Powerless

Monday, November 22, 2010

It’s been quite a week so I thought it best to blog sooner rather than later.

God answered prayer and I remained healthy all week for the class I was teaching. I had a cough in the mornings but it cleared up enough to lecture and I felt good most of the time. I don’t know how I would have managed if I had caught what Peter has had for the last month!

The class I was teaching was called “Gender and Peacebuilding” and I had the four pan-African peace participants in this class. There were three men and one woman but unfortunately the female participant missed most of the class due to eye problems. It would have been nice to have an African woman speaking to these issues but instead it was me, a white western woman with three African men. Oh yes, and the chicken. The one that pecked by the classroom door most days. Maybe she was there to give me a bit of support.

I really enjoyed teaching the first day as we looked at gender roles and stereotypes. There was lots of discussion as we struggled with the definition of equality. We finally concluded together that equality doesn’t necessarily mean being the “same” but it has to do with issues of fairness and justice. I used the analogy of a common dish of nshima that everyone dips into for their meal. Equality could mean that we divide the nshima into equal portions and that is your limit or that everyone takes what they need, more if there is a big appetite and less if you are smaller and don’t need as much. This seemed to make sense and addressed the fear that equality means that there isn’t enough.

But the rest of the week proved to be a challenge as we got deeper into the material and deeper into culture and beliefs. In our discussions I heard things like:

• “Women should take responsibility for their actions. If they get pregnant, it is their own fault.” (Uh, it takes two to tango!)
• “Women don’t make good politicians. In our country, we have a female MP (member of parliament) and all she does is sit in the capital city doing nothing. She doesn’t serve her constituents but just enjoys her salary in the city.” (From this example it is obvious that ALL women make bad politicians. Hmmm, I wonder if there are any male MP’s that do the same?)
• “Childcare should be done by the weaker sex.” (Women are the weaker sex apparently, if you were wondering.)
• “Monogamy leads to rape.” (The reasoning is that men have “needs” that can’t be controlled so if they can’t have those “needs” met at any time then other measures will be taken. No single woman can meet those limitless “needs” so more wives are needed.)
• “Women become prostitutes for their own sexual satisfaction.” (ARE YOU KIDDING ME?)

The statement about prostitutes seeking sexual satisfaction needs more comment. I was outraged and pressed these three men further on their understanding of prostitution. I asserted that while there may be complex reasons for why women choose prostitution, the number one reason is poverty. They discounted my assertion by saying it may be different in the USA but in Africa, prostitution is about female sexual satisfaction. Thank heavens it was time for our morning break because I was about ready to blow a gasket. During the break, I quickly researched on the internet and found four articles on prostitution in Mali, Nigeria, Mozambique, and South Africa. Each one argued that poverty was the number one reason why women go into prostitution. When I brought back what I believed to be irrefutable scientific evidence that poverty was the biggest factor, not sexual satisfaction, they responded with a story about a prostitute who just had a very high need for sex. In conversations later with Peter and Ryan and Molly, I finally grasped that for them, anecdotal evidence held more power than research. That is interesting to note cross-culturally but at the time, I was dumbfounded.

I am impatient (not a surprise by now to regular readers of my blog). I was easily discouraged about the attitudes and beliefs of the participants that I deemed ignorant. I wasn’t giving them much credit. Every morning, one of them would say, “I learned something yesterday. . .” and reveal that there had been new insights absorbed. But I was learning as well and gaining appreciation for some aspects of African culture that address gender issues. The one participant from Southern Sudan said that in his tribe, it was difficult to get divorces and it was rare for people to have extramarital affairs. This was because if a marriage split, because of infidelity or something else, money had to be paid. If the wife was to blame, she and her family had to pay back the lobola, or bride price. I was curious if the man also had to face some kind of penalty, and indeed they do. They may have to pay back seven cows to the wife’s family if he has an affair and/or ends the marriage. That is costly and a good deterrent, he said. And in Malawi, thirty percent of parliament is made up of women plus they have a female vice-president. Other countries in Africa have presidents that are women. So it isn’t that the West has it all together and Africa has work to do. We all have areas to work on regarding gender issues.

On the day we were discussing “manhood” and how there were multiple “masculinities” (meaning there isn’t just one stereotypical way to be a man), the students had an epiphany. After looking at stereotypes of manhood and how men suffer by narrow definitions of what it means to be a man, we did an exercise where we wrote on the board characteristics of an “ideal” man. There were wonderful words listed like: enthusiastic, nurturing, courageous, sharing, devoted, humble, self-controlled, cooperative, strong, etc. One of the men looked at the board and said, “Why is this labeled for men? Isn’t it possible for women to be this way too?” YES!!!! So then we talked about how these characteristics could be the ideal for both men and women, not divided based on stereotypes. We could focus on our common humanity, allowing for differences in male circles and within female circles and not limit or label people based on gender.

This week I also discovered the difficulties of trying to do crisis telephone counseling here in Zambia. The person in crisis was able to first call me using Skype to my phone but the money quickly ran out. I tried calling back but had been given the wrong phone number. As I was trying to sort out getting the correct phone number, I realized that I didn’t have very much “talk time” so Peter was able to transfer K10,000 to me. By the time I got the right phone number, the next day, I had found K20,000 more at the MEF tuck shop (taking the last they had). The talk time came in K5,000 portions so with each one I had to scratch the back and then call Zain (the provider) and type in the numbers to refill my account. It turns out that calling a neighboring African country is very expensive, something we had already been told by pan-African participants here at MEF, but that I discovered for myself. All that talk time only gave me about 10 minutes and then it ran out. We were really right in the middle of an important conversation so I had to find more talk time to call her back! I hopped in our car to quickly drive to the other side of MEF to try to find more talk time. The first place I tried didn’t have any but I was directed to a personal residence further on where they were selling it. I was able to buy K80,000 in K10,000 units. Back in the car, over the many potholes, and back to our house where I had to scratch off the backs of eight little cards and enter each one separately. Finally, I was able to call the client back and continue the counseling. We talked superfast at the end when I was notified that the money was running out, but by then we were pretty much through with what needed to be said. Crazy! Not to mention the fact that it cost $25 to talk for 45 minutes! Thankfully, the person I was talking to understood about talk time and the challenges of living in Africa and didn’t let that affect her.

With my class finished, I was no longer lecturing on power issues related to men and women. But we had a different sort of power issue to contend with. Peter and I dropped off the boys at their school for a movie night and we proceeded on to the Mukwa restaurant for a date. We elected to sit outside in the patio area since it was finally a little bit cool. After we had ordered mouth-watering Indian dishes and naan, we noticed that there was lightning lighting up the sky. There was no thunder though so Peter reassured me that the storm would pass us by and we could remain outside. Our drinks came and I was getting more worried as the wind picked up. As soon as I felt a few rain drops, I declared Peter wrong, with a capital W, and we moved inside. And none too soon, because minutes later, we were hit with a major storm. You wouldn’t believe the wind and rain and thunder and lightning. Peter admits he was VERY wrong! We managed to enjoy our delicious food but there wasn’t much by way of conversation because the storm was so loud. We were worried that the school would lose power and the movie would be cancelled but when we arrived to pick them up, around 8 p.m., they reported that everything was fine. There were puddles of water in the assembly hall, blown in by the storm, and a tree fell on the premises that was very loud, but other than that, it was all cool. We went the “back way” from school, avoiding the broken down truck at this one stoplight that makes traffic there horrible (it has been there a whole week already!). It was a good thing too because later we learned that a tree had fallen across the road on the regular route. We had almost made it home and were driving down the road to the MEF gate when we could go no further. A tree had fallen across that road too and so we had to turn around and find another way home. There are only two ways to get into MEF so we had to go all the way back into town and then proceed through townships and potholed roads to get home. We had some trouble finding the one road that we needed, partly because it was dark and raining, and partly because we avoid the back way unless absolutely necessary because it isn’t a pleasant drive. An hour later, we made it back home but the power was out. And we remained without power for the next 45 hours!!!

That storm did some major damage, I tell you. The next morning we walked out of the MEF gate to see the fallen tree that had caused our detour. They were working on clearing it, with axes and machetes, no chainsaws of course. We saw many fallen branches along the way. A sheet of asbestos roofing blew off Audrey’s house and there was water damage inside. A large section of the wall that surrounds MEF and is supposed to provide security, fell down. Trees fell and knocked down power lines in two different areas of MEF, causing our power outage. As time went on, our cell phones died and our computers lost whatever battery they had. No laundry could be done (darn!) and no baking, things that were on Saturday’s agenda. So we read and played games and puttered and kept hoping we would get power soon. Power was restored to the other section of MEF by Saturday night but not for us. I managed to make burritos for Ryan and Molly on our little propane stove and we ate by candlelight. Adrian joined us for lunch on Sunday as I scurried to use up things in my fridge and freezer that were going to spoil. Finally, late Sunday afternoon, power returned and we rejoiced!