LAUSR

The representative from the foreign aid agency, a woman with whom I had crossed paths several times in the small town of Mangochi in southern Malawi, banged her fist on the table. “How can we get them to distribute condoms? They should be distributing condoms!” She was referring to the traditional birth attendants (TBAs) in the Monkey Bay Safe Motherhood project that we were there in the meeting to discuss. She envisioned them as ideal community actors in the HIV prevention project she worked for. I had been working in Monkey Bay for the past three months evaluating a Safe Motherhood project. I was also a graduate student in anthropology at the time and therefore inclined to take an ethnographic approach to my task. I knew the TBAs wouldn’t distribute condoms. I had been to their homes to talk to them about their work and had asked them as politely as it is possible to do so how they felt about distributing condoms. “Oh no,” they invariably told me. “We don’t do that. It’s not our place to talk to men about that.” I had also watched as they slid the ‘Safe Birth Kits’ they had received as part of their training out from under beds or curtained closets, opened the lids to reveal lengths of condoms still in their packages, closed the kits again and slid them carefully back into place. Imagined by a foreign aid agency to be working in the realm of ‘reproductive and sexual health’, these TBAs refused. Their work was attending births. They did not fail to fit the bill, they refused it.