This is an angry post.
This kind of thing happens to me all the time in Kenya. e.g. I'm standing in line, putting in my dinner order at the hostel in Nairobi. I've been waiting in line for five minutes. Some guy walks up to the counter. He has a crumpled bill in his hand. I am just about to open my mouth to tell the waitress what I'd like for dinner, when he extends his money to the waitress and she promptly stops paying attention to me. She takes his order. I look at him, momentarily surprised that he’d budge in line. Frustration wells up. The scenario is all too familiar. He did such an obvious job of budging. I stare at his face, trying to make him look at me, trying to make him uncomfortable. He won’t meet my eyes.
This kind of thing happens to me all the time in Kenya. At first, I wondered whether I was missing something, perhaps there were details in the systems for buying or ordering food, bus tickets, groceries etc. that I did not know about because I was a foreigner. I noticed that none of our male, Kenyan partners budged in front of us, in fact they were very courteous. Then, I started thinking about whether the guys who budged in line were simply jerks. You know- jerks, just like the American version. People who, for some reason, nature and/or nurture, consistently behave in rude ways.
A couple weeks ago, after being in Kenya for two months, I was standing in line to buy airtime for my phone. A twelve-year-old Kenyan boy of Indian descent used the small size of his body to get in front of me and cut me off. Budging in line, I soon realized, is a cultural norm amongst many Kenyans. So is treating women as second-class citizens. It's a complex topic that I'm only familiar with of because of these frustrating scenarios. I apologize for the oversimplifications- I'm annoyed! For the moment, all I know is that many females, such as the dinner waitress who took the guy’s order, are also implicated.
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