Game Control Read Online Free PDF Page A

nice man.
      'Duplicitous' as her organization had so recently been described, the idea of family planning as a means of population control in a country where contraceptive prevalence remained below 5 per cent was absurd, so Eleanor didn't think in terms of demographics any more. She regarded herself as providing an everyday service, even if Pathfinder did get its support from agencies with bolder designs. She consoled herself there were times in her own life that she was grateful for the Pill, and to extend this opportunity for pleasure without consequences seemed a reputable calling, if not very glamorous. For she no longer imagined she was preventing worldwide famine or raising the standard of living for the poor. In lowering the sights of her work, she found it duller, but no longer ridiculous. She had helped a few unmarried girls escape the wrath of their families; a handful of already overworked mothers—and in this country women did everything —find a contraceptive they could hide from their husbands, whose precious manhood would be insulted if they discovered their wives used birth control.
      In Eleanor's case, the pills had worked a bit too well. As she drew into her late thirties, the age at which many of her clients became grandmothers, even her own workers felt sorry for her. Among some tribes of East Africa a childless woman was a contagion, isolated in a separate hut outside the village, not allowed to touch pregnant wives, and sometimes stoned for being hexed. In Eleanor's darker moods the word barren
    would take on an interior complexion as she scanned the hot, dead landscape, unsure why she was here, her face so dry—she was out of moisturizer again. She submitted good-naturedly to nurses' teasing about visiting gentlemen from USAID or Ford, but the men never stayed longer than a few days and were odiously well behaved (or simply odious). It was when the teasing stopped that the situation got under her skin, the downcast shaking heads when one more prospect had fled. These were the times, in private, when she snapped pens that didn't write, threw the phone to the floor and pulled maliciously at condoms, stretching them at her desk and burning holes in the rubber with smoking matches.
      It's funny how you just assume you will get married.
      No, if you were born when Eleanor was, you don't say married; you say, or something like it , since the word is sullied from too many wiped hands. But still you have a picture in your mind of a time when everything will be different; when there are no more days you simply haven't a taste for; when something is settled. In a furry, indistinct form Eleanor had always seen a whole other life beginning at about thirty-five; she was now thirty-seven. Pole-pole , she was admitting to herself, like cracking open a door, that all women did not get married—or something like it—and though she was an independent, successful Career Girl, the grey shaft of her future that slatted through that crack split down her head like the slice of an axe.

    Eleanor looked forward to Nairobi, at least a city where she could buy face cream; all that shops in Dar stocked was curling shelf-paper. And she was ready for the extra remove of a higher position. While Eleanor had been pressuring Pathfinder to integrate contraceptive services with broader health care, in the interim her clinics were barraged with cases of young children with ringworm and TB, and the nurses could only offer depo-provera. Mothers would come in for vitamins and walk out with spermicide, a little dazed, not sure what had happened. It was painful and impolitic. Eleanor didn't want to watch any more; she was ready for one giant step back from suffering, and she was nagged by the insipid mystery of what anyone was suffering for.
      She even considered declining the post and returning to the States, but while like any astute Westerner she knew she would never belong in Africa, she no longer fitted in the US