A small knock rattled the door. Another visitor, I thought. Great. I hadn’t had a moment’s peace since arriving. I’m still something of a curiosity in my sister’s husband’s village in rural Zimbabwe, and I was staying in the newly built rondavel (round, hut-like house) across the dirt road from his family’s main complex. So I was a curiosity and fair game, especially for the teenage girls living in the area.
Sighing, I opened the door. I’d seen her before but we had not actually spoken. She was slight, sinewy, and radiated bashfulness. But there was something else, something hard about her, that made me realize she might not bend if pushed.
She greeted me. I greeted her. Then we waited. The wind blew cool under the graying, cloud-thick sky.
“Is there something you want?” I asked, playing, but also tired.
“Yes,” she stated. “Sweets.”
This was how I met Tsitsi. Tsitsi, whose mother died when she was just a baby. Whose father (my sis’ uncle-in-law) passed away a few months ago. Whose aunt found her in a nearby village, going from house to house looking for food, a place to sleep, a glint of affection or even just interest. Whose time was spent herding cattle – something girls generally don’t do – but wishing she was in school. And whose quiet, unassuming ways still allowed glimpses of the flint behind her eyes.
I didn’t know a thing about her when she first stood at my door. But over the next few days, I learned. And my sis told me that Tsitsi was in danger of not going to school, because those relatives who were looking out for her already had school fees to pay for others and little money with which to do it. Her uncle’s pension, for example, is 10,000 Zim dollars a month – but the bus fare to town to collect it is 40,000. One US dollar, by the way, gets about 15,000 Zim dollars on the black market. School fees are 600,000 a term, but they spiral all the time as money becomes more and more worthless.
So the night before we left, we called Tsitsi back to my little rondavel. My sis told her that from now on, she didn’t have to worry about school fees, because I was going to take care of her. She wouldn’t have to borrow old uniforms from schoolmates, because I would buy one for her. As long as she was in school and trying to do better, I would help her. The child sat between us on the bed, and when she spoke she seemed only able to look at her feet. “I’m confused. I don’t know if what I’m hearing is true. I don’t really know who Rachel is, where she comes from. But I just want to thank the God who made her.”
The next morning we took Tsitsi to town with us, and drove her to my sis’ brother’s house so that his wife could help her shop. Tsitsi’s small bag was in the back of our car; my sis had just given it to her the night before. But all it contained was a wet dress. It was the only other dress she had, so she had washed it the night before to bring it along. I had been trying all week not to be overly emotional about where I was and what I was seeing – the funerals, the living conditions, the cobra at the side of the footpath that nearly struck me, the hard labor of just getting by – because for me it was all tempered with the affection and welcome of people who didn’t know me at all. But the wet dress did me in. I went back out to the car, got my wallet, and took out the rest of the rands (South African currency) in it so they could also be exchanged and so that Tsitsi could also get some other clothes, a decent pair of shoes. My sis explained to her sister-in-law, who would take Tsitsi shopping after the holiday weekend, what she needed. “And if there is extra money, just…”
I cut her off. “No extra money,” I said. “Spend it all. If you get what she needs and there is still more, just let her choose some things. I don’t care what. I just don’t want it back.” I swallowed what felt like a swelling tumor in my throat. Tsitsi shyly hugged me in the driveway and my sis made her promise to study hard.
When the family was told that I would be taking responsibility for Tsitsi, they had all thanked me again and again. “It will be announced at school!” one of them declared.
“I don’t care about that,” I said, “Please don’t do anything that will embarrass her.”
“It will be called the Dr. Rachel DeMotts Scholarship for…” he continued.
“Really, please,” I said. “Don’t do that.”
He pushed. So I said, “If you must call it something, then name it for my grandmother, Mavis Johnson.”
So the money for Tsitsi because the Mavis Johnson Bursary. My grandmother passed away 20 years ago. We still call her the little hornet. I suppose I thought of her so quickly because there was something familiar in Tsitsi – a pinch of stubborn, but a sure and loyal warmth.
But when I came back and talked to a friend about Tsitsi, she told me I had better not get my hopes up for the girl, that she’d probably be pregnant within a year or two. Her pessimism (and the lurking views of Africans underneath it) was a bitter earful and I felt like she was warning me not to care, like I’d been foolish somehow, that I had better not really get invested or I’d be disappointed. But from my point of view, what I’d done wasn’t about me or my hopes or getting credit. I just thought that if I could make it possible for a 14-year-old girl to stop worrying about whether she would be able to go to school, then I should. It was simple. Like a wet dress, and having a dry one.
Monday, April 16, 2007
spatial politics
When ordering my business cards a while back (and I do mean a while), I found out that I was hired under a line for spatial policy under the governance unit. I didn’t really want ‘spatial policy’ on my business cards, so I changed it to simply ‘governance.’ But last week in Zimbabwe, I got an unexpected lesson about spatial politics anyway.
I went with my honorary older sister to visit her family. So I spent the better part of a week a couple of hours’ drive from anything that should really be considered a road. My sis’ family lives in a village with no electricity and only a few boreholes for water. I hadn’t really asked for details when she said we’d go visit for Easter. But somehow, even considering the places I’ve been, I wasn’t quite prepared.
See, besides the fact that I wanted to spend time with her mom especially, who has made gifts for me even though we’ve never met, I wanted insights. I wanted to understand how it is that Mugabe is still in power, how he can beat and arrest and release and abuse and arrest and release the leader of the MDC (the opposition party) time and again without people refusing to take it any more. It was bad when I was in Zim five years ago. Now, inflation is up to 1600% and food shortages are looming again. The back of every road sign we passed for hundred of kilometers had "MDC" spray-painted on it in shaky white letters. But what I really wanted to know was, how are people surviving in country that prints money with an expiration date on it?
I got several kinds of answers that apply to the space beyond the cities. One, Zimbabwe is fertile; if you have land, you have a decent shot at making something grow on it – even if it’s only enough to scrape by. So people out in the villages have multiple crops and hopefully some livestock or chickens to keep things going. But the second was more insidious. Sitting on the steps of the house at night in the quiet, there was no radio buzzing in the background. No blue glow of the TV. No version of last week’s newspaper on the table. Though to be fair, the only papers left in Zimbabwe are government propaganda anyway. But it was clear to me that apart from word of mouth, information was not available. And then we talked about elections.
Elections in Zimbabwe are a joke. Intimidation is rampant; people are told that there are cameras watching them and if they don’t vote ZANU-PF (Mugabe’s good squad) “we will KNOW…” But people are hungry. And just before the polls open, ZANU-PF tends to show up in villages with food. They hand it out, a gift from your government. But the thing is, the food comes from abroad – from USAID, from the UN’s World Food Programme – and it was meant to be delivered without political strings. So in the end, those ‘helping’ acts of donations are actually supporting the continued brutality of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, he of the goob-of-a-mustache and raging paranoid storm of an ego.
My sis’ husband’s father thinks the end is near. “You look over there and see death. Over there too, it’s death. So the end is coming.” I hope so. But I hope it’s a different kind of end.
I went with my honorary older sister to visit her family. So I spent the better part of a week a couple of hours’ drive from anything that should really be considered a road. My sis’ family lives in a village with no electricity and only a few boreholes for water. I hadn’t really asked for details when she said we’d go visit for Easter. But somehow, even considering the places I’ve been, I wasn’t quite prepared.
See, besides the fact that I wanted to spend time with her mom especially, who has made gifts for me even though we’ve never met, I wanted insights. I wanted to understand how it is that Mugabe is still in power, how he can beat and arrest and release and abuse and arrest and release the leader of the MDC (the opposition party) time and again without people refusing to take it any more. It was bad when I was in Zim five years ago. Now, inflation is up to 1600% and food shortages are looming again. The back of every road sign we passed for hundred of kilometers had "MDC" spray-painted on it in shaky white letters. But what I really wanted to know was, how are people surviving in country that prints money with an expiration date on it?
I got several kinds of answers that apply to the space beyond the cities. One, Zimbabwe is fertile; if you have land, you have a decent shot at making something grow on it – even if it’s only enough to scrape by. So people out in the villages have multiple crops and hopefully some livestock or chickens to keep things going. But the second was more insidious. Sitting on the steps of the house at night in the quiet, there was no radio buzzing in the background. No blue glow of the TV. No version of last week’s newspaper on the table. Though to be fair, the only papers left in Zimbabwe are government propaganda anyway. But it was clear to me that apart from word of mouth, information was not available. And then we talked about elections.
Elections in Zimbabwe are a joke. Intimidation is rampant; people are told that there are cameras watching them and if they don’t vote ZANU-PF (Mugabe’s good squad) “we will KNOW…” But people are hungry. And just before the polls open, ZANU-PF tends to show up in villages with food. They hand it out, a gift from your government. But the thing is, the food comes from abroad – from USAID, from the UN’s World Food Programme – and it was meant to be delivered without political strings. So in the end, those ‘helping’ acts of donations are actually supporting the continued brutality of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, he of the goob-of-a-mustache and raging paranoid storm of an ego.
My sis’ husband’s father thinks the end is near. “You look over there and see death. Over there too, it’s death. So the end is coming.” I hope so. But I hope it’s a different kind of end.
Friday, March 16, 2007
it's for me
My office phone rang. This is almost notable in itself for several reasons: mostly because it doesn’t happen very often, but also because it’s been changed three times in the last month or so. Apparently we are ‘upgrading’ our ‘system’ here in the hopes it will be closer to possible to make phone calls like normal people. I picked up.
Me: Hello.
Her: Helloooo [crackling sound]
Me: Hello?
Her: Yes, hellooo [more crackling]
This is going to be good, I thought. I have no idea who this is so let’s commence with the niceties expected when answering the phone here. See, you don’t just identify yourself. You greet each other first and carry on a bit. It’s rude to just announce who it is without showing your interest in the other person’s wellbeing.
Me: How are you?
Her: Ah, I’m just fine, mma, how are you?
Me: I’m also fine, mma, thank you.
Her: This is Mma [garbled someone-or-other I couldn’t hear] calling from Main Campus.
Oh, crap. Maybe this isn’t going to be good. Someone actually initiating contact from Gabs is a bad sign. Bad. Now I’m nervous.
Her: And is this Dr. DeMotts?
Me: [oh well] Yes, mma, it is.
Her: Oh, good! How are you?
Me: I’m still fine, mma, thank you.
Her: Oh, good! And this is your extension, number 7239?
Me: Uhhh…yes, mma, it is. [you DID call ME, after all]
Her: Oh, good! Mma, I’m calling all the extensions in the book and checking to be sure they are right. See, we can call you from main campus now!
You have GOT to be kidding me. I choked back a powerful desire to laugh.
Me: Well, mma, yes, that’s pretty great. And good luck with all those phone calls.
Her: Yes, thank you! Thanks, mma.
And she hung up.
Me: Hello.
Her: Helloooo [crackling sound]
Me: Hello?
Her: Yes, hellooo [more crackling]
This is going to be good, I thought. I have no idea who this is so let’s commence with the niceties expected when answering the phone here. See, you don’t just identify yourself. You greet each other first and carry on a bit. It’s rude to just announce who it is without showing your interest in the other person’s wellbeing.
Me: How are you?
Her: Ah, I’m just fine, mma, how are you?
Me: I’m also fine, mma, thank you.
Her: This is Mma [garbled someone-or-other I couldn’t hear] calling from Main Campus.
Oh, crap. Maybe this isn’t going to be good. Someone actually initiating contact from Gabs is a bad sign. Bad. Now I’m nervous.
Her: And is this Dr. DeMotts?
Me: [oh well] Yes, mma, it is.
Her: Oh, good! How are you?
Me: I’m still fine, mma, thank you.
Her: Oh, good! And this is your extension, number 7239?
Me: Uhhh…yes, mma, it is. [you DID call ME, after all]
Her: Oh, good! Mma, I’m calling all the extensions in the book and checking to be sure they are right. See, we can call you from main campus now!
You have GOT to be kidding me. I choked back a powerful desire to laugh.
Me: Well, mma, yes, that’s pretty great. And good luck with all those phone calls.
Her: Yes, thank you! Thanks, mma.
And she hung up.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
maun desperate housewives association
About a month ago I snuck into a very exclusive gathering here in Maun – the book club. My friend Monica, our librarian at the centre, had worked her way in and was hosting, so she invited me. Stupidly, I assumed that reading was involved. “What book are you all reading?” I queried. She laughed. “Oh, Rachel, it’s not really about that…”
It is about white expat women getting together, having a few drinks, and trading copies of books they’ve read. There is no discussion of anything that’s been read. It’s more like a traveling library with booze and snacks. And the library is mostly “chick lit” - books by ‘writers’ like Danielle Steele with flaming pink covers and drawings of skinny women in spiky heels who are always after a man. Or men.
I admit, I went out of a sense of something like arrogant curiosity. What do these mostly South African wives of safari guys talk about? They insulate themselves from life here in their big houses with razor wire, snarling Rhodesian ridgebacks (dogs bred to fight lions), and security systems, coming out to take the kids somewhere or shop at the Safari Spar. I couldn’t imagine.
I went early to help Monica cook and set out the books, which travel from hostess to hostess in a set of lopsided cardboard boxes. The more trashy paperbacks I pulled out, the more I wondered what I would have to say in conversation. Then again, if I were to play the voyeur, it didn’t really matter if I were at a loss for words.
It was a small gathering; apparently word had not made it all the way around to the usual suspects. But about half a dozen women pitched up, dressed in sparkly sandals, cropped pants, topped with carefully styled hair. One woman had brought her kids. But she left them in the car to sleep, with the whole vehicle draped in a mosquito net.
We served carrot salad, spicy chickpeas, basmati rice, pakoras, yogurt dip, and sliced cucumbers. It was more food than usually accompanied the evening’s non-bookish banter. As we settled in, talk revolved around three things.
Food. A lot of this was about weight loss. “It just makes sense not to eat carbs and protein together!” “I lost ten kilos on that diet!” “The gluten in wheat is just not good for you!” And on and on. I had another pakora. And another. They’re made with chickpea flour, after all.
Illness. Here I thought I could relate to the tales of malaria. But I couldn’t get a word in. Not that I tried very hard, mind you. But I felt a bit like I was looked through rather than at. I became quieter. Every time I got up my chair edged back from the circle a bit more, and a bit more. Then, we got onto the subject of HIV. The human resources director of a major local safari company – apparently they were not ALL desperate housewives – held court on the costs of caring for all their employees who are positive. “We have to fly them down here to get their medications, and pay for treatment, and we’re overstaffed by 25% to make up for when people are away or sick, it’s just a huge burden and it’s so expensive! It costs money to fly them down here, and you know they’re only making 700 pula a month anyway [about $115], so we have to pay for them to stay here, and the flights…” There were so many things I wanted to say, simmering quietly in my growing anger. ‘THEY’ are human beings, I thought. And what does it say about your profits if you can overstaff by 25% and still make a shitload of money doing it?
Travel. A truck-driving short-haired woman in boy’s sandals and cargo shorts talked about her upcoming trip to the family farm in South Africa. And a deeply tanned woman in a white miniskirt had just returned from three weeks in Argentina, after having spent the holidays in the Cape before that. Her flights were late getting in, so apparently she did the unthinkable. “I just got my bags and I WALKED OUT of the airport! I mean, you don’t DO that!” She and her husband stayed at a lodge set up mostly for people who wanted to come and hunt birds. They were surrounded by fields of sunflowers – planted, well, to attract birds. I wish she’d stuck to the birds, because her discourse on race relations in the former Spanish colony was even more sickening than the notion of growing gorgeous flowers so birds could be shot. “It’s so much more harmonious than here. I mean, they all speak the same language, it’s one culture, everyone’s white. Or at least not really black.” Silently choking, I pushed back even further. How does someone actually think like that, and then decide it’s ok to let it come out of her mouth? The obliteration and subjugation of indigenous cultures in Latin (case in point) America was no less brutal than it was here. And the idea that speaking Spanish was just naturally what everyone did, well, the parallels with Afrikaans must have utterly escaped her.
But the shopping in Buenos Aires is brilliant, apparently, and oh, it was delightful to hear about how much red meat and wine she consumed. I guess we were back to food after all.
It is about white expat women getting together, having a few drinks, and trading copies of books they’ve read. There is no discussion of anything that’s been read. It’s more like a traveling library with booze and snacks. And the library is mostly “chick lit” - books by ‘writers’ like Danielle Steele with flaming pink covers and drawings of skinny women in spiky heels who are always after a man. Or men.
I admit, I went out of a sense of something like arrogant curiosity. What do these mostly South African wives of safari guys talk about? They insulate themselves from life here in their big houses with razor wire, snarling Rhodesian ridgebacks (dogs bred to fight lions), and security systems, coming out to take the kids somewhere or shop at the Safari Spar. I couldn’t imagine.
I went early to help Monica cook and set out the books, which travel from hostess to hostess in a set of lopsided cardboard boxes. The more trashy paperbacks I pulled out, the more I wondered what I would have to say in conversation. Then again, if I were to play the voyeur, it didn’t really matter if I were at a loss for words.
It was a small gathering; apparently word had not made it all the way around to the usual suspects. But about half a dozen women pitched up, dressed in sparkly sandals, cropped pants, topped with carefully styled hair. One woman had brought her kids. But she left them in the car to sleep, with the whole vehicle draped in a mosquito net.
We served carrot salad, spicy chickpeas, basmati rice, pakoras, yogurt dip, and sliced cucumbers. It was more food than usually accompanied the evening’s non-bookish banter. As we settled in, talk revolved around three things.
Food. A lot of this was about weight loss. “It just makes sense not to eat carbs and protein together!” “I lost ten kilos on that diet!” “The gluten in wheat is just not good for you!” And on and on. I had another pakora. And another. They’re made with chickpea flour, after all.
Illness. Here I thought I could relate to the tales of malaria. But I couldn’t get a word in. Not that I tried very hard, mind you. But I felt a bit like I was looked through rather than at. I became quieter. Every time I got up my chair edged back from the circle a bit more, and a bit more. Then, we got onto the subject of HIV. The human resources director of a major local safari company – apparently they were not ALL desperate housewives – held court on the costs of caring for all their employees who are positive. “We have to fly them down here to get their medications, and pay for treatment, and we’re overstaffed by 25% to make up for when people are away or sick, it’s just a huge burden and it’s so expensive! It costs money to fly them down here, and you know they’re only making 700 pula a month anyway [about $115], so we have to pay for them to stay here, and the flights…” There were so many things I wanted to say, simmering quietly in my growing anger. ‘THEY’ are human beings, I thought. And what does it say about your profits if you can overstaff by 25% and still make a shitload of money doing it?
Travel. A truck-driving short-haired woman in boy’s sandals and cargo shorts talked about her upcoming trip to the family farm in South Africa. And a deeply tanned woman in a white miniskirt had just returned from three weeks in Argentina, after having spent the holidays in the Cape before that. Her flights were late getting in, so apparently she did the unthinkable. “I just got my bags and I WALKED OUT of the airport! I mean, you don’t DO that!” She and her husband stayed at a lodge set up mostly for people who wanted to come and hunt birds. They were surrounded by fields of sunflowers – planted, well, to attract birds. I wish she’d stuck to the birds, because her discourse on race relations in the former Spanish colony was even more sickening than the notion of growing gorgeous flowers so birds could be shot. “It’s so much more harmonious than here. I mean, they all speak the same language, it’s one culture, everyone’s white. Or at least not really black.” Silently choking, I pushed back even further. How does someone actually think like that, and then decide it’s ok to let it come out of her mouth? The obliteration and subjugation of indigenous cultures in Latin (case in point) America was no less brutal than it was here. And the idea that speaking Spanish was just naturally what everyone did, well, the parallels with Afrikaans must have utterly escaped her.
But the shopping in Buenos Aires is brilliant, apparently, and oh, it was delightful to hear about how much red meat and wine she consumed. I guess we were back to food after all.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
march in the delta (clinic)
I absolutely thought it was malaria again – the fever, the aching muscles pulling on aching bones, my increasingly lack of ability to comprehend what was going on around me. Even as I sat on it, I felt like the couch got further and further away. The 104 degree thermometer in my armpit confirmed it. So I called a friend and she took me to the clinic. Malaria, I said, she said. A nurse called the doctor and the next thing I knew I had a handful of little bags – quinine for the malaria, paracetamol for pain and fever, some antibiotic for my guts that was not the loperamide the doctor wanted me to have (“we don’t seem to have any…”). After refusing to be admitted I went home to my friend’s guest room to sweat and hallucinate and shake with wrenching chills while ghostly paperwork flew around the room and my head…manila file folders, pink sheets of paper, envelopes, stacks of things I had done and not done over the previous week haunted me. I must be a nerd if the only things bubbling up when I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep are office supplies.
Anyway, the next day was worse. I threw up the water I was trying to drink, which meant the meds would not stay in my stomach. So back to the hospital we went, and I stayed – even though there was no IV quinine on which to put me, which was the whole point of going in. But then, it’s gastroenteritis, the doctor said, when for a second time they didn’t see malaria in my blood. I was infected with a raging unknown parasite, but he added: “It doesn’t really matter what it is as long as the fever’s coming down.” I was in no shape to argue. Having started the treatment for malaria, I had to finish it or risk developing resistance to it in the future. Quinine, by the way, makes your ears screech while the bitter yellow pills turn your stomach against you. It also wreaks more havoc with your liver than a month of nights at the Maun Sports Bar.
I SMS’d my brother and his wife. “So are you gonna die or what?” he yelled into his cell phone, standing in their kitchen in Italy. The nurses were lovely people but they did not really inspire confidence. Pushing burning antibiotics into my veins every four hours, they seemed to only enter the room when I was in just enough of a stupor to think I might be sleeping. Once I rolled over and my IV tube, hooked into a small bottle of liquid pharmaceutical fire, fell onto the floor. Medicine poured onto the floor. I grabbed for the bottle, twisting it upright while my other arm flailed at the nurse call button. After she stuck the tube back in, I pointed out that at least a third of the bottle was not coursing through me but pooled under the edge of the bed. “Oh, well, that’s too bad, because it’s the last one!” Next, a syringe full of one of the other kinds of antibiotics I was shot full of didn’t want to pour into the IV. So she leaned on the plunger. Hard. The back of my hand swelled with a germinating golf ball of penicillin, my distended vein making my eyes go wide with pain. “Let’s just take this out,” another nurse said softly, later, pulling out the IV needle. And shoving a new one into my inner wrist, so that I could not move my left hand without feeling the drag of the newly embedded needle against tendons and flesh.
I bled into the IV. My guts got me up every hour to go the bathroom. My bed and I slowly took on the smell of my gym bag. My head throbbed and my hips ached with the strain of trying to be absolutely still. I didn’t leave the little room with the indigo-swirled comforter (“It makes me think of water and bugs swimming in it,” said my friend) and pepto-pink door for three nights. I swung at mosquitoes with my dirty flipflop, figuring if I didn’t have malaria when I went in I might well have it by the time I got out.
The fever shrank, but the infection in my guts was unrelenting. Two days in, the doctor commented on my loperamide dosage while doing his morning rounds. “I’m not getting loperamide, you didn’t have any,” I said weakly. “How am I supposed to be taking it?”
“You take a double dose to start, then one more after every time you go to the bathroom,” he said. For the first time I felt despairing tears well up. “They gave me something once yesterday but that was it,” I said. I wasn’t taking the drugs I was supposed to have. No wonder. I have a friend in med school who thinks he wants to be a doctor in Africa. At some point, I remember thinking, maybe I should ask him if he really wants to work under these kinds of conditions. That is, what medication? You mean we should have quinine in stock during prime malaria season? And that there should be a close relationship between what gets written down on a chart and what happens to the patient?
The next day, after nine kinds of medications, half a dozen rotating nurses, three different doctors, the payment equivalent of about forty bucks, and my signature on 34 separate invoices, they let me go home from the Delta Clinic. Mostly I was tired – of more chemicals circulating inside me than blood, of the deafening ring in my ears, of not being able to sleep, of being poked at for what seemed like no reason. But I was also ok. Folks from work had come to visit, called, asked about me. Even the cleaning ladies gushed with relief to see me back in the office, eight days later. And I reminded myself, at least I wasn’t out in the bush. At least I didn’t have a major trip planned. At least my friends were around to look after me. At least I could afford to GO to the hospital. At least, at least. “What the hell were you doin’ in the hospital?” my boss cried over the phone from Gabs when he found out.
Maybe I should have said, I just needed a few days of air conditioning.
Anyway, the next day was worse. I threw up the water I was trying to drink, which meant the meds would not stay in my stomach. So back to the hospital we went, and I stayed – even though there was no IV quinine on which to put me, which was the whole point of going in. But then, it’s gastroenteritis, the doctor said, when for a second time they didn’t see malaria in my blood. I was infected with a raging unknown parasite, but he added: “It doesn’t really matter what it is as long as the fever’s coming down.” I was in no shape to argue. Having started the treatment for malaria, I had to finish it or risk developing resistance to it in the future. Quinine, by the way, makes your ears screech while the bitter yellow pills turn your stomach against you. It also wreaks more havoc with your liver than a month of nights at the Maun Sports Bar.
I SMS’d my brother and his wife. “So are you gonna die or what?” he yelled into his cell phone, standing in their kitchen in Italy. The nurses were lovely people but they did not really inspire confidence. Pushing burning antibiotics into my veins every four hours, they seemed to only enter the room when I was in just enough of a stupor to think I might be sleeping. Once I rolled over and my IV tube, hooked into a small bottle of liquid pharmaceutical fire, fell onto the floor. Medicine poured onto the floor. I grabbed for the bottle, twisting it upright while my other arm flailed at the nurse call button. After she stuck the tube back in, I pointed out that at least a third of the bottle was not coursing through me but pooled under the edge of the bed. “Oh, well, that’s too bad, because it’s the last one!” Next, a syringe full of one of the other kinds of antibiotics I was shot full of didn’t want to pour into the IV. So she leaned on the plunger. Hard. The back of my hand swelled with a germinating golf ball of penicillin, my distended vein making my eyes go wide with pain. “Let’s just take this out,” another nurse said softly, later, pulling out the IV needle. And shoving a new one into my inner wrist, so that I could not move my left hand without feeling the drag of the newly embedded needle against tendons and flesh.
I bled into the IV. My guts got me up every hour to go the bathroom. My bed and I slowly took on the smell of my gym bag. My head throbbed and my hips ached with the strain of trying to be absolutely still. I didn’t leave the little room with the indigo-swirled comforter (“It makes me think of water and bugs swimming in it,” said my friend) and pepto-pink door for three nights. I swung at mosquitoes with my dirty flipflop, figuring if I didn’t have malaria when I went in I might well have it by the time I got out.
The fever shrank, but the infection in my guts was unrelenting. Two days in, the doctor commented on my loperamide dosage while doing his morning rounds. “I’m not getting loperamide, you didn’t have any,” I said weakly. “How am I supposed to be taking it?”
“You take a double dose to start, then one more after every time you go to the bathroom,” he said. For the first time I felt despairing tears well up. “They gave me something once yesterday but that was it,” I said. I wasn’t taking the drugs I was supposed to have. No wonder. I have a friend in med school who thinks he wants to be a doctor in Africa. At some point, I remember thinking, maybe I should ask him if he really wants to work under these kinds of conditions. That is, what medication? You mean we should have quinine in stock during prime malaria season? And that there should be a close relationship between what gets written down on a chart and what happens to the patient?
The next day, after nine kinds of medications, half a dozen rotating nurses, three different doctors, the payment equivalent of about forty bucks, and my signature on 34 separate invoices, they let me go home from the Delta Clinic. Mostly I was tired – of more chemicals circulating inside me than blood, of the deafening ring in my ears, of not being able to sleep, of being poked at for what seemed like no reason. But I was also ok. Folks from work had come to visit, called, asked about me. Even the cleaning ladies gushed with relief to see me back in the office, eight days later. And I reminded myself, at least I wasn’t out in the bush. At least I didn’t have a major trip planned. At least my friends were around to look after me. At least I could afford to GO to the hospital. At least, at least. “What the hell were you doin’ in the hospital?” my boss cried over the phone from Gabs when he found out.
Maybe I should have said, I just needed a few days of air conditioning.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Thursday, February 22, 2007
happy birthday, jackass
I know, I know. But the idea that Bob here gets to eat cake while there is literally no bread in the shops, inflation is at a world record 1600%, and life expectancy has dropped to 36 (the lowest on the planet), well, it really pisses me off. That's his wife Grace on the left, and the martini glasses hold an 8 and a 3. Which is already more than double what most Zimbabweans are getting these days. Mugabe has been P-resident since 1980 and recently parliament voted to move the dates of the next election from 2008 to 2010, so that prez and parl can be chosen at the same time. I haven't been to Zimbabwe since 2002 but i'm going there for Easter, and in some ways I am really not looking forward to it at all.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
go well, ryszard
He certainly never knew it, but I am quite sure that Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist and interpreter of Africa extraordinaire, helped me to get my first job out of grad school. In the guest lecture I gave in a comparative politics class as part of my job interview, I read aloud from one of his books. Yes, I know, it sounds odd. But in talking about the development of the state in Africa, I read Kapuscinski’s description of Idi Amin. “Everywhere he went, it was as if Amin moved the state with him,” he wrote, I read, separating the weight of each word carefully, placing them gently into the ears of the students staring at me. The dean himself also sat in the front row, rapt, and told me later that to him my reading was more like dramatic performance. But it was Kapuscinski’s words that animated the room that day.
For a journalist, Kapuscinski was a freak. He was eloquent, modest, and lived in slums and got robbed with sides of TB and malaria. He was so far off the journalist’s path that, when I first read one of his books, I refused to believe he actually WAS a journalist. He covered the entire continent, loved it, breathed it in, and wasn’t big on talking to government officials. Real people were what mattered. Real people in villages sprinkling the countryside, people without food or reliable income or access to power. A traveling companion of Kapuscinski’s once remarked, “Because people from Europe spend their time here only in the cities and drive along the major roads, they cannot even imagine what our Africa looks like.”
Kapuscinski, however, makes imagining possible:
“More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun. Just yesterday, an autumnal London was drenched in rain. The airplane drenched in rain. A cold wind, darkness. But here, from the morning’s earliest moments, the airport is ablaze with sunlight, all of us in sunlight.
In time past, when people wandered the world on foot, rode on horseback, or sailed in ships, the journey itself accustomed them to the change. Images of the each passed ever so slowly before their eyes, the stage revolved in a barely perceptible way. The voyage lasted weeks, months. The traveler had time to grow used to another environment, a different landscape. The climate, too, changed gradually. Before the traveler arrived from a cool Europe to the burning equator, he already had left behind the pleasant warmth of Las Palmas, the heat of Al-Mahara, and the hell of the Cape Verde Islands.
Today, nothing remains of these gradations. Air travel tears us violently out of snow and cold and hurls us that very same day into the blaze of the tropics. Suddenly, still rubbing our eyes, we find ourselves in a humid inferno. We immediately start to sweat. If we’ve come from Europe in the wintertime, we discard overcoats, peel off sweaters. It’s the first gesture of initiation we, the people of the North, perform upon arrival in Africa.”
-Ryszard Kapuscinski
First three paragraphs of “The Shadow of the Sun”
For a journalist, Kapuscinski was a freak. He was eloquent, modest, and lived in slums and got robbed with sides of TB and malaria. He was so far off the journalist’s path that, when I first read one of his books, I refused to believe he actually WAS a journalist. He covered the entire continent, loved it, breathed it in, and wasn’t big on talking to government officials. Real people were what mattered. Real people in villages sprinkling the countryside, people without food or reliable income or access to power. A traveling companion of Kapuscinski’s once remarked, “Because people from Europe spend their time here only in the cities and drive along the major roads, they cannot even imagine what our Africa looks like.”
Kapuscinski, however, makes imagining possible:
“More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun. Just yesterday, an autumnal London was drenched in rain. The airplane drenched in rain. A cold wind, darkness. But here, from the morning’s earliest moments, the airport is ablaze with sunlight, all of us in sunlight.
In time past, when people wandered the world on foot, rode on horseback, or sailed in ships, the journey itself accustomed them to the change. Images of the each passed ever so slowly before their eyes, the stage revolved in a barely perceptible way. The voyage lasted weeks, months. The traveler had time to grow used to another environment, a different landscape. The climate, too, changed gradually. Before the traveler arrived from a cool Europe to the burning equator, he already had left behind the pleasant warmth of Las Palmas, the heat of Al-Mahara, and the hell of the Cape Verde Islands.
Today, nothing remains of these gradations. Air travel tears us violently out of snow and cold and hurls us that very same day into the blaze of the tropics. Suddenly, still rubbing our eyes, we find ourselves in a humid inferno. We immediately start to sweat. If we’ve come from Europe in the wintertime, we discard overcoats, peel off sweaters. It’s the first gesture of initiation we, the people of the North, perform upon arrival in Africa.”
-Ryszard Kapuscinski
First three paragraphs of “The Shadow of the Sun”
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
mmmm, sparkly
[just in time for Valentine’s Day…ah, I’m laughing now…]
Last week while in South Africa, I saw the movie “Blood Diamond.” This decision was, in some ways, against what remains of my better judgment, because I know it would make me angry. But I couldn’t quite NOT see it either, so, there I was. The movie is about how alluvial diamonds in Sierra Leone fueled a rebellion that turned kidnapped children into drug-addicted murderers who chopped off the hands of the less cooperative, and made a few gun runners and smugglers wealthy. It is also yet another movie about Africa through the eyes of white people – a South African smuggler and an American journalist. And imagine! They somehow find love and screw in a landscape swarming with mostly crazed, heavily armed Africans killing each other, but for one good black man (who just happened to find a big fat rock) trying to save his family. A surprising approach, no. But still infuriating, definitely.
A bit of background. Last year in my African Politics class, I gave a lecture on diamonds. I started with the whole idea of a wedding ring – a prehistoric reminder of ownership and property. Some historians say that it comes from women being bound hand and foot when married off. Once she learned to behave and promised not to run away, her feet were untied. Eventually her hands would also be released, with the exception of a single strand left around her finger as a reminder. Romantic, no?
Then, there are stories about gemstones and royalty in Europe going back hundreds of years. Eventually we work our way up to DeBeers, the largest diamond company on the planet. DeBeers is South African and controls the vast majority of the world diamond market by hoarding diamonds and heavily restricting sales to artificially inflate their value. DeBeers built prisons for the apartheid government in exchange for the labor of black prisoners who had done unconscionable things like walk through a white neighborhood on the way home without a government-issued pass. DeBeers is largely responsible for a marketing campaign in the 1930s and 40s that created the idea of the engagement ring and the two-month salary rule. They actually sent sales reps from jeweler to jeweler to talk about their stones, weddings, and how much men should be advised to spend. So much for cultural tradition (for another iteration, see the more recent ‘right-hand ring’ campaign – though you have to go to this site to connect DeBeers with ‘a diamond is forever’…).
As I am sure most of you know I could rant on about this for a while. I must have had my angry juice this morning. But let’s get back to the movie. Nothing about its setup surprised me in any way. It’s simple, it sells. And Leo DiCaprio has come a long way since The Blue Lagoon, baby. We are, however, talking about a cadre of actors and filmmakers who did not even go on a ‘fact-finding’ trip about diamonds in Africa until after the film was already in the can. AFTER. And did I mention that the trip they did take was organized by none other than DeBeers?
But here’s the kicker. Jennifer Connelly’s character, the well-meaning journalist, says tearfully towards the end (as Leo’s mocking her for thinking writing makes any difference…wait…), “But if those girls KNEW someone died for that stone, they wouldn’t BUY them!!” Or something like that.
Now that, as my brother would say, is one metric shit ton of crap. Stories about blood diamonds have been in the American media for years. Granted, they are not exactly first on the evening news, but they are out there. This is not new information. Even here we have a few models who cried when they found out that the Botswanan government moved the San out of an area in which they wanted to sell mining concessions. And at the same time, DeBeers was recently allowed to begin opening stores in New York and Beverly Hills. Sounds like their market is really shrinking. And I am foolish, but not so foolish as to think that the sorority girl in the back row of my African Politics class is going to forego that diamond engagement ring she’s been taught to fantasize about since she was in a frilly pink dress because of her crazy professor’s stories.
What exactly would it take, do you think?
Last week while in South Africa, I saw the movie “Blood Diamond.” This decision was, in some ways, against what remains of my better judgment, because I know it would make me angry. But I couldn’t quite NOT see it either, so, there I was. The movie is about how alluvial diamonds in Sierra Leone fueled a rebellion that turned kidnapped children into drug-addicted murderers who chopped off the hands of the less cooperative, and made a few gun runners and smugglers wealthy. It is also yet another movie about Africa through the eyes of white people – a South African smuggler and an American journalist. And imagine! They somehow find love and screw in a landscape swarming with mostly crazed, heavily armed Africans killing each other, but for one good black man (who just happened to find a big fat rock) trying to save his family. A surprising approach, no. But still infuriating, definitely.
A bit of background. Last year in my African Politics class, I gave a lecture on diamonds. I started with the whole idea of a wedding ring – a prehistoric reminder of ownership and property. Some historians say that it comes from women being bound hand and foot when married off. Once she learned to behave and promised not to run away, her feet were untied. Eventually her hands would also be released, with the exception of a single strand left around her finger as a reminder. Romantic, no?
Then, there are stories about gemstones and royalty in Europe going back hundreds of years. Eventually we work our way up to DeBeers, the largest diamond company on the planet. DeBeers is South African and controls the vast majority of the world diamond market by hoarding diamonds and heavily restricting sales to artificially inflate their value. DeBeers built prisons for the apartheid government in exchange for the labor of black prisoners who had done unconscionable things like walk through a white neighborhood on the way home without a government-issued pass. DeBeers is largely responsible for a marketing campaign in the 1930s and 40s that created the idea of the engagement ring and the two-month salary rule. They actually sent sales reps from jeweler to jeweler to talk about their stones, weddings, and how much men should be advised to spend. So much for cultural tradition (for another iteration, see the more recent ‘right-hand ring’ campaign – though you have to go to this site to connect DeBeers with ‘a diamond is forever’…).
As I am sure most of you know I could rant on about this for a while. I must have had my angry juice this morning. But let’s get back to the movie. Nothing about its setup surprised me in any way. It’s simple, it sells. And Leo DiCaprio has come a long way since The Blue Lagoon, baby. We are, however, talking about a cadre of actors and filmmakers who did not even go on a ‘fact-finding’ trip about diamonds in Africa until after the film was already in the can. AFTER. And did I mention that the trip they did take was organized by none other than DeBeers?
But here’s the kicker. Jennifer Connelly’s character, the well-meaning journalist, says tearfully towards the end (as Leo’s mocking her for thinking writing makes any difference…wait…), “But if those girls KNEW someone died for that stone, they wouldn’t BUY them!!” Or something like that.
Now that, as my brother would say, is one metric shit ton of crap. Stories about blood diamonds have been in the American media for years. Granted, they are not exactly first on the evening news, but they are out there. This is not new information. Even here we have a few models who cried when they found out that the Botswanan government moved the San out of an area in which they wanted to sell mining concessions. And at the same time, DeBeers was recently allowed to begin opening stores in New York and Beverly Hills. Sounds like their market is really shrinking. And I am foolish, but not so foolish as to think that the sorority girl in the back row of my African Politics class is going to forego that diamond engagement ring she’s been taught to fantasize about since she was in a frilly pink dress because of her crazy professor’s stories.
What exactly would it take, do you think?
"i care"
A friend of mine suggested to me a few days ago that in fact, most people don’t care about poor people. “I’ve literally been sitting in meetings where someone will say, ‘I don’t have time for the poor!’” he insisted.
I argued. I felt I had to. I also felt he wasn’t quite right. But it wasn’t because of some burgeoning faith in humanity’s fundamental goodness. It was because I wanted to spin his comment differently.
“I think they care in the abstract,” I said. “Like, oh, wow, that’s really too bad that she’s living in a dumpster and he has no access to medicine. It really shouldn’t be that way! Let me put on a ribbon to show everyone else that I care, that I think it’s BAD! And then I can go back to sipping my cappuccino and planning my trip to Hawaii and feeling good about myself. Whew!”
He laughed with a sharp bitterness that is increasingly familiar to me.
“It’s like looking at a puppy,” I continued. “You go, awwwww, isn’t that adorable, I really FEEL something warm and fuzzy here…for about ten seconds…then I go on with my life. Don’t KICK the dog. Just give it a pat. And then walk away.”
I wasn’t being terribly articulate, I admit. But I was trying to get at something I’ve been trying to, well, get at for a long time. It’s the gap between what we know and how we act. Maybe it’s more a matter of what we are willing to know, and the extent to which we are willing to align our behavior with that knowledge. I’m not sure. But I do know it’s easy not to pay attention – to poverty, to HIV, to developing world debt, to the war, whatever. And it’s easy because it doesn’t really affect the lives of most people in the West. Not really. I know that when I go back to the States, I have a good job. I can go to the grocery store and buy onions any time I feel like it (Botswana decided to ban onion importation because we should be able to grow our own…but instead, we have no onions). I can call my parents, go on vacation, sleep on flannel sheets in the winter and crisp cotton in the summer with no malarial mosquitoes lurking in the curtain folds. And I can make my own cappuccino.
Now before I piss anyone off, let me say as well that I clearly am as guilty of not being affected as anyone else. I can’t figure out how to align my actions more closely with what’s going on in my head (ok, maybe that would be a disaster anyway). I’m swimming in a soupy sort of cognitive dissonance these days – somewhere between how I am, and the way I think I should be. I suppose that’s not so unusual, given that I work in a building where they lock the bathroom door when there’s no toilet paper and live in a house that has fleas (maybe – we’re still not sure).
I imagine that we all want our lives to ‘add up’ somehow – to amount to something, to have weight and shape and a pleasant taste when we take time to savor them. Here, I have a Zimbabwean sister – but I also have white friends who have lived in Africa for 15 years and can’t count a single black friend. I just spent three weeks in Europe, where among other things I bought a cobalt vase of Venetian glass and ate risotto with black truffles. But next week, I could go down with malaria and, well, possibly die. Last week I participated in a conservation workshop where one moment, I was being called “Dr. DeMotts” with a shovelful of thick disdain smeared on my title, and in the next I was asked to give a presentation to people who’ve been working the region for twenty years. Back, and forth, and back again. It’s just increasingly difficult to have my feet on the ground when I’m not sure whose ground it is, or what I’m doing on it. I asked my boss how he manages all the bouncing around between continents and cultures, and he said, “I’ve been doing it for twenty years.”
But that didn’t really answer my question.
I argued. I felt I had to. I also felt he wasn’t quite right. But it wasn’t because of some burgeoning faith in humanity’s fundamental goodness. It was because I wanted to spin his comment differently.
“I think they care in the abstract,” I said. “Like, oh, wow, that’s really too bad that she’s living in a dumpster and he has no access to medicine. It really shouldn’t be that way! Let me put on a ribbon to show everyone else that I care, that I think it’s BAD! And then I can go back to sipping my cappuccino and planning my trip to Hawaii and feeling good about myself. Whew!”
He laughed with a sharp bitterness that is increasingly familiar to me.
“It’s like looking at a puppy,” I continued. “You go, awwwww, isn’t that adorable, I really FEEL something warm and fuzzy here…for about ten seconds…then I go on with my life. Don’t KICK the dog. Just give it a pat. And then walk away.”
I wasn’t being terribly articulate, I admit. But I was trying to get at something I’ve been trying to, well, get at for a long time. It’s the gap between what we know and how we act. Maybe it’s more a matter of what we are willing to know, and the extent to which we are willing to align our behavior with that knowledge. I’m not sure. But I do know it’s easy not to pay attention – to poverty, to HIV, to developing world debt, to the war, whatever. And it’s easy because it doesn’t really affect the lives of most people in the West. Not really. I know that when I go back to the States, I have a good job. I can go to the grocery store and buy onions any time I feel like it (Botswana decided to ban onion importation because we should be able to grow our own…but instead, we have no onions). I can call my parents, go on vacation, sleep on flannel sheets in the winter and crisp cotton in the summer with no malarial mosquitoes lurking in the curtain folds. And I can make my own cappuccino.
Now before I piss anyone off, let me say as well that I clearly am as guilty of not being affected as anyone else. I can’t figure out how to align my actions more closely with what’s going on in my head (ok, maybe that would be a disaster anyway). I’m swimming in a soupy sort of cognitive dissonance these days – somewhere between how I am, and the way I think I should be. I suppose that’s not so unusual, given that I work in a building where they lock the bathroom door when there’s no toilet paper and live in a house that has fleas (maybe – we’re still not sure).
I imagine that we all want our lives to ‘add up’ somehow – to amount to something, to have weight and shape and a pleasant taste when we take time to savor them. Here, I have a Zimbabwean sister – but I also have white friends who have lived in Africa for 15 years and can’t count a single black friend. I just spent three weeks in Europe, where among other things I bought a cobalt vase of Venetian glass and ate risotto with black truffles. But next week, I could go down with malaria and, well, possibly die. Last week I participated in a conservation workshop where one moment, I was being called “Dr. DeMotts” with a shovelful of thick disdain smeared on my title, and in the next I was asked to give a presentation to people who’ve been working the region for twenty years. Back, and forth, and back again. It’s just increasingly difficult to have my feet on the ground when I’m not sure whose ground it is, or what I’m doing on it. I asked my boss how he manages all the bouncing around between continents and cultures, and he said, “I’ve been doing it for twenty years.”
But that didn’t really answer my question.
Friday, January 12, 2007
cape to chobe
I personally drove about 4500k’s (on a 6000ish-k trip)in the past two weeks. This was all in the name of a nice holiday, which was in fact, nice. But driving is not really my favorite thing to do. I should have picked up on the warning signs when it took us nearly four hours to leave Maun, because:
1. I didn’t have the ownership papers for my boss’ car.
2. I didn’t have police clearance for the border.
3. I didn’t have a letter from the bank giving me permission to take their car (which is in fact paid off) across the border.
4. I didn’t have a letter from my boss allowing me to take the car anywhere.
Now, if I had known I needed any of these things, I’d happily have started collecting them prior to 6:45am on the day of an 8:00 departure. But, I didn’t. My bad. So after finding the registration, I went to the office and forged a letter from my boss on university letterhead giving me permission to use the car. We then went to the police station, where we were sent upstairs. There, we were told, no clearance without bank permission. Now, again, it’s not my car – so being me, I went to the bank anyway – on a Saturday morning – and demanded a letter for someone else’s car based on a fake permission letter from the owner (who was in Canada). Which I got. Returning to the cops, I was told, “Oh, the guy with the keys to the office where the stamp is that goes on the letter has knocked off.” The woman who was ‘helping’ me said I was out of luck. But then there was a small tinkling sound against the tile as she rifled through a stack of papers…a spare key hit the floor. Et voila, we were off. And across the borders of three countries over the next two weeks, no one ever asked to see so much as a shred of all my paperwork.
Cows, donkeys, goats, minibuses, potholes, dirt hills, twisting mountain roads, and twenty-six hours later we arrived in Cape Town on Christmas Eve. I hung some plastic Santas on the aloe plant and went to bed. But Christmas Day we spent by the sea with some friends, eating curry and drinking Jack Daniels in the sun. Not bad. Not bad at all.
A full travelogue would require more space and energy than I’ve got right now, but let me share a few things I picked up along the way:
Zimbabwean and American definitions of a ‘good road’ are even more markedly different than I previously thought.
Karaoke is apparently a universal language of its own – even in Korean, on the side of a mountain in Africa.
There are, in fact, baboons in Cape Point.
Breaking and entering is sometimes easier than you think.
Even at the end of the world on New Years Day, you might see someone you know.
Some wine has enough legs to run a marathon.
Slapping yourself actually does keep you awake in the middle of the night.
Every safari has it asshole. And sometimes, she’s Canadian.
When you need it most, there is no tonic water in Botswana. Or fish.
Rain drives all wildlife into deep hiding. Really. I saw it once.
When a bar in Africa floods, you really don’t want to be there to see what floats out.
And, elephants apparently may prefer the side of road to the park:
happy new year, everybody...
1. I didn’t have the ownership papers for my boss’ car.
2. I didn’t have police clearance for the border.
3. I didn’t have a letter from the bank giving me permission to take their car (which is in fact paid off) across the border.
4. I didn’t have a letter from my boss allowing me to take the car anywhere.
Now, if I had known I needed any of these things, I’d happily have started collecting them prior to 6:45am on the day of an 8:00 departure. But, I didn’t. My bad. So after finding the registration, I went to the office and forged a letter from my boss on university letterhead giving me permission to use the car. We then went to the police station, where we were sent upstairs. There, we were told, no clearance without bank permission. Now, again, it’s not my car – so being me, I went to the bank anyway – on a Saturday morning – and demanded a letter for someone else’s car based on a fake permission letter from the owner (who was in Canada). Which I got. Returning to the cops, I was told, “Oh, the guy with the keys to the office where the stamp is that goes on the letter has knocked off.” The woman who was ‘helping’ me said I was out of luck. But then there was a small tinkling sound against the tile as she rifled through a stack of papers…a spare key hit the floor. Et voila, we were off. And across the borders of three countries over the next two weeks, no one ever asked to see so much as a shred of all my paperwork.
Cows, donkeys, goats, minibuses, potholes, dirt hills, twisting mountain roads, and twenty-six hours later we arrived in Cape Town on Christmas Eve. I hung some plastic Santas on the aloe plant and went to bed. But Christmas Day we spent by the sea with some friends, eating curry and drinking Jack Daniels in the sun. Not bad. Not bad at all.
A full travelogue would require more space and energy than I’ve got right now, but let me share a few things I picked up along the way:
Zimbabwean and American definitions of a ‘good road’ are even more markedly different than I previously thought.
Karaoke is apparently a universal language of its own – even in Korean, on the side of a mountain in Africa.
There are, in fact, baboons in Cape Point.
Breaking and entering is sometimes easier than you think.
Even at the end of the world on New Years Day, you might see someone you know.
Some wine has enough legs to run a marathon.
Slapping yourself actually does keep you awake in the middle of the night.
Every safari has it asshole. And sometimes, she’s Canadian.
When you need it most, there is no tonic water in Botswana. Or fish.
Rain drives all wildlife into deep hiding. Really. I saw it once.
When a bar in Africa floods, you really don’t want to be there to see what floats out.
And, elephants apparently may prefer the side of road to the park:
happy new year, everybody...
Friday, December 22, 2006
christmastime in maun
I’m sitting in my office three days before Christmas. Everyone else is gone – and mostly long gone at that. But it’s ok, because it allows me to sing along with Frank and Dino and Sammy if I feel like it. I’m listening to Christmas with the Rat Pack, after all, since the shimmery heat and rain and careening termites outside don’t really evoke much holiday spirit for me.
For the past week or so I’ve been trying (off and on) to write some sort of profound (or at least thoughtful) holiday letter. Tomorrow I’m leaving for the Cape, the beach, the winelands – an African holiday full of things that most people probably don’t consider to be particularly African. I’m tired. I need a break. And so I’m going to the city and I’m going to see movies and eat sushi. Not terribly profound, but nice.
My traveling companions arrived here in Maun yesterday. They are my second family – my two older Zimbabwean sisters and their husbands. And they are a reminder of how fortunate I am. This might sound funny, but few of the expats I know living here seem to have black African friends. When I first described my relationship with my sis Daisy to a Canadian friend of mine living here, she said, “How did you get to have that kind of close relationship with her?” Her tone of voice suggested that she was asking about an expedition to the moon. How ever did I end up there.
But here I am. And as much as I wouldn’t mind a good old fashioned Colorado blizzard, the sun and my sis are not such a bad substitute. So, happy holidays, everybody, and sing away:
For the past week or so I’ve been trying (off and on) to write some sort of profound (or at least thoughtful) holiday letter. Tomorrow I’m leaving for the Cape, the beach, the winelands – an African holiday full of things that most people probably don’t consider to be particularly African. I’m tired. I need a break. And so I’m going to the city and I’m going to see movies and eat sushi. Not terribly profound, but nice.
My traveling companions arrived here in Maun yesterday. They are my second family – my two older Zimbabwean sisters and their husbands. And they are a reminder of how fortunate I am. This might sound funny, but few of the expats I know living here seem to have black African friends. When I first described my relationship with my sis Daisy to a Canadian friend of mine living here, she said, “How did you get to have that kind of close relationship with her?” Her tone of voice suggested that she was asking about an expedition to the moon. How ever did I end up there.
But here I am. And as much as I wouldn’t mind a good old fashioned Colorado blizzard, the sun and my sis are not such a bad substitute. So, happy holidays, everybody, and sing away:
Here comes Giraffe! Here comes Giraffe! Right down Giraffe Lane!
Here Comes Santa Claus
from the Christmas Song Generator.
Friday, December 15, 2006
life is a comedy
It’s hot here. I mean, pouring-sweat-while-sitting-on-the-couch-in-front-of-a-fan kind of hot. Which of course also means that we can’t seem to have the electricity and the water working at the same time. It’s become a game of sorts…which is one is going to crap out first today? Should I go for a run at 6am while it’s only mildly scorching with no guarantee of a shower when I get back? Do I dare pour the yellowy liquid in the basin that passes for an emergency water supply over my head? Where is the shovel so I can go out in the yard and go to the bathroom? And what exactly causes the myriad of agitated red bites of all sizes all over me (a triangle of spots on my right forearm, a swollen welt on my waistline, an angry crimson knot on my hip bone) when the fan dies in the middle of the night? I have five friends coming thru next week. Now that is going to be fun. Larry, my boss and housemate, went to public works in town to ask about the water problems. It went a little something like this:
“Our water keeps going out.”
“Oh….well, where do you pay your water bill?”
[pause. We’ve never paid a water bill. Not because we’re deadbeats, but because, well, we’ve never gotten a water bill. Larry's been in the house for 2 1/2 years and still, no water bill.]
“I don’t know, my landlord pays it. We live in Disaneng ward.”
“Ah, that one, the borehole is trouble, well not the borehole but the engine. And if they fix the engine there will be no problem.”
[pause]
[pause]
At this point Larry came home and we broke out the whiskey. He mumbled something about duct tape. I said, if I could reasonably believe they’d ever HAD any duct tape, I’d think there was a good chance the engine might actually get fixed. But anyway, as Mark Twain said, whiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’ over. This has perhaps never been more true than it is here and now.
But the game goes on when I get to work. Last week, after having been here for six months, I got an office. Full of previous occupants’ junk, but still, an office. Then it took ten days to get some hanging file folders so I could get organized. After me asking three or four times, our secretary just delivered about six of them. Six used hanging file folders. I wanted to laugh, but I controlled myself. Then yesterday my computer locked me out of the internet. ACCESS DENIED for no apparent reason. My laptop no longer reads the power source when it’s plugged in, unless I balance it on its side like a teetering architectural absurdity. The guys at the computer shop in town (I know, I laughed out loud too) say they’ve fixed it. So I’m off to town, hoping my laptop bears no relationship to that troublesome borehole engine. At least for now.
“Our water keeps going out.”
“Oh….well, where do you pay your water bill?”
[pause. We’ve never paid a water bill. Not because we’re deadbeats, but because, well, we’ve never gotten a water bill. Larry's been in the house for 2 1/2 years and still, no water bill.]
“I don’t know, my landlord pays it. We live in Disaneng ward.”
“Ah, that one, the borehole is trouble, well not the borehole but the engine. And if they fix the engine there will be no problem.”
[pause]
[pause]
At this point Larry came home and we broke out the whiskey. He mumbled something about duct tape. I said, if I could reasonably believe they’d ever HAD any duct tape, I’d think there was a good chance the engine might actually get fixed. But anyway, as Mark Twain said, whiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’ over. This has perhaps never been more true than it is here and now.
But the game goes on when I get to work. Last week, after having been here for six months, I got an office. Full of previous occupants’ junk, but still, an office. Then it took ten days to get some hanging file folders so I could get organized. After me asking three or four times, our secretary just delivered about six of them. Six used hanging file folders. I wanted to laugh, but I controlled myself. Then yesterday my computer locked me out of the internet. ACCESS DENIED for no apparent reason. My laptop no longer reads the power source when it’s plugged in, unless I balance it on its side like a teetering architectural absurdity. The guys at the computer shop in town (I know, I laughed out loud too) say they’ve fixed it. So I’m off to town, hoping my laptop bears no relationship to that troublesome borehole engine. At least for now.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
what a long, strange trip it's been
I just got back from two weeks in the US, a whirlwind sprint through Colorado, San Francisco, Boston, and New York City. And it never ceases to amaze me how much harder it is to go back there than it is to come here. I think it has something to do with expectations, and desires. I want living here to be different. I want to learn from it. I expect to feel clueless a substantial portion of my time. And I enjoy that, because it helps me to look around me in a way that I might not otherwise have done.
But going back stateside...well, I'm supposed to know the rules. I'm supposed to be able to navigate. But I can't get out of a grocery store in less than an hour. I can't make decisions. As I told a friend of mine over the weekend, when I go to the store here, my list says 'chickpeas.' If there are some, I buy some. In the US there will be at least ten kinds, canned or dried, seasoned or not, which brand, how big a container. Here, I just buy some chickpeas. And I'm not inundated with things I didn't know I needed until I saw them. I am always surprised by how reasonable my grocery bills are here. That's because there isn't a whole lot more to buy beyond what I actually need. And because I don't get so distracted by the partially hydrogenated bells and whistles just begging to pop off the shelves and into my pantry.
Another friend asked how I thought it would feel to be in Boston full time starting next fall. Standing by the Charles River at sunset, I stared at my feet in the fading light. "I'm gonna have a hard time," I said softly, deliberately. I've accepted it already, which part of me hopes will make it a little less to carry when it arrives. I marvel at how little I 'get over' things - especially the cognitive dissonance in which I flail and drown while thinking about buying a loft in Lowell next fall (hardwoods or carpet? exposed brick or vaulted ceilings? close to school or overlooking the river?) when some of the women who work here occasionally have to ask me for money to get their intermittent electricity turned back on. Facts and snapshots swirl in my head...nearly 48% of people over 25 in the Caprivi have HIV... women take care of their adult children who are dying of AIDS and adopt their siblings' kids when brothers and sisters die... elephants protected in the name of nature conservation destroy a year's crop in a five-minute stomp through a long-nurtured field...Hollywood makes a movie about blood diamonds that fuel conflict in various African countries but its stars don't actually come over here to see what it's like until after the filming is over...
Past a point, there just aren't words. My life is a fairy tale.
But then, I think about the box of wine glasses I have in storage in Chicago that I have never used. They've never even been unwrapped. Actually I have wine glasses, champagne glasses, AND double cocktail glasses, all in a lovely shade of unused crystal turquoise. I pay rent in Chicago for my stuff. Plenty of people here can't afford proper homes for themselves and their children, but I can rent a climate-controlled room for my sweaters and sofa. And for shit I've never even used. It' s mind-boggling. Guess you all better come to one hell of a housewarming party next Labor Day weekend.
But going back stateside...well, I'm supposed to know the rules. I'm supposed to be able to navigate. But I can't get out of a grocery store in less than an hour. I can't make decisions. As I told a friend of mine over the weekend, when I go to the store here, my list says 'chickpeas.' If there are some, I buy some. In the US there will be at least ten kinds, canned or dried, seasoned or not, which brand, how big a container. Here, I just buy some chickpeas. And I'm not inundated with things I didn't know I needed until I saw them. I am always surprised by how reasonable my grocery bills are here. That's because there isn't a whole lot more to buy beyond what I actually need. And because I don't get so distracted by the partially hydrogenated bells and whistles just begging to pop off the shelves and into my pantry.
Another friend asked how I thought it would feel to be in Boston full time starting next fall. Standing by the Charles River at sunset, I stared at my feet in the fading light. "I'm gonna have a hard time," I said softly, deliberately. I've accepted it already, which part of me hopes will make it a little less to carry when it arrives. I marvel at how little I 'get over' things - especially the cognitive dissonance in which I flail and drown while thinking about buying a loft in Lowell next fall (hardwoods or carpet? exposed brick or vaulted ceilings? close to school or overlooking the river?) when some of the women who work here occasionally have to ask me for money to get their intermittent electricity turned back on. Facts and snapshots swirl in my head...nearly 48% of people over 25 in the Caprivi have HIV... women take care of their adult children who are dying of AIDS and adopt their siblings' kids when brothers and sisters die... elephants protected in the name of nature conservation destroy a year's crop in a five-minute stomp through a long-nurtured field...Hollywood makes a movie about blood diamonds that fuel conflict in various African countries but its stars don't actually come over here to see what it's like until after the filming is over...
Past a point, there just aren't words. My life is a fairy tale.
But then, I think about the box of wine glasses I have in storage in Chicago that I have never used. They've never even been unwrapped. Actually I have wine glasses, champagne glasses, AND double cocktail glasses, all in a lovely shade of unused crystal turquoise. I pay rent in Chicago for my stuff. Plenty of people here can't afford proper homes for themselves and their children, but I can rent a climate-controlled room for my sweaters and sofa. And for shit I've never even used. It' s mind-boggling. Guess you all better come to one hell of a housewarming party next Labor Day weekend.
Friday, November 03, 2006
something is clearly wrong with me
Here at the centre, we recently finished building a tented camp on the property so that visiting students and researchers have a convenient place to stay. This is a good thing in part because we are far enough from ‘town’ that even local minibuses do not run out this far. Public transport is, well, another post, but suffice to say it’s always a dicey endeavor. To avoid it, I just spent Wednesday riding 600 kilometers in the back of an open Land Rover. At least it with two black women in the cab and me in the back, we drew some pretty hilarious stares. And I did see a nice kudu along the side of the road, but we were going way too fast for me to really appreciate it.
Anyway, I pitched up at work on Thursday morning thoroughly sun-and-windburnt and finally had my first chance to see the permanent tents that have been put up.
I’m in love.
Ten olive green canvas squares on top of gnarled wood platforms curl around the center open area of the camp. Across the open part of this crescent is a kitchen with fridges and lockable cupboards. Behind it, showers with chunky stone floors and sinks for scrubbing laundry. The tents are on wood frames with solid doors and house two twin beds with metal wardrobes and a table. And a fan. Which means there is electricity. In the tents. They are shiny and new, the crisp canvas unsullied by sand or sunbleached creases or monkey shit. Ok, I’m sure they already have monkey shit on them but in my daze I didn’t see any.
I’ve previously mentioned the fact that I’m not exactly enamored of the house I live in right now. Among other things, it’s hot and buggy because there are no screens on the windows – so I can either coat the place with insects or myself with sweat. Given that mosquitoes here carry malaria, sweat wins. Besides, the cat brings mice in rather than keeping them out. She also brought a bird in once that was still alive and wasn’t really interested in killing it (picture me chasing a one-eyed bird around an orange-walled concrete room and you’ll, well, laugh). The house is also far from anything except the bar at the only backpackers’ in Maun, and heaven knows I don’t need that kind of encouragement. Besides, I am not sure how much longer my boss will allow me to freeload, nor what it would do to our so-called working relationship (I haven’t seen him since June) if he did. So I’ve been thinking I ought to move out, but getting my own place feels like a commitment in which I am profoundly disinterested. The house, mind you, is the envy of many people here. It’s quiet, it’s got the river on three sides, the birdwatching is great. I’m just not its biggest fan.
Et voila, a tent. But the tent of all tents, perched in the bush where I can walk to work, with screen windows I can leave open, with a porch I can sit on. There are, I’ve been told by someone who is staying in the camp, a lot of “night sounds” to add to the ambiance. Seeing as she’s from the capital, I bet the kind of night sounds she’s used to are not quite what I’m looking for. But the tents, the tents are the peace for which I have been searching here. Unfortunately I was told recently that no one will be allowed to live in them permanently. Not that I expected to grow old in olive square number eight. But soon, with any luck, I may have a change of residence…
Anyway, I pitched up at work on Thursday morning thoroughly sun-and-windburnt and finally had my first chance to see the permanent tents that have been put up.
I’m in love.
Ten olive green canvas squares on top of gnarled wood platforms curl around the center open area of the camp. Across the open part of this crescent is a kitchen with fridges and lockable cupboards. Behind it, showers with chunky stone floors and sinks for scrubbing laundry. The tents are on wood frames with solid doors and house two twin beds with metal wardrobes and a table. And a fan. Which means there is electricity. In the tents. They are shiny and new, the crisp canvas unsullied by sand or sunbleached creases or monkey shit. Ok, I’m sure they already have monkey shit on them but in my daze I didn’t see any.
I’ve previously mentioned the fact that I’m not exactly enamored of the house I live in right now. Among other things, it’s hot and buggy because there are no screens on the windows – so I can either coat the place with insects or myself with sweat. Given that mosquitoes here carry malaria, sweat wins. Besides, the cat brings mice in rather than keeping them out. She also brought a bird in once that was still alive and wasn’t really interested in killing it (picture me chasing a one-eyed bird around an orange-walled concrete room and you’ll, well, laugh). The house is also far from anything except the bar at the only backpackers’ in Maun, and heaven knows I don’t need that kind of encouragement. Besides, I am not sure how much longer my boss will allow me to freeload, nor what it would do to our so-called working relationship (I haven’t seen him since June) if he did. So I’ve been thinking I ought to move out, but getting my own place feels like a commitment in which I am profoundly disinterested. The house, mind you, is the envy of many people here. It’s quiet, it’s got the river on three sides, the birdwatching is great. I’m just not its biggest fan.
Et voila, a tent. But the tent of all tents, perched in the bush where I can walk to work, with screen windows I can leave open, with a porch I can sit on. There are, I’ve been told by someone who is staying in the camp, a lot of “night sounds” to add to the ambiance. Seeing as she’s from the capital, I bet the kind of night sounds she’s used to are not quite what I’m looking for. But the tents, the tents are the peace for which I have been searching here. Unfortunately I was told recently that no one will be allowed to live in them permanently. Not that I expected to grow old in olive square number eight. But soon, with any luck, I may have a change of residence…
Saturday, October 28, 2006
never more american
Let me be clear, at least to start. I love living here. I love that it’s difficult and complex and that a day never goes by without me learning something. But sometimes, the battling for these lessons makes me tired. And I am indeed, right now, so tired of being tired. Some experiences lately have reminded me of my split personality and how I always feel a little bit in between. I can’t help but feel skeptical of the Westerner who comes to African and proclaims that she is fully home. In some ways, I am. In others, I never will be. The differences between Rachel and Rahele (what Lozi speakers here call me) remain profound. A small illustration:
Rachel: A cousin of my sister Daisy’s husband decided to come for a visit. She didn’t ask, nor was she invited. She just packed her bags and put herself in Daisy’s car last weekend when she was coming back from Vic Falls. Ellen has been here for a week and shows no signs of leaving. Every day, she goes shopping, buying clothes, shoes, an umbrella for the sun, and whatever else. And comes back here, eating and drinking from our kitchen, fanning herself and throwing suffering glances around until someone switches on a fan, painfully forcing herself to eat the mostly vegetarian food we cook in this house. Literally, last night, sooooo slloooooowly, she forked up one agonized kidney bean at a time. After a few days she started to do the dishes and saying thank you for random things like tea. After Daisy told her she should. She has not so much as brought home a loaf of bread to share, but just sits, waits, naps, and moans about the heat. She doesn’t participate in conversations, try to get to know anyone, or do anything but bring a brooding presence to a small house. She just turns the radio on and sits ands stares while I am trying to work. No, I take that back, last night she was reading her Bible. Culturally speaking, Daisy can’t ask her to leave for fear of angering her husband’s family. But I keep thinking, I could ask her. I’m an ass of an American anyway.
Rahele: Reality in Zimbabwe, from where Ellen is coming, is pretty grim for most people right now. Prices spiral upwards every day, and a few weeks back the government re-issued all of its currency with three zeroes removed. Yeah. So shopping here, even as far from the capital as you can get in Namibia, seems comparatively cheap. Living under a regime like Mugabe’s, where ministers are once again tossing around outlawing meetings of the opposition, has got to be a nightmare. The guy has ordered orphanages to be bulldozed, for the love of God. I never thought of Katima as a paradise before, but in some ways it is. And being in a relative’s house, Ellen probably thought she knew what to expect from the cuisine. A meat-and-cornmeal-porridge-heavy table is the cultural norm, but we rarely make either one here. I wonder what fresh vegetables cost in Zimbabwe. For that matter, I wonder how many people can even get fresh vegetables in Zimbabwe. On any given night there at now at least four people here for dinner anyway, so it’s not as if it actually makes any difference to cook some more food. And even if it did, I would do it anyway, because to come here under these circumstances cannot be the most enjoyable thing. She’s quiet and sleeps a lot. What’s the difference anyway? If we can offer her a break, we should.
I swing back and forth between these two, feeling like they are both honest but also each perhaps a bit incomplete on its own. Mostly I realize how much I have changed, and continue to change. I really am a professional nerd, having these reactions but also watching myself have them, picking them apart and wondering how it is that they always seem to knit back together in a slightly different way.
Rachel: A cousin of my sister Daisy’s husband decided to come for a visit. She didn’t ask, nor was she invited. She just packed her bags and put herself in Daisy’s car last weekend when she was coming back from Vic Falls. Ellen has been here for a week and shows no signs of leaving. Every day, she goes shopping, buying clothes, shoes, an umbrella for the sun, and whatever else. And comes back here, eating and drinking from our kitchen, fanning herself and throwing suffering glances around until someone switches on a fan, painfully forcing herself to eat the mostly vegetarian food we cook in this house. Literally, last night, sooooo slloooooowly, she forked up one agonized kidney bean at a time. After a few days she started to do the dishes and saying thank you for random things like tea. After Daisy told her she should. She has not so much as brought home a loaf of bread to share, but just sits, waits, naps, and moans about the heat. She doesn’t participate in conversations, try to get to know anyone, or do anything but bring a brooding presence to a small house. She just turns the radio on and sits ands stares while I am trying to work. No, I take that back, last night she was reading her Bible. Culturally speaking, Daisy can’t ask her to leave for fear of angering her husband’s family. But I keep thinking, I could ask her. I’m an ass of an American anyway.
Rahele: Reality in Zimbabwe, from where Ellen is coming, is pretty grim for most people right now. Prices spiral upwards every day, and a few weeks back the government re-issued all of its currency with three zeroes removed. Yeah. So shopping here, even as far from the capital as you can get in Namibia, seems comparatively cheap. Living under a regime like Mugabe’s, where ministers are once again tossing around outlawing meetings of the opposition, has got to be a nightmare. The guy has ordered orphanages to be bulldozed, for the love of God. I never thought of Katima as a paradise before, but in some ways it is. And being in a relative’s house, Ellen probably thought she knew what to expect from the cuisine. A meat-and-cornmeal-porridge-heavy table is the cultural norm, but we rarely make either one here. I wonder what fresh vegetables cost in Zimbabwe. For that matter, I wonder how many people can even get fresh vegetables in Zimbabwe. On any given night there at now at least four people here for dinner anyway, so it’s not as if it actually makes any difference to cook some more food. And even if it did, I would do it anyway, because to come here under these circumstances cannot be the most enjoyable thing. She’s quiet and sleeps a lot. What’s the difference anyway? If we can offer her a break, we should.
I swing back and forth between these two, feeling like they are both honest but also each perhaps a bit incomplete on its own. Mostly I realize how much I have changed, and continue to change. I really am a professional nerd, having these reactions but also watching myself have them, picking them apart and wondering how it is that they always seem to knit back together in a slightly different way.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
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.
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.
spiders, every day
Recently I came across one of those lists of funny facts about what happens to the average person over the course of a lifetime. Included was the statistic that we probably swallow an average of eight spiders per person, per lifetime, while sleeping. Last night when I went to bed I looked at the walls in my bedroom, littered with a growing number of the big flat spiders that my boss refers to as “not-so-bads.” And I practically laughed out loud, thinking, I’m pretty sure I’ve already exceeded the average on this score.
Spiders are a relatively mundane part of life here. And in thinking about them, I thought also about the ways in which I tend to describe living here. It’s not all big mammals and dramatic realizations, though these things of course tend to make for better stories to email home. But perhaps, an average day would also shed light on what it’s like to live here. Let me walk you through one from this past week in Maun.
WEDNESDAY
4-5am: Start waking up. Already, still, hot in the room. Ceiling fan not really helping. Roll over and try to go back to sleep. Wake up, roll over, try to go back to sleep again. Parsley, the cat, stretches out on my back and purrs.
6am: Lose the battle and get up. Feed my boss’ cats, as he’s away in Cape Town or Canada or Delft or I’m-not-sure-where. Open the window so Parsley can get out and I shut off the outside lights, which I leave on all night. In a house that has been broken into twice this year, and which is semi-famous for housing a writer who was raped here and a Member of Parliament who shot a thief here, it seems like a good idea. Shower in cold water, make coffee to bring along to work, put on CNN to kill time. Yes, CNN.
7:45: Call my friend Monica to ask about when she thinks she’s leaving, so I know when she might pick me up. “I’m having my rice cakes and jam and so I’ll be on my way in ten minutes,” she says. I lock up and start walking down the sand track towards the tarred road to minimize how far she has to drive to pick me up. Yesterday we went to the gym in town together early-early and had breakfast at a local place that bakes its own bread and muffins. Lovely.
8:24: Arrive at work. Look for cleaning staff to let me into my boss’ office, which is where I sit though I don’t have keys. This takes anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes.
8:30: Coffee, email (we have a satellite connection)… what do I have to do today?
9:00: Literature search on the environmental legacies of apartheid. Reading articles, making lists of things to get thru interlibrary loan. Wow, this feels like the US.
10:00: Meet with the director of the centre about some projects I’m working on with the University of Florida. Not the first person to do so, he expresses some discontent with the amount of time my boss is away. Makes me feel in an awkward spot, but substantively we have a good chat and he is very supportive of my research agenda.
10:55: Research…reading…sometimes, someone stops by to say hi and I’m reminded that the entire world is not, in fact, electronic.
1:00: Lunch. Otherwise known as, leftovers at my desk.
1:12: Back to research. And email. Having been away for the past three weeks, I owe a lot of email. A LOT of email. Also still looking for articles online. Can’t get that, or that, or that. Order a paper copy of an article to be mailed from the US and hope it will arrive in time to be useful. Hope it will arrive at all.
3:10: Break down and switch on the air conditioning for a little while. Eeesh, it’s hot, and brick buildings were not invented in (or for) southern Africa.
5:28: Work day over. I head home with Monica and we stop at my (boss’) place to pick up the things I need to cook for her and her partner, as promised.
5:55: Start making squash and carrot curry, yellow dal, and rice seasoned with peppercorns, cinnamon, and cloves for Monica, Christiana, and their friend Elena. Try not to get into argument with Elena, a recently returned to Maun American, about the significance of reality TV and the meaning (her definition) of “trash” in culturally specific, judgmental terms. Figure, better to drink my gin and tonic and cook.
6:20: G&T number two. Elena is telling stories about her recent trip to the US and I focus on cooking. Better to not get in trouble, I think.
7:10: Food is pretty much ready, but Monica is on the phone with the friend who looks after their house outside of Harare. He’s been trying to email, but computer viruses, after all, respect no national boundaries.
8:00: We eat outside, enjoying the breeze and the smell of the spices and the wine. We talk about our families, about explaining why and how we live here. Christiana’s mother died earlier this year and she talks about the emotional shifting that comes with losing a parent. Elena’s parents sound sophisticated and artistic, and I feel a little provincial. Which to be honest, I enjoy.
9:05: Strawberries and cream, with a side of dark Swiss chocolate I brought for Monica and Christiana from the duty-free shop in the Johannesburg airport. The air is cool, the company thoughtful and engaging, my head is spinning.
9:40: Monica’s a little looped, so Christiana drives me home. She waits at the gate for me to walk up the drive, until she sees lights inside go on. The house feels empty, cavernous, sweaty. Crazy the cat greets me outside, mewing loudly and insisting on something that only he understands. “I fed you already, little turd,” I remind him, slurring just a tiny bit. Inside, Parsley jumps quietly into bed with me and I sleep.
Thursday, we had an open house of sorts for the local safari company guys. But that’s another story entirely.
Spiders are a relatively mundane part of life here. And in thinking about them, I thought also about the ways in which I tend to describe living here. It’s not all big mammals and dramatic realizations, though these things of course tend to make for better stories to email home. But perhaps, an average day would also shed light on what it’s like to live here. Let me walk you through one from this past week in Maun.
WEDNESDAY
4-5am: Start waking up. Already, still, hot in the room. Ceiling fan not really helping. Roll over and try to go back to sleep. Wake up, roll over, try to go back to sleep again. Parsley, the cat, stretches out on my back and purrs.
6am: Lose the battle and get up. Feed my boss’ cats, as he’s away in Cape Town or Canada or Delft or I’m-not-sure-where. Open the window so Parsley can get out and I shut off the outside lights, which I leave on all night. In a house that has been broken into twice this year, and which is semi-famous for housing a writer who was raped here and a Member of Parliament who shot a thief here, it seems like a good idea. Shower in cold water, make coffee to bring along to work, put on CNN to kill time. Yes, CNN.
7:45: Call my friend Monica to ask about when she thinks she’s leaving, so I know when she might pick me up. “I’m having my rice cakes and jam and so I’ll be on my way in ten minutes,” she says. I lock up and start walking down the sand track towards the tarred road to minimize how far she has to drive to pick me up. Yesterday we went to the gym in town together early-early and had breakfast at a local place that bakes its own bread and muffins. Lovely.
8:24: Arrive at work. Look for cleaning staff to let me into my boss’ office, which is where I sit though I don’t have keys. This takes anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes.
8:30: Coffee, email (we have a satellite connection)… what do I have to do today?
9:00: Literature search on the environmental legacies of apartheid. Reading articles, making lists of things to get thru interlibrary loan. Wow, this feels like the US.
10:00: Meet with the director of the centre about some projects I’m working on with the University of Florida. Not the first person to do so, he expresses some discontent with the amount of time my boss is away. Makes me feel in an awkward spot, but substantively we have a good chat and he is very supportive of my research agenda.
10:55: Research…reading…sometimes, someone stops by to say hi and I’m reminded that the entire world is not, in fact, electronic.
1:00: Lunch. Otherwise known as, leftovers at my desk.
1:12: Back to research. And email. Having been away for the past three weeks, I owe a lot of email. A LOT of email. Also still looking for articles online. Can’t get that, or that, or that. Order a paper copy of an article to be mailed from the US and hope it will arrive in time to be useful. Hope it will arrive at all.
3:10: Break down and switch on the air conditioning for a little while. Eeesh, it’s hot, and brick buildings were not invented in (or for) southern Africa.
5:28: Work day over. I head home with Monica and we stop at my (boss’) place to pick up the things I need to cook for her and her partner, as promised.
5:55: Start making squash and carrot curry, yellow dal, and rice seasoned with peppercorns, cinnamon, and cloves for Monica, Christiana, and their friend Elena. Try not to get into argument with Elena, a recently returned to Maun American, about the significance of reality TV and the meaning (her definition) of “trash” in culturally specific, judgmental terms. Figure, better to drink my gin and tonic and cook.
6:20: G&T number two. Elena is telling stories about her recent trip to the US and I focus on cooking. Better to not get in trouble, I think.
7:10: Food is pretty much ready, but Monica is on the phone with the friend who looks after their house outside of Harare. He’s been trying to email, but computer viruses, after all, respect no national boundaries.
8:00: We eat outside, enjoying the breeze and the smell of the spices and the wine. We talk about our families, about explaining why and how we live here. Christiana’s mother died earlier this year and she talks about the emotional shifting that comes with losing a parent. Elena’s parents sound sophisticated and artistic, and I feel a little provincial. Which to be honest, I enjoy.
9:05: Strawberries and cream, with a side of dark Swiss chocolate I brought for Monica and Christiana from the duty-free shop in the Johannesburg airport. The air is cool, the company thoughtful and engaging, my head is spinning.
9:40: Monica’s a little looped, so Christiana drives me home. She waits at the gate for me to walk up the drive, until she sees lights inside go on. The house feels empty, cavernous, sweaty. Crazy the cat greets me outside, mewing loudly and insisting on something that only he understands. “I fed you already, little turd,” I remind him, slurring just a tiny bit. Inside, Parsley jumps quietly into bed with me and I sleep.
Thursday, we had an open house of sorts for the local safari company guys. But that’s another story entirely.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
drought, poor people, and mutilated movies
A few weeks ago, I reread Norman Rush’s book about whites in Botswana. It’s called, well, “Whites.” Considering that I hadn’t lived in Botswana the first time I’d read it, I wondered if I’d look at it differently now. It’s safe to say it struck me harder this time. In particular, an exchange between two expat Americans stuck in my head:
“Answer this question. Do you like it in Africa?”
She said she did.
“But you can’t quite figure out why you like it, am I right?” he asked. “Because, I mean, hell, it’s inconvenient. Gaborone is dead at night, the movies are ancient and all mutilated because they have to come through South African censorship because that’s where the distributor is located. But still we like it here. Drought, poor people…even when they get a decent movie, they mix up the reels. We want to be here anyway, but we can’t figure out why. Except that one night I figured it out. It’s because it isn’t our country and we can’t help what happens. We can offer eople advice and we get paid for it. We get good vacations, we eat off the top of the food chain, we get free housing. Hey!, but we’re not responsible for what happens if Africa goes to hell, ecause we’ve done our best. Also, at the same time, we’re not responsible for what happens in America either, really – because hey!, we weren’t home when it happened. Say we get fifteen percent compliance on birth control here, which is what we do get and which is terrific by Third World standards. O.K., it’s not enough. But what can we do, we tried. We told them. But we’re too late. We all know it, but somebody pays us to keep up the good work, so we say fine. Why am I telling you this? I forget."
Certainly, I forget too. But what lingers is this idea of responsibility. I thought to myself, if Rush had asked me why I’m here, I suspect I’d have said just the opposite. I’m here because I do feel responsible. Not the kind of responsibility that makes the state of affairs my fault – I’m not so arrogant as that. But the kind that says, I’m a human being, I’ve had a lot of privilege, and I have a responsibility to do something with it that might hopefully help someone other than me. The kind of naïve, idealistic responsibility that makes it possible for me to get out of bed every day in a region of Namibia where nearly half of the population is HIV-positive and where some women still think they can’t even talk to me without their husbands being present. I’ve seen a lot of things, living here. Things that no one should ever have to see, much less live through. And despair is a constant undercurrent. But the idea that I’ve come here to escape responsibility, well, it’s absurd. And probably a little bit right.
After all, I can go home. I can leave whenever I want. I even have a fantastic job waiting for me in a place that I am sure will be good for me. I’m working with a Zimbabwean academic who is now based in the US, who reminded me that “we can’t change things here.” We. Can’t. And he’s right. But he’s also wrong. I hope.
“Answer this question. Do you like it in Africa?”
She said she did.
“But you can’t quite figure out why you like it, am I right?” he asked. “Because, I mean, hell, it’s inconvenient. Gaborone is dead at night, the movies are ancient and all mutilated because they have to come through South African censorship because that’s where the distributor is located. But still we like it here. Drought, poor people…even when they get a decent movie, they mix up the reels. We want to be here anyway, but we can’t figure out why. Except that one night I figured it out. It’s because it isn’t our country and we can’t help what happens. We can offer eople advice and we get paid for it. We get good vacations, we eat off the top of the food chain, we get free housing. Hey!, but we’re not responsible for what happens if Africa goes to hell, ecause we’ve done our best. Also, at the same time, we’re not responsible for what happens in America either, really – because hey!, we weren’t home when it happened. Say we get fifteen percent compliance on birth control here, which is what we do get and which is terrific by Third World standards. O.K., it’s not enough. But what can we do, we tried. We told them. But we’re too late. We all know it, but somebody pays us to keep up the good work, so we say fine. Why am I telling you this? I forget."
Certainly, I forget too. But what lingers is this idea of responsibility. I thought to myself, if Rush had asked me why I’m here, I suspect I’d have said just the opposite. I’m here because I do feel responsible. Not the kind of responsibility that makes the state of affairs my fault – I’m not so arrogant as that. But the kind that says, I’m a human being, I’ve had a lot of privilege, and I have a responsibility to do something with it that might hopefully help someone other than me. The kind of naïve, idealistic responsibility that makes it possible for me to get out of bed every day in a region of Namibia where nearly half of the population is HIV-positive and where some women still think they can’t even talk to me without their husbands being present. I’ve seen a lot of things, living here. Things that no one should ever have to see, much less live through. And despair is a constant undercurrent. But the idea that I’ve come here to escape responsibility, well, it’s absurd. And probably a little bit right.
After all, I can go home. I can leave whenever I want. I even have a fantastic job waiting for me in a place that I am sure will be good for me. I’m working with a Zimbabwean academic who is now based in the US, who reminded me that “we can’t change things here.” We. Can’t. And he’s right. But he’s also wrong. I hope.
the view from here
A while back - and by this I mean, a few years ago - a colleague started a conversation about 'Africa' with me by asking, "What does it LOOK like where you live?" Knowing this individual well enough, I could see that she had been thinking for weeks about how to ask the right, most intelligent question about a part of the world that was totally unfamiliar to her. And now, knowing my own tendency to write long, carefully crafted missives rather than brief updates, I see that this is probably in fact a good question. So I thought I would share a few images.
MaSubia Cultural Festival, Bukalo Kuta south of Katima Mulilo, Caprivi Strip, Namibia
Going up into the Delta, July 2006 (the water is, in fact, quite cold in winter)
MaSubia Cultural Festival, Bukalo Kuta south of Katima Mulilo, Caprivi Strip, Namibia
Grass basket wrapped with palm leaf strips
Ballot counting for a new management in Kwandu Conservancy, also in the Caprivi Strip
My tent inside my research assistant's courtyard in Choi village, Caprivi (one of my study sites)
My friends Rosemary's daughter doing her best to make off with my sunglasses at the annual Ngoma Market Crafts Festival, Caprivi
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