Male-Female Interaction

Pakistani woman in a Burqa. Photo: Marianne Patton/Mercy Corps

March 24, 2003 - After nine days of living in Islamabad, it's becoming more clear to me just how much I don't understand the subtleties of male-female relationships here. For starters, I keep touching men. Just friendly touches on the arm or whatever. I'm a touchy-feely person by nature and this was reinforced in Eritrea where you always touch people.

This is inappropriate here (women don't even shake men's hands unless the men extend their hands first) and is interpreted basically as a sexual advance. I decided to explain to our male staff that this touching business is simply a habit that I'm trying to break and they shouldn't get any funny ideas about it. Luckily, our staff are different than the average person so they understand better where I'm coming from. Still, better to break the habit...

Even simple things like going to the cash machine require that I be accompanied by a man. In the car with our male drivers, I'm supposed to ride in the back, which I hate (feels way too colonial to me). Our Pakistani staff are not supposed to be alone with me in my house. I shouldn't make eye contact with men.

What I don't understand is, if male-female interaction is so sensitive, why is it that you can only hire men to clean your house and do your laundry? Why is it that all the tailors are men? I've noticed that my male house keeper is not comfortable actually putting my clothes away after he's washed and dried them.

I want to assure you that everything is truly fine. We did go into hibernation on Friday but it was just a precautionary measure and, with the benefit of hindsight, was probably not necessary. I used the free day to start getting settled into my house and to host a barbecue for all of the expatriate staff that are in town as well as some of our Pakistani staff. It was a blast.

Our movements were less restricted over the weekend. We were allowed to walk around town a bit, go to restaurants, shop and the like. Some of us went pashmina shopping. I didn't buy any, but the variety and colors are amazing and they are really inexpensive. I had no idea how many different kinds of pashminas there are: regular, ones with one side pashmina and the other side silk, plain ones and ones with patterns woven into them, ones that have one color on one side and another color on the other and water pashminas.

After you decide the exact kind, quality and size of pashmina you want, then you have to pick a color. It's kind of like going into a paint shop and getting those little paint color samples offering 62 shades of lavender.

Actually, shopping for anything is kind of like this. There is so much of everything here. You have to exercise a lot of restraint, especially after living in Eritrea where there isn't much of anything.

My daughter Tess called tonight. She's enjoying life in Portland and her new school. She's in a family co-op kindergarden and is in a mixed kindergarden/1st grade class. She told me that her teacher said that she can read better than the 1st graders!

She sounds like such a little adult on the phone these days. She informed me the other day that President Bush had started a war in Iraq and that even some children had been killed. I asked her what a war was and she said, "It's when people kill each other... don't you know what a war is, Mama?"

Yes, baby, I do...