Linda Orsi Robinson
author of "Sunday Morning, Shamwana; A Midwife's Letters From The Field"
Blog Archives 2012-2015
Sunday Morning ~ Dark Eyes, Happy Heart
Maso a usiku anagona ndi wa khate. ~ Eyes full of darkness slept with a leper.
~ Chewa proverb
I've been in a news blackout this week and can feel my heart and nerves a little calmer. I hadn't planned on it, but my granddaughter was with me for her school vacation and it just happened. Without a television, I get my news from the radio and it is very much part of my morning routine. I walk downstairs, feed the cat, put the tea kettle on, and turn on the radio. Alone in the house, I've come to regard the hosts of the morning radio show as friends. Though really, this has nothing to do with being alone since I've done this everyday of my adult life, even when the house was full of people. After a fasting from news for a week though, I can see how anxious I've become about the current state of affairs. Well, I knew I was anxious, but didn't know how anxious. It's become a way of life. It's like knowing your job is stressful but not realizing how stressful until you aren't doing it anymore.
I believe being informed is a civic responsibility but got a glimpse this week of how utterly calming it is to be ignorant. I know I can't keep this up and on my long car ride home today I'll listen again, but it has been a sweet respite. I know I can't keep my head in the sand forever, but it has been refreshing. Having an innocent human with me for a week has been lovely. What a treat to wake every morning with a bright little face smiling at me. We talked about our dreams. We propped ourselves up in my sunny bedroom and looked through books. We piled cookbooks around us and sought ideas for her brother's birthday cake. We sipped our tea and imagined this was the most important decision in the world. We discussed how to pull it off, how to transport it back home. We punctuated our conversation with "Good idea!" and "Hadn't thought of that!" We sewed a birthday present, we made a card, we experimented making different shaped loaves of bread. We baked cookies. It all seemed joyful and important and I couldn't bring myself to mar the week imparting current events that seemed vulgar and filthy in our clean, safe, bubble of a world.
She watered the plants. I watched what joy she took in doing that chore. I soaked up her eagerness to help and be part of something good. I thought of a nurse I used to work with who came to work one day upset after watching a documentary on World War II. She said, "I was a young girl when that was happening. I went about my life as carefree as ever. I had no idea." I wondered if my granddaughter would be saying something like that when she was in her 50's. I shook off that thought as if it might lead to the worst case scenario. I felt no dilemma about protecting her. I wanted to do that at all costs, at least while it's possible. I said a prayer we could turn things around, that when I looked again, things might be better. But for one week, all was right in our world.
One snowy afternoon we walked to neighbors' house to bring them some of the cookies we'd baked. We walked home after dark and she was scared. She said she didn't like walking at night near a "haunted" forest. I told her I do it all the time. I feel like the forest is enchanted, not haunted. Nice people live in all these houses tucked back in the woods. If we needed help, they would help us. She relaxed a little and thought about that. It was a perspective she hadn't considered. I told her I wouldn't let anything bad happen to her and she believed me. I thought about making promises I couldn't keep, knowing there will be a day I can't protect her from evil things. For this week, though, I pretended to both of us that I could.
Love to all,
Sunday Morning ~ Thin Ice
Gomo likagamuka, zako umadyeratu. ~ If the riverbank caves in, you eat your food as fast as you can.
The days are getting longer but the temperature is colder and the heath at the end of my road is finally frozen over. It was below zero yesterday but bright and sunny. I love these winter days with cold squeaky snow underfoot and bright sun on my face. I walked with a friend and her dog through the woods until the heath opened in front of us. She'd not been there before and I told her how lovely it was to walk out there in the winter when the ice was solid enough. I usually wait until I can see footprints in the snow, not usually brave enough to be the first one out there. But I felt a little more confident with someone else along so we tentatively took a few steps on the snow covered ice. We bounced a little, then jumped. It seemed solid underfoot so we continued, tentatively at first, then confidently taking in the surroundings. It was gorgeous, the only time of year we can get that particular perspective, walking out on the open heath. We checked out animal prints and tried to decipher which critters had been there before us. With sun on our faces and a happy dog chasing sticks it was a perfect Saturday afternoon winter walk. We reminded each other of how lucky we are to live here, how healthy it was to get out and appreciate how beautiful our winter world is. We talked politics and lamented the current state of affairs. We talked about climate change and worried about what will happen if we don't change our course soon. It's February and we are just now walking on the ice. I'm usually out there by Christmas. We discussed the actions we could take, were taking, how to keep ourselves from losing hope. We both enjoy white privilege and recognize that, but we're both women and have endured our share of discrimination and misogyny. We're no longer of childbearing age so don't need to worry about finding a maternity service within driving distance, but both care for and worry about other women. We're both politically active and independent; can take care of ourselves, cut and stack wood, grow food, care for our children. We're both healthy and active. We have a lot going for us. We live in a beautiful place, have figured out how to stay warm (enough), have the foresight to plan for the years when we'll have to moderate our activity and lifestyle. We talked about how we can use our good fortune in life to help others. She knows the outdoors, knows the woods and feels at home there. So do I. The forest calms me and somehow insights about the larger picture can come into view.
We stopped to look at a patch of ice not covered by snow and wondered if it were a spring. My friend took a heavy stick and banged on it until the ice cracked. She showed me how you can measure the thickness this way, looking at how deep the cracks went. Fascinating! I'd never known that. I always figured if there were footprints bigger than mine out there, it was safe enough for me! But this opened up a new path to independence and safety. We tried to recall the ice safety chart: how thick ice has to be to hold a person (3 inches), a car (7 inches), a truck (10 inches). The heath is untouched by heavy machines so we couldn't judge safety by what was sitting on it. The heath is open and wild and beautiful. Nothing but coyote prints…how much does a coyote weigh, I wondered? The cracks in the ice produced by the stick looked to be at least three inches so, reassured, we moved on in the sunlight enjoying the fresh cold air. I was happy. I felt safe. Less than ten steps later I crashed through the ice up to my hip, stopping there only because of the size of the hole my leg made. My butt hit the edge of the ice and my knee hit a submerged log that stopped me from going deeper. There was no warning, no cracking sound, no slow sinking into a boggy spot. This was a sudden plunge and could have been comical if it weren't so cold. The ice around me was strong enough to haul myself out, thank God, and I stood soaking near the rim, made sure I could walk, retraced my steps, and turned toward home. Well, so much for our walk. That was over. Maybe the submerged log had weakened the ice there, warmed the water or something. We mused about the physics as I slowly walked my bruised butt and knee the two miles home.
Walking back with water sloshing in my boot we thought of analogies for what just happened. We related it to raising teenagers or life in general. Just when you feel you've got things under control: caught up on your bills, fixed the car, registered people to vote–– the ice can give out underneath you. I thought of how grateful I was to be walking with someone out there, grateful for my old boots that despite being filled with water, keep my feet warm, grateful that soup was waiting on the stove, that warm dry clothes were just upstairs, that my new water heater can fill my tub for a long hot soak.One step can change everything, but then you have no choice but to deal with it, eat fast, learn from it, teach others, hope they listen, and move on.
Sunday Morning ~ Democratic Aspirations
Mfumu ya ndeu simanga mudzi. ~ A quarrelsome chief does not build a village.
I was organizing some storage spaces, wondering why I kept so much random stuff, and came across a folder full of letters I wrote each Sunday to my parents when I was Peace Corps volunteer in the late '70's. My mother had saved every one, written on a light blue airmail foldout which was letter and envelope combined. I made a cup of tea and sat to read them, ignoring the mess I'd made pulling things apart. I thought maybe I'd find some great writing, type them up, and have another book, but after reading the first three, I was bored out of my mind. When I wrote these I was newly married, off on a two and a half year adventure, ballistically idealistic, and …boring. I lost count of all the exclamation points I used on sentences that did not deserve an exclamation point. It was all rosy and everything was great! The letters didn't really say anything. They seemed a fake expression of contentment and bliss. I was very disappointed in my twenty two year old self. I thought I wrote better than that. I wondered why my writing was so bland as my memories of that experience are quite exotic.
I got married just after graduating college and went off on a two month honeymoon cycling in Europe. When we returned, my new husband, Joe, and I walked into the Peace Corps office in Boston and flipped through a black binder labeled "Africa" with page after page of available positions for volunteers. There was a binder for each continent. At that time if you were a nurse you could go anywhere but we wanted Africa and found positions in Malawi that matched our skills. We'd never heard of Malawi, but it was in Africa and had jobs we wanted. We took our lengthy applications then went to the library and pulled out an Encyclopedia Brittanica with a gold N-M on it's spine. We looked up Malawi and found two paragraphs. Under Government: it stated that Malawi had gained independence from Britain in 1964 and was a one party democracy. Hastings Kamuzu Banda was president for life. Under Economy: it said the cash crops were tea and tobacco. It had a few other facts about geographical location and average rainfall and something about David Livingstone. There wasn't much. But it all sounded fine to us and we started the long application process and were selected for a "pre-invitational screening". We flew to Chicago just before Christmas to find out what that was all about. Peace Corps had been asked to leave Malawi in the 1960's after one of the volunteers, Paul Thoreau, wrote some unflattering things about Kamuzu Banda in an article called Tarzan was an Expatriate. After ten years or so, in 1978, the Malawian government decided to let Peace Corps send volunteers again with strict conditions. We could only work in health and agriculture, not in education. We had to comply with the repressive regulations regarding dress and public speaking. They didn't want any young Americans filling the heads of Malawian youngsters with notions of free speech. It was illegal for women to wear pants, and skirts had to be below the knee. Men were not allowed to have facial hair, or wear collarless shirts. Birth control was illegal and was never to be promoted. No one was allowed to voice any criticism of the president. I asked naively, "Is president-for-life the same as dictator?" and was told that word was never to be used. If we couldn't comply with all this, we couldn't go. Somehow it was presented to us as respecting their culture, which, I guess it was. A repressive dictatorship culture.
A month later, in January 1979, we were on our way for our three months of in-country training. It was there that we were told to write home every Sunday to reassure our parents we were ok. This would prevent Peace Corps from having to field calls from worried family members when they didn't hear from their kids. (That's where all the writing on Sunday started for me.) We were also warned not to write anything critical of the government or indeed the country. Our letters were subject to being opened and read. And, good girl that I was, I complied. I wrote each week about how great everything was. It's really creepy now when I read them. There was a severe drought when we were there. People starved. I never wrote about it. The president gave speech after speech about how no one was starving. We privately mocked this, but no one spoke out. No one.
We quickly learned who we could talk to. We talked to each other of course, and with other volunteers and expats, but we were very careful about what we said to Malawians. It was awkward when they would ask about the US. They were trying to figure out what was true. One man asked me if it were true that the US had gone to the moon. I said, "Yes! Yes, that is true!" Then he asked, "What was it like there?" as if I, myself, had gone. It took a while to explain that it was a special event and we all weren't going back and forth, but it was stunning how confused they were about what was reality. We laughed about it. The news there was all blatantly censored. Big black lines went through headlines in news magazines and everyone just accepted it. Time magazine came to us via the diplomatic pouch uncensored however, and we had to make sure they never left our house. During the Iranian hostage crisis some of our Malawian friends were at our house visiting and they picked up one of the magazines and started thumbing through it. They looked at the photos and started showing each other excitedly. "Oh! Oh! Look! Look at this!" It was a photo of a protester carrying a sign that said KILL CARTER. They turned to us and asked, "You can do this? You can carry a sign like this in the US?" Then to each other, "Oh no. You wouldn't get as far as the market here." Another said laughing, "You wouldn't get out your door! Your wife would stop you!" Everyone laughed. There was never any sentiment expressed that life would be any different there than it was then.
Women weren't allowed in the bars. I accepted this and so did every other woman I knew there. I drank my beer and gin and tonics at home which was more comfortable anyway. But the male volunteers went to bars regularly. Joe didn't go often, but occasionally he did. There were men known as "Special Branch" who would buy drinks for guys in the bars and see if they would drunkenly criticize the president. Joe told me once that a guy sat down with them with a round of beers and the Malawian he was with traced an S and a B on his arm with a finger. It was a warning to be careful and not drink too much. Everyone accepted this. The stories of the political prisons were famous and they were whispered regularly from ear to ear. I knew of no one who risked a visit to one of those.
We lived like that for two and a half years listening to speech after speech of the president telling everyone how great everything was. And I wrote that in my letters home. The Malawians lived with that for three decades before there was an actual presidential election. Last May there was another Malawian presidential election. The results were contested siting ballot counting irregularities in favor of the ruling party. When I was there in June I saw protest after protest calling for an investigation and recount. The protests forced a review by the electoral commission then the supreme court. The deliberations lasted for months. This past week the results were announced and the judges read the findings aloud for eight hours. I heard shops were closed as everyone was glued to their radios, listening. The judiciary nullified the election and called on the legislature to restructure the electoral process to be more representative.
Wow. What a difference forty years makes. I'm hoping someday we can be like Malawi.
Sunday Morning ~ Imbolc and Saint Brigid
Kacirombo kofula m'njira katama mano. ~ The insect that digs a hole on the path must trust it's teeth.
~Chewa proverb
Yesterday was the feast of Saint Brigid, the Irish patron saint of dairy, lambing, midwifery, the return of spring, and the printing press. She had quite an eclectic list, I must say. I haven't thought much about this woman until yesterday when she popped up all over the place. I decided to read up on her, wondering if she'd provide a lesson I needed to learn. There are so many saints! It's hard to keep them all straight. I have my favorites, of course. Saint Anthony has come through for me many times, though I try not to take advantage of his generosity and remember where I put things, but a couple of necklaces whose clasps have failed have been recovered in the most unbelievable of circumstances after he and I had a chat. And Saint Christopher with all the solo travel I do, he and I talk a lot, too. But I did not know there was a patron saint of midwifery. I wonder why this has never come to my attention before.
I recently spent a month roaming through churches and cathedrals in Sicily, Spain, and Portugal and have seen depictions of many saints. I've even seen some (creepy) remains lying in glass tombs. There are arrow-pierced, beheaded, mutilated saints painted all over the place. Those poor people. I'd stare at their artist-depicted, mangled bodies, stunningly detailed and anguished, and think, "How devoted to a belief they must have been. What would have driven a human to be that staunchly devoted? Must it truly be divine?" That was along side the thought, "How did they ever get that painting up there?"
In Italy when I entered a sacred space filled with mind boggling, breathtaking art: mosaics, paintings, marble inlay, whatever, I got filled with a sense of overwhelming awe at the artistic magnificence. The detail! The monumental accomplishment! It speaks to me of devotion. The wealth that went into the churches, basilicas, and cathedrals, the architectural masterpieces surviving through all these centuries despite bombings, earthquakes, and neglect, all seemed miraculous to me. I'm a benefactor of that wealth, I get to experience what it produced, enjoy it, marvel in it, post pictures of it on Facebook even. The monstrous wealth of a few went into supporting the arts in a sense. They still stand. It is incredible. But when I got to Spain my first thought at the sight of the silver studded altars was, Oh my God: the pillage, the conquests, the massacre. It was obscene. Yes, the workmanship and artistic genius was there, but my God. Where did all that silver come from? We know where it came from. The saints were there though, oiled and tucked in between swirling golden orbs that, to me, mocked the goodness they represented. There was too much idolatry of conquerers, clad in silver armor with drawn swords. In God's name, sort of, but God was just a ruse. It screamed greed. It was obscene to me and I couldn't get by that. And I thought, it's happening now.
I had a lot of time to think on this trip. I wondered about devotion and how often it takes being killed or maimed to stand up for truth and justice. Were these people just born with that kind of inner strength? And why is this even necessary? Why doesn't everyone just believe in what's right, because I know what's right, right? In my college philosophy class we had discussions about this. Why do we think we are right? We discussed justice and whether those most powerful prevailing was justice. The professor said it was. I said it was not. I had no argument aside from regurgitated dogma to support my beliefs. I was coming from a small mill town where most of us were Catholic and had similar rituals and belief systems. No one at home challenged those. My philosophy professor was a bisexual Jewish lawyer from New York, getting his PhD in Philosophy at a Jesuit University. It was like shooting fish in a barrel for him. I left that class crying a lot. I wanted to believe that there would always be a just and therefore, happy, ending. That meant the way I wanted it to end. Just wait three days and he'll rise from the dead and everything will be fine. Okay, sometimes it's a little longer than three days. Hang in there.
After so much pondering about the grisly end to so many of the saints I was happy to read about Saint Brigid who died of natural causes after leading a life of chaste devotion. Phew! What a relief. It's debated whether she actually existed; her character possibly fused with the pagan goddess Brigid who divined over Imbolc, the celebration of the return of light and seedlings and spring cleaning. Saint Brigid was a champion for the poor, a female Robin Hood of her day who took riches from her chieftain father (who abducted her from her slave-mother) and gave them to the poor. How she got away with that unscathed had to have been divine intervention, that's all I can say. Whether it's true or not, I love the story, I love the history of pagan rituals being integrated into christianity, I love imagining the people celebrating the return of light and looking forward to something green to eat again. I love imagining a strong woman fighting for the poor and what she believes to be right, taking a jewel-laden sword and handing it to a beggar to buy food. Nice gesture, though he was probably immediately killed for it. I wonder if she thought that one through.
I used to think the saints lived in barbaric times: chariot races, bullfights, public beheadings…what un-evolved humans! If only they'd had the resources for education we have now. Think of the insights, the technical advances, the studies identifying causes of disease and scientific remedies. Cures! Vaccines! Then I think of the ways barbarism still exists in modern dress. I shake my head and tsk tsk, basically glad I don't live in Saudi Arabia or wherever else public flogging is legal and think I'm doing my part by refusing to buy a ticket to a bullfight. I wonder how all of this can shift and how where we live won't protect us anymore.
I heard snippets of news while I was traveling but I was mostly blacked out by choice, hoping justice, as I believed in it, would prevail. I got home in time to make frantic calls to my congresspeople, dismayed that justice is not quite taking on the form I envisioned. Was my philosophy professor right? If the most powerful prevails is that justice? I think of strong and powerful as two different things. The most powerful may prevail in the short term, but the strongest endure until the power shifts. Looking at it that way keeps me from losing hope.
And so here we are, struggling for justice in a very unjust system with a chaotic jumble of frustration and noise swirling around. How to keep clear? I'm intrigued by the saints, if not for guidance, then for insight into what it means to really believe in something and fight for it. To stay strong. I have no desire to hand my severed breasts on a platter to God, so Saint Catherine is out of my league, but Brigid is a bit of a role model I'd say. She believed in her mission to serve the poor and marched (or maybe glided in a saintly way) toward it. I love the images I found of her looking serene and confident. That must be what it is like when you have no doubt about being on the right path. I love what Joan of Arc said when asked what she would do if no one followed her: "I shan't look backward to see."
Onward with our teeth digging, digging, digging. The light is returning.
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