If you aren’t wearing pants why bother with the shirt?

13 February 2012

Frank always makes friends when we go out in public

Daily observations often leave me with questions and comments that I’m not allowed to express or find answers to due to cultural sensitivity. Fortunately, I have a blog and enough of an audience who can help me ponder these thoughts:

1)   I know a woman who works in rural towns to teach mothers about health and hygiene. The catch of it is that her own 2 year old son enjoys going #2 outside, preferably in front of doorways, and also likes to poke, stomp and splash his own feces before it dries. I may or may not have stepped in some of his business recently, and doing so would not have been the first time my shoes have met human feces in Ethiopia.

2)   I believe the children’s song “head, shoulders, knees and toes” was written after the women’s dress code in my town. The other female PCVs and I have had a lot of discussion about whether conforming to this dress code is crucial for cultural integration, or if we wear pants we can discretely encourage some sort of women’s liberation movement. I wear pants frequently and I must admit I think Emma Goldman would be proud!

3)  Even though geography is taught in all schools children, and even adults call all white people China.” Conversly, all dark skinned people are accused of having Ethiopian ancestry. What I want to point out is that there are thousands of ethnicities in the world besides these two. Never in my life would I think that I could be mistaken as Chinese. It's actually a bizarre compliment.

4)   If your horse or donkey is vital to your livelihood why don’t you treat it better? So many people have a horse cart taxi, or depend on their animals to haul things to and from market. These animals are a status symbol between really poor and poor, and you think that people would be more proud of owning such an important asset, yet they treat their animals terribly. My fried Tarikwa told me that many Ethiopian’s are so poor they can’t afford to treat themselves well, let alone their animal. I understand this to some extent, but whipping your animal, or using it to haul until the load creates open and bloody sores seems avoidable to me. Horses cost around $100 here and donkey are even cheaper. The price reflects the monetary and social value people have for these creatures.

5)    Why wash your coffee beans 3 times if you don’t bother washing your hands to prepare them? If I make it 2 years without contracting typhoid it will be a miracle.

6)   At market there are at least 20 people in each area selling the same thing. Where is the innovation? Atleast pile your produce in a clever manner to make it more appealing. Twenty women with kale or potatoes or red onions or moldy butter or basket grass… well you get the idea. If I pick one over the other I immediately hear about how I offended those I didn’t chose. “My kale is beautiful, why didn’t you buy it?” When I point out that it all looks and costs the same they seem confused, like that has anything to do with it. Am I missing something?

7)  If you aren’t wearing pants why bother with the shirt? I’ve seen this mostly with children, and even a few grown men. Really though, if you don’t have pants what is a shirt concealing?