I am sitting now in the Peace Corps office in the capital, having just completed a handbook on the activities of the Women in Development committee (WID) in Guinea. And so I find myself thinking about women. I find myself thinking about women's work, and how gender changes our experience of the world. I think about myself as a woman, and of the lives of a few of my Guinean women friends.

The average number of children borne by a Guinean mother is 6.8, versus 2.1 in the U.S. About one-half of girls are married by the age of 16, half have children during adolescence, and half are just one of several wives. One-half of women between 14 and 49 are malnourished. Ninety percent of women are circumcised. Eighty percent have received no formal schooling.

But this is too big for me to get angry about. It's like trying to wrap your fist around a tree. Instead, it has taught me something. It has taught me about gratitude. About respect. About a truly difficult life.

I am friends with only a couple of women here, because very few women are educated enough to speak French. Adama Barry Dian is my "mother" and her family takes very good care of me. She is the third and youngest of three wives, and has four children (not including me). Although she is not schooled past the 6th grade, she speaks very good French and followed a midwife training program in town. She is now an unpaid midwife at the Health Center, where she works in the morning. In the afternoon she cooks for her family, oversees the household, works backbreaking hours in her manioc fields, or scrubs worn-out clothes on the rocks at the stream.

Adama is very kind to me. You can ask my real mother, who met her when she visited in August. "My co-wife!" exclaimed Adama happily, rushing to greet her. She sent us a bowl of rice and milk for lunch a little later, and walked through mud to accompany us out on a visit to the stream. Her 3-year-old grandson, Amadou Oury, we joke is my "husband". So when Amadou Oury met my boyfriend from the States, he was understandable nervous. Adama bent down to him and said in Pulaar, "Say 'I entrust my wife to you'". Fidgeting, he repeated to my boyfriend, "mi adday debbo an fii maa", and the wrinkles were smoothed.

But in Guinea, I'm not really allowed to have a boyfriend. I had to tell everybody he was my fiance. The word for "boyfriend" really means "lover" here, and would be very shameful. In a society where arranged marriages are the norm, women have very little sexual/romantic freedom. And in a society where boundaries between the sexes are very strict, women and men have very little casual contact. This is hard to get used to, coming from the U.S. I introduce Guineans to a male friend, but what they hear is male "friend" (uh-huh, nudge-nudge, wink-wink). I brought a male friend to my site for an hour once, and they're still asking me how he is.

My other female friend, Aicha Bama, doesn't quite play by these rules. As much as Adama is the sweet, nurturing, and meek village woman, Aicha is raucous, straightforward, and sharp. She was educated at the university in the capital, far away from her home town. After coming to the village of Wawaya as the Health Center pharmacist, she had a child out of wedlock with a man she loved in town. She later married him, and he comes once a week from town to see her. They have the happiest, healthiest baby girl I've seen yet in Guinea. "We want her to be a doctor", he once said to me.

Aicha is partially deaf, and so we yell at each other back and forth, and she tells me what's the score, what time it is, what's going on. She doesn't take any trouble from any man anywhere. Yet, she knows her place and talks the talk, walks the walk. Complaining once to the Health Center director about a problem with a male intern, she presented the infraction candidly, but looked quietly at the ground while doing it, in the traditional style. She's not making a huge splash, she just wants to live her life. And I appreciate that. I respect that. Just as I appreciate how Adama stretches time and energy from her busy and tiring day to bring me bowls of food. I appreciate Aicha's tact, and what she must have gone through to reach the point she is at today, and I admire that.

And gratitude? I mentioned gratitude above. I have gratitude for many things. I am thankful for our lives in the States, and the hard work that was laid down so that I may have so much freedom in my life. I am grateful to be an American and not a Guinean. Yet, that is because I was born American. Were I Guinean, I would have different expectations. Indeed, were I a man I would have different expectations. It is so clear how Adama and Aicha's gender shapes their experiences in their lives. The lines between men and women are a little more blurred in America, but it's there. Having seen the more blatant inequality in Guinea, I can see more clearly the lines we draw in America, and the expectations that we have. Because of the accident of my birth as a white woman in a small New England college town, I have a certain idea of how the world is supposed to treat me, and I follow that vision, and it is fulfilled. Just as Guinean women's expectations are fulfilled. Things are as they shall be.

And so I am grateful for the way life is, that things work out as they must, and give us all a space to shine. Because I shine, in my studies and in my work. Adama shines; she has accomplished and given so much for a woman of little schooling. And Aicha shines; she has succeeded in gaining a high level of education and a relatively self-directed life against adverse conditions.

And the sun shines down over us all, and life goes on, and things change. They change gradually, with seasons, and with years. But they do change, and they need to change. And for that, too, I am grateful.