Being a single woman on the mission field is tough.
I volunteered abroad in Uganda with a faith-based development organization for four years straight out of college. Serving overseas was something I had been looking forward to my entire life; it was a dream-fulfillment scenario for the missionary kid in me who just wanted to return to the familiar smells, sounds, and lifeways found in Africa.
My optimism about how great my assignment was going to be sailed me through my weeklong orientation session in the States without deeply considering the challenges of serving solo. While I do remember attending a session or two on security protocols in our placements, including one on identifying and reporting sexual harassment, I did not anticipate just how lonely I would feel and how hard it would be to make friends as a twenty-something single white woman in Uganda.
In my life up to that point, I leaned into my interests to make friends. But there was a mismatch between my interests and the typical (accepted) interests of Ugandan women my age. At the time, I was a sports fanatic. I thrived in competitive settings and felt most at home in my body while sweating under a scoreboard.
At home, I had a healthy mix of male and female friends. One of my first questions after I had settled into Soroti Town was where young people went to play sports. My hosts took me to the sports ground, an open multi-use field near the government offices which contained areas for volleyball, netball, soccer, and squash. I was in for three of those, netball being outside my frame of reference as an American — was that a broken basketball hoop?
I entered the grounds with great anticipation, sure that I would find friends. The problem was that the majority of the players who gathered in the evenings were men. And my presence garnered a lot of unwanted attention.
It was difficult to be “of marriageable age” but uninterested in marriage. It was also difficult to represent a country that markets female sexuality and availability in the bulk of its media and have my disinterest read as a genuine “no.”
I was an anomaly. And anomalies tend to garner more interest, not less. So, while I would have loved to compete every evening on the sports ground, I knew it wouldn’t get me closer to developing the secure friendships I sought; I had to find where the women my age hung out.
That’s where things got even tougher. It turned out that most Ugandan women of my age and socioeconomic status were either in a degree program in a larger city or were established in a home with so many responsibilities that they were generally unavailable to “just hang out.” The fact that I had leisure time was another anomaly.
I reflected on these challenges with my host mother one evening, joining her on the mat she had pulled out into the shade. Stretching her aging legs in front of her and sitting ramrod straight beside a basin of peanuts, she began shelling what she needed for the peanut sauce that evening.
I, too, sat, spread my skirt to cover my knees, and mimicked her motions, scooping up a handful of peanuts, popping them open, dropping the shells to the mat and the nuts into her basin. Along with the peanuts, my story opened; I laid out my challenges for my host mother to see. How could I make genuine friendships with people my age?
“You can do this,” she said, motioning to our shared work. “You can visit your friends and join what they are doing. There’s always work to do; it is lighter when we do it together.”
This was the key. So straightforward. So actionable. But not easy. Internally, I had to wrestle with my deeply held “shoulds” that raged against women having to do the bulk of the unpaid labor in the household. But if I wanted friends, I needed to meet them where they were, and where they were was in the laboring.
Additionally, I needed women to trust me enough to allow me into that work space, and that meant moving from official visitor status into potential friend status: from formal sitting room and finest china to tea in a chipped mug out back on the mat shelling peanuts and sharing stories.
I tried this out with my language teacher, Rose, the woman I had grown closest to. We would sit side by side on her couches, holding a primer between us — I, struggling to string new words together; she, patient and encouraging. There always came a point where the lesson blended into evening tea, and Rose would usually excuse herself to gather the hot water flask, the tea leaves, and the accompanying treat — banana, boiled egg, bread with fresh peanut butter.
The first time I asked if I could help with the tea, she froze. I could read her indecision on her still face as she considered the ramifications of her response.
Allowing me to the back of her house meant that I would see that she didn’t have a cabinet for her dishes but kept them neatly stacked on a plastic rack in her pantry that also held a giant sack of charcoal for her outdoor cook stove and several sacks of dried sweet potatoes and peanuts, a testament to her latest harvest. Allowing me to the back of her house meant that I would notice that the reason we usually moved outside to take our evening tea was because her house had no electricity. Allowing me to the back of her house made our curiosity, expectations, and judgment of one another take on new depth.
What courage it took for Rose to say yes, to show me where she kept her tea things, to chat evenly all the while, though internally she was likely wondering what I was about to say or ask next. All I had hope for was the possibility of sharing deeper, truer stories about our lives. Of becoming friends. I held Rose’s yes with such tenderness, not wanting to shatter this generous extension of trust.
The fact that Rose said yes and handed me the tea tray transformed my life in Uganda from one on the periphery as a visitor to one where I was included and even expected to do the dishes from time to time. Through our friendship, our time together expanded. Rose taught me to crochet wonderfully detailed placemats. I taught her to play Rook, the Mennonite trick-taking card game. We cooked together, taking turns teaching one another our favorite dishes. We shifted most of our interactions outdoors, near the cook stove, reserving the sitting room for the days when we were hosting other friends, together.
What I learned in my friend-making adventures while serving solo is that I had to make an effort to demonstrate cultural understanding throughout the process. I had to leave the sports ground and find women in their homes. I had to spend time sharing food formally as an official visitor before I could make the audacious request of becoming a regular friend. And when that request was granted, everything and everyone felt a little more real in the best way possible. I might still have been serving solo, but I was no longer alone.
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Esther Harder manages the Substack Write Like an Outsider. She is a book coach who helps missionaries and expats transform their life journeys into stories that lead readers home. She served in Uganda from 2003-2008 and Rwanda from 2011-2012. Find out more about Esther on estherharder.com.
