On Sunday morning I went for a run from the mission/orphanage where we are staying. To get to the main road, I ran down a half-mile dirt road past a small beach on the Caribbean Sea. As I was running past a spring that ran to the beach, I saw a young woman who was washing her clothes and herself. It was already over 80 degrees at 9 am so I was running with my shirt off. The woman at the spring was doing the same.
When I got to the road, I turned right with high hills to my left. Another spring ran down the side of the mountain and in the spring was another young woman ten feet from the road and dressed the same as I was--naked from the waist up.
A half-mile down the road a motorcyclist sped toward me gesturing to put my shirt on. A few minutes later another one did the same. I put my shirt on. Clearly I was in violation of some local custom. Or maybe the problem was aesthetic. I could see lots of reasons to tell an old guy to put his shirt on while running.
I suppose bathing by the side of the road is a fact of life here and old guys running with their shirts off is not. But I did think that most every guy I have ever known would like to live in place where shirts were mandatory for men and optional for women.
Neil,
ReplyDeleteNice observation, it made me remember a memory from Haiti, I want to share with you:
I normally never carry a camera on me when travelling abroad. Basically for two reasons: 1- never really have time to take pics, 2- lack the patience.
When I went to Haiti for the last time, someone asked me to take pics for her to take to her church for a donation campaign. I saw no problem with it and took my camera along for that.
I was able to take three pictures. The first was of a few hundred tents on a road side going uphill( the hotel I used to stay had fallen in the earthquake), as there was a woman bathing at the entrance of one of these tents, on the clothing conditions you mentioned above, I ended up erasing the pic. The second was of a stone wall, clearly with rocks that had been smashed/compressed by a huge level of pressure that could happen only on very deep level of the Earth crust,a very curious finding, a few months after the quake, and the third was a beautiful 3 year old boy, nearly naked, alone, in a street, looking right at me. His gaze pierced me. I could not take any pics from then on for feeling like an invader. I went back to my Baruch Spinoza cocoon and have been there ever since...