Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Hunger on the Street (Journal: January 2011)

This is an excerpt from my January 2011 journal:


Lest my emails make it sound like Burundi is only fun and games (and good food and beaches) tonight’s email will bring us all back down to earth.  When I write about life here, I do not intentionally sugarcoat, just as I do not intentionally point out the hard, scary, bad things.  I figure that every place has things that make us nervous, bad situations, people who must make difficult choices, poverty.  Never once did it occur to me to tell people about the woman who lived (lives?) in the City Hall subway stop when they asked what it was like to live in NYC.  But a woman lived in the subway, near Pace University, and she slept on a cardboard box and did her business in a McDonald’s cup and I walked by her every time I went uptown on the 4/5/6. 

This afternoon my Dutch neighbor, Frederieke, and I went for a walk.  We’ve both been trying to exercise more and this is the third weekend that we got out for our power walk.  We only slightly modified our route today, heading down the mountain from the exclusive expat neighborhood of Kiriri into the equally exclusive next door neighborhood of Ruhero 1 for a lap at the public garden. 

Burundian’s are unique with their love of exercise, going to such extremes that each day of the week one of the government ministries (ministry of interior, health, security, finance, etc.) closes at 3pm so the employees can go exercise.  As of 3pm everyday, people are jogging, walking, doing calisthenics on the street.   Lots of people.  For a few hours at a time, exercise works like a great equalizer.  Young, old, fat, thin, rich, poor, expat, Burundian – everyone is working out.  A smile, a thumbs up, and we’re all in it together.

I really like my walks with Frederieke.  Sometimes we talk about fluffy stuff like the various merits of Edward and Jake from the Twilight series and sometimes we talk about serious stuff, like what more can be done to stop the ongoing rape of Burundian and Congolese women in the countryside.  Today our walk took us to the public garden for the first time.

The jardin publique is just that.  A public garden, cut from the same concept as Central Park, but much, much, much smaller.  There’s a small playground, basketball courts, fields for Frisbee football, a pavilion where I’m hoping to go for step aerobics, and a track that runs around the outer edge.  Today there was a private wedding, attended by a government minister, and therefore many extra armed police standing around the perimeter. 

We finished our lap, enjoying the normalcy of walking in a city park, and had just headed back out to the street when she fell.  Eva? Francoise?  Euginie?  I don’t know her name but I saw her collapse on the street about 100 yards from where we walked.  My first reaction was puzzlement.  Did that woman really just fall down?  Why did she fall in the middle of the street?  Why is the security agent across the street from her not doing anything?  Frederieke and I hurried toward her, looking around to see who else had seen what had happened.  When I saw the little foot hanging from the side of her body, I broke into a run. 

A woman carrying a baby on her back had collapsed in the middle of the road about 200 yards from the entrance to the public garden.  She fell on her back, pinning the baby to the pavement.  When we reached her, I thought she was dead.  Her eyes and her mouth were wide open, unmoving, and she didn’t respond when we grabbed her arms and pulled her upright.  The baby was moving but did not make a sound.  We screamed for help as one passerby helped us pull her off the road.  Not knowing what to do in case of an emergency in Burundi, Frederieke stayed with her while I ran to find the police.

I stopped 2 passersby on the road, Burundians who had also come to exercise, explaining as quickly as I could what had happened and asking what we should do.  At one point I remember saying, “I’m a foreigner here.  What should we do in this type of situation?  Where do we get help?”  No one had a response.  The police wouldn’t leave their “posts,” where they hung out in a circle chatting.  By the time I got back to the woman, Frederieke had the baby in her arms and the woman was propped up by a tree, alive.  A group of onlookers had gathered, a gawker’s traffic jam as it may be called at home. 

I don’t know what we would have done if my friend Jasmin hadn’t pulled up in her car shortly thereafter.  Jasmin is Belgian and married to Boscoe, a Burundian.  They have two daughters the same ages as our boys and just moved to Burundi from Belgian so he could invest in his country.  The crowd that had gathered told us that the woman was hungry and Jasmin had several muffins in a box, which we fed her.  For the first time, I saw her child move to take the muffin away from his mother to feed himself. 

Collapsing from hunger is perhaps not as uncommon as we’d expect in the world.  What is shocking is to see it happen in front of you and to realize that NO ONE knows what should be done to help.  Until Boscoe arrived, no Burundian had made even any indication that he/she would take responsibility to find help.  There is absolutely no safety net at all in Burundi.  No 911 to call.  There are hospitals, but no ambulances and no treatment without money.  There’s no social security, no homeless shelters, no safe houses for women and children.  Even if the police would have reacted, they don’t have a protocol to follow, don’t know any first aid.  Besides driving her to a hospital, where she would be refused without payment, there isn’t anything they would or could have done.  Burundi has roads and restaurants and shops and people who exercise, but when a vulnerable woman collapses with her child due to hunger, there’s no net to catch her. 

Eventually she told us (in Kirundi) where she lives and Boscoe said he would give her a ride home and money for groceries.  Frederieke and I walked home, half stunned and half mad at it all.  How could this happen?  Why is it like this?  When will it change?  What will happen to that little boy?  Later I heard that she had fallen over again in the car so they took her to the hospital anyway.  The doctor said she had collapsed from hunger, not having eaten for over a day and with too much physical exertion.  While at the hospital, a nurse told Boscoe that it’s not a good idea for him to drive her home.  The neighborhood is too rough to take a car after dark and he could expect problems from her family and neighbors, who may accuse him of having harmed her.  Not wanting to get dragged into a situation he didn’t understand, he brought her to the bus stop, made sure she knew where she was headed and gave her money. 

And I sat on my couch and wrote about it on my MacBook Pro.  What chance does she, does her child have for a healthy life?  Could it have been an act?  A desperate step taken when she saw two white Mzungus walking toward her?  What could possibly be worse than intentionally falling to the ground, on top of your child, with the hopes that two strangers would be wiling to help?  No one with other options would do that.  No matter how I examine it, I am unsatisfied.  How quaint.  I’m unsatisfied and there’s a starving mother in Kanyosha trying to feed herself and her baby.

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