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6. Seeking Safe Passage: Pregnancy Risk and Prenatal Care
- Vanderbilt University Press
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183 Chapter 6 Seeking Safe Passage: Pregnancy Risk and Prenatal Care “Ah, Dona Raquel. Since we last met, I have suffered so terribly.” Two weeks after giving birth, exquisite, cherub-faced Amelia was puffy in the cheeks, dark under the eyes, and thinner than I had ever seen her. Her health had been poor on and off near the end of her pregnancy, but she had given birth to a healthy baby boy, James, named after my husband. She proudly held her two-week-old son, in an intricately detailed blue sweater, pants, booties and hat, and soft baby blanket she had knit on a new knitting machine, just like the one she had made for my daughter. In a setting where male names carry on lineages and families are lifelines, this honor of “naming after” was also a line she had thrown out for help. It was a subtle gesture by someone with a weak social network, and therefore, I learned, with a baby at risk of not surviving, to reel in a bit closer foreigners who might not be in her social network for very long. Amelia had needed the lifeline, but it had been too little, too late. I had known Amelia before I started the prenatal care study. She was one of the only two women who participated in the research project who had a wage-paying job. At thirty-two, she was a young widow and the mother of two girls, and she was also caring for her two younger sisters. She managed all this at the moment by working as a domestic, cleaning and serving tea and water in the office of a small international health organization operating in Gondola, for which she earned about $120 a month, one and a half times the government’s official minimum salary. Now she was also knitting and selling acrylic baby sweater sets. The only difference between Amelia and her Mucessua neighbors who had little formal education, no employment history , and few marketable skills was Amelia’s courage and tenacity: when the NGO arrived in the district, she walked to their office every day for weeks asking for a job, until a spot opened up when a woman took maternity leave. She had filled in and quickly won over the entire staff with her dry humor and assiduousness. I had not recruited Amelia into the prenatal care study—she had enlisted me. She had heard about the project and approached me conspiratorially, 184 Family Secrets I assumed to participate in the research. When I first interviewed Amelia, soon after she had discovered she was pregnant, she requested to speak to me alone. With a combination of desperation and aloof determination, she asked me if I knew someone at the hospital, one of the foreign doctors maybe, who could arrange an abortion for her. She was not wavering or asking for advice. She needed me to arranjar and colocar, to arrange things and hook her up to my network. Abortions are illegal in Mozambique except to save a mother’s life, as noted earlier; however, some doctors were known to “help” women. I encouraged her to set up a prenatal care appointment at the provincial hospital and heard nothing more from her for over a month. When Amelia and I met two months later, she was lithe and energetic. I was not sure if she was still pregnant.“I’m still in this study of yours,” she grinned when we sat down with tea in the kitchen of the small office where she worked.“You’ll still have to bring me some gifts, after all.” She had not been able to arrange an abortion and had decided to make the best of things. A new relationship with one of the kindest fellows who worked as a driver at the same organization was going well. She felt supported, adored; she was beaming. Over the next months I had seen Amelia only briefly now and then as I went about my interviews with other women in Mucessua. She had a way of disappearing and showing up when she wanted to be found, and I knew she was busy with a new relationship, impending pregnancy, and her jobs. Now we were sitting down together to catch up. Amelia had been pregnant six times before this unwanted pregnancy; four of her children had died; she now had three living children, two daughters and baby James. Since our last interview and the birth...