Tigist

On our way to the hospital she had asked if the sky was touching the land and that it looked like it was going to fall…I think that for this place maybe she was right, I think here it would.

She is Tigist. She is 17 years old. She has a soft face, one of the sweetest I've met. Hers is the kind of face that makes you want to go to long lengths, jump a mile, make it rain…whatever you can do to get a smile. At the safe abortion clinic in Zeway she was the first girl to volunteer to tell her story.

She wore an orange skirt with flowers sewn in and the traditional white veil on her head for the heat. While she spoke she watched her feet move like mine do when I'm nervous. She has no family, she told us. She had gone to work as a maid and ran a man's house just by herself. He asked to marry her and when she said no, he raped her. She said all this in a simple, factual way. She had already come to the free clinic in Zeway for 3 days and had been turned away, so you can imagine it was…even harder when they told her she was too far along to have the abortion done at the clinic, because they don’t have the right materials. They told her she would have to go to a hospital, and she started to cry because she didn't have the money. She also hadn’t gone to the police about the man who raped her, and so they say they would have no way of knowing if she was in one of the "legal categories" for getting an abortion, one of the categories is rape. ((I’m sorry if I’m talking kind of like a robot but its hard to pin words on all this)

She has a friend she grew up with, they were neighbors in the same village. Her friend, Belaynesh was in the same situation, also too far along to have the abortion at the free clinic.

We shared a life-span of a few days with these girls. It’s crazy to me how well you can communicate when you don’t share a spoken language with somebody. We had a translator, Asnagatch, who helped us for more wordy things…which is you know, mostly everything that can’t be communicated in hand gestures, hello, goodbye, thank you, I love you...Something I realized though, is that body language and wanting closeness are more than exact words. I think the true language is laughter and stomach growl, that’s the real poem; everything in between can be a lesson in grammar. It was arranged for us to go with them to a hospital where a doctor who knows IPAS (the organization that does research and gives training on safe abortion procedures) agreed to perform the surgeries. (theres my inner robot again) They were scared because they had never been to a hospital before, or in a car. They are so brave… I don’t have a true enough word for it, but they’re safe now and it’s a big breath to be able to say that. After the surgery between lying down Tigist sat up fast, "so no more baby??" and then started crying, they kept saying "we are so happy now, we are so happy.."

A day before the surgery they brought us to their home. They live together in a compound in Zeway. It struck me as funny (again with laughing like hydrogen peroxide for the pain-wound) how welcoming everyone in the compound was to us. They had never seen us in their lives and brought out chairs for us and all of us focused on laughing at the toddlers, probably because it was the most obvious thing we could share. Imagine some Ethiopian women with cameras walking into some random apartment in NYC or into white picket fence-land in middle America, I really don’t think people would be pulling out chairs and letting them play with their kids.

I hear that these girls’ story is common here. One thing Belaynesh said was, "I never regret for anything I am…God has created it." So that sentence kind of shattered every organism in my chest……From what I’ve seen, the people here have been open-open-open and giving, so my brain hurts from trying to understand why it’s so hard to be a woman in this place.