#15 The Rubbish-Picker’s Wife: an unlikely friendship in Kosovo, by Elizabeth Gowing

Posted by on Aug 26, 2015 in book review | No Comments

Elizabeth GowThe Rubbish-Picker's Wife, Elizabeth Gowing, Elbow Pressing is a writer who is new to me and her current book is not my usual reading. I was sent a copy of The Rubbish-Picker’s Wife to review, which is my disclosure statement – and on my usual basis I said I’d read the book, write a review and ask the author if she was happy for me to publish it, but I wouldn’t change anything I thought or felt about the book – all that would happen is she could ask me NOT to publish, if it didn’t work for you.

It’s an interesting question why I accepted the book at all. Partly because as the former CEO of a number of charities and think tanks, the premise interested me, partly, I think, because the snippets of Gowing’s writing I found online were fascinating: precise, very British (as in restrained but candid) and yet profoundly honest about her reactions to the places she finds herself in.

I’m glad to say I found the book rewarding. There are three reasons it was a compelling read for me:

 

The subject matter fascinated me

It’s beautifully crafted

The stories Gowing tells are sometimes humorous and sometimes emotionally charged, but always rendered with delicacy and precision.

One of the dilemmas that Gowing explores is the micro-macro approach – should we install water pipes to help people have better facilities to wash and do laundry or should we train them to become water engineers and plumbers so they can develop their own communities? It’s a debate I remember having every week for several decades, or so it felt, at the UN, at DFID, at EU funding meetings, with individual benefactors, with donor agencies …. it was draining. Because Gowing gives us anecdotes that explore this dilemma, it becomes real and vivid again, and allows us, the reader, to begin to appreciate some of the policy decisions that charities, NGOs and government bodies make daily around health, poverty and development. The answer, by the way, is both – do both, and do them well.

Another thing that struck me about the book was an early statement about the process of educating children excluded from school in Fushë Kosovë, a part of Kosovo with intense poverty and deprivation for complex reasons. As Gowing says, “We had the same trouble I’ve had in every primary school geography lesson I’ve ever taught of understanding whether Prishtina is in Kosovo or Kosovo is in Prishtina and the sheer implausibility of being able to put your finger right over Fushë Kosovë – blotting out this very building from the map. If you’re going to rely on education to give you a place in the world you can’t rely only on maths, literacy and English”. It’s hard for us to imagine a worldview that doesn’t have maps, that doesn’t extend beyond walking distance and that can’t work out whether a town is bigger than a country or not. It’s also very easy to assume that the internet age and mobile connectivity has destroyed this isolation, but it hasn’t, in my experience. The problem with deprivation is that it prevents people having the very tools that would remove deprivation. You may indeed have a mobile phone, but if you bought it from a market stall and it runs on black-market unlocking, you’re unlikely to have the time, money or knowledge to check out your village on Google Earth and get a sense of global perspective!

Even though I worked in this field for some years, I’d forgotten how intractable it can be. Gowing’s battles to get the children accepted for school are beautifully rendered without judgement but with a real sense of outrage that there can still be places in Europe where universal literacy is an aim, but not a practical goal. I’d forgotten too how intense the relationships are when people expect to live and die in a house, in a village, in a community that their parents also lived and died in. Gowing delineates that too … the endless ramifications of community relationships for good, and for ill. A woman has her IUD removed because her spiritual adviser says she should, and then gets pregnant when another child will definitely go hungry and cause the other children to go hungry too. It’s easy to get angry about such accounts, but the truth is, that spiritual adviser will be there for the family when they grow and have children of their own – but the family planning clinic might not be!

Something I would have liked more of is Gowing herself. She has real doubt about her ability to help, about her role, about whether she’s a do-gooder and a busybody … this level of doubt and enquiry into motive helped make the book rounded and honest. She also had some health issues that I wish she’d talked a little more more about – very few people in the aid and humanitarian world get out unscathed; my own health impacts include: pneumonia and septicaemia in Mexico, Helicobacter virus and bleeding ulcers in India and chronic fatigue syndrome in either Sweden or Denmark, not sure which because I lost a chunk of memory that’s never come back! Of course my own background makes me want to know more about Gowing’s experiences but I think most readers probably would have wanted a little more of this very human frailty to be explained and explored too.

I really recommend this book, even if it’s not your regular reading material. I found it both fascinating and frightening and I felt confident I was being invited to enter a lived experience. This is not a book written after a month somewhere, by some hipster wannabe journalist who’s read Eat, Pray, Love and jumped on the bandwagon. It’s a deep, honest, tender and sometimes self-doubting account of the reality of absolute poverty and how we can all do a little more today, and every day, to alleviate the poverty and suffering of those right on our doorstep. If I sound preachy, don’t be put off – this is fine reading in the best tradition of Victorian travellers, it’s subtle, considered and honest and the fact that it has a deep and impassioned message simply enhances and shapes this excellent, beautifully written narrative.

And apologies for the dodgy photo – the rain and general gloom here today mean the available light is very low, hence ‘atmospheric’ cover shot!

Leave a Reply