Some public healthy thing I wrote for UVP

For those more interested in the work that I'm doing here and not my existential musings...here's for you:

Myth, stigma, and taboo shroud family planning efforts in many villages. At Buwaiswa, one of Uganda Village Project's targeted Healthy Villages communities, the shroud was particularly opaque. As a field officer, I was assisting with family planning workshops, bringing nurses and contraceptives to women in remote villages that otherwise would have limited access to such services. Women gathered around outside the empty room where we sat with nurses, wanting the information and contraception, but scared of who might see them, especially their husbands. We’ve found that most husbands are against contraception, yet in most cases it is not acceptable for the wife to refuse sex. So, we position ourselves near wells so that women can pretend to fetch water, or make whatever excuse they need to make to leave the house. Others simply sneak out when the sun goes down. This issue is one of the major challenges that Uganda Village Project faces in its family planning program, and we are currently working on an awareness-raising program for men using respected village leaders to speak out on how family planning has helped them.

A tall, handsome young woman with high cheekbones, big eyes, even inky skin, and a cropped afro came into the room. Her youngest child, less than a year old, was wrapped to her back with a kitengi cloth. She was my age, with four children. Despite the women outside gossiping about whoever was trying to get birth control, the woman was one of four others in four hours who ventured in to see us. After weighing her options, she opted for Depo Provera, like most women, because of its inconspicuous nature. The nurse handed her a pregnancy test. Positive. She didn’t miss a beat, smiled gracefully, and left. I was floored by the composure with which she took the news. The average woman my age who has even experienced a false alarm for an unplanned pregnancy sees her life flashing before her eyes.

At Nabitovu, there was no room for us. We held the workshop under a tree, as we commonly must do when working in these remote areas. The village was more receptive to family planning, so everyone was enjoying their neighbors’ company, giggling at the condom demonstration. As things began to wind down, an 18 year old mustered up the courage to walk over. Most of the women who come to us are in their 20s/30s, and married with multiple children. When the other women lingering around realized what was going on they inched closer to listen, whispering among each other.  The girl could barely look at our nurse. She mumbled her answers, staring at the ground or the sky, fidgeting, burning in the heat of her public humiliation.

She had an older boyfriend in town. She had no idea whether they used condoms or not. “I never look,” she explained.

I was horrified for her. My first experience trying to get birth control in America is etched in the stone of my memory.The doctor stared expectantly over his spectacles, ready to record the personal details of my sex life. Sitting in a cold room smelling of rubbing alcohol, I squirmed in my examination gown, mortified. I managed one-word answers. I’d sooner suffer in silence than relive that experience while a group of my mother’s friends and neighbors sat nearby, watching, listening, and judging.

A woman at another village in her early thirties with nine children came to us seeking birth control. Pregnancy test = positive. Her face betrayed her devastation. She grew desperate. “I can’t have another child. I have to stop this pregnancy. Please help me stop it.“ Abortion is illegal in Uganda. Post-abortion care is widely, and legally publicized through clinics, yet clandestine abortion contributes to approximately one-third of Uganda’s maternal mortality.

Looking at that woman, I thought of my grandmother who gave birth to nine children in Nigeria. Though she is a devout Catholic who once studied to be a nun, I wondered if she had ever wanted contraceptives or if she actually intended to spend over 5 years of her life pregnant.

What would this woman do --attempt an iron hanger abortion? Consult a spurious doctor with fraudulent credentials because she couldn’t afford anyone else? Or would she give birth to another child she couldn’t feed?

Anti-abortionists argue that women have other choices. But when your husband refuses family planning methods altogether and you cannot refuse sex in marriage, and you live in a society in which adoption is uncommon because of widespread poverty, I wonder what exactly are those other choices?

The week before I arrived, a woman in labor arrived at a hospital where she ended up waiting for hours, only to be referred to a different hospital. Before reaching the next hospital, she was hemorrhaging, as someone encouraged her to push while riding the boda boda, a motorcycle taxi. At the hospital, the fetal heartbeat was gone. Nevertheless, she had to deliver the baby. After seeing her dead child, she fainted and died shortly thereafter. And to think she was one of the few women who could actually afford to pay for the 2,000 shillings (~1 dollar) taxi to the hospital so that she didn’t have to deliver at home on a bare floor.

I often joke half-seriously that being a woman is the worst decision I’ve ever made. Not only is there the ubiquitous cultural and institutional discrimination, but also sex, the source of life, is disproportionately risky for women, and childbirth carries a very real risk of death, with a lifetime risk of maternal mortality of 1 in 25. What’s more is that nothing I’ve said is really specific to Uganda. The stories would largely be the same, if not worse, if I were in rural Brazil, Nigeria, the Philippines, India, Afghanistan. Until access to healthcare improves across the world, it will remain dangerous to be a woman in these places.

"For birth control I just rely on my personality." --Liz Winston

Deciding to blog/ Coming to Africa

Let me preface this blog entirely with the following: My close friends are aware that I’ve resisted blogging for quite some time.  Working in rural China might’ve been a perfect place to begin since my experience was a series of unfortunate events that are only amusing in retrospect.

Perhaps it’s a fear of the pressure to publish something eloquent and profound on a consistent basis, because I am neither eloquent nor profound...or consistent.

Most likely, though, I don’t want to become another travel blogger answering people’s  inevitable and unoriginal “HOW’S AFRICA???” (because Africa is all one big country, right?) I’ve glanced at a few travel blogs, and I’m not amused. I don’t really care to write a blog about the “exotic” food, or whether the people are nice, or what it’s like to live without air conditioning and television or consistent electricity, or trinkets I might come across that’d be a gem at the World Market. I don’t want to post photos of half naked, malnourished Ugandan children covered in dirt and dust standing in the doorways of mud huts or emaciated HIV sufferers–though that is the reality where I live and work.
Much to people’s chagrin, I am not here to eat, pray, love nor am I on a safari of endless adventure and wonderment.

I don’t know what this blog is supposed to be about. I might write about my work in Uganda or I might write about whatever comes to mind. I might use complete sentences or decide to write in cryptic haikus. Or I might stop writing anything altogether. Having decided to at least attempt blogging anyway, I must say, I still feel like a tool.

"And if you wanna make sense
Whatcha looking at me for?
I'm no good at math"- Fiona Apple
--

In the past two weeks I’ve visited Dubai for a few days and been living in rural Uganda for the rest, and all I want to talk about is the fact that everywhere I go people gawk and shout “white woman!” at me. When I was in Nigeria a few years ago being called onyeocha, I laughed it off. But now I have the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Souls of Black Folk, The Invisible Man, and 5 years of being black at Berkeley in my bones. 

Now, muzungu irks me. 

In China people wouldn’t believe that I, like my co-workers, was American. “Americans have white skin, no?” a student asked. A blonde haired, blue-eyed co-worker cut in, “Well, most of the time.” Without dignifying my co-worker’s thoughtless response, I explained that part of my family originated from Nigeria. I left the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade out for time’s sake.

Berkeley was a formative period of racial identification and understanding white privilege, from something like an insensitive PETA demonstration comparing the black-American experience to that of animals, to my classmates’ flippant questions about my hair. Everywhere I was reminded that I was in fact “other.”

Marcus Garvey and his contemporaries once advocated for the return of African-Americans to Africa, as if Africa would be the place where we could stop being a disadvantaged minority and finally feel at home. Yet here I am, only one generation removed from my African roots, having to muster up every ounce of decorum to keep from visible cringing, and wave back to little kids shouting “white woman” at me.

Would my experience be the same if my light skin tone didn’t stick out like a sore thumb?

The question double consciousness answers for DuBois is what does it mean to be an American Negro? For my own purposes, I would like to amend that and pose the question: what does it mean to be a descendant of an enslaved people AND slave masters, while being raised only by my a Nigerian family in white suburban America, and then returning to Africa? (I can never be a writer because I pose more questions than I answer.) For all intents and purposes, I had identified as Nigerian, as an African. That was until a friend in the intellectual struggle for meaning and direction for the black cultural identity explained, between bites of an enormous burrito, “We are NOT African. That ship has sailed.” No pun intended.

“Other” haunts me as I negotiate the in betweenness of my existence and identity.

But at who or what am I mad? The Ugandans? No. The proverbial Man? Always.

However, if I am completely honest with myself, it may be fear masquerading as exasperation, fear that the “white woman” I’ve now been identified as is the same “white woman” of William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden. The last thing I want to be is just another privileged (yes, here, I am in fact privileged) American jackass coming to a resource-limited country to volunteer, doing absolutely nothing meaningful or effective, yet filled with glowing self-satisfaction at having ventured into the Dark Continent to live on the edge, surviving without many modern amenities.

As people tell me how proud they are of me, I’m filled with a growing sense of inadequacy, unable to see anything to be proud of yet. I can’t help but be suspicious of myself. When deciding between volunteering in Uganda or working in Santa Cruz do Sol, Brazil teaching English to wealthy German Brazilians, my friend Vanessa commented, “Uganda is the perfect opportunity NOT to help The Man.” But I wonder, to Ugandans, am I an embodiment of The Man?

Walking on the street late one evening to get a rolex (a type of food, google it) after work, a little boy followed my co-worker and I saying with a child-like sing-song cadence, “You are the ones who brought us disease, you are the ones…”

So I am paranoid.  But the non-profit I’m with is what Easterly would categorize as a “Seeker.” And at the end of the day, I believe that they will make me useful, even when I feel useless.


"...I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me." Timothy Levitch