Sitting In Silence In Africa

Peace Corps worker who served in Benin wrote this about her time with the village women. It mirrors what I have heard a lot of expat women have express. It seems to be harder for women to break the cross-cultural ice.

"Besides big Mama and a few other women, most of them had not gone to school and, therefore, didn't know French. I visited them, but the visits mostly consisted of my sitting on a bench, saying nothing while they sat on a bench saying nothing.

Or we would shell peanuts together, or pound peanuts together, but no one talked as the peanut shells piled up, and I coughed when I inhaled fine chunks of the shells. Sometimes my visits reminded me of a bizarre compilation of bad first dates—nobody said much, and I spent the whole time trying to think of ways to
politely end the experience.

When a conversation actually did take place in French, it usually led to dramatic increases of knowledge and cultural appreciation on my part."
(Last Moon Dancing. Monique Schmidt. Pg110)