Hello
Everyone!
I know it
has been a very long time since I have written but the combination of really
poor internet access due to the rainy season and the fact that I have been extraordinarily
busy lately has meant that I have been avoiding any extra tasks (my blog sadly
being one of them!)!
A month ago
now (wow, time really does fly) I did a five day four night village needs
assessment trip! Each day I went to a new village to do a community member/villager
needs assessment...
Dawn breaks
at about 6:00am and music begins to blare from a battery powered radio in the
‘living room’ of the house. Bongo Flavor, the preferred upbeat music type of
this country, fills the whole house only to be masked, ever so slightly, by the
sound of scurrying feet, sweeping of the floor, rushing in and out of the house
to cook, and general house cleaning.
Before I
knew it a thermos filled with plain or milky chai (the Swahili name for tea)
and a small container of sukari (the Swahili name for sugar) would be sitting
on the living room table with either fresh chipati, a loaf of bread and blue
brand margarine (expensive luxury items in most parts of the country and
especially here), or pots of rice and beans sitting next to it. As the sun
began to rise each day the main front door to the house was opened to let the
cool air from the evening before inside to refresh the newly cleaned house.
This was
the morning routine I experienced everyday throughout my needs assessment trip.
After the morning routine was complete, the children and parents would head off
in their own directions until the evening. The children and mother, who was a
teacher, would head off to school, often walking many kilometres (depending on
the school they attended) while the father would take a bicycle to the nearby
village office for the Kiroka village, only to return in the late afternoon or
just before dark to prepare for the evening.
Gender
roles in the villages are much stronger than they are here in the town and I
found this quite fascinating during my stay. Even though the woman in the
household I stayed in worked a full time job, just like the husband, and took
care of the kids, she was responsible for the entire house! She had to wake up
earlier than everyone else to clean and boil water so her family could have warm
bucket showers in the morning, would come home and go straight to work on
preparing the garden and cooking for the family for the rest of the evening.
While talking to her husband at home, he bluntly said that she has to cook,
clean, and take care of the house for him because “[he] is the man of the house
and [he is] bringing home the money’, which I found out actually is not
entirely true because she also brings home money as a teacher there.. Needless
to say the continuous lessons I learned throughout my village trip about gender
roles were not really surprising, although sometimes were devastating to
witness. To avoid unnecessary tragic details all I will say is that empowering
women alone will not end what I witnessed, it also requires a change in consciousness
of the men in the community in order for real gender equality (yes, I am not
even talking about equity yet... that is much much too far out of reach at the
moment) to happen.
Needless to
say, regardless of the craziness that I witnessed things still went surprisingly
better than expect on this trip! From now on, to make it easier to understand
what I experienced, I have divided the rest of the post up into separate
villages.
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