The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

was a source of pride for the Jula women. I felt her screams inside me, though, alongside my own stifled cries. Between contractions, her head dangled limply to one side, drops of sweat that had beaded up in the curls of her hair at her brow, ran in rivulets down her face and into her ear. Aminata dabbed her face with a rag. Awa’s eyes were large vacant saucers. I met Awa two weeks after I arrived in the village to work at the health center. I was helping the nurse with his monthly vaccination of infants when she confi- dently strolled over, sat at the register and proceeded in her slow and careful handwriting to record each child’s vaccinations as if this was her job. When I scheduled “baby-weighing days,” she came again, and helped me record each infant’s weight. Effortlessly, she translated my French into the mother’s Jula, slid wriggling babies onto the scale, and then recorded the weights. On the first day, when I told one mother how beau- tiful her son was, and the mother gasped and stepped back in fear, Awa corrected me. “Bintou,” she said, using the African name she had given me, “we don’t like it when you say the child is beautiful. We think the spirits will hear you and come take all the beauty away. In Marama-Ba, you must always say ‘Mama, how ugly your child is!’ The mother will know what you mean.” Another day, after weighing the babies, she sighed, sat back in her chair, then turned to me and said sim- ply, “Thank you, Bintou.” “Thank you? For what? You’re doing all the work! I should thank you!” “No, Bintou. After I married, I thought that this was it — I would never again get to use my French, and I would only work as a farmer in my husband’s fields. Now I can use what I learned in school. I’m very happy.” Unlike other village women, Awa was confident, and willing to try new things even when they challenged her own beliefs and customs. I imagined her learning to navigate a Wal-Mart or surf the Internet, if I could just take her home with me. I believed that she could survive anywhere. I was not really surprised, then, when I heard other village women talk about her. “She married for love!” they said quietly, with an air of drama. “How shame- ful!” they whispered and clucked their tongues, all the while blushing. They relished telling the story, each time adding more enticing details. In its most basic telling, the story went like this: Four years earlier, Awa was married to a man in the vil- lage of Marama-O. But when she met Namory, a prominent cotton farmer from Marama-Ba, she fell in love, and they would sneak out to the cotton fields at night and make love under the stars. One night, Namory’s friends snuck into Marama-O and “kid- napped” Awa from her husband’s home, just as if she was a young bride being taken from her father’s house. They brought her in darkness to the bed of the waiting Namory. Scandal arose the next morning when Awa’s angry husband went to Awa’s parents and to the village elders of Marama-O. To settle the affair, the elders of the two villages met and listened to both the pleas of the scorned husband and the cotton farmer in love. Awa had sat quietly on a stool, head covered with a shawl, and was not allowed to speak. In the end, the elders decided to annul her first marriage and acknowledge her marriage to Namory, but decreed that she could never return to her home village. She would have to start a whole new life in Marama-Ba. T his evening, at sunset, the midwife went home for dinner and her evening bath. She told us to come get her when the baby came. Aminata, Mon and I stayed with Awa in the little cement room, which, like our spirits, grew dimmer as the evening progressed. To soothe her youngest infant, tied to her back, Aminata remained standing and swayed from side to side, some- times reaching back to tap her palm rhythmically upon the infant’s bottom. She paused only to periodically expose Awa’s taut belly and listen with a small ear horn for the sound of the baby’s heart. Each time when she went back to rocking her infant, I knew that Awa’s infant was still alive inside her, and felt relieved. After midnight, the midwife returned, glanced into our room, declared authoritatively that Awa needed to go to the hospital, then left to go to bed. The slow, creaky wheels of an African emergency began to turn. Suddenly people I did not recognize appeared out of the darkness to help. Aminata sent them off to deliver messages. Someone went down the road on a bicycle F O C U S J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27 Rachel Herr is a new entry professional specializing in health and nutrition with USAID’s Foreign Service.