to be a woman

"so, becca, after being here for 18 months, what can you say is the hardest part about your service?"

"hands down: being a woman."

several times recently i have been having a conversation with a mauritanian man, someone i've known through the majority, if not all, of my service. and i think to myself, he's just not like the others. maybe this is the one mauritanian man that is not going to bring it up. and then immediately, like he can hear my thoughts, he asks me why i don't marry him and take him to america with me. get him a visa. give him money. i am american after all, aren't i? and there goes one more.

i politely explain that it's not nice to ask americans about their marital status or that i don't know anything about visas, or that, by the way, we marry for love in the states and that if you ever want to marry an american woman you don't tell her that. some apologize, some continue to try their charms, some make some backhanded comment about how they thought we were friends. this happens several times a week.

or i go to see my mayor. he tells me, without greeting me first, that i need to fix the solar panels at the girls' center because he needs to charge his phone. for the record: greeting is the most basic thing that people do here. it's the first thing you do when you see someone, and the more you greet, the more respectful you're being to someone. most greetings last at least a few minutes before anyone says why they're paying a specific visit. and i don't even deserve a simple "bonjour." this from a man that i am at least 6-7 years more educated than. this from a man who has a position because his family has had power in the village since it started. this from a scrawny pulaar man that i could probably pick up and throw at least a few meters. i don't even get the respect of a small child. not even that.

the gens d'arms essentially act as the police here. they rotate through different villages on a weekly basis. i hadn't seen this one guy for a few months, so i was saying hi to him in the streets. one day sala and i were sitting in our friend djeinaba's restaurant, and he was there. he started the whole marriage talk, his approach being that he was "very interested" in marrying us, and not seeming to understand that that doesn't matter for an american woman if they're not interested. getting really annoying, almost harassing. and then djeinaba was getting our plate ready.

djeinaba is a pulaar woman, and my best friend in town. a really stellar human being and one of the few people who i think has any kind of gist of how hard it is for us to be volunteers here. she only speaks pulaar. she asked the man in pulaar, when the plate was ready, if he would come and sit to eat with us (this is very common. when food is served anyone within earshot is asked to sit and eat. she was being polite). he said, in pulaar, that he didn't eat with women. fine, no big deal. a lot of men don't eat with women. but then he switched to french, so that only sala and i could understand, and said

"i don't eat with women, i sleep with women."

i wanted to throw up. and this was a police officer in a public place and nobody else even batted an eye. his language switch meant he intended the message for us. maybe a dig because he had been so rejected by us. maybe a sick attempt at an offer, since we ARE american women, so clearly we must sleep around.

i wanted to hit him. i wanted to get up and yell. but there is no officer above him who wouldn't just think that was funny. there's no one to answer to that would see something wrong with it. and yes, these are things that local women have to deal with, but it's to a different extent. everyday i stand out because i am white (a refreshing experience at first, a frustrating and tiring one after about a month), because i am american, and because i am a woman. and for some reason that gives people license to harass me more than other women, and with no fear of consequence.

the single thing that i miss the most about america is my right to demand respect. and i am reminded of it's absence here every day.