Yebo, sisonkhe

I have two weeks left in Swaziland.  I was going to write about joy.  The joy I feel living here.  The funny little moments in the grocery store where three or four cultures collide at once and I smile and buy my cheese and Swazi Times and feel so lucky to be here.  But I don’t think I can do that right now.

I was born in Santa Barbara.  My baby brother goes to school there.  I’ll be getting married there next year.  Getting lunch on the way back from Kruger, the TV was tuned to SkyNews and a Santa Barbara county Sherriff was describing a mass shooting.  I was frantic – where?  Who?  And slowly I learned that my baby brother, his friends, our family, were all fine, and slowly I learned more about what had happened in Isla Vista, and why.

This hashtag, YesAllWomen, breaks my heart and gives me hope.  This is the first time I have ever seen wedding blogs and science writers simultaneously address the treacherous, uneven bog that walking through the world as a woman can be.  I am overwhelmed by the sameness of these experiences, the wave of women’s voices saying they all feel this way.  The way that I thought maybe I was weak for feeling too, when instead I should always be smart and brave and adventurous and unafraid.

Tonight a friend told me about a conversation she had had with a bright, educated, hopeful young woman here in Swaziland.  The girl carries around condoms with her all the time.  Just in case.  Not just in case she meets somebody and wants to have a safe, spontaneous experience.  In case she is raped, she hopes she can at least talk the assailant into not getting her pregnant.  Last week another friend told me about a gardener who had molested an 8 year old girl.  Because there was no ‘forensic evidence’ the police wouldn’t do anything.  So the family tracked the man down and beat the hell out of him instead.  It wasn’t his first offense.

The papers in Swaziland are full of men murdering women, men raping women, men being outraged that women would suggest they have the right to own property, work, exist as equal human beings.  It is tempting to separate what is happening in America from what is happening in Swaziland.  Oh, those Africans, they are so backwards.  Sentencing gay people to death and treating women like second class citizens.

But yes, all women.  All women, in Africa and in America, we all live in fear of men.  No, not all men, but we all of us live under this constant threat of violence, this constant fear that comes with something as elemental as our gender.  We are, all of us, told that we are less than human, that we count for our ability to be fucked and not our ability to think interesting thoughts and do good things.  The experience takes different shapes, but the fact of it is the same.  I have been harassed in Swaziland, in South Africa, in Tanzania, California, Maryland, and Georgia.  I don’t sit too close to men on the bus because South Africa, and I won’t let men get too close to me in clubs because Los Angeles.

This is, pardon my language: fucked up.  I am drawn to my work for many reasons, but so much of it is that  while I have more privilege and more voice than the women I work with, talk to, pass on the street every day, we are still the same.  It is not my job to speak for Swazi women, to take their voice, but in this one way we are the same.  Yes, we are all women.  Yes, all women are constantly told we are a little bit or a lot less than human.  Yes, all women know this same fear.  It is intimate, it lives with us, haunts our memories, leers in our windows at night, warns us not to walk too close or trust too much.  I want to contribute in some small way to making people see this.  It devastates me that we all walk in a world shaped this way.  It infuriates me that yes, all women navigate these same dangerous paths together.  I am driven to come here over and over again, to spend my day thinking about HIV, violence, hunger, poverty, and inequality, not because the experience of women in Swaziland in South Africa is so unlike mine, but because at the core it is the same.

There is no difference between us.  My sisters in South Africa live in a country where a quarter of men have admitted to raping a woman.  My friends in America have been told not to make trouble, or to stop being such a bitch when they were assaulted by friends or classmates.  Yes, all women.  All of us.  This is personal.  I don’t know how to make it stop.  But I don’t know what else to do but try in some small way to push back.

Eat your broccoli

There is this idea that I struggle with.  Here in Swaziland it is in my face all the time, but in America it doesn't go away either.

When I was a volunteer, I caught a group of neighborhood kids pawing through my garbage.  Rural South Africa does not exactly have scheduled garbage pick-up, so you pile everything up in the yard and then set it on fire.  I had taken my trash out earlier in the day and came back from some meeting or event to see a group of kids bent over the pile.  One little girl had found some food that I had thrown out.  A plastic tube of something akin to instant breakfast that I'd been intrigued by at the grocery store, found really gross, and then delayed throwing out for a few months.  She was eating it by the handful, doing her best to assume an air of curiosity and irony rather than intense hunger.  Later I found her sitting on the church steps, hunched over and moaning with a stomach ache.

I have never been able to throw food away again.  I feel shame when I allow something to go bad, when I don't recycle and repurpose every meal until nothing but peels and rinds are left.  Knowing that I am wasting something that my neighbor would have gladly pulled out of the garbage -- I just can't.  It would be shameful, cruel, disrespectful.  Even if she is 10,000 miles away and will never see that thing of cheese that I didn't get around to eating after it looked so interesting at the farmer's market last week.

And yet.

I hear this line of thinking a lot, from other ex-pats, from folks who have spent 6 weeks, two months, a semester abroad in this part of the world.  The disdain for friends at home who buy their children ipads or lots of fancy toys at Christmas.  The discomfort we feel going out to a nice meal in a country where  fully half (at least) the population is food insecure.  My own guilt and unease planning an American wedding while living here, spending more money on a dress than many of the participants I'm talking to will earn in a year.

But I don't know what my discomfort buys them.  I don't know what distaste for money spent in America -- for safaris and brunches and nights out at House on Fire here -- does for my neighbor in South Africa.  If my parents generously, generously pay what they can afford so that the day when my person and I get married is as fun as we can make it -- is that cruel, is it shameful, does it disrespect the experiences of every couple and their parents who can't do the same?

I hear this line -- the one where you should eat all your peas because of the starving children in Ethiopia, Somalia, Swaziland, and not to mention very likely down your own street anywhere you live in America.  And it makes me wary for two reasons:

The first is that children in Somalia, Swaziland, Baltimore, Atlanta, or Oxnard do not exist to be poverty porn.  Some of them like peas, some of them do not.  People are people, we are complicated, we are multifaceted.  We have more than one thing going on at a time.  My neighbor does not exist to be the bogeyman who convinces other children to eat their broccoli.  She is an autonomous person with other interests than being the sad punchline to somebody else's story.  Including mine.

The second reason is that I don't think comfort is inherently immoral.  I don't think it is bad to lavish gifts on people you love if you can and if it makes you happy.  I don't think it is bad to enjoy an expansive brunch with friends here in Swaziland after working hard and feeling stress.  Yes, my stress is not as bad as that of a woman living with HIV and trying to feed her children.  I am not an elderly grandmother trying to support three generations of family 10k from the nearest paved road.  And I don't pretend to be.  But what is the point of suffering olympics?  Getting married in a horse hair and lentil dress that I scavenged from behind the Salvation Army is not going change the fact that about 30% of the people I meet on a given day are infected with HIV, and if they are a poor woman they are much, much more likely to be so.  I can work very hard to have some impact on that, and also still want to wear a pretty dress.

I think the danger of saying "I can't because they can't" is that it steals the focus from where it should be.  When I say that we shouldn't go to brunch because of the township we must pass to get there, where is the focus?  Are we talking about the real and devastating structural inequalities that fuel that township?  Are we talking about the people who live there, their experiences, their needs, their humanity?  Or are we talking about what a lovely and self-sacrificing person I am?  This is the other thing I have been learning for the past 8 years, and if I could I would line up every single person who ever even thinks about getting into any sort of social service anything, line them up and shake them one at a time and tell them very clearly:

It is not about you.

I find these comparisons, these wry comments on first-world problems and rants about how much money your cousin's neighbor's friend spends on dog food to be frustrating because they turn the spotlight and the focus onto that rich, likely white, entirely privileged person.  It is the idea of 'what can I take from their suffering?  How does her poverty impact my life?'  It uses other people's lives to highlight your own.  Other people who have less voice, less power, who aren't granted the opportunity to be whole and multifaceted and real.

Don't be wasteful because it is bad to be wasteful.  Don't be wasteful, because it disrespects and ignores the privileges that you have.  Don't trash your dress, don't throw out your food, don't build a superfluous airport -- because those are all a celebration of waste and destruction for the sake of it.  But just as bad (maybe) is turning the fact that 650,000 of your neighbors are food insecure into something that is about you and whether or not you should get a massage.  That's pretty disrespectful too, as I see it.

 I have not sorted this out yet.  I don't know that I have the idea just right, but it is something I've been thinking about a lot.  I am not perfect.  I am trying.  I do not throw out food.

At The Clinic

I have been circling the notion of ‘public health in Africa’ for the last…six and a half years (!).  First I was a Peace Corps Volunteer assigned to be a “School and Community Resource Volunteer” – a title I am incapable mentioning without using either print or air quotes.  I loved my time serving as a PCV, and I think I did make some sort of difference somewhere, but as job titles go that particular one is magnificently nonsensical.  It means I hung out in primary schools, and went on walks, and had a lot of conversations with a lot of people, and saw what 30% HIV prevalence really looks like on a daily basis in a rural South African village.  And eventually I found my way to this idea: “Huh…If ‘hey baby’ is an effective pick-up line, there is probably a self-esteem problem happening in the teenage girls around me.”  As nuanced indictments of the gender and economic structures that contribute to HIV risk and vulnerability go…there have been better summations of the problem.  But it was my step one.  And I’ve read a lot more, and listened a lot more, and I like to think I’ve got a slightly more multifaceted understanding of the situation now.   And I know just how much I still need to keep learning, reading, and (mostly) listening.

In the time since I COS’ed (that’s Close-of-Service to those of you who are unfamiliar with Peace Corps vast, impressive sea of acronyms) I’ve spent a lot of time reading, thinking, and listening about all those social things that go along with public health and HIV in southern Africa.   I got a masters degree in the social and behavioral aspects of international health (hint: you should spend some time listening to the people you’d like to help before you start helping).  Now I’m working on a doctorate in behavioral sciences in public health (bonus hint: make sure you’re listening the right way, so that when you tell other people what the folks you want to help had to say, those other people believe them/you).  I spend a lot of my time thinking about gender, and inequality, and how people respond to or are constrained by the social landscape around them, and how those responses and that landscape affect their health.  (I also spend a lot of time talking about this.  Certain people who have spent the last few years in close contact with me probably now know more about gender and HIV than they ever, ever wanted to learn.  That first date was a tip off).

Even though I have spent the last six years engaged in public health in southern Africa in some way or another, this past month is my first time spending a lot of my day in and around clinics.  Two years ago I spent a day navigating different aspects of the health system with a sick acquaintance, but that was only a snapshot, albeit a vivid one.   From March through June, I’ll be spending every. single. weekday. recruiting pregnant women in a couple of different government run antenatal clinics in urban and rural parts of the country.  Which means that my research assistant and I spend a lot of time hanging out, chatting with nurses, watching each day go by and catching the rhythm of the place. 

Partially because we are spending most of our time in the antenatal part of the clinics, and partially because all over the world women just tend to interact with health care more often than men, the clinics are spaces full of women.  Pregnant women.  Women with infants, toddlers, pre-school aged kids there for their check-ups and immunizations.  Women waiting for family planning (mostly injectables, as far as I can tell).  Women getting counseled on how to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV, pre and post HIV test counseling, with impressively true to life models on which male and female condoms are demonstrated.   Female nurses, of course.  (But a few men, too!).

Outside, I sometimes see people sitting.  They sit quietly on a set of cinderblock bricks that have been abandoned there.  These people are usually bent over, looking down, almost always alone.  Maybe they are tired after a long process of getting to the clinic, or from sitting in the hot waiting room all day.  Maybe they are waiting for a ride home.   But I know that another service at the clinic is HTC (HIV testing and counseling), and I know that every day men and women are learning their status for the first time, and I know that that news is not always good.  In fact, that’s why I’m there.  I ask women to share their results with me, and now my study has biomarkers and it is Much Better than if I had just asked about behavior.  I try to give these quiet, alone people their space.  I feel empathy and compassion, but I don’t want to intrude.  They are out in the open, but I try to give them whatever privacy I can.

There are women everywhere, and there are babies everywhere.  Toddlers roam the halls of the clinic mostly at will.  Their moms keep an eye on them, or know that all the other nurses and women in the clinic will redirect them if they get up to anything too nefarious.  They come and get their childhood immunizations -- I have figured out the word for ‘shot’ recently, it is usually the thing that a child is whimpering over and over again while they rub their arm and get reassured by a nearby nurse/grandmother/aunt/mother.  There is exactly the amount of screaming, crying, and general wailing that you would associate with a couple of adjacent buildings full of bored and/or in pain infants and toddlers.  There are far, far fewer tantrums thrown than if these buildings were in the US.  In the last month I have seen exactly zero child meltdowns that were not related to falling down or getting a shot.  (There is a good deal I could also say here about the luxury of liberal, rich world parents shunning childhood vaccinations that literally save lives in Swaziland and around the world.  But instead I will simply link you to this website that comprehensively explains how vaccines cause autism and other diseases).

Sometimes people hand me babies.  My assistant tries to coax me to tie them to my back, since I have expressed doubt about the standard method that women here use.  A woman leans over, slings her child around and onto her back, wraps a towel around herself and the child, with the kid clinging to her back and both legs sticking out on either side of her back, and ties a couple of knots in the towel to make the whole thing stick.  I thought maybe this could be a bit precarious -- doesn’t the towel ever slip?  This was apparently a ridiculous question, and now my assistant is on the lookout for any woman who will let me give it a shot with her baby.  There have been very few takers so far.  Last week I was handed an infant so that mom could, well, enjoy not holding an infant for a little while.  The baby was very calm, it did not seem at all worried about the strange new face color that was now looming over it instead of mom.  We all agreed this was hilarious.  Then it spit up some liquid aspirin all over me.  I chatted with the baby’s sister – I told her that the woman on the poster on the wall was a doctor.  Her mother and my assistant reassured the girl that the woman was probably a nurse.  She asked me in siSwati if I was still a student, then where was my school uniform?  I do not have an adequate siSwati vocabulary to explain that constant mild panic and ongoing uncertainty are my uniform.  Then she commanded that I tell her a joke.  Or sing a hymn with her.  I didn’t know the words, so she sang it herself.  As far as I can tell, the words were “Jeeeeezus….Jeeeeezus.”  There may have been more.  Unclear.

Later, in the hallway, I stopped a little boy who was trying to make a break for freedom out the clinic door.  Despite repeated interrogation (uyaphi?  uypahi? -- where you going?  where you going?), he did not seem fully clear on where he was going.  Or where his mother was.  Or what his name was.  Probably because he was two and preferred chattering about...something? birds?...at length instead.

A nurse walked by and stared at him, and stopped in her tracks.  Wow!  She said.  Miracle baby!  She told me that when he was 18 months old, his father had refused to put him on ARVs until she had forced him.  At 18 months the little boy couldn’t hold himself up in a seated position.  She had thought he was going to die.  And today he was roaming the clinic, making friends with random Americans while his mom got her (their?) treatment.  The nurse just kept shaking her head in amazement at the power of ARVs.  I was amazed by her power -- she saved that little boy’s life.

 The morning starts with singing and prayer.  My assistant and I set up our computers, our juice, our cookies, and our paperwork, and listen to the hymns coming from the next room.  They are beautiful.  They are the same four part harmony that I remember from Steenbok, from the way the teachers would begin every morning meeting, from the choir rehearsal in the church next door to my house.  I miss those hymns, and I love listening to them every morning.  Then there is a prayer and a sermon.  I can’t quite tell, but I think there is one for the nurses, and a separate one for the women who have queued up in the waiting room.  The praying is out loud, all the nurses praying together at the same time, loudly and repetitively and urgently.  I think it is the thing that collective effervescence became, the thing that transformed into football cheers and really good concerts.  It is intense, and unified, and driven in a way that can make the hairs on your arm stand up, if you happen to be sitting in the middle of it in a hot tiny church that has lost power and is sitting in twilight in a rural village somewhere.  The sermon is usually loud and strident, and bordering on shrieking.  Here is where I lose interest, and become annoyed.  Really, I told a friend of mine over email, you would think that if Jesus was actually there he would get on with the business of ministering to all the sick and pregnant ladies  -- a third of whom have HIV – rather than going on about the gospel of how one should minister to the sick and pregnant, and how one will then someday triumph in heaven.

Fortunately, I have friends who are smarter than me.  Sometimes, I email them snide comments, and sometimes they offer me wisdom in return.  You know, my friend told me, all of that sounds like a ritual.  And rituals are powerful, and important, and we all need them in our lives.  He’s very right.  The nurses I have met – they are sometimes rushed, and they sometimes speak briskly, but they are there every day.  Day after day they convince parents to put their children on ARVs.  Day after day they tell women who are living with HIV not only that they can prevent the virus from being transmitted to their child, but they give them the tools.  Every day they tell somebody that they have HIV.  Every day they provide health care and counseling to women who are rushing to work and women who have never been to school and never had a job.  Every day, I can guess the stories they hear from their clients.  And every day they keep coming. 

Yes , but... what were you wearing?

Last week, a friend and I were eating dinner.  We are both ladies, in the ironic/millenial sense of lady-blogs and lady-pens, though not usually the sense in which my mom would use it when I got yelled at to "Stop that!  Be a lady!" when my brother and I would have burping contests at the dinner table.

I mention the lady-fact because it is always relevant.  Unignorably so in Swaziland, and harder to ignore in the US than you might think.  Especially once you start paying attention.  (Seriously, could Sherlock fail the Bechdel test any more egregiously?).  Sometimes it is nice to pretend that gender is not relevant, and some days it is easier than others -- in Swaziland and America both.  But I can't escape how much my lady-ness shapes my day here.  

My friend was asking me what I do about unwanted attention.  Catcalling is common.  Any man on the street has the right to call out at you 'hey baby!' 'hey sweetie!' Sometimes, he will reach out and run his hand down your arm in a particularly creepy gesture.  I have been asked to be someone's Christmas present, to be their girlfriend, to be their wife.  I mean, marriage proposals, sure.  Those are easy.  My lobola is 30 cows and you have to get them to America.  I have been absolutely assured that there is no way my fiance is faithful so why am I so hung up about it, and that I am being a total bitch for not being super excited and flattered, and willing to take it as a joke and laugh with the men about how hilarious it is that they have the right to demand to touch me, to comment on my body, to explain just how much fun it would be. Mostly it's funny.  Mostly people mean it to be funny, or think it is funny.  

Sometimes, especially in South Africa, there is a whiff of defiance and anger in all of this.  Much like the American South not too long ago, Apartheid South Africa in many ways used the claim of “protecting” (blonde, blue eyed) white ladies from this type of thing -- and the follow up types of things.  (The women’s own personal interest in who they may or may not have wanted to be protected from not withstanding).  In South Africa, because of this, I think a lot of the attention I get has more to do with reactions to those institutions.  Those institutions are not me, but I know that I can represent them, and I think this has just as much to do with how I am perceived and reacted to than the pants or skirt or ring I was or was not wearing that day.  And that is as much of Apartheid era racial and gender politics as I want to get into.  They are complicated.  I am not an expert.

I told my friend I have mastered the bitch-glare.  Which I have.  Or the joke -- 30 cows and no less.  Or walking fast.  Or, if it is a particularly bad day and I've just had it from hanging out in mall parking lots and getting propositioned by men (while I am busy trying to proposition women to answer my 90-something question survey, and to convince them that it will be quick, really) and I feel somebody has crossed a line, then a judicious "Don't touch me.  You may not touch me."  Accompanied by all the bitch glare I can manage.  Or just enough that I think it won't provoke violent retaliation.  Which is a very real concern, and why I try to steer towards jokes whenever possible.  They are safer.

And she said -- yes, but that's what I do too!  And I took a deep breath, and I glanced at her shorts and I said:

"Yes, but what were you wearing?"

What a terrible, loaded question.  I would never say that in America.  Never.  But here I felt like if I didn't I would be overlooking the obvious.  Yes, but what signal were you sending?  Yes, but what were you saying?  Yes, but were you asking for it?  You are not asking for it.  I am not asking for it, but you will never catch me in a skirt much above my knees here.  Before I joined the Peace Corps, you wouldn't have caught me dead in a dress or a skirt.  But in rural South Africa they were expected, they were easier, and I had to put up with less bullshit when I wore them.  Now they have practically become my uniform.  I am used to them, I like them.  I have a serious weakness for a pretty sundress.

In Swaziland, if you wear jeans -- especially skinny jeans -- or shorts, or miniskirts, you are "a prostitute."  Trust me on this, I have spent a lot of time asking about it.  I kind of knew that dresses were more appropriate than pants, but really learned it the day I showed up to a meeting of sex workers in the northern part of the country, and we all got a good laugh from the fact that exactly three of us were wearing the same outfit.  Jeans and a black t-shirt.  Women still wear jeans, and skinny jeans, and miniskirts and shorts here.  I see them every day in Mbabane and at the University.  But I would definitely never feel comfortable in the latter three here in Swaziland.  (Skinny jeans and me don't get along in any country, I think.)  

I am happy to leave the boundary pushing to these women.  While it drives me out of my mind that the way a woman dresses, the way a woman sits, the way a woman…exists in public…means that men feel they are entitled to her, I also think that this is not my country, and I am not the one in a place to do the hard pushing back.  In the US, I have stopped in the middle of a run to lecture men on why catcalling women with headphones in and zero interest in their impressions of her is inappropriate and unwelcome.  But I don’t do that here, because it isn’t my place and it isn’t my decision.  It is not my job to be the white feminist who brings short skirt and fingernail polish freedom to the women of Swaziland.  It is not my role to explain to friends about how they really should just tell those men in the taxi rank to get bent, or to feel like a brave role model when I do it myself. There is a small, but amazing and growing feminist community here (and LGBT community, for that matter).  There is an organic, local feminism that is not interested in my feelings, just as I am not interested in the feelings of a man on the sidewalk who is pretty sure he should be able to tell me what I should do, or how I should look, or feel, or that he is entitled to some attention when I’m out running (or trying to administer some damn surveys).

I do not wear shorts here.  I limit jeans to casual settings.  I worry when my skirt is much above my knees.  Because I find it makes my life easier.  Many other women don’t.  Many women I work with, and socialize with, and admire and respect don’t.  And I will leave that to them.