Women's Rights and Hypocrisy

UGH ok I am getting more and more frustrated with the way women are treated. It’s not even so much the division of labor – women = housework; men = providing for the family – as the nonchalant way that men can say, as though stating fact “well, women are the weaker sex.” GAHHHH

Mom: to answer your question about whether I have to follow the cultural norms, no. As a guest, I have been treated like the men (I always eat with the men, I'm served first, I'm mostly able to interject my own opinions (if they stop talking long enough for me to politely get a word in edgewise) etc) and I get to talk to the women and help out in the kitchen. So I guess I'm getting a bit of both worlds.

Santo, as fascinating as he is to talk to – when it comes to his opinions on Ugandan politics and his ideas of human rights and how they clash with mine – can also be incredibly frustrating to talk to. He really likes the sound of his own voice (seriously, he was BORN to be a pretentious professor) and he’s one of those people who state all of his opinions as fact. When we were talking about Uganda-specific issues this was a little less apparent, though I was aware of it to some extent – I was mostly interested in his opinion sort of as a case study of a local and non-Western opinion. When he tries to talk about things outside of Africa, however, it’s really obvious (“Well, the British race is the most populous race in the world because all Americans and all Australians are British so when you combine all of those people it makes the biggest race.” FALSE and FALSE.)

More frustrating is when he uses the terms “human rights,” “justice,” “peace,” “Obama,” etc as vague, sort of interchangeable terms for “everything right in the world.” Sometimes I think he just throws these terms into whatever he’s saying without thinking about what they actually mean, so that the sounds like he’s right. He also clearly doesn’t consider the equality of men and women to fall under human rights – though he’s quick to repeat that all people are equal.

But MOST frustrating is when he contentedly lectures that Christians like him believe that a man should only have one wife – something he repeats fairly regularly. [Side note: They seem intent on knocking religion into me, so soon I’ll know all sorts of “hallelujah” songs and how to cross myself in Acholi. Just what I wanted!] Now, I knew that he had had a wife before his current wife, but that she died ten years ago. I was a little suspicious of the timeline because his current wife (Daisy)’s oldest daughter is almost my age. But I didn’t ask questions, mostly because I was completely overwhelmed (and still am) by the sheer number of children running around! I have NO idea which one is which, and who belongs to whom.

One of our assignments is to create a family tree of our homestay family and write a paper about it, so this weekend I casually asked people about their family members as I was helping out in the kitchen. [I am still confused. Take for instance, “She’s my uncle’s daughter so she’s my mother but we are sisters.” WTF?!] So as I was going out on Saturday with my “half-brother” Dennis, the oldest son of the first wife, I innocently asked how many brothers and sisters he had. Suddenly he got really embarrassed, and launched into his life story for the next few hours. So turns out he was actually from another relationship between the “first wife” of Santo and another man (with his own set of children from his marriage to a woman who went and attacked Dennis’ mom). Santo, meanwhile, has at least 16 living children (at least two have died) with at least FIVE different women, whom he usually courted about three at a time, I guess?

And then he has the nerve to sit there in front of his wife, who has taken in Dennis’ brothers because his mom died, and say that good Christians should only have one wife, and that women are inferior to men – oh, but he’s all about “human rights.” GAHHHHHH. Fortunately, our neighbor Winnie is able to poke fun at exactly this hypocrisy without making it too obvious, so I can kind of vent my frustration at him under the guise of siding with her.

So I ended up getting in a big argument with Dennis about women’s rights, and how I think that housework and providing monetarily for the family should be split equally between men and women, and how women aren’t given the same priority as men in education, and basically how men can be just as immoral as he thinks women are, etc etc etc. I don’t think I accomplished anything, but it felt good to fight over it.

One of the women who does most of the cooking, Jackie (don’t think she’s related, but she and her husband have a hut in the backyard of the compound), overheard most of this conversation. So the next morning my “mom” explained that the only reason she doesn’t eat with the men is that the kids like her to eat with them, and at dinner tonight Jackie and Nancy ate with us. I kind of get the impression that they are only doing this to appease me. I don’t know… I guess we’ll see.

Ok, that’s it for now. Hope everything is going well back in the US!