Life in the Fourth Gender

Some countries have different ideas about women. How do you think it would affect you, and how would you respond, if you were treated as “less” than men? Curt asked in my interview.

Well, I guess I’d deal with it—somehow. I’d have to, wouldn’t I?

I tossed the idea back and forth, whether or not I should write about this, publicly. I like balance and satisfied readers, listeners. When I make a CD mix, I never put two rock jams in a row. Instrumental, then rock, then weird, then mellow. Never put two slow songs next to each other is a safe rule. So I feel I’m cheating you and all things balanced, with consecutive “downer” posts. But for my own sake, for honesty’s sake, there are things I have to voice. This blog serves as our journal, and I’ll want to return to this. Hopefully after I’ve grown stronger, and these present demons have vanished.

When various recruiters drilled me about gender inequality, asking how I’d feel if Daniel got all the credit for my own accomplishments, I shrugged my shoulders. We’re a team. He can have the credit, if it makes them happy. I won’t mind. Daniel explained to them that in the privacy of our own home and minds, the achievements would still be mine, and he’d acknowledge me for them. We were confident in our answer, and still partly are. But we naively thought that this would be the extent of gender inequality I would experience. I took my recruiters’ questions as Gospel, and thought the worst possible scenario would be patting my husband’s back for my own achievements. Big whoop.

It’s a small price to pay to get to do this. A small sacrifice, I said.

Just remember it’s hard to know what things will feel like, until you feel them. It may be easy to say now, Curt said.

As it turns out, Ethiopians have no trouble comparing Daniel to me, aloud, with no special favor given to either. Not once have I felt they were congratulating him for my own successes. They seem to see me as a smart woman, worth more than a “lesser half” of my husband. Unfortunately, this was the part of the test I was prepared for. It was going to be easy, and I was going to ace it.

In the past few months my true test has been showing more and more of its face. From June through February, it hid behind a rock, lurking in shadows as Daniel and I walked past. When March showed up, when my serial flasher struck a third time (on International Womens Day) and I needed a new route to school, when my Teacher Mentoring Program began and I had to start going every day, and there’s no Daniel at my side, the lurker left his shadow. He sits in full view on the rock now, waiting for me to pass, taunting me. Incessantly.

As a girl who has not once knowingly shown cleavage, as a girl who hasn’t worn shorts an inch above the knee since middle school, I am shocked at the way I’m looked at, sneered at, spoken to. My skirts are long, I wear sleeves, not a smudge of makeup, and yet every day I feel I could sympathize with the prostitutes of New York, walking bare-legged and nearly naked down dimly-lit streets. (You think this is hyperbole. It’s not; this is the best comparison I can find.) And this is something I wasn’t prepared for. With emotions I’ve never imagined.

Have you known what it’s like to feel like an object of sex and little other value? Every single day? I’ve found there’s a gradation of emotions. The first time, it’s an uncomfortable pinch. The second, it’s a strong shove. Third, a punch in the back. But by the fourth time, and sadly every single time exceeding four, it’s a nasty kick in the face—courtesy of stilettos. You can’t ever go back to that initial uncomfortable pinch.

I told you about a few weeks ago, the man who said, “You girl! Come here!” then got so angry that I refused him, that he followed me with F *** yous quite a ways down the road. When he crossed the street, he was still yelling it over the median. Well, let’s talk about this week. I’ll give you a glimpse into two consecutive days: Thursday and Friday.

Thursday I passed one of the high schools on my walk to Soloda school, where I would teach 6^th and 7^th period of 7^th grade English. Two boys lingering by the fence blew me kisses and winked. I shook my head no and kept walking. “F*** you! F*** you, you mother f*****!” they yelled back.

Friday, as I waited on the bench to pay our electric bill, a young man told me I was beautiful. Then he and his friend sat a few feet beside me, both of their heads turned for long minutes, staring at me. When I left there to walk to Adwa school, I passed a room full of men. “You! You! Girl! Girl? Hey!” I’ve begun ignoring every male voice above the age of thirteen in public. You can guess what followed. “F*** you! F*** you!” I left Adwa school to go to the post office (thank you, Lindsay and class for the school supplies). I was limping from my leg accident, not able to “outwalk” the high school boys behind me, like my usual fast, directed pace. “Hey baby. Hi baby. Hey baaaaby”—they took turns trying to say this in increasingly “seductive” voices. I ignored this. What came next: “mumble mumble barely-understandable-English f***ing with me?” That evening, leaving Soloda school with six 7^th grade girls, two of them holding my hands, walking on the college campus, they were telling me what their names meant in English. Tsegen means Ostrich, Luam said, making a noteworthy impression of a walking ostrich. When they didn’t seem to know how to explain their names in English, they substituted “beautiful” and “good.” We passed a college boy during this conversation, who graced us with his contribution. “Beautiful? Which of you is beautiful? Which is ugly?” he asked, scanning his eyes over all the 7^th graders, considering. Disgusted, I remembered my conversation with a young P.E. teacher here, as he pasted school photos of 8^th grade girls onto a poster for the school office. He shook his head in disgust, indicating the pictures. “They are not beautiful. Last year we had beautiful girls. They all went to secondary school. These are ugly.” I wanted to vomit all over his shoes. Instead I explained to him how rude and inappropriate his comments are, and as an adult he should not be talking about young girls’ beauty. Fast-forward to college boy judging my 7^th grade girls, and he seemed shocked when I told him, “Wow! That’s enough! You are so rude.” He defensively said, “I did not mean me,” (here I think he meant “you” in his faulty English), as if it shouldn’t bother me as long as he dubbed me as worthy of his eyes.

My defense mechanisms are failing. I can only shout so many times in Tigrigna: “Because of you, Ethiopia has become very ugly! Because of you! You are rude and ugly. Ugly culture. Ugly ugly culture!” It was so satisfying the first time, against the 40-year-old in the suit, especially when I saw it made him angrier. It worked. More than that, Tigrigna is probably the angriest-sounding language, even angrier than German. So growling and hacking strange words at him, with voice raised, was therapeutic. But every time after has felt ineffective. It doesn’t measure up against the knives of insults they throw first.

It builds up and becomes a tangible, crushing, sopping burden, more than you could guess. I feel like every youth group skit where a girl wears a backpack that people keep adding bricks to. I walk around with this backpack everywhere. If you consider that there is no relief—that I can bet, with a winning record, that every single time I am outside that gate without Daniel I will be sexually harassed, can you imagine maintaining a happy, light spirit? I feel like a changed, hurt, and angry person. I’m always on my guard, often with clenched teeth and hands, ready to push anyone who might try to touch me. I’ve seen signs of my liking of Adwa quickly diminishing, my beginning to generalize all Ethiopian men into one detestable category. I cry myself to sleep, injured leg propped up on a pillow, wondering if it could be worse, and blessing America.

Why are you crying?! Why are you crying? Don’t you have idiots in America? Teacher Hailu reamed me. (On that infamous Friday he had asked, “How is Adwa life?” and I answered truthfully.) Six teachers and I sat outside the library, waiting for the bell to signal class. No! Not like this. Not once has someone told me F*** you in America. For 25 years! But every day, Hailu. Every single day here. Why? (I stroke my arm.) Because I am white. His red eyes became redder, and he somehow seemed angrier than he normally appears. He started shouting that they are the f***ers, not me, over and over again, nice and loud for the library full of students to hear, with crude hand gestures to boot. Laughing through tears, this was the only relief I felt. Hailu so much resembled my protective grandfather, and for the moment, that was enough.

How is it that two people who share the same house can have completely different experiences? Daniel loves it here. No one sexually harasses a 6-foot married man. What makes it all worse is that these men know I am a married woman. The men who taunt me on our own road have seen Daniel and I, the married ferenjis, pass by them every day. And yet the moment Daniel is absent, they pounce on their unguarded prey with their propositions. As if the constant humiliating cat-calling wasn’t enough; they’ll disrespect my husband too. The sort of man they could never ever compare themselves to, and they’re rubbing his honor in the dirt with their asinine comments.

Last night I had a heart-to-heart with one of our beloved volunteers here, a strong woman in her sixties. She and her husband have lived in America only 8 years out of the 36 they’ve been married. They raised their children in West Africa, and have lived nearly everywhere, as strangers in strange places. They were volunteers in Afghanistan during the war. There are things we can obviously learn from these two. So she and I stood by our sink, pausing from the dishes. I told her I could barely take it anymore. We wondered how the Ethiopian women bear it; this seems heavier than the barrels they carry on their necks and backs for miles, barefoot. She told me about the week Doug was gone on a trip around Ethiopia, a month ago. She had the bajaj driver bring her 30 yards beyond his normal route, to her house, so she payed him four times his fare. He demanded 15 additional birr. She was being ripped off as a ferenji, so she refused. He began screaming and cursing at her, F this, F that, you F-er. She said she didn’t know how to respond. She was shaking, confused, quickly got within her gate, then began to cry. No one has ever spoken to me like that, she said. No one. This is a strange place.

If it is true that Americans, foreigners, are treated as a third gender in Ethiopia—treated entirely different from everyone around us—it follows that foreign women are a fourth gender. We’re at the level of loose, attainable floozies (to choose a less-offensive term, for the sake of saving asterisks).

As the bricks grow heavier, I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know what to do to make the bricks lighter. I don’t want to hate it here. “Adwa” may have lost its status as potential middle name for a daughter, but I certainly don’t want it to shift any further left on the spectrum of dislike. In the transition from March to April, I may have gone from “pretty happy” to “unhappy”, but I won’t leave. I won’t let these “men” win by ruining my stay, though they certainly are ruining it. So how does it become better? And does it? Do I just resolve to stay for the sake of these students, teachers, my dreams, and my husband, sad and unhappy? That’s the back-up plan. But I will pray this is a phase, that I will become numb and my back slicker, so everything can slide off. But I’ve always been an easy crier, and it’s already a miracle and great change that instead of crying with every F-word, I’m able to scream back at them. Who is that girl? Danielle in America would never muster the mean energy to scream at a stranger. But as of April 2013, I know I would find great pleasure in deliciously kicking any one of these men to the ground. I fantasize about this often.

When I think back to January, to November, and try to analyze what was different then, all I can come up with is that Daniel and I were always together when on the main road. I used to be able to take my hidden, unpeopled shortcut to school, until it became unsafe (props to the town pervert). The other option is that all of Adwa has a light switch, and someone recently switched it off in the night. Phrases such as “living hell” and “living nightmare” often come to mind, and I wonder if these men have any idea the power of words. They probably just think it’s funny, and maybe they don’t know what they’re saying. But it doesn’t make the blows any less painful. At least I feel safe knowing they won’t touch me, not in daylight on busy roads—but I’ve never wished the rhyme true more than I do now: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Adwa pulls the shortest straw in all this: because of just a portion of her men, everything good and beautiful about this town and her good people becomes sorely tainted. Even her majestic mountains become ugly: like a distorted filter is placed over everything in sight.

I’ve briefly considered investing in headphones and an MP3 player, so I can block it all out, hear none of it, for sanity’s sake, like Richelle and several other volunteers do. But I’ve been 10 months in country, and I still cling to my purse wherever I go, look around me in all directions, grip my high-power emergency whistle in my free hand, and take the term vigilance seriously. Like a hound with perked ears, I walk around Adwa in the same manner I bolt out of bed when I hear something suspicious. Wearing headphones is what they want me to do, a persecuted damsel in a conspiracy/action film would say. If I want to stay safe, I need all my senses on constant duty. This eliminates headphones. Perhaps when my leg heals, and I’m no longer a vulnerable wounded doe, I can go back to my hidden shortcut. The physically unbelievable Lisa Frank-like beauty of that route seems a symbol of the freedom and ease of mind that path provides. It’s also symbolic that the reason I can’t take this path is because of an Adwa man who lies in wait for young girls, pants unzipped. (Is this even real life?)

I keep repeating to myself Peace Corps’s slogan: The toughest job you’ll ever love, remembering that so many other women have trudged through this before, and are trudging through now. I can too.

Curt was right. You haven’t a clue what something will feel like until you’re in the middle of it. Until you’re staring at 13 calendar pages and telling yourself to hold on, that certain people have powers of redemption and may save you.

Like the 3 ½ foot fifth grade girl, on this particular dreadful Friday. I held onto my ace bandage for grip, and tried pulling my leg up the rocky hill with my hands. How can I climb this without falling backwards? (You’d laugh if you saw this hill and the trouble it gave me.) I was in pain for having walked 3 plus miles that day on an ugly rainbowed bruise and strained ankle. The moment I stop, hands on my knees, considering my options, there she is. Danayit! and tiny outstretched hand to pull me up.

Every time I see Meron. When she shows me how she wrote her name in Tigrigna with our crayons. When she dances and counts to ten. The first time I understood a full sentence of hers, in her quiet whispers: Daddy says you said you’re feeling better.

Teacher Hailu defending my honor in the roughest language, spitting as he shouts.

Writing notes to Lindsay’s wondering American fourth graders, explaining Ethiopia’s strange and different clock-reading ways. Thinking as I write this, This really is a cool place.

My own students and their eagerness, their love for me. Ephraim, Samuel, Biniam, Seble, Elen, Rahwa, Bilal, Mulugeta, Gezenesh, Tekle, Abeba. When they tell me they love me as I walk out of the classroom, it almost seems to cancel out the “I love yous” from the sneering men.

The sympathy of my husband. Daniel understands the weight of what I’m dealing with, and he hates it. The promise of quiet evenings reading Sherlock Holmes with my husband every night also works wonders.

And the entire Girimkil family holds powers they don’t know of. They know what they’re saying when they explain, “Sometimes, rest is good,” speaking of drinking coffee together, and the value it adds to our health.

I’m praying that in a few months there will be a shift in my spirits, a shift in our blog posts. I have a feeling that June 20-July 10 at home will be a time of healing. Three weeks of no staring, no air kisses, no professions of love, no curses. No one will even turn his head. We’ll return to Adwa to host a week-long summer camp for 50 Ethiopian Orphans and Vulnerable Children (females), and then three months of rest. Of not leaving the house without the other. I trust I’ll be refreshed, and will overcome.

I could taste this hope of overcoming, the promise that it may pass, the morning I lay on the couch, baseball bulging from my shin. Frozen pumpkin massaged the mass as I cried to Daniel, who bustled about the house trying to figure out whom to call, where to go, what to do and how. When he stepped out of the house to call the ambulance with Girimkil, I whispered in choked grief: I don't want to go home, I don’t want to go home. Let us stay. Don’t let it be broken. Please, Jesus. Please, Jesus. Let us stay.

So there must be something keeping me here. And it’s a strong something that detests anything or anyone who might try to sully it.