I feel like
I’ve talked a lot about some of the girls in my life here – their situations,
their challenges, and how I’ve been working with them. The situation for boys and men, on the other
hand, is just as interesting, and I suppose challenging in its own way. I do a lot of work with SeneGAD, our gender and development group, and one of our
big pushes for 2013 is Men As Partners’ Tournees. Some of our Language and Cultural
Facilitators (LCFs), who are the Senegalese teachers who guide us as we learn
Wolof, Pulaar, cultural intricacies, and everything in between during our first
few months, have been trained to lead gender awareness talks for other
Senegalese groups. Some of the male LCFs
wanted to specifically target men for these talks, so we’re hosting them around
the country to lead gender discussions.
Personally,
I have a complicated relationship with males in this country. I live in a female-dominated household, with
only two host brothers, a quiet 14 year old and a raucous toddler. Living in a city, I deal with more street
harassment than a typical Peace Corps volunteer, and almost all of it comes
from males aged 15-25. These are the
people who yell at me in baby voices, hurl racial slurs at me, chase me and ask
me to marry them, and basically try to provoke me in any possible way for their
personal amusement. I’m sure there are
plenty of nice, upstanding men roaming the streets of Senegal, but for my own
personal sanity, I sacrificed interacting with them. Maybe this is unfair, but ultimately, it was
a survival mechanism.
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| Some great guys from my English class, including Pape Samba, who is somehow involved in every single project I've ever heard of in Thies |
Then again,
I’m also aware that men face their own challenges here. Certainly, I do think their lives are easier
than the lives of women. Women, after
all, are the ones who clean morning through night, cook all of the food, chase
after the children, lug water, and run errands.
During all of this, men are usually lying on mats and being responsible
for the labor intensive process of making tea.
That was sarcasm. You can make
tea lying down. But as my English class
of men, really great, open-minded men, once explained to me, men are
responsible for supporting everyone, their households, extended families, and
relatives. And in an economy where almost half of the
population is unemployed (in 2007, the CIA World Fact Book said the unemployment rate was 48%), that can be quite a hefty burden. The culture says their job is to have a job,
and when they can’t do that, they feel helpless: there’s nothing to do but try
and look busy. There’s nothing to do but
try to feel like they’re contributing, maybe by making tea for everyone.
I’ve tried to
take that perspective and let it temper the annoyance I have with the men I run
into every day. At the garage, which is
the transportation center, you can’t go two steps without some man accosting
you about where you’re going, then trying to direct you to a car or bus. I used to find this process incredibly
annoying – I know where the cars are, thank you very much, I take them every
week, I live here, let go of my bag, I can walk over there myself. I used to think that all of their aggression
and insistence was related to the prospect of getting a commission for delivering
a passenger. But I’ve since realized
that actually, most of these guys just want to feel like they’re doing
something.
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| Some of the great Life Skills coordinators and teachers from St. Louis and Louga. |
It’s the
same with the men we sometimes pass standing in the middle of the road,
directing traffic. They aren’t policemen
or traffic controllers or transportation leaders. They’re literally just normal men who stop to
take this up. The other day a male
security guard described how I would need to wait in a line before using the
ATM. Thank you, sir. I wasn’t sure what this progression of people
standing outside the bank was, and I had no idea that I should stand at the end
and wait until the person in front of me takes a turn. But then again, he just wanted a job to
do. I think they all might just be
normal men who want to feel useful. And isn’t that what we all want?
It doesn’t
help that Senegal is deeply entrenched in the talibe system, which sends young boys to religious
schools, or daaras, at a young age to study the Koran. In many ways, this system is a noble
religious tradition, keeping Arabic and Koranic studies alive for the younger
generations. But often, it becomes an
easy way for families to discard young boys when they can’t support them. Someone once commented to me about the lack
of orphans in Senegal. She attributed it
to the lack of AIDS crisis, which I think does play a part. But I also think
Senegal lacks orphans because overtaxed families hold on to their girls, who
can provide in-home labor, and send their boys to daaras instead of simply
giving them up. In a way, daaras are
culturally-approved, free boarding schools.
At many
daaras, there isn’t enough money to support the high number of students, and
the compulsory begging meant to teach humility becomes a necessity for running
the school and feeding the kids. At worst,
some corrupt marabouts make kids beg and keep money for themselves. Daaras run the gamut: there are good ones and
not-so-good ones, and there are some that incorporate progressive, French
schooling and some with frightening levels of abuse. The talibe system as a
whole obviously has all sorts of consequences for Senegal, but for me, one of
the most interesting is the sheer amount of teenage boys without real-world
skills it produces. As one PCV once
explained, so many boys leave their daaras with only Arabic fluency and the
ability to beg. They struggle when they
return home to their villages, and many end up back in the cities, hawking
phone credit, newspapers, magazines, or working in the garages – doing what
they’ve done best for the past 10 years.
And I think many of them end up as the bored, listless boys who can find
nothing to do except sit outside and yell at the random American girl who
passes by on her bike.
Women hold
incredible potential to develop Senegal further, and they should be
supported. But then again, men here are
not the enemy – like the women, they are trapped in a lot of systems of their
own. Then again, because men hold more
power, they have more power to change things.
It’s funny: whenever I talk to a Senegalese person about implementing
some kind of gender discussion for men, their agreement always takes the same
response – “Yes, because sexual abuse happens to boys too!” That is true, but let’s be honest: men
represent something less than 5% of sexual abuse victims, but yet, this is the
default understanding of men and gender in this country. In other words, few people have any idea of
the power and connections that men hold to shift gender ideals, and ultimately,
health, economic, and environmental ideals, for both women and themselves.
So here’s to
the boys and seeing how our new, male-centered gender initiatives pan out. And here’s to that hopeful day in the future
where I can be less scary on my bike and maybe even drop a smile or two to
passerbys on the street.
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| Two of my favorite Senegalese guys: my host dad and Mohammad |
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