Since my last update, I’ve had my first visitor from home, attending mid-service conference, and started/finished my first funded project. It’s been a busy month. Here goes my attempt to capture it without boring you silly.
After weeks of being told by my headmistress that the community contribution was never going to come through, it actually did. Little by little, and mostly through students’ parents rather than the village government, we got all the materials we needed to start building. Who says Africans are lazy? We finished with the first part of the project—building the tank—and will be building the stoves this week. It was great to go to mid-service conference feeling like I actually had an answer when people asked what I’ve done for the past year. It was also awesome to see what great projects they are all up to, from starting a pre-school to HIV/AIDS care groups to chickens and cows and more. It’s a diverse selection of projects—I liked seeing where everyone found the intersection between their skills and interests and their communities’ needs.
Anyway, back to me… By the time the community contribution materialized, I had rush to Kenya to pick up Cameron, my first American visitor and soon-to-be Peace Corps/Senegal Volunteer. So I put the project on hold for a few days and hurried across the border.
I rather liked Nairobi, despite its reputation for being one of the most dangerous cities in Africa (hence, “Nairobbery”). Billboards advertising products that aren’t even available in TZ, huge buildings, clean parks, giant supermarkets… and many people speaking beautiful, fluent English with this sort-of-Britishy-but-still-African-sounding accent.
The highlight of the time we spent in Nairobi was visiting the park where Wangari Maathai and the women of the Greenbelt Movement successfully protected public land from being turned into a giant corporate building. It was great to see an African city where the residents have and use a large green space for recreation. Students doing homework under trees, lovers holding hands and sharing soda, parents running after escaped children… all framed by skyscrapers and the hustle and bustle of one of the business capitals of the continent. If anyone is looking for proof that we’re successfully exporting western culture, for better or worse, visit Nairobi.
After Kenya, we spent a few days at my site, met the neighbors, drank chai until we sweat sugary milk, started organizing for the building project at the secondary school (now nearly complete!!), visiting my site-mate, and hiking around the foot hills of Hanang. After being at site for a while, we headed to a small island called Pemba located on the archipelago of Zanzibar. I cannot recommend Pemba more highly. We rented bikes from a VSO volunteer and a random kid off the street, and in just a couple days were able to see pretty much the entire Island, including a lovely little stretch of rainforest opening out suddenly into a huge stretch of virgin beach. Rivaling the environment, the culture of Pemba is incredibly rich… a wonderful mix of African, Indian, Arabian, and something distinctly Zanzibari that’s hard to put a label on. Every night we went out and enjoyed the street food—octopus soup, shish kebab-y things, fish that’s basically still breathing it’s so fresh, spicy potato soup, and my absolute favorite: spicy ginger tea out of tiny cups, drank while making small talk with old men on their way home from mosque.
While not exactly a down-side, it is important to remember that Pemba is very conservative and not used to foreigners yet, so appropriate dress is crucial to avoiding offense and rude comments. This is rather difficult when you’re a woman who wants to go swimming. Traveling with a male companion, I definitely became more aware of the differences in how we were treated and what things we were allowed to do/comfortable doing. I had to find a totally deserted piece of beach before I felt comfortable getting in the water, whereas Cameron could have stripped down and jumped in pretty much anywhere. I also regularly looked around and realized that I was the only woman doing whatever I was doing—eating soup on the street, being out after dark, drinking tea with the elders, riding a bike.
It’s the same in the village; my white skin and foreign origins act as a sort of trump card that gave me freedom to do things women are technically allowed but not really supposed to do. I’m not treated like a man, but I’m not treated like a woman either. I inhabit a space where white privilege is so pervasive that gender has little room to make itself known. It’s not exactly bad, at least in terms of getting things done, but it’s just disconcerting. I really can’t complain because if I were viewed as 22-year-old women are here, the villagers would be too busy trying to marry me off to listen to what I’ve come to do.
Taking these thoughts back to the village, I had the privilege of watching, and translating for, two of my favorite debaters as they fought it out over gender roles. Cameron and Mama S. are easily the two most opinionated people I know. It all started when I told Mama S. that Cameron is a few months younger than me. She was vehemently convinced that that just wasn’t possible. Baba then explained that, even if a man is younger than me according to the calendar, I’m actually younger than him because he’s a man and therefore he takes care of me. He further explained that, according to the scriptures, I come from man’s rib, which means I was created after man was. Thus, I will always be younger than and submissive to all men on the planet. I asked if that held true for their two-year-old grandson and they affirmed that the toddler is, in fact, older than me. At this point I just had to start laughing, but Cameron was still ready to argue the point. At one point, Cameron made the argument that I run and hike faster than he does, but he bikes faster than me, so we really are equals physically. Mama just used the point he made about biking as an argument in favor of the “men are better than women” point. Baba S. refused to believe that it was possible that I had an easier time climbing Mt. Hanang than Cameron did, and later told me in secret that he thinks Cameron must have been pretending to make me feel better.
The argument somehow expanded to talking about how we discipline children in the states, and who’s in charge of deciding the family’s schedule for the day. Obviously someone (preferably the father) has to be the stronger, meaner parent. And someone has to decide what the other does for the day. They asked what would happen if I woke up one morning and wanted to go to Katesh (a town about an hours’ bus ride away) and Cameron said no. Would I really still go without permission? Wouldn’t he beat me up until I agreed to stay? What terrible things would happen when I got home? We tried to explain that, at least ideally, relationships in our culture are based on mutual trust and equality—each partner does what they want, with respect for the needs and desires of the other partner. Baba and Mama S. just kept asking, “But who’s in charge? Who gets the final say?”
As the argument wound down, Baba S. announced that he had just one question left to ask: “Who pays the bride price?”
“No one,” I replied.
He looked at me like I had just told him that all cows in America have three heads. And that’s when it hit me.
My Tanzanian parents don’t care who’s in charge as long as someone is. Yes, to some extent, it’s about men being dominant over women, but on a deeper level, it’s about societies and families having a rigid structure. For someone living in a very patriarchal society, the concept of a matriarchal society is more fathomable and comfortable than the concept of a world where everyone is equally free to make choices for themselves.
The debate between Cameron and Mama S. raises provocative questions about the way international NGOs approach women’s empowerment. Seeing the questionable way women are treated in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and the remarkable amount of work they do compared to their (often drunk) husbands, the development community has responded by distributing aid money so that it benefits women more than men. It’s absolutely logical, since they’ve proven more trustworthy as well as more in need. Microloans, community development projects, HIV/AIDS education, farming technology, fuel-saving stoves, small-scale income generation projects—the new trend is to focus the majority of resources on women in pretty much every development effort out there. While I definitely think that’s a step up from focusing mostly on men, I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of leaving the men out. And I do see the men being left out of a lot of development efforts these days.
What’s the danger of a woman-focused, woman-led development movement? Do I envision a future Africa where women call the shots and men are destined to spend their lives following after their wives’ skirt-tails? No, of course not. But if we really want to be promoting gender equality rather than just the almost vacuous concept of women’s empowerment, we have to promote equality in our work on the ground and not just in theory.
