National and International Women's Day

Yes, Mauritania has a National Women's Day. You just can’t stop progress.

I started the week by hanging out with the women's co-ops at the office of the Condition Feminine. (When I type that, it looks like I'm talking about an civil government micro-managing women and their monthly problems, but actually it's just the political cabinet for women's rights here.) I had a few cultural moments when I was sitting around chatting with the women. Lalla (a BIG elderly Moor lady) decided she wanted to play a game with me. Think pick-up sticks with a dash of violence added for kicks. She tosses some wooden sticks on the ground. Which direction they are facing determines the number of times she slaps me. Then she takes the sticks, indicates I should puff out my cheeks and hold my breath, then she slaps my cheeks with the sticks to make me expel the air. After repeating this never-ending fun numerous times, she says, "no no, wrong wrong, me me." So I say "Ok, Ok." Only when it's my turn to do the slapping, she takes a sip of water before puffing out her cheeks. The new addition means that the slapper (me) gets sprayed with water from the slappee (Lalla).

Then Lalla decides she needs to see my breasts. I think it had something to do with when she asked me why I wasn't married, and I said men are only problems. And she said, yes that's true, but you still need one for milk (babies). Hard to argue with that. To prove her point, she pulled out her breast and put it on display in my face. She has a son who needs a wife, she says, and I need a husband, so it's a done deal. But I guess she needed to check the worthiness of my milk-producers. At first this involved a slight tugging on my shirt, but soon it became an all out wrestling match with a woman 5x my age and size. Lalla should be a WWF steroid chick. That woman can get the job done. Quality Mauritanian fun.

It's a good thing I like being silly, because I think I ended up looking a bit silly the whole morning.

For International Women's Day at the Girls Mentoring Center, Genny and I had planned an evening called "Les Femmes au Travail" (Women at Work). We had been taking pictures of professional Mauritanian women in Nouakchott and Aioun. I made the photos into a slideshow presentation in the Computer Center, played to the music of "I'm Coming Out". Mauritanians love photos, so that was a big hit. We had invited 8 professional women from Aioun to come and speak about their work. 3 of them actually showed up, which is a pretty good turnout for us. One of our friends, Badiallo, came to speak about being a teacher. She did that for about 2 seconds before going off on a bit of a diatribe. She said some people in town say that we subvert Islam at the GMC (we already knew this), but it isn't true, we do good work here and we are good people, and all of the girls should come to the GMC. After continuing to extol our virtues for a couple of minutes, she then went to her chair, sat down, and serenely folded her hands. The presentations were all in Hassaniya, so I didn't completely understand until Genny told me when we moved over for the group picture, along with a disclaimer that "I didn't tell her to say that! I didn't!!" We paired a group of girls with one of the women, and they drew a picture of her working and asked questions about her responsibilities at her job. After the girls presented those, we had refreshments. Genny had baked a cake with Nouha, Saida, and Mariem (3 of our GMC girls), so we had a cake presentation. It seemed to all go relatively smoothly and successfully, and Genny and I were pretty pleased. And Genny, Hector, Jarad and I had a good laugh over their discovery of our true intentions for the GMC.