On the Value of Invisible Things

Imagine, just for a moment, that you are a 29-year-old woman living in an area where war reigns. Every day you hear planes flying overhead and alarms sounding, and although you can still work most days — you work for a local bank, or in a gallery — the worries about the future of yourself and your beloved, your safety, the well-being of your friends and family members, make you feel sick. What if this ridiculous, terrifying fighting never stops? What if someone you know dies tomorrow from an accidentally wrongly landed bomb? And what does ‘wrongly landed’ actually mean, if other people die in the process, strangers, who just like you last year were doing things that now seem unthinkable: drinking coffee on a bench on the street, dancing at a party, making plans for the future?

Those are things you think about, all day, and often all night too. One morning you get out of bed early — sleeping doesn’t work anyway, because of the worries and an inexplicable nausea, which turns out not to be so inexplicable when you find out a little later that you are pregnant. You are sitting on the edge of the toilet and looking at the stick in your hand, on which the pink line is clearly visible, which means you are carrying a new human being, and you cry, because you know that this means you will leave this house this week — your beloved was right, he always wanted to flee but you didn’t, because you didn’t want to leave your old father with his aching back, your mother with early dementia, because what are they to do here, in this country that turned to be an enemy for people you have never met, what are your parents to do against such anger without your help, but, you realize now, what is my child to do here at all, in this life of fear, I must help it be safe, be loved, that is my main task from now on.

Six weeks later your feet touch icecold seawater, and it is dark around you but you squint against the bright light of the police boat aimed at you, your fingers are white and search for those of your beloved, but they are not there, that was right, he was not allowed to come in this boat, he promised to come later, you first, you both first. Your hand clutches your belly and someone is shouting that you must go *that way, that way*, and you whisper in your own language to the child that grows inside of you that the man didn’t have to shout like that, did he now, he’s just a bit agitated that man, we’re not doing anything wrong, darling, it will all be fine, but everyone around you keeps shouting and crying, just like on that boat, and you decide to look at your feet, only at your feet, step after step after step, and only when you arrive after two hours of walking at a place where, behind a fence, hundreds of barracks stand, do you hear for the first time a voice that is soft and speaks in a way that makes it seem worth to look up.

“Are you pregnant?” the voice asks, and your belly is hard, and you remember that that’s not good, the doctor said something about it at home when you had your first ultrasound, your husband ignored that remark, he laughed that the sound of the heartbeat sounded like a techno beat, but you couldn’t think about your parties from back then, not even about the one where you and him met, you only heard the warning: a hard belly indicates stress and too much of that can lead to health problems of your baby, to premature birth, to everything you don’t want and afterwards you had promised your husband to take good care of your child but how, you now wonder, how is that even possible, in a country where everyone is afraid or angry, or on a boat filled with people and the desperate hope that hangs between them like the heavy air before a storm, or in this camp, where only people with hollow eyes live, this place that you recognize from the news on television but apparently has become your life, now, too?

“Are you pregnant?” the kind voice asks again, and you nod and you look up and there stands a woman your age, and she gives you a note with a number on it and she says: I am going to help you with everything you need, I can take you to a midwife, I can help you plan for your delivery, I can put you in touch with other women who have ended up here pregnant and who have children now, we have diapers and extra warm blankets, and this number, this number is mine and you can call me 24 hours a day, and as she says that you feel something move in your belly for the first time, it feels like a fly trapped in your hand or the pulsating tail of a fish on dry land, and you think: maybe, yes, I believe I can do this.

That voice exists. It is the voice of one of the staff members of one of the organizations with which I will be collaborating for my new research project on intergenerational health in refugee camps. These are organizations that do crucial work in and around refugee camps, focused on pregnant women and their unborn children, but who receive relatively little credit for it. Sponsors, you must know, are not impressed by intangible practices like ‘letting yourself be called out of bed by a woman in need’, or ‘reassuring a woman who is about to give birth alone, in a hospital where she does not speak the language’. I, however, am incredibly impressed by that kind of invisible, unquantifiable help. I suspect that they are not only extremely valuable for the women, but also for the health and stress level of the unborn child, and thus for an entire new generation. That is why I will not only, with a team of researchers, look at what we can do better for pregnant refugee women, but also at how we can keep these organizations afloat, because they receive little, and increasingly less funding. I’ll keep you updated about our findings.

But now, just briefly, imagine once more that you are that pregnant woman who arrived in the refugee camp, without your beloved, without your aging parents, and imagine that you stand there, tired from the walk, your belly hard, your mind dark, and imagine that that one, kind voice had not been there?

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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