Sunday, July 14, 2013

More Emerson in Africa

More Emerson in Africa

Currency:  I'm amused that in Emerson's chatter and his general play, now when he talks about how much things cost, the numbers are in the tens of thousands.  He doesn't really know the difference between American dollars and Ugandan shillings, but his numbers have expanded to reflect the big numbers he hears adults talking about!

Bargaining:  You know all the Americans who say one reason they don't like traveling in Mexico (or something like that) because you are supposed to bargain and it makes them so uncomfortable?  Well, clearly the solution to this problem is to spend time in a bargaining country as a small child.  It worked for me, but it apparently works even better when the child is verbose, confident, and outgoing.  We were at the craft market the other day and I gave Emerson permission to ask how much a helicopter cost.  He trotted over to the stall owner, and declared back to me "Ten thousand!"  The seller clarified that she had said 15 thousand, thinking that he was too young to have brought the message properly.  He repeated "ten thousand," and finally told her, quite calmly and firmly "we'll give you TEN thousand for it," and walked back to me with the helicopter.  

Intelligence:  We had to buy some cables for the electronics, which I knew would involve some waiting around for Emerson, so I had had him bring some toys and games in his backpack.  But once he saw what I was doing, he abandoned the toy (sprawled all over in the tiny store) and climbed up a chair and leaned over the counter and wanted to see everything and do everything himself, and remained to boss us around for the entire time.  As we were leaving, the saleswoman commented that he was a very bright boy, "not like our children here."  I said something about there being some ordinary children and some bright ones everywhere, but she said she thought it was the environment, and that the local children weren't so smart.  She explained that a Ugandan child would have just sat on the bench and waited for me the whole time, instead of climbing up and being so engaged in what was going on.

I am a little relieved that this exuberance is seen as intelligence instead of just bad manners, since Emerson has terribly bad manners compared to the Ugandan children!  (At least, that intelligence was the conclusion of one person.)  As a side note, if this is the criteria, Hibiscus is obviously bright as well, because she has certainly not inherited the Ugandan virtue of being able to sit patiently in one place.

Gender:  Hardly anyone knows whether he is a boy or a girl, although their gender roles seem to be as strongly defined as Americans'.  For instance, he will be looking at the pretty bracelets in a shop, and the shop keeper will start to say something, and then pause and ask me "is it boy or girl?"  When I say he is a boy, they turn to Emerson and tell him "that is not for you! is for girls to wear." I think many people do guess boy, because of the clothes he is wearing -- the girls here wear skirts and dresses, almost exclusively.  But some of them must have noticed that foreign children dress differently, so they think he is a girl because of his hair.  For those of you who know that he left home with his curls in quite fluffy condition, I did give him a haircut which is very typically boy- by our standards, but here the boys all have their heads shaved down to a mere fuzz.  Some of the girls have a longer amount of fuzz, and some of them have tiny braids or twists, so I guess Emerson's three inches or so is a girl-amount of hair by local standards!

Food:  A picky eater + a limited diet makes for a slim boy!  Although he is happily embracing the Ugandans preference for everything sweet, and would happily keep himself full on sweetened juice and fried dough balls and cookies and ice cream and hard candies and sweet yogurt and jam, I am peculiarly un-Ugandan in this instance and keep refusing to let him eat sweets whenever he sees them.  To an endless line of potential sweets, he is willing to add fried bits of blandness, such as chips (french fries), chapatis (like a cross between a pancake and a tortilla), and rolexes (chapatis rolled around fried egg). Other than these, his diet has expanded by exactly zero percent since arriving here, and while our access to food has decreased by a much larger percentage.  He won't eat any of the amazing and fresh and delicious vegetables (except for carrots, like he does at home, but these carrots aren't very sweet or tender until they're cooked, so he keeps "getting too full" before he gets to the raw carrot part of the meal); he won't eat any fruits except watermelon and mango; whatever meat we are served he won't eat, as it's tough and fatty.  As for the main foodstuffs here, he won't eat matoke (starch banana) or any of the local starches, except for rice but only barely -- we don't have nutritional yeast, which he normally puts on his rice, so he wants it as "rice porridge" (which I've served for breakfast) with sugar and milk.  I don't let him put sugar in his dinner, so them he just stirs it around and whines.  He has been refusing to eat beans here, and of course won't touch anything mixed together.  He eats pasta when I make it plain, but there's no butter or cheese to put on the noodles.  He does eat the cardboard-like white bread, eggs, and Irish potatoes --  I'm trying to remember if there's anything else!  Don't worry, he's not going to waste away to nothing; he's going to waste away to a small ball of sugar.

...and Children:  All the happy, fat, barefooted, raggle-tag little children in the shops and the lanes call out to us as we pass by, and now that they have gotten used to us some of them occasionally come running up to hold my hand for a moment or to tag Emerson.  Usually Emerson still kind of resents being the center of this random attention, or he feels too shy to answer back, but occasionally the stars are aligned in just the right way and he starts playing.  Once on our walk home he was being a motorcycle, and a group of children came up and he grabbed one boy's hands behind him.  Emerson's idea was that they were a train and he was the engine, and the other boy clearly thought it was some kind of tug-o-war, but one way or another they careened around the lane for a while looking happy while the boy's mother and I laughed and encouraged them.  After that, the idea of playing with other children was in his head, and it has popped out occasionally.  I had some copying to do, and while we waited for the paperwork to be done, he ended up playing some kind of complicated chasing and hiding game with a couple of nearby children and a stapler for an hour or so.  

Emerson had never been shy, but it has cropped up in the last months, and come out with a vengeance here.  During Sunday School last week, I was thinking about the difference between shyness and introversion: that a shy person is actually extroverted and wants desperately to join in but feels like they can't, whereas an introverted person doesn't really want to join in, although they might feel like they have to.  I think that is the crux of the difference between my childhood experiences in Asia and Emerson's here.  I did make some friends, when I had a chance to get to know other girls my age in a quiet setting, but I also remember being encouraged to join into a big group when the adults thought I would really like it if I tried, when I really wanted to vanish into the floor -- or rather, be a bird on the wall who was allowed to watch quietly.  So I am cautious about encouraging Emerson to join in, but at the same time I can feel in him this huge craving to be part of things.  A few times, with the children on the street or at Sunday school or when visiting the classroom, something has captured his imagination and suddenly he runs and gallops and yells with the other children, and that seems to be what actually makes him happy.  He comes back to me laughing and pink-cheecked, and then suddenly remembers that he's different and he's overwhelmed, and he wants me to hold him and pick him up and take him away, and he buries his face and won't look at the other children any more.  So I don't think he wants to be a bird on the wall like I did, I think he wants to be a busy little boy.

Humor:  The style of joking and playing with little children seems a little off-putting to our American sensibilities, with the firm walls we put around ourselves.  Many friendly women have joked with Emerson in this manner, but I've seen them playing with their own children or students the same way, so I think it is natural to them.  The theme seems to be to say something completely incorrect, and then defend the position while laughing; trading children around is a major theme; lots of physical contact enhances the game.  The people doing the joking -- shopkeepers, waitresses, other people I am working with, vendors in our home village area -- are in roles which, at home, would deal directly with the adult and generally ignore small children, or simply ignore both of us.  The joke is often that the woman is going to take Emerson home with her, although sometimes they offer to let me have their child.  Sometimes this might be enhanced with taking Emerson's arm like they are going to steal him away, and one woman offered "come home with me and I will breast-feed you."  Another time, a school administrator told Emerson that it was Friday, when it was Tuesday, and she kept this going for quite a long conversation.   Another kind of play is to pop the fingers at the child, in what I can kind of describe as how we might pretend to be a duck pecking our baby, especially on the cheeks and neck.  Sharing is another theme, such as if one has something to eat or play "are you giving one for me? I have always wanted one of those!"  These games are a little confusing to Emerson, although when we talk about how they are being playful and how to play back, he seems to catch on and be willing to play along.

(As a side note: It's funny how startling it is to hear the word "breastfeeding" in casual conversation.  I am around many mothers at home who are passionate about child-led weaning and the right to nurse in public and the potent abilities of human milk and otherwise make the subject a large part of conversation and thought, and yet we Americans usually avoid the word "breastfeeding."  Even those of us who talk about it frequently and comfortably come up with cutesy substitutions like "giving her numnums," or would even prefer slightly vulgar phrases such as "boob time" rather than just the direct description.  Here people say "breastfeeding" whenever they mean "breastfeeding," and they also don't see any reason to avoid the subject if it is relevant.)

Conversation:  It's not just humor; people here are much more willing to engage children in conversation than Americans are.  Greetings are very important here, and before asking for direction or to buy a banana or walking into an office it is mandatory to go through a whole "hello, how are you, I'm fine, how are you, thank you" conversation.  But what is the most different is that the banana-peddlers and office workers expect to have the conversation with Emerson, as well.  They are willing to laugh it off when he doesn't respond (I don't think I would get as much sympathy!) but they invariably greet him, and if he does respond they go through the whole greeting conversation and handshake just like they do with me.

When they find a way to go into a more detailed conversation, they do that as well.  For instance, if he has a toy out in a restaurant, the waiter is likely to pause and ask him quite a number of questions about how it works and what he is doing, and listen seriously to his responses. And you know how detailed his responses can be!  People want to hear about where he goes to school and whether he knows how to read, and they praise him.  Emerson has been given bananas and a leather flamingo bookmark by shopkeepers who are praising him for learning to read, and encouraging him to continue working!

...and Men:  Emerson may be uncertain in his relationships with children, but not so with men.  He gloms onto them right, left and center, and from casual interactions to more long-term ones, all kinds of men are warm and encouraging toward him.  He will go out and trail around after the caretaker of our apartment building, and haul his hose for him and come back to tell me all about the ladders going up to the water tanks and everything that Moses did up there.  (Luckily he did not seem to have permission to climb the ladder!  In fact, adults are constantly saying "stop that, you will fall.") One fatherly figure saw him examining a motorcycle and gently put him on his own (glancing at me for permission) and took him for a short and slow ride, stopping at the beginning and end to let Emerson try out every button and knob.  We spent a leisurely lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant where Emerson made tons of friends; the pool players paused their game to show him how to knock the balls around, and the butcher showed him how he cut the meat, and came out to play rounds and rounds of the apparently-universal high-five game where the little boy slams the hands as hard as he can and the man pretends to be wounded and knocked over.  (I have insisted to Emerson that this is a game you play with men, not with your mama.  Mamas' hands get too tired to play that game.)  We were there for about four hours, mostly while Emerson chattered and played!  When I check to see if he's bothering anyone, they wave me off.

Some of the reading I have been doing has shed another angle of light on these relationships.  Several authors have described how their parents taught them during their childhood: around age four or five, their same-sex parent brought them along to do the work with them.  The women describe in detail how their mothers told them how to do things and how important it was, and then praised them extravagantly for doing their little bit.  For instance, the author described that while she mangled a couple of matoke with her knife, her mother neatly peeled and cut the whole batch, and then the mother told her husband that night how his daughter had prepared his matoke for him and the father thanked the daughter and insisted it was the most delicious matoke he had ever had.  In this way the children gradually acquire all the parents' skills, and meanwhile a great deal of pride and joy in doing their work.  

So I think for these men, letting a little boy tag along while making him feel like he is essential to the process, is just the natural way that they have learned and that they are teaching their own sons and nephews and young cousins.  

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