Journal Monday, March 3, 2008

It feels like a long time since I've written in here. Here I am sitting on my porch, admiring the view. The sun is setting in a pinkish fashion this evening, and I'm not sure how long I'll be able to write, but I feel as if I had an interesting day, perhaps one that is worth writing down.

It's had some ups and downs. I got up this morning around 7:30, to the sound of Na at my door with breakfast in hand. Breakfast was beans leftover from last night, a treat for me. Jelika had saved them from the night before because I didn't get to eat any (and I had bought them in the market that morning) because I went over to Dao's house to eat last night. Two of the CAA professors were going to leave and zork in a different place and all the other teachers had a party for them. It was a very male-oriented affair - all the teachers from the school were there, plus Hamadoune and Baliandou from IRCT. They sat around playing cards, listening to loud booming music and drinking tea (for what else to men do in Mali?) and I sat around feeling fairly awkward as usual. I got some of them to teach me the game they were playing, which was a bit more complicated than the usual Mali UNO game. I kind of got it, played a few hands.

Then Dao stood up and gave a speech about all the good work that they had done the past year, and awarded them each a new mosquito net. Actually, I was selected to give them the mosquito net, I think because I was the only woman there or because I was the toubab. After this little ceremony, I sat around for a while feeling restless and then finally begged off to go sleep.

In any case, none of this has that much to do with today, except that when Dao came over to tell me about the meeting of the men, he also said that he had arranged a meeting for me with the ladies at IRCT. We had talked about going back to IRCT and N'Tarla to have another meeting with the people there about work, after I complained a few weeks back about having nothing to do. So he said the plan was for me and Abou Diabate to go up to IRCT in the morning to talk with the ladies and then up to N'Tarla to greet the dugutigi and set up a meeting there. Dao would go himself but had some business to take care of for the school.

So this morning, after having eaten my beans and spent a half hour or so working on digging a pit I'm going to put compost in, Abou came by and we went up to IIRCT together.

IRCT is the research institute up the road 4 km from Ferme, and it's fairly well off - Id say even more well off than Ferme - they have electricity and a tap water system. Whenever we do baby weighings at the maternity on Wednesdays and a giant baby shows up with a well clad mama, you know that they came from IRCT or from Ferme. I guess this is part of what made me uneasy about going up there - I wasn't sure if I really wanted to concentrate my efforts on helping a group of people who are already fairly well situated.

When we got there, we greeted some of the workers and then went to the "center," where the women study Bambara sometimes. The meeting was to be held there. It took about 45 minutes, but eventually the place filled up and we began the meeting. It mostly consisted of greetings, then some explanation on the part of the women as to what their current activities are. During the rainy season for a number of years now, the women have gone out to work their field together, harvesting peanuts and two types of millet. During the cold and dry seasons, the ladies take the money they've made from the farming and individually partake in small commerce activities, returning money to the caisse with some interest later on. They've made a fair amount of money this way, and for the past few years have been trying to get things together to have a garden as well. Things have started to fall into place as far as that is concerned in the past few months. They got permission to use some land near IRCT as the garden, dug one well, got the president's (of Mali) wife to donate garden tools somehow, and are using all of their money to take a loan out of the bank to dig another well and clear some of the land. They need some money, however, for a fence which they said would cost between 500 and 1000 USD. They also said they were looking for some money to help with books to study for their literacy classes and buy a blackboard.

After this explanation, I was asked to speak and explain where I stood on things. I said I couldn't say what I could do as far as the money was concerned at the moment, but maybe once they got the garden going we could bring some people in to do formations on gardening. Abou pointed out that they needed money to get things in order before they could do any formations. Which makes sense, and thinking it over now, I think that might have been an insufficient answer to give them. But I wasn't really prepared to be asked to give money right on the spot and give a definative answer. And I told them this, that I wanted to go look at the garden and talk to PC a bit and know them a bit better and then maybe start a project. But Abou kept bugging me to clarify my answer and objecting that maybe I hadn't understood when I felt like I had said what I was going to for the moment. And then I felt annoyed and uneasy and kind of guilty that I couldn't answer right away. Then Rosaline, the president of the women and a tall and sort of impressive woman, asked what I could say to the women so they would keep up their spirits. That annoyed me even more, but I said they had done good work and God willing, they would be able to do more good work. Which felt kind of insufficient again, because the way they had presented it, it wasn't just God who had the power to decide if they would do more good work, but me.

So basically, I felt kind of bullied and uncomfortable. But then we took a turn around the area where the garden would be and I began to perk up a little more; it felt good to be out of that particular situation. The garden area was very large, and I'm not sure exactly how they're planning to water everything with the two wells they have planned, assuming they use the majority of the land. There's a large stretch of land covered in underbrush that they said they're going to try to clar, and one well that is already dug. All in all, things seemed remarkably in order, especially for Mali, and I began to think it might not be a bad thing to try and help them with some money. They certainly give the impression of being well-organized and motivated.

I still felt a bit annoyed, though, as abou kept saying how I could just help them with this and explaining the situation over again, just in case I hadn't understood the first three times.

After our turn around the garden, we went to Rosaline's house, a large house typical of the area, and sat down and talked for a while, a bit about PC and a bit about Ferme and a bit about the ladies at IRCT. Well, actually for the most part they talked and I picked up what I could of what they were saying and once in a while someone bothered to direct a question my way.

Then the remaining ladies left, leaving me with Abou, Rosaline, and Rosaline's husband. Rosaline's husband and Abou talked for what seemed like forever before Rosaline invited us inside to eat. They actually had a dining table inside with bowls and spoons for rice (the first I've seen of this in Mali) and I ate with the men while Rosaline ate outside.

After lunch we sat around for a while, then Abou and Rosaline wandered off to have a "meeting." They were in their meeting for a very long timem but eventually they came back, and when they returned I asked them what they had been talking about and abou said they were talking about marriage. How two people can respect one another in that situation. Since for various reasons I've been feeling lately like I understand the relationship between men and women in Mali less and less, and I was a little annoyed about the way they made me feel about everything in the morning, I decided to spark some conversation and told Abou outright that I don't understand how men and women here relate to each othere.

He said, okay, what don't you understand? I started off with why do women do all the cooking here. Malians always get a kick out of my insistence that men should cook, and it's my standard response to would-be suitors I meet on the streets to explain to them how my husband is back in Amerikim and by the way he does all the cooking for me, just to get a laugh out of them (or a look of incredulity) and distract them from their attempts to get my number and address. Abou explained how men do cook if there are no women around, but if there is a woman around, she cooks, and that's just how it is.

I then commented on how women do a lot of work here- cooking, cleaning, raising the children, and why don't men do the work, too. Abou said men do help with the children-take them to the doctor if they're sick, for example. And how men work and women work, they just don't do the same work.

So I asked then, what about education? Why are so many women here less educated than men? This was where we started to get a bit more confused. Abou said something about women reaching the age of puberty and then running off and thinking they could act like men and go "tulonke" (play) and get pregnant. And how it was their fault if this should pass and they will have shamed their parents. How in Mali, it's very important for people to keep their dignity and having a daughter get pregnant robs them of their dignity. I made some further inquisitions and learned that in Mali, it's always the woman's fault if she gets pregnant. According to Abou, it's always the woman who goes to the man to get pregnant, never the man who initiates the sexual relationship.

That made me so mad. I guess I was asking for it, and in a way it's good to have had the conversation, but it left me feeling kind of sad and disillusioned that my friend thought these things. And Abou seems to me a very honorable and good person for the most part.

So I said to him, okay, you're not going to convince me of your viewpoint and I'm not going to convince you of mine, but I guess we can try to explain things. And he said, that's true because we come from different cultures with different ways, and that's why we see things differently.

So I tried to explain to him what I thought, which is maybe just as much my personal version of things as much as a representation of American culture. I said that in my view, being pregnant outside of marriage is not a shameful thing in and of itself. It is something that has downsides and upsides, good and bad in it, but in and of itself it is not shameful, to the woman or her parents. And furthermore, that sex is a thing that involves two people, a man and a woman. And if the woman becomes pregnang, she can't point her finger and say it's the man's fault, at the same time as he can't to the same thing to her because they both decided to have sex.

Which seems to me perfect reasoning, but of course Abou just reiterated what he said, and to top it off said that a man can't force a woman to have sex. And I said he can't? And Abou said, can't she scream if she doesn't want it? Thankfully that was just a side conversation that I didn't ask him to explain anymore, because I don't want to think of what he would have said.

In the end, we didn't reach any big conclusions. Throughout most of it, Rosaline kept quietm though she made it clear at various junctures that she more or less agreed with what Abou had said. We agreed to reconvene on Saturday, because Rosaline said she would teach me some Malian cooking. The tentative agreement was for Abou to come along too and Rosaline made some crack about getting him a skirt for the occasion. Ironically, perhaps, I realized this evening that Saturday is March 8, Women's Day in Mali.

The whole conversation left me feeling ready to write a really long journal entry and get it all sorted out and compartmentalized, but I'm not sure if I can. I've always prided myself on being able to see both sides of an argument and to respect other people, but I realized there are some things I can't respect, even if I don't think I can really change them. I generally find Abou to be a very good person, and I know he cares for his wife and is very involved in helping out the women, but I just can't agree with him on this point. I suppose as far as pregnancy goes, it's not even the rule in American society that pregnancy out of wedlock wouldn't make someone feel shameful, or that some wouldn't point the finger at the woman. I don't agree with Abou that this is just a matter of our cultures being different. Yes, Malian and American cultures are different and therefore the roles of women and men are not going to be the same. But women are not naturally subordinate to men, and to chalk the kind of inequality that exists in this society up to culture is erroneous. Gender inequality exists in the US as well, but we identify it as a problem instead of just saying that it is they way God willed it.

Following this conversation, later this evening I happened by Mama Wedragu's house on the way home from watering the garden and stopped to chat as I do fairly oftern. We were sitting there talking when Adiaratou happened by and told us that Odile, one of the ladies who's been working at the maternity lately, had just had a baby girl. Which surprised me because I hadn't known that she was pregnant. Which then made me feel sheepish because she's the third one of my coworkers at the maternity in the past two months or so who has had a baby and who I didn't know was pregnant. And also, none of them had husbands. Add to this Bintou, also working at the maternity and also an unwed mother.

So despite having my head kind of tired from my talk with Abou, I had the same talk with Mama. Mama was in agreement that having a child out of wedlock was a shameful thing in Mali and said that if a woman had a baby out of wedlock people wouldn't come to the baby's baptism because the baby had no father. I explained to her what I thought and she tooke it in stride. Mama is completely aware of the injustice of the way women are treated here. She's constantly being held back by her husband from going to one social event or another and complains to me about it, even as she follows his orders. And she has told me numerous times the story of how her mother forced her to marry her husband when she was fifteen, even though she refused and wouldn't even go to her own wedding. And yet here she is, 25 years and seven or eight children later, living with him and doing as she's told.

I don't have any good way to respond to this. I don't know whether to ask her why she doesn't leave him (two of his other wives did, after all), just like I don't know how to feel towards Abou, knowing what he thinks about all of this. The bottom line, I guess, is that all of this is probably what most people in this country feel. They have this set of cultural beliefs to live up to and live up to them to one degree or another.

Somehow that feels insufficient. That doesn't feel like a conclusion but rather just another "mogo te kelen ye" (people aren't the same) cop-out. There must be some values that are constant, something that is right and something that is wrong, and something in between. I just feel at a loss to try and identify which is which.

Oh dear, my brain is tired now. I suppose I'll just have to keep some of these questions safe for another day.