Zoo animal

To be completely honest, I’m starting to get tired of feeling like a zoo animal.

In some ways the notoriety is completely like being a local celebrity. A few weeks ago I got on a 20-seat bus (which, like daladalas with 13 seats, usually hold at least twice that many people), and was shocked that the conductor of the bus knew my name. I had never seen him before. At first I thought he was saying a Swahili word that sounded like my name, but sure enough, he was saying “Rachel” and asking how I was. He must have known about me from a previous village – word travels fast. Ever since, every conductor on every bus along that road that I have boarded has known my name. Talk about a small world!

Another example: in the village where we are staying now, I was sick with a fever for a few days and lost my appetite, so I stopped going with Irene on our nightly foray to eat rice and beans on the street at a picnic table by lantern light. Everyone started asking “Where is the mzungu?” Irene explained I was sick, and ever since everyone—all complete strangers—has been asking if I am feeling better. Thankfully I have a huge stash of granola bars and dried fruit and nuts!

Already I’ve had to bow out of observing many of the interviews we do because we have determined that my presence there alters their quality – including respondents’ answers and the number of distractions – considerably. When I am present at an interview the assumption is that I am a doctor – what else would a white woman interested in health be doing in a village? Clinic cards come out spontaneously, and answers to wide-open questions are short, like answers you would give to someone in authority. All of these actions run counter to what we are exploring, which is how women understand and experience their own reproductive problems, in their own words. (Though certainly their hopes and expectations are highlighting an area of great need in this area – the need for affordable, good-quality medical services). In addition to my presumed clinical identity, my presence at a house for an interview is occasion enough for parades of curious “visitors” – hardly the ideal situation for private interviews that delve into a woman’s marital, sexual, and reproductive experiences.

Why can’t we just shut the door and go on with the interview? In Tanzanian culture it is the height of rudeness to fail to welcome someone – however unannounced the visitor – to your home. If a person says “Hodi” (basically “hello, may I enter?”), you have to say “Karibu” (“welcome”), then drop whatever you are doing to greet your guests. So a parade of people then enter, some just to gawk obviously at the mzungu, some to try to sell me things (an old lady tried to sell me a pile of oranges mid-interview), some try to show me to their children, some come bringing gifts of corn and rice, some invite me to their homes, some ask if I will be their girlfriend… suffice it to say I wish sometimes I could change my skin color. Obviously the interviews proceed with fewer interruptions when I am not there.

However, when I am not there, I have to be somewhere else in the village, and an unattended mzungu is an even more open invitation for unsolicited gawking and greeting. So I try to keep a low profile during the day, shutting the house where I stay and rarely leaving my room. In one house I even had to shutter the window because groups of kids kept coming by to spy and giggle, having cornered me in my room. Then I really felt like a zoo animal. I know sequestering myself is denying a level of cultural immersion I could be experiencing, but because we switch villages so often, the novelty never seems to wear off, and so the end effect is much too exhausting to engage with strangers for the whole day. I am a much more effective emissary from elsewhere when I’ve had my beauty sleep!


My "cage" in the house where I stayed