A Cinderella Story

I recently went to Germany!  I will write about that wonderful vacation at a later time!  But I wanted to write about this now.

Last week, my host sister’s birthday passed by unannounced.  In a family where certain birthdays are celebrated with pizza deliveries, drinks, music, and store-bought cakes, this was less of a surprise than maybe it should have been.  Certain members of my family are certainly privileged more than others, and on some days, it’s still difficult for me to discern who gets what, and why. 

For example, most nights at dinner, we separate into two groups.  At one bowl, I sit with my host mother, host father, their grandchildren, and my cousin from France.  My other host sisters – girls who live at the house, somewhat distantly related to the main family – eat at the other bowl.  Sometimes our visitors eat at the first bowl, sometimes they eat at the second one.  And when my host mom’s daughter comes home on the weekends, she and her husband eat separately with their two children.  The daughter from her first marriage stays at the bowl with me, as usual.  The only method I can find to this madness is that maybe everyone invited to Bowl #1 contributes money to the house, while Bowl #2 is for those who give labor.  Because I certainly pay my share of rent, and the grandchildren and cousin have families that must pass on a lot of money to my host parents. 

But back to my forgotten host sister.  She eats at bowl #2.  Eating at bowl #2 also means you aren’t always invited to parties and family outings.  Or so I thought.  Until the other day, when everyone was preparing for a baptism party, and I saw that normally forgotten sister, Fatamata, getting her hair done alongside the grandkids.  “Are you going to the baptism?” I asked her, somewhat unable to hide my happy surprise.  She nodded, somewhat unable to hide her enthusiasm under her normally surly expression.  I watched her run around, giggling with the other girls going, dressing up in her fanciest clothes, trying on shoes, feeling important.

When it came time to leave, the whole family moved the car into the street and started piling in.  It was going to be a circus event for sure – nine people in a small five-seater.  I wondered how they were going to manage it.  And then my host parents found a solution: “Get out of the car, Fatamata.”  And with that, they drove away, literally leaving her in a cloud of dust.

I stared in disbelief.  They had literally just kicked her to the curb, without a thought.  Fatamata slowly slinked back to the house, her chin high, her usual stony expression back on her face.  She’s used to being treated this way by the family.  She hardly looked surprised, but I could tell she was disappointed.

I love my host family – I do.  And I know that they don’t think that how they treat Fatamata is anything but wonderful.  In Senegalese culture, when people open their homes to extended family members, simply giving them a roof and meals is seen as the highest form of generosity.  And to make up for that generosity, these kids – almost always girls – are expected to cook, to clean, to do the laundry, to do all of the manual labor, to do everything and watch the immediate family members get all sorts of things that they don’t.  It reminds me of Cinderella.

In the world I grew up in, children are told the Cinderella story and expected to learn empathy.  “The way the stepmother favors her own children over her stepdaughter Cinderella isn’t fair!” they say.  “She does all of the work and still has to live in a shoddy room with ratty clothes, while her stepsisters lounge all day in new things, forcing her to do their chores.”  But unlike how those kids react, I haven’t found many people who think this set-up is something worthy of changing in Senegal.  Cinderella used to be a typical, unchallenged way of life in our part of the world too.  I don’t know when the general opinion shifted it into fairytale territory.  But in Senegal, this is just the way it is.  Everybody knows and accepts it, especially Fatamata.

Almost all of the girls who won my Michele Sylvester Scholarships live with aunts, uncles, and extended family members.  I don’t know them well enough to know whether their lives are like Fatamata’s or not.  But I do know that one girl told me she wants to be a lawyer in the future so that she “can work to end the mistreatment of girls by their aunts.”  I’m pretty sure she, and most of the girls in my program, live that kind of life.  It also makes me think that some girls are starting to be angry about it, and rightfully so, in my opinion.

I know it’s far from my place to tell my family to treat all of the girls equally.  I know that even if I said something, they’d probably just laugh at me and think I was crazy.  But I can’t help the desire to make my other host sisters feel just as important as everyone at bowl #1, even if they don’t think they deserve the difference.