Positive values

One important area where I have seen improvement is where men show greater consideration for women. Everything to do with caring for babies used to be strictly women’s work. The new health policies introduced after Independence emphasised, among other things, the special care that both infants and their mothers need if children are to grow up strong and healthy. We all learned to take more care of them. Caring for the young became an investment in the future, which gave us all hope that the future would be better than the past.

Some of those hopes have faded now, but we can’t blame the health policies for that. They were a noble effort to improve the lives of all our people and reminded us that we all share the duty of caring for the weaker and more vulnerable members of society. I was surprised the first time I saw a man carrying a baby on his back; the baby had to be taken to the clinic and his wife was very tired. That was a very pleasant surprise. Now it is not unusual to see a young man walking in a high-density suburb with a tiny little girl sitting on his shoulder and the two of them are chattering away in their own private baby talk. That shines a little light in our dark world.

And traditionalist men shouldn’t fear that if you give an inch, women will take a mile. More than twenty years ago, I was trying to calculate poverty datum lines and what help each person might need in our rural area to live above the poverty line. Lines I said, because every individual’s needs are different, but we can calculate averages by age and gender. Discussing this with women who were to help in the survey, everyone agreed that a pregnant woman needs more and better food than any other member of the family, because she is eating for two (and sometimes three or four). They agreed that, thanks to the teaching by village health workers and others, everyone accepted this. The next biggest need was for a boy of about 17, who is making his last spurt of growth. Everyone agreed that he’s always been able to look after himself. I was surprised at the women’s response to the next example, a girl in her final burst of growth, probably aged about 14. The women all said; “She has no problem in getting the food she needs; she’s in the kitchen”. A realistic answer, factual and without exaggeration, because everyone took each other seriously. All these answers showed that people did try to understand other people’s needs.

In years of development work among rural people, I met many dedicated village health workers, who were always available to advise people on issues of hygiene and health, especially the health of children. Our local village health worker, like many of her colleagues, was ready to learn new things and knew her job was to serve the people. Traditional herbalists refuse to ask for a fee, because they believe their knowledge is a gift they were given for the benefit of their community. Village health workers continued that tradition. A real healer doesn’t let people die just because s/he isn’t getting as high a salary or as big a car as s/he wants. Those hands-on healers could teach our modern, supposedly more highly qualified, doctors some important lessons.

Without the lessons we all learned from the health programmes of the 1980s, would our local primary school today be insisting that the boys take their turn to sweep the school yard? And without men who don’t mind doing jobs that used to be reserved in a simpler society for women, letting women do jobs that used to be reserved for men would only be doubling their work load.