I’ve been gone for a while for good reason. You’ll see why below. I had actually written an entry before I got sidetracked then wrote another on why I was sidetracked, so there are two entries below. In unblog-like fashion, the older entry is first.
DRINKING TEA (written 5/13)
A girl came by the night before last and began cooking in our kitchen, and then again yesterday evening. I recognized her, having seen her before briefly in the house. She keeps her hair short; unable to afford to have it styled in the salon. She wears the same thin white cotton, diagonally striped top; her breasts already big, but no bra.
Ester and I sat at the table drinking African tea as the girl moved quietly about the kitchen. I took the hot drink slowly for several minutes then approached the girl to introduce myself. She glanced away as I spoke and reluctantly, incompletely answered some of my questions. I gathered only that she was called Agnes, her English was poor and that she didn’t have much.
I sat back down at the table just outside the small kitchen. Ester looked at me and said that Agnes' family lived on the outskirts of Lugazi and that she was cooking for her sick mother who was admitted to the hospital near our home.
“Her mother was here once. You were resting in your room. The mother is very weak.”
We sat in silence for a few moments and I poured myself some more.
“So, how does Margaret know the mother?”
“Mummy brought her back to Lugazi to live here for a while. She is from Daddy’s village.”
“She brought her here when she was a child?”
"Yes.”
We stirred our tea and watched a Ugandan musician perform on the T.V. Ester told me he was singing about his ex-wife who left him for another man.
For a while we watched; the television barely audible; Agnes’ soft shuffling behind us. I began telling Ester about my trip to the village earlier that day. I told her the local priest was surprised to learn that most Americans have only 2 children.
“There are many differences between
“Yes. They have so many children and they can’t even take care of them.”
“Why do they do that?”
“I don’t understand. Maybe they have girls, but are trying for a boy. Like in your family there are three girls, then they want a boy.”
“But I know of many families with boy, boy , boy..”
“Then maybe they want a girl.”
“Okay. What if they had a girl, then a boy?”
She laughed. “They can’t stop there.”
“So, it’s not that they want a girl and a boy.”
“Yes, they want many. You know. Sometimes if they have more than one wife, they can have like 20.”
“I know. But if they can’t take care of them?”
Ester paused and raised her eyebrows, “They just don’t care.”
I stared into the full mug of light brown liquid absorbing Ester’s words; trying to make sense of the foreign and frustrating. My mind turning over and again the cultural absence of family planning like a coin in my hand. Ester knew these things. She has lived them. She is one of many, many, many. She calls Margaret and Steven her mummy and daddy, but they are not. She went to school as long as her own parents could afford it, until she was a teenager.
Nodding towards the kitchen, Ester then said “Agnes. She only went to P7 in school. She is the first of six. Both her parents are HIV positive. She’s 13.”
The corners of her mouth lifted in a vague smirk because she knew it so ridiculous, because she knew I never encountered such a thing before; Ester said, “She’s already been married and he’s run off.”
My gaze shifted to Agnes in the kitchen. She was smiling at her wrist, admiring a watch that she had found on the counter. She saw me looking and, embarrassed, quickly took off the watch. I reached again for my cup; knowing I must accept what I sought.
SURVIVAL BY FORTUNE
As my fever subsided, between moments of semi-consciousness and aching nausea I would gaze at the rust smears on the walls of my private hospital room in wonder. What happened to the patients whose blood remained? Did they walk from their beds to the arms of relieved family members? Or were they carted away by widows and widowers? How did they come to be here? What illness befell them? What good chance in life afforded them privileged medical care, rather than coping with illness at home or in the clinic?
The day I was overcome by severe malaria, Agnes’ mother died of complications related to AIDS. Diagnosed only a few months ago, the clinic gave her ARV drugs, which she did not take. Her husband, too lazy to test himself, assumed he was positive as well. Too selfish to get his own free treatment, he stole hers, effectively murdering her. She succumbed in the government hospital and her body was driven back to her family’s village in mummy and daddy’s car, otherwise her remains would have been transported like most Ugandans: wrapped in cloth and placed on the back of a boda boda.
I did not attend the funeral since I was still admitted. I would drift off and mummy would not be in the room with me. I would awaken and again she would appear, on the phone making funeral arrangements and giving updates on my health, providing me with food, water, clothes and bedding. She was tired and worried, but worked bone hard; as always. I told her I was sorry about her friend when I was clear headed. She nodded and said “it is unfortunate.”
Ester was by my side for two days in the small room that contained only a couple of mattresses and no shower or toilet, not even ones nearby. She cleaned my mess from diarrhea and vomit, ensured I received my medications, forced me to eat and drink, changed me, carried me, sat me up; was my nurse. I asked her why the hospital’s nurse in the hot pink uniform with white tubing didn’t tend to me and she said that they only treated you. I didn’t understand. It seemed there was no one else in the few dorms of this modest building. “What is she doing, just sitting in the room?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“That is ridiculous,” I heard myself saying. Ester started to tell me that when you go to hospital you had to bring someone to care for you. And in the government hospital you don’t get your own room, and they don’t even have drugs there. Someone has to go to the pharmacy in town to buy them then the nurse will give them to you. I started to drift off again…
Restlessly moving my throbbing joints to no position of comfort, suffering from heat and cold at once, too fatigued to lift my head or talk, incoherent from the pain and the medication that filled my mouth with metallic residue, I knew I would be okay; thinking of my life compared to Agnes and her siblings.
The father ruthlessly beats them. Drug addicted, impatient and callous, he had run Agnes off once before, telling her to get married to an older man who quickly used her and left her. And the family in the village wouldn’t take the children in either. The father’s brother’s wife had chased Agnes away a couple of years ago when she was recovering from illness.
“She’ll probably get married again,” Ester told me.
“What about the little ones?”
“They will stay with the father.”
“She’ll probably get infected like her mom, marrying an older man,” ‘I said, hoping she would object.
“Yeah. And she won’t get married just once.”
“What do you mean?”
“The husband will probably run her off for a new wife after some time.”
“How long?”
Ester shrugged. “Maybe just a month because she is so young. Then she’ll have to get married again.”
I squinted. “What do you mean married?”
“They just start living together.”
“Oh.”
“They don’t go to church and have a ceremony. They just get married.”
The mother herself had been married many times before taking the husband who fathered her children and essentially took her life. Often the poorest families survive by pushing the adolescent daughters to live with an older man. The mother’s first husband had driven her away after a while, forcing her to take another man that did the same; again and again. And so it seems her daughter’s fate, trapped in the same cycle of poverty and abuse.
As anywhere, the destitute here bear the weight of life’s harshest cruelties. It is largely fate that distinguishes those that live just to survive, and those that are blessed with more; the family and circumstances into which you are born, and the doors that open and close along the way. It is mere chance that defines Agnes’ mother’s death and my survival; hers of being born poor and African and mine of being born rich and mzungu.
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