'I can guarantee you they pity us'

By Rachel Pritchett, synod communicator

BREMERTON — She'd been riffed as an Olympia music instructor, so thought the time might be right to become an ELCA missionary.

First stop for Barbara Robertson was as an English teacher in Haydon, Tanzania, a village "35 miles off the edge of the earth. Holy cow, what have I gotten into?" she remembered thinking.

Twelve years later, the 55-year-old native Washingtonian is briefly back home, making stops at supporting congregations including Our Saviour's Lutheran Church of Bremerton on Sept. 10, where she spoke about rural women in the east African country.

"A woman's life in Tanzania is very, very hard. It is a life of work," she told a gathering of about 35 women. Village women can expect to have about six children. Many likely will die in their 40s, thanks to AIDS/HIV. They birth at home, for the most part.

Health care is difficult to access. If villages are lucky enough to have rural health clinics, women "will be slipping around the back door looking for birth control," Robertson said. Some husbands may beat them if they find out.

Village women walk long distances to market twice a month for provisions and to socialize. Men go too, to congregate and drink. Men don't carry water long distances, but women and children do. Girls fetching water alone can be assaulted or raped, she said. They can be raped by a neighbor, who then makes recompense by giving the father a couple of goats.

Not all males are "rascally sorts" in this unleashed patriarchal culture. Some husbands are kind, and give their wives leeway to start small businesses, like selling chickens, milk or beaded things they've made. But the role of women in villages has been to work, to bear children and to give sexual pleasure to their husbands on demand.

There is a flip side.

Tanzanian women have a strong sense of sisterhood. If a woman's sick, her home soon is crowded with every female in the village bringing gifts of food.

"Our sisters know about carrying one another's burdens," Robertson said.

She has seen vast improvements in prospects for women. The government has built more primary and secondary schools and now is encouraging girls to complete their schooling and even go to college. Fathers now can be arrested for discontinuing their daughters' schooling at the seventh grade in order to marry them off.

"The government has put its foot down about girls in secondary school," Robertson said.

These days, Robertson lives in Morogoro, where she is an AIDS/HIV program officer with the Morogoro Diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania.

She said it is easy to pity women in Tanzania. But because they have a sisterhood that's so strong and we don't, "I can guarantee you they pity us."