Life under the burka

Within a day of returning to my city, I found myself packing a bag for a few days in a village helping with the education projects that I was running during my time here before. We have a short-term team that will be doing the teaching and activities, but I was asked to come along just to help get the teacher training seminar running.

So, we set off in our van piled high with notebooks, pens, soccer balls, jump ropes, and everything we’d need to live the next few days: cushions to sleep on, bottles of drinking water, and a gas stove (which they call a picnic here, because you just take it on a picnic, put the pressure cooker on top and bam, instant hot meal in the middle of nowhere. Let me tell you, these people perfected camping WAY before we did!).

This village project was a bit different as all of us women donned our burkas as we approached the village. It is a bit more conservative and we wanted to convey our respect for their way of life. So, I saw the streets, the few shops, and mosques of this village behind a blue screen about the size of my fist in front of my face. I got lessons from the teachers of when to pull the burka up so I could breathe a bit and have my face exposed and when to pull it down again (pretty easy…if there is a man on the street, the screen is down, no man, no screen).

And this is the fun part of cross-cultural living. There are new ways to learn of doing EVERYTHING, even wearing a burka. Just when I was thinking I had mastered wearing it and blending in on the street, one of the teachers said the whole village knows about the foreign women in burkas because they don’t walk like the local people. To top it off, I nearly walked out of the school one day with my burka on inside out, until one of the teachers called out after me and corrected it for me.

There are 12 teachers in the school and most of them are really young (one girl is 14 years old). Some of them are even still students. So, they study in 6th or 7th grade and then teach 1st grade. This is actually quite normal in the villages as there is a shortage of teachers. I absolutely love spending time with teachers because often they are the only women in the village working outside the home, and they all have a great desire to help their village. I really wish I could show you pictures, but they said they don’t want me to take pictures of them.

Next week the short-term team will be returning but I will stay in the city. There are friends I still have not been able to visit yet and want to have time to see them and I possibly want to spend some time at the university in town doing some observation and talking with them about how things run, for when I return here full-time next year and pursue working in the higher education realm.

I’ll close with a few pictures from the village:

A view of the village.


This mosque is over a hundred years old. This is the view from the window of the house we are staying in.


Coming back from teaching. I think someone caught me off guard or staring or something. I'm not smiling at all...but I was happy!