Today provided a new experience which may prove both prophetic and salutary. Seeing that the doors had been closed for prayer time and having no phone with me during my lunchtime visit to the nearby Saudi Hollandi Bank, I chose to walk the fifteen minutes back to the school rather than disturb someone at prayer to phone the school for a ride. The noontime temperature was well over 90 F, but I'd been getting quite used to the hot temperatures with my 4:30 workouts, regularly done in 85 to 95 F heat. Besides, I'd walk comfortably seeing as I didn't have a class right after lunch.
Moments after leaving the bank, I stood waiting for a typical yellow school bus to go by so I could cross the road. It was impossible not to notice that the sun beat down in that relentless way it has here. Untypically, at least in terms of my Ontario experience with yellow school buses filled with elementary students, it seemed no one was seated, and hanging out of nearly every window was a boy dressed in brightly coloured short-sleeves, many holding chip bags and cans of pop outside the windows as the bus rocked around the corner into a busier street. All boys. There were no girls on the bus. Several of these boys had not only their arms out but their heads too and those are the ones I could hear hooting and hollering as the bus slowly picked up speed and moved away.
Just a few minutes later, a second yellow bus passed me by as I was crossing another street. It was filled with the now familiar black-shrouded figures of elementary school girls, all of them seated, all of the windows closed. The difference in the behaviour of the two sets of children was strikingly obvious and my reaction to it a mixture of sadness, resignation, but hope too, in the end. Boys, it seems, and to some extent males in general, in this place, get to do pretty much what they want. They can be loud, goofy, reckless, expressive, even defiant to some extent, particularly when they are young. Girls, on the other hand, not only can't be like that, not in any public way, they must in most ways be the opposite.
I wouldn't have wanted to have been a passenger on the boys' bus, but I'm not sure I'd have wanted to be one on the girls' bus either. How stifled, I thought, how repressed. The boys' bus must have had quite a nice breeze through it and their short sleeves made sense. Those yellow buses aren't air-conditioned in my experience. Through the girls' bus no breezes blew, no fresh air, litle or nothing to quell the heat.
But my experience with the girls was not yet over and it is what happened next that may well prove prophetic in this hot place. The second bus pulled up to a stop sign just as I cut across the street behind it and several girls at the back of the bus were staring at me, some with hands over their mouths, leaning to a friend and apparently whispering clever funny things about the strange pale, bald-headed man on the street. Many had smiles, so I waggled a forefinger at them in a friendly way and smiled too. I could hear laughter at this and two or three waggled fingers back at me, grinned openly, as others quietly waved to me. Several rapped on the back windows as I passed closely by the back corner of the bus while it pulled away from the stop sign.
All of this I found reassuring. Under the cloak of social expectation, these girls managed to peek out for a moment or two and behave, in a very quiet way, like the boys on the first bus. I had provided them with something that allowed their truer more natural selves to emerge for a few seconds. Their darkened faces had lit up, their smiles emphasized the faces of children, their mildly scampish youthfulness shone through.
Once out of sight, I expect they returned to their more practised behaviour of obediant girls on an outing in a world which seems in so many ways to not want them to engage with that world. It was, for me, a heartening few seconds we had together as I walked along, trying to keep in whatever shadows the few trees and taller buildings cast onto the sidewalk. Perhaps theirs will be the generation that finally gets out from under the patriarchal yoke.
Of a more immediate concern, however, I couldn't help being reminded yet again that here it isn't only the heat that's oppressive.
No comments:
Post a Comment