<\/p>\n
Hillary Clinton visits Angola this week. The caregivers of Angola, the United States, and the world haunt her mission as they haunt this age.<\/p>\n
Isn\u2019t it curious that those who care for others can be called caretakers or caregivers? A caregiver<\/a> is \u201ca person, typically either a professional or close relative, who looks after a child, elderly person, invalid, etc.; a carer\u201d. A caretaker<\/a> is \u201cone who takes care of a thing, place, or person; one put in charge of anything\u201d. This explains why caregivers are mostly women, underpaid or not paid at all, who look after others in need: children, the sick, the elderly, you, me. This explains why there are caretaker governments and why there are no caregiver governments or States.<\/p>\n In Ireland, a caretaker is<\/a> \u201ca person put in charge of a farm from which the tenant has been evicted\u201d. Angola is evicting thousands<\/a> of people right now. 3000 family households were just bulldozed on the outskirts of Lusaka, to make way for gated condominium `communities\u2019 and shopping malls: \u201c`They arrived at around 3am,’ explained Rosa<\/a>, a pregnant mother of five who has lived for three years in the area of two neighbouring informal settlements known as Baghdad and Iraq. “First came the police, and then the machines and they just started to knock down the houses. There was no warning, we had no choice but to leave because of all the police so we just grabbed what we could and then watched as they pulled down our homes,” said the 29-year-old.\u201d<\/p>\n What happens to Rosa and her five children, what happens to that future child of hers, if it survives its birth? What happens to Rosa, now homeless, when she goes into childbirth? The maternal mortality roulette is now firmly stacked against her. And what happens then to the five or six kids?<\/p>\n Maki knows. Maki is a fictional character in \u201cPorcupine\u201d, the title story of Jane Bennett\u2019s collection, Porcupine<\/a><\/em>. Maki is Black, Zimbabwean, lesbian, a writer and student living in South Africa, and she knows: \u201cThe statistics have been stable for centuries; the babies of the caretakers died with much more frequency than those in the caretakers\u2019 care. It\u2019s not a riddle.\u201d<\/p>\n Rosa and her children, the women, men, children of Baghdad and Iraq, in the southlands of Lusaka, they must just die. If that\u2019s economic and social progress, if their eviction and death is part of community formation, then Angola is a proper Caretaker State.<\/p>\n And Angola is not alone. We are living in a Caretaker Era, on a globe of evictions in the name of progress, in a world of caretakers\u2019 children dying. The statistics have been stable.<\/p>\n Take the United States, a wealthy country. With all its wealth, the United States health care system is \u201cone of the worst of all the industrialized nations<\/a>.\u201d In 2000, the World Health Organization stopped ranking national health care systems, because the data, they said, became too complex. In their 2000 assessment, of 191 nation states, the United States ranked 37th<\/sup><\/a>, and this despite spending a higher portion of its gross domestic product on health than any other country.<\/p>\n So, what happens to the Rosa\u2019s of the United States? What happens to their children?<\/p>\n According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development Health Data 2009 report<\/a>, \u201cMost OECD countries have enjoyed large gains in life expectancy over the past decades.\u00a0 In the United States, life expectancy at birth increased by 8.2 years between 1960 and 2006, which is less than the increase of almost 15 years in Japan, or 9.4 years in Canada. In 2006, life expectancy in the United States stood at 78.1 years, almost one year below the OECD average of 79.0 years\u2026.Infant mortality rates in the United States have fallen greatly over the past few decades, but not as much as in most other OECD countries.\u00a0 It stood at 6.7 deaths per 1 000 live births in 2006, above the OECD average of 4.9.\u201d<\/p>\n If Rosa is a caregiver in the United States, she\u2019s an underpaid woman of color. She\u2019s Black, Latina, Native American, Asian. What happens to Rosa, to her children, to her next child, if she\u2019s, say, Black?\u00a0 \u201cBlack infants in the United States<\/a> are more than twice as likely as white infants to die in the first year of life. In New York City, infant mortality rates were 3 times higher for black infants than for white infants in 2001. Neonatal deaths, that is, deaths that occur within 28 days after delivery, account for nearly two thirds of all infant deaths. Similar to the racial disparities in infant mortality rates, black neonates are more than twice as likely to die, compared with white neonates.\u201d<\/p>\n