Words

                         

 My friend stepped inside the house and immediately removed her wig. “Today it is very hot!” she announced. Scratching and fanning her short hair, she laid the wig aside.

  “Then why would you wear a wig?” I asked.

  “If I don’t, people will mock me!” she exclaimed. “When I am in my house, I don’t need it. But if I go somewhere, you need to be proper and wear a wig.”

  In this culture it is the normal to see a woman with long braids one week, short the next, and long straight hair the next. Extensions and wigs are the accepted way to wear your hair. If you just leave it short, you are most likely too poor to have your hair dressed properly and that is a shame. All school age girls keep their hair cut, so it is the expected thing for a girl.

   “I don’t go outside much,” another friend told me. “I just stay in the house and watch TV.”

   “Why?” I was puzzled.

   “I don’t have friends! If you have friends and you sit and talk, they will go around and tell everyone what you have said. It will be very bad.”

  Some women would go to work, or go selling something but this friend had not managed to find work. But I was sad she wasted her days away like that.

   Another friend told me her story. “I sent my daughter to a private school. She needed to go to the hospital and she didn’t go back to school for two and a half months. But still they made me pay the school fees. So, I stopped sending her to school. (She would only have been in kindergarten. There is a lot of pressure to get your children in school by 2 or 3 years old.) And even though the people know my situation. They know I am alone and trying to support my daughter. They smeared my name. Everywhere I go, people will say, there is the woman that won’t send her child to school!”

   A woman from our church explained why she was no longer attending church in her village. “I can’t afford proper clothes and shoes for church for all my children. If we go to church with my village people, they will laugh at me. They will tell me I don’t care for my family well. At your church, no one cares how we dress.”

  When I hear these things, it often makes me angry. These people are just trying to live, to survive. They are doing the best they can to keep their children fed and in school. Why are their neighbors, their church family, their friends putting them down over their hair and clothes? Why is the gossip so vicious?

  But what would you do? What if you moved into your nearest town. What if the rest of the people that lived in that town were your family, friends, church family, and fellow school patrons? What if every time you stepped outside your front door (of your one room house) to cook supper, wash your clothes, or just get a breath of fresh air; you met one of those people? What if your children played with the neighbors children every evening because they don’t have anywhere else to play?

  It would be a bit like living in a glass house. Everyone’s windows are open so even when you are inside and talk on the phone, people can sit outside your house and listen. Your privacy is almost gone.

  Then look at the other side of things. Do we fuss about people’s hair and clothes? Do we gossip about what other people do and say? Are we critical of the choices other people make for their family? And how much worse would it be, if we lived next to each other and saw everything our friends and neighbors did?

   Maybe it isn’t a Ghana problem. Maybe it is a people problem. Maybe it is a sin problem.

   There is a song that came to mind as I went over all this.

 Let me be a little kinder

Let me be a little blinder

To the faults of those about me

Let me praise a little more

Let me be when I am weary

Just a little bit more cheery

Think a little more of others

And a little less of me

 

Let me be a little braver

When temptation bids me waver

Let me strive a little harder

To be all that I should be

Let me be a little meeker

With the brother that is weaker

Let me think more of my neighbor

And a little less of me

 

Let me be when I am weary

Just a little bit more cheery

Let me serve a little better

Those that I am strivin' for

Let me be a little meeker

With the brother that is weaker

Think a little more of others

And a little less of me