Fabio Geda: “The houses of waiting welcome women near the hospital at the end of pregnancy in Angola to counter unacceptable deaths for the complications of childbirth”

The wait, once suspended, does not have the same value at any latitude. Waiting for Portuguese, it is said to be Espera. And already in this word there is a sense of trust. After the best seller In the sea there are crocodiles, Fabio Geda returns to the bookstore with The house of waitingpublished by Laterza, the story of a Journey to Angola between the capital Luanda and the deep South, Chiulo, on the plateaus on the border with Namibia. And of a rural hospital where the Cuamm carries on the Casa dell’Altresa project, a structure in which pregnant women spend the last month of pregnancy to guarantee their safety and that of their children. Fabio Geda puts black and white stories of cooperation and the destinies of Angolan women and men transformed by the encounter with the Italian organization. The book also emerges the ruthless beauty of Africa, the streets of the capital Luanda, inhabited by over ten million people and young people who wait to sell anything, the beauty of a breathtaking natural environment, inhabited by populations who fight with drought and malnutrition.

Fabio Geda in Angola. Credits Nicola Berti Cuamm

Fabio Geda arrived in Treviso with the Zanetti Ets Foundation and IMAGO Mundi Foundation to tell his experience in Angola.

What happens in the house of waiting and why is it so important for the women of this part of the world to live the last month in a protected situation?
«In a house of waiting, women wait to give birth. It is a strategy with which we try to contrast unacceptable deaths such as those of mothers and children for the complications of a birth. The problem that the houses of waiting offer an answer is the distance between the places where women live and the nearest hospital. Sometimes these distances are enormous. Angola has a very low housing density, which means that in certain areas the hospital is for two or three hours of motorcycles. Imagine what it means to have to do two or three hours of motorcycles with an obstructed birth, or with an ongoing bleeding. So women are invited to live next to the hospital over the last month of pregnancy ».

In the book there are also the streets of the capital Luanda, inhabited by over ten million people and young people who wait to sell anything.
«Luanda is a tentular city. It hosts a third of the inhabitants of the Angola, which is a nation of Italy four times, and therefore, as it is easy to imagine, a land where you can drive for a long time without seeing anyone. In Luanda, however, traffic along the main arteries is already in itself an experience that saturates the senses. It is a complex city, full of contradictions. On the one hand there are the skyscrapers of the managerial centers and on the other the Musseques, the poorest peripheral neighborhoods. There are many voices, many bodies, a lot of music, a lot of life. Wherever you see the signs of prosperity that has invested Luanda between 2004 and 2014, when the money of oil and diamonds made it one of the most expensive cities in the world. But then came the crisis generated by the fall of the price of oil and to the signs of prosperity the skeletons of the buildings under construction have been added, which now emerge in the urban panorama abandoned for years, as finished on the illusions “.

The house of waiting, cover.

Who is Agostinho Neto and what role does it still have in the collective memory of the nation?
«Agostinho Neto was the first president of Angola, and is considered the father of the homeland. To me, more than as a politician, it is interested above all as a doctor and as a poet. Doctor, because we are here to talk about health. And poet, because my main work tool is the word. In the book, then, you will discover in what unpredictable ways the human story of Agostinho Neto and linked to Italy and above all to an extraordinary person such as Joyce Lussu, an irreducible protagonist of the Italian resistance. His is a crazy story. Di Neto I tried to tell above all the passion with which he faced life, whatever he found himself doing, that he was the doctor or who tried to culturally organize an anti -colonial resistance. A passion that is also found in the poems that wrote ».