Celebrate bonds amongst girlfriends

FEMALE FELLOWSHIP
A Celebration Of
The Bonds That Exist
Among Girlfriends
By Sala Elise Patterson

I've always considered myself a girl's girl. I have a small collection of girlfriends whom I treasure and with whom I have cultivated strong relationships over the years. Of course I have male friends too, but our relationships are inevitably tainted by the When Harry Met Sally factor (unless they're gay). My friendships with my girls, on the other hand, are different - they're deeper. For a long time I assumed this was because we shared common interests, tastes and dreams, but one experience taught me that it went well beyond all of that.

You see, I went to live in Benin, West Africa shortly after graduation from college. I had gone to work for a development organization on an education project, and I was one of a group of fellows assigned to the capital city of Cotonou. Upon arrival, my first instinct was to seek out women friends. As it turned out, all of my female fellow coworkers were nice, but I didn't feel an extraordinary connection with any of them. Just as well, I thought; I wanted to make friends with local women anyway. Why come all this way to socialize strictly with Americans?

After a month, I was reasonably acclimated, my high school French was coming back, and I had scoped out my favorite stretches of beach, cafés and restaurants. Then it happened: After a frustrating day at work and a bad phone conversation with a long-distance boyfriend, I needed a girlfriend to hash it out with. I realized then that all of my friends in Benin were men. Yes, even though I was out all the time meeting new people, all my local acquaintances were male. Women, it seemed, never went out except to run errands or to take the children to school. I just couldn't figure out where the women went after that.

Around the same time, my roommates and I decided to civilize the homefront and assign weekly chores. My chore was to do the food shopping every Sunday, the day everyone goes to the neighborhood market. My first week on duty, I grabbed a big straw bag, slipped on my flip-flops and headed to the bustling bazaar. The market takes up about three-square blocks and is surrounded by a long, crumbling brick wall with a gaping hole on each side for access. Passing through the entrance, the first thing I saw was...women. Seas and seas of women, swathed in colorful fabrics, chatting away, snacking, bargaining, rearranging their merchandise.

So here they are, I thought. I approached the first stall for tomatoes and announced, in my labored French, that I wanted 20 tomatoes. The woman behind the stall must have been about 70. She looked at me with confused eyes and said something in Fon, a local language. Out from behind her flowing skirt popped a beautiful little girl who responded in French, "That will be three francs, Tantie," (the name given to all foreign women). The entire transaction between myself and the grandmother passed through the young translator. It then hit me, I just loved being in their female presence - watching a grandmother and grandchild, having the elder's intense eyes glance me over, sum me up and figure me out the way we women do.

At the next stalls, I looked for women my age, women young enough to have seen the benefits of universal enrollment and were thus likely to speak French. Although most of the women were shy, I got smiles, sometimes even a word of advice like, "Don't take that one; it's not ripe."

Then I found myself at a stall right next to the exit. It was attended by a woman with a slightly swollen belly; she must have been about five months pregnant. She had the biggest, brightest smile and was humming to herself as I approached. She greeted me, "Bonjour, Tantie! Qu'est-ce que vous voulez ce matin?" Her ebullience caught me off guard and made me giggle as I replied, "De l'ail," (garlic). She ruffled through the pile to pick the best heads and began asking me questions about who I was.

She was intrigued that a woman would travel all this way to live in a foreign country by herself. Where was my husband, where - at 23 years of age - were my children? When she learned I didn't have either she stopped, cocked her head to the side and said, "No husband, no kids. I like that idea." We shared a laugh as she bagged my purchase and handed it to me. "One franc, fifty," she announced. Clearly, a rip off. I shot her one of those New York looks that let her know that I knew what was going on, but I handed her the money. She threw back her head and laughed and then reached into the pile, grabbed another fat head of garlic and threw it into my bag. "My name is Angelique," she said. "Come back next week."

Every Sunday I looked forward to my dose of girl time with Angelique. We'd sit and have a cup of water, talk, listen and inevitably laugh a lot. She taught me a lot about Benin and hopefully I taught her something about America. But mostly we learned about each other. And then I understood. I learned that what my girlfriends do for me is allow me to celebrate, contemplate and figure out myself through them - a semblance of me. Our woman-ness is one of our highest, most beautiful common denominators. It's what links us and makes our friendships special.

One day several months later, Angelique didn't show. Her sister, who had come in her place, told me that Angelique had given birth to a little boy named Mustafa and that she would be at home for a few weeks. I bought my garlic just the same, and as her sister bagged it and gave me the same discount as Angelique, I knew that she had been instructed to do so. I walked away smiling, knowing that I had made another precious girlfriend who would look out for me just as I would look out for her. It didn't matter that our bonding hadn't taken place over coffee. What mattered was that it had taken place.