Dress Distress

Women cooking at church on a special Sunday

The way one dresses is very important to people in the Sahel. I have found in many poor countries that I’ve visited around the world that dressing nice is very, very important. I don't know, but have wondered if it might be because it is less expensive to dress nicely than home improvements and you can't carry your home with you. Since I joined the women's group I am now expected to buy 4 new dresses that the women will wear to match on the same day. One was a Christmas dress, a New Years dress, a “Thanksgiving” dress and a dress that every women in the region will buy. The fabric costs about $10 and the sewing is probably around $6 for most dresses, which seems expensive to me, but even more so when you consider the average income in the country. Maybe going overboard on clothing happens in US churches as well, but here the economics of it seem even harder to sustain.

So I am not excited about being forced to buy all these dresses, as 3 or 4 of these dresses are enough for me for a couple of years. They are not comfortable enough for me to wear them every day and I frankly don't have enough closet space for a lot of them and would like to live more minimally. Culturally it is expected, so I go along with it. The thing that blows my mind though is that these women are spending $16 on a dress four or five times a year and when we hear so many have trouble paying their children's school fees or buying enough grain for the year. Priorities are very different from mine for spending both time and money. Of course we are not here to make a culture look exactly like us, so we try not to judge their different priorities but to work to understand and find the redeeming aspects of God working in/with/counter their values and culture.

Women singing and dancing at a "Thanksgiving" service