My Nigerian Sisters

Shortly after the United States invaded Afghanistan, I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about Zainab Salbi and her organization, Women for Women International (see link to left).

The premise of the organization is simple, but elegant: Women in peaceful, prosperous countries like the United States commit to sponsor women in impoverished, war-torn countries. Women for Women International acts as the go-between, the facilitator, and the engine for societal change.

We, the fortunate ones, are matched with women in countries such as Afghanistan, Serbia, Rwanda, and Nigeria. We send in $27 each month. Women for Women keeps a portion to fund its operations and uses the rest to help our "sisters" re-build their lives. That means learning skills and investing the contributed capital in some form of self-supporting enterprise.

We also exchange letters with our sisters. The point of this exercise is to build a bond that provides psychic and emotional support for both the sponsor and the sponsored. This individual connection of one woman to another adds a dimension of personal involvement that is absent from the disembodied act of writing a check or receiving a bag of rice.

I wanted a sister from Afghanistan. Who wouldn't want to help a woman who was forbidden to feel the sun on her face or even to look out of a clear window? I confess, I was a little disappointed when I was assigned a Nigerian instead. But all it took was reading the description of Nigerian widowhood practices to erase my disappointment completely.

When a woman's husband dies in some parts of Nigeria, she is forced to drink the water used to wash the corpse. This is one of the ways she is expected to prove her innocence regarding her husband's death. Her head is shaved, she is forbidden to bathe, forbidden to change her clothes, forbidden to sleep on a bed, and kept in complete isolation for a year. Often, when she is finally permitted to rejoin the life of the community, she finds that all that belonged to her husband has been absorbed into his family, leaving her and her children with nothing.

My first Nigerian sister was a 62 year old widow with only one surviving child--a grown daughter. Her letters were full of gentle humor and concern for my family. We traded stories. She told me her daughter's fiance had taken ill; I told her that we thought Adam was getting serious with his girl friend. She asked if Bob had had any luck at his fishing. I told her no, but we lived in hope.

My second and third sisters were much younger women. Both had living husbands and housefuls of children. One planted cassava and took her crop to market in a nearby town. She was very proud of selling her harvest in a place with a population of 100,000. She sent a picture of herself in a colorful yellow and red dress, with matching headscarf, hoeing the rows between her plants. I often wonder what sense she made of my having older parents who live on the other side of the country. That came up when I explained that I had been in Florida, caring for my mother after she broke her hip. My sister was circumspect, however. She sent prayers for a speedy recovery and overlooked the fact that I chose to be so far away.

My most recent sister is a Muslim woman. She thinks that she is in her mid-thirties, but she is not sure. She has eight living children and several who have died. Given the number of people in her household, I am reasonably sure that she is not her husband's only wife.

She has a serious, sober face and wears the traditional hejab. A couple of months ago, she sent a picture of herself at her sewing machine. Sewing is how she plans to increase her family's income. She wrote that she was finally receiving treatment for her hypertension--another benefit of my sponsorship.

As I read her letter, I wondered what on earth I could write about to a woman who gets her drinking water from the house next door. It's been almost a year, and I am still wondering. I told her about my work, about my friends, and about our fruit trees. I did not tell her about our recent vacation or about the dog. I couldn't imagine how I would explain the idea of vacation to the sad, somber woman who looked out at me from the picture.

The week before Thanksgiving, I got a letter from Women for Women announcing that Ai Khalid, my Muslim sister, would soon be graduating from the program. I was surprised--and ashamed. My job at Mills was so all-consuming that I didn't write nearly as often as I meant to. I don't think I sent more than a couple of letters in a year's time. It's possible that I sent only one.

My woeful performance with respect to Ai weighs upon me. How hard is it to write a letter? Not hard at all. That's half the promise I made when I signed up to sponsor her.

I wrote the most frequently to my first sister, and my relationship with her was real. I wrote least frequently to this last sister. As a result, I can't really say that we have a relationship at all. She writes formulaic letters to a concept, not to me. All I am to her is a sum of money, and a theory. The money makes a difference in her life, but I, the theory, don't. I have added nothing human to her experience, given her no sense of someone taking time for her, no feeling of someone reaching out to share themselves with her, no assurance that someone far away awaited the news that she, that specific and unique woman named Ai Khalid, was well and moving forward. I wish I had. We are both the poorer for my inattention.