One of the workers here is bright and happy, but scarred and bald. About 20 years ago, his mother went crazy and dipped him in the kitchen fire, head first. He went to the district hospital with burns down to his skull. A Norwegian woman (the wife of an engineer here who stays at the rest house with me) arrived as the hospital was saying they could do nothing, so she whisked him away to the tea plantation hospital (which was British-run at the time – now Unilever owns it. They kept him for a couple of months, performed skin grafts, and eventually sent him back to the district hospital for final recovery, and so that his bandages could be changed. The Norwegian woman went to visit him a week later to find that rats had eaten through the unchanged bandages and his skull was again bare.
Care is improved, but I’m not sure the rats are gone from the hospital, which now services exponentially more patients – sometimes on floors, when they run out of beds.
I heard this story last night and I’ve been contemplating women and children and rights ever since. The worker doesn’t know where his mother is. He and his siblings (6 total) ended up with a relative who already had at least as many children of her own. I wonder how that aunt kept her sanity.
Mental illness is not something that is treated here in Iringa, but it’s obviously present. Women lead very stressful lives, and as work takes their husbands far away for extended periods of time, I imagine the stress increases. Becoming a working woman doesn’t necessarily take the stress away. Many of the women I spoke to have children but weren’t allowed to bring them to the field. On the one hand, great – that’s 30 less pounds of squirming child to carry around for 8 hours in hot sun. On the other, there are very few child care facilities, so many of the women leave their kids with family in far away towns and spend their meager incomes ($50 a month) on transportation and cell phones to stay in contact.
Why aren’t women allowed to bring kids to the fields, you ask? Because regulators come by, and if a 15-year-old babysitting her 3-year-old brother is seen planting seedlings, she counts as child labor. Granted, that 15-year-old should really be in school, but she’d need to be a very good student to get a government scholarship, and with school fees plus books, uniforms, and boarding expenses, her parents aren’t likely to have the cash on hand.
Tanzania has struggled to protect the rights of the child – “child labor” accounts for work done by anyone under the age of 18. School is supposed to continue until then, but the school initiative is newish, and the legal working age is older. So now there’s a significant collection of 13-18-year-olds in Mafinga town doing nothing, because they can’t work and they can’t go to school.
Sigh.
Back to Malawi today! I’m looking forward to two days on smelly buses that pass semis while taking blind curves at 60mph.
