Two women

Years ago I was working in a very underdeveloped part of a developing country. The kind of place where there are no schools, no clinics, no stores, no roads, just nomadic pastoral people who carry around AK47s and let the elders settle disputes.

I work in this area a lot, and typically spend a month or two there at a time. So we get to know the locals quite well.

The women are incredibly non-interactive, and typically run away or yell at you to leave. Because of the culture, we only work with the men in our research. This is the kind of place where women are barely above the level of a goat in terms of value, and it is only the rare woman who is worth a camel. So I hardly get to know any women.

Most of the little girls are REALLY REALLY shy and won't come anywhere near you, even moreso than the grown women. But there was one little girl who was different, Fozia.

We worked in the area near her tiny little family compound for weeks at a time each year, and she and I developed a friendship. She would actually come and sit with us, hold my hand, and be bold. She sparkled with curiosity and charm.

Fozia was maybe 11 when I first met her. She already knew who her husband was going to be, some cousin on her father's side of the family. She was excited to get married and to have babies.

One day the two of us were walking, holding hands, talking through my very poor ability in her language. She asked me how many children I have. I replied "none". She stopped, looked at me with jaw agape, paused for just a moment of shocked realization, and then violently shook her hand loose from mine, hissing out the equivalent of the word "useless".

That event happened close to the time we were leaving for the season, and Fozia wasn't there the next year. She got married and was now living with her husband. We worried that we'd never see her again. She was still a pretty small girl, and maybe only 14 or 15 at the time. So many of the girls we met would never be seen again, lost in childbirth. I feared for Fozia.

She was back at her family compound a couple of years after she had left to be married. She had a son but her husband had soon thereafter died of a disease.

She wasn't the Fozia I had known. The sparkle was gone. The little girl was gone.

We drove by her village and stopped for just a few minutes so I could say hi to her. I gave her a water bottle and she gave me a little beaded necklace, like the kind all of the women there wear. But the photos of the two of us lack the chemistry, the laughter, the happiness that we had shared just a few years earlier.

Those photos are remarkable though in what they do show.

The contrast in our lives couldn't be more stark.

Me, now 39 with a PhD and worries that revolve around academic politics and science and paying off the money I've borrowed for my IF treatments in an attempt to have my first child.

Fozia about 20 years my junior struggling just to live, feed and protect her son in a seriously patriarchal society.

I think about what her life could have been like. If I had met her when she was a few years younger I might have tried to bring her to the US, to get her an education and all of the developed world opportunities that that would bring.

But I think back to her hissing "useless" at me.

What is life really all about? What is life as a woman really all about? Maybe Fozia's life is more meaningful, more fulfilling, and maybe, just maybe, filled with more sincere emotion, good and bad, than mine is.

When I think about what being a woman is really all about, I wonder if I am less of a woman than she is. And honestly, I don't know the answer to that one.

Our culture is so different from the one in which our species has evolved. We face a strange new world of meaning and solace. Many of us are far from "home" and very much alone. We have choices and then there are times that we don't. It almost seems that if we had no choice at all it would be easier to deal with the times when we don't.

But Fozia had lost her sparkle.

I wonder if I've now lost mine too.