The Boob Tree

In Mozambique, there exists a type of tree that bears bulbous, inedible gray fruit resembling dusty pomegranates. At first sight, the tree appears almost as if it were desiccated by a giant wildfire that left on its gnarled branches fragile gray paper lanterns or delicate bird nests ready to disintegrate with a single touch.

In olden days, late-blooming young Mozambican girls would kneel beneath the tree and lament their lack of breasts, in the hopes that the tree would receive their tears and prayers and grant them boobs at last.

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I encountered the tree one day while accompanying Tsembeka activists on home visits in another bairro of Chicumbane, and I almost entirely missed the strange formation lodged between two vibrant lemon trees because I was so focused on not stepping in mud puddles. It had just rained for six days straight and the sandy roads were essentially mush under my feet. The telltale hoof prints and fresh cow patties everywhere testified to the cow herders’ morning trek to the grazing fields. My life is cheia (full) with “Ah, I’m in Africa” moments.

While asking a tree for boobs might seem strange to us foreigners (I thought at first that the activists were messing with me and making up some outlandish story to answer my question about what type of tree it was), I am reminded that there’s a lot on this continent that doesn’t mesh perfectly with my American ideas of what is “normal” and “right.”

For example, in rural areas of Mozambique, the sick are more likely to turn to curandeiros (local witch doctors) than go to the hospital. Sometimes the reasons are distance and convenience; hospitals can be located many kilometers away while the curandeiro may live just a few streets down. Sometimes it’s mistrust; the nature of diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and the range of technical terms and complicated practices used by health workers makes the subject of health a difficult one to understand. People would rather receive a simple cure (“Here, drink this tea”) than hear that they have to take X pills for Y amount of days or even (in the case of HIV/AIDS) for the rest of their lives.

My organization Tsembeka does two types of home visits: the basic one, in which they check in with HIV+ patients and their families, make sure the sick are adhering to treatment, give hospital referrals, etc. The second kind of home visit is called an “Active Search,” in which the hospital reports that the HIV+ patient has stopped showing up to appointments and stopped picking up their meds, which indicates that they have abandoned their treatment, and the activists go to this person’s house to look for them and see what’s going on. This is actually very common, because people will stop taking their medicine once they start to feel better. This is dangerous not only because it’s misleading (as you know, HIV is incurable) and the patient will eventually fall sick again, but the disease also builds drug resistance making treatment less effective.

At one house we visited, an old man was laying on the ground outside. He was obviously frail and sick but the activists confided to me that he refused to go to the hospital. “I’d rather die here at home,” He kept saying to them. There was nothing they could do, short of dragging him to see the doctor (and give him to opportunity to then blame his poor health on the hospital treatments). Fortunately, one of the young boys living with the family was adhering well to his treatment and was doing well. At another house we stopped by, the patient, who had abandoned his treatment for some time now, had just fugir-ed (escaped) from the yard when we arrived, presumably because he didn’t want to talk to the activists. His elderly mother regretfully told us that they had tried everything to get him to go back to the hospital, but he just didn’t want to.

All in all, the activists and I visited five families that day (and would probably have completed more, had it not been dreary and rainy) and at each house, I received the short version of a complicated story. Family structure is convoluted in Mozambique. There is no “nuclear family” ; everybody lives under the same roof, extended family included. A child may be sent to live with another relative for any number of reasons (parent dies, or cannot provide for the child, or doesn’t want to take care of the child) so oftentimes it can’t be assumed that the kids that greet you in the yard are directly related to the tenants of the house, or even… live there.

I was also with a Peace Corps trainee, Jasmin, and while the families and activists conversed in Changana, we talked quietly amongst ourselves tried to guess the family relations- who was the mother of whom, how old each person was. At one house one of the activists, Luisa, beckoned over a girl that looked about 15, with a baby on her back, and explained to us that this baby was the girl’s second child. “A child having a child, can you believe it?” Luisa shook her head disgustedly and chided the girl for not dressing her children warmly in accordance with the weather. Luisa then took the girl’s hospital card (signed off every time the patient goes to the hospital) and told her that she has to come pick it up at the Tsembeka office when she attends the HIV+ mothers support group, where they learn about child nutrition and how to make nutritional porridge for young children. I found this kind of a strange tactic- bullying people into attending support groups, even if it is for their own good.

The next house was a similar story. The three older activists severely scolded a group of adolescents for not taking their toddler to the hospital. “The mother refuses to take her child to the hospital even though the kid is clearly malnourished and anemic. She keeps saying that she will go tomorrow but never does,” was the explanation I was given by an activist, whose voice was filled with scorn and disapproval for the mother. No adult was present at the house and I wasn’t quite sure if one of the young girls (who all looked maybe 12, or younger) was the mother that they were referring to, or if the mother of the toddler was an adult who happened to be absent. Child-headed households are apparently very common.

I noted that almost half the families we saw had multiple family members who were sick, and that all the houses we stopped by that day were within one block of each other. So many sick in such a small area? I wonder then if this is an anomalous neighborhood, or if maybe I am just oblivious to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in my community.