Newsletter 'Volume 31 – Issue 8 May 2020

  I've been using the past weeks to write some reflections on my life experiences.

As I write this it's been more than 5 weeks since I saw a human face other than my son, who brings me groceries.  Last week I had an appointment at University Hospital; nothing happened that was out of the way but all my caregivers were masked as part of the protocol of the Covid-19 pandemic.  The masks took my mind back to the times I worked in the Middle East where women, with few exceptions, were always masked. 

  Over the nearly 12 years I visited there, I delivered about 50 lectures to Middle Eastern hospital medical staffs.  Routinely, the veiled women doctors would arrive early and seat themselves at the back of the room in a quiet huddle.  Later, the male staff would come in, sometimes accompanied by one or two unveiled women who sat with the men.  In all those lectures I never fielded a question or received a comment from a veiled woman whereas, the few that were unveiled provided regular and powerful critiques of whatever I was teaching.  It was similar in clinics with the medical students; veiled female students made little comment in contrast to the chatty ones with open faces.  I observed there that taking away someone's face is a very effective way to shut them up and take away their personal power. 

At the King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh, I once provided some merriment for the women in the department because they were all of similar build and I wasn't able to distinguish among them from behind their veils.  Eventually I learned that they worked diligently to give subtle clues to their individual identities within a narrow range of options.  One of them confessed to me that she wore her mask with the upper edge at the level of her lower eyelids whereas her colleague dared to display 3mm of skin below her eyelids.  How racy was that!

One of my colleagues in Yemen was a Canadian gynecologist who was sought after for his expertise with female genital cancers.  It was his routine after the physical examination to allow the woman to dress before he sat with her to explain his findings and discuss treatment options.  The practice of Arabic physicians tended toward merely providing a diagnosis to the husband or other accompanying male. My colleague insisted on speaking directly to the woman and for this he would ask her to remove her veil.  When she demurred on grounds that it was unislamic and immodest to do that, he would explain that he needed to see her face to have the conversation she deserved and that he didn't buy the argument about modesty because she had not been overtly embarrassed to show him her bare bottom just minutes earlier.  In fact, he was trying to make a point to the Yemeni doctors that female patients deserved the courtesy of direct discussions that a more veterinary-style discussion with the husband did not address.

After working in this environment for a few weeks on multiple occasions, I noticed a profound relaxation in my state of mind when we stopped in Frankfurt on the way home.  It had everything to do with the appreciation of mixed crowds including women with faces.  It wasn't that those faces were in any way sexual, but just the relief that came with the appreciation that I was back in a society where people were valued as self-expressing individuals regardless of gender.

There is a place in the human brain where faces are uniquely recognized and the

There will be an end to our current preoccupation with masks when the Covid-19 virus will become history and I look forward to observing whole faces and doing my own grocery shopping again. I'm not so sure of how or when our sisters in the Middle Eastern countries will be liberated except I am sure that they will come to their own Me Too moment.

AAD   Apr 19, 2020