COLBERT AND ALEX
Many of you will remember the little 4 yr. old I talked about last summer…Albert-he struggled to live for a month and half before he died at home in his mother’s arms. He lost the battle against HIV that so many children here lose. Madame Ita, the midwife that I work with here has been visiting the rest of the family way up in their village at the top of one of the mountains to the East so that she can write to me and keep me updated on their lives. She did this on her own accord, knowing how much I loved their family and how impossible it was for me to stay in touch with them any other way. The first weekend I was here Madame Ita made our tedious journey to their little 2 room mud-brick house-nestled between the palm trees deep in the forest. I had brought clothes and games for Colbert the older boy that I had met 10 months ago standing alone outside of the hospital with his 2 month old baby brother on his back. I had chosen a tiny red pullover that was so soft for baby Alex, who was now almost a year old. Colbert’s eyes lit up when he saw me-he was standing against the mud walls, with Alex tied on his back, washing their clothes in a bucket of dirty water. I gave him the toys that the nurses from my mother’s office gave me to bring here and he could barely stop laughing. We sat on bamboo stools while he played with his toys and their mother Catherine dressed Alex in his new pullover. I took their picture together-his head covered in the red hood.
Two weeks later-I came home from my weekly volleyball match to hear that Colbert was looking for me. He had walked alone from his village of Tadu, for more than 6 hours to where I lived to tell me that Alex too had died…
Catherine has HIV, she had five children, and has already buried two of them in less than a year. The three that are left are so incredibly malnourished I had completely missed their ages by years when guessing. Colbert, who I thought was 8 years old, is actually 11 and his sister who looks 4 or 5 is almost 9 years old. She has a classic look of Kwashiorkor, her beautiful eyes sunken so far in her face.
It wasn’t until last week that Catherine’s uncle told me that when Albert died last year, the Catholics in the village has refused to bury his little body anywhere in their cemetery because he was not baptized by their church. Traditionally, family members who are not buried in the church plots are buried in the family’s compound, but Albert’s family had lost their house and all of their crops had rotted while he wasted away in the hospital and his parents fought in vain to keep him alive. So Catherine had carried his body around for days looking for a place to bury her child. Finally the uncle had agreed to bury him in his house… the very uncle who had come to ask me the "White Woman from America"-why I would take the time to care about this "poor Black family from the bush…" he couldn’t understand…and there are many reasons why.
....White people showed up in Cameroon in the 1500’s and started trading weapons with people for local goods. Shortly thereafter those same White people started stealing human beings from their homes and forcing them to work. Soon the rest of the White world realized that they could exploit the continent of Africa by stealing lives and raw materials and forcing Black hands to build White cities and royal palaces. Soon Cameroon’s vast coast was invaded by men stealing fathers, sons, grandchildren, daughters, sisters and shipping them to the Caribbean where they would wait to be bought for nothing and sold to White people in Europe and in America. Then White people came to ‘own’ this country-Cameroon-to destroy histories and traditions and to bring their enlightened and civilized ways to the barbarians of the jungle. Missionaries swarmed the shores of Cameroon-multiplied and spread themselves into every corner of people’s lives bringing with them false promises and new methods of manipulation. Today, the French and the Religious institutions still control the entire country that they left in shambles, including the currency they have slashed more than once, however, the debts of the Colonial days remain for the Cameroonians alone to repay.
Today, the Americans have built the biggest building in the country in Yaoundé’, the capital, their own embassy---implying they are here to stay. Of course! The oil pipeline that runs through the neighboring country of Chad needs to flow through Cameroon and out of the same shores that continue to be raped, so that we can all drive our cars and power our cozy lives. A few years ago people started cheering and investing in hope when the IMF and the World Bank agreed to provide the country with their ingenious SAP (Structural Adjustment Program) promising to forgive a tiny fraction of the country’s foreign debt. As the months and years go by villagers keep hoping their lives will improve- and don’t get me wrong-very few people are sitting around waiting-rather, they are working harder and harder to provide for their families and function with our leftovers, trash, more loans, expired drugs…the scraps from our table. And while they work tirelessly and speak of “perseverance”, their country is becoming privatized right out from underneath them-and of course-by foreign “investors”….so public water taps in remote villages were shut off in one night and when women carried their drums, buckets, and leather pouches to fill with water for their families, their bodies, their farms, their whole entire lives…everything and everybody returned home empty. An American company bought the water catchments in Cameroon, they sell it to small local Cameroonian companies, who then sell it to people who depend on it to live and so poor families grow even more destitute and slowly their hope for the benefits of SAP and the promises of a better future begin to dry up just like the taps. None of the rich countries miss out on such opportunities…after all; we are all after the best deal-no matter who we exploit to get it.
Today in Cameroon--- priests who have learned from the masters of the Catholic religion tell mothers that their children won’t go to heaven when they die, unless they are baptized by a professional-sprinkled with water swimming with amoebas-and so behave as Civilized White Christians do. It sure is a good thing that the Whites showed up and taught people how to treat other human beings-how to be civil. Well, Catherine, desperate to help her dying baby get to heaven after suffering too much on this earth in his short life, ran to find a catechist to baptize Alex while he suckled at her breast and died in her arms. We both wept together…on her bamboo bed in the dark cold of her mud brick home…and I told her that I respected her beliefs and her religion but that I believed with all my heart that Alex and Albert were together, that God had not forsaken Albert and left him in limbo because no one sprinkled water on his head-that he was loved just as much as all of the other children who leave us.
And for those of us, including myself, who want to judge Catherine and her husband and to lay blame in their arena only, for contracting HIV and killing their children unknowingly by transmitting the virus they were carrying in their blood-should remember the whole story of this country, should try to imagine a poverty so magnificent that is steers your life around every turn of every minute of each day that you breathe, and hopefully try to at least check whether or not our own seemingly innocent actions in our boundaries of wealth, of health, land, and opportunity…don’t help-even in the slightest fashion---families to lose more children and people to lose more lives.
CATHERINE AND ALEX...
The little girl smiling at us is Courage, she is Colbert's last living younger sibling. Before I left Cameroon she came and stayed with me along with Colbert and Catherine (I wrote about them previously) and we tested both of these children for HIV and held our breaths. As you now know, Catherine has already lost two of her youngest to AIDS and wanted to know if her other children were infected. Although both children are severely malnourished and hence small and fragile in many ways...they do NOT have HIV. We found this out on the day of my "send off" party, put on for me by more people than I could count from all of the villages I had worked in.
