One day this will all be over

Ross Parsons

Description

Ross Parsons has been working with HIV-positive children in Mutare since 2005. As a child psychotherapist, he was interested in exploring how a therapeutic group, meeting regularly, might offer a way of elaborating and meeting their needs. His account of these experiences is presented as a rare blend of anthropological and psychotherapeutic approaches to the study of children, and he is candid about the close, even intimate, relationships that resulted: �I have crossed the classical ethnographic and psychoanalytic boundary of the cool observer. The therapist, while still awkwardly present, has also become an advocate in pursuit of the ethnographic.� The period of his research coincided with one of deep crisis in Zimbabwe�s economy: employment opportunities were few, public health and education services were in decay, and the prospects were grim for those on the margins of society. �In the course of my fieldwork I have attended too many funerals.� In the absence of state support, the poor look variously to international NGOs, and to the church. Parsons offers telling insights into the crossroads of donated pharmaceuticals and Christian faith, and is constantly alert to the place of traditional spirituality and ties of kinship.

Sujets

• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: Weaver Press
• Date de parution: 13 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781779222015
• Langue: English

Extrait

One day this will all be over
One day this will all be over
Growing up with HIV in an Eastern Zimbabwean Town
Ross Parsons
Weaver Press, Box A1992 Avondale Harare Zimbabwe www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com
Ross Parsons 2012
Cover photograph: Linette Frewin First published by Africaid in their exhibition The Audacity of Hope , World AIDS day, 2010 and reproduced here with their kind permission.
We would also like to thank Tsvangirai Mukwazhi for his photograph on . Irene Staunton for the photograph on and Linette Frewin for all other photographs, and for her generous support of this project. Photograph on Tsvangirai Mukwazhi Photograph on Irene Staunton Photographs on , , , , Linette Frewin
Cover Design: Danes Design, Harare Typeset by forzalibro designs Printed by Print Works, Harare
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise - without the express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978 1 77922 172 8
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
1
Introduction Growing up with HIV in urban, eastern Zimbabwe
2
In this vale of tears An ethnography of suffering and sorrow
3
Who cares? Family, kin and other forms of caring
4
Visible secrets Illnesses, exposure and disclosure
5
If I had faith Churches, spirits and healing
6
One day this will all be over Dying, death and grief
7
The heart remains An epilogue
Bibliography
Preface and Acknowledgements
For how can I go so far as to try to use language to get between pain and its expression?
Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations (1945: 245)
The following is a work haunted by suffering and grief. I offer it as an inadequate memorial to the children I have known who have now died. I am greatly indebted to all the children and their families whom I have come to know, indeed to acknowledge as my own, in the course of the work. I have gone to great lengths to obscure their identities in what follows but I hope not to have obscured their great generosity of spirit, of resilience and of their consummate good humour.
In Zimbabwe, Dr Geoff Foster, Dr Mark Patterson and the paediatric staff at Mutare Provincial Hospital were more than hospitable and I have the greatest respect for their commitment, dedication and hard work. Dr Thokozile Chitepo, Dr Isaac Machakanja, Dr Abigail Kangwende and Mrs Maryjoice Kapesa, in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Africa University, provided a congenial intellectual home amidst the general degradation of Zimbabwean academia. Michael Bourdillon, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Zimbabwe, is always a kind and generous colleague who shares with me his encyclopedic knowledge of local ethnographic literature and reads earlier drafts of work. Nancy Chulu maintained the children s group with great equanimity and compassion during my absences. Hellen Magadaire was an invaluable research assistant and translator at various points. Ashleigh Mortelman very generously gave the final manuscript a thorough proofreading, which greatly helped me in the final stages of preparing the manuscript. She also generously helped me in my understanding of, and admiration for, Pentecostal Christianity.
In the USA, the work was funded, fostered and supported by the Department of Anthropology at The Johns Hopkins University where faculty and fellow students helped me greatly in clarifying, deepening and widening my thinking. In particular, I am deeply grateful to Pamela Reynolds, Jane Guyer and Aaron Goodfellow who were diligent, generous and provocative interlocutors. Sylvain Perdigon, Sidharthan Maunaguru, Valeria Procupez and Vaibhav Saria are all both great friends and immensely helpful readers. Paola Maratti and Ruth Leys in the Department of Humanities, and Sara Berry and Pier Larson in the Department of History all read drafts, commenting and teaching with the greatest generosity. In particular earlier drafts of a number of chapters were greatly improved by their reception in the university s Africa Seminar and Anthropology Colloquia. Any errors are entirely my own.
Amanda Hammar, in the Centre for African Studies at the University of Copenhagen, whose seminal work in Zimbabwean studies has been one of my inspirations, has long been one of my most valued friends and colleagues. Fiona Ross, in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, has provoked and supported my work at a number of crucial junctures. Jane Reece, at the University of Bristol and a fellow traveller, has been a friend, editor and encourager.
Irene Staunton and Murray McCartney at Weaver Press in Harare have been strong supporters of the publication of the manuscript and facilitated its acceptance by Douglas Johnson at James Currey in London. Helpful readers reports, which greatly improved the manuscript, were provided by Sara Berry and Amanda Hammar. I have also been very privileged to work with the Zimbabwean photographer, Linette Frewin, an old friend, whose photographs of HIV-positive Zimbabwean children add immeasurably to the final book. Yogesh Nathoo, meri jaan , has endured, more than anyone else, my long preoccupation with the work. None of it would have been possible without his love, generosity and support.
1
Introduction Growing up with HIV in urban, eastern Zimbabwe

Why, and how, do HIV-positive children sometimes survive in the midst of the multiple deprivations and extreme social suffering associated with living in contemporary Zimbabwe? What does such survival look like? Zimbabwe stands at the epicentre of a regional, indeed global, HIV pandemic. Infection rates are variously estimated at over 14% and the weekly mortality rate is said to approach 4,000 (more on the problems of statistics later). Child survival from HIV is rare. Most HIV-positive children will die before the age of five, and this remains the case even after the advent of antiretroviral drugs. To explore the questions in an ethnographic mode I established regular contact with a group of children in the eastern Zimbabwean border town of Mutare, all of whom were HIV-positive. Details of the children, their circumstances and the ways through which I came to know them are described in full in the following chapter. In the constant presence of ambivalence towards the multiple adversities of life, these children embody a fierce attachment to a daily life that is staked as free from the dilemmas inherited at birth and confronted each day. And yet a strong attachment may have its limits.
The indicators of the contemporary Zimbabwean crisis are widely known: inter alia, unemployment estimated around 90%, hyperinflation approaching 14,000% (prior to dollarization in early 2009), life expectancy declined to the mid-30s (from the mid-70s two decades ago), widespread state-sponsored violence and the denial of fundamental democratic rights, hunger and food insecurity, and decaying state institutions (Raftopoulos and Mlambo 2009, Hammar, Raftopoulos and Jensen 2003, Raftopoulos and Savage 2004, Harold-Barry 2004, Alexander 2006, Hammar, McGregor and Landau 2010, Jones 2010, Musoni 2010, Worby 2010). 1
The children I worked with lived under the shadow of untimely death, unexpectedly and indeterminately deferred. Physically small for their ages, they often bore the outward signs of affliction and illness, and constantly stood exposed to the unstable, potentially devastating possibilities of social stigma and rejection. Their survival, however, indicates that for some, care has been found, and is perhaps more available than we might have thought. Recently initiated into a (chaotic) national rollout of antiretroviral treatment programmes, these children are strikingly ambivalent about such treatments, favouring the possibilities of supernatural healing, often through charismatic Pentecostal churches (Maxwell 2006, Robbins 2004).
The study observed, amongst much else, grief, ambivalence, shame, resistance, and persistence in the face of death. The emotions had social expressions and intimate textures and were instantiated in the daily lives of children. The children lived with self-imposed secrecy and selective confession, strategic engagements with kin and their peers, and through their performances, effacements and self-representations in public spaces and activities. My previous training as a psychotherapist, and established relationships of trust, allowed me to approach the difficult task of working with chronically ill children with an ethical sensitivity, a careful artisanship, and a complementary theoretical and methodological base, that brought to bear the two disciplines of anthropology and psychology on the subject at hand. 2
My psychotherapeutic work formed a foundation, and a parallel endeavour, that allowed me to move outwards from a therapeutic setting to develop an ethnographic portrait of children growing up in a small African urban centre under conditions of extreme adversity. The children s lives are lived within the imbrications of poverty, multiple bereavements, displacements, and disruptions in schooling, and the care associated with normative notions of kinship having been complicated by living with a chronic, life-threatening illness. Resources, whether practical or emotional, were few given the ongoing depletion and decline of the Zimbabwean state. I deliberately chose a small urban centre as the site of the study, because we know that the population of sub-Saharan Africa is both young and rapidly urbanizing. 3 The ethnographic material permits me to look back, from the standpoint of the children and their carers, at the in