I went to a village in an outlying district yesterday. I had to cover fully and wore the national veil. I went with a mixed team and sat in the back of the car with my female staff, who were also fully covered and veiled, of course. We turned off the tarmac road and entered into a maze of single track path, wide enough only for one vehicle, with walls six feet high along the sides. We encountered a problem when a bicycle rider with branches of wood across the back came towards us and there was nothing for it but to scratch on past him slowly. When we arrived we waited in the car as the men piled out until we were given the go ahead to get out, upon which we were completely ignored and walked straight through the middle of the men, our own colleagues and the men of the village, who did not bat an eyelid as we walked past their faces.
We went into a large open compound with bleached mud walls to find a woman, her daughter-in-law and a gaggle of children. The mother of the household had bright blue eyes and dark skin, most of the children were under the age of 10 and the daughter-in-law could not have been more than early twenties and on her second child, which in many ways in conservative. We lifted our veils and put on our head scarves, we sat on a mat on the floor in the middle of the compound in the spring sunshine and the children gathered around to look. My female colleagues introduced the objectives and themselves and me...with absolutely no mention that I was a foreigner. They used my newly appointed tribal name and let it rest that it would be understood that I was from the capital and therefore only spoke the other main national language and not the one of this area. Not a question was asked.
Having done our work with this household we said our goodbyes and moved onto another household, encountering a small room no bigger than 2x3metres wide filled to the edges with women and children. There was an obvious matriarch decades older than anyone else in the room, there were two young women with white-pasted faces and dark lipstick and sparkly clothes, there was a sewing machine with a dress under the needle, there were boy and girl children and one mentally disabled girl who they treated horribly. She was smiley and greeted us but her household would not touch her and made her sit in the corner though we ushered her to sit by us. They used the word for crazy to describe her. I don't know how she managed to have a smile on her face.
We had hardly begun the work we had with this group before a little boy came to the door and said that one of our male colleagues needed to see us urgently, we ignored him once until he came back persistent and the message came that there was a problem and we needed to leave immediately. So we said our speedy goodbyes, slightly heart in mouth as to what was so urgent, and met our colleague at the door. He said, slightly panting, that he was sitting with the men of the village who had become angry that we were talking to the women and without their permission and why did we want to talk to them as they knew nothing and that we needed to get out of there now. You don't want to vex the elders so we got out and went back to the house we started with and sat there for two hours waiting for the men to finish their work.
In those two hours I had such an insight into the life of a village woman from that place. In many ways that household was well off, the husband was an elder, they had an electricity hook up, they had space, they were probably rich by the village standards. But rich or not the lot of a woman varies little in such villages. The wife, of the blue eyes, sat with us the whole time, without a strong word she orchestrated everything that happened. The children got bored of us and began to play their own games, none of the girls were going to school - there was only a boys school in the vicinity and there was no way they would send the girl further afield to go to school as it is hardly a priority, what does she need to learn to read and write for. What she needs to learn is what I saw the women doing - cooking and sewing. It was a delight to me to be able to sit at the opening of the kitchen space, a cavern with arched and blackened cieling, and watch the daughter-in-law prepare bread. She crouched on her haunches and to her right was a pit fire with a gently domed dish resting on top, to her left on the floor was a plastic sheet laid out and covered in flour, with dollops of dough already divided and rounded, by the sheet was a bowl filled with a liquid looking dough which she adeptly snatched at with one floury hand and pinched lightly with the other in order to measure out how much she needed. She then patted it backwards and forwards in her hands and tucked bits under other bits and plopped it on the floured sheet, patting it with one organised little pat. Then she picked up one of the dough patties and swung it in her hands like a pizza maker, she spun it very thinly and then swept it onto the domed dish atop the fire, occasionally she stoked the fire in the pit by sweeping some straw from the floor into the pit with a poker. She kept one eye on the bread gently browning on the fire whilst tugging at another snatch of dough and preparing other patties. Once the bread, which was more like an enormous chapatti, was done she whipped it off the fire and flung it to the end of the sheet where a pile of these discs was steadily growing. She would be called a bread specialist or chef in any other country.
She would also be called a skilled artisan, as would her sister-in-law if you saw the handiwork that goes into the shirts they stitch for their men. In the typical regional style the front panel of the shirt and collar are embroidered with hand stitching of minute detail. I have never believed it when I have been told such things were done by hand not machine, until yesterday when I saw them doing it.
In the absence of school the children played in the pile of dirt and pebbles against one wall, the boys had a plastic truck which they used to imitate the construction trucks filling their backs from the dry river beds and discharging their loads at sites of reconstruction. The girls began playing a simple game with five stones in which they threw the handful in the air and tried to catch as many as possible on the backs of their hands, the ones they caught they scored, then the used one of the score stones to catch another from the ground by throwing it in the air whilst snatching at the one on the ground and carrying on until all of them were in the hand. Although it appeared so simple when I tried my hand at it I realised it was alot harder than it looked. And this is how the women and children of the household spend their day: not going to school, nor leaving the house, but learning the ways of their life as they will unlikely to know anything different.
That insight into the life of the women and children of a typical village household spurs me on to work for their inclusion, education, rights, in any way that I can with the tools and opportunities I have before me.
