Migration: A disabled woman’s story

29 Oct, 2017 - 00:10 0 Views

The Sunday Mail

Dr Christine Peta
This article will focus on the story of Kasa, which contains themes that emerged from interviews with a large number of disabled women.

Kasa is a 62-year-old woman who was born and raised in Zimbabwe.

She got married at the age of 18 to her then 30-year-old husband soon after she had finished high school. Her husband was employed as a semi-skilled technician by a telecommunications company in the city hence he continued to stay in his one-roomed lodging in Harare (urban area) and Kasa started to live with her husband’s parents in their rural village.

Her husband would visit the family on public holidays or when he was on vacation.

Within the first three years of their marriage, Kasa gave birth to a daughter and a son. She lived with her children and her in-laws in the village whilst her husband worked in the city.

Fifteen years and two teenage children into the marriage and at the age of 33, Kasa acquired multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a disabling disease of the central nervous system that disrupts the flow of information within the brain, and between the brain and the body.

The immune system attacks the protective sheath (myelin) that covers nerve fibres, the nerves themselves may deteriorate or they may become damaged. Such damage results in a “short-circuiting” of the nerve impulses that travel between the brain and other parts of the body, thereby making it difficult for a person to function, a person with multiple sclerosis may have partial or complete paralysis.

When Kasa acquired multiple sclerosis at the age of 33, both she and her in-laws did not know she had multiple sclerosis.

As such, Kasa’s in-laws aligned the symptoms of multiple sclerosis to evil spirits and witchcraft and at that time Kasa agreed with them.

Together, they consulted a number of traditional healers within the vicinity of the village, hoping to find a cure for whatever had befallen her, but Kasa’s health continued to deteriorate.

Her in-laws decided to send her to the city, where she would for the first time begin to live with her husband whom she had not lived with on a continuous basis during the 18 years they had been married.

“They said I must go to town to live with my husband and hide there and I should not come back to the village until I am totally healed, because people would think they have evil spirits.”

By hiding away disabled people, some parents, guardians or relatives are just being downright cruel to the person with disability, or they are just bent on protecting themselves from stigma, particularly in an African context where disability is often associated with evil spirits, taboos and witchcraft.

However, when Kasa got to the city, she realised she could not cope with the demands of her marriage as she was not used to living with her husband, more so now that she had multiple sclerosis.

As days went by, Kasa’s legs and arms continued to lose strength to the extent that she could hardly walk or use her hands to do the household chores that she had all along been able to do. Her husband – who was also learning to live with a wife for the first time – did not know what to do.

“When I got multiple sclerosis and went to live with my husband, he wanted to be intimate with me and I could not do it, I was feeling like there was electricity in my body because of the pain.

“This husband was also now like a burden to me, and living with him every day was kind of not working out well for me, I was not used to living with my husband daily, so I started thinking of my children and in-laws and thought perhaps it was a better life.”

Three years after moving to the city and when Kasa was 36-years-old, her marriage ended in divorce and her husband remarried.

During colonial times, the urban lifestyles of many people in African societies were rife with insecurity, hence most households would maintain both a rural home and an urban one with the wife “managing” the affairs of the rural home whilst the husband would be working in the urban area, visiting the rural home to see his wife and children and to bring provisions during holidays (Anderson, 2001).

Colonial governments developed complex legal systems which favoured the employment of unmarried male migrant workers. Such laws would limit the period of time that a person would stay in the urban area to the duration of his employment contract.

The same author states that it was compulsory for all employed urban Africans to be registered and those who were not registered would be repatriated by the government to the rural areas, thereby creating insecurities in urban lifestyles.

Bearing in mind such insecurities, African urban employees would be forced to sustain their rural homes where women and children would remain, to work the land (Anderson, 2001) and to breed any domestic animals that the family would acquire using the husband’s income from the urban area.

The above practices perpetuated into the post-colonial era, with urban areas being regarded as insecure work places and rural homes being the secure primary home; hence no matter how rosy life would turn out to be in the urban areas, people would maintain links with their rural homes where they expected to go back in the event that something goes wrong in the city or if not, for purposes of retirement.

After the divorce, Kasa went to live with her sister, who started to help her seek medical care.

“One doctor told my sister to leave the room, then he asked me to get off my wheelchair and get on the bed so that he could examine me, when I failed to get on the bed because of pain, he started to shout at me. He said to me ‘why are you so weak? Why did you not get tested for HIV? this must be Aids’.

“I told the doctor that I did not think I have HIV and when I tried to tell him my history, he said ‘don’t tell me you don’t have Aids because you are not a doctor’. I went for an HIV test, the results came out negative and the doctor was angry. He said to me, ‘now that you don’t have Aids I can’t help you, just go and find another doctor or just go back to the village where you came from’. What a horrible attitude, I thought.”

Negative attitudes of healthcare staff may either be inborn, or they may arise when training starts and people discover that healthcare is probably not what they thought it was.

This article indicates that as women are pushed by disability from rural areas and are drawn to urban areas by the promises of accessing better and “modern” healthcare, gaining access to appropriate healthcare may not be automatic.

There is evidence that the healthcare terrain in the urban areas may be embedded with a number of challenges, which create barriers for disabled female rural-urban migrants.

In addition, the partial migration of families which results in family members not living together, may lead to the breakdown of marriages, particularly when disability strikes, and husbands and wives who have never lived together are forced to live together by disability.

There is need for further rural-urban migration studies which explore the experiences of persons with disability within a context of such migration in African countries.

 

Dr Christine Peta is a public healthcare practitioner who, among other qualifications, holds a PhD in Disability Studies. Be part of the international debate on how best to nurture a society which is more accessible, supportive and inclusive of disabled people. Partner with Disability Centre for Africa at [email protected]

 

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