Keeping it in the Family
She looked at me in the eyes and warned me, “What we are doing is wrong.” I sat confused. “How can it be wrong when we are so right together?” She agreed and decided to brush aside the conversation. Had I known that this would be the conversation that preceded the conception of our child that was so unwelcomed by the village, I may have put some more thought into it.
Who would have known that I would fall in love with my sister-in-law? Had I known that it would happen, I never would have introduced her to him in the first place. After we were told that all of the men in the family would need to go to America to send back money for the family, my four brothers and my father began to pack their things. It was very hard …show more content…
“We met five years prior, and she was the love of my life. We married after only having known each other for two weeks, but we were lucky that we were actually in love, because many married couples are not, as I am sure you know. After only two months of being married she fell very ill. I was worried so I took her to see the elders in our village to see if they knew anything about her illness or how to heal her. They told me that she had schistosomiasis, which they told me is a parasite that comes from freshwater snails. They said that “in [the] water, there are minute and invisible sand lice that penetrate human skin when [a] man is bathing in streams or in water from the streams” (source). When I asked how long it would be until she got better, they told me that the medicine for it is very expensive and hard to get so there was little hope that she would survive. She passed a month later. I was devastated. Her death was very hard for me to handle and I became depressed and malnourished. This made me vulnerable to disease and I contracted one of the few cases of polio in our village. I somehow managed to survive the illness with only a paralyzed left leg. At first I was angry because I did not want to live in this world without her, and I couldn’t even go to California with my brothers because of my leg.
She expressed her sympathy with my story, but I told her it was better this way, because had none of this happened, I would be in California
She looked at me in the eyes and warned me, “What we are doing is wrong.” I sat confused. “How can it be wrong when we are so right together?” She agreed and decided to brush aside the conversation. Had I known that this would be the conversation that preceded the conception of our child that was so unwelcomed by the village, I may have put some more thought into it.
Who would have known that I would fall in love with my sister-in-law? Had I known that it would happen, I never would have introduced her to him in the first place. After we were told that all of the men in the family would need to go to America to send back money for the family, my four brothers and my father began to pack their things. It was very hard …show more content…
“We met five years prior, and she was the love of my life. We married after only having known each other for two weeks, but we were lucky that we were actually in love, because many married couples are not, as I am sure you know. After only two months of being married she fell very ill. I was worried so I took her to see the elders in our village to see if they knew anything about her illness or how to heal her. They told me that she had schistosomiasis, which they told me is a parasite that comes from freshwater snails. They said that “in [the] water, there are minute and invisible sand lice that penetrate human skin when [a] man is bathing in streams or in water from the streams” (source). When I asked how long it would be until she got better, they told me that the medicine for it is very expensive and hard to get so there was little hope that she would survive. She passed a month later. I was devastated. Her death was very hard for me to handle and I became depressed and malnourished. This made me vulnerable to disease and I contracted one of the few cases of polio in our village. I somehow managed to survive the illness with only a paralyzed left leg. At first I was angry because I did not want to live in this world without her, and I couldn’t even go to California with my brothers because of my leg.
She expressed her sympathy with my story, but I told her it was better this way, because had none of this happened, I would be in California