Under the Veil

The other day we were playing "class expert" and an interesting problem came up. For all you aspiring English teachers out there, this is a great activity which has never let me down. It gets the students to speak and requires zero prep work. You have all the students write down a problem or a question, preferably one that uses the current grammar points. You then pick a student to sit at the front of the class and the rest of the kids fire questions at them. Meanwhile, you are standing at the board writing down the grammar mistakes and getting volunteers to fix them. It's a great activity and I have never seen anyone NOT get into it.

Anyway, we were doing this in one of my more advanced classes and one of the girls brought up her problem. Fatima (not her real name) told us that she didn't want to wear her veil anymore but that her family was making her. Fatima wasn't talking about the headscarf (which no woman would ever consider going without) but rather the veil that covered the bottom half of her face. Many women here go without that veil, and I asked her why she wasn't one of these. She told me that her husband's family (her husband works abroad and is trying to get her a visa) is the one that doesn't want her to go without. Although she lives with her mother's family and her sisters don't wear the veil she is still expected to wear it.

I have been here for four months only, but I really starting to suspect that I would never understand this whole shame thing that they have got going on. All of the people in my class knew Fatima really well and I suggested that she not wear the veil in class, even going to far to suggest that she use me as an example. She told me that with the veil she had problems breathing, but that didn't matter. Were she to take the veil off it would bring Shame to her family. Honor, shame, honor, shame, I just don't get it.

She told me that this was a real problem. I noticed that some of the phones that the students bring to MALI were taken at the door, and when I asked for the reason I was told that they were camera phones. The students aren't allowed to bring cameras because they might try to take a picture of the few girls that are brave enough to remove their veil while they are attending classes. Fatima had tried to remove her veil once (please remember that we are not talking about the headscarf here) and she told me that there were a lot of people that tried to take her picture. Plus, it got back to her husbands family and she was shamed. The entire time that she is telling me this I am staring at her wondering what the big deal is. So someone has a picture of her? Who cares? This is a part of society that I am just not able to understand.

We had another discussion in another class then started as a discussion on different types of exercise (I DO yoga, I GO jogging...) and turned into a debate concerning how much freedom a woman should have to walk on the street. I won't go into the debate, but the final decision of the class was that a woman should be able to walk down the street with a brother or a husband without people assuming that she was having an affair. As for whether a woman should be able to walk down the street whenever she damn well chooses wearing whatever she wants, forget it. Another class had a discussion about a woman's right to work. The final consensus in that class was that a woman should be able to work as much as she wants provided that her work doesn't interfere with her household duties. I suggested that if work did interfere with her household duties then maybe her husband should step up. Why would a man want to wash dishes? I was asked.

Ramadan is the worse for women. The women I know all work. This means that they have to get up to teach for their 4-6 hours, and then go home and spend about 3-4 hours making a Ramadan dinner for their families. They have to do this every day WHILE they are fasting. One of the teachers that I work with was describing her schedule to me-- teach at 10, go home at 2, cook until 6, then do Ramadan family stuff and clean the house until around 3, (she can't sleep because her family doesn't sleep) then make Ramadan breakfast and catch two hours of sleep before working again. When do you sleep, I asked her. During the two hours, she pointed out, as if she was talking to a dull child. When I pointed out that two hours of sleep wasn't enough she shrugged and said that she can sleep during her day off. The men, on the other hand, work only about half as much. Myself, I work for 6 hours a day and I barely have a minute to myself, and I don't have to cook for anyone. It's pretty appalling, if you ask me.