Up For Grabs

The first time my three-year-old neighbor Tamar grabbed my breast and said, “mine,” I thought it was just an extension of our typical conversations (she grabs hold of my necklace, glasses, headphones, etc and says, "mine.") But recently, she’s gotten a bit bolder, and recently managed to cram her chubby arm down the high, snug neck of my t-shirt. As I struggled to extract it without tearing my top or dislocating her shoulder, I said, “What are you doing in there?!” “Eat it!” she replied, “eat it!”

I assured Tamar that I am not a vending machine, a cow or her mother. “I have no milk,” I told her. “There is nothing in there for you.” She regarded me suspiciously. Betty, her mother assured me that she no longer breastfeeds, but then added that, “Sometimes Tamar sneaks it.” For goodness sakes, it’s not a cookie, it’s your flesh! How can someone sneakily suck fluid from your body? Well, breastfeeding here is not like being served in a restaurant, it’s more like a buffet and as soon as the babies are old enough to grasp, they help themselves.

Then Betty says, “I tell her, ‘Don’t drink that, you will get sick!’” “‘Sick?’ I asked her. “No, breast milk is good for children.” So Betty explains to me that since she doesn’t breast feed regularly, she's afraid the milk gets sour inside her body. Although I have no personal experience to draw from, I told her that sounds pretty impossible. But we were getting off topic so I just asked her to please reiterate to Tamar that I don’t have milk on tap.

Here is Lesotho, children breastfeed until a much older age than they do in the states. I think (for HIV negative mothers) this is a good thing. It’s free, nutritious and comforting. In Lesotho where formula is unaffordable for many, HIV positive mothers are recommended to breastfeed babies until they are 6 months old provided that they don’t give the babies any other food or drink. For some reason, exclusive breastfeeding is a much lower risk than breastfeeding along with giving other food and drink for HIV transmission.

When a mother no longer has milk, the nipple is employed as a sort of a pacifier. In fact, any woman’s nipples, mother or not, are fair game for this purpose. I learned this fairly early in my Lesotho teaching career. When Basotho students cried, I would pick them up and they would immediately go for it, their little white teeth shining like vampire fangs. Hence, “Don’t do that” was one of the first Sesotho phrases that I learned.

So one day, I’m walking around campus, the rest of my body preceded by my milkless communal pacifiers, and a girl in another class asked me if I would like a sticker. She had brought them to school to celebrate her 7th birthday. I said, “of course.” She then asked me if I would like two, and if she should put them on me. I regrettably answered in the affirmative to both questions. I should have known better. The precision and symmetry of her sticker placement could not have been more unfortunate, and the stickers themselves were starbursts emblazoned with the word, “PARTY!”

And I wore them the entire day.