3/8/05

Happy International Women's Day, now get back to pounding the millet.

Is there anything more ironic than holding a celebration of women's rights, in a place where they may as well not exist? Being a man, I suppose I can only really observe this, rather than truly understand, but to me it seems almost like a joke here in Chad; "OK, you can have your Girls Day, but make sure my dinner's on the table, the laundry is done, and the water is hauled from the well." This is the sense I got from Marc, when I asked him if he'd be taking over anything that his wife normally does. He fixed me with the same "Are you from Mars?" look that small Chadian children gape at me with and laughed.

"No, that's women's work," he said. "Hauling water, finding firewood, taking care of the children, and making food is all women's work. If she isn't here, I'll do it, but that's her job."

I'm trying to imagine what my Mom's reaction would be to that theory, considering that she is the main wage-earner for our family, and it's my stepfather Kenny, who is in charge of cutting firewood, laundry, fixing the water system, and having dinner ready when she gets home from work.

Theoretically, all Chadians are equal, with universal voting rights, and equal opportunities for all. In practice, Chadian women seem to have three basic rights: the right to be utterly subservient to their husbands and do household chores from sunrise to nighttime, the right to be a baby factory, and the right to be denied an education. Of course, not every woman in Chad is like this- two of the trainers we had, Louise and Grâce, have Master's degrees in law, and although they are married and engaged (respectively), they have outside lives as well. The sense of second-class citizenship is instilled early on- I remember a situation that happened during our training that really struck me, and I simply wished I could do more.

We were doing practice teaching, and I was observing a professor at Lycée Feminin, an all-girls public school in N'Djamena. The lesson was on similarities and differences, and the teacher asked for things that were the same throughout all of Chad, and others that varied. He drew two columns, 'THE SAME,' and "DIFFERENT,' and looked for hands. The first few responses were pretty straightforward; everyone eats boule, not everyone speaks Ngambaye, etc. Then one girls hand shot up- the professor called on her.

"Women are inferior," she said. I sat up in my chair, trying not to look too shocked, as the teacher wrote it on the board under 'THE SAME.' Remember, this was at an all-girls school. This specific teacher had worked with the US Embassy as a language teacher for years, and certainly had a wider perspective of the world than most. But I guess when you get down to it, he was still Chadian, and some things just sound appropriate in this culture, like women admitting their inferiority to men.

I couldn't presume to guess what this must be like to watch as a Western woman, (although I'll make it a point to ask some of the female Volunteers when I see them next), but as a man, it's frustrating for me to watch and feel so powerless. Maybe I'm chickening out on this, and caring more about self-preservation, but I find myself regularly holding my tongue, or simply smiling and nodding when Chadian men make what seem to me incredibly insulting or chauvinistic remarks about women.

It happens at all ages, when I hear Livana say, for example, "leave the dishes, the girl will take care of them," 'the girl' being his mother. Or when Marc and I were discussing the grade reports I was filling in, and he unblinkingly told me "11 is a good score, but for a girl, the best is usually a 9." I noticed this the other day as well- I'd invited the best students from each of my classes to my house for dinner, which turned out to be five men and one woman. As I was putting dinner on the table, she jumped up and began serving food to the five male students, each of whom were sitting on the mat watching her. As she handed them their plates not a word of thanks was spoken- it was simply accepted that this was her job, even though she was just as much my guest as the other five. While we were eating she stayed on the edge of the mat, barely saying anything- traditionally men and women never eat together, and she clearly was having a hard time with it. I just wished there was more I could do, but I was afraid making an issue of it would cause huge problems. So, I let it continue, not happy with myself for doing nothing, but also realizing any attempt to change thousands of years of societal behavior would do no good. I even asked Marc about it recently, why it is that men and women never eat together.

"It's simple," he told me. "Men are men, and women are women."

Oh, OK. That clears it up.

Some would say that the reason we're here is to make change, to inspire Chad's development- while that may be a noble goal, realistically there's very little we can actually do. For my part, I try to do the little things, like thanking women and girls if they help me with something, asking tough questions where it's socially appropriate, and making it a point not to simply sit and stare if a woman is doing something for me. I even asked Agathe, the 13-year-old girl who cleans for me (I thought of trying to hire Livana or Ertchey to do it, but they'd probably simply order Agathe to do it, and keep the money- another compromise, I guess) why she acted so timid around me. I told her, "I'm a person, just like you," which seemed to make her relax a bit. I don't know how much of an effect little comments like that will have on her life, but maybe hearing she's equal from a man, and a white man at that, will help reinforce, and just perhaps things can begin to change...

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