Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

Author:Alan Weisman [WEISMAN, ALAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316236508
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

In the village of Ahmed Khan Zour, fifty kilometers farther north, a HANDS theater troupe is giving its 640th performance. More than one hundred women in bright salwar kameez and sparkling nose rings, surrounded by daughters with henna-painted arms and even some fathers, crowd under a portico to watch. The performers begin with a song that equates happiness with health, and health with a two-year gap. A male actor explains that the drama will reveal what that means, and invites them to figure out what’s wrong with the picture they’re about to see.

It begins with a marriage ceremony; the bride is very young. The scene shifts to a bedroom. The wife lies against a pillow, trying to comfort an unhappy infant.

“What’s wrong?” asks her husband.

“He’s sick,” she says.

“Fix him!”

“What can I do? I’m sick myself. I’m pregnant again,” she sobs.

The next day, a neighbor comes by and finds her sicker and weaker. “Why don’t you space your births?” she asks. “My husband and I do.”

The whole family gathers. “You’re not sick, you lazy liar,” declares her mother-in-law. “You just don’t want to give my son children. You only worry about yourself!”

By now, the audience is murmuring, and the action stops. “What’s wrong here? And why has it happened?” the actor playing the husband asks.

Hands raise; opinions are voiced. The wife wasn’t even sixteen; she wasn’t ready to have children. Her parents should have taught her about waiting between children. Most comments, though, blame the mother-in-law: “They want us to have as many children as they had to have,” says a woman in a black hijab, to applause.

The woman playing the mother-in-law turns out to be a doctor. Out come the pills, the injectables, the T-shaped copper IUDs, the foil-wrapped condoms. She explains each, and explains which ones require a visit to the clinic.

“We have to go all the way to Thatta,” a woman says.

“Not today,” says the doctor. Walking to stage left, she pulls back a sheet, revealing the ambulatory clinic they’ve brought along. She steps inside. “I’m here all day,” she says. And the line forms.

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