You have to have sex, to have babies, to survive, to manage the labor of daily life, so that you can have someone to look after you while you die. A professor of mine in grad school once talked about how culture has the tendency to turn back in on itself, to distort itself into consequences that are perhaps unintended but no less problematic. And nowhere else has this been more clear than in these past months here in the Caprivi.