Your mother doesn’t run this country anymore.

In the Central African Republic, a country currently struggling with sectarian violence and the resulting humanitarian crisis, the newly sworn-in president Catherine Samba Panza recently started she believes she was elected because the country “didn’t want any more male politicians.” 

While I can’t help but grin at this imagery (that all male politicians in the CAR are so corrupt and unable to develop their country that the voting population has thrown their hands up in the air and turned instead to the trustworthy and nurturing female politician who will gently easy the country through their current conflict and crisis) that the most powerful woman in the CAR attributes her political influence to her people wanting a leader “who could calm things, reconcile people,” stereotypes that continue to define women based on their perceived rightful and natural role as mothers and caretakers puts a slight damper on the election of a female leader of a country in an area of the world where women have to fight to be seen as more than the wife of their husband and are lucky to complete an education.

Powerful women must walk a strange dichotomy in our society. On one hand, successful women are judged as being conniving and ruthless and, to put it frankly, as bitches. On the other, when women try to curb this image, they are seen as emotional and unstable and unable to run a country or company for 3-4 days every month.

Samba Panza’s reliance on the latter surprises me. As the leader of a country that needs strength right now, she should own her abilities and power instead of becoming seen as the mother of the CAR who is responsible for focusing on the emotional support of a country, while leaving the politics, economics and development for others.

Why can’t she, and other powerful, just be praised for their effectiveness as leaders? Why can’t she just be seen as the right person to be at the head of her country right now? Why can’t the focus be on past on how she will be different from past leaders, regardless of her gender?

My point is, Samba Panza, don’t comfort your nation. Run it.

I'm waiting to be surprised how easy it is to forget.

The film was Hotel Rwanda. My friends and I went to a screening of it tonight at the American Cultural Center in Cotonou. Not particularly because we wanted to see the movie again, but because it was something to do at an unfamiliar place in a city with which we were trying to become more familiar.

My first interaction with Hotel Rwanda was, like most people who lived in the western world in 1994, one of guilt. And this was in my living room in the United States. In a room full of Beninese, it was more familiar. 

There is a scene when all of the western citizens are being evacuated from the hotel, and the staff has just realized that no one is coming to help them and the thousand refugees staying at the hotel. A British cameraman is ashamed at his ability to leave and the Rwandans’ inability to do so. It is raining, and as he turns to walk out on the people he has just lived with for the last week with the knowledge that they may not survive after he goes, a hotel porter opens an umbrella and walks him to the bus.  The cameraman scoffs at the porter and sends him back under the awning, out of the rain.

It is with this feeling that I’ve become more familiar in the past year.

The respect with which I am treated in this country I have done little to earn. And is so much more than the respect given to a woman who was born into this society. I can work as hard as I can to empower those women for the next 12 months and teach those women about how they deserve what they want and how these unspoken rules about what they accept as an acceptable form of treatment are false. But one day (and it’s a day that is approaching faster and faster) I am going to disappear into the rain and back to a country that recognizes equality between the sexes and has seen waves of feminism and the unspoken rules that run the society allow for women to be unsatisfied with what they have been given. Where I can go back to pretending that the rest of the world must also be like this.

In which I get unreasonably angry at a four-year-old

The neighbor kids were all playing in my house. They, as usual, were managing to take everything off my shelves and to find everything that I had tried to find. (See: iPod Touch, Cocoa Puffs, back issues of Esquire) I, as usual, was trying to find my happy place, this time, with a Christopher Hitchens anthology in the corner.

I was interrupted by shrieks of laughter and Modeste (older and speaks French) asking me if I had heard what Migdel (the four-year-old in question and doesn’t speak French) had just said.

“He said, Madame,” Modeste explained to me, “that he was going to come to your house tonight because you’re his wife.”

This is the second time in two days someone less than 5 years old has called me his wife, (in French here it’s literally “his woman”) and it’s the second time that I’ve wanted to smack a kid for it.

I deal with sexual harassment on a daily basis. I’ve been proposed to at the market; I’ve had men try to pull me off my bicycle while riding and one man, who had just come back from the fields, tell me that it was now my time to get to work while gesturing to his crotch. I used to not be able to get my mail without the man who stands between me and my Crystal Light packets stroking my arm until I told him that I was married to my postmate.

What gets to me most about these interactions is the feeling that I’m a thing that someone is allowed to claim. That what I want has no relevance in these situations. That my job is to serve as the needs of someone else.

I will never be anyone’s woman in any language.

“…Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

“But how?” was the most common response I received at the first meeting of my Girls Club today.

After 10 minutes of telling the boys at the middle school they were not allowed to stay (Beninese boys are not used to being told no), I told the group of 13 girls assembled to complete the phrase ‘Because I am a girl…”

Most filled in the sentence with things they wanted to do at the club: play soccer with me, make dinner with me, hang out with me in general.

I filled mine in with “Because I am a girl, I can change the world.”

This threw them for a complete loop.

“How can I change the world?

“I can’t do that.”

“It’s God who changes the world.”

One just laughed.

I’ve written before about the differences in the Beninese and American mindset. I think very differently than my colleagues, but I usually chalked that up to them being mostly male and mostly 10 years older than me. I never thought that with a group of females with some of whom there is a less than five-year difference in our ages that we would think so differently.

I grew up in a family who told me I could do anything. I grew up thinking that I could change the world. But I saw the world, I learned about the world and I had the support system that could allow me to reach the world.

My girls have not and do not.

No on has told them they can do anything they want. No one has told them they can leave their village. No one has told them there is so much more they can want from life.

I guess an American telling them this now is better than no one ever saying anything.