Culture of Cheating

I do not understand Machismo, and I am a man! I was first really introduced to it in Costa Rica but three years here in Mozambique has blown open the cover that it is a really shitty way to treat one entire half of the population. I just got a phone call from a friend of mine. She was dating this guy from her town for almost a year and a half. It turned out that he’d been cheating on her the entire time, with a 16 year old student no less! We were amply warned during our training about fidelity issues within the Mozambican culture, however we always want to give the benefit of the doubt. This guy seemed like a really good guy and he didn’t look that bad either. That’s for a whole different blog, the beautiful people of Mozambique. Going back on topic…

One gets lonely here. Most people end up dating a Mozambican. But within that culture if a man only has ONE woman, he’s viewed as less of a man. Of course, everyone “officially” says that polygamy is over, the state outlaws it but you’d have to be complete blind not to see it. My friend’s guy told her flat out that he had sent the previous girl away, that she was the only one – that lasted for about two weeks. Now the news is that he got this other girl pregnant! She’s 18 now but she’s still my friend’s student. So it seems that there was never anything more than “oh look I’m dating the white girl” from this guy’s part. That hurts. I’ve had a girl totally stalk me, she has been stalking me for most of the 3 years but I just play along. I think it’s more out of affection now because I came out to her, she laughed and said you white people are weird, but if you don’t like girls okay! I was shocked but I was desperate to get her off my back. Finding out you are only being pursued for the color of your skin makes you feel so used and worthless. Every conversation with strangers tends to work out how much they want some “whitey” as there friend. White skin is better in the minds of some desperately poor Mozambicans and since they can’t change the color of their own skin, they do everything they can to have some of the “accessories.” It sucks. Besides, I don’t really think the African sun treats white skin to kindly. I’m always breaking out in rashes and weird skin issues when the majority of Mozambican friends have skin that would make a supermodel jealous.

What I want to know, why are people scared?