"Obruni! Obruni!" they call out to me as I walk past them on the streets. A woman turns to her son, "Say, 'How are you, obruni?'" A little girl runs up and almost knocks me over with a big hug for obruni. "Eyyy, obruni!" Sometimes they talk amongst themselves as I pass--alert others of my passing. People stare; people smile; people wave. Obruni means white person, and where I am living and working, I am the white person. (Well, that's not exactly true. There is Sami--the volunteer who came before me--but, in this sense, she doesn't really count.) Being the only white person has been a really interesting experience, but it's not the same as being the only black person. Sellers, cab drivers, etc. assume I'm rich or ignorant (largely true, but I'm learning quick!) and try to rip me off. This isn't so much a big deal because worst case scenario they think I'm dumb and laugh at me, but I still pay a price that's lower than what I would have paid for whatever good or service in the United States. The people that I usually react to me with curiosity and adoration.
It has also been really interesting to realize that I feel much safer walking through the unlit streets of the Liberian refugee camp than I do walking down the streets of Boston at night. The fact that it is impossible for me to go unnoticed helps, I'm sure, as does the fact that the streets are no less busy at midnight than at noon. But neither explanation can fully account for the fact that I have experienced absolutely no sexual harassment in my time here--not a single instance. I don't get creepy up-and-down's; no one has put their hands on me; and the "hey"s I get are more like "whats up?" than "hey baby, lookin' good!"
The people that I work with have gotten to know me better, and I feel more like "the American" than "the white girl." (I'm not sure how to explain that exactly, but it feels different.) And of course we make light race jokes back and forth that serve to make light of cultural differences. For example, Sami uses the acronyms BMT and WMT to mean black man's time (what I've heard some Wellesley students refer to as "African time") and white man's time. The idea is that if a white person says let's meet at 9:30am, that means 9:45am latest, and when a black man says let's meet at 9:30am, he doesn't really mean any time in particular and the meeting is more likely to happen closer to noon than 9:30am, especially if it is a group of people meeting.
All and all being a white woman in Buduburam's not bad. Really who minds a random hug from a really cute kid? :)
UPDATE 01/05: The cat calls have started. Maybe they just had to get over their surprise, or maybe you just have to stick around long enough to realize that men are taught to treat women like animals everywhere.
UPDATE 01/08: I have at least one person ask me for money everyday. The first asked me for "something so that when I look at it I will think of you." Taken off guard, I did. They were headphones, which are actually completely useless to her. Another asked me to buy him time at the internet cafe. Another man asked me for a candy. A girl at the village said to me, "Bring me a ball...and a toy." Others ask me for my contact information: "I want to make friends, give me your contact info. Here is mine." They are looking for one of two things--money or sex--and instinct tells me it's more of the first.
When I walk with Morris, Joseph or Tony, I never have any problems. But I've realized that when walking alone, I like walking at night better. When people pass me in the shadows, they see an outline of braids and wrap skirts (lapas) and don't really notice my skin color. By the time I pass them and they do their double-take, I'm four feet past them.
There is several noticable differences about being a woman here, one of them being that there are hardly any mirrors here. As a woman, you are hardly ever confronted with the image of your own body, and any woman can tell you that there are times when it feels or has felt that way--a confrontation. The only time I've seen them are once in a hotel and once when the woman who braided my hair pulled it out for me to see it. Another difference is that "fat" is not an insult. It's kind of like saying "blonde"; there's potential for an insult there but more often than not it's a statement of fact. Being model-thin and overweight (obese) are equally bad. Being sickly skinny signals that you might be sick, which means you might have AIDS, which might as well be leprosy. Fat is phat here. Fat means curvy to very curvy (for someone my height, think size 10-18). It means that a woman enjoys food. Food is a metaphorical stand in for life and for sex. Big butts are also the ish here. Women as young as 2 wear strands of beads around their waist in order to "push the fat down" to "make the shape show"--to have bigger butts. Tony the cook tells me that it is also sexy when a woman's belt catches the light when she's in bed with a man. He also says that Liberian women do it right (he's Liberian) and Ghanian women do it wrong. Ghanian women, he says, wear as many as 6 strands of beads which can show through their trousers or dresses. Liberian women wear one or two, which is sexy. I was really skeptical that this tecnique actually works. I told him that it was genetic. If Liberians in the north have big butts and make babies with men whose sisters, etc. have big butts, then maybe it's genetic. Tony says, no, it's true. There's no way to say for sure. Correlation is not causation, but, then again, the Chinese tradition of feet-binding works so maybe it works similarly. Who knows.
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