I used to think icebreakers were a good idea for getting people to talk at seminars. Sunday, the seminar my counterpart and I were giving for guardians of orphaned children got off to a rough and awkward start. There was such a mix of people; orphaned kids themselves in school uniforms, brothers and sisters who cared for them, aunts and uncles, and wrinkled grandparents embarassed to speak Swahili. I picked an icebreaker that seemed to be appropriate for all ages, but it was a complete flop. You had to choose an emotion and then act it out for others to guess. The most we got were two of the students standing up and looking ashamed. Then one of the attendees stood up and explained that it was a hard game because they were not prepared. And when I stood back and looked at it, the concept did seem unimportant and a little ridiculous, so we jumped right into the seminar.

The point of it is to make “Memory Books” for kids with information about their parents, families, ancestors, and themselves in their childhood. As Americans, we tend to think that kids in difficult situations need emotional support, and we see the Memory Book idea as a good way to help with self confidence. This seems to be a new concept in my village. They seemed more to see it as a good way to record information in case anything happened to them, the guardians.

At one point my counterpart was explaining to a 13-year-old orphan and her brother/guardian how to fill out a certain part of the book which asked for a list of important people in the girl’s life. The girl could read and write, but her brother couldn’t even sign his name. They both looked very scared and submissive. When asked who was important in her life, the girl said “My parents.” My counterpart just looked at her and said “They’re dead, choose someone else.” It occurred about 5 times in the course of their conversation that he reminded her of this unfortunate fact. I know the girl was aware that her parents were dead, but to me it seemed insensitive keep telling her. In this culture though, this bluntness is very prevalent and accepted.

Fatness, Part 2
I told a friend of mine about my goal of convincing someone to name a baby Fatness, and to my absolute delight he said “I have a friend named Fatness.” I suppose I do not set my goals high enough. I now hope that I can meet a “Fatness” before I leave.

The teachers told me that often people hear a word or see it written and decide to use it as a name. They said that if the parents are at the hospital and a bus passes, the baby might end up with the name of the bus line. There are luckily no Greyhound buses here, but there is “Superfeo” (which means super ugly in Spanish), and according to the teachers, there are some unfortunate children running around with that tag.

They also claim that if I come back in 15 years I will encounter kids with my name. Somehow I’m not so confident that it would actually be “Gail.” More likely, it would be Gillr, Ger, Girl, or Piskops. It would be worth it to return just to give my condolences to those poor children.

Tuesday I went to help out with the monthly weighing of village babies, and discovered a new hobby: checking out the names on the cards. Here are some of my favorites: Agape, Abass, Big, Godness, Skolastika, Sist, Ravuness, Jailos, Albino, Milkson, Herigod, Heribert, Frolida (I’m sure that’s supposed to be Florida, but they switched the l and the r), Jeronimus, Loines (sorry about that!), Pili (meaning “second”), Sijali (I don’t care), and Hatunahaki (meaning “we have no rights”).

Chuchu the Goat
The other day I helped my friend buy an orphaned goat from an old farmer. We got it back to her house and started trying to feed it random things. It didn’t like powdered cows’ milk from a bottle, but it did have a taste for all the little green things in her courtyard, sausage, spaghetti, and eucalyptus leaves. It was being loud and obnoxious all night, and all of a sudden we heard one of my friends who was sleeping on the floor yell “Quit it!!” I guess the goat had kicked the door until it broke into the house and had crawled into bed with him. As an added bonus, the goat left us presents all over the floor, which were hard to avoid stepping in at 6 am when we had to get up to catch the bus.

Botany and Tears
The other day I stumped my environmental club students when I asked them to compare the functions of a plant to the functions of a human. They had no problem comparing eating food to a plant being out in the sun, having babies to making seeds, drinking to taking up water from the soil. But two questions I asked stumped them. The first was why plants show off their reproductive organs so ostentatiously, while respectable humans (in most societies) hide theirs. The second was why many plants encase their offspring in delicious food, while any human mother with a heart would never stick her baby in a cake and set it out where animals could devour it. They obviously are completely unaccustomed to this type of question, and I had to lead them to the conclusions of pollination and seed dispersal by means of animal digestive tracts (and at this age, anything that even remotely involves poop is hilarious to them). I’m not sure they like the idea of eating swollen ovaries whenever they bite into a fruit, but it gave them something to think about.

After the lesson, I made a few kids cry. It was one of the more rewarding experiences in my teaching history. We played a game where you had to make a circle and say something environment-related within a certain category (for instance edible plants), and then point to another person meaning they had to quickly say another word within the same category. If you delayed or repeated a word, you were in the middle of the circle until someone else messed up. The kids loved the game so much that two or three were laughing so hard they could hardly speak and had tears rolling down their cheeks.

Another Happy Wife
One of my best friends was sold yesterday. I went to her bride-price party, which was much like the last one. I spent most of the time sitting in a dark room with her waiting for the price-negotiations to be done so they could ship her off to her new house, about 4k away. It was sad, and interesting. She had a really horrible cough, but seemed to be in decently high spirits. Mostly I think she was just resigned to her fate. She said she wouldn’t get to rest until midnight, because once she got to her house she would have to unpack everything and cook for her new husband. I managed to shock her with tales of weddings in our culture: she couldn’t imagine the bride and groom dancing together at a wedding, especially in front of their parents. Nor could she believe the bride and her parents are supposed to be cheerful at the occasion.

Fatness
One thing I love about being here is how people laugh when I say my name is Gail and then say “My name is Goodluck,” or something equally as ridiculous. They laugh at my name because is sounds like "Girl." I'm so sick of this predictable response that sometimes I just introduce myself as "Peace Corpse." (The common pronunciation of Peace Corps)

Here’s another quiz: Which of these are actual names given to Tanzanians?

Loveness, Lightness, Gladness, Fatness, Happy, Gift, Wheatness, Kolonel, Urea, Agbert, Toadbert, Gozbert, Cuthbert, Sixbert, Filthbert, and Field Marshall

There are only 3 that I made up. This said, I wouldn’t be surprised to meet a “Fatness,” a “Toadbert,” or a “Filthbert.” It is, in fact, one of my goals to convince a family to name their child “Fatness.” You might think that cruel, but as fatness is a positive trait here, I think it couldn’t hurt.

Then there are some common historical names like: Boutros, Jackson, Adolf and Hitler. (Hitler is my bus conductor.)

Then the names that start out ok, but seem to get confused midway through: Juliethar, Anether, Jimson, Gerson, Glbart. (spelled exactly this way by a 4th grader of mine.)

And finally the names that are actually in Swahili but mean something sad:
Sikujua- I didn’t know
Mengi- A lot
Sijaona- I’ve never seen
Tuombe- Let us pray
Sifai- There’s something wrong with me (literally: I don’t work)
Shida- Issues
Lusungu- Pity
Simtaki- I don’t want him/her
These are just some examples. I've heard an unsubstantiated claim that these names are picked to deter the Devil from wanting to take the children. Others just say that the names are a brutally honest memory of what is going on when the child is born.
The beauty of names here is that people just make them up. Nice for parents, but you can't help but feel bad for poor little Spleenbert and Turdson. My heart goes out to these unfortunate younguns. I just try to give them hope by encouraging them to look forward to the day when they have children of their own.

A Health Festival
It’s not easy for a young mzungu female to get a captive audience of young Tanzanian males, but there’s really no way for them to escape if they are in the middle of a soccer game for which you have provided the ball. Last week we had our “Health Cup” soccer and netball tournaments, and I went to each of the 6 games with my counterpart to do skits at halftime. We tried to make them funny but with the main message that people should get tested for HIV. The first was about a person who had HIV but it was hard to believe because she seemed to be plump and healthy. The second was about a girl who didn’t want to get tested because she didn’t have time or money and was scared of the results. The third and fourth were about a couple where the girl refused to marry the guy until he got tested. The last two were about testing for the health of an unborn child.

I think the one they liked best was when I dressed up as a man who fell in love with a young girl (my counterpart). I came to her very shyly and tried to tell her that I wanted to get married, but the words for “to kill” and “to marry” are very similar, so I pretended to get them mixed up. Another way to say “to marry” is similar to how you say “close the bucket,” so I explained how I wanted us to “close the bucket” together. Then when we got it sorted out, I told her that we weren’t communicating because her Swahili was not very good, and she only knew “Kihehehe.” I was very surprised that she would refuse to marry me until I got an HIV test, and I told her that I’d never done “wheat” before in my life (the words for wheat and sex are only 1 letter off). I wasn’t sure at the time whether people were actually accepting the message of the skits, or whether they just found them amusing.

It seems that everyone in my village has a strong opinion about voluntary HIV counseling and testing. A great majority thinks testing is a good thing to do. Many are scared to get tested and don’t see the point as there is no cure. A few see it as a bad thing, and claim that people who know they are infected will deliberately go and infect others so that they will not die alone. A few fear the doctors, think they are liars or crooks, or suspect someone involved in the process must have ulterior motives for doing the testing. But it’s always healthy to have a few skeptics.

At 10:00 in the morning on Saturday I started to panic. The “Health Festival” signs had been posted, flyers distributed, and announcements had been made at funerals. Everyone in town, and many from the surrounding areas knew that there would be music, entertainment, soccer and netball finals, and, most importantly, HIV testing on Saturday starting at 9:00 am. Five different people had already told me they wanted to be first on the list to get tested, but the testers hadn’t shown up and I was starting to sweat. One man had accused us of lying to the villagers and was threatening to start telling everyone to go home (which I found odd because things generally start at least 2 hours late in the village).

The generator and TV set-up that we planned to rent from the next village up had fallen through (the owner had realized that morning that the TV wasn’t really working). About 30 villagers had gathered already, along with primary and secondary school students, and were waiting for things to start.

The sound of a car pulling up was music to my straining ears. The doctors gathered and gave a speech about HIV and testing under the bamboo/sisal “tent,” whose skeleton, left over from the grade 7 graduation, had been resurrected for the event. One thing they mentioned was that usually the vast majority of people who show up for testing are female, but they were surprised that it wasn’t the case in my village. I think this might be due to our efforts to target young males with our mid-soccer-game skits, but I can’t be sure.

The villagers gathered at the primary school and went in to one room for testing, and then waited to enter another room to receive their results one-by-one. While people jostled each other at the classroom doors (lines are non-existent here) we played music and watched plays performed by various groups.

I had expected maybe 30 people to get tested, but was hoping for 100. By the end of the testing, a total of 238 villagers had been tested, 22 of whom were positive. I realized upon hearing these results that I had been hoping unrealistically that nobody would be positive. The idea of testing is that those who are negative will be happy to hear their results and will continue to take care of their health. Those who are positive will lead healthier lives, avoid infecting anyone else, get further counseling and possibly go on anti-retroviral therapy. The results cannot be considered a good representation of the number of infected individuals in the area because testing is voluntary, but it’s better than nothing.

The day ended with the netball and soccer tournaments, and me going home to find my cat in labor. It was a hectic day, but I was very happy with the number of people tested.