Call me madam*

*Name of a chop bar in Osino, along the Accra-Kumasi road.


I've been getting no small amount of attention in Ghana on account of my earrings. I've had my ears pierced for quite a few years, and wear a pair of small steel studs these days.

One of the first people to remark on them was a mobile credit seller.
"Are you a boy or a girl?" he asked me. He was convinced the bible had a verse telling how earrings were for women, not men, to wear, and that mine must be causing me great pain.

He asked me why I wore them and I said, "Well, I like them."

"But it is for a woman," He continued," If I gave you a dress, would you wear it?"

He was just diving into the part of the conversation when he asked me how I could not believe in God and why I didn't go to church when young woman wearing a uniform (of a bank, supermarket, or filling station) came into the conversation and lectured his head off, that there was more than one religion in the world, and that I didn't have to go to church with him if I didn't want to.

"Goodbye, Michael," she said as she got up and left. She'd been listening the whole time.


A few days later, on a tro (sort of a minivan-bus-taxi), a woman selling eggs with hot pepper walked up to the window and smiled at me.

"You have these," she said, pointing to her earrings.

"Yes I do," I replied, grinning.

"Do you also have these?" she said, gesturing to her breasts.

I wanted to tell her I wished I did, but hesitated moments too long.

---

I'm enjoying all this attention I'm getting, which is a little out of the ordinary for me. I take secret delight in bucking the status quo (in such small ways) in a place like this, dominated by stubborn, hard-headed, (often aggressive, often very muscular) men.

Interesting fact: it is indeed true that only women wear earrings. Girls and boys alike are required to have hair cut close by lower grades of schools, which means that they are nigh indistinguishable before puberty. This means that most Ghanaian kids are going to school (yay!) and that earrings become a very apparent distinguishing feature between boys and girls, which seems to make an idea persist and carry on to define men and women.

---

Little did I know that a year later, I would wear a dress to my graduation ceremony and royally piss my family off.

Make your own tea

Indian society is frustratingly patriarchal. Ironically, it seems equality is something I take for granted back in "the first world". I'm equally annoyed with many responsibilities being distinctly male or female (who should I seek?) and that it is directly against conventions for me to take on certain tasks ("don't you dare touch those dishes!").

Sometimes, the things I hear make me downright depressed ("this is a woman's work", "men don't come into the kitchen", "in my home,…").

These attitudes seem to be cultivated from the day children can walk. I took a trip out to rural villages, where most of the children crowing around me were boys, where I could see just down the street a young girl handling a goat, or carrying sand. The crowd around the communal water pump or tank is invariably female, some of them are only girls and some of them are still in their school uniforms.

Ouch. When a woman as old as my mother won't let me help her bring in the water or sweep the floor when I kick over my pail of nungu husk (I wrestle her for the broom and buckets), for some reason, it hurts. A man has never offered me tea, and I have seen perhaps one man at the pump and one more carrying a water jug. I did see a man milking a cow yesterday and it made me happy in a small, quiet way I can't exactly explain.

Even in the Organisation of Development Action and Maintenance, with activities in womens' organisation and empowerment, et cetera, this culture persists. Women are given manual or tedious jobs, none hold any executive positions. Ironically, this is India, one of the few countries that has had a woman prime minister (and the largest democracy in the world, to boot – although just how democratic, I think is moot).

This problem is deeper rooted yet. India is a country of arranged marriages and dowries, where three sons are a relief and three daughters all but leave a family in financial ruin. In rural India, people don't date. Sometimes people in urban India don't date either. Love marriages are rare, and I smile when I hear about them even though I don't believe in the institution.

Change will come slowly and perhaps painfully, but I have every hope that it will one day be acceptable for women to be educated, take on skilled jobs, not be married (or choose their husbands), not have children, maybe even for men not to have moustaches. Change is in the air already, perhaps. The ratio of little uniformed boys and girls going to school looks even. Some girls even ride bicycles to school.

The key (and the difference between India and say, the States), I believe, is education – free, liberal pursuit of knowledge, the distribution of human capital. That's the glimmer of hope here.

One evening, I watched a powerful woman - a district officer of the government's Women Development Corporation, sent to advise the NGO's woman programs, like Self-Help-Groups they formed under government ideas and initiatives. She was an expert negotiator, well spoken, strong presence, using rhetorical questions and undisputable information to draw support, get the agreement of men, and instructed, interrupted, even challenged them. I don't speak Tamil and didn't understand an eighth of what happened, but I enjoyed watching her draw sweat from the men around her.

She spoke forcefully to me when she answered my questions. I was a little caught off balance, but I was not surprised her guard was up. In any case, I was too busy being impressed by her electric charisma.