Sunshine

When I was 23, I went to Tanzania to help set up an electronic database to track babies with HIV.  I wrote about the clinics (http://chelseatosea.blogspot.com/2013/07/we-woke-up-early-and-met-with-member-of.html)  and how I held a baby with HIV and how ““[The nurse] didn’t want to tell mothers they were HIV positive if she didn’t have the medicine to treat them.”  Her words circled me for years.  I didn’t think I could work with HIV again.

But now I’m back in Africa, back in the HIV clinics, this time in Swaziland: a country with the greatest HIV prevalence in the world (26%).

I was led into the clinic and greeted by the Nurse, Sunshine.  Sunshine was in her late forties and had long braided hair dyed red at the tips that she kept in a swinging ponytail.  She was an HIV prevention nurse who has been working with adolescent girls for the past 15 years.

“Hello momma, come sit down.” Sunshine had a voice as colorful as her namesake.

I sat down on a chair in the minimal but clean and brightly lit clinic. 

“Hi Sunshine it’s so great to meet you!  Can you please take me through what a normal HIV Prevention session looks like?”

“Of course momma.  You see, I tell my queens that their vagina is their playground.  But they have to keep it protected.”

She opens up her wooden drawer and pulls out a massive black dildo and slaps it on the desk.  It wobbles around a bit before standing aggressively erect. 

“I tell my queens, you can have fun with a brother,” she starts waving around the dildo “but tell him he cannot enter your Southern Hemisphere without a condom.”

We moved on to female contraceptives.

“I tell my queens, if your man tells you that your IUD is poking his thing, you come straight back in and I’ll cut your strings so you can get right back to it.”

I can see the line of young girls outside many with babies of their own.  The same kind of line I saw in Tanzania years ago.  But I’m older now.  It’s the same heavy, dark field, but it’s the lightness that I can now see and take home with me.  The Sunshine.

On my way out Sunshine pulled me to her side.

“I hear the US has condoms that light up in the dark?  Could you bring us back some of those? I think we could have fun with them.”

I promised her I would.

A Dating Life of First Chapters

Speed dating through NYC has left me winded.  Tinder, Ok Cupid, Coffee Meets Bagel, Cupid Drinks a Coffee.  I have been on 19 dates in 2 months.  It’s not the dates that are leaving me exhausted but the ease at which each person enters and then abruptly leaves my life.  It’s the dichotomy between the almost relentless connections we maintain on social media and the jarring transience of our dating life.

I dated my last boyfriend for only 4 months but Facebook still shows me his picture every day.  Linked in tells me he got that new job he wanted and Instagram tells me it wasn’t in my head, he really did like her, love her?

And while it’s totally messed up that we can’t move on, that I know he ate a banana for breakfast, it’s also sort of comforting.  There remains a connection that justifies the days and dreams and anxieties I shared with him.  It’s not just gone.

If Facebook anchors me to past loves, online dating has me throwing lines out again and again just to leave me baitless and hungry.

I am so sorry you still love your ex-girlfriend but please do not cry on our date.  It’s embarrassing.  And I know you’re excited but please don’t reach over and honk my boob 30 minutes into our first beer.  Because that’s sexual assault and the guy before you tried it already.

And although it’s fun to always have a story about a crazy to share over brunch, I would give up the laughs to share a cup of coffee with someone who has lasted through the season.

And so I reach out and lean in and learn about your sister’s new baby and how you also just want a connection, something to sustain past this drink, the now.  And then it ends.  Facebook told me that the guy I dated in college for 2 months rode a horse in his wedding but I’ll never see you again. After two more dates I won’t remember if you were you from Kentucky or Tennessee?

We love to live for love and love for life.  So how do I rectify an online life where I’m almost forced to attach with a dating life of first chapters?

A few weeks ago I met up with Matt, a man I had been texting with for days.   Both curly haired Italians, we hotly contested how my Brooklyn sawce would beat his Boston sahce. When we met, we didn’t stop talking until I hit him in the face with my talking hands.  But neither of us felt the romance. 

Would he be just another Matt OkCupid in my phone to be erased in a month?

Yesterday, I went on a date with someone who didn’t believe in Gay people.  Didn’t believe they existed.   I immediately called Matt.  “That’s nothing,” he said.  “I went on a date with a girl who asked me to spank instead of kiss her at the end of the night.”  I smiled because 1) good for her and 2) because I knew I would see Matt again when he posted on Facebook tomorrow. 

First Field Trip in Ethiopia

I woke up at 6 am and met my coworker downstairs for breakfast.  We were going to a rural town in West Ethiopia called Assosa.  I would be visiting the clinics in my project to see, for the first time, how they were running the programs I only read and wrote about.  It was a 1 ½ hour plane ride and I knew I was getting close when the captain said, “we will be landing after some time and some time and the weather in Assosa is fine.”

Assosa is bright, primary colors. Red dirt and green bushes and women with yellow and blue head scarves.  We drove for hours in a bumpy land cruiser to get from clinic to clinic.  Every time my jaded eyes glazed over “this looks like Uganda” something would jar me back to Ethiopia.

Mud hut. Mud hut. Mud hut. MAN RIDING DONKEY. Mud hut. Mud hut. Mud hut. CAMEL.

The differences are subtle but I make myself savor them because I don’t want to be so world-weary at 26 that my eyes barely flicker.

At the clinics we asked the health care workers and a focus group of mothers how they felt about the calendar we developed to help them remember their Antenatal Care and immunization visit dates.  The interviews had to be translated from the local language to Amharic to English.  They would talk for an hour and by the time it would get to me the translator would tell me “they love it.”  During all this translation I had time to squeeze a lot of baby cheeks.  It was damn cool to hear what they think about a tool that was so abstract to me before.  That I had helped convince donors about and yet had never seen actually being used.  Many of the women had deep tribal scars on their face that made them look like they were perpetually crying.

We visited women at their homes and they showed us how they used the calendar to remind them of important dates.  The mud walls and straw roofs make their homes very cool.  There is usually a tarp separating the kitchen area (coal fire, a few bowls and pots), and the main part which has 1 or two big beds for the family to sleep on.  They sometimes hang dried corn from the ceilings and paint pictures on the walls.  The women told us how even their kids and husbands read the calendar and help them remember important dates.

Back at the office, I ran to the squat toilet because I had been holding it in all day.  Just as I was congratulating myself for aiming properly, I realized I didn’t have toilet paper.  I had to inconspicuously waddle around the office until I found some.

The next day we traveled to a remote hospital to see the new infant warmer they had installed.  I have learned to guard myself when I go into clinics. There are always things I don’t want to see.  And if I don’t see them, then I don’t have to look away.  http://chelseatosea.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-moment.html 

In the delivery room I saw the newborn warmer.  My colleagues oooed and ahhed at the wonderful advancement.  The room looked like a scene out of Jacob’s Ladder.  Beds were falling apart and the delivery bed looked like a medieval torture device.  I’ve seen maternity wards in these countries hundreds of times. But my friends in the US are starting to have babies. Recently on Facebook, a friend took us through her experience giving birth to a premature baby.  Every day she posted pictures of the baby hooked up to all sorts of machines, fighting for life. And she looked so small.  Here, a baby must look microscopic.  I can’t imagine how hard it’s going to be to come back here once I have children of my own.  The guilt just might do me in.  We congratulated the clinic staff on their new machine and got back in the car.

I ended my field trip with honey wine, communal eating and a scary butcher that posed for a photo.

Hello from Ethiopia

I landed in Addis at 1pm, plenty of time to get to the hotel, shower, and hit the town so that I could write an adventurous blog post.  Instead, I saw the bed and my eyes watered up like I was seeing an old friend.  So instead of exploring, I drank cup after cup of silky Ethiopian coffee and played Adele's new song on repeat.

Hello from the other siiiiiiiide.

Cupid Drinks a Coffee

Immediately off the plane from Uganda, I noticed the men.  And the big grocery stores.  And oh my god the men in the grocery stores.

I had spent a year and a half without a second date (you can read about my Uganda dating experiences here:  http://chelseatosea.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-science-of-dating-in-kampala.html ) and was definitely going a little cray cray.  I immediately revved up the old dating sites: Tinder, Ok Cupid, Coffee Meets Bagel, Cupid Drinks a Coffee, and set up my profile.  Twenty something girl seeks a real live boy.  Must have teeth.

I met a real live boy and we started to date.  We ate pizza and took walks during the last NY summer days and I texted him when I traveled.  “Dude, I’m going to get such massive thighs from all of this pooping in the squat toilet at the office.  How was your day baby?” 

I was stuffing myself with affection because I remember what it was like to be malnourished.  Four months after we started dating, it ended.  I was sad so I called Val.

“Vallie, I think I wore my heart on my sleeve and it hemorrhaged all over us.”

“You got laid and cuddles for 4 months?  How dare you be upset when people are dying in Africa from lack of snuggles?”

And she’s right. I’m in the land of plenty, no need to mourn.  But now that I’m feeling less like I need to pack on the kisses for the long winter, I can breathe and actually explore New York.  Next up: New York Snuggery http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-york-snuggery-offers-cuddles-hour-article-1.1173154

(maybe not)

Sensory Deprivation Tank

I want to explore things in New York like I do in other countries.  I may not be able to go on a quickie safari but there are tons of crazy shit New Yorkers do that would make even a lion’s head turn.  Like, pay $100 to be locked in a pod that deprives you of your senses.

I heard about the sensory deprivation tanks from the book I’m reading, Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks.  The book shares examples of how people who lose their sight, hearing, or even who have an extended period of lack of stimulation in their landscapes (desert, solitary confinement), can start to hallucinate.  Charles Bonnet syndrome is found in people who can hallucinate whole scenes in front of them but do not have sight.  Musical Ear Syndrome is when there is loss of auditory function and yet the person can hear music or people talking.  People can even hallucinate feelings if they’ve lost their sense of touch.

In an experiment to test hallucinations, people were put in a sensory deprivation tank for a long period of time and many started to hallucinate.  So I signed me and my friend Hannah up for back to back hour sessions at a sensory tank in Gramercy.  Because New York and Adventure and Hallucinations and Africa Doesn’t Have This.

I got to the “spa” early.  Hannah had already started her tank time and I wanted to hear about her experience before I went in.  The spa was basically this old dude’s house with women and their long grey hair sitting in various corners participating in the spa services.  Such services included: Cem Tech- Communicates with the Body’s Cellular Structure Use Millimeter Wave Technology, Biomat- The Combination of Far Infrared Light, Negative Ions and Amethyst Quartz Crystals Opens the Channels for Intelligent Cellular DNA repair and Total Body Wellness.  There was a women behind a curtain sitting on a full body vibrator. It was awkward.

When Hannah came out she looked all zenny.  Thing is, she is zenny.  She’s a meditator who’s done silent retreats and stuff so she was able to completely zone out and lose herself in there.  I didn’t have such high expectations for myself. My goal was just to not get too bored and hopefully hallucinate a medieval carnival.

When it was time, I was led into a small bathroom, given earplugs, and told to shower before entering the tank.  The “tank” was an oldish bathtub with sliding doors painted black to block out all light.  The temperature was regulated at 93 degrees Fahrenheit to closely match body temperature.  The water was filled with pounds of Epsom salts to keep the body floating. 

I started out by trying to cheat the system by trying to not float.  It’s nearly impossible! You’re completely buoyant.  It is a strange sensation.  You can’t see or hear anything and you start to lose your sense of self.  As a dancer-atheist-scientist, I see myself as my body, not as something inside my body.  But this somewhat falling apart, lukewarm bathtub challenged that.  I couldn’t feel a body or a space and was completely my mind.  And so my mind drifted.  “What if I were a corpse floating in a vat of embalming fluid?” Was my main thought.  And when I got bored of that I thought about what I wanted to eat for dinner.  45 minutes passed relatively quickly and then I got bored of not hallucinating so started to play games.  What if I wiggled only my pinky.  Would that be enough to propel myself into the tub’s wall on the left.  YES! 

When my time was over, I showered and put on my clothes and stepped outside.  I felt like I was still floating and was very calm.  My mind completely serene from lack of senses.  And then I stepped down the stairs and into the subway and saw a man jacking off to the Bible.

I did not "come home"

Back in Uganda

We packed into 1 Land Cruiser, 10 adults, 1 baby, for a 9 hour trip to Kitgum, 1 long and bumpy dirt road, 0 air-conditioning.   Upon arriving, my hotel had no hot water and no electricity.  It’s a cup water, soap up, splash-water-on-self kind of shower and a no fan night.  I lay in my bed without a sheet, covered only by a blanket of buzzing mosquitoes.  A rooster wakes me at 5 am and there is no hot water to make coffee.  I get to work at 8:30 and wait for the training which doesn’t start until 2 hours after it is supposed to.  Remind me again why I left New York?

When I got off the plane in Uganda, I felt different.  It felt different.  I breathed in the thick air and didn’t feel at home.  I have only been in the US for a month, I’ve visited home for that long before, but I guess, a part of me has closed the door on Uganda.  I met up with friends and danced and drank but it was in an ecstatic way, the kind you reserve for vacations.  Not the kind of prudent, I better not really let go because that guy at the bar is kind of cute and I have to do my laundry tomorrow, kind of way.  (Just kidding I never did my own laundry in Kampala.) 

This is the first trip I’ve made after having moved back to New York.  My contract says I will travel 45% of my time to Uganda, and soon, Ethiopia and Liberia.  Part of me wants so much more.  I still want to work at a refugee camp doing research on outbreaks, or to do emergency research on epidemics.  But part of me wants so much less.  I missed my friend’s wedding and I started to date a really cute man.

I took a walk after work through the village.  The sun was setting and damn beautiful.  Nothing particularly profound occurred to me.  No eureka moment.  But in this moment I was happy.  So I guess we’ll see.