The Beige

Everything is organic, a shade of taupe – mud and bamboo and straw and wood, except for the occasional tin roof or a blue plastic bag half hidden in a pile of discarded peanut shells. Even the leaves of the mango trees are pale and powdered with sand-dust. But everything else – the chickens, the old broken buckets, the chairs and gourd bowls, the goats and piles of hay and the weaved baskets and even our skin – are all a continuum of white and brown, so quiet you feel subdued by their modesty, but nonetheless unjudged. Perhaps out of fear of being lost in the Great Beige they wrap themse3lves in rebellious fabrics. The royal blues and seafoam greens and magentas and lemon yellows lay on their body loosely, like an extravagant afterthought, in concentric circles, repetitive patterns of abstract stars, flowers, strange items like pinapples, purses and ladders. The women fill the paleness with these colors, sitting forwards and backwards on the wooden benches, all of the younger women with a baby strapped to their backs with a mismatched sheet.

We drove here from our “big village,” the doctor, midwife and I, to talk about women’s health issues – pre-natal care, giving birth, family planning – and how they can improve all these issues by coming to the health center. The fifty or so women in the last few villages seemed mixed. I asked if they could think of any benefit to birth control the outspoken old woman screamed “none;” the younger ones, though, seemed focused on my explanation of contraception, or how to count your ovulation days. Today, as the doctor mentions birth spacing, a fight breaks out between him and the old men listening, citing Allah and words too quick for me to grasp, clear though through their dramatic body language. When we talk about going to pre-natal conversations or giving brith in the health center, the men groan about the $2 fee. I do the math with them, and we realize that they only need to drink tea twice a day instead of three times, for only a week, and the money’s there. They gasp, laugh. But will they give up their precious tea? This is nothing new; even in America people with buy flat screen TVs and not health insurance. I get it.

After our little talk we get ready for tomorrow – another village, a few more women. Maybe we are just rubbing the sand in our throats but it’s something to talk about. If fabrics can’t combat the meek, subdued Great Beige, well maybe sex is a start.