'Happy' Ramadan

Lately Guineans have been driving me a bit up the wall crazy. It’s Ramadan. Everyone is Muslim, so everyone is fasting. Everyone. There is no prepared food to buy; most restaurants are closed. Instead of music, you only hear the Koran being read. I’m not Muslim, so I’m not fasting. To me, that’s simple. I do not light candles because it is Chanukah, I do not go to the mosque five times a day. I sometimes eat meat. I do not practice integral parts of religions other than Catholicism. Even that I see as flexible; I take what I like about it and leave the rest. Growing up in America, religious freedom is seen as a basic right. It doesn’t matter to me that other people are not Catholic, and I am not going around telling people they should convert or that they should give up something for Lent. To be completely honest, I believe people should make their own life choices and it’s not up to me to tell them otherwise. If you want to drink, drink! If you want to eat lamb, go ahead! Even if I am in one of my vegetarian stages, I am not going to suggest you instead order the tofu. Maybe that is why it’s driving me absolutely crazy that 100 times a day, I am asked if I am fasting. I don’t look Muslim. I have blue eyes and am just as pale as I was 8 months ago when I left for Guinea. Although Guineans do not often meet people from outside the country, they know that there are Christians (neighboring Sierra Leone is full of them) and that most white people they meet are not Muslim. My go-to response is, “Am I Muslim?” and when they respond with no, I then ask, “Then should I be fasting?’ The answer is usually yes. I try to explain that I should not be fasting. The fast is part of the religion and while I am trying my hardest to integrate into Guinean culture, I am not trying to convert to Islam. For most Guineans, they cannot separate Guinean culture from Muslim culture. After about a week of this I caved and decided to fast on Fridays, the holy day for Muslims. Ramadan is a part of Guinean culture, so I thought I should give it a go. Fasting was hard. I got up at 4:30 in the morning to eat some hardboiled egg and bread, then went back to bed. I woke up thirsty, but was not allowed to drink water. I was not terribly hungry, but I was so thirsty. It is what I focused on. I stopped working hard in the afternoon. I just wanted to sleep away the last hours of my fast. I realized that my work was more important to me than the fast. I reaffirmed my commitment to nonparticipation. I’m going to do it again tomorrow (since it will be again Friday), but nobody can convince me to do everyday. So today, when someone asked me if I was fasting, I went through my typical spiel. I told him I respected his culture, so I am fasting on Fridays as a show of solidarity. His response. “That’s bad!” If a Muslim only fasts on Fridays, he is a bad Muslim. "Il faut faire le gen". Il faut is a strong sentence structure, a command. You must fast everyday. And so we returned to the beginning of, “Moi, est-ce que je suis Musalman?”. He agreed that no I am not, but I still needed to be fasting. I kind of lost it. I told him that religion was a choice and that it is mean and disrespectful to try to force his religion on me. That I did not appreciate it in the least and that I found him intolerant. That it was not at all obligatory for me to be fasting and that if I choose to fast once a week to show my support for his culture that is one more day a week of fasting than is necessary. I got up and walked away. He was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but really Guinea, please open your mind to new ideas, other ways of living. I am looking forward to spending this weekend on a farm and then a few days in Conakry away from my community where I have to deal with the constant questioning. Soon after that, Ramadan will be over and if so many people around the world are living each day without food or drink, I can do a month of extreme annoyance.