The World Of Women Throughout The Planet, In Unfamiliar Places The Bond Of Sisterhood Remains Strong
It was midnight and there was only one other female passenger in the Bangkok airport lounge. I walked over to her, plopped down in a nearby seat and settled in for the five-hour overnight layover.
I was en route to the Himalayas in Nepal. For almost a decade, I had taken months off at a time to backpack around the world. But always I had traveled with a partner.
Now I was on my own and, although I didn’t want to admit it, I was scared.
The nearly empty lobby wasn’t helping my nerves. Owners of the airport shops slept on the floors of their stores, which were “closed” by a single chair or skirt draped across the entrances to their businesses, their homes.
Men paced, played checkers and stared at us, two women travelers sitting in front of the sole television blaring CNN International in English.
I smiled to myself when the other woman shook her head and cast her eyes down. I was doing the same thing. Don’t look. Don’t acknowledge. Don’t worry. She shook her head again when a man chose the seat next to mine from at least 25 empty ones. I got up, moved away from him and sat closer to her. Two seats away.
About an hour later, the woman reached for my hand. I almost jerked my fingers away, then remembered where I was. In many countries women walk hand in hand with other women and men arm in arm with other men. What’s taboo is for people of opposite sexes to touch in public.
She was offering her friendship. And her food.
From her Seoul home, she had brought two brown hard-boiled eggs and salt, two sweet rolls and two slices of plain bread and some jam. She simply took my hand to get my attention, then reached into her carry-on and laid out the goodies on the chair between us.
She gestured, “Dig in.” I nodded, wondering if I’d be as generous.
I bought the tea, heavily sugared and half-full of milk, as is the custom in Thailand. We struggled through conversation using sign language, her limited English and my even more limited Thai, which she also spoke.
Her name was Rose. She was a mother, a sister and a daughter. I was a daughter. But by the time I saw her off on her flight to Laos, where her husband was working, I was also her sister.
Sisterhood. Not the political stuff that generates dozens of theses and heated arguments. Just the common bond between women built on fear and joy that can transcend social, economic and age differences.
During my trek through those majestical mountains, women fed me, invited me into their homes when I was cold and gave me advice on where to find other like-minded women. They offered tea, medicine and simply rubbed my back while I threw up for three days after foolishly eating porridge cooked with unpasteurized milk.
Don’t get me wrong. There were generous and helpful men, as well. But what struck me was the knowing look in the eyes of the women and their unsolicited help.
In a tea house, in one of the remotest parts of the Annapurna range, I stayed up late, the lone Western woman, discussing Buddhism with an assortment of European men. We’d been hovering around a table set over a kerosene space heater that was warming the room. There was nothing else to do; our uninsulated rooms would be as frigid as outside, and our hiking was done for the day. We were just waiting out dawn.
The tea house owners were a young married couple who served us, quite naturally, tea and plenty of dahl bhat (lentils and rice), a Nepali staple. Every time the woman brought out a plate, she’d come to the table, hand me the dish, and we’d serve the food. At the end of the evening, she sat on the bench next to me, wrapped her arm around my shoulder and said, “Namaste bibi.”
“Hello, little sister.”
We chatted for nearly an hour. By then I had exhausted her English, so we just smiled a lot.
She didn’t charge me for any of my food. Nor did the woman who owned the guest house in Tada Pani, where I warmed myself by the fire in the kitchen and opened the male porters’ beer bottles with my Swiss Army knife so they didn’t have to use their teeth.
And on crowded Katmandu streets, when I was asked for the umpteenth time, “Hashish?” “Change money?” “Shoe shine?” I’d seek out the nearest Nepali woman with my eyes, and a bright warm smile invariably would fill her face and renew my strength.
This generosity of spirit was contagious, as easily passed on as it was to receive. I’d found, as the days unfolded, I was offering the same comforting eye-contact, the same pats on the back, the same smiles.
So before I flew home, via Bangkok again, I stuffed my carry-on bag with pumpernickel bread, yak cheese and sweet biscuits from Katmandu. I’d be prepared for the hunger pangs. The foreign languages would no longer sound foreign, but familiar. And the din of CNN wouldn’t be comforting as much as a reminder that work loomed large.
I shared my feast with a woman from Bombay. She bought the tea.
MEMO: Lara Wozniak is a staff writer at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times.