A different kind of discrimination.

I'm walking back to Vegas, on an emotional high after a brief time of hanging out with local friends, and almost back to my dorm when a car pulls up and stops at the gate. They're asking me something, but I don't know what, "Rra?" is my clueless response. A man gets out of the car and comes forward. Was he trying to drive through? "The gate is locked," I offer. He comes up to me, hand extended. "Oh, no," he tells me, "I just wanted to say 'hi'." The smile falls. The high is gone. I take the hand as disinterestedly as possible and keep walking. He tells me his name and asks me for mine. "Botshelo," I say. I'm already past him, I keep on walking, and leave him to his startled confusion.

It's after dark on a Friday night and I'm trying to get from Game City back to UB with my friend. We approach one of the taxi hawkers and ask for a lift. "Forty pula," he says. I'm indignant. "Forty pula? No, fifteen." The bartering continues and he refuses to budge. Another woman - a local - comes up to approach the hawker and he tells her the same: "Forty pula." She becomes just as indignant as me. "Don't worry," I tell her, "I'll walk away and he'll offer you a more reasonable rate, he just can't let on right now that he's trying to charge me more than he should because I'm white." When all was said and done we got the cab for P30. Still too much. And the whole way we listened to the driver tell us things about the U.S. we had no idea were true: that we all have millions of dollars, that we are sponsored by the government to go to school 100% like here in Bots, that we are all guaranteed a job and no one is unemployed, that everyone has fancy new cars and everything that they could ever want. It was hard for him to hear the truth - and I still don't think he believed us.

It's a different kind of discrimination that you find here as a white person living in an African country. When people see you, they almost automatically assume that you have loads of money. Listening to some of the ideas people have about life in the U.S. is disturbing, to say the least. And if you're a woman, you automatically receive much more male attention than you would ever want or need. Perhaps it's just a more verbalized culture here, but I have gotten hit on more in this month and a half than I have in my entire life prior to my arrival in Bots. Frankly, it's rather annoying. Examples like the first one (which happened just a little while ago today) are fewer and farer between for me than they are for some of the other international students - for what reason I cannot be sure - but they can turn a good day into a sour moment real quick. It's insulting to be assumed to be x, y, and z because I'm a blond, white girl walking down the street.

It's a different kind of discrimination which makes you pay more for the same quality products, makes you the potential sexual object and societal leg-up for any male that eyes you, and renders you unable to trust people completely because they may just be hoping to get close to you and steal your stuff.

But it's something you learn to live with, and to try to move beyond. I wouldn't say I'm bitter about it, and so I wouldn't want you to get the wrong impression. There are guys out there (although they are fewer and farther between here) who will actually get to know you before they ask you for your number so that you can meet again, or who don't ask you what you like in a guy and proposition you within the first five minutes of a conversation. And I really don't get it as bad as some of the other international students do. Perhaps because I keep a lower profile, perhaps because I dress more modestly, but who knows?

For now I'm off to choir where, aside from a comedic engagement at camp, I have not been uncomfortably approached by any of the guys. I suppose I've found the good ones.