When my husband and I were dating, Nicaraguan culture didn’t
quite know what to do with me. Here I was, clearly a lady-girl, yet I had more
in common with the men than with my own gender. I had an employment history, an
education, I could drive, and I had absolutely no idea how to sweep the floor
with a towel/stick apparatus. I was also 26 with not one single child. I did my
best to learn woman-y things like cooking Nicaraguan cuisine, laundering
clothes by hand and straightening hair. And although I did, in fact, become
proficient in all such feminine pursuits, by that time I had already been accepted
into the world of men, and there I stayed.
Going back to visit proved very different.
Now I had a baby to take care of. And the baby was very
disoriented by the sudden, sharp, change in climate, routine and people.
Clearly objecting to all these strange new people holding him, all he wanted
was Mommy.
And that’s when I fully entered into the world of a
Nicaraguan woman. Apparently, men go off and do fun things; women stay in the sweltering
house and work really hard.
Case in point, we went out to the country to visit Eli’s
grandma. As you might remember for my previous horrifying trips to La Mina, I
kind of hate the country. Eli stuck me in his grandma’s windowless house in 100
degree heat (no air conditioning, not even a fan, people!) and gallivanted off in
the hills with his brothers. While he ate fruit from the trees and enjoyed
himself, I had my hands full of a hot, grumpy baby who very quickly developed a
high fever.
As Troy snoozed fitfully on my chest in a hammock strung across
the living room, I had a lot of time to ponder gender roles in the world. I
watched Eli’s aunts toil silently, preparing food, scrubbing clothes, wetting
the dirt in the front yard so it could be swept bare. You never see men helping
with these endless, backbreaking chores. Eli is nearly the only male in his
whole family who even knows how to cook (his dad learned late in life after his
wife passed away).
Sure, women and men are made different and are supposed to
have different functions. I have upper body strength suitable for hauling
around my little chunky monkey, not chopping down trees. If there’s a tree that
needs chopping, I’m calling in a dude. So I’m not saying that men and women
should be and do the same things.
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| Grandma's House |
But.
Dear lord how on earth did we get here?! The injustice felt
even more oppressive than the relentless heat.
The day before, one of my brothers-in-law complained about the
new domestic violence law in Nicaragua. It’s called something like The
Protection of Women from Domestic Abuse Act and means a man who beats his woman
automatically goes to jail even if she doesn’t want to press charges. His main
objection was that it only applies to men. What about women who beat their men?
How is that fair?
I pointed out that my husband could probably fend off my
puny, ineffectual fists without the help of law enforcement but he was still
grumpy about the inequality of the new rules. Maybe the law isn’t fair and just
as it should be. But somebody needs to look out for all the women who are
already at a cultural disadvantage. Their lives are hard enough without giving
any man an inch of space to abuse them.
In any case, I am grateful to be back in the States in my
own culture that is flawed in different ways. And I am glad that it didn’t take
Troy very long to adjust to all the new faces and embrace his big Nica family.
Maybe he also thought that after 50 consecutive hours of quality time, we
really needed to see other people.
