Posted by Ryan on September 6, 2005, 9:07 am, in reply to "Part 7: Illegal international flight to avoid complying with probation" One day H—, another co-worker at the center, and I went out to eat lunch at a nearby restaurant, a little place where they scoop you up some little dishes of doodads, rice and chicken or something, and offer with it some kind of Kool-Aid-type drink made from tapwater that could give you dysentery, which I would routinely turn down and order a Coke instead. (The Coca-Cola is fine in their country; tastes a little different because the sugar is local and not as refined—which is better for you actually—but it’s an American company and the water in it is purified up to U.S. standards.) There was a song playing. An American song. Backstreet Boys. ’Cause you are... my fire, But we... are two worlds apart, “This song makes me remember my girlfriend back home,” I said to H— as we were sitting there at the table. “We used to hear it when we were together places. She liked it when I’d sing little bits of it to her.” “What are the words saying?” he asked me. I listened, then translated the words: Tell me why.... I shook my head. “I can’t really make much sense out of its meaning in English, either. But that’s what the words are saying.” We ate, and after we were finished we were casually walking back to the center along the dirt road that had cement sidewalks running beside it, against the gray concrete brick walls of a factory that stretched alongside the road. As we continued on our way back, we passed by a sight that shocked me—shocked me plumb out of my mind I must say—leaving me mouth gaping. I couldn’t believe what was happening—and right there in front of us. There were two men standing on the sidewalk, both turned towards the gray-brick wall, and they were both urinating—right there, right out in public, in broad daylight, right on the sidewalk, with the urine running down the wall, over the sidewalk and trickling down into the dirt. My jaw dropped open. I couldn’t believe what my eyes were saying was happening. Right out in public, for crying out loud! Apparently H— noticed the shocked expression on my face. He kind of made an embarrassed giggle—not that he was embarrassed about it happening, having grown up with it, but seeing how I appeared to be embarrassed about it, it seemed to cause him some embarrassment too. As we walked the rest of the way back, I was still shaking my head, mouth still open in disbelief at what had just happened. Wasn’t this a monogamous culture, I was told? Where they were modest about sexual issues? And doesn’t being modest about sexual issues mean always being very careful to guard against the possibility of private parts ever being seen by members of the opposite sex? What about the ethic I had always understood back home in the U.S., where there were always two doors and a wall to walk around in public restrooms, to protect against the possibility of anybody of the opposite sex ever seeing anything? How could those men just... right out on the sidewalk? What if a woman were to come walking by... and see them? When we got back to headquarters, I came in and sat down to rest, still shaking my head, probably with a horrified look on my face. (Not that I was horrified at the sight of someone urinating, but what was hitting me was the thought that it was in public, and persons of the female gender... well, they could have just come walking along and seen it too.) I had come prepared for the idea that this culture was going to be very different from what I had grown up with. And from everything I had heard, I was expecting it to be strict about things like the need for people to cover themselves, and I had come ready to live in an environment like that. At the center I set myself to thinking, ‘Well, maybe they have some way of... knowing... that there aren’t going to be any women around anywhere—and if there were, then perhaps, they wouldn’t run the risk of getting so close to the possibility of... their private parts being seen that way.... ‘Yes, that must be it,’ I thought. ‘Maybe they just... have some way of knowing... preparing... so that such a thing couldn’t happen when women were around anywhere.’ Well, I thought wrong, as it turned out. One morning when I got up out of bed in the second-story bedroom where I was staying, I went to the window and stood there for a while looking out. There were peasant people walking by as they usually did during the day, though not everyone was there all at once at this time of the morning; every now and then a person or two would pass by, usually carrying fruits they had picked, or other things, in bags or in baskets on their heads, or in double containers at the ends of poles balanced on their shoulders, or hauling them in wooden carts, taking them to the market to sell. Then, as I watched out the window, one peasant man came walking along when there was no one else around. He stopped, looked around, then proceeded to the wall on the other side of the street with his back to me, where there were some sheets of reddish-brown rusted-out tin siding nailed to a wooden frame, with grass growing wild at the bottom. He reached his hand in front of him, opened the crotch of his clothing and started urinating there. After having observed this happening a few times with a few different people, I concluded that it was no doubt a common practice. Again this time, there weren’t any women around. But I was bearing in mind that there could have been. Well, it didn’t take me too much longer of living there, walking around through the endless shantytowns and lower-class neighborhoods, to learn that not only was it a common practice in this country, but when the men did it, they didn’t even seem to be giving a second thought to the question of whether there might be women walking by when they did. They would casually turn to the walls to take a squirt when they were walking anywhere. Strange, nobody, not even the women and girls, seemed to think a thing of it. They’d just walk on by as if nothing were happening. You’d think only if they were in a corner somewhere would their genitalia be blocked completely from view, but they didn’t just do it in corners. They turned against walls in plain view of everyone, and you’d think if the women were to only as much as look up as they passed by, they’d be able to see the whole kit-and-caboodle from the side view. But apparently they didn’t. I noticed the men often peed against trees and telephone poles, which, in this culture, was apparently considered as much human behavior as canine. Was a tree or a telephone pole supposed to provide cover from the eyes of passing women? In a few cases, I noticed women doing it too. They would sit down somewhere in public and cover their legs with their long skirts, then urinate in such a way that nothing could be seen; they were still all covered up, down to their ankles. Once when I was in a restaurant that was part of a local fast-food chain they have there that tries to imitate American fast-food restaurants, I went into the restroom and used the urinal. When I was finished and was washing my hands at the sink, the door opened and a female restaurant employee came walking in, pushing a wheeled mop bucket. When she looked up, seeing that I was standing there at the sink washing my hands, she politely looked down, then left, leaving the door propped open by the mop bucket. I was a little taken aback. In this country, did the female restaurant employees come into the men’s rooms without even knocking first, when it was time to clean them? Well, apparently they did. It occurred to me that, though I was at the sink washing my hands, I COULD just as well have been at the urinal, which didn’t have a little divider beside it, and if I had been turned at just the wrong angle, she COULD have gotten a brief eyeful. But when I thought about it, I figured, on the other hand, if nobody seemed to think anything of everybody urinating out in public, then the men probably didn’t think anything of it if women saw their backs while they were at a urinal in a restroom. So, it must have been considered acceptable in their culture for the cleaning ladies just to go walking into men’s restrooms whenever they had to. (But as soon as she saw that I was inside, she left and waited till I was out before she went in again to mop the floor.) Link: Post a response
Message modified by board administrator September 6, 2005, 9:12 am
(Originally posted November 7, 2003, 6:52 pm)
my one... desire.
Believe me when I say,
I want it that way.
canÂ’t reach to your heart,
when you say...
that I want it that way.
—Ain’t nothin’ but a heartache....
Tell me why....
—Ain’t nothin’ but a mistake....
Tell me why....
—I never wanna hear you say....
I want it that way.
