Fatness

There's a little girl that comes to our wee little school at SWSC and her name is Fatness. Yup, her name is Fatness. Trust me, I double checked with one of her older siblings a couple times that this was in fact her name. The Canadian-ess in me, made me wonder why anyone in their right mind would name their kid Fatness. Were her parents preparing their baby girl for hundreds of minutes of future ridicule? Any kid in Canada wouldn't make it out of the hospital with a birth certificate scarred with such an insulting name. After a while, my Zambian-ess kicked in and I realized that the name was most likely given as an honour. An honour to be fat, eh? This is Zambia. Fat is beautiful. Fat is wealth. Fat is health.

How did the translation across the ocean get so misinterpreted about this physical quality that is so appreciated here and not there? Why are millions of ladies and girls across the ocean devoting so much valuable brain power to 'fatness'?

I've been called fat so many times since being in Zambia. At first it kinda sucked because I didn't think I was fat at all. I grew up watching friends worry about their diets and their amount of excerice, and it was never me. I watched friends suffer by reading the lies in labels on packages at the same time as reading the number of calories burned on the treadmill, making sure it all equaled out. I never thought twice about the way I looked. But I got to Zambia and people started calling me fat and it made me want to return an insult, because that's what it was, an insult to me. What they were saying though was that I was beautiful. Unfortunately, I couldn't hear that. Instead, it made me feel badly about what I had and others didn't. I saw weight as an indicator of wealth and I didn't want to be wealthy. I didn't want to have something others didn't. My skin colour was already a big enough sign of my wealth and that was something I couldn't change. I lost a lot of weight. I stopped being healthy. I stopped being beautiful.

What a waste of time. It was time I should have spent loving; myself included.

Be with me here on this one ladies because a negative thought spent on the way we look should not be regarded as more than just a simple thought. It can pass. It should pass and we should let more valuable thoughts take its place. The way I think about HIV in Zambia is the same way I think about the disease of weight; useless. A big part of me is in SWSC because I'm thinking about the millions of minds that could stop HIV if they weren't dying from it. A big part of me is in SWSC because I'm thinking about the millions of minds that could LOVE more if their minds weren't already controlled by image.

There's a change that needs to happen in our hearts. It's not merely a change for Africa, because the way I see it; places like Kibombomene in Zambia are already so much farther ahead of places elsewhere. There are women and girls here who love themselves and each other and they don't need a mirror's approval. They don't need a magazine or a tv show to tell them if they're beauitful enough. Wars and avoidable deadly diseases and corruption and all that other jazz that we peg as the "problems with the world today" aren't going anywhere until we spend more time being in love.

The names our parents give us or our friends call us, should not effect how we love. The world will continue calling us things we don't like...let it pass...and let love BE as good as it is.