Few emotional states are simple, but
ours in approaching the end of our stay here are bordering on chaos.
Especially in the last month we have both found ourselves longing for
home and missing kids, friends, house, and even the cats. Yet now
both of us are feeling sadness about leaving a place where our ties
have deepened and we have felt needed and in return feel a true
responsibility. It is not a “Hello-Goodby” relationship to the
people of Hawassa and the culture of Ethiopia. Our contact has
permanently touched our lives.
Saturday Marty and Dagim interviewed
four 10- and 11-year-old street boys over eggs and enjera. Marty had
looked forward to the interview because, in her mind, little boys are
“easy”: fairly simple emotionally and with short, uncomplicated
lives. Right.
It broke down when one little boy began
crying talking about his widowed mother who works so hard selling
enjera house-to-house to maintain a home for him and his little
sister. Yet she cannot afford to buy him clothes and school supplies,
forcing him to go to work and beg on the streets to stay in school.
His worry was about her and her desperation, a burden (along with the
financial one) that children should not have to bear.
Then tears flowed from his friend, a tiny malnourished 11-year-old who says no-one will allow him to carry things on the street (that is one of the jobs, along with shoe-shining and car-cleaning, that street boys do in Hawassa) because he looks too weak. He described leaving his far-away Wolayta town two years ago to escape poverty and violence in his home as well as threats from “gangsters” who killed his two older brothers. He sleeps on the pavement and begs in the day and has never again had contact with his parents.
12-year-old too small to carry on street |
Then tears flowed from his friend, a tiny malnourished 11-year-old who says no-one will allow him to carry things on the street (that is one of the jobs, along with shoe-shining and car-cleaning, that street boys do in Hawassa) because he looks too weak. He described leaving his far-away Wolayta town two years ago to escape poverty and violence in his home as well as threats from “gangsters” who killed his two older brothers. He sleeps on the pavement and begs in the day and has never again had contact with his parents.
In turn, our lovely young friend Dagim
took each boy and held him in his lap and kissed his cheek and dried
his tears, reminding him that he had friends here in a spontaneous
display of Ethiopian kindness that Marty relies on for her own
sustenance. We have no answers for these young children who still
have dreams of being doctors and teachers and who protect each other
from the older, more hardened boys who sometimes threaten them and
try to steal their money.
Barely had we breathed out when we went
to our next appointment with three women who live in the place that
Marty had dubbed “Beggars Village” but is really named Qerchu.
She has started in the last week diagnosing and treating the sick
there, after having a couple of disastrous experiences trying to get
them seen and treated at the clinic at her hospital. The patients
were simply lost in the system, which, though it is the public
medical center, required money at every turn – registration, labs,
x-rays, and prescriptions. Money that beggars simply don't have. She
brought an older woman whom she suspected had cancer to the Medical
Outpatient Clinic for evaluation. A couple of hours later she left
her own work at the Emergency Department to find the woman lying on
the floor in front of the Surgical Outpatient office. The patient had
been ignored there by the nurses and providers as they wrapped up to
go to lunch. Anger usually doesn't help, but Marty was pissed and
demanded evaluation, which led to..... expensive tests that the woman
couldn't pay for. The woman does have metastatic cancer that cannot
be treated in Ethiopia and Dagim and Marty took her to the local
Mother Theresa Center for care for the sick and dying on Monday.
Back to Qerchu. One of the women there
has had numerous somatic complaints that Marty ultimately believes
are due to hunger and depression. Marty and Dagim decided to try to
help at least the hunger by making the woman part of our “study”
and thereby giving her a meal and a small amount of money, while at
the same time revealing the life story that led to her emotional
pain. She was accompanied by two Sidama (the predominant ethnic group
in Hawassa) women and their total of five youngest children,
including two nursing babies. Not exactly serene, but oftentimes fun.
Two of the three women were themselves
orphans at a young age, very possibly from the AIDS epidemic, though
they didn't know. They had faced the fate that most orphans in this
country encounter: working as servants for neighbors or extended
family. All three married abusive, alcoholic husbands whom they left
to try to find work, but found nothing and ended up begging with
their children in Hawassa.
The contrast among the three in their
ability to face the challenges of being a mother on the street was
huge. One woman, the Sidama interpreter (the other two didn't know
much Amharic and Dagim knows no Sidama. We usually go through three
languages, so may lose quite a
bit.) was spunky and hopeful and humorous and often angry. The other
two were quieter and my “patient” displayed true defeat, as did
her 4-yo son.
Marty found
herself deep in homesick valley earlier this week, and finally
realized that it was provoked in part by a visit to Qerchu where
fights broke out among the women and Dagim was yelled at (thank God
for language barriers – she had no idea what was happening) for not
doing something that would have been very difficult for him to have
done. The anger and hopelessness of hunger and destitution coupled
with impossibly close living quarters – up to eleven people in one room separated by bamboo partitions that conceal
nothing from one another – lead to much internal jealousy and
bickering as displacement. Marty spent the next couple of days
feeling alienated from Hawassa and pretty darn hopeless herself. When
with some trepidation she and Dagim returned, they were greeted hospitably and the
woman who yelled at Dagim apologized, And many of their “patients”
had improved. We all respond to our environment.
Street mother and 7-mo-old |
In the meantime
she is searching for support for these folks and is finding that,
though everybody these days claims that they are interested
and doing things for street children, you could never tell it by
talking to the kids themselves. The only agency that ever seems to
help them is the local Orthodox Church, that hands out food and
clothes, usually on holidays. One group of kids said that they had
had their pictures taken by people from an organization that said it
was going to help them, but they never heard from these folks again.
Marty is
impressed by the energetic and generous nuns of Mother Theresa,
who take in anyone who ends up at their gates. They have hundreds of
folks of all ages – malnourished children, the mentally and
physically ill. Austrian Sister Servita at the Center is interested
in the Street People findings and wants to talk more.
All is not
suffering and homelessness. We have thoroughly enjoyed visits by
anthropologists Barry and Bonnie Hewlett and Rob Quinlan and their
graduate students. They are setting up a longterm relationship
between Hawassa University Anthropology Department and Washington
State University that sounds excitingly fruitful.
And last night we
were honored to be invited to Doctor Walelign's family
homecoming celebration, he having just returned yesterday from receiving
his PhD in India. It was very moving: we sat around a bonfire eating
roast goat and his parents blessed him and spoke of the riches of
having children. There are many riches in friendship as well.
It is exactly three weeks till we are home. Our appreciation of our contact with you and your concern and friendship is constant. We will see many of you soon. Others of you whom we are leaving here, we will miss more than you can know.
Marty and Elliot
As eloquently as you have both described your experiences,I still find it hard to imagine what you must be feeling right now. All I can say is that we've missed you, too, and will be glad to have you back among us.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Michaelann.
ReplyDelete