Life Down the Rutted Red Road

(warning this post contains some references to feminine stuff)

My current world is one of dictionaries and word lists, red lines over my homework and a whiteboard full of words that refuse to surrender to my brain’s memory bank. My tongue stumbles again and again on particular words and my teacher threatens to start charging me chocolate every time I pronounce a letter wrong, again.  Out of consideration for her health and weight I have not yet acquiesced to that suggestion.

All this effort is in pursuit of learning the local language. I do not particularly love the process of learning it and would much prefer to be doing something. But, I want to be able to buy fresh fish, not the dried stuff that you can smell from the other end of the market. I want to be able to see a patient in a clinic and not have to make educated guesses about what they told me. I want to have a conversation about my marital status without worrying that I just agreed to marry some relative. I want to be able to sit with a grandmother and listen as she tells me of days before I was born. I want to learn so I don’t look completely stupid all the time.

But I also want to learn because the way a culture use words, and often the very words themselves, reveal how the culture thinks and what it values.

The other month I learnt a new word: sinn al ya’s, which literally means the tooth of despair. (Ok, the word sinn could refer to tooth or year – but tooth sounds more dramatic. Maybe that is where we got the English phrase long in the tooth). It does not refer to tooth ache or depression. It refers to menopause.

I double checked my dictionary when I first read that. Menopause. The tooth of despair? Isn’t that a bit dramatic? I know menopause can toss emotions around like the whirls of dust in the dry season. But, really? Having your period can be a pain. Literally. Not to mention the pain of childbirth. You would think that these women after 14 babies would be celebrating they do not have to do that again.

I learnt this word as part of conducting a birth attendant training for refugee women. Many of them had some experience as the ‘village midwife’ but many of them had not had the opportunity to learn to read or write.  I have conducted this training several times now, and each time one of the favourite topics has been the female reproductive cycle. For most of them, this is completely new information and it takes a bit of time for them to get their heads around it.  But once they do start to understand, then they want to know what it means when someone does not have their period.

Although most community education programs include this topic for the purpose of teaching about family planning, my attendees main concern is infertility. Sure, sometimes they would prefer not to be having their eighth child before they turn thirty, but babies are delighted in and having children is seen as the main purpose in life. And when war is added to the equation, it is also seen as replacing those who have died and a way to resist those who are seeking to wipe them out.

But infertility, that is devastating for a woman. For, of course, it is her fault. For after six months, one year or if he is being really patient maybe two years without producing a child, her husband is likely to get another wife. Then she will have no guarantee of someone to care for her when she can no longer carry the 20L of water on her head from the village water point.

Talking about infertility leads to talking about menopause. I couple of months ago I met up with a friend in a neighbouring country who is doing similar training. She is discovering how so many women there are completely ignorant about menopause, as women are only now starting to live to an age past menopause.

Back to my training, there was one participant whom I shall call Seima. She was not the brightest of the lot, but she was vocal in her participation. After we discussed that the normal age for menopause is 45 to 50, she pipped up quite concerned, “I am only 36 and I have not had my period for three years. What could be the problem?”

I am always hesitant to guess ages. Some of the women have such beautiful unblemished skin that you might think them younger than their age. Others of them, due to their hard lives, find old age early. Yet, even I could admit that Seima looked nowhere near 36. So, my co-teacher, a midwife but also a refugee, started a series of questions to try and get some idea of Seima’s approximate age.

“How old is your first child?”

“He died.”

“Ok, how old is your second child?”

“He’s big”. That’s helpful.

And then the question that would never be part of my background, but for them is how they date things, “During what war was your child born?” And Seima told a particular one.

“So, then he would be at least 30 years old. Seima, I am sorry you cannot be 36. You must not be having your period because you have reached the time of sinn al ya’s.”

After that, Seima sat subdued for the rest of the session. Who am I to say this is not the tooth of despair? At least it means that children are desired and valued.

Just do not get me started on the fact that the word for a single woman is closely related to the word for suffering.