How was your World AIDS Day?

It may have flown under the radar for most of you but on Dec. 1st I celebrated what I would call a health workers professional holiday, World AIDS Day. Mo, my closest neighbor and dearest friend, and I started the day with English breakfast tea, omelets, toast, and fresh mango. The day was sunny, beautiful, with a cool breeze, almost too perfect. Representatives from Serenje district are coming to commemorate this oh so important day and we are dressed accordingly. We left my house at 8:30 for the school so we wouldn’t be late for the festivities. (Silly us, things never start on time. But we’re leaders in the community, so we want to be good examples.) I have even been told that my begging and pleading has been heard and that there will be Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) for HIV available. All seems to good to be true.

Sure we pass men and women (children in tow) already drinking on the “beer garden” dotted road to the school. And yeah maybe they asked me for money to buy this beer, but I wasn’t going to be wound up this early, not today. We arrive at the school and find that some of the school children are practicing their songs and parade strategy. I find the girls group I work with there as well and we go over the activity that I taught them. Nine rolls in and rolls by. Ten rolls in and rolls by and still no show of the 30 odd people from the district that are supposedly coming. The one who orchestrated much of the event decides that we should start without them. I agree because it is really irritating that we always have to wait for people to show up when they are well aware of how long it takes to get to places and consequently when they would need to leave by. (Mom, I completely understand everything now.)

Mo and I made crowns for some of the small kids who were doing poetry and they did an awesome job performing. There are some other small dramas and a bit of dancing just for the fun of it. I hear transport buzzing in the background around 11:30 and sure enough in rolls a caravan of Land Rovers blaring the radios over the delicate voices of the youth. “Yea! They’re here!”—only two and half hours late. I quickly found one of the main organizers on that end and I asked about VCT and about the videos they were suppose to bring for me. (I organized it so that we would be able to show HIV/AIDS movies, keep in mind I live in a village with no electricity.) VCT, check. Videos... “I forgot to bring them again.” Ah, right because when you forgot them yesterday and I said, “Don’t forget them tomorrow it is really, really important,” what I meant was, “people weren’t really looking forward to this and educational videos about HIV issues in local language wouldn’t really help at all.”

So anyway, the activities rewind slightly, the newly arrived guests in their matching World AIDS Day apparel find their seats in the shaded tent (while the children bake in the sun), and we restart with a microphone. A few more community members begin to trickle in. Now it isn’t just the 150 odd kids who weren’t working in the fields, its 50 or so mothers who just finished with the Friday under-five clinic. MO and I become slightly distracted as we scramble to find rooms for the nurses to begin giving the VCT.

I nearly cried when I saw that the nurses came. (I’ve become unnervingly emotional lately, the thought of prostitution kept me in tears for the better part of an evening.) This is amazing though. People in my area are going to be able to know if they have HIV, know if they don’t, learn how to live positively, or learn how to protect themselves in the future. This is HUGE. In America Cancer isn’t scary, serious, or understandable until you find a lump. People here can give you all the right answers about HIV/AIDS but they will not change their behavior until they can feel it closing in on them, until they find out one of the women they cheat on their wives with is HIV positive.

By the end of the day my ragged band of promoters and I convinced or persuaded some 100 odd people to get VCT. Quite an accomplishment considering that the family I stay with and at least half the people I work with didn’t even attend the event. When I saw them later that afternoon and asked them why they didn’t show up to the biggest event concerning health that has really ever happened here they replied, “I didn’t get an invitation.” Me neither. Apparently me telling them about the event, the activities, the start time, and their confirmation that they would attend was in my imagination. Certainly I couldn’t expect them to attend a community event without first hand delivering a gold embossed invitation. What was I thinking? I suppose everyone drinking at the beer gardens didn’t attend because they didn’t get invitations either.

So that about sums up my World AIDS Day. I’ll start next year’s invitations today and maybe I’ll finish all 20,000 of them by next December.

Campaign of Shame

I am living in a country where it seems there is no shame. No concept of remorse, a convenient view of right and wrong with a stifling, almost senseless self-awareness—that being none. There is no shame when you are drunk at nine in the morning. There is no shame when you’re drunk at nine in the evening with a baby on your back. There is no shame when your child is suffering from malnutrition 10 feet away from you as you buy another bottle of beer. There is no remorse when you show up a half hour late for a meeting. There is no remorse when you show up two hours late for a meeting. There is no remorse (or shame) when you are caught stealing cookies from a 10-year-old boy when you are a grown man.

I don’t want to be called a Satanist in the streets and see teachers having “sleep overs” with young girls. I don’t want to be bullied into going to church by women who show up half way through the service. And I have had just about enough of being approached by married men. Justin Timberlake is apparently bringing “Sexy” back, well I would like to bring shame back. I want a campaign of shame. I want village shamers. I want reinforcements. Most days I have enough righteous anger to clear a way for the Lord. But trying to make people ashamed for their actions when they don’t have a grasp for the concept is unfulfilling and often spirals into a fit of rage when you next see another Peace Corps volunteer.

I was prepared to be defeated and disillusioned before I came here, but I skipped right past that to irritated. So I have spent some time pondering about where I acquired my keen sense of shame. Is shame a Dutch thing that trickled down from my pious ancestors? Is it a Christian Reformed thing or maybe just Calvinist or Puritan? How about the Mid-west, is shame and crippling guilt our thing? (Clearly I am hesitating to let all of America into the blessing that is shame.) Is it in the water? Can we import it? Possibly start immunizing children for the lack thereof?

I thought that I knew about people not having shame, I thought that Americans had actually written the book. As it turns out the magnitude at which it happens here is far greater per capita. We can all either pat ourselves on the back for not being at the top of the domestic (I say domestic since we clearly have some international shame on our backs) shame pile or we can weep for the state of life here that has apparently killed shame.

Zambia 3, Emily –1

“It’s not even that I was ‘not stressing the small stuff’ or was being more mature, I’m just defeated. Zambia has defeated me.” KC commenting on the three hours she spent waiting for transport to leave in the afternoon, the half hour ride, —which deserves its own paragraph entirely— the hour she spent at her house trying to break in since she forgot her key, and the return travel to Serenje where she was forced to spend the night.

It’s not just KC it’s me too. Actually at least one day a week it’s everyone I know. I have begun to prefer that it come on a rainy day so then I don’t necessarily have to impose my seething demeanor upon an unsuspecting villager—although sometimes it can be quite cathartic. Some of us have hypothesized that, like your bladder, patience is a strength that is finite. You can tone your biceps and make them stronger but you can’t hold “it” all the time and expect to not be wearing depends when you’re 40. I don’t want to believe that my patience is like my 15 minutes of fame (which I’m saving for my hang gliding around the world in 40 days). I anticipate one day that I will get married and have kids, I feel like I might need as much as I can get to do that without going to prison.
So I’m hoping that it is finite on a daily basis. Everyday you get ten bars and maybe if you have a good provider you get roll over. Maybe the problem here is that you run down everyday, ring up overage charges, and end up flipping out at the end of the month. I still have about 16 months to come up with a conclusion. If you wait patiently and read diligently you can add it to your personal “Secrets of Life Manual.”