After I got back from Moz (and got over a brief resurgence
of an old back injury from rowing that kicked up and put me on bed rest for
almost a week) I had the chance to participate in an awesome youth camp down in
Salajwe! A fellow volunteer named Mary asked me to come and talk to about 250
kids about the differences between sex and gender. It was going to be a two day
event, with three one hour and 20 minute sessions a piece per day.
I have done this talk before but only in the context of
talking to people about LGBTQ issues, so it needed a little tweaking. Part of
being in Peace Corps is gauging the social climate of certain topics, and
talking to kids about gender and sex in the context of its ability to be fluid
across a spectrum, or the fact that there are people whose sex and gender don’t
match up, would not only have gotten me into trouble but would have caused
serious issues for Mary as the Volunteer placed at the school. So I changed the
talk to focus on the idea that a lot of gender comes from perceived social
assumptions, and not physical realities of someone’s sex, and that this shouldn’t
limit someone nor skew someone’s view on others.
In order to do this I used an exercise out of a Life Skills
manual that my friend Lindsay loaned me. I made up about 40 flash cards that
had things on them like: Teacher, Pastor, Fixes the Car, Violent, Takes Orders,
Has Babies, Cleans the House, Tends the Cattle, Makes Babies, Owns Lands, and
Grows a Beard. Then I made two different colored cards that said “Girls and
Women” and “Men and Boys.” I put one on one side of the chalk board, and one on
the other, and then placed the rest of the cards face down in the front of the class.
I had the students come up to the front, pick up a card and put it under one of
the two categories. Afterwards we talked about the differences between physical
realities of sex (if you are having a baby you have female sex organs) and jobs
that they had “gendered” based on their opinions. 
This conversation lead to WHY they had these opinions,
things like culture, tradition, beliefs, religion, taboos and totems. We talked
about how changing any one of these could create different assumptions. I told
them about how my religion (Irish Catholic) meant that I couldn’t be a pastor,
and that there were certain societies where women took leadership roles, and
how traditional dress for certain societies for men involved wearing “skirt”
type clothing (Scotts.) Depending on how much time we had, and how the class
was reacting I asked them questions like “If I turned everyone here into a girl
(for the guys)/ guy (for the girls), what would you miss about being your
original sex? How would people treat you differently?” and “Is there a
difference between a Motswana woman or man and an American woman or man?”
My favorite was, when trying to drive the point home, I
asked a class about how they would react if one of the male students walked
into the classroom wearing a dress. Everyone giggled, and then I asked them
why? Botswana doesn’t have any laws about guys wearing dresses, dresses are
comfortable, guys can physically accommodate wearing a dress, and when it is
hot they keep you cooler than pants. I think this one really got the point home
and got them thinking.
There were a lot of interesting points that happened in
these lessons:
The first class to run the exercise, and every class
afterwards, insisted that we have a middle column between the two.
I had slipped a “Making Babies” card in there expressly for
the purpose of talking to the kids about the responsibilities that come
with sex, since we had a volunteer running a safe sex class, and one on
reproductive systems, so I thought it would be a nice tie in. I figured when I
put this in there, that is would almost always go to “Girls and Women”, but to
my surprise the card ended up all over the board, twice in the “Men” column.
I put the “Grows a Beard” card in the deck to have an
example of something to do with sex for the guys, and in retrospect should have done something a
little more clear cut than that because I had one student SERIOUSLY fight me on
the idea that she had seen women who had grown beards down to their chest.
I only had one class that put almost every card in the
middle, which kinda threw me off about the talk afterwards. You have to love it
when students are already on top of what you are going to teach them.
It was an amazing experience and I had a lot of fun doing
it. I think there might be something to this whole gender theory bit, and I’m
wondering if maybe this is what I should go to graduate school for (if I end up
going to graduate school at all.) I know that this type of work is something I
would like to continue doing, and have started poking around for jobs that might
include it. I was really thankful to have been a part of this camp, and I hope
to be able to do so again before I leave.
Hugs and smooches,
p.s. Do YOU know the difference between sex and gender??
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