Unmentionables

...It’s been a while.

You’ll never believe what happened.

My organization offered me a position after the ending of my placement, even going so far to ask whether a certain salary would be acceptable.  This nebulous offer (the second of its kind) felt good but, as I sat on a moto for an hour to get to a health centre where we would be carrying out a supervisory field mission, I had time to reflect on it.

As that happened to be a day on which being female and taking a long moto ride just did not go well together, I decided I would rather set my head on fire.

Thankfully, we arrived at our destination just before the rain hit (otherwise I would have quit my voluntary position, as well as my thoroughly involuntary one on the back of a moto, and crawled home), and started a discussion with the head nurse and his nutritionist (who probably knew enough about psychology between them to cover a small biscuit) about the focus groups we were to be leading the next day.

‘Focus group’ is actually a misnomer because it is associated with free money offered for research of some sort.  However, since everything here is associated with free money, it really doesn’t make a big difference.  We were really organising self-help groups to encourage resilience and partnerships based on shared experiences.

Only they would much rather have helped themselves to free money to feed their families. 

First, we had a group of teen mothers who were supposed to arrive at 8am, actually arrived at 9am, and were to be kept waiting until 11am (when our donors would arrive, so they could see what excellent work we were doing).  I used my subtle powers of persuasion (identified by my mother as ‘godawful whining’) until my colleague agreed to start the group therapy session around 9:30.

Unbeknownst to me, he also had a superpower – a motormouth that he planned to use until our donors arrived.  Hours later, caught between an overwhelming disgust of outhouses and visions of the Japanese flag, I finally had to choose the greater of the two evils.  When I returned, I delicately indicated (through what my friends call ‘epileptic facial spasms’) that I was not happy with the current situation.  Reluctantly, my colleague’s steam engine of thought ground to a halt at 11:30, and we encouraged the women to go home. 

Luckily for him, they were not about to leave the room without some pay for a hard day’s work of listening to how life could be spectacular even with a baby clinging to each breast like a hairless koala.  Despite our calm refusals, they belligerently held onto this hope as strongly as those sweet babes, through our donors’ evaluation, and right through some individual counselling sessions.

I watched a spreading puddle around a toddler, sound asleep at his mother’s feet and oblivious to his baby sister jabbing him in the head with a stick, and gave thanks to each part of the Trinity that I was not a teen mother in Central Africa.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  The day before, when we arrived in that health zone, we’d had plans to stay at the local boarding school.  After walking a mile and gaining at least 5 kilos in the form of sticky mud on our shoes, we arrived just in time to escape the second thundershower.  In the middle of that storm, we learned that the rooms were full for the night.  I contemplated asking for a manger (cramps, contractions – potatoes/potatoes, if you ask me), but gave up, sat under my wilting scarf and soggy hair, surrounded by whispering teenage boys who didn’t know they were one pick-up line away from death, and waited for dawn while my colleague harped on about banyamulenge (Congolese Tutsis) beside me.  Finally, one nurse said we could stay in a convent.  We were taken to a priest, who also said we could stay in a convent.  The priest then took us to the home he shared with other male priests, deacons, and chaplains, and invited me to join the convent. 

I have thought about this in the past, but my mom (and, more recently, my boyfriend) assures me it is a bad idea.  That evening, over a rich meal and flowing beer, I reflected that maybe there were secrets about convents that none of us knew...

...In order to discuss this in greater detail, and, uh, since I hadn’t seen my boyfriend in a while (relationships warp all periods of time to be either way too long or way too short – there is no in-between), I decided to meet him one evening, one street away from home.  [Totally Unrelated Note:  At the time, the city was in a state of heightened security due to civil disobedience and rebel activity in the south.  In light of this, our team had had an hour-long session to discuss security protocol that forbade basically everything necessary to a relationship involving two private people with full-time jobs, a focus on church involvement, and large, nosy families.  Needless to say, I giggled a lot – due to how irrelevant the session was to my life, you understand.]

...I regret nothing except lying to Carrottop, who thought I’d been kidnapped, found me in a dark office (not doing anything I wouldn’t do with my mother in the room, I swear), and hinted that This Was Not Okay (by shrieking it). 

That I’m fine?  That I’m not having sex?  That I have no idea why the light switch is not connected to the battery?

Lying and putting yourself in possible danger, as it turned out, but let’s not quibble. 

Regardless, I felt like screaming the same thing, but for vastly different reasons - the foremost being that I was escorted from the premises and driven one street up to my house as though I’d been found in a jail cell with a blood alcohol level that could fell a buffalo rather than fully clothed in a locked office with a local across from a rocking wedding party.  I was in such a snit that I had a break-up speech planned for the next day - but then helped host a formal ‘Meet the boyfriend you caught me sneaking around with’ dinner party with the family instead.  In the absence of God striking me down with a lightning bolt, Carrottop was forced to write an Incident Report that included Unmentionable Words that would end up in our Grandpa’s hallowed inbox, despite the fact that there was no incident and dinner had been a bribe to keep her big mouth shut.

As though this was not enough, our resident rat also made a guest appearance.  He had, in fact, been the silent listener to our conversations, the skittering presence in our quiet moments, the noisy chewer behind the fridge all along, though I thought I’d been pretty dedicated about keeping our food out of reach.  Privately, I’d hoped to live peaceably with Ratilla the Hungry (or, alternatively, that he’d be electrocuted so I could sell him to my colleague), but Butters seemed disturbed to find the fridge cord nearly chewed through. 

At least he had warned me in advance that he’d lined some rat traps with peanut butter or there would have been another Incident Report to write. 

That night, Ratilla woke me at 4am to profess his disappointment in our actions (particularly in closing the garbage can), and that he would also be forced to write a report about this, but slipped away when I shone my cellphone around the room and keened desperately. 

Work the next morning came in the aftermath of this trauma.

“We must buy 3 flit shap!”

I squinted.

“$5 per flit shap - 3 flit shap!”

Lip whats?!  Rat traps?!  Peanut butter!

In the end, however, I agreed that we would probably need 3 flip charts. 

It was a little bit more difficult to understand that locals referred to aid as franca ya munyama, or devil’s money.  It wasn’t seen as ‘real’ money.  In fact, it had to be used quickly - it could be wasted, given away, anything... because it couldn’t serve any good.  It was to be obtained at any cost, but it couldn’t be put to good use – it didn’t count, in essence.

...Do you think donors plan the sustainability of their projects with this belief in mind? 

I sat and listened to a coworker disparaging some practices of his own countrymen – that they would litter because the country had no value, that they would waste because the money had no value – and wondered how any of this could possibly work...