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Bulgaria

    PANDEMIC MATH

    On Outer Cape, Data Show Whites Have Lowest Vaccination Rate

    The Jamaican pastor of Truro's Chapel on the Pond leads by example

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The official statistics from the state Dept. of Public Health say that 114 percent of the residents of Provincetown have been vaccinated against Covid-19.

    Obviously, that is impossible.

    The problem is that the state’s calculation is based on 2010 U.S. Census figures, updated by a formula from the Donahue Institute. But that formula almost certainly doesn’t account for elements of Provincetown’s population, such as seasonal foreign workers here on visas. If they were not in the country when the census was taken, they would not have been counted.

    And while public health officials congratulate themselves on the high local vaccination rate, talking to residents across the Outer Cape, most of whom won’t give their names, makes it clear that many are not vaccinated.

    Who are they? A significant number may be immigrant workers from Bulgaria — some of the Provincetown residents who probably aren’t included in the state’s population figures.

    The Independent granted anonymity to five service industry workers from Bulgaria to discuss vaccination rates in that community. All five said they believed that fewer than half of the Bulgarians in Provincetown are currently vaccinated against Covid; and some estimated the number to be as low as 10 percent.

    “The J-1s, the kids who are coming here, I think it’s less than 5 percent,” said one worker. “The ones who are living here now, maybe a quarter.”

    “My first day back in Provincetown, I got the vaccine,” said another Bulgarian. “When I had lunch with four of my friends, they all asked me why I got it. They still don’t have it. I wish I could tell you different.

    “Bulgarians are very set in their ways, and they’re not going to change their minds,” she added. “My mom believes Bill Gates put microchips in the vaccine. I can’t convince her to get it.”

    “The shot they give to rich people is not the same as the shot they give to us,” said a third person interviewed by the Independent.

    “I’ll tell you this much: Bulgarians are very off and on. It’s this or it’s that,” said the fourth person. “The shot is supposed to keep you from getting the virus. If it doesn’t, and people are getting sick anyway, why would you put this in your body?”

    Two of the people interviewed regretted having been vaccinated for that reason. “If I’m going to get sick anyway, why did I take this shot?” one asked.

    Nationally, there is a racial gap in vaccination rates. Black and Hispanic vaccination rates are generally lower than those of white populations, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

    But Mass. Dept. of Public Health statistics appear to show that, on the Outer Cape, white residents have the lowest vaccination rates. The DPH weekly reports on vaccinations per town, last updated on July 22, show that over 95 percent of Black, Asian, and Hispanic residents in Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham have received at least one vaccine dose.

    In Provincetown, over 95 percent of white people also have had at least one dose, the DPH reported. As for the white populations of the other towns, the vaccination rate is 89 percent in Wellfleet, 85 percent in Truro, and 81 percent in Eastham.

    An effort to speak with members of the Jamaican community revealed a harrowing story.

    Carlene and Pastor David Brown at their church, the Chapel on the Pond, in North Truro. Nearly everyone they know is vaccinated.(Photo K.C. Myers)

    David Brown, 60, is head pastor at the Chapel on the Pond in North Truro. Brown and his wife, Carlene, began coming here from Jamaica in the 1990s through the H-2B temporary visa program. Like most of their congregation, the Browns work in the service industry. Several days before the pastor was scheduled to get his first Covid-19 vaccination in early April (during Phase II of the vaccine rollout), he began to feel ill. He went to Outer Cape Health Services and demanded a test, even though he had no fever or cough.

    “I just did not feel right,” he said.

    That night, he received a call that he had tested positive. He gave state contact tracers the phone numbers and names of the people in his congregation.

    After two weeks, on the day he was supposed to end his isolation, he was taken by ambulance to the ICU at Cape Cod Hospital.

    Breathing was excruciating, he said. Deep breaths felt like torture, so he concentrated on small, slow sips of air. At night, the symptoms got worse. He could not sleep or lie down. “I would not wish that on anyone,” he said.

    After a day in the ICU, he was sent home and told to return if his symptoms grew worse. He felt, Brown said, that he was going to die.

    But he did recover at home, with Carlene’s care.

    When Brown returned to the pulpit, he told his story to his largely Jamaican congregation. He urged everyone to get vaccinated. About 10 of the people in his church, including one child, also came down with the virus, he said.

    By now, he said, nearly everyone he knows has been vaccinated. With the Delta variant causing new infections, he plans to stay on message.

    Brown said that Pat Nadle, the executive director of Outer Cape Health Services, contacted him last week in an effort to provide Covid education to his community. He said he is arranging for Nadle or another staff member to attend a Sunday service and talk about all the reasons to be vaccinated.

    Nadle could not be reached for comment before this week’s deadline.

    BOOK REVIEW

    From Lust to Love and Cleanness, in Nine Chapters

    Garth Greenwell’s new novel is 100 shades of gay

    By

    Garth Greenwell’s 2016 debut novel, What Belongs to You, which was on the long list for the National Book Award, is a story of love, lust, and loss, centered on an unnamed narrator, a gay American teacher in Bulgaria. Cleanness, Greenwell’s follow-up novel, published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is narrated by that same teacher in Bulgaria, still unnamed, as he embarks on a love affair with R, an exchange student from Portugal, and deals with its eventual collapse.

    Cleanness by Garth Greenwell
    Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell, is a novel with a powerful gay male romance and graphic sadomasochistic sex scenes. (Photo Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

    The book has a pleasing symmetry: it’s divided into three parts, each with three chapters. Parts one and three detail the aftermath of the narrator’s affair with R. (None of the characters is named. Each is represented only by an initial.) Part two is about the affair itself. The individual chapters are not sequenced in a linear fashion — some of the chapters, in fact, have previously appeared in The New Yorker — but taken as a whole, they offer a satisfying understanding of the narrative that is greater than the sum of its parts.

    In part one, in the first chapter, the narrator meets with a troubled student who comes out to him, seeking comfort and advice on how to navigate his sexuality in conservative Bulgaria. The narrator asks the student what he wants his life to be, a question with which the narrator himself is grappling. In the second chapter, the narrator hooks up with a man for sex. It’s a graphic scene, in which the narrator wants to be dominated. In the last chapter, the narrator finds himself in the middle of an anti-government protest, which he observes but does not take part in.

    In part three, in the first chapter, the narrator spends time with Bulgarian writers in an unnamed seaside town. He has taken a break from R, but his thoughts, which he can’t repress, keep returning to him. The next chapter contains another graphic scene, in which the narrator has very rough sex with a young man he meets online. This time, instead of being submissive, he takes total control. In the last chapter, the narrator goes with former students for a revealing night out on the eve of his leaving Bulgaria.

    The second, middle part of the book is taken up with the affair with R. The young exchange student is restless and somewhat aimless, but the affair gives the narrator someone to focus on and fulfills his need for love. “Sex had never been joyful for me before,” the narrator says, “or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did.”

    One of the most beautiful and moving parts of the book occurs in the chapter “Frog King.” In it, the narrator comes to realize that he is truly loved, and Greenwell, in his writing, conveys a palpable sense of unconstrained emotion and passion in this breakthrough: “I love you, I whispered again and again to him. You are the most beautiful, the most beautiful boy. You are, he whispered to me, you are, you are.”

    Garth Greenwell
    Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You. (Photo Shipman Agency)

    To the narrator, the love affair is clean and pure, in sharp contrast with his past sexual encounters, which he sees as toxic. This theme runs throughout. He and R stay together for two years, even long-distance, after R leaves Bulgaria. But the lack of proximity eventually frays the bond. The transformative nature of the affair and its bittersweet dénouement are persuasively told through the narrator’s perspective.

    Of the graphic bondage-and-domination sex scenes in chapters two and eight, Greenwell, in an interview with Farrar, Straus publisher Mitzi Angel, said, “I had the goal of writing a scene that was, at once, 100 percent pornographic and 100 percent high art.” The passages effectively portray the growth of the narrator and the inner workings of desire — even how it can be lethal in nature, what Greenwell described to Angel as “the obliteration of the self.”

    These chapters may be polarizing. They are shocking, not only for their graphic sexual content but also for the narrator’s observations and awareness in being submissive in the first scene and dominating in the second.

    In Cleanness, Greenwell has fleshed out characters who long for pain and humiliation but also love. The writing is dense, and the narrative sometimes frustrating in its inscrutability. But it offers readers a thought-provoking and compelling journey, one that reaches for real wisdom.

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