Thursday, June 30, 2005

I'm back. . .

Today, like most weekend mornings, I woke up to choral harmonies coming from a parade of overloaded flat-bed trucks passing my house carrying a steady stream of mourners from the morgue to the cemetery. The altered pitch rises and lowers as they go by, and most of the songs are now familiar to me. The past few months have been a deluge of events that, back home, we understand as rare ordeals requiring weeks or months for recovery. Here the velocity of death and birth are such that the grief and joy are tangled up together in ways that are hard for me to comprehend.

One story of far too many: There is an activist at the Beira Day Hospital who learned she was HIV positive after her first husband died and her soon-to-be second husband asked her to go with him to get tested for HIV. She was positive and he was negative. “Never mind,” he said, “no one else who I’ve asked to do this has had the courage—you were the only one. I still want to get married.” Nine months later, she fell ill with tuberculosis and was bed-ridden. Somehow, he wasn’t bargaining on that--the burden of a sick and possibly dying wife was something he hadn’t considered. As is common here, decided he couldn’t be bothered to care for her and delivered her back to her parents’ home, a gesture that essentially means: “Here, I don’t need this any more, you can have it back.” Just then, the Beira Day Hospital HIV treatment center was opening, and although she had to be carried to her appointment, she managed to be one of the first patients enrolled. Her TB was treated, she rapidly improved, and she has gone on to be one of the star health activists now working there—supporting her friends, family and other patients as they are tested and go through the difficult early stages of understanding and accepting the diagnosis that she knows so well.

She met her third husband when she was recovering from her TB and just getting her strength back. She always insisted on using a condom and when he confronted her about it, she told him that she had HIV. He too accepted it – but now she knows that ultimately, she’s on her own. She has no ill will towards the second husband who abandoned her. “If it weren’t for him, I never would have been tested at all,” she plainly observes. She didn’t want to have another child (she has a 9 year old from her first marriage) but here in Mozambique, marriage is inconceivable without children and the social stigma against childless couples is too much to bear. So after careful consideration and control of her HIV, she got pregnant and now has a chubby 3 month old with an easy laugh and insatiable bright eyes that drink in everything. She spent nearly the entire week before he was born in the hospital, not for herself, but instead caring for her brother who was dying of Malaria. Her first labor pains came during his funeral. Everyone here has a story like this one.

So I have been negligent in the care and feeding of the blog because sometimes, it’s too much to put into words, and it feels wrong to write about the more mundane things when you’re stuggling to come to terms with the traumas that are part of daily life.

On the brighter side, I also had a deluge of visitors over the past few months. My film guru friends and mentors came out and we took hundreds of photos and hours of film which we are editing down to about 6 minutes to put on the HAI website soon. You can see a small sample of the photos we took here, and I’ll let you know how to download the film as soon as we get it up in finished form.

In case you think my life is all tragedy, I went on a great birthday canoe safari with my friend Ed. We got laughed at by hundreds of hippos and scared a few elephants (apparently, they don’t like the way people smell.)

We got some US press on our efforts in Slate.com after a short visit from a journalism fellow. I am quoted in one article dissing the US government and in another dissing the Vatican. Not bad for a day’s work. You can read his view of the scale-up here. Click on different days of the week if you want to read Adam's other articles about Mozambique.

Finally, I'll put you all on notice that I'll be back in the US (after spending a couple of days in London) on about September 22nd. I'll be in Cleveland for a few weeks, then New Mexico and possibly Seattle, with a last stop at the American Public Health Association Conference in New Orleans and then back here. Hope to see you all during that whirlwind visit.

Abracos,
Wendy

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's time for the next post, my friend. Miss your words.

Love,

Molly

8:01 PM  

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