27/11/10

Emma’s goodbye party was today. At 7am this morning Ann and I met up with her and one of her colleagues who is also one of my colleagues (he teaches at both schools) and he drove us to her school so pick up the plastic chairs and tables and large cooking pots she was borrowing for the party. When we were loading the truck our colleague mentioned that there weren’t many chairs. “That’s okay, the men can sit in the chairs and the women can sit on the ground on mats.” (In traditional Mozambican families this is the norm, at meal times the father and older sons eat at the table, the wife, daughters and young children sit on the floor.) When I didn’t so much as crack a smile, he said “but it’s okay though, the women here like to sit on the floor.” No actually they don’t, Ann and I disagreed with him. “Well it’s just because of the clothes people wear, it’s easier that way.” Actually, Ann disagreed with him, it’s much more difficult to sit on the floor in a skirt. Later, once we had loaded everything into a very full truck bed he joked, “the girls will have to hang off the back.” He called us (Ann and myself) meninas which means girls and is incredibly offensive. I would have been annoyed by anyone here calling me that, a vendor or a person on the street. But for a colleague to call me that is absolutely ridiculous and I told him so. Having errands to run in town, and thinking that it might be bad for my professional life here if I tweaked out on a colleague, I excused myself to go into town and get away from that situation. Last time I ever do you the favor of typing out your exam for you, jerk.
Emma’s party was amazing. She gave a short speech at the beginning, her director gave a speech and her colleagues presented her with gifts of capulana. Afterwards everyone had plenty to eat and drink and eventually everyone started dancing—a fantastic party. Anna and Joyce came up to the party to surprise her and Donna and Luis came down too. A few times a couple of us female PCVs almost came to blows with a few of Emma’s male colleagues who have more traditional views on how to talk to and treat women, but Donna reminded us that he aren’t going to change a 30 year old jerk and for Emma’s sake we should just let it go.