Monotony

I made it through the weekend -- miraculously -- and managed to sleep quite a bit thanks to the generosity of Schedule 3 prescription medicine. I had quite a few visitors, and each one provided respite from both physical and emotional pain (As an aside: there is never a good time for a broken heart, but one of the worst times must be when you are laid up with a cast and unable to move. Lacking all of the usual conveniences of distraction, one is driven to contemplate, more than necessary, the said heartbreak in excess. And come up with quite a beautiful litany on the parallels of simultaneous physical and emotional healing).

There was Patey with her excessive chatter and ability to beat me in Scrabble on her first try, Jan with kindness and gentleness, Ros with wit, humor (and pizza!), and Brendan with chocolate cake and shared dreams of living overseas. I am lucky indeed to have a diverse group of friends in my current country-of-residence. And lucky to have a faithful core back home call me around the clock (even if my sister can never really grasp the 9 hour time difference).

I am reading a few books under the current circumstances, one of which is titled Factory Girls, and explores the migrant factory community in modern China. I was inspired to read this book after a perplexing client at the clinic whose story continues to confound me. She is a forty-something Chinese woman who speaks no English and arrived over a month ago with her 14 year-old daughter for antenatal care. One of the nurses called me in to assess the situation, as the story relayed via the daughter seemed sketchy. I called my friend Patey (who is fluent in Taiwanese, Mandarin, French and English) and she offered to come over and translate as she wasn't doing anything at the moment. So Patey, the woman, her daughter and I crowded into my office to discuss her situation. The details were vague, but through translation we gathered that she, her husband and daughter had come out to South Africa under the promise of a job only to be deserted six months into the gig. Except her husband wasn't deserted; no, he left along with the boss, taking her passport and identity documents and leaving a three month pregnant woman and her daughter completely stranded. The situation looked bleak. And to make matters more difficult, the woman was intent on waiting for the husband to return, even though she hadn't heard from him in several months. The plot thickened when I learned that she was living with a Kenyan woman who "worked nearby". I ran the story by a few colleagues who thought it reeked of prostitution, but I am not sure ...

Then, a few days before her follow-up appointment at the clinic, the Chinese woman phoned Patey and begged her to come to her house to tell her the real story of what happened. Patey demurred, feeling uncomfortable by the vagueness of it all, and the woman persisted. She refused to meet Patey at the clinic, or at a neutral locale, insisting that Patey come to her house to discuss the situation. Patey resisted and the woman kept her follow-up appointment at the clinic. When I saw her the week before my accident, her daughter had learned a little more English and we were able to communicate via the daughter and her hand-held electronic translator. The situation has not changed much; the woman was 9 months pregnant by then and feared returning to China because of the one-child policy. She had heard nothing from her husband or the employer, and her options remained grim. I asked her to contact me after she had her baby and Patey and I would meet with her to make a plan, which will probably include contacting the Chinese embassy because without proper documentation, her and her daughter have no future in South Africa.

I did a bit of research on my own, and found that there is a huge undercover human smuggling ring operating in South Africa -- specifically with Chinese laborers. They are lured out under the promise of work and after arriving in country are abandoned, as the employer runs off with the money he made in the work transaction. And yet I wonder: why did the husband leave his pregnant wife? Knowing very little of Chinese policy, I cannot appropriately advise this woman on what to do, other than take the strengths-based approach and encourage her own intuition and insight. A disconcerting situation, all around.

Tonight I am off to a friend's house for dinner, following a desperate text message I sent around 10pm last night begging her to take me out of the house! All book/movie/online reading recommendations are much appreciated at this point, as are personal updates.