Congo wardrobe

Alone on a gray day yesterday I needed something to look forward to. So I decided to go through my closet and check out what I had to wear for my trip to Congo in May.

I went through my clothes and found quite a few gaudy, flowy things that I hardly ever wear here but that would be appropriate to wear in Kinshasa. I tried on outfits and made a pile of clothes all ready to pack. The trip is three months away!

This exercise gave me a taste of my inner colorful self. I do not wear such things here because I am self-conscious about drawing attention to myself. The self-help guru Byron Katie asks what you believed when you were 5 that may still be guiding you in unhelpful ways. Well, that’s one for me.

Ever since I was 5, wearing a dress, and demonstrated to my brother’s 7-year-old friends my ability to somersault and heard Duane say, “I see her pants, I see her pants” with every revolution, I have associated getting attention with embarrassment. This was confirmed in many ways throughout grade school. Already in first grade I felt others looking at me funny because I always had the answers so I stopped raising my hand, even to go to the bathroom (besides, I was afraid of the self-flushing toilets). This led to acute embarrassment one afternoon as I got off the school bus and had to pee in the lane, causing my brothers to snicker. You see, I remember these incidents. There are a few more. They are my only vivid memories of childhood.

Let’s not get into how shunning attention for fear of embarrassment has affected my professional life but it has. Instead, let’s keep it to the innocent level of clothes. I love color and pattern, but my habits of dress are strongly influenced by my environment; that is, by what seems appropriate; that is, by what other people are wearing. I am not obsessed about this but I am aware. I have found, for example, that what I wear to church has changed since I moved to a different community.

There is not a drastic difference in how people dress in my old church and new one—the range is wide in both. You’ll see people in jeans and men in suits and ties. What I notice, though, is that, surrounded by more people my age, as I am in the new church, I lean toward dressing more like them. For example, I did not own a single pair of dress pants for some time but I suddenly found it necessary to acquire some. Now I often go to church in the dress-pants-and-sweater uniform, sometimes topped with a jacket, which a dozen other respectable Mennonite ladies my age are wearing on any given Sunday. Weird.

Sometimes I try to trick myself into nonconformity by, for instance, throwing on a gaudy Russian shawl. 

People notice and give me compliments. The compliments make me uncomfortable. They stir up that old association of attention with embarrassment. But I don’t like to fade into the woodwork, either. So I seem to ration my fashion statements. This week two scarves intertwined, next week simple sweater and pants. One week a Congo cloth jacket over a plain outfit. Then many weeks later, purple flowy pants with a plain top. Weird indeed.

I acquired most of my colorful, flowy things in other places like Russia or California. The last time I was in Africa, nearly four years ago, I found that I had been starved for color. I feasted my eyes on the bright colors and the marketplace cloth. But I didn’t buy much, knowing I wouldn’t wear it back home.

Now I am involved with the Congo Cloth Connection and going on this trip back to the country where I fell in love with color some 40 years ago. The trip is more about developing human relationships than about cloth. I am truly grateful that both of my churches and the Congo story project are supporting me on this trip—and trying not to be embarrassed about that kind of attention.

But I know that, on a dreary February day in the Midwest, I have an inner fashionista who is starving for color and can’t wait to get to those shops and markets.