It’s currently 4:24am and I am wide awake. I tried going to sleep five hours ago, and spent hours staring at the top of my mosquito net, so I am allowing myself to open up my laptop and start writing a blog. For the past week I have been having difficulties sleeping, always falling asleep hours after I first climb into bed. I feel like I am falling back into the sleeping pattern that I have during the school year – my mind racing all night and being exhausted during the day. I think it might be because I am going home in 22 days. When we first arrived in Tanzania, I was sleeping at 8 pm every night. I didn’t have worries about the future, and I didn’t get anxious about all of the things that I need to do back at home. However, as August 17th approaches, my brain it seems has designated the hours between midnight and six am as the hours where I figure out my life. There are appointments I need to book, my trip to Texas I need to plan, O-week and sophing, things I need to buy for the new school year, races I want to run and need to sign up for, applying for jobs in the school year, and the list goes on. This crazy jumble of things that I need to plan are making me realize how much I am going to miss the relaxed pace here, the same relaxed pace I was initially frustrated with when I arrived. I love the nature here, the friendly environment, and the beautiful sunrises and sunsets. I am going to miss going on two hour walks with my roommates through Mwanza, buying bananas from people sitting on the road, and taking in the beautiful rocky landscape without worrying about so many of the details that trouble me back in Canada.
Field Study in the Mara Region
Last week I had an amazing opportunity with Kivulini. I was able to travel with them for six days to three different rural districts in Tanzania. We spent two days in Magu, two days in Bunda, and two days in Tarime, gathering research for an evaluation on their training program. I was lucky enough to get to go and sit in on interviews and focus group discussions about gendered violence, HIV, and power in communities. I learned so many interesting, and also unsettling things. Some of the responses in the interviews shocked me… they were responses to questions about violence that I had never even considered before. For example, one woman told me about the Musoma tribe she was a part of, and how in that tribe beating your wife means that you love her. She told me that if a woman is not beaten, she feels insecure because she doesn’t think her husband loves her. I have been trying to wrap my head around this concept for a week, and I still can’t grasp the belief system behind it. I also heard many stories about female genital mutilation, and was surprised at its prevalence in some villages. A key reason that female genital mutilation occurs, according to many of the men I spoke to, was that they believe if a woman has part/all of her clitoris cut out, she will no longer be interested in sex and therefore won’t cheat. Apart from the health consequences that negatively affect a woman who has been circumcised, the process of female genital mutilation is unjust and cruel in that it prevents a woman from enjoying sex. By doing this, it makes the act of sex entirely for the male’s pleasure – giving the male a clear power over the woman. As well, one of the reasons behind FGM (to prevent a woman from cheating), means that FGM not only harms a woman physically and sexually, but it is a way of controlling her. Hearing so many stories of FGM really struck a chord with me.
From this six day field study, I am writing a report for Kivulini on the results and improvements that can be made to the training to make it more effective. I am also currently working on a paper for an independent study I am doing for a course credit, and am struggling with writing it. I have experienced so many things that I don’t know where to begin or how to be concise.
Conversation with a Law Student
I had an interaction the other day that I feel like I should share. I was walking on the SAUT university campus and a male student came up to me and started talking to me. He asked me many questions about Canada, and then began asking me more personal questions. When he asked if I was married, I laughed and said no. He then asked if I had a boyfriend, which I also replied no to. He then asked me if he could be my boyfriend.
I told him no, and then asked him why he wanted to date me when he had only known me for two minutes. He told me that it was because I was a mzungu. I proceeded to tell him that if he wanted to date me because I was a mzungu, that was a ridiculous reason. It’s just skin colour. I could be the worst person in the world, but he wanted to date me solely for my being white.
THEN, his response is what struck me; it confused and infuriated me.
“You are from the Western world. You have brains. Tanzanian women have dormant brains. They can’t think.”
I have been made very aware on this trip of the low respect and lower status that women have in Tanzania. However, I would have thought that this low respect would apply to all women globally (as horrible as that is), but instead here was a law student explaining to me that white women could have brains, but Tanzanian women were not able to think. I have to admit that I got into a bit of a debate with him here… I told him that maybe Tanzanian women here don’t have as much access to school, and therefore can’t be educated and use their brains (which are the exact same as mine) to learn as much as I am able to. I also told him that on the SAUT campus I see MANY students who are girls, and that I was positive they were intelligent and could easily be smarter than him or me
I think this situation really bothered me because of the positive attention he was giving to me, while he spoke so lowly of the people of his country. It made me once again question the way I am viewed by people while I am here. It also made me realize how real the after effects of colonialism are. Initially coming here, I would have never argued back with him, but now that I have been here for over two months I felt like I could. And I’m glad I did – women in Tanzania deserve respect just as much as any other person internationally does.
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It’s coming up for 5 am so I am going to try the sleep thing again (hopefully with more success than I had earlier). I’ll be seeing you in 22 days Canada.
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