Juno and Jeneffer

Contrasting stories: the hollywood version was in a DVD we saw this
week, the story of teenage pregnancy, a cute saucy articulate 16 year
old who chooses to carry her surprise pregnancy to term and give the
baby up for adoption. Juno is a great character, and while the movie
has some raunchy moments it generally chooses life by acknowledging
the incredible value of an unborn baby, and sympathetically portraying
the longing of a childless woman who waits to adopt, and the paradox
of being a normal teenager who is required to also be a responsible
adult. The movie asks the question: can two people really love each
other for life? And answers with hope, in spite of all evidence to
the contrary. And the baby ends up well cared for and loved while the
teenagers are figuring all this out.

Now the Bundibugyo version. Jeneffer also showed up this week, 15,
quiet, on the margins, dutifully bringing her scrawny infant for
care. We weighed him in at 1.45 kg, not even three pounds, though
he's more than a month old. She agreed to stay admitted with him, but
on the second or third day it dawned on my that she was sleeping on a
bare hospital mattress with no sheets, and had none of the usual
clutter about her: no pans, no food, no relatives, no extra clothes.
The nursing staff got her story for me: she had been a primary school
student, living with an aunt after her parents divorced, and agreed to
sex with a secondary school boy who promised to marry her. When her
aunt saw she was pregnant she angrily ejected her to the care of the
boyfriends' parents, who were not so thrilled. He went to school
every day and she dropped out. Eventually she ran away to her
mother's home (about 10 km), but her mother had remarried and the step-
father was not interested in taking in the pregnant teenage daughter
of another man. So they told her to leave, and she went to her
father's house. Here the reception was not hostile, but her father
lives across the border in Congo and is busy with his new wife and
family. So among these four homes (aunt, boyfriend, mother, and
father) there is not one single adult who seems to have noticed that
this is a girl with a starving baby and no help, that she came for a
check-up and never returned. Meanwhile she sits on her bed on the
Paediatric ward, half-heartedly breast-feeding her pitiful skeletal
little boy and spooning milk formula into his mouth when the other
mothers take pity and allow her to use their pans to boil water. I
help her with some food and blankets, one of the nurses sometimes
brings her a meal. I don't think she expects the baby to live, and
I'm not sure I do either.

The contrast must carry some clue . . . in the America version the
girl is smart, goes to school, gets medical care, has friends and
family who support her. She makes some bad choices, and some good
ones, and life goes on. Her pain is another's blessing, which carries
seeds of redemption. In the Bundibugyo version, the girl's bad
choices define her and seem to defy her any chance of escape. The
proverbial African family which should provide a safety net for her
landing has instead been found to have holes, and she has fallen
through, dropped by her relatives, by the education system, even by
the medical system. No one is looking very blessed at the moment,
least of all her child. Juno is aggressive and active in pursuing
what she thinks is right, even at high cost. Jeneffer is passive and
fatalistic in waiting for help that trickles her way. I have often
read that poverty is the lack of choice, and this seems to hold in
this story. How can we give Jeneffer choice, which is probably more
important than giving her milk for her baby? And is it fair to try to
get her to take hold of a life that is so massively stacked against
her? Does she have real options, or only illusions of them? When I'm
dealing with a mother the age of my oldest child, it is a wake-up call
that something is very very wrong. Both girls would have done better
to wait for sex until the commitment of marriage in the context of
maturity. But they didn't, and I'm interested in the contrast in what
happens then. I suspect the girls' fathers are key in the contrast,
and the disconnect between fathers and daughters in this culture is
one I have not thought enough about.