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.