Notes from the Field
Last week, I returned from a trip to the south, crossing from Southeast Oromia into the SNNPR, from Shashemene to Dilla to Sodo, driving through lush, rolling coffeeland and huts sprouting out of the ubiquitous false banana plant (inset). One lorry we got caught behind had a massive thorn tree strapped to the back. I figured out why a few days later, when a similar lorry was unknowingly transporting two grinning boys perched on the back of the truck like geckos.I thought I’d share a small glimpse of what I experience when I’m out in “the field,” as development workers somewhat patronizingly refer to the rural areas in which our programs run.
The first two days, I spent a lot of time at health centers in rural towns about an hour’s drive from the Rastafarian hub of Shashemene. All health centers in Ethiopia are built to the same exact dimensions: they are shaped like an H, have open-air waiting corridors, and almost none of them have running water in the facility. They have laboratories and nurses, but rarely house physicians, and cannot provide transportation or emergency care, including emergency obstetric care. There is a perennial shortage of drugs, most particularly of local anesthetics and treatment for STIs and respiratory infections. Sometimes, they even run out of gauze.
I was documenting an intense one or two-day service brought to these health centers in long-term family planning methods (Norplant and IUCD) which were previously unavailable in the area. Alerted to the service by a scattered network of community health workers, women would come from remote and inaccessible villages over 30 kilometers away, and wait patiently for hours to be screened and given a family planning method and/or a referral for antenatal care (if they found out they were pregnant) or STI treatment (for an infection discovered during the pelvic exam.) At least a third of them had babies, some of them newborn, wrapped to their backs and huddled in layers of woolen cloth, sleeping or wailing or breastfeeding as their mothers sat quietly. One woman was wrapped in a fleece blanket that said “2008 Olympics.” There was the usual overwhelming scent of rancid butter, eucalyptus smoke, and beriberi wafting along the packed corridors.
Many of the women had the facial beauty tattoos common in rural areas, scoring their cheeks and chin and jaw line with dark, fuzzy lines. If you asked nicely, they would slide a fold of cloth aside and you could see the matted hair, crescent eyelids, and pale smooth skin of a tiny infant head. Some had husbands who came with them and awkwardly held the babies in their laps, still holding onto their dula (walking stick) or umbrella, while their wives were on the insertion table. We helped provide some women transport due to the rough topography and distances, and many had never been in a car before. So they got motion sickness, and the cars needed some deep cleaning immediately thereafter.
The first day, the apparent stagnation of the muddy and downtrodden rural setting was belied when one of the training supervisors, a gynecologist, told me that a few months ago and a few kilometers away, about 20 Christians had been slaughtered in their homes during a spurt of ethnic/religious strife. This area, like most in Ethiopia, supports what used to be successfully cohabiting beliefs: Muslim, Orthodox Christian, and a Catholic minority. Ethiopia has promoted religious tolerance for centuries, and for the most part the large Muslim and Orthodox Christian populations have survived in close quarters and without much strife until recent years. Among the woman waiting for the services, black-veiled Muslims huddled against Orthodox Christians with their wooden cross necklaces and forehead crucifix tattoos without any apparent tension. The obvious fact was that women of all faiths were desperate to stop the flood of “God’s blessings” in the form of children that they can’t feed…the exhortations of Popes, Patriarchs, and Imams be damned.
posted by Margot @ 8:40 AM
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