"She says you have the better skin"

The scope of living in a White-dominated world just hit home... not for the first time in my life, but it still reverberates nonetheless.

We've just returned from the market, where I was having a dress made by a local seamstress (the dress is beautiful and the crafstmanship is enviable by a wannabe seamstress such as myself). This market is located down the street from NAR, just outside of Kigali, and very infrequently traveled to by Muzungus, and we are called this moreso here than anywhere else that we typically visit (Mike, you can disagree if you'd like, but I think it's true). As we are leaving, a group of women calls to us and says many things that we can't understand (except "Muzungu"), so Henz, our friend and a regular at NAR who we brought along with us to translate, asks me if I understand her. When I say no, he says, "She says you have the better skin."

I immediately feel ashamed, embarassed, and saddened, but am left speechless because I don't know how to respond to that in English, much less in Kinyarwanda.

How sad it is that a poor, rural African woman who has probably had little direct interaction with Muzungus in her life, expresses some jealousy over a white girl walking by. What is global society teaching her or showing to her to cause her to make such a statement? And sadly, in the world we live in, is such a loaded statement so inaccurate?

Because I am a white girl from the USA, doors have been opened to me in a way that this woman may never fully understand. Yes, I tend to get caught up in self-pity when thinking about my return home: how I'll be returning to little savings, as most of my money was spent on this trip, and how I may not immediately have a job, a place to stay, etc. But how selfish of me! If need be, I could crash at my parents' place (right, Mom and Dad...?), or wait tables at Sailfish until I find something more secure. This woman at the market is most likely surviving on $1 a day, entirely dependent on how many people come to herto buy tomatoes on any given day.

It's a worldly injustice that I've profited off of, and has led me to obtain a degree from a great University, while most females on this beautiful continent do not even have the opportunity to attend or finish primary school. It's a worldly injustice that one cannot even begin to comprehend unless immersed in a country where he or she is in the privileged vast minority, and even then, it is almost incomprehensible. Yet it is a worldly injustice that is difficult to change, because of the social structures and ideologiesthat are present everywhere. Yes, we have our first African American presidential nominee which is awesome and says a lot about some people, but when you learn some of the views other people have about him, it's still quite discouraging.

So what's a (white) girl to do?