Wednesday 31 January 2018

Uphill Both Ways

One small positive in dating a local (other than having a souvenir) is that he unwittingly shares common cultural practices and colloquialisms for me to dissect.

Like the harvest song that the beneficiaries of his project sang to work late one evening – about striking the ground as though each blow was killing someone from a neighbouring tribe.  Most of my colleagues are from this tribe, and I’d heard stories of how, during one of the many wars that have plagued this nation, they had created artificial borders in order to catch (no release that hunting season) those not from their tribe by checking the pronunciation of a certain greeting.  At that time, I’d decided that this tribe was quite obviously stark, raving mad. 

Now I see that their foray into early immigration policies was possibly justified. 

This story repeats itself multiple times with different players:
-          Maashi vs. Babembe
-          Nande vs. Hutu
-          Banyamulenge vs. everyone else

I’ve further learned that locals apparently believe Europe is everything not-Africa and not-‘the West.’  Thus, Europe includes Australia.  So when I was part of a mental health training session where everything from mass shooting to euthanasia seemed to come from ‘Europe,’ which I clearly represented, I tried to stay calm.  Yeah, well, at least we don’t rape without compunction, or note ‘embezzlement’ as a job task, or kill people routinely due to the shapes of their noses, or...  I continued until I realised I was expounding on the theme that my culture’s method of destruction was much more civilised than another.  

“If divorce comes from the West,” I tried to explain rationally, “so did the emancipation of women – our ability to be economically independent and our right to be safe from abuse at the hands of our fathers and husbands.”  Does that mean good ideas came from Europe too?  Freedom?  Peace?  All from Europe, d’you think?

Indians tend to follow this fatally derailed train of thought as well:  Everything degenerate came from the West!

Yes, because burning a widow on the funeral pyre of her husband was brilliantly enlightened – pun fully intended – thank you.

No culture is perfect.  Quite frankly, we’re all bat-guano cray-cray, and the worst thing is that we’re proud of it.  I have a friend in the fashion and journalism industry who is of Asian descent, does not like being asked where he’s from, sometimes sports ice-blond hair, talks often about his ‘spirit animal,’ and bemoans a white girl ‘misappropriating’ a hanbok

We’re so blindly unreasonable in our judgements of right and wrong without being willing to do anything about them.  So I listened to doctors and nurses at the end of a mud road in Central Africa note that ‘Europeans’ are savagely individualistic, uncaring swine, and Indians are quite hopelessly backward for their beliefs in a pantheon of gods.

“If I marry in India, they’ll give me a dowry?!  We should start a campaign!!”  
- Father of 10, grandfather of 16

When yoga, named as a form of exercise and relaxation, was also identified as coming from Europe, I’d had enough.  “Actually, yoga originated in India.”  When all eyes turned to me for a demonstration, I continued, “Indian Christians generally do not practice it because it was intended as a form of worship.”

Which was when the entire room realised I wasn’t Muslim and blessed me in the name of the Lord. 

I gave up.  I’d been violently feverish most of the weekend, had only been partially lucid for most of the day – for example, when we had an apparently serious discussion on the chances and consequences of an epileptic fit during sex – and had realised that being the only woman and foreigner in the room was not ideal.

Settling our bill at the local hotel was another adventure as I was apparently the only one who wanted an official, completed receipt for the nights I stayed there.  The manager calmly offered us all completed receipts even in the face of incredible pressure, so I shook him warmly by the hand and congratulated him on his principles before scampering out behind my frustrated friends.  Once outside, I held out my hand and received an empty receipt that one of them had threatened from one of the workers in the office. 

I carefully folded the slip of paper into my pocket, blaming my tight throat on my recent illness. 

Finally on the long, long way home, using public transport that took one hour to make absolutely certain that it was impossible to fit more than 22 people in a 16-seat bus, at 4:30pm on Sunday evening, I started a war of the sexes on the bus.  My session co-facilitators seemed somehow convinced that women were the greatest obstacle to adequate family planning.  One of them cited a BBC article in which a group of Rwandan men were apparently lobbying to sterilize themselves because the women around them were incapable of understanding that ejecting a 3-4kg human through their vaginas every year from the age of 18-65 was infeasible. 

Right. 

While I have no doubt that there are many African men who would be willing to follow principles of family planning for the health of their wives and the success of their children, the notion that the majority of African women are so pious that they cite the Bible while pulling their husbands to bed after a day-long struggle for food and water, all while breastfeeding two toddlers seems… unlikely. 

One gloriously forthright woman took up my banner and said that men were the problem, citing her own example.  Neither of us denied that most women wanted children, but my understanding was that local women were generally content with 5-6 spaced over a longer period.  The men whom I’d questioned, on the other hand, had humbly stated that they would accept as many children as God gave them – which, as far as I can gauge, means 8-12 living offspring. 

Though I cannot fault this Christ-like obedience, I wonder if their opinion would change if their bodies were affected at all by pregnancy and labour.

This resulted in a spirited conversation that took over the whole bus, with the single women and the men on one side, and the married women and me on the other.  During this trip, it was decided by the men that ‘European’ women didn’t want children.  This came from yet another state-employed official who usually tries to convince me that foreign donors are stingy and should budget a regular salary for his fellow citizens (from the health care professionals to the community leaders) for the hard work of accepting training in identifying mental illness and offering trauma healing for their own population.  In addition to increasing the amount they pay him to teach.  Oh, and perhaps also a little something for the poor villagers who come for individual counselling, group therapy, to learn about sex- and gender-based violence, etc. 

As I usually bite my tongue in order to keep from throttling him with it, I also ignored this straw man in the face of the bigger battle – that we all have preconceived notions that take courage to face and change. 

And I wondered how long this journey would take. 

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