Being a woman

In November 2009, I buried a close friend of mine. Djami was a 16 year old grade 7 boy. I had never been to his house until the Monday after his death. And I went everyday for the rest of that week, throughout the funeral.

Funerals are different here. They last a week, women sit together, coming together to support the mother and sisters. Men sit together, usually with some kind of physical barrier between the two sexes. I was always with the women – my learners, Djami’s sisters and cousins and other relatives.

On Wednesday of that week, I dodged study to go and pound mahangu to feed over 200 people that coming Saturday after the burial. I was with 22 of my female learners who have never seen me as their teacher, but as their sister. Nicky and I went together. There were girls who shared a mother or a father with Djami. There were girls who were his neighbors and had grown up with him. They were all somehow family. We were all somehow family.

His mother was sitting near us. His aunts and grandmothers there too, all on blankets or mats on the sand. All of the younger generation – the learners and me – did the pounding. The older women sifted and separated the shells from the flour part we’d eat as porridge.

I wished plenty of times living in Namibia that I was a man. The power they steal from women, the control the have over us, the silence they force us into is suffocating and depressing. But on that afternoon, standing or sitting or pounding, listening to the hollow thud of 14 muto pounding into 7 kakundhu – giant mortars and pestles – being part of that group of women, who for that afternoon could come together and laugh and enjoy themselves while mourning the loss of a brother, a son, a cousin, a nephew, a grandson, a friend or a learner, was the most powerful I’ve ever felt as a woman. I smiled and laughed with them all, for once knowing why I was laughing. It was genuine happiness and ease I felt, watching those girls, listening to the music of creating food from grain, giving life to all the family of Djami.

Being a woman has its challenges - we have to talk louder to be heard, repeat ourselves a million times before someone might listen, fight harder for what we think is right, do more to get recognized for our abilities. But it’s a beautiful thing when we come together.

The women here are incredibly strong people, and I feel extremely privileged to have had the opportunity to get to know them. Now I want to make sure that the girls I know and love are given the opportunity to grow to become educated, powerful, strong women.

Help them do that.

Go to http://www.gladrags.com/c-54-donate-pads.aspx to donate reusable cloth pads to the girls at Andara Combined School so they can still come to school when they are menstruating. Without them, they are forced to miss classes while their male peers create an ever widening education gap.

Your responses make me ever prouder to be here and helping the people I've grown to love.

Thank you,
Lori

"I haven't been in the trenches of war with these women, but I've been in the trenches of daily life with them, and if you ask me, that forges the stronger friendship." Aheb