Because I am a Girl (4 page)

The idea was disgusting. She would rather die. Later, back home, she inspected her face in the mirror. It gazed back at her, naked, square-jawed. She had never worn make-up. Perhaps she should use some of her own products to woo Kwesi back. She could pluck her eyebrows and
lighten
her skin with Dimples Skin Lightener. She could perfume herself with jasmine and use her Cote D’Azur make-up kit, complete with brushes, to shadow her eyes and paint her lips. Maybe then she could win back his love.

Or she could visit Giti, the witch. Everyone feared Giti. She lived alone behind the mosque, she was known to have the evil eye. Only the other week a headless chicken had been found outside her front door. Giti could put a curse on one of Ernestine’s skin creams. When Adwoa bought it, her face would erupt in boils and Kwesi would run away in horror.

What else could Ernestine do? She could go to church and pray. She could storm into Adwoa’s house and tell her to lay off her husband. She could have a showdown with Kwesi.

Or she could do nothing and hope it would pass.

Ernestine was a coward; she did nothing. The sun sank behind the trees. The bats detached themselves and flew away. She swept the floor and washed her mother-in-law’s hair. She separated her squabbling sons. Her older children came home from school. She cooked them
jollof
rice and red pepper sauce. Her husband came home from the fields and put his mobile on the shelf, where it always sat. Grace came home, her books under her arm. She didn’t say a word. Ernestine caught Grace looking at herself and Kwesi with an odd expression on her face. Did she know something was up?

*

The days passed. Ernestine went out selling her wares but she avoided Adwoa’s house, she couldn’t bear to see the woman. On Wednesday the girls’ football team played a match and Ernestine, working the crowd, made a large number of sales. Grace had backed out of the match saying she didn’t feel well. She was nowhere to be seen, and wasn’t at home when Ernestine returned. At the time Ernestine thought nothing of it, presuming Grace was menstruating. She had too many other things on her mind.

The next morning, needing to replenish her stock, she rose early, to travel into Asseweya with her husband. It was hard to believe that only a week had passed since her last visit.

The sun was rising as they climbed into the bus. It was just pulling into the road when someone yelled.

‘Wait!’

Ernestine looked out of the window. Adwoa hobbled towards them, one hand clutching her long, tight skirt, the other hand waving the bus to stop.

Adwoa squeezed herself into the seat behind them. She was dressed in an orange and green batik outfit; her hair was embellished with one of Ernestine’s gardenia-clips, and she was perspiring from the unaccustomed exercise.

Ernestine froze. The harlot greeted Kwesi politely, as if she hardly knew him – she nodded to him as she nodded
to
the other passengers from the village. Her mascara was smudged and she was breathing heavily.

She leaned forward to Ernestine. ‘My dear, I’m spitting mad,’ she muttered. ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with my brother, the good-for-nothing drunk.’

Ernestine’s head span. She glanced at her husband but now the bus was moving he appeared to have dozed off. It was all pretence, of course.

Adwoa was jabbering away. It seemed to be a family quarrel about a will. ‘… left him some land but he can’t farm it, the rascal’s a cripple! …’ The words seemed to come from far off. Ernestine’s mind was busy. Was this a pre-arranged tryst between her husband and Adwoa?After all, it was unusual for her, Ernestine, to go to Asseweya two weeks running. The two fornicators were certainly playing a clever game, Kwesi feigning sleep and his mistress engaging Ernestine in some incomprehensible story about a drunken cripple.

When they arrived in town Adwoa pushed her way to the front of the bus. Ernestine watched her big, gaudy body work its way through the crowd. She was heading for the phone-charging booth.

And now Adwoa was standing there, shouting at Ngobo, the man with the mobiles, the man who never moved. The man who, it turned out, happened to be her brother.

*

People said it was God’s will, that Ngobo was born a cripple. People said it was an ancestral curse. People said it was just bad luck. Some people had shown him kindness; some had bullied him. Mostly, however, people had ignored him. When he was a child he had begged at the crossroads outside Asseweya, where the traffic streamed between Accra and the north. Every day one of his brothers or sisters would push him along the central reservation and leave him at the traffic lights. He sat on his little cart, his withered legs tucked beneath him. This was a prime spot for the disabled and fights would break out between them as they jostled for the best position.

But the worst fights were with his sister, Adwoa.

Adwoa, who throughout his childhood bullied and teased him. Who stole his sweets and ran away on her strong healthy legs. Who ridiculed him to the other girls. Who left him on his cart, in the rain, while she disappeared into the bushes with her boyfriends. Who stole his money and taunted him to come and get it. And who now was trying to steal back a cassava-patch their father had left to him in his will.

A cripple has to develop alternative methods of survival. Over the years, Ngobo had learnt to be wily. Of course he was bitter – how could he not be? But he had his wits. Each day, at his stall, he watched people coming and going, busy with their day, blessed with their children,
people
who took it for granted that they could move from one place to another, dance, have sex, have a life.

All Ngobo had were his mobile phones. They sat there on his table, rows of them, plugged in and silently charging. Within them lay the only power he had – the power to settle old feuds, to pay back his tormenters … And to make mischief.

*

How did Ernestine discover the truth – that Ngobo had lied, that there was no message on her husband’s phone, that Ngobo had simply wanted to take revenge on his sister? Why had he chosen Ernestine and her husband, a respectable, hard-working couple who loved each other? What had they ever done to him?

I’ll never know because at this point the trail grows cold. I suspect that Ernestine’s strong, unadorned beauty had inflamed him, that he was half in love with her himself, and bitterly jealous of her happy marriage. That he had watched her on her visits to the beauty shop on the other side of the road, and wanted her for himself. Who knows? I heard the story from Lily, who owned God Is Good Beauty Products. She’s my cousin, and I dropped in on her when I travelled to Ghana to visit my relatives.

All I heard was that a few days later Ernestine’s daughter Grace, who had been acting so strangely, drew her mother aside and told her that she was expecting a baby. The father was a taxi-driver who used to stop at her
auntie’s
stall to eat her fried fish. He had promised to marry Grace but he was never seen again. Poor Grace, so rigid and intransigent, and who, it transpires, didn’t manage to practise what she preached.

When I arrived in Accra I stayed at the Novotel. They put me on the second floor. Through my window I could see the pool, the sunbathers, the waiters serving drinks amongst the bougainvilleas. A high wall surrounded the garden.

When I returned from upcountry they put me on the sixth floor. This was above the wall and when I looked out of the window a different Africa was spread below me: the Makola Market which stretched as far as the eye could see … a heaving mass of people, vegetables, goats. The room was air-conditioned and the window sealed, but in my heart I could hear the voices and the music, I could smell the exhaust fumes and the frying food. …

I watched it for hours as the sun set and the swallows swooped. And then it was gone, as if it had never been. When night falls Africans melt back into the darkness, into their unknowable lives. Then the hotel reception rang to tell me my taxi had arrived, to take me to the airport.

Africa evaporated into the blaze of the terminal building. All I had was Lily’s shea butter, which I rubbed into my hands. I smelt it on my skin as I slept all the way back to England, leaving Ghana, and her stories, behind.

BRAZIL IS A
Catholic country, so copulation equals population. What about the Rhythm Method, I hear you ask? Well, do you know what you call a woman who uses the Rhythm Method? Mum.

I’m in Brazil. I know. It’s a long way to go for a wax. In fact I’m in the equivalent of an unwaxed pudenda – the north east of the country, Maranhao, on the edge of the rainforest, home to the country’s poorest people. I’m not actually here for a Brazilian (this is the only context in which you’ll ever hear me say this, but Bring Back Bush!) but to see what Plan is doing to improve the lives of young women in this impoverished place.

I wanted to tell the story of one girl. But all the girls I met – Maria, Jeanine, Rosana, Lorena, Amanda, Marina, Cintia, Melissa, Nataly, Teresa, Ana and Johanna – had the same sad tale. It’s a story of child prostitution, teenage pregnancy, HIV, no contraception, illegal back-street abortion, sex tourism, single mothers, macho men, irresponsible, absentee fathers and domestic violence.

*

Teresa is typical. She is fifteen and already has two baby girls. Her sisters fell pregnant at twelve and fourteen respectively. The question is, did they
fall
, or were they
pushed
? With no access to contraceptives and brash, cocksure boyfriends who refuse to wear condoms, especially when deflowering a girl – it’s a game of Ovarian Roulette.

A pregnancy test is the one test you can’t cheat on – and these teenagers fail it far too regularly. The placenta is known locally as ‘the partner’ – and in most cases, it’s the only partner there at the birth. The fathers are U.F.Os: Unidentified Fleeing Objects. Brazilian men seem to approach commitment with the same enthusiasm a nude guy approaches a barbed-wire fence. To them a ‘paternity suit’ is the latest look in men’s leisure wear down in Rio.

The town I am visiting, São Luís, is nick-named ‘The Love Island’, because of the high number of pregnant teenagers and AIDS patients. The slum where Teresa lives is called, ironically, the Olympic Village,
Cidade Olimpica
. 70,000 people squat here in destitution – going for Gold in the Misery Olympics. With fetid garbage strewn on every street corner, no running water but plenty of running raw sewage and decrepit buildings scarred in graffiti, you could say that on first view, the favelas lack charm. On second and third sight too, actually. But the charm of the women I met made up for it. Despite their penury, in each ramshackle
dwelling
young abandoned teenage mothers greeted me with shy generosity and warmth.

Teresa invited me into the minuscule hut she shares with her mum and two children. It’s a lopsided mud-brick construction which leans tipsily into the street. The holes in the walls are stuffed with plastic bags to keep out the rain and wind. A sardine would feel cramped in there. And yet, clean washing fluttered from lines which criss-crossed the tiny room. Her two little girls, eighteen months and three, sported perfectly plaited hair and freshly laundered frocks.

I asked the teenager if she would like to go back to school. ‘Oh, I would love to,’ she replied, despondently, ‘but there is nobody to look after my kids.’ Her first unwanted pregnancy forced her to leave school.

The door wheezed open and Teresa’s mother shuffled in unexpectedly from work. World-weary and weather-beaten, she looked eighty, but is only forty. Teresa shyly revealed that her mother was also pregnant at twelve. I asked Teresa’s mum if it was difficult to accept that her three daughters became mothers at such a tender age, just as she did.

‘It is difficult to accept, yes. I was very sad when I found out my daughters were pregnant. But the reason … well, their father was not a good example.’ Sadness strained her face as she lowered her bulk on to the bed next to me, the springs mourning beneath us. ‘He drank and smoked a lot
of
dope in the house. Both girls were rebellious and angry that I stayed living with this man. It’s been very difficult for them.’ She was fretting at her fingers, bending and stretching them as if warming up for a piano concerto. ‘You see, my own mother, had three children by the time she was sixteen. They were starving. At ten years old, I was the eldest so I became a prostitute to bring home milk for the baby and food for my siblings. I didn’t want to steal. I would rather work as a prostitute,’ she said defiantly, the veins in her neck standing out like cables.

‘I took drugs to numb the experience. My boyfriend, he was thirteen years old, he took drugs too. He became an addict. At fifteen my boyfriend was living off me as a pimp. He use to hit me.’ Her face burned with indignation. ‘I have been a victim of domestic violence all my life.’ Tears ran down her lined, exhausted face. ‘I am most ashamed of the time I had to have three men at once,’ she admitted, her face as crumpled as the unmade beds she is trying to forget.

I felt dreadful that my questions had made her weep. I tried to change conversational tack, explaining, self-deprecatingly that with my diplomacy skills I really should take up a career in hostage negotiations … But Teresa’s mother waved away my apologies and insisted on concluding her confession. ‘This year I’ve accepted Jesus and found the strength to leave prostitution and my pimp,’ she revealed, her voice see-sawing with emotion. She is
telling
me all this, she said, ‘because Jesus tells us to embrace the truth’. (Teresa’s mother has abandoned Catholicism for the Pentecostal religion – an increasing trend in Brazil.)

She started to cry again, blaming herself for her daughters’ blighted lives. ‘It was so bad at home, the drinking, the violence, it was no wonder my girls went wild.’ Thick tears plopped onto her chapped hands.

Teresa, mortified with embarrassment at her mother’s unexpected revelations, plugged a squawking baby with a bottle and looked at her feet. I probed the mother a little more, enquiring why she hadn’t talked to her daughters about contraception. Ironically, although working as a prostitute, her Catholic upbringing had left her too self-conscious to broach such sinful subjects. Her only advice to her three daughters had been, ‘don’t go out with boys’. She admitted that it is now something she bitterly regrets. ‘We just feel ashamed to talk about these issues.’

In a rather bleak postscript, she concluded that in the Plan-run school where she now works as a cleaner, she can see the twelve- and-thirteen-year-old girls going with men for money. She had worked as a child prostitute to support her own mother who had also worked as a child prostitute and both had endured pregnancies aged eleven. And now her three daughters have followed biological suit by having babies in their early teens. It’s a vicious cycle – a menstrual cycle. The question is, how to break it? Teresa’s mother receives no alimony or social security. She
must
work scrubbing floors all day to support her three daughters and clutch of grandchildren, even though her hands are gnarled with arthritis. She sleeps in a hammock strung across the dismal room; her daughters and their babies nestled into the small cots below.

In Brazil, paedophile tourism is rife. (In São Luís alone, 1,000 children are known to have been sexually exploited in the last year.) The young girls I met told me of specific bars and service stations where such tourists go, knowing that children will be available for proposition. One of Plan’s counsellors revealed that even though the government says they’re trying to break these paedophile rings, the girls are getting younger. ‘They use to be twelve to seventeen. It’s now eight- to nine-year-olds being offered, with younger children pimped by their parents, in their own homes. Two weeks ago,’ she added, bleakly, ‘a father and grandfather were convicted of having sex with the youngest child in the family – she is four – and of selling her to men. The little girls have to be stitched up as their vaginas have been torn and split. Sometimes they are also penetrated with objects. I see these cases every day and I never get used to it.’

In every dilapidated shack, I found young women who had become little more than a life support to their ovaries – reduced, by lack of contraception and lack of access to
abortion
, into breeding cows. Forced to drop out of school and unable to work, it’s as though society has handed them an eviction notice. They have become runners-up in the human race. Cintia and her sister share a hovel with their four babies and their mother, who, although also crippled with arthritis, must work as a domestic to support them – yet is paid only at the whim of her mistress. As there is high unemployment, no unions and no basic wage, Cintia’s mother has no choice but to put up with this capriciousness and take the fiscal scraps she is thrown.

At fourteen, Cintia had a baby, prematurely. ‘I wanted to be a police woman,’ she told me, with longing. Her sister, now eighteen and the mother of three children, with another on the way, wanted to be a teacher. But instead they look after their babies and try to help their mother around the house. ‘Mum was angry with us at first, but loves us and the kids.’

But how can these mothers mother, when they so desperately need to be mothered themselves?

Although their shack is neat and tidy, there is no money for a septic tank. The toilet is a pit covered by two wobbly planks through which the toddlers could easily fall. The sisters dug a hole in the backyard, but had no money to buy a tank. Ignorant about hygiene, they now throw their garbage into the pit – nappies, food scraps and waste – where it all festers in the sun. As it’s been raining, the squalid pit has filled with water, turning it into a
surreal
fishpond in which the soiled nappies bob about. All the babies have rashes, sores and skin complaints, which I can’t quite put my finger on – and would much rather not, come to think of it. But there’s little doubt that it’s to do with the festering bucolic pool in their microscopic yard.

My next visit was to Diana’s tumbledown hut. She is thirty with three teenage children. Here the family defecates in a bucket. The mother then wraps the family’s faeces in a plastic bag and carries them to the garbage truck once a week. This is the tropics, I hasten to add. She does this week in, week out, year after year after – well, you get the pathetic picture. A case of
Oh, those old familiar faeces
.

Diana’s thirteen-year-old daughter sat mutely in the corner, sucking her thumb. Her legs were covered in bites and discolorations. She is four months pregnant. ‘As a mother, I do what I can,’ Diana shrugged, ‘but in these areas, girls start their sexual lives at twelve.’

Diana’s daughter told me in a faltering voice that girls have sex so as not to lose a boyfriend. With a self-esteem that is limbo low, they dread being cast off into social Siberia. This macho society encourages young boys to sow whole acres of wild oats, but girls can’t go on the pill without parental permission. Most don’t have the fifty cents for a packet of three condoms. Many girls die from illegal abortions. They try to abort using herbal pessaries and potions from the forest. The latest
misguided
fad is for the pregnant girl to eat four ulcer pills and insert four vaginally to provoke miscarriage. ‘You can’t have babies any more after this,’ Diana told me, matter-of-factly.

Worse than the urban slums are the favelas on the edge of the rainforest. The aptly named Poverty Street, Rua de Pobreza, is a cluster of rickety mud houses, with no sanitation and nothing but sheets of plastic tacked to the roof for protection against the five months of rainy season. Half collapsed and open to the elements, the huts look as though Pavarotti has sat on them. There are 4,000 families squatting in this one area, quite literally, as there are no latrines. It must be impossible to get to sleep here – mainly because some insect is always blinking its 9,000,624,439,002 eyes at you in the dark.

Despite this, the young mothers showed me their lean-to’s with the pride of 1950s housewives – the tiny stone fireplace for cooking rice, the well where they fetch water, the palm fronds tied together to make a private place to wash, the earthen floors swept clean.

I had come to meet thirteen-year-old Maria, a beautiful and bright student. Her mother asked me to stay for lunch, offering piranha. Gritting my teeth, I decided that I’d better eat it before it ate me, giving a new definition to ‘fast food’. What an innovative way to lose weight – eat piranha and diet from the inside!

In a water-to-wine, loaves-and-fishes act which would put Martha Stewart to shame, Maria’s mother magicked up a lunch of rice, black-eyed beans, beetroot, tomato, potato and fried fish. The kids stood around wide-eyed, amazed at this sumptuous feast. Starved stray cats insinuated themselves into the hut, weaving a mewling minuet round our legs. Some days the family has nothing to eat, Maria’s mum revealed. The adults sleep on a single, lumpy mattress on frayed, torn sheets, the babies in filthy cribs with the other kids strung above them in a hammock. Maria’s mother told me that they moved here to try to improve their lives. (How bad could it have been in the city? I wondered, aghast.)

Despite the desperate poverty, there is a quiet dignity to these women. After lunch, I retreated on to Maria’s small bed, with her mum and sister, away from the village men. The males hovered nearby, suspiciously. They all had the sort of faces you usually associate with Crime and Accident reconstruction units and I didn’t want to rile them.

Maria is doing well at school. She takes pride in her appearance. Two filthy dolls are decoratively draped upon the bed and a plastic handbag is proudly displayed, on a nail on the wall, along with dog-eared books. Her bed-sheet depicted a beaming Jesus, but the mattress beneath was just a pile of bricks with a thin blanket. If Maria can over-ride her ovaries, this girl could make her mark. If
not
, she will join the millions of other young women in the Missing Persons Bureau. And who is missing? The girl with potential – the girl she was B.C. (Before Childbirth).

Out of earshot of the men, I asked Maria’s mother what aspirations she has for her daughter. ‘To stop her from having a baby,’ she told me, emphatically. Maria’s mum then whispered that, after a Plan workshop, she started secretly taking the pill. Her sister is operating a similar subterfuge. They dare not tell their husbands. Both women yearn to have their fallopian tubes tied. I asked why their husbands wouldn’t go for the snip, being a much simpler operation. Maria’s mum shrugged. ‘It’s impossible to convince my husband to wear a condom, let alone have a vasectomy,’ she sighed.