The White Skin Condition

These days I’m looking pretty crispy, like someone who spends a lot of time in a tanning salon, trying for that “I just got back from getting skin cancer at the beach” look. Of course at my particular tanning salon, I only get tanned on arms up to the shoulders and legs up to the knees. The rest of me stays paper-white. I’ve been trying to remember to apply sunscreen (yes, really, calm down, Mom) because being permanently sunburnt gets old after a while. Still, I don’t think that sunscreen works that well. I had high hopes for the “Kids Sunscreen SPF 50.” I thought it would work better because kids have sensitive skin and so their sunscreen should work harder, right? But really I bought it because it was the spray kind of sunscreen, which is easiest to apply, and because it was the cheapest thing I could find in the dead of winter in Oklahoma.

Agyila is gingerly touching my white leg

Whether or not it’s because of my failing sunscreen, I’ve had lots of skin-color comments recently. Sometimes I bring up the issue myself by making hilarious jokes that leave my friends rolling with laughter. One such joke I made that solicited fits of hysterical giggles was, “I don’t think I’ll work in my garden until later because if I do it now then I’m going to be burnt red by the sun.” This is probably a situation where cultural humor does not translate. But just as I wasn’t offended when my Scandinavian colleague made fun of my equator-temperature-accustomed body by sarcastically offering me a winter coat from Sweden to protect me from the Arctic AC of the Khartoum office, I was not offended by people laughing at my melatonin deficiency.

In India when it was extra sunny, people were always chasing me around trying to get me to use an umbrella. They were worried I would lose my beautiful pasty pallor. Me, always trying to lose that beautiful pasty pallor because, really, for me, skin cancer is probably inevitable, always refused their kind offers. Not so in South Sudan. When I sit in the sun, people offer me seats in the shade, but nod knowingly when I state my reasons for declining (though usually this is followed by predictions of sun-induced malaria).

            “Yes,” says Repent, “You need to become darker. Then the children won’t be afraid of your creepy white skin and run away from you screaming, and then you won’t look so much like a Jalabi.”

            Me: “What’s a ‘Jalabi’? (I thought it must be some kind of creepy pasty white food like a ‘jelabi’ donut in India. I was wrong.

            Repent: “You know—the Jalabis. The Arab people from the north who came down here and fought us.”

            Not looking like a Jalabi=Suntan motivation.

This kid ran right up to me with open arms. His sister (I
didn't get a good photo of her) came up behind me and
rubbed on my arm a bit, looked at her hand,
looked back at me, and then walked off, having
determined that whatever it was I put on me to become
this color, didn't rub off easily.

The other day I was comparing my tan to Lexon, and I told him I was catching up. He said, “Oh no. This skin is original. You cannot be like me.” Another time when Lexon caught me in the sun, he tried to warn me off because of malaria, but I explained about mosquitos again, so he went for another tactic: “Look, your skin is changing. It is not supposed to be like that. Look how it is red here and white here and brown here. You cannot be like my skin. This is how God made me.” I said, “Well, He made me so my skin will change colors in the sun.”

Another time I was sitting with some ladies outside in the sunshine, and they were trying to pull my sleeves down (I’d tucked them up over my shoulders). They said, “This way your shoulders won’t become red.”

I said, “I don’t want my shoulders to be white while the rest of my arm is red.”

“Why?” They said.

“Because that would be weird.”

“What about your legs? They’re still white?”

“I know. I don’t like that either.”

“What about the rest of your body. It’s white, right?”

At this point I realized the futility of trying to explain the cultural stigma of a various types of tan lines to African women.  I just said, truthfully, “I wish I had skin like yours that is all the same color and doesn’t burn so easily as mine in the sun.”

One of my friends clucked her tongue sympathetically and said, “It is too bad, but if you marry a Moru guy, at least your children can have good skin.” I should definitely take my future children’s skin conditions into consideration when thinking about marriage. I mean, they will get every bad skin gene from me—I'm prone to acne, sunspots, large pores, redness for no apparent reason, bacterial staph infections, ringworm, bug bites…The least I can do is give them a fighting chance by marrying someone with good skin.  

Kids joining me on my morning run
(I turned around and snapped this photo
of them without stopping), which may
or may not have anything to do with me
being white, and more to do with
the fact that it's fun to run in the morning.

So here I am scaring innocent people like Esther, who rushed over in concern after seeing a red spot on my leg. I had to explain to her that it wasn’t the plague, just a weird white skin issue where things that my leg rests against for a while leave their mark for a few minutes.  She gave me a pitying look, which made me feel better, knowing that people around me were starting to understand my personal trials and troubles.

But once again, Baby is the one who tried to offer a possible solution my problem. It started with a little friendly (I think) ribbing between him and Repent. Baby said, “Amanda, you can call Repent a ‘Jenga.’” I didn’t get the joke, but Baby thought it was funny, so he explained that a ‘Jenga’ is a ‘Dinka’ (another tribe here in South Sudan—if you follow the news, which you should, and the news includes information about things not happening in the US, which means not an American news channel, then you might know something about the Dinka).  Repent said, “NO, I’m not! I’m not black enough, I’m not tall enough, I’m not skinny enough, and I don’t like to eat hot peppers.” I volunteered to be Dinka after that last bit about hot peppers because I think that the only way to truly know that your cooking is good is for people to be coughing and sneezing in the next room while you’re frying up the hot peppers. I learned that in Indonesia. But it has come in handy here too because I let Esther, Lexon, and Baby try some food I’d made for myself, sending them running for the water. Afterwards Lexon told me, “Amanda, your cooking is difficult for us to eat. You put too much sheta (hot pepper).” I only put the first bit of that comment on Facebook because I love it, and I always try to cultivate a healthy fear of my cooking—it keeps people from asking me to cook for them, i.e. Lexon and co and anyone else who invites me to a party and expects me to bring a ‘side dish’ (I don’t even know what that is, and I hate parties).

A few cool kids, some of whom find me amusing,
others who find me disturbing

Having written that whole paragraph, I now realize it has nothing to do with Baby solving my white skin problem, but I typed it already so whatever—shortly after the previous-mentioned not-relevant-at-all conversation, Baby was trying to convince me to take him along if we get permission to borrow a car to drive out to a far away village, and he told me that he can help if we get stuck in the mud, which, he said, is clearly not something Repent can do (since he is a big important man) or me either.

“You think I can’t help with mud?” I said.

“No! Because you are white! If you step in the mud, you will become black!”

I'm thinking he might not completely understand the permanence of the white skin condition. If only I could slap on some mud and be instantly changed so as to be less scary to children and less-easily sunburned and less likely to be mistaken for someone's mortal enemy…But I'm pretty sure that's frowned upon-slash-considered seriously offensive by most people, and I'm not a fraternity party-goer nor that blonde chick that put on black-face for Halloween, and I'll just have to stick with the skin that I have, while admiring the skin that I don't have, and continue to apply sunscreen. Lots of it.

A horrible and humiliating bathroom mirror selfie
 that I contorted myself to take that Judy, Megan, and Joanna
can laugh at for years, but I wanted to show you my multi-colored skin.
That is not a shadow from my phone on my shoulder, by the way.
I really do have a very crispy brown shoulder line that looks like I didn't
scrub off well, but I did. And then I'm red because I forgot to put on
sunscreen today when I went to go see the hippos. And then my natural whiteness
is there because I wear shirts in public, except for now I'm at the beach so--swimsuit.

So you don't leave the blog with that image of
my impending skin cancer burned into your brain,
here's me with Repent's niece (I forgot her name!), Gadi and Ruben--
since last post I didn't get to put in a good photo of him.
Can you see the mischief brewing in Ruben's eyes?
Oh, he is up to something.