International Headlines

Hopefully, one day we will make the news for positive things. In the meantime, I am glad that some of the struggles of the women here are being acknowledged. Following the NY Times article, I have also attached a Swazi Times article. Obviously these circumstances are not universal in Swaziland, but from my limited experience they occur much too often.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23lives-t.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

August 23, 2009Lives

Truck-Stop Girls
By M. CATHERINE MATERNOWSKA

In May, I was traveling down a South African highway with a colleague and a driver, headed toward Swaziland. A private foundation had assigned me to assess a health clinic that it set up for truckers and the girls and women who trade sex with them for cash and goods. Truckers are well known to transmit H.I.V. up and down the highways. And Swaziland, a small, landlocked country dependent on its busy trucking corridors, is particularly troublesome. It has the highest H.I.V. rate in the world: one in three people is infected.

When we reached the Osheok border post, the Swazi official welcomed us, inspecting the vehicle efficiently. Apart from a gas station, a dozen roadside vegetable stands and some dingy bars, there was little activity in the little border town. Adjacent to the customs office, there was a small building fashioned from a shipping container with a hand-painted sign outside: “Truckers Wellness Center.” It’s an innovative way to set up a clinic. While papers are processed at customs, truckers use the clinic to obtain medications for “hot urine” and other sexually transmitted diseases.

We watched truckers filing into the clinic throughout the evening, but there were no girls. So I wandered up and chatted with the border official, who said: “You want girls? Then go to Matsapha. They’ll attack your car!” Matsapha is the main overnight hub for truckers. It was well past 11 p.m., but we decided to go there. As we drove, the “majestic mountains, fertile valleys and lush forests” described in Swaziland guidebooks appeared only as shadows.

Matsapha was still, almost abandoned. A lone gas attendant directed us to the edge of town and an old sign on a hill for the Economy Flats motel. The driver slowed, and as the official predicted, about 10 girls in tiny dresses and little shorts swarmed around our vehicle. But when they saw my female colleague and me, they screamed and went off. I sent the driver out to negotiate. “Tell them we just want to talk,” I said. “I’ll buy them dinner.” The lure of food was enough. Three girls got in the car, and we drove down a narrow, beaten track through the trees to a rundown complex of rough cement-block buildings. This was their home. This was where the truckers slept and the girls earned their meals.

We sat on stones outside the barren rooms and talked with the young women. Dozens of girls, between the ages of 14 and 24, were hanging around the compound. Men smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor walked up and down the path and in and out of the cement-block buildings. The girls were alert to one another’s needs, listening for sounds of violence in the rooms or the shouts of the younger girls closer to the road.

I met eyes with a 16-year-old named Mbali. She was thin, with close-cropped hair and a beautiful smile. I offered her a packet of crackers, which she ripped open with her teeth. After wolfing them down, she looked at me and said, “I hate having sex.” Her parents were dead; she was unable to pay her school fees, had been abused by an overburdened aunt — and now, like many of the girls, she was a runaway. Nearly one in four Swazi girls is H.I.V. positive, and Mbali is one of them. Her treatment options are limited. “I have nowhere to sleep unless I find a man,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t have money and food for two days. A man without a condom will pay more, so obviously I say O.K. because I need money.”

She continued: “I am so tired. These men are so rough.”

I’ve been working with women and girls for over two decades now — in Haiti, in Zimbabwe, in Tanzania and in Kenya — and I have heard this story often. But this one, deep in the forest of Swaziland, seemed so desperate. I was as surprised as she was when I suddenly burst into tears.

Mbali held my face and said, “Don’t cry!” She hugged me. How absurd can life be? A 16-year-old, H.I.V.-positive orphan was comforting me while I wept. It was a strange way to carry on an interview, but that’s what we did. I asked her what she needed most. “Someplace safe,” she said. “Someplace to be a girl. Someplace where I won’t have to have sex with men anymore.”

The driver of our car appeared, carrying takeout food from a nearby bar. I could hear trucks speeding along the highway through the forest. I kept thinking about what Mbali asked for: a safe place to be a girl. How strange. How simple.

M. Catherine Maternowska is an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and a consultant to the Nike Foundation and the North Star Foundation

Swazi Times Article:
http://www.times.co.sz/index.php?news=9976

HIV Positive Hubby Kills Wife

PIGG’S PEAK – Her decision to leave her husband on Women’s Day after enduring being assaulted by him during their time together was not enough to save her life.

Four days after she had left, he tracked her to her parental home where he stabbed her more than six times while she was asleep with her daughter. He later committed suicide by hanging himself in a nearby bush. This was after she had refused him sex without a condom.

The incident happened in the early hours of yesterday at Malanda, situated in the outskirts of Pigg’s Peak.The couple, according to relatives and church members, had been engulfed in problems after going for an HIV test at the local clinic. The wife tested negative while the husband tested positive.

A marriage counsellor, Dumsile Ndlovu, confirmed that the two had gone for an HIV test but would not be drawn to comment on their results. According to relatives, the problems started after they had gone for the test.“They were told during counselling at the clinic that they would have to use a condom each time they engaged in sexual intercourse, but the husband would have none of it. She would refuse to have sex with him if he did not use a condom and he would beat her up.

“Other times when she refused him sex, he would call his ex-girlfriend whom he had a child with and tell her how much he missed her just to spite his wife and make her jealous,” the relatives said.After weeks of enduring this torture, the wife then approached their church for assistance.

Counselling
The counselling process in church started but the beatings continued at home until she decided she had had enough and on Women’s Day, she left. Four days later he walked over seven kilometres, from Luhlangotsini to Malanda, her parental home, in the middle of the night arriving after 2am, where he broke into the house she was sleeping in.

“I was disturbed by screams of a woman shouting ‘sisi ngaze ngafa’ (I am dying sister). When I went to check what was happening, I found him stabbing her. I tried to hold him, but he pushed me away and started stabbing me too. I was stabbed in the head. Luckily, I managed to escape from the house and rushed to a nearby homestead where I called for help,” said Ncobile Dlamini, sister to the deceased.

Dlamini said neighbours responded to her screams for help but when they got to the house, she found her sister lying in a pool of blood by the door while the husband was no where to be found. “There was blood everywhere and I could not believe what had just happened,” said Dlamini.Police were called to the scene and a search party for the husband was commissioned.

Residents and police searched the whole night after a suicide note, apparently left by the husband, was found at their home.He was found about four hours later dangling from a tree. In the suicide note, he apologised for his actions and left instructions on what should happen to his children. Police Public Relations Officer (PRO) Superintendent Vusi Masuku confirmed the incident. He said the matter is being investigated by the Pigg’s Peak police. * Names of the deceased have been deliberately withheld because of the HIV status of the husband.