The 200 Shilling Question

I am definitely living in rural Tanzania. See if you can guess which one of the following things happened yesterday at the village meeting:

a. The meeting had to be postponed because of a pack of baboons ravaging a nearby maize field.

b. The meeting ended with all the village leaders crouched in a field eating bugs.

c. The meeting was interrupted because we had to go to a burning to drive out the witchcraft that had taken hold of one of the village elders.

d. People arrived on time.

If you guessed a, you are wrong, but good guess because I have heard (although haven't actually seen) that baboons are a real threat to maize fields.

If you guessed c, you are wrong, but good guess, because I have been to a meeting where everyone was even later than usual because the pastor was performing an exorcism of bad magic which involved burning, but luckily, as I found out, not of people.

If you guessed d, haha. Not in a million years.

If you guessed b, you have just won 200 Tanzanian shillings! (Please visit Tanzania to collect your prize before May 26, 2007).



If you want to try again, here's another test:

Which of these tales is true?

a. While barreling down the hill on my bike I was flagged over by a guy going uphill. He apparently thought the best tactic for convincing me to marry him was telling me that I had already agreed. "So, remember when we decided to get married? Yeah, so when's that going to happen?" I have seen him twice before in my life, and have had the formulaic Kihehe (local language) conversation with him, which he must have read too much into.

b. My four-year-old neighbor told me I was going to heaven due to my sweet-potato-planting skills.

c. I carried water on my head and nobody gawked.

d. Frozen precipitation fell from the sky.

e. I turned into a young (and less felonious) Martha Stewart, making bean "tacos." This entailed growing beans, tomatoes, carrots, and corn, harvesting them, and then drying the corn and getting it ground into a flour to be used for tortillas*. They were... edible.

*I am using a loose definition of tortillas, as the flour didn't stick together so came out in little thick chunks. Eating it was much less graceful than you might imagine.

Answer: All of the above except c. No chance of even breathing without being gawked at.

Thanks for playing.

The dry and "cold" season has begun. I am hoping that contour-ridging on my farm has managed to save enough moisture to push through my remaining crops: a little bit of wheat, broccoli and sunflowers.

My main activities these days have been AIDS-related. I just finished a seminar for a group of about 15 out-of-school youth who were interested in becoming AIDS educators. I looked forward to teaching them every day because they were pretty enthusiastic, and so grateful for my time. Tomorrow we are having a pretty big party for those who passed the test to become AIDS educators. They organized the whole thing and invited all the village leaders from surrounding areas. I only have to provide them with certificates. There is rice involved, and you know that if there is rice involved in any kind of party, it must be pretty special. I'd say it's pretty much the same way a birthday cake makes a birthday party.

There was also a big village-wide meeting that came at the request of another NGO which is apparently giving money for AIDS education. The point of the meeting was to determine why villagers thought AIDS was so prevalent in the area. They divided into groups and then were supposed to say what caused AIDS. Topping the list was drunkenness, followed by "careless sexual practices," which I took to mean without a condom, but there was absolutely no mention of condoms outright. It was a very interesting learning experience for me. I gave a short speech about life skills, AIDS testing, and stigma about AIDS, but was careful not to alienate myself by bringing up the topic of condoms. On Thursday, all interested villagers are invited to a lesson about AIDS, which will mainly be determining what they want and need to know about the disease. But I will be very surprised if anyone shows up. Farm work has died down, but there have been so many deaths in the village recently (averaging 2 per week for the last month) that it has been hard to get any work done.