DURBAN--Challenging the world
to accept that "reproductive health is indeed
a human rights issue," Dr. Manto Tshabalala
Msimang, South Africa's Minister of Health, chaired
a panel Thursday that was comprised of a massage
parlor sex worker, a wheelchair-bound woman,
a refugee, and a teenager afflicted with HIV.
Msimang
appeared embarrassed that the entire panel lives
in South Africa as she repeatedly stated that healthcare
issues are "a global problem; not just a South
African problem."
Though each of the panelists gave testimony about
the need for a more compassionate approach to dealing
with reproductive and sexual health issues, it
was Pretty Ndlovu who brought many in the audience
to tears.
Choking back sobs and speaking with a quivering
voice, the commercial sex worker's speech was barely
discernable as she gave a brief account of her
life in prostitution.
Orphaned when her
father died in 1992, Ndlovu's family followed
the African custom of assigning
responsibility for raising children to the deceased's
oldest brother. Her uncle, who she referred to
as her "stepfather" and who is currently
a Durban police officer, hoarded her father's fortune,
she claimed, and offered to pay only 3,000 Rand
(less than US$150) for her substandard schooling.
"I see him from time to time," she said
with a sneer. "But I pass him just like I
would a stranger. He sexually abused me. Can you
imagine?"
Determined to care
for herself and her younger siblings by "doing the best for them without
depending on a man," Ndlovu began working
in a local Durban massage parlor in 1997. Obviously
disgusted with her customers' blatant disregard
for their own--let alone her--well being, she seethed
when she mentioned how her patrons try to persuade
her not to use a condom by offering to pay her
more money.
"If he's got brains," she said, "why
is he coming and asking to sleep with me without
a condom?"
Quietly wiping their own tears, the assembled
crowed cheered enthusiastically as Ndlovu regained
her composure, though she was still gently dabbing
her eyes ten minutes later.
Equally compelling though infinitely less emotional
was Beatrice Necobo, a South African native and
Commissioner of Gender Equality. Wheelchair bound
with a vacant stare that focused on no one in particular,
Necobo addressed the crowd about the reproductive
healthcare issues of the world's disabled populations.
Stating that people with disabilities are often
viewed as asexual, Necobo testified about how healthcare
workers speak with and recommend services without
regard to handicapped person's feelings and emotional
well being.
Necobo described
how doctors and nurses often ask disabled people
why they would want contraception,
when no one would find them attractive anyway.
She also claimed that radical hysterectomies --
rather than other alternatives -- are recommended
to "make rape acceptable" since the victim
would never get pregnant. When a woman with a handicap
does become pregnant she claimed that their babies
are virtually always delivered by caesarean section
when the mothers can usually give birth naturally "with
just a little assistance."
Like Necobo, who
spoke about the need for medical information
to be printed in Braille, Jean Pierre
Kalala, a refugee from the Democratic Republic
of Congo, spoke about the value of having medical
information written in the languages that refugees
understand "not just English and Zulu."
To illustrate his point, he told the tale of a
nurse from his home country who was gang raped
by six men as a weapon of war. The woman he claimed
moved to South Africa thinking her life would be
safer here. Instead she found that without English
fluency she was unable to express herself in a
medical environment.
Frustrated with the plight of refugees and other
victims of war, Kalala said that soldiers routinely
punish women and girls by gang raping them and
then deny access to medical care by destroying
clinics and stealing all the medication. As a result,
by the time the refugees find a safe place to live,
they often think they have no right to medical
services.
"It's very, very bad," Kalala
said, shaking his head with desperate disgust.
Stunned, disturbed and eager to share their own
stories, the audience had to be asked to leave
the Coast of Dreams room at the scheduled end of
the session.
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