Four Wives

Sherri is leaving on Friday and so she has been saying goodbye to the various students and nurses. Today during an English class for the pharmacy students, the girls asked Sherri what she would tell her friends and family at home about Somaliland. Sherri responded that she would tell about all the nice Somalilanders she has met. But, then she also said that she would tell about the men with four wives and the pregnant women who must have their husband’s consent to have a procedure done. I decided I also want to share with my family and friends some of these cultural differences. So here goes on some of what I have observed so far.

I have never met a group of people quite so devoted in their daily actions. Whether this is true religious devotion or fear of societal backlash is probably dependent on the person, but either way these people have a daily ritual and they do not vary from it frequently. I have yet to meet a single Somali here who is not a Muslim. Living in an Islamic society means the entire day is structured around prayer times. Almost every mosque in town it seems has a loud speaker system to call to prayer the people of Somaliland. The first call begins around 4:30am. Not everyone wakes up at 4:30am (myself included) but the first thing people do in the morning is pray. The next call to prayer is not until 12:30pm, then 3:30pm, 6:15pm, and finally 7:30pm. Men are supposed to actually go to the mosque for prayer, but the women are allowed to pray from home (or in the nurses case…from within the hospital). The first day I taught English class, it was a 4pm class on a Sunday afternoon. Within the first five minutes, two girls asked me if they could leave class to go pray and come back. They had over slept their afternoon naps and missed the 3:30pm prayer. I was not about to tell them they couldn’t go pray to learn English, so they left.

The strong Islamic culture appears to affect the women most in comparison to the United States. All women wear full length dresses with a head covering. According to Islam, they should actually have everything covered except their hands and face. This means that some women wear socks with their sandals since their feet should technically be covered by this rule, but many women do not follow this. All women wear shamots or sheels (scarves/the two different hijab forms) and some also cover their entire faces except their eyes (burqa style). If they do not cover, they believe they will be going to hell.

To me it feels like women are oppressed in society, but who am I to say that about their culture. If you know no other way of life then how would your life feel oppressed? I have not met any women who seem to feel they are overtly oppressed by men, religion, or society. Coming from where I come from, I could not survive living truly within this culture without feeling suffocated.

Almost all women are housewives, doing all the cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc. A student told me recently during class that husbands will not even take their dishes to the sink after dinner because this is considered shameful. I told her my future husband would have to not only take the dishes to the sink but wash the dishes too. J I certainly cannot imagine this life on a daily basis forever.

The most disturbing part to me is the effects on women within the health care setting. Within the hospital setting is becomes interesting to observe the husband-wife relationships. The labor and delivery department is most definitely a place for women without their husbands. A laboring women will arrive at the hospital with about two to five relatives in tow (sisters, mothers, mother-in-laws, friends, whoever). This is actually funny because you will look into the laboring room and think there are about 10 women in labor when it is actually only two plus all the relatives. The husbands will randomly stop by, gaze into the labor room, and then promptly leave without speaking to his wife. I mentally give a grand celebration when a husband stays for more than a few minutes and actually talks to his wife. Sometimes a woman will come to the hospital, deliver a baby, be transferred to maternity, and leave the following day with the husband stopping by perhaps for a total of 10 minutes. However, anytime a woman has a variation from a straight-forward vaginal delivery (i.e., induction, c-section, D&C for IUDs), the husband must sign his consent for any procedure to be done. This becomes very frustrating when the husband is not at the hospital. If the doctor determines a c-section should be done, there will be a chain of cell phone conversations or a relative going to hunt down the husband. Once the husband arrives, which could be anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours later, there will then be debate as to whether he is willing to consent or not. Some husbands request that they try for another hour or two before he will consent while others are more willing to agree when everything is explained to them by one of the midwives or doctors. Recently Fadiyha, one of the midwives, sat down a husband and told him that unless he wanted his wife and first child to die he needed to sign the papers…so sometimes they will play hardball and it works (people call her the boss woman). While this consent issue does really bother me, it is also something that is the cultural standard. The hospital could not decide to abolish it without upsetting the traditional societal set-up. It could be argues this is for the worst and the hospital should try to change things, but if they were to remove the consent forms it would also mean that many men might not allow their wives to go to the hospital to begin with. It seems to be one of those cultural-competency issues; you have to work within the current system to try to improve health outcomes as best as possible.

As you might expect, everyone also has tons of kids! Family planning is pretty rare as families leave the number of children up to Allah’s discretion. So far it seems that 7-9 is pretty average. The most I have seen so far is a woman having her eighteenth child. Eek. Having a male child is also very important within the culture here. If a woman does not have a son, then there is some pressure on her to have one. The husbands also seem to show up around the hospital more frequently after delivery if there is a boy. Some men also have multiple wives. A husband will only marry additional wives if he has enough money to afford maintaining multiple households. Many men will marry again especially if their first wife has not had a son. The female students are funny to talk to because they all so they want to marry a man who will not marry other women. From what they say, some men will marry a woman and promise to only marry her. But, then later in their marriage, he will decide to take another wife. The wives live in different homes, sometimes even in different towns. This may be for the best considering multiple wives hate one another. Apparently the husband will often refurbish the home of his first wife after taking a second wife in an attempt to appease her anger about the second wife.

There are other things too…but that’s all for now.