Being Not Just One of the Boys

If I had grown up with this kid,
I would have gotten to play
with all of his super-hero dolls.
Here he is suggesting I get bit
by a spider so that I can get super-powers.

I have no brothers. I grew up with dolls and dress-up clothes. This wasn’t really a hardship for me. I mean, Micro Machines were kind of cool, but so was Polly Pocket. I preferred stuffed animals to Barbies anyway.

But in spite of being surrounded by girls at home, I was almost always the only girl in my class at school. Living in the “language school” town of Indonesia, were people would come to study Bahasa before heading out to various other cities and islands, I prayed diligently for another girl to join my class at the beginning of each school year, having already said my tearful goodbyes to the girls who had left at the end of the previous year, most of whom I’ve never seen again in my life.

Being the only girl in elementary school is not easy. Especially if you are a competitive only girl. I felt that the honor of all woman-kind rested on my shoulders. I had no issue with cooties, but I was going to win every dang spelling bee and every mad minute math competition and finish every test before all those other stupid boys or die trying. It was for all Women everywhere. And, I usually did. I also always got picked last by some reluctant boy for any partner work, which didn’t bother me too much, except that it meant that I had to work with a boy who would be unlikely to do his work to my high standards. (These days I don't get picked at all, but at least I don't have to worry about lowering my standards.)

A Facebook conversation about broken compressor parts,
which I mostly faked my way through

Fast forward to my life now. I work with two water organizations. This is typically a male-dominated field where muscular men heave giant equipment around and send each other emails about whether we need more 152mm drill bits or 140mm ones. They are the guys that know how to fix a car when it breaks down by the side of the road. I am the girl sending them emails or calling them and asking them for photos of women drinking water from the well and population data.

 While I never wanted to be a girly girl, I’ve never had dreams of being a car mechanic either. Though, to be honest, it would be really cool if I knew how to fix a car. I took autoshop in high school, but I think I already mentioned on this blog somewhere that I mostly convinced the teacher to let us spend the time watching video tapes of Junk Yard Wars that his family had sent him. Therein lies my talent—convincing other people to do what I want them to do. It’s a talent that is not stereotypically connected to either men or women.

Being the only girl is not such a big deal to me anymore. It comes with perks. I never have to share my hotel room with anyone on group trips. This is nice because I like to be alone and also I always forget my towel and end up walking around naked looking for it. It does mean that I am often left out of conversations centering around sports I don’t care about. And there are the inevitable jokes about male anatomy that they try to make in whispered asides, but they are not great at whispering. So I feel free to talk about tampons and hang my sports bras up to dry over the fire place in the Himalayas because most of them have daughters anyway, and it is good preparation for them.

But I do like hanging out with other women, and I resented friends in high school who told me how much they prefer the company of boys. “They have so much less drama,” they said. Which is complete crap, of course. I know so many dramatic boys. They are just as exhausting as dramatic girls and much more sensitive to being laughed at.  I’ve never understood the attraction of a moody bad boy.

Still, I’m not very good at the girl thing. This was brought to my attention again recently when I showed up to dinner out with friends from the office and a colleague visiting from out of town. The one other girl in the office came a bit late with one of her friends. They were dressed up beautifully in lovely white dresses and make-up, with perfectly braided hair. My hair was also braided—the French braid, which is this white girl’s “I didn’t wash my hair” style. I was wearing the same outfit (a Neverthirst t-shirt, of course, and a cheap skirt from the market in Khartoum) I’d worn all day because why get other clothes dirty at the end of the day? And I was definitely not wearing any make-up because I don’t see the point in applying something that will melt off my face in seconds with the heat of the sun and the sweat of my brow. And I was tired and did not care to make the effort at all. Honestly, and you may not believe me and my teammates here certainly don’t, but there are moments when I do feel inclined to dress nicely. But, also honestly, those days are few and far between and almost never during the hot season in Chad.

Emelie, making me a cake on my bday--
she's beautiful, she bakes, AND she wears makeup.
She is the perfect woman.

And so that night at the dinner table, three men from three different countries, who are all married anyway, gave me lots of grief about my slovenly appearance and “Why can’t you be like Emelie and Mireille?” Obviously none of my defenses about changing clothes or putting on make-up in the heat were valid in the light of Emelie and Mireille who had done both. I took my usual feminist tactic of, “I don’t have to dress up for anyone if I don’t want to.” And they tried to convince me that I want to dress up for me. Actually, I figured out later that Anders thinks I’m suffering some kind of repressed depression from what happened in Mundri last year and that’s why I’m making no effort in my appearance. But he was with me in Kenya when I both dressed up and wore make-up and clearly didn’t notice, so I think it was more the shocking comparison between me and the beautiful Emelie and the stunning Mireille. I mean, really, these are gorgeous ladies. There would be a marked contrast between me and them if we were all dressed in t-shirts and skirts, but I have never seen Emelie in a t-shirt, and I work with her everyday AND we stayed together in Mongo for a week. She gets out of bed looking perfect. Sadly, I don’t think I have a picture of us that night unless Anders posts it on Facebook, and he was mad at me for making an angry face in one of the pictures, so I don’t think he will.

 After taking crap about it from them ALL night (not Emelie and Mireille, they are too classy), I decided I dress up with a vengeance the next night. And the next morning at church when Anders thought I dressed up because I didn’t wear a t-shirt (it was a blouse made out of t-shirt material though…hehe) and I hadn’t put my hair up yet (I was running late of course), I almost un-decided to dress up with a vengeance. Clearly, if it was so easy to please them, why try harder? Because once you set a precedent, you have to keep up with that standard. But I am competitive, as you know, so that evening, I decided to use my minimal time at home to make myself look GOOD. And of course, that takes a lot of work.

And it turns out, I maybe deserved all the criticism. I was hoping to find something tight and low-cut and sparkly in my closet, but it seems that I don’t actually own any clothing like that. I have no dresses (here in Chad anyway) and nothing with sequins.  I have things that are low-cut, but only because they are lose, so they hang low on me.  They are not very sexy but they are so comfortable—like wearing a pillowcase, and really, is there any object that is more comfortable than a pillow?  I had to settle for skinny jeans and a black shirt (black is sophisticated, right?) and the one pair of high heels I have with me for attending weddings in Khartoum (when Zuhoor doesn’t make me borrow hers).

Anders gave me Danish gummy penguins,
so I forgive him for being a jerk
about my "laid back style."

And let me tell you, putting on skinny jeans in a house that is 100/38 degrees with no AC and one fan that does not, unfortunately follow me around the room like a Roomba or a character from Beauty and the Beast, is very difficult. And you should put them on before you paint your nails, but I wanted to wait until the last minute to put on my jeans because I was trying to keep cool while I put on make-up. I do not have a fan in the bathroom where I have a mirror, and I was not feeling motivated to pick up the one I had and drag there and then try to untangle the extension cord enough to make it reach and the fiddle with the plug again to make it turn on (it is finicky), so I just went for it. It was another mistake on my part.

I decided to put my hair in the “fancy ponytail” -where you wrap a section of hair around the rubber band, creating the illusion of having tied your hair with your hair, which is obviously something mermaids would do, not having rubber bands under the sea, and so it is cool. This hairstyle also has the benefit of looking good for about 5 seconds while I’m looking in the mirror. And I only find out at the end of the night that it came unwrapped a few minutes later and curled weirdly over the rest of the ponytail all night long. After I got the pins jammed in right and swished my hair to make sure it would stay in, and then had to do again because it didn’t stay in, I noticed I was sweating profusely. No makeup in the world would stick on that. I tried a few times to dry it off with the towel and then I realized that foundation would not be an option. I went to stand in front of the fan for a few moments. Then I came back in to focus on my eye makeup, which is the only thing that I actually like doing. I have liked it ever since I was a kid stealing my grandmother’s eyeshadow and drawing long curlicues out the sides of my eyes trying to look like Jasmine. My sisters told me I looked like an evil witch, and I thought that was even better. I did not get so creative this time, but I did have to run into the fan in between lining each eye. Then I busted out the mascara, which I only use when I’m really trying (i.e. weddings in Khartoum) because I actually think it makes me look scary—like I have spiders on my eyelids or something because my eyelashes are already long and mostly black. They are my one beauty. Like Jo in Little Women, when she cuts of her hair to sell to buy books or writing paper or something and Amy says, “Oh Jo, your one beauty!” Only, I would never cut off my eyelashes to buy books—I would just find a way to download the pdf of the book for free off the Internet. So I basically never use the mascara, but it turns out, when you don’t use something like that and you live in Chad, it dries up. I didn’t know this was a thing. And if you think that you can pour some water in the tube and make it work again, you are also wrong. So I threw it away. And used the clear stuff I put on my eyebrows to make them stay in one place. And then I was done.

But I had to take some girl mirror selfies to be really official about dressing up and I found out that I am also not good at those. Here are a few that are not as bad as the rest. And I’m sorry for the dirty mirror. The light in my bathroom isn’t really bright, and I never actually saw that dirt until it was on my camera.

The "in the mirror" picture.
Don't you like Naomi's rubber duckies?
Am I making the face right? I feel like I should have
pooched the lips more or something.
It is hard to hold a face AND look for the camera button.

This face is dumber-looking, but at least you
can't see the dirty mirror.
Also, why take the mirror shot at all when you
have the ability to flip the camera to take a mirror
photo when you are not looking in a mirror?
I never understood that but I was trying to be true to
the persona of "The Girl Who Dresses Up to Go Out on the Town."

The shoes, the awkward leg-photo,
the messy house in the background.

Ultimately, the beauty effort was appreciated, though the neighbors might have been scandalized by the skinny jeans, and I proved my point. And today I am wearing a skirt that is too big, a pillow-case t-shirt over a sports bra, dirty flipflops and no makeup. I didn't even wash my hair, just blobbed it up on top of my head. Having had no electricity for 3 of the 5 days that have passed this week, I think that the fact that I haven't melted into a pile of salt (all the liquid would be instantly sucked into the dry air) is enough of an accomplishment. I also translated some French documents into English and some English documents into Arabic and tested the voltage on my solar battery to see why it stops working at 2am even though it supposedly has 12.71 volts going into the system and wrote this blog. So what if don't wear makeup or clothes that fit me?

How cool am I checking the voltage?
Guess what I was wearing.