The Last Supper

Today I found myself at the head of the lunch table, staring down the corridor of 25+ hungry men (a double dose of disciples), mounds of rice, and a fish bigger than any I’ve ever seen, marveling at the urgency and efficiency with which they tucked into their meal. These are not starving people, at least not currently, although I can’t speak to their childhoods. Yet they must realize how easily they could be, how little distance there is between them and hunger, and therefore they eat with a purpose, like I’ve seen only Africans do. As I wasn’t standing in wait by the door for the lunch table to be set, I was one of the last people to arrive to the table, and found myself picking through the dishes to put together a full meal. The food culture that exists here doesn’t seem to be greed exactly – if you show up at lunchtime at the home of a Mozambican, they will insist that you eat. Yet when everyone has their plates in front of them, it’s every man for himself on a mission of nutrition. Not having suffered through years of famine and civil war in the not-so-distant past, I can’t personally feel where it is they’re coming from.

The reason for this gathering of 30 people (3 of which are women) is a week-long training in construction of water tanks for rural areas where water catchment and conservation is tricky. The trainer arrived from Bali, and as he speaks English but no Portuguese, I quickly became the impromptu translator. That was yesterday’s task, and I was treated very professionally as such. Today, however, the manual labor began, and try as I might to shrink myself and blend in by doing little tasks, there are a few men in this group who insist upon calling attention to my womanness. (In general, I have found the men here to be very respectful of me as a professional, but once we break down initial barriers and they learn I’m not a white ice-queen, some of them step beyond the line I appreciate.)

No matter what I did today, I couldn’t escape it. “Hey Mica, why don’t you try to saw? Haha! Or you could dig, heh.” And yet had I picked up the saw, everyone else’s work would have come to a screeching halt and I would have been, to borrow a friend’s phrasing, like a polar bear in a cage. So I ignored their urgings as long as I could before finally asking “Why is the idea of me sawing so entertaining to you? Is it because I’m a woman?” Now obviously, we all knew the answer to that question, but it was the best way to bring attention to their passive harassment, however harmless they assumed it to be. They answered yes, that’s why, and I responded tartly that where I come from, being a woman doesn’t make that much of a difference in such matters – another half truth, but it gets the point across: don’t belittle me and I will participate as an equal. It doesn’t help that I am half the size of most of these men, another reason that their face-stuffing is so curious… Anyway, in response to my comment, one of the 2 other foreigners present at this training announced, to my satisfaction “It’s just because they’re not educated on gender matters” and their giggling trailed off as they looked down at their feet and mumbled something about being educated, perhaps slightly embarrassed or maybe I just imagined it. Either way, I felt like somehow I won this, one of the battles I had chosen. And I do pick them. Every day. As wisely as I can.