I've been thinking a lot recently about at what point you are open to considering alternate “normals” normal. The students have arrived and they are to varying degrees adjusting to life in
At the same time, I’ve started having funny conversations with my Swazi housemate, Dumisa. Dumisa is really friendly and we tend to cook dinner around the same time, so we end up chatting quite a bit. We are both about the same age and generally pessimistic about relationships, so there is sort of this undertone of the possibility of a relationship between us. I mean, we already live together right? Except there isn’t a possibility. Dumisa does the vast majority of the talking and sometimes what he says is so far away from my “normal” and he seems so committed to his “normal” that I don’t feel the need to comment. Instead I just laugh, because a lot of what he says is really funny, even if he doesn’t realise its funny. I think he has been interpreting my silence or laughter as agreement and is beginning to think we are a great match. When I started picking up on this, I decided that I need to start speaking up more clearly. So, one thing Dumisa feels strongly about is that he wants to marry a woman who knows her gender. By this he means a woman who knows that she should do the laundry and cooking and he will cut wood and replace flat tires. I have often joked with him that I don’t know my gender, but apparently he didn’t get it. So the other day he saw me walking out of the house with my laundry. I told him that I’m lazy and there is a machine at work, so I carry my clothes to work and do it there. Later, he asked me about this and I reiterated that I don’t know my gender. He said, “Look there are 3 types of guys you might find: the kind that thinks you should not use a machine because you have two hands, the kind that doesn’t care if you carry your clothes to work as long as the laundry is done, and the kind that will buy you a machine so you don’t have to carry it.” I asked, “What about the kind that will share in the laundry responsibility with me?” He looked completely dumbfounded. “What? That’s the problem with the world today! People who try to mix up what God has created. God made it very clear in the Bible what a man should do and what a woman should do.” “Where in the Bible does it say that women should do laundry?” “It’s there mon! I’m telling you!” (This is where he turns on his Rasta.) The more I try to question how women doing laundry became his definition of normal, the more resistant he becomes. The funny thing is, he does his own laundry. I guess its okay if you aren’t married. I started questioning him on why a woman who is capable of changing tires should get married, particularly if you have a gas/electric stove and don’t need wood chopped. It seemed like a pretty bum deal to me, suddenly the woman gets sacked with all the laundry, cooking and child care responsibilities, and all she gets in return is a man who can change tires, and how often do you really get flats anyway, and who’s to say he’ll even be in the car at that moment? By now he was very frustrated by my heresy and would have no more of this crazy talk. I think I pretty well convinced him that we are not a good match.
But all of this, juxtaposed with watching my students adapt to life in Namibia, and my boss who has no desire to consider new ideas which is way too long of a story to go into right now, has really got me to thinking a lot about what makes people open to consider “new” ideas which are not in their definition of “normal”. Does how many different varieties of “normal” you encountered before a certain age play into it? Is it just in your nature when you are born to either be open or not? Or does it depend on your motivation? ie. If you are a student that came to
Its funny too how I tend to consider myself open minded, but yet I of course do have my limits to what I will allow into my definition of “normal”. I’m sure its just a spectrum. But how do people get placed on the spectrum? And how do people move along the spectrum?
