QUIZ #2

I just got to visit my homestay family again after 10 months, which was terrific. It was a happy reunion, because I could actually understand what was being said and respond in a comprehensible way. It is crazy how fast kids change. I also remember being incredibly intimidated to walk down the street during training, fearing that I'd greet someone improperly, or be harassed for money. Now it seems so natural; it's like returning to your old elementary school as an adult and wondering how you could ever have found it so intimidating with its knee-high desks and water-fountains. Now I'm headed back to site, where I hope to get a lot of villagers to come to an agroforestry introduction by advertising it as cheap fertilizer. We'll see how that goes.

Here's another quiz for those of you who liked the last one: I live in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. Which of these can be found at my site?

a. dancing chameleons
b. giant crabs that climb coconut trees and steal the coconuts
c. coconut trees
d. big hairy spiders
e. cobras
f. trees with huge seed-pods shaped just like sausages
g. trees with huge seed-pods shaped just like eggs
h. trees with huge seed-pods shaped like Belgian waffles with whipped cream
i. donkeys
j. lions

Here are the correct answers: a,d,e*,f,i

There are no lions, coconut trees, or giant crabs (I'm about a 12 hour bus-ride from the ocean, but these do exist on Zanzibar), and there is only one type of breakfast-food-like seed-pod that grows on trees.
There are chameleons that change color and they walk kind of like the moves to “Walk Like an Egyptian,” which I've been told is to fool predators into thinking they are sickly (because anyone who would do that dance in public must be deranged). Sometimes it's hard not to run them over on your bike. There are lots of big hairy spiders that like to watch over me as I sleep, so I can vouch for their existence. To my neighbors, anything that squirms is deemed a “cobra,” hence dangerous and thus must be exterminated. But I could swear that most of the time they are garter snakes or even earthworms. If I look skeptical at my neighbors' classification of the creatures, they will clarify: “a baby cobra.” Sausage trees ARE as gross-looking as they sound, but I've heard that you can carve the pods into chairs and have a comfy sit-down. I've never tried it, nor seen any that are big enough for that. Oh, and donkeys are kind of boring, but useful and present in small numbers. Thanks for playing! Hope you did well.

These days my main project is guacamole. Most people here have never had it, but I am hoping that after 3 years the village will abound with the two essential ingredients, avocados and lemons, which grow on trees and we are planting those trees.

I also want to start a dictionary of Swanglish words. Some of the words that everyone uses in English (even though you native-English-speakers may never have heard of them) are:

1. Frumpin
2. Piss Kop
3. Watakani
4. Pipe wrange
5. Godown

You might be able to decipher a couple of them. They mean (respectively) frying pan, Peace Corps, watering can, pipe wrench, and the "go down" is, inexplicably, a granary. There are many words that you can just add extra I's to if you want to Swahilify them. A good example is wikiendi (weekend).

This morning before I left my village I had the new experience of going to a grave-building party. My counterpart's mother died a long time ago, but he explained that they still needed to build a tombstone so that nobody will ever build a house on top of her. I arrived at 7:30 in the morning and was greeted by some already-tipsy old ladies who didn't understand when I declined their offers of local brew by saying "it's too early for drinking." Unfortunately I had to leave before any of the grave-building fun could begin. Maybe next time.