Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [29]
Curious, I ask, “What kind of rights do women have now?”
Thinking hard, Joe does his best to come up with an example, but eventually quits.
“Because,” I help him out, “women are inferior to men here, right?”
“Yes, inferior,” he nods, silently complimenting me on grasping the concept so quickly, and we walk on.
Shuffling from stall to stall, I sprinkle a fine dusting of ignorance over everything I touch, coming to rest by a heap of what appear to be lazily made cheerleader pompoms. “Joe, what are these?”
“Grass skirts. You wear them around your waist.” Adding emphatically: “But only women.”
“I know, because they're skirts. But what would happen if a man wore one?”
He's quite taken aback by this. “You'd … look … like a woman.”
“And?”
Instead of replying, he visibly shudders, as if being mistaken for a woman, even as a joke, would be social suicide.
Moving on: “And what's this?” I pick up an ugly green bulb with tentacles that I recognize.
“This is the most important part of our kastom,” he explains, for the benefit of the audience. “This is kava. It's a traditional herb drink. See the roots here? That is the most important part of the kava. The young boys chew this …”
“Young boys? Why does it have to be young boys?”
“That is their job.”
“So it's like homework?”
“Yes. Homework.”
“Okay. The little boys chew the root. And?”
“And they spit it out onto a leaf, strain it into a coconut shell, mix it with water, and that's it, you have a delicious bowl of kava.”
Wait a second. So kava, then, if I'm understanding this correctly, is a processed liquid that's first combined with the spit of little boys, then strained through an old sock or something, and finally served up in a shell to drink. Oh—my—God.
“And have you,” I ask, indicating Joe, who looks too sensible ever to have put such a vile thing within three feet of his lips, “ever drunk any of this …”—unhygienic bilge—“… stuff after it's been spat out by little boys?”
“Oh, yes,” he says cheerfully. “Yes, I drink kava. Sure.”
I think I may faint.
“What's the point of celebrating National Women's Day anyway?”
“They're trying to recognize women,” Joe says.
“Who's trying?”
And then something dawns on me, something I didn't spot at first. Scanning the table at the head of the rally, I quietly count the number of female speakers on the panel. Marking them off on my fingers, I estimate the total to be somewhere around … zero. The Women's Day committee is made up entirely of men!
“But of course!” Joe explains quietly. “Women aren't allowed to speak.”
“Hang on. So you're telling me that the only people allowed to campaign for women's rights are …?”
“Men. Yes.”
Oh, that's just great.
“We would like to share everything in the home,” one woman tells me. She's a gray-haired firebrand with a real sense of purpose about her. “So sometimes if the woman is sick, then men take over. Women is used to doing cooking morning, lunch, and dinner. We've decided we both have to do it.”
“Good for you,” I cheer.
“Women is used to being under men. We're starting to come up.”
Excellent. “How long d'you think it'll take before you're the superior species?”
“Well, it'll be a long time, obviously,” she chuckles.
“Oh—why?”
“Well, we have just started last year.”
“Last year?”
Oh God. Watching this great bulldozer of hope march off into the crowd, I turn to Joe and mumble despondently, “Nothing's going to change, is it?”
He gives me a strangely knowing look, but doesn't reply.
Farther along, in among the vegetables, we pass what for me is the most harrowing sight of the trip: a chicken trapped in a small cube-shaped cage made of sticks.
Let me define “small.” First, imagine a chicken. Now imagine a cage. Now shrink the cage until it's a lot smaller than the chicken, then lock the chicken in it anyway. For a culture supposedly in tune with Nature, the ni-Van abuse it a little too wantonly for my liking.
Distracted, I step out of the TV show for a