‘Hope’ and ‘Will’

Having had Muslim/Christian morality rammed down my throat in training and starting off being paranoid about showing too much leg and having a beer in the bar I now wear pretty much what I want (H is forever pulling my skirts down over my knees on the moto) and don’t feel remotely guilty going in the bar for an odd beer AND talking to the men there. I realize I am not liberal about sex at all, but that I have very strong feelings about love and relationships that are totally alien to how many people think here. I am certainly not going to be preached at by any Bogo-ite about morality when I think most show such an appalling lack of concern about the future for their young. To be fair nobody has preached to me at all. I get treated with great respect and affection by the average person on the street. Because there are 4 nasarras in Bogo and they think all white people look alike and can’t differentiate features it has taken them a few months to realize I am about 20 years older than the other 3 and they now call me mama nasarra. In many respects, other than pecking order on the buses about who gets to sit on the front seat, I get treated like an honorary male.

 

The other day I was working with a woman in her home who is about 30, speaks very good French and has 2 teenage girls. She does my workshop catering and by African standards is quite wealthy and her girls go to school. The complexities of catering for 70 people became apparent as she herself can’t leave the compound and has to send either young children or men out to buy the food. It is not even a nice compound. They don’t do gardens or flowers here. There is no green, just cramped togetherness. When we left I said to H, ‘how can she give her girls a vision or dreams for their future when she never leaves that space?’ ‘Vision? Espoir (hope)?’ H scoffed. ‘What do they need with vision and hope? Those girls will marry at 14 and stay in the compound just like their mother’. Such a thought depresses me, but what I need to accept and understand is that the majority of women here just accept it with no desire to question.

 

So all my American self-development theories of having the vision, and planning towards it in incremental steps, that has worked pretty well for me (with allowances for the fact that those in your plans may have their own ‘volonte (will)’ that doesn’t, unfortunately coincide with yours), is just irrelevant here. When Bogo-ites start on ‘c’est la pauvrete’ (it’s poverty) I think no it isn’t, ‘c’est la volonte’, but the truth isn’t as simple as that.

 

I have long conversations on these issues with my French/Fulfulde teacher Jean-Poste (with 2 of his children above) such as whether they should start a programme about family planning so that people have less children and may then be able to afford to educate them, but he is catholic with 5 children and both the Catholic and Muslim faith don’t do contraception. There are concerned people who have tried to run small business workshops for the young female prostitutes on the market, but pretty much as people complain of young unmarried mums in England, they would rather hang out with their babies and mates chatting.