Birth Control

Birth control was not something I thought I would need when I made the decision to come to Africa. Boy, was I wrong. Birth control is something my community and I need quite desperately. Otherwise, we might have a bunch of little ones running around our house in a number of months. However, contrary to some of the local gossip, the birth control is not for us volunteers; it's for our dogs.

The Therese Volunteer Community has two very beautiful and friendly female dogs named Special (named after the popular Carlsburg beer here) and Teteza (means "Protection" in Chichewa). Though Teteza is still in her pre-teen years, we are expecting that quite soon, she'll be ready to start bearing offspring, and we do not want that to happen. Special, on the other hand, is in the prime of her life, and the guys in the neighborhood know it. About two months ago, Special was in heat, and we had every male dog in the Karonga area coming to see if Special wanted to "play." Right away we saw the intentions of these boys, so like any caring parent, we locked our little girl in the house and wouldn't let her go out at night. We also heard that we could go to the public hospital and pick up some expired birth control injections, which would still work on a dog. Several members of our community went to the hospital to inquire about the birth control, but none were successful. Luckily, keeping Special inside and throwing rocks at every male dog that even looked at our house kept her from getting pregnant. Unfortunately, from what I've been told, dogs go into heat about every 21 days until they become pregnant. So about three weeks ago, the boys started coming back around. Special hated being inside, and she would usually end up going to the bathroom in one of our rooms. Most often, it was the room where we store our food. She has a particular liking for peeing on our potatoes. We NEEDED to get some birth control for her.

We all made a commitment to go to the hospital and see if we could convince them to provide us with the injection. We have several friends who are nurses here who had already expressed willingness to inject Special once we got the injection.

About two weeks ago, Molly and I were heading into town to pick up some snacks for a party with the MIRACLE staff. On the way into town, the brothers had to stop at the hospital to check up on one of the students. As the brothers got out, I looked over to Molly and said, "Should we try to get the birth control." She looked back at me with a silly, somewhat hesitant smile. We both knew we needed to get it, and so we decided to go for it.

We walked into the hospital, giggling about what were were about to do, and found our way to the pharmacy. We knocked on the door, and after a few minutes, a receptionist of sorts came to the door. Molly explained that she was looking for some birth control and was wondering if she could get it there. The receptionist said she would have to get a pharmacist, so she went back to another room. A few minutes later a man came out to see what we needed. Molly explained again what she was looking for, this time using depoprovera, the name of the birth control injection. The pharmacist asked, "What do you need it for?" Both of us looked at each other confused, and Molly responded, "Birth control." The pharmacist knew that, so he tried again by asking, "Is it for service." Now slightly more confused, Molly and I looked at each other not knowing how to respond. "What do you mean," we asked. The he said, "Is it for service or personal use?" Aha! We still didn't know what service meant, but personal use sounded like it was what we wanted so we went with that. (One of the volunteers before had explained that we wanted to use it on our dog, and they said that wasn't allowed, so we were avoiding that explanation.)

The pharmacist said that we would have to see someone else about that, so he told us to follow him. He brought us back outside the hospital and led us toward the maternity ward. He pointed to a woman in blue who was standing in front of a long line of women with their babies, and she was weighing each of the babies. Neither of us wanted to interrupt this woman's work just so we could get birth control for our dog, but we decided just to ask her where we should go, and see what happens from there.

The nurse led us inside the small building she was working outside of. When we walked in, we found ourselves in a narrow hallway crowded with women standing and sitting in all open spaces, waiting for someone to respond to whatever their particular needs were. The nurse had us follow her to a door marked "Family Planning," and knocked on the door. The door opened, and the nurse instructed Molly to go in. Not wanting to leave Molly alone in some little room in a public hospital in Malawi, I followed Molly inside. We found three nurses in the little room. They greeted us and then asked us how they could help us. Molly explained what she was looking for once again, and the nurses looked at us both with questioning eyes. One of the first questions the main nurse asked while pointing to me was, "Is this your husband?" Molly looked at me, smiled and giggled a little bit, and responded "Yeah!" Her tone suggested more of a, "Sure, he can be my husband if that's what you're looking for." Malawi is a deeply Christian country and to say that the two of us weren't married would be a good way not to get birth control. The two of us shouldn't be having sex if we weren't married. This is very true, but we couldn't tell them that the birth control was for our dog. I remained mostly silent for all of this.

The nurses laughed and smiled a bit, one of them making some kind of joke in Chitumbuka from what I could pick up from nonverbals. Then, the main nurse asked Molly a number of questions:
Nurse: "Do you have a baby now?"
Molly: "No"
Nurse: "Do you want a baby now?"
Molly: "No"
Nurse: "When do you think you would like a baby?"
Molly: "...Uuhhhh...I don't know...mmm...5 years?"
Nurse: "Why don't you want a baby now?"
Molly: "We're not ready yet."
Nurse: "So you want to practice family planning"
Molly: "Yes."
[The nurse pauses, smiles, and looks up at me.]
Me: [In a very confident and self confirming voice] "Family planning is important."

Molly just about burst into laughter at my ridiculous comment, but she did a good job of containing it. I giggled a bit after I realized how silly that response was, and I'm laughing now as I write about it. The nurse looked at me as if I was brainless.

The nurse saw that we were looking for birth control, that we didn't want to have a baby, and that we wanted to practice family planning. Both Molly and I agreed afterward that the nurse knew we weren't married, and we figured they saw that we were just excited to try to get birth control, which means they probably thought we were doing you-know-what.

Finally, the nurse agrees to get us the birth control. Success! Or so we thought. The nurses exit the room, leaving Molly and I to laugh about what had just transpired, what we got ourselves in the middle of, and how to go about the rest of the situation. We even came up with alias names so that it would be harder for anyone to identify us. We decided on Desmond and Molly Jones, inspired by the characters in Obladi Oblada by the Beatles.

Soon after, the door opened again, and the main nurse returned with a box of the birth control injection. After setting the box down, the nurse immediately went for the windows and began closing them, probably to provide some privacy. Molly and I glanced at each other with frightened looks, knowing what that meant. Quickly, we both spoke up, "Uhh! We...have a question!"

We explained to the nurse that we have a friend who is a nurse and we were hoping that we would be able to take the injection home so that our friend could give the injection. We told her that Molly was a little nervous about getting the injection and so she wanted the comfort of having a friend do the injection. The nurse was a little bit confused so we explained it again. Once she realized we were asking to simply take the injection with us, she told us that they only do the injection there and they can't allow someone to just take it. Disappointed, we decided we had pursued this as far as it goes. We told the nurse that we weren't comfortable enough and that we would come again later. We then both ran out of the office, out of the maternity ward, and back towards the car, laughing, giggling, and smiling about what we had just done. We're curious still about what kind of news about this event will spread. As we were walking away from the maternity ward, Molly heard someone call her name. She works with many women in the villages through the Women's Empowerment Program, so it's a good chance that one of those woman were in line and saw the two of us coming out of the Family Planning office. Hopefully, they didn't infer what we were doing there, but if they did, and if word gets back around to our places of work, we'll probably have some explaining to do. The positive thing is that all of our co-workers know that we don't want anymore litters of puppies, and they know the lengths to which we have gone to try to prevent Special's pregnancy. As ridiculous as it is, it won't sounds too uncharacteristic for us to explain to them that we were trying to getting birth control for our dog.

:) Where else could I get into something like this? :)