In July, 2008, I, Princess Rachella, Intrepid African American Girl International Journalism Consultant, pulled up stakes once again and headed to Nairobi, Kenya. Through my various adventures, I've concluded that if I get any MORE explosively fabulous in these prequel years to "THE BIG 5-0," I will have to register myself with the Pentagon as a thermonuclear incendiary device.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

An Unequal Burden

If I’m gonna be completely honest with myself, the main reason I keep coming back to Africa is because of women like Josephine Yire. She’s a 40 year old Nigerian Civil Service health worker who looks old enough to be my grandmother.

Josephine is a patient at the National TB and Leprosy Training Center in Zaria. We met her last Wednesday, during the workshop field trip. Sadly, her story is just about typical for most women in Africa. She got married, had 3 children……and eventually contracted HIV. So what did her husband do when he got the news?

He divorced Josephine, ordered her out of the house, and forbid contact with their children. Because of course, she MUST have cheated on him. There’s no way HE could have contracted it from one of his 4 or 5 girlfriends, or the 2 or 3 co-wives. And here’s the thing….too often, in African cultures, when a woman is diagnosed with HIV, even her own family may abandon her, or accuse her of adultery.

I’m telling you, the vast majority of African women can’t catch a break, no way, no how.

But Josephine’s story has a more gut-wrenching sidebar, something that still haunts me. You see, a short time after Josephine’s husband kicked her out, she found a cramped, one room apartment just outside of Zaria, hoping to try and move on with her life. One day, her younger sister showed up, needing a place to live. Naturally, Josephine took her in, even shared her bed.

Now, that might not seem like such a heroic feat in a poor African village. But get this….Josephine’s younger sister had tuberculosis when she showed up on the doorstep. And Josephine knew it. AND Josephine works for the Nigerian Ministry of Health, so there’s overwhelmingly strong evidence that she was very familiar with how contagious and potentially deadly TB is.

When several of the journalists asked why on earth Josephine would expose her already weakened immune system to full-blown, possibly drug resistant TB, she replied by saying she didn’t want to make her sister feel abandoned. If she had asked her to sleep outside, or use different plates or spoons, her sister would have felt rejected. For Josephine, there WAS no choice….a strong family tie wound up binding her in a deadly grip.

Now, I love my sister Marilyn a lot, but if she showed up on my doorstep coughing up a lung, I would politely instruct baby girl to log on to Hotels.com and see what kind of a deal she could rock. I mean, I’d certainly call her every day, sometimes even twice, but she most definitely wouldn’t be sharing my bed. (Hell, NOBODY has shared my bed for a pathetically long period of time, so I don’t think breaking that streak with plague victim is the smartest way to go.)

But every minute of every day, African women must confront the issue of choice….or to put it more accurately, lack of choice. No choice about who or when you marry, no choice about whether your husband takes one or 7 more wives, no choice about refusing sex when you have strong evidence that your husband is screwing everything with a pulse…..and no choice about whether to abandon a loved one with cholera, typhoid, meningitis, TB or HIV.

Desperate poverty robs a woman of so very much, it’s almost incomprehensible.

Except for whenever I see a woman like Josephine, or a woman walking down a dusty road in a village early in the morning balancing a 20 liter jug of water from a filthy stream a couple of miles away, or a huge bundle of wood that would cause major cranial injury to the average American woman.

Usually, that woman has a baby tied to her back and a little one walking beside her, and she’s headed back to her hut to cook breakfast and wash clothes for the family, knowing that in about 6 hours, she’ll have to repeat the whole process by heading back to that stream to get 20 more liters of filthy water to cook dinner and wash clothes.

When I lead journalism trainings, I don’t discriminate against or ignore the male reporters. I think my very presence as workshop leader helps chip away at their hard-wired negative opinions about a woman’s intelligence and capability. But if I’m really gonna be completely honest with myself, I keep coming back because I want to create a vast army of women journalists who can critically analyze these issues and produce thoughtful, enlightening, human stories about the plight of women and children on the continent.

No delusions of grandeur for me, eh?? Maybe the term “vast army” is a bit over the top, but I truly feel I’ve made a difference each time a woman journalist has thanked me for my help, and keeps in touch to ask for advice about a story, or get some virtual editing. Because what I do is truly needed, I will continue to choose to battle jetlag, abysmal lodgings, maniacal mosquitoes, and whatever else it takes to keep doing this type of work.

Because in a way, I don’t have a choice.

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