"Hello, my name is Tiffanie..... and I am an ignorant white girl."
"Welcome Tiffanie."
(golf clap or poetry snaps insert here)
I grew up in picturesque suburbia--straight out of Edward Scissorhands. My parents signed me up for things like country club golf lessons and English style horseback riding lessons. I had excessive Christmas mornings and extravagant birthday parties. I grew up in cocktail parties, fashioning beds from fur coats. When I was 4, I knew that wine was better aged and cigars needed to be Cuban. All of my friends had white skin and I knew nothing of the other 5 continents in this world (Europe non included). What I mean is, I grew up in a privileged, suburban, white home. I knew nothing about race or culture or world languages and religions, or poverty. I grew up never once thinking about the skin I live in, or anybody else's for that matter.
I never knew what it felt like to be different until I went to Uganda. I never understood how it felt to fixate anxiously on my skin color or my hair texture. Wondering if it is desirable. I never worried how strangers would receive me purely because my skin color was foreign to them.
In Uganda I was the different. I was the scary. I was the conundrum. In parts of the country, the very remote corners and mountain tops, there are children who have never seen a white person before. They are told stories and myths about what we look like and how we behave. We are cannibals. We can fly. We do magic tricks. We bite. We are celebrities. We are ghosts.
Sometimes the children are climbing all over each other to try to get closer to you. To touch you and shake your hand and hug you. And sometimes the children are hiding behind bushes, covering their eyes because if they can't see you, you can't see them.
Sometimes (most of the time) they ask you for money ("MUZUNGU GIMME MONEY") because that's all they've ever known about white people: they hand out money.
Uganda is one of the most romantic places I've ever been because of this. I am the minority. I am the one who can't speak the language. I'm the one who's always lost and can't figure out the right way to do things. I am the foolish girl that can't wring a chickens neck or yelps at the sight of a carved cow. I am the slow girl who can't do the same amount of physical work or walks too slow up the mountain. I didn't even know how to bake beans! I was the different one.
A couple of times I found myself staring at my skin. How many hours did I spend wasting in Chicago wishing I was tanned and blemish free? How much money do we spend on lotions and potions that will prevent wrinkles or hide birth marks? For once I realized I am most beautiful in my natural state. No makeup. Not even regular showers. Greasy hair. Dirt caked into the crevices of my skin. That was beautiful on me.
My skin is the story map of my life. I have scars that tell stories--trying to open a tuna fish can, falling from a tree, scraping knees on soccer fields, the stint of Cellulitis that kept me in the hospital with a permanent IV. My moles remind me of my mother and my grandfather. They are little dots that appear like letters from my Native American ancestors up and down my neck. My birth marks were kissed over and over again as a baby. Because my skin is delicious.
I hope that one day I will be covered in wrinkles the way these women are. They show the magnificent depth of their wisdom, the weather of their hearts, the way rings of a tree trunk show its age. It is so beautiful.
One of my first challenges in Uganda was earning the trust of children who were scared of me. To some of their little minds (who never could have imagined the other races of the world), I was not just simply white, I was a mutation! Was it contagious? Was it caused by an illness? Was it a freak variation in chromosomes? Was I just weird? Was I so different that I couldn't be trusted?
Sometimes I am white and that makes me blend in. Sometimes I am white and that makes me stand out. Sometimes, when I feel my whiteness, it feels guilty. Sometimes, it feels beautiful.
I have an extremely large, dark family overseas. I am the muzungu.
And we love the skin we're in.
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