No Husband, No God

There's a nice guy who works at the kayak school who I chat to most days. In the course of our conversations he was amazed to learn that I was thirty-nine and have no husband or children. Cassius himself is forty and a grandfather, like most people his age. It is incomprehensible to him, and many others, that I could be so old and still single. Hardly surprising in a country where, according to yesterday's paper, 70% of girls are mothers by the age of 18. Life expectancy here is about 50, so it made little sense for me to be brushing off his horror with comments about being young and having plenty of time for that later. The WHO says 'healthy life exectancy' is only about 42.

In another conversation, while sipping tea on a bench in the mud behind a tiny restaurant shack, I answered no to so many religion questions that I was left with no choice but to admit the truth, that I don't believe in a God. Poor Cassius nearly choked on his tea, but was too polite to make a scene.

Thereafter, he introduced me to anyone he knew by saying,
"This is Zoe, she's thirty-nine and has no husband and no god."
Thus began my career as a freak-show exhibit...