Because They're Burning Bricks

Posted By Sika on January 22, 2009

One of my friends at work is a scandalous divorcee. She contracted HIV from a job before this one, her husband was negative*, and so he decided that she had been sleeping around with the doctors and left her and their kids and picked up some pretty young thing. This was four years ago, and just a few weeks ago he came crawling back.

I don’t know about you, but if my husband accused me of something I didn’t do and then left for four years, I’d be somewhat hard-pressed to take him back. Some of my coworkers think that the pretty young thing cast a spell on him, poisoning him and making him leave. Which I have a hard time believing. I’m not exactly saying I don’t think it’s possible—“There are more things on heaven and earth . . .” and all that, but if I’m to be totally honest, I’m definitely not saying I do think it’s possible.

Anyway, as I am wont to do, this whole situation had me navel-gazing a bit. Especially when one of our coworkers told my friend that she needed to accept him back in the house, and make him feel welcome, and specified she meant “as a wife welcomes a husband.” This, on some level, makes my skin crawl. So my strong friend is nodding rather meekly (for her).

There’s a certain level of glee that she has, though, too. At the January birthday party** my friend was asked for to give a prayer and a blessing for the campus director to close the party, as she is a pastor. She began talking about how this is a jubilee year (for whom, I’m not sure) and how a jubilee year is a year when things are returned to you. I think there was also something about how bad things don’t happen and how the people who steal from you will be punished, which I’m thinking those people would feel was a bad thing to happen, but I guess I just don’t understand.

And then she went into how four years ago her husband left and someone predicted that four years later he would be back, and then here he came, ambling along, nearly four years to the day. And two things struck me. One was that if I were her, I would have vilified him for his actions to the point where I couldn’t forgive, at least not to the level of letting him back in my home and my bed. I still think this is a sane course of action, but who am I to say that it’s the best?

The second was that here is my friend, talking easily and openly at work about something that I would keep absolutely private, and yet the academic secretary tells me to stop making trouble if I mention her incredibly visible pregnancy in public. In fact, she told me she was pregnant by saying, “Sika, look at me, are you blind that you can’t see how I’ve changed?” Another coworker is also hugely pregnant, and I haven’t heard anyone mention a thing about it. We think the things that are meant to be private and the things that are meant to be public are obvious and immutable, and yet they aren’t—it’s all learned and arbitrary.

Oh, so it turns out that the blessing to the CD was that this year would be full of life for her. The path from point A to point B made more sense at the time, even decorated as it was by the juiciest gossip to hit the school since I’ve been here.

*To me, there’s something about the way this story was told to me that indicates that neither my friend nor her husband would have been all that surprised if she had contracted HIV from him. And she probably would have stayed with him if she had been, because boys will be boys and men aren’t in control of themselves and all the other bullshit excuses men use here (and elsewhere) to justify their choosing to act out-of-control.

**My favorite part of the party was when Ferestes, upon learning the Campus Director’s age, said, “You now have lived longer than the average Malawian.” Everybody laughed. Wait, that sounds so wrong. Both that it’s my favorite part and that everybody laughed.  Maybe it was that Ferestes sounded so cheerful about it—it was in much the same tone of voice in which she repeated, “She’s a daaah-ling, She’s a daaaah-ling” about Mary later on. A few people very pointedly asked Gama, the only Malawian male in the room, why it is that life expectancy is even shorter for Malawian men. Gama was noncommittal, so Ferestes, the dean, and a few others started talking about bad choices and risky behaviour as the source of the difference. The dean sounded a bit bitter, but Ferestes was laughing as she snarked at Gama.

Categories: Malawi, Philosophy
Tags: culture, HIV