Living for Disco

I have been attending a VSO meeting over the last couple of days, one of the components of which was assessing gender in the context of HIV. Gender is a big buzz word these days in the development community. All sorts of people are now requesting that you have gender as a ‘cross-cutting issue’, and that it be taken into consideration in your programmes. I’m not sure all of them know exactly what they mean themselves. I mean, I can see the point in addressing gender issues in a country where 44% of men feel that it’s acceptable to beat their wives, but how to do it is the real challenge.

And who am I to try? I’m a white, middle-class English woman for God’s sake. Could I understand less about cultural mores in rural Namibia? I’m happy with the idea of training people - of developing concrete skills - or with challenging someone who’s views have an affect on me personally, but I’m uncomfortable with imposing my own cultural beliefs on other people. I believe more and more that that change can only come from within.

So, we spent a morning looking at common gender stereotypes. After identifying more of a few of these, e.g. men don’t cry, women should not tell men what to do, blah, blah blah, we debated them. As you can imagine, some of the women* were getting a little huffy about the more blatant ones.

Then we broke for lunch. Unconsciously, we segregated ourselves by sex, women on one table, men on another. The conversation on the women’s table proceeded thus:

“You don’t own an iron? I didn’t think anyone didn’t own an iron.”

“I just can’t bear ironing – I don’t see the point.”

“But in Zambia, every Sunday afternoon you’ll find women ironing everything, even the underpants. This is because of the flies. But I like ironing. I can iron for five hours in a row.”

“Me too! I find ironing very therapeutic.”

“But do you iron your sheets?”

“Of course I iron my sheets!”

“Well, I only iron certain things when I’m going out.”

Then we started talking about washing machines.

I still have no idea what the men on the other table were discussing. Probably stock market prices, or football.

*for ‘some of the women’, read ‘me’.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 9:36 am and is filed under Under African Skies, VSO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.