At a fancy Lebanese restaurant in Freetown, we all helped ourselves to a delicious spread of food. The conversation at the table drifted towards relationships, and the owner at one point joked to my boss saying “We should get you a Lebanese wife eh….you try ‘em out once. You don’t like them, you return, no problem”. As the large table, mostly filled with male expats uncomfortably laughed, I kept a poker face. The owner looked at me and said, ‘Come on, you should laugh more, it’s only a joke’.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. During a challenging hike once, a local Sierra Leonean guide ‘joked’ to me saying ‘You did this hike, that’s good, but don’t try the higher mountain. You’re a woman, you can’t do it’.  Similarly, when I was once returning in an auto, the driver insisted I take the seat between my 2 male colleagues so they can ‘protect’ me. From what, I never understood. The wind?

Anyhow, the point is that, fieldwork in Sierra Leone (which also happens to be my first full-time job) brought out a whole new challenge that I was grossly underprepared for. Being surrounded by liberal friends who are willing to engage on gender is one thing, but trying to convince people for whom patriarchy is a way of life is another. As I came back from the Lebanese restaurant that night, I mulled over for a long time if I should have confronted him in front of everyone. That definitely seemed like the right thing to do and I cursed myself for not being more vocal. But I was also supremely confident that I could not have changed his way of thinking one bit and maybe left the others uncomfortable. That being said, I should have spoken up no matter what.

This also made me dwell over my identity and dig deeper into why these things happen. I was reminded of the concept of ‘intersectionality’, which I first came across a few years ago. Simply put, intersectionality asserts that people are often disadvantaged by multiple sources of identify (their race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion etc) that dynamically interact with each other to create and perpetuate oppression. In this context, my identity was driven by my age, nationality and gender and helped explain a lot of my experiences as a young foreign woman.

From interacting with government officials who wouldn’t take me too seriously or working with local enumerators who preferred to turn to men for instructions or just being blatantly cut off by others while talking, it started to make sense. What I also realized was that a lot of these things were just labelled as ‘cultural’. For instance, cutting someone off in Sierra Leone is a common way of communication. But the fact that this happens to women WAY more than men is also evident. So, can culture be an acceptable excuse to mask sexism? Most certainly not. But what if it is not your own culture? Do you then respect it or disrupt their belief systems at the risk of angering the hosts and appearing morally superior? Where do we draw the lines between respecting somebody else’s culture on their land and giving up your own individual beliefs and liberties? While fieldwork gives me more to mull over, I’ve realized I’m in no mood to learn how to take pathetic jokes. Neither should you.