White Girl

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.  Sounds good but for a white girl in West Africa, the results can be a little humorous as you’ll see in these two short stories.

Date of original journal entry: April 2010

It was my first day teaching a Bible class at a very remote junior secondary school and the teen girls were less than engaging as they sat in stoney silence staring at me.  For the majority of them, this was their first time seeing white people and when we arrived we heard the headmaster gently reminding the students that they had nothing to fear from their special visitors.  Stephen went off with the boys while I took the girls.  But my class dragged on; it was dreadful and I just didn’t know how to connect with them.  Then it hit me.  My hair!  I had brought along a folding chair so I retrieved it out of the truck, sat in the shade and asked who wanted to “plant” my hair, as they call it.  Oh, the chatter that broke loose was so worth the agony.  They, of course, didn’t know how to comb or handle my long golden curls and were more than a little rough but we instantly bonded.  The planted braids look so beautiful on Sierra Leonean women and girls.  But, face it, on White Girl, they looked very … well, let’s just say it – awful.  And they felt awful.  It took me the entire three hour ride home to take them out.  And I’ll never do it again.  But for the girls in Sahn, it was an instant ice breaker and they no longer feared me.  We then went on to have productive classes for the remainder of the semester.

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Date of original journal entry: October 2010

How about another funny hair story starring Yours Truly – Me!

One day I was walking through town looking for bananas.  Having exhausted my usual places, I ended up at the main junction which is about the furthest point from our house that is still in town.  I found my bananas but had to wait till the woman selling them was finished helping another lady.  Being the curious kitty that I am, I asked what the other woman was buying.  It looked like meringue and was being spooned from a large basin into a plastic bag.  The purchaser had first tasted it by touching a tiny bit to the tip of her tongue so I became inquisitive.  After a fashion and with the assistance of a man passing by who acted as translator, I learned that it was locally made shampoo to soften hair.  Oh! that sounded good; my hair had become a horrible frizzy hay stack.  The shampoo was made with palm oil so I figured it would be just the thing.  I bought some.

With my errands completed, I stopped to check on a friend who had been sick.  She and several other church ladies were on her veranda so we had a nice little visit.  “By the way,” I said, “What do I do with this?” and I held up my baggie of shampoo.  Same explanation, it’s shampoo to make your hair soft.  They tried to explain how to apply it but we all decided I’d go back and they would do it for me.

So later in the day, back I went.  We had a fun time.  They applied the foamy goop to my dry hair and proceeded to comb it through.  But first, Fahtie had tasted a tiny bit on the tip of her tongue.  Hmmm, curious, but, oh well, I didn’t ask why.  As they were combing it through I yelped because they had pulled too hard.  “Did that hurt?”  “YES!”  Now mind you we are doing this outside and a large group (both men and women) has gathered to see White Girl get her hair done!  My hairdressers quickly started rinsing my hair and then took a bar of regular bath soap to it, lathered me all up, and then followed it with another generous rinse, buckets of water being hurriedly brought by the little girls from the public well pump to accommodate my long hair.

Then they all walked me home.  It was then that I asked Fahtie why she had tasted the shampoo.  “To be sure it is not too strong,” was her casual reply.  “What do you mean, too strong?”  “It is made with caustic soda; if it is too strong it will burn my tongue.”  All this in a combination of Krio and very broken English but I caught the caustic soda part!  When I yelped they thought they had gotten some shampoo on my scalp which they try to avoid.  Fahtie showed me some places on her fingers that had gotten burned from it.  And what they man by soften the hair is RELAX it.  Words in Krio don’t always mean what we think and even if they sound the same that doesn’t mean they use them the same way.  Good language lesson that day!

So my hay stack went from bad to worse.  I washed and conditioned it immediately upon returning home and I even had visions of having to cut it – it was such a mess.  But I have been nursing it along and I am starting to get some life back in it.  But we really did have a fun time and some great laughs.

Post Script –

I’ve resolved: no more hair experiments for White Girl!