Dirt Blindness
If your house is constantly clean, what do you have to compare it with? What kind of sense of accomplishment do you get from cleaning up small messes every day?

My strategy is to let parts of my house sink into such a state of clutter that cleaning would better be described as remodeling. It makes me feel benevolent and slightly magical to turn the trash heap into a perfectly decent living area. Then I flit around the house, feasting my eyes on the shimmering concrete, stacks of books, and alphabetized spices (ok, I've never gone quite that far). I pride myself in the fact that my floor is so clean you could eat a peanut off of it (applying the 10 second rule of course). I generally don’t do this kind of drastic cleaning on a whim; it takes a special occasion. I’m like a guy who waits for a wedding to shave off his full-length beard, shocking his friends with the sight of his handsome, long-forgotten chin. Once I get wind of a potential visitor, my first reaction is a deep despair over the state of my abode. Excuses come to mind—vandals, raccoons, tornadoes, witchcraft—but upon realizing the first three don’t exist in my village, and a curse that makes your house dirty would be rather lame as curses go, I’m forced to plan out the work. The trick is to start scrubbing early enough that I have a few days to appreciate the cleanliness of my lair before guests come so that I don’t begin to hate and resent them on arrival for the chaos they bring. It also can’t be too early or I will spend days spraining toes as I leap across the living room on tiptoes and starving, as cooking inevitably messes up the kitchen. Once a grand cleaning has been completed, I usually feel as if it deserves to be noted. For the amount of energy I have expended in the effort, I could just as well have made a wedding cake, built a henhouse, or developed abs of steel (all of which merit congratulations). I used to hope that people would at least comment. Then one day a 14-year-old boy did comment on my clean house, but I just felt patronized. It was as if he had congratulated me for brushing my own teeth or dressing myself. Cleaning is such a part of life here that generally only its absence is noted.

One of my neighbors is sympathetic to my lack of cleaning skills. She knew I was cleaning up, and actually came over to help. She decided, of all things, to wash my buckets. I was under the impression that buckets that had spent their entire short lives holding water and nothing else weren’t in need of a scrubbing. Wrong. I guess sometimes I just don’t even see the dirt. This is ok, as it lends a name to my condition—dirt blindness. It sounds kind of exotic, like I’ve been stranded in the desert too long. I was very grateful for the aid of my neighbor, who is a pro when it comes to household cleanliness. She is the owner of two kids under 10 and a miniature dinosaur who teeters around on two or four limbs roaring and terrorizing the living room. It is his personal goal to knock all items on the floor and drool on them. Still, she somehow manages to erase all traces just seconds after they occur. If Tanzania had a cleaning Olympics, my neighbor would be a top contender. I would be a jealous spectator.

Don’t know beans
When I was little, I made a list of the things I needed to learn in order to qualify as an adult. By the time I was five, the only things left on the list were: learn to drive, lock the front door, and cut my own meat (I hadn’t yet learned about taxes).

I sometimes imagine what my list would have been like were I born a Tanzanian child in a rural village. Most likely I would have given up completely. The list would include: learn to balance half my weight on my head, scrub clothes clean with knuckles using only a cup of water per garment, simultaneously carry a baby on my back and pound grain, learn to winnow wheat or rice without spilling half the load, etc. I still don’t think I have a remote chance at qualifying as an adult here. If I suddenly looked and talked like the neighbor women, I think they’d probably treat me with pity.

I recently realized the repercussions of my eclectic farm (which is a patchwork mix of corn, sunflowers, beans, soy, peanuts, carrots, pumpkins, cowpeas, green peas, potatoes, and more). While I proudly receive praise for my healthy crops and successful intercropping experiments, I also curse myself for planting such a random mix in random places. Orchestrating the harvest is difficult. Then there’s my bean problem—it dawned on me that I don’t really know what to do with them once they’re ready. I know you bring in a tangle of bean plants, dry them, beat them til the beans are free, and put them in a basket and pour them back and forth until all non-bean particles have been excluded. But it’s the little steps that elude me. How long must they dry for? How do you get the beans from the ground to the basket? Once done, do you really have to go to the trouble of sorting the beans by color?

At one point last year, my friend declared me a “black man,” for my ability to cultivate crops. It was a compliment. But nobody has ever called me a Tanzanian woman. That is still way beyond my abilities at this point. Babies handed to me still cry as if I’m the devil, I inevitably get soaked whenever I carry water on my head, and when I cook greens they taste like leaves, not food.

Yesterday I attended a meeting where women were told they had to set a curfew for themselves to get back to their homes. I had to sit on my hands, but couldn’t keep small noises of exasperation from escaping my throat. Finally, one of the women suggested that the men also have a curfew, at which I jumped up and clapped while the men glared at me. This idea was very hotly contested, but in the end, the men said they would set a curfew later. The women must now be home by 8pm to avoid fines. There was also a lot of debate over what punishment a woman must receive should her husband disturb the peace of the village by beating her for not cooking vegetables. Not one of the women questioned that the beating would be warranted. I feel so far removed from this type of submission, that I have to pretend it’s a joke to keep from going mad.

I think if plopped in a village looking and speaking exactly like a Tanzanian man, I’d stand a far better chance of being accepted with my current abilities and tendency to speak my mind.

Peace Corps stresses you should “Greet everyone”
This morning I called out “Hello Grandmother!” when I saw an old woman, and she didn’t reply. I figured she might be deaf. I was about to try again when I realized she was actually just a stump.

Mwalimu Peace Corpse
It happened so gradually I barely realized what was happening. Like someone whose nightly scotch gradually grows in size, going from shot glass to cup to mug, to bottle. One day I just woke up and realized that… I’m a teacher.

I’d been in denial for a while. What started as a couple of harmless school clubs gradually spilled over into several classes. You take on one class, and soon it’s “I’ll just take one more before noon. That’s it. I know my limits. I can stop anytime.” When you wake up and go straight to school, give lectures and exercises, grade papers all day, and live your life by the “bell” (actually a rusty wheel hung on a tree that kids hit with a mallet), then you’ve got to eventually accept the truth.

Once you start you can’t quit. You worry about whether the kids actually understood what you said about the renal vein, and whether they care about the main crop of Sri Lanka. You find yourself trying to snap out of the teacher voice with your friends. You constantly have chalk on your hands, in your hair, and, inexplicably, on your butt.

If I were a normal Tanzanian teacher, I’d be carrying a stick wherever I went. Instead, I’m armed with only my knowledge of kids names, which I say with my most evil angry teacher-voice when they are being noisy. For now, that’s working. But at any point they could realize there’s no threat of punishment and decide to eat me alive.

Winter, summer, spring, fall… such generic terms
Tummy-trouble season is over. Clothes-never-dry season is over. Scrape-muck-out-of-your-orifices-after-bike-rides season is over. Farm-morning-until-night season is over. Eat-giant-unripe-peaches-pretending-they’re-apples season is over.

It is sideways-rain season. It is tall-crop season. It is pear and roast-corn and fresh-bean and flamboyant-mushroom season. It is warm-morning season. I like this season.

Sadly I’ll only see one more season here in Tanzania. I call it frozen-morning, custard-apple, dust-in-your-nose, haul-your-water season. Wherever you brush against any plants, your clothes get coated in “dog decorations,” long thin black seeds that grab on like Velcro. People call me a hick for always being covered in them. They say it must be because when I decide to go somewhere, I march there in a straight line, through farms and fields, ignoring all obstacles.

Each season here has its good and its bad, so you have to learn to love the good.

I think I’m turning Tanzanian, I really think so
Emerging from the forest with a bag full of roots on my head, a hoe, and another bag of edible mushrooms, I felt more Tanzanian than some of my villagers, or at least more village than some of my villagers. People were asking me what I wanted with lidupala, a well-known local tuber that can be used as a pesticide for maize-munching bugs called luhoma, when there was chemical pesticide readily available at the store. I pointed out that this was free, and better for the environment, and probably wouldn’t slowly give me cancer.

Lacking a mortar and pestle, a friend of mine helped me beat the tubers into a pulp with a club and soak them overnight. The next day we scooped cupfuls of the substance and poured some into the tops of the infected corn plants, watching the milky liquid spiral down the stalks. I imagined the screams of the little earwig-like monsters as the fatal tsunami hit.

As a mushroom-picker, I am a complete flop. I was lucky to be with a skilled mushroom expert, adept at choosing only edible mushrooms. He had nearly filled a bag with little red and yellow mushrooms, before I found my first- a tiny shriveled pink specimen, which I insisted we take as it might be my only find of the day. Most of the rest of the ones I found were deemed inedible. We managed to get enough mushrooms for a very decent meal for 2 and a cat.

A failing system
The state of the primary school is dreadful. There are over 600 students, 7 different grades, and supposedly 7 teachers. There are supposed to be at least 17 teachers for this number of students. You are lucky to find even 4 teachers at school in any given day, and I’d have a heart attack if even 3 were teaching in the classrooms at the same time. Two of these teachers are perpetually drunk, and go to work only when they get bored with drinking. One of them was just beaten to the brink of death by a former teacher for “preferring someone else’s wife,” although he has 5 of his own. If he recovers, it is unclear whether his kidneys will work again. Two of the other teachers just took their national high school exams, and pretty much gave up teaching classes so they could study. The husband of one of the teachers lives 5 hours away, and she often visits him and, understandably, takes her time in getting back to the village. The kids are in class most of the time without a teacher. The 7th grade kids are forced to go to school on Saturday and Sunday, when the teachers can find time to work with them. I am going to start sitting in on some classes and might help teach science or math if I start to feel comfortable. I am also working with the priest to try and set up a library so that kids can study on their own.