Washing

Warning! This entry contains nudity! (Though not in picture form.)

Last week, as I approached my neighbours' house (the same neighbours mentioned last entry) I heard the familiar sounds of washing and laughter. With a full household and no machines of convenience – such as the washers, dryers, dishwashers and showers we use at home – there is a nearly-continuous stream of washing going on. There are the tubs: plastic basins, in many colours and sizes; buckets, both metal and plastic, again in many sizes; and the big metal bathtubs, used for heavy-duty laundry and the bathing of adults. In due course, any number of household items are thrown into the tubs, covered with water, and scrubbed diligently with Sunlight soap until they are clean. Shirts, pants, underwear, socks, blankets, sheets, carpets, towels and dishcloths – cups, plates, spoons, frying pans, cast-iron metal pots that sit over the fire and get crusted with mealie-meal – small basins inside of larger ones – hands, faces, babies – everything.

Last week, however, as I rounded the corner, I saw something new: G being washed by her older sister. G is my favourite of the daughters, my garden assistant and quiet observer, who helps me sweep the floor and eats popcorn while watching movies she doesn't quite understand. She's a bright girl, and we get along well – most of my weekends are spent with G, working together in the garden. She is about twelve. Her sister, N, is maybe sixteen.

I thought, when first I noticed them, that N was just sitting on the step and holding the soap for her. After all, a twelve-year-old is perfectly capable of washing herself. But no - N was holding a bar of tough-looking soap in one hand, G's slippery, ticklish leg in the other, and vigorously scrubbing away as G shrieked with laughter. I laughed with them, and chatted a bit about their baby sister. It's not an odd thing to see my neighbours in various states of undress, and neither of us feel uncomfortable about it – but it was a surprise to me to see G being so decidedly washed by her sister.

Being washed by another person is something, in Western culture, that comes to an abrupt halt as soon as you are old enough to wash yourself. In general, we are so self-conscious of our bodies – our precious skin and fat and hair and flesh – that we rush our bathing, spending as little time as possible scrubbing and prodding and touching our embarrassing physical selves. In the past, having someone else bathe you was considered a pleasure, a luxury. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, all had servants or slaves to bathe them, to clean each crevice of flesh and then anoint the body with oils and perfumes. Sisters and mothers bathed with each other, chatting and scrubbing backs, washing hair. Public bath houses were common, or communal family baths. In many parts of the world, this still exists.

When I was in India, I went for an Ayurvedic massage in Kerala. The massage itself was a strange experience – I was laid out on an ancient wooden table in a low-ceilinged, oppressively hot room, the accumulated oil of thousands of previous massages having seeped into the wood and turned it a deep, lustrous mahogany brown. My masseuse was an old woman both shaped and coloured like a walnut, who spoke only Malayalam and gestured for me to undress and lie down on the table. She gave me a tiny g-string to wear, like the disposable underwear you get to try on swimsuits: a thin strip of fragile, paper-like cloth, tied around the waist with cheap string. She poured copious amounts of oil over me and performed her massage. Afterwards, she gestured me into a wash-room off to the side, and indicated that I should sit down on a small plastic stool. I perched on the stool, apprehensive – the whole experience had been so decidedly odd that I wasn't very relaxed at all – and without further ceremony, she began to wash me. Buckets of water splashed over my head were followed by energetic scrubbing with the ubiquitous green Medimix soap, then more water, then more scrubbing. She washed my hair with shampoo from an unmarked plastic bottle and then carefully oiled and combed it.

What did I feel? What was I thinking? I don't know. I hadn't expected to be washed. When she showed me into the room, I assumed that I would wash myself – for a moment I had the uneasy suspicion that she was going to stay and watch while I did – but I didn't realize what was really going on until the first bucket of water broke over my head. The masseuse performed the task with such impersonal efficiency that I couldn't possibly object, and she had clearly carried out this wholly unremarkable part of her job so often that there was no embarrassment, just the simple shock of a completely unfamiliar physical sensation. I hadn't been washed like that – businesslike, scrub, rinse, repeat – since I was a toddler.

Washing another person is a physical intimacy rarely allowed back at home. Why? Like cleaning ticks off of a fellow primate, it is a helpful favour, and like a massage or an embrace, it is a pleasant expression of intimacy or love. But nudity, and familiarity with our bodies entirely, is not generally accepted. It's something paradoxical to me – public breast-feeding, or having a bath in your front yard, are no problem here. Back in North America, they would be horrifying. Imagine walking back to your house and finding your neighbour in metal washtub in her front yard, splashing around with a bar of soap – with her sister scrubbing under her arm! Or being in a board meeting with a local NGO and having the chairlady whip out a breast and start feeding her child – while still addressing the rest of the board? Inconceivable. And yet, many of my friends here have been shocked and appalled by their first visit to a Western-style beach in South Africa, where men proudly strut around in Speedos and women barely cover their bits and pieces with neon string bikinis.

For further strangeness, let's consider the act of greatest physical intimacy that two adult humans engage in – sex. Surely, after the extreme intimacy of having sex, bathing each other should be a pleasant and comfortable activity? But I would venture to guess, based on study, anecdote, and first-hand experience, that most couples do not bathe each other, and would even consider it weird or awkward to do so. I mean, many people won't even have sex with the lights on. Why not? To add my voice to the chorus of complaint: we shouldn't be ashamed of our bodies, or our physical, animal selves. We don't all have to make love like porn stars, celluloid and perfect. We don't all have to be mothers like Victoria Beckham, with scheduled Caesareans and bottled formula from day one. We are the human animal, the “third chimpanzee,” dirty and flawed and mammalian – bathing and breastfeeding and hard-wired for the joy of touch. Celebrate!

The Girls Next Door

Impromptu traditional dancing; unrelated to this entry

Next door to me lives a fairly typical family. They stay in a one-room house, which is really classy by the standards of the village. The house was built by the trust, so it looks reasonably finished (as opposed to the more common mud/dung-walled houses) and it doesn't leak. Best of all, it has running water and electricity, which I would estimate only 5% of the houses in the village have.

Within this house stays an ever-changing collection of women. The chief occupant is P, who works in my Trust as an assistant to the Health program. P's salary pays for the rent on the house. With her stay the following ladies: P's three daughters, occasionally P's sister, occasionally P's niece, occasionally the children of the sister and the niece, and occasionally some random women I do not know. P's husband is a teacher in a far-distant settlement, so he comes to visit on school holidays. When he comes over, they usually kick the girls out of the house to stay in the empty house behind the office. I don't think that this is technically allowed, but such is life in a one-room house with 4-8 occupants.

The final occupant of this house is a toddler, about 16 months old. This girl, L, is in the unfortunate position of being hated and neglected by all.

Let me preface this by saying that neglected children are an oddity around here. In general, San people take incredibly good care of their children - they are constantly with their babies, playing, feeding, talking to, and generally caring for them. Children take top priority, and I have rarely seen anyone be harsh to a child. The unlucky L, however, is the daughter of an "ex" girlfriend of P's husband - the "ex" is in quote marks because it's clear that, since P and her husband have been together for at least ten years, L is the product of an extramarital affair. Not so unusual. The difficult part is that L's mother, apparently unable to care for her daughter, passed the responsibility onto the father. And the father, apparently unable to care for his daughter, passed the responsibility onto his wife. P, understandably, is none too thrilled about having to provide for the daughter of her husband's ex-mistress.

So L is neglected. I find myself very conflicted. P has a daughter about the same age as L, and it's heartbreaking to see this most perfect of social experiments being played out: two girls, sharing half their genetic material, are raised in the same house, but one is drenched in love and the other is simply fed and left to sit in the dirt. L is always crying. I found it incredibly irritating until I realized why she was crying; now I want to comfort her. However, as I keep reminding myself, a child is not a cat - it's a terrible idea on many levels for me to get involved in this situation. So many aspects of it are foreign to me; the casual passing-around of babies, the acceptance of unfaithful spouses, the communal living. I'm sure an unwanted baby is so much MORE irritating in an overpacked house. So I try to stay out of it.

What would you do? In P's position? In her husband's? In mine?

And to close, two irrelevant photographs:

Kimchi the cat.
Sprawled in her preferred spot on my desk, messing up all of my wires. I think she likes the heat coming from the little cooling fan of my laptop.

The road is beautiful and long.
This is from the area where we're trying to set up the game farm.

Why Bother Getting Old?

Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. Sounds like an awesome plan, right? Read on to find out why natural selection says otherwise...

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This is a follow-up to my previous entry The Capacity to Learn?

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Again, with credit to Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee, let's consider the question: why do we have old people? Forgive me if you've already thought about this – for me, it was one of those questions that seems blindingly obvious in retrospect, but I'd never asked myself before. (Sort of like – Q: “Why would the First Nations people of Vancouver Island invent a bed that folds up into a couch?” A: “It's a hide-a-bed, not a Haida bed, you complete moron.”)

So, why have old people? As we know, the purpose of all life is to propagate itself – whether bacterium, mosquito, baobab tree, hamster, or human being, the basic drive is to survive to reproductive age, and then reproduce as much as possible. Caveat: the offspring should survive to reproduce themselves. No good having 100 babies if they all die before adulthood. Anyhow, summed up: leave as many children as you can. Most animals, quite sensibly, die as soon as they accomplish this goal.

Take salmon as an example. They hatch, try not to get eaten, grow a bit, then leave their native stream for the ocean. Next, they swim around in the ocean getting fat and reaching adulthood, and then – incredibly – they swim right back to their very own native stream, charge upstream, mate, spawn (SPAWN! SPAWN!), and promptly die. This gory sight can be witnessed at any number of salmon spawning streams: the salmon arrive, lay eggs, and DIE. They know what's up. There is no point – in an evolutionary sense – in surviving past the birth of your babies.

Some animals - for example cats - for example my cat, who is pregnant again - have babies and don't die. Why? Just to annoy me! But seriously, two reasons: (1) They need to nurse their babies, something that the lucky mother salmon are not required to do. (2) They can have more than one round of babies. Again, see example: Jenn's cat.

Human beings, however, have an even crazier level of longevity, exemplified by seemingly the most illogical of phenomena: MENOPAUSE. Why bother with menopause at all? You are no longer nursing babies. You are no longer having babies. Quite possibly, you are no longer supporting your children at all. So, if you are no longer nursing or otherwise keeping your children alive – so that they, in turn, can have more babies and further propagate your genetic material – and you can no longer have more children of your own, why stay alive? Indeed, very old people become a drain on the resources of their children and community, requiring special help and no longer contributing to the communal tucker pot. This seems like a disadvantage, doesn't it? Why would natural selection ever favour the development of such a long lifespan in human beings? We are stuck with two questions:

1. Why do we have old people?

2. If, for whatever reason, there is an advantage in staying alive for such a long time - why menopause? Why don't human females remain fertile, as human males remain virile?
   
   

The answer to “why do we have old people” is difficult to divine in modern society. I love my grandmother very much, but if I had to say how much she has directly contributed to the survival of myself or my parents over the past 10 years, I'd be forced to admit that it's not much. I suppose there are vague emotional/spiritual benefits, but in the hypothetical situation of balancing those benefits against an extra mouth to feed, it wouldn't come out too favourably. Fine. In comparison, take an example from my past week of life in D'Kar.

On Thursday evening I was out in the field with some guys from the office, and we were camped out in the bush, making dinner. Suddenly there was a great rumbling, and of all things, a massive hailstorm descended upon us. BAM BAM BAM, chunks of ice bashing the car, sliding down my shirt, falling in the soup, and all melting away in about 30 seconds. This, clearly, is not a common occurrence in the Kalahari. When I got back to D'Kar, all the talk was about the storm. “Were you scared?” I asked one young girl.

“No,” she replied. “I know about hail.”

“You've seen it before?” I asked, incredulously.

“No,” she rolled her eyes. “Of course not. The old man, JM, told me about it.”

Often, this is the answer to such questions. “The old man told me about it.” It's another cultural blind spot for me: if it doesn't hail here, I think to myself, and they don't have television, how can they know about hail? Well, simple. If it has happened in the past 70 or so years, the old people will know. This is oral knowledge, oral history, and it is powerful. As human society became ever more complicated, the amount of useful knowledge there was to pass on increased, and therefore the advantage in keeping people around longer and longer to pass on that knowledge. So selection favoured more and more energy spent on repair of the body, because it paid off in terms of advantage passed on to the offspring. (More energy spent repairing the body as it deteriorates --> longer lifespan.)

A more hard-core example comes from Diamond: “When I visited Rennell Island in the Solomons in 1976, many islanders told me what wild fruits were good to eat, but only one old man could tell me what other wild fruits could be eaten in an emergency to avoid starvation. He remembered that information from a cyclone that had hit Rennell in his childhood (around 1905), destroying gardens and reducing his people to a state of desperation. One such person in a preliterate society can thus spell the difference between death and survival for the whole society.”

So, humans have longer lifespans than any other animals because we have a unique advantage in sticking around: passing on complex knowledge. Sometimes the knowledge of old people can provide life-or-death information about rare events. I cannot overstate the immense respect that San people have for their elders - “the old man,” which perhaps sounds derisive when typed out in this blog, is in fact a term of greatest respect and affection. It's not just a convention of etiquette, as respect for elders so often is in modern Western society – it's a genuine respect for the unique and extremely valuable knowledge that old people possess. They are the original Wikipedia.

Which leaves us with – why menopause? If we must get old, why not continue having babies the whole time? Why only women, and not men? The answer in brief is that childbirth is an extremely risky enterprise for human females, much more so than almost all other animals. Menopause is another compromise, another evolutionary trade-off: it's worth it to keep you around for your knowledge, which increases the fitness of your offspring. But after a certain age, the risk of dying in childbirth outweighs the possible advantage of having more children. (Stating the obvious: men don't risk death by spreading their seed.)

Why do human women have particular trouble giving birth? Most likely because human heads got out of proportion with the rest of us – our giant brains grew and the pelvis didn't have time to catch up.

And that, my friends, is that. We have giant heads, and we get old. Personally, I cannot wait to be “the old woman,” and I look forward to demanding the respect I am due. I do not care if other sources of information have rendered my elder-knowledge somewhat obsolete; I will take the best seat in all situations, hit on younger men, own dozens of cats, and insist that I know best about everything. LOOK OUT WORLD.

Whew

Hello all,

Back from Shakawe and a very hectic weekend at the Maun Festival, but as it turns out I'm heading off into the field again tomorrow, back on Friday. My garden is suffering. No time for big bold entries, but I'll leave you with a couple of photographs. The picture above is of the reeds lining the river, which people harvest and dry to use for fences and walls. It's quite beautiful, actually, the silver-grey bundles of reeds surrounding the houses. You can't buy them in Ghanzi, sadly.
Above, the papyrus, which gives the illusion that the river is just a narrow channel. In fact, though it seemed to be only 30m across, the section of river pictured above stretches several kilometers, broken by floating beds of papyrus. The roots twine together to form a raft, which can dig into the river bottom if it gets low enough, but will detach and float away with the next flood.

Then we have Sam, the kgosi of the Croc Farm, and the largest crocodile I've ever seen. What a monster. He just lay sprawled in the sun, blinking lazily at us. He has to be kept in his own pen, or he'd eat the other crocs.

SWEET DEAL. See you all in a week.