"Monique was really the first feminist in her part of the world," Bidwell said as she recalled Monique's tireless efforts to educate women, difficult trips to the city for scarce medicines and hours and hours she spent tending to women and children despite, and sometimes in defiance of, the lack of support from village elders. For some in Granville, Bidwell's book brings both closure and new beginnings. Bidwell's connection to Monique lasted beyond her two-year stint with the Peace Corps and touched local residents when Bidwell brought her to Granville in 1992. Monique loved Granville, a place "so green with a ground so full of water," Bidwell writes. Kay Bork, research librarian at Granville Public Library and a former French teacher, remembers when Monique visited her French class at the high school and taught the class how to make peanut stew. Carol Apacki, a family friend, remembers her first impression of Monique. She arrived during Bidwell's wedding shower. From remote Africa, "she walked into this room of 20 or so women like she was a queen, just beaming, with such stature and poise and warmth," Apacki said. "She was radiant."
Mali RPCV Kris Holloway Bidwell writes out of love, friendship and admiration for Monique Dembele and the women of Mali, and out of a passion for making change
Peace Corps experience basis for area native's non-fiction book
Kris Holloway Bidwell featured in Granville Reads program
by CHARLES A. PETERSON
Sentinel Editor
Sometimes in life, one experience defines a person for years to come, sometimes forever.
A girl who grew up in Granville, Kris Holloway Bidwell, had that experience when she joined the Peace Corps in 1989 after college and worked alongside a young midwife in Mali, Africa.
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Her story is told in "Monique and the Mango Rains," Bidwell's first book. She writes out of love, friendship and admiration for Monique Dembele and the women of Mali, and out of a passion for making change.
Bidwell, who authored the book under her maiden name, Kris Holloway, will be in the Granville area for five days, Oct. 22 through 26, to talk to churches, schools and the community. She is the daughter of Jane and Bill Holloway, of Granville.
Bidwell is on a national tour to introduce the book, which was released Sept. 15. Monique and the Mango Rains is the communitywide reading selection for the Granville Public Library's program, Granville Reads. The book is on sale at Reader's Garden and available for loan at the library.
Bidwell will hold a Granville Reads conversation at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 26 at the Presbyterian Church, an alternative space for a library under construction. She also will speak locally at Denison University, Granville High School and Newark Campus of Ohio State University mong other places, including Columbus.
Monique, at age 24, was midwife and primary health care provider for the southeastern village of Nampossela in Mali, a country where childbirth can mean life or death.
"Most women are married by the age of 18 and have (on average) seven children, one of the highest fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa," she writes in the book's introduction.
The maternity mortality ratio, or the risk of death during childbirth and pregnancy, is among the top 10 highest in the world. Less than six percent of women use contraception and more than 96 percent have some form of female genital cutting performed during infancy or childhood, she explains.
It was this environment Monique lived and worked, managing a clinic where women from the village and surrounding areas came for prenatal and pediatric care, raising her own children and dealing with a difficult marriage. It was in this environment that Monique and Kris became friends.
And it was in this environment that Monique, herself, died tragically and ironically during childbirth eight years after Bidwell left Africa.
"Monique was really the first feminist in her part of the world," Bidwell said as she recalled Monique's tireless efforts to educate women, difficult trips to the city for scarce medicines and hours and hours she spent tending to women and children despite, and sometimes in defiance of, the lack of support from village elders.
For some in Granville, Bidwell's book brings both closure and new beginnings. Bidwell's connection to Monique lasted beyond her two-year stint with the Peace Corps and touched local residents when Bidwell brought her to Granville in 1992.
Monique loved Granville, a place "so green with a ground so full of water," Bidwell writes. Kay Bork, research librarian at Granville Public Library and a former French teacher, remembers when Monique visited her French class at the high school and taught the class how to make peanut stew.
Carol Apacki, a family friend, remembers her first impression of Monique. She arrived during Bidwell's wedding shower. From remote Africa, "she walked into this room of 20 or so women like she was a queen, just beaming, with such stature and poise and warmth," Apacki said. "She was radiant."
Writing the book was a journey for Bidwell, brought about by anger at Monique's death and the need to improve life for women in Mali by raising social conscience.
The possibility of a book began when she and John went back to Mali after Monique's death. In order to gather strength to write after the passage of so many years, she said she focused.
"Every moment I had to relive being there," she said.
In her Massachusetts home with a piece of soil from Mali for smell, photographs and video for sight and recordings of Monique's voice for sound, she "stayed hyper-focused on everything."
"I felt a huge responsibility," she said.
Bidwell took fiction writing courses, talked with writers and experts on women's issues, and wrote "lots of crap," realizing she had to be willing to write badly to learn to write well.
"I wrote the first chapter 36 times," she laughed.
"I want to put a face on the problems in Africa," Bidwell said. "I feel change can happen at the grassroots level."
Bidwell believes in community conversations about social issues, and it is her goal to engage audiences as she travels the country.
Part of the profits of the book will support Clinique Monique, a clinic in rural Nampossela started by Maxim, Monique's eldest cousin, in her memory. Contributions from the United States are also training Monique's sister, Angele, in midwifery in her quest to continue Monique's work, and educating Monique's three children.
"These are perfect ways to carry on her work."
For Bidwell and the women in Mali, Africa, Monique was transformational. "She was an amazing woman."
