Dropped Threads 3 (10 page)

“She is fine,” I reply. “She is at work today but she sends her greetings.” All this time the handholding continues and we stay comfortably connected as we begin our walk up the narrow path. When we arrive at the meeting place, each woman greets me in much the same way, shakes my hand and then adds, “You are most welcome here.”

Today we gather in a cool grassy spot in the schoolyard on Harriet’s large straw mat. Jamiila and Shakillah are sitting side by side, singing the Agabagaya song as Shakillah records the lyrics in my notebook. Although there is a mild breeze, the women occasionally dab their faces and necks with handkerchiefs. They sit with their legs outstretched in front of them, barefoot and relaxed. Jamiila’s baby plays contentedly with the grass that tickles her chubby legs. Occasionally, a chicken clucks by, inspecting and stabbing the ground intently, and when the hen does not move on, it is subtly shooed away by one of the women.

I greatly admire these women and their commitment to each other and to their group, which began informally and then gained official recognition from the Masindi District Office three years ago. Their purpose is clear and simple:
they want to eradicate poverty in their village. And the women work vigorously in a multitude of ways in an effort to achieve this goal. Being members of Agabagaya means that the women contribute to a cash cooperative every other Sunday. The bulk of the funds they collect is given to a different woman each meeting and so, over a six-month period, each member of the group receives a lump sum payment once. How the women use the money is up to their individual discretion. Harriet paid for materials to add a room onto her home; Epiphania used the money to pay the school fees for her children; and Joy purchased clothes in Kampala and then sold them to the villagers in her front yard.

The surplus funds collected at each meeting remain in the group pot and are used to make purchases that benefit the group or to generate an income for them. Currently, the women have purchased and are raising one hundred chicks to be sold once they have matured. They own a cow for milking and they grow mushrooms, which they plan to dry and sell at the market. The women do not own land as a group, so each “project” is housed at one of the members’ homes: the chickens at Shakillah’s, the piglets at Dorcas’s and the organic compost at Epiphania’s.

The women of Agabagaya, all of whom have some formal education, continue to further educate themselves in areas such as farm management, first aid and organic gardening techniques; therefore, sometimes the group spends its surplus money to pay for the women to attend workshops or courses. The women ensure that their children attend school, and they have organized Runyoro literacy classes on Saturdays for villagers who are interested in learning how to read and write in their local language. One of the members of the group, sixty-seven-year-old Aidah, who cares for six of her orphaned grandchildren, runs a
nursery school in a simple brick building in her backyard for the villagers’ preschoolers.

The women of Agabagaya labour endlessly within their homes and communities and yet many of them are also employed: Harriet is a waitress at a local guest house, Lois is a high school teacher, Dorcas is a controller, and Shakillah owns a small sewing shop.

The children of Kihande attend school, run and play with other children and help out with chores and housework. They delight in knocking mangoes out of the trees, singing songs to each other and playing with simple, often homemade, toys. After school they come home and work alongside their mothers, preparing meals and fetching water. The children often gather near us when we meet, curious about my presence. It took days for me to figure out whose children were whose—the Kihande women allow their children to be cared for, monitored and disciplined by the collective. The children, in a sense, belong to all of the women.

I understand that these women’s and children’s lives are not perfect. They are faced with issues that are not prevalent in my world: the devastating effects of
AIDS
, the ongoing threat and treatment of malaria, inequitable access to education and an unsettling and sometimes brutal political situation. But what impresses me the most is not just the way in which the group cares for their children, but also the strong commitment to collaboration that these women have established in so many aspects of their lives. Collectively, they provide emotional, financial and educational support for each other. In Kihande, as in many other parts of the world, the burden of household responsibilities—child rearing, food production and preparation—rests with the women, and these women have found a way to share the load, to prosper not just individually but also in ways that benefit their
greater community. Undoubtedly, they could not achieve alone what they are able to do as a group.

I recognize the worth of the bond the women of Agabagaya have created because I experienced similar benefits from my mother’s relationships with the other neighbourhood mothers. Their focus, like that of the women in Agabagaya, was their children and their families. And as children we had space to roam and unscheduled time to play. There was joy in our simplicity: coming home after school, eating carrots that we pillaged from the garden or snacking on buns still warm from the oven. And yet these women, my other mothers, also made time for each other emotionally and socially.

•    •    •

I can’t help but reflect on my own life as a grown woman in light of these two collectives. I too have a circle of supportive women in my life—women who give me strength, courage and support. However, the relationships I have with my women friends have little to do with daily survival—with actually bettering our families and enhancing our communities. In contrast to the women of Agabagaya, our relationships are an embarrassing privilege of middle class—we golf nine holes, eat at Thai restaurants and meet on the occasional Wednesday evening in the middle of winter to enjoy a latte and share a slice of cheesecake. We go out with our own cars and our own bank cards, leaving our partners—and for some, our children—at home.

Our survival and our children’s well-being do not depend on our collaboration. Like the women of Agabagaya, we socialize, laugh and share daily problems, but we are careful not to overstep certain boundaries—like those of parenting.
We don’t generally share our resources, work collaboratively for the betterment of our communities or openly consider the long-term possibilities of our friendship. Although I value and am grateful for what we have (and I know my women friends are too), in our increasingly individualistic society, there are boundaries to our friendship, territories that we do not enter and ground that we do not tread. Our focus is often on the sharing of our personal successes, struggles and career and family milestones, not on a concern for the wider community.

And yet, as I go on with my routine life in Winnipeg, having completed my studies and returned to work. I hold on to Agabagaya’s story carefully, not wanting the memories to fade, and greatly aware of the possibilities that the women of Kihande village have allowed me to imagine.

•    •    •

I prepare to leave Kihande just before sunset in an effort to get home before it grows so dark that I can no longer see my way on the unlit roads and paths. Tradition dictates that one or more of the women will walk me partway home, sometimes holding my hand as we proceed. In the beginning, the women insisted that most of the group walk with me, often taking me on different roads and pointing out important landmarks. As time went on, however, fewer women came along. I took this as a sign of acceptance, of no longer being perceived as a guest. Now, only one or two women accompany me each time, and I silently celebrate feeling less like a visitor who needs formal hosting and more like an equal, a friend, a member of their group.

Tonight, after sharing a huge traditional meal that some of the women prepared, we talk about an incident at one of
the local schools where a girl had been reprimanded for not complying with the dress code. After debating the different sides of the issue, the topic of conversation naturally shifts, as conversations do, and Lois sings for us a song she wrote. Eventually we are all singing and laughing and dancing. There is always a lot of laughter with these women and being with them gives me great comfort and a sense of familiarity. I feel overwhelmed and in awe of their kindness, their generosity—and their ambition. I dread leaving, but the room is growing dim as the sun begins to set, and I know it is time to go.

Sally walks me from her house across the road and then stops. “You know the rest of the way from here.” She encloses my hand in both of hers and smiles. We can hear the faint voices of the women singing, interrupted by splashes of their laughter. Sally begins to step backwards, eager to get back to the house to join them.

“Greet Dominique when you see her,” Sally calls to me over her shoulder. “I will,” I call back, waving. As I meander down the road past the barefooted school children walking to the pump with jerry cans to fill with water, I watch the sky change colour, from azure to shades of indigo near the horizon. Birds are calling and a boy on a bicycle speeds past me ringing his bell, signalling the children to move off the road. I am aware of the smile that I wear and of the feelings of contentment that rise within me as I continue to walk on, the rest of the way home—alone.

My husband and I
take our three-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Maeve, for a walk. It’s cold and we’re bundled up: toques, neck warmers, felt-lined boots. The ground is frozen. There’s no snow and a bitter wind, so we head up along the edge of the field, duck into the shelter of the woods and visit a stone firepit we made last summer. We squat by it, pretending to be camping. She loves this.

“Pretend we’re the Gypsy family,” I say.

“We’re cooking rabbits,” she says. “We caught one, and smacked him till he was dead, and then we put him on a stick, and now we’re cooking him.”

Later, we go up to the highest field. Our feet crunch frozen reindeer moss. There’s a pale sun, presaging snow. Maeve is stumping gamely uphill, holding Peter’s hand. We stop to admire the view: far below is our farmhouse with its cluster of barns, beyond the meadow is the church, and across the road from the church is an old one-room school-house. It’s been converted into a home, and Maeve lives there with her parents and little sister, Bridget.

I kneel beside her to point out these landmarks. She’s ripping off her mittens, stuffing them in her pockets.

“Maeve! What are you doing? You can’t take off your mittens!”

“My hands are having hot flashes,” she insists indignantly.
She waves her hands back and forth, fingers spread. I feel her hands. Indeed, they are sweaty hot.

•    •    •

When she has hot flashes for real, I’m happy to think, they won’t be a shock to her, as they were to me. “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?” I said, constantly, to my friends, at the onset of menopause, feeling as if I’d entered the strangest territory, having crossed a boundary I never knew existed. My mother told me nothing, since she says she wasn’t aware of menopause, although she may not have realized what it was that was affecting her. I remember how, when I was twenty-two, she’d spend a day in bed for no discernible reason. Or fly into sudden trembling rages—once, even, hurling a bowl of mashed potatoes at my father. (It wasn’t the best china, she explained later.) My mother-in-law told me about the time that
her
daughter asked for information on menopause, having chosen it as a subject for a school project.

“I was mortified,” my mother-in-law told me, in a lowered voice, distressed by the memory. “I don’t think I’d ever spoken that word out loud.”

Women still lower their voices when voicing the word
menopause
. Over the years, I’ve heard older women say, “She’s going through her change,” looking at each other significantly, their words reverberant with hushed momentousness, like so much else to do with women’s lives. And I realize that within myself is a voice that whispers, even now:
Shame, embarrassment, weakness, mortification
.

This time in my life began, like secrecy, with the presence of absence. Nothing happened; and then, one day, I realized that I had passed a few months with no period. I was as
shocked by the lack of blood as I was when I was fourteen and found my underpants stained with brilliant red. Both events elicited confusion. At fourteen I thought—where is my tomboy self? The girl who could beat boys at arm-wrestling, jump off roofs, ride bareback? Furious, I lay on my bed curled around the clutching pain of cramps. And for the next thirty years, I struggled with a slippery sense of identity. I felt continuously at odds with my body, the one thing in my life I was enraged at being unable to control. I was not glad to be a woman.

In the 1950s, there were almost no successful female role models. I was deeply imbued, not by my parents but by the culture of the times, with a sense of inferiority. Women had intuition rather than intellect. Dick and Jane’s father went to work, and their mother was waiting at the door at the end of the day, in wasp-waisted dress and red lipstick, fresh and cheery, having spent all day readying the house for his return. This enraged me, once I was old enough to think about it; yet by then the damage was done. I’d absorbed the insecurities of my generation. Museums celebrated the accomplishments of men, in both the arts and the sciences. Men were explorers, athletes, musicians, physicians, lawyers, engineers. Women were bad drivers, incompetent, helpless, destined for blowsy, bosomy middle age.