An Alaskan in Tanzania......................And on to Honduras

What’s to love about Honduras

2010-07-07T17:10:00.000-08:00

“Don’t disappoint Honduras!” quips Don Obidio whenever he pressures me to visit his integrated farm. As we wind our way down to his isolated farmhouse through his beans, corn, coffee, and fruit trees, he points out a flowering tree that has, he says, mysteriously fallen over several times and miraculously resurrected itself. He’s most proud of his bees, and teases me about being scared of getting stung. “Come over and we’ll get rid of your arthritis!” he chuckles, referring to the curative properties of the bee sting. He’s got 3 types of bee colonies, two of which are stingless, therefore he calls them “your friends”. The highest quality honey is a runny blond serum known for its medicinal properties, said to be good for internal bleeding and eye problems (when dropped directly into the eye). It sells for 6 times the price of regular honey. He tells us about the problem of bee diarrhea, which can shorten a bee’s brief 15-day lifespan significantly. He jokes about taking just enough honey from the bees' storehouse so they won’t get offended and move away. He wants to serve me a dish of pure honey, a delicacy for Hondurans. I just can’t do it, but the Honduran I’m with digs in. Then Don Obidio’s face lights up as he remembers that he was going to show me two certificates he has received from trainings in tourism and bee-keeping, which he has framed and hung on the wall. These dusty prizes are typically treasured here, and often a job applicant will simply take a folder-full of certificates to an interview. The latest of them was from 5 years ago, but his pride is as fresh as if it were yesterday. The light breeze, the warm summer day, and the simple, easy-going humor of this farmer and his family are exactly what I love about Honduras.

You know you’re starting to set down roots into Honduras when:

2010-07-07T17:07:00.002-08:00

1. You wouldn’t dream of writing an agenda for a meeting that didn’t start with “open the meeting”, then “pray to god,” and end with “close meeting.”

2. You feel a weird emptiness when a bus isn’t decked out with at least three of the following: silhouettes of impossibly busty women, bitchy instructions to passengers (“ask for security not speed” and “if you miss the bus it’s not the driver’s fault”), stickers of sinister-looking punk kids or Calvin peeing on something, soccer paraphernalia, the Honduran and American flags, signs deferring blame for accidents to religious figures (“This bus is protected by the blood of Jesus”), stuffed animals, or, my favorite, a sign that says “don’t vomit on the floor.”

3. To avoid getting sick you refuse to bathe after exercising or eating.

4. You chalk all illnesses up to “changes in climate.”

5. A meal without tortillas is like jam without bread.

6. Your bottom lip has taken the place of your index finger as the body part of choice for indicating location.

7. If you’re female, you decide you must look awful today if you pass more than 5 men and don’t get a single catcall.

8. You understand the dirty doble entendres in many of Honduras’s most favorite songs, such as El Gusano (The worm) and Arriba y Abajo (Above and Below).

9. Within seconds, you can identify a song as merenge, salsa, bachata, cumbia, or punta and know how to dance it.

10. You refer to a person with a bachelor’s degree as “el licenciado” (the licensed one.)

11. You carry an umbrella in every season, using it as a parasol for shade on sunny days (I’m never giving this one up!).

12. Upon meeting older women you know, you put your hand on her upper arm and kind of pat her a little.

13. When your tummy aches or you twisted your ankle, you go to someone who can “sobar” you. It’s a special type of massage for the affected area that sometimes requires the use of lard.

14.You can distinguish between the “ch!” noise used to shoo away dogs and the “ch!” noise used to get a pretty girl’s attention and make her fall in love with you.

15. You say things in English like “We realized a capacitation on Friday and it passed tranquilly.”

16. The remedy for a bad smell is to spit on the ground.

17. You have learned to do the dead fish handshake, and no longer crush unsuspecting Honduran mens’ hands when you greet them.

Fame

2010-02-05T16:50:00.003-09:00

Upon hearing my name, the new Peace Corps Volunteers gushed, “So you’re worm-girl!” They were referring to my recent worm-compost project. The nickname is unfortunate; I’m just glad I haven’t done a latrine project yet.

Our compost worms are happily procreating (assuming that’s an applicable term for hermaphrodites) in their new beds of manure and coffee pulp and tortilla crusts (you didn’t know tortillas had crusts, did you?). We are now embarking on phase 2 of the project: permaculture gardens.

The so-called Green Revolution sprouted in the US in the forties and fifties; newly-developed agrochemicals caused agricultural productivity to soar. One of the most famous of the pesticides from this era is DDT, which was used for malaria-control as well as crop pest-control. Of course, in the US, there has been a strong movement against the use of pesticides, and many of the systemic or “red-tag” pesticides have been banned (aldrin, dieldrin, endosulfan, several organochlorines). Environmentalists have raged against “persistant organic pollutants;” these are organic chemicals that persist in soils, and when ingested, in human fat tissue. The US still manufactures many of the banned pesticides, exports them to poorer countries where restrictions are fewer, and then often buys back the produce. In western highland Honduras, the vast cabbage fields are kept worm-free with frequent sprayings of Tamaron. When a field needs to be cleared in order to plant or if the schoolyard grass is getting too tall, the herbicide Gramoxone (Paraquat) is applied. In some countries, Gramoxone has been used as a chemical weapon, much like tear-gas. The WHO has recommended that Gramoxone be prohibited for its acute poisoning effects.

Now, forgive my tendency to compare everything in Honduras to Tanzania. But in Tanzania, people would boast when their cabbages were organic, and shyly tell you the only way they could get their tomatoes to grow in the wet season was by spraying, and did you still want to buy them? There was at least an awareness about the environmental and health effects of certain pesticides. And they were expensive! In Honduras, I feel that the environmental movement has been born, but is taking its sweet time with its first steps. Coffee is the only product that is widely grown organically.

It is extremely rare to see a farmer with adequate protection spraying his fields at a time when he has determined the weather and wind-direction are prime. More common is to send a teenager in a t-shirt and jeans to spray, and then hang the chemical backpack in the yard where the kids play, dump the chemical container by the river and have the boy's pregnant mother wash the contaminated clothes (soap helps many pesticides penetrate your skin). I’ve heard more than one horror-story of pesticide poisoning from drinking liquids stored in unmarked soda bottles. And who will ever know whether the seemingly high incidence of birth defects and cancer in the area or the fact that almost anyone you talk to is suffering from “bone aches” of some sort are related to long-term exposure to pesticides?

There is a cabbage field just above my town’s water-intake in the buffer zone of the Biological Reserve. I’m working with the water-board to buy land to protect the watershed, but buying up the land in question is a distant dream.

When I embarked on a permaculture garden project with the worm-composting group, I didn’t know what to expect. The group members all claim to know the benefits of an organic garden, and unanimously agreed to grow these family gardens without pesticides (we can’t say the gardens will be completely organic because it’s near impossible to find organic seeds around here). But whenever I’ve visited the plots where people hope to plant, they point out some caterpillars or ants and say, “I’m going to spray those.” Then, checking themselves, they say “Oh, but what can I use, because you said these are supposed to be organic, right?” I feel that they actually doubt it is possible to grow without chemicals, and ask them how their parents grew vegetables.

Organic vegetables aren’t sexy. They are often smaller, paler, spotted and pimply. Growing them isn’t very glamorous either; you may have to withstand more bug-bites, spend more time inspecting vegetables and making natural pesticides, and put up with small yields. Sadly, despite my best efforts to convince them, many members of the group may be growing organic just to humor me. On top of insisting on using several permaculture techniques, a leader of the group and I have lobbied to avoid using hybrid seeds. They have agreed, but grumble about the varieties of carrot, which will have a low germination rate, and won’t grow to be a pound each, like the monster carrots to which they are accustomed in this area.

I miss Tanzania, where the biggest challenge was water (scarcity in the dry season, its brute force in the wet season), men didn’t disdain my farming attempts because of my gender, and the default for growing was always organic.

Questions for 18 Rabbit

2010-02-05T16:45:00.004-09:00

If I could meet some people from the past, one would have to be 18 Rabbit (695-738 A.D.). He was a Mayan king at the height of a thriving civilization, which was destined to peter out beginning in the 800’s. When the Spanish arrived, in the sixteenth century in Copan, where ruins from the once-great society are found, the indigenous people apparently could not (would not?) tell them anything about the buildings. So, my main question for him would be whether he saw the end coming. Were there signs? Did people think technology would come along to save the day before things got desperate? Did he think his was the most powerful nation in the world? Was anybody freaking out about rising temperatures?

I also like him because, according to our guide at Copan Ruinas, 18 Rabbit broke with the long-standing tradition of tearing everything down and rebuilding every 52 years. Some little voice inside of him might have whispered, “there’s got to be a more efficient way to do this.”

It is really amazing to walk around the ruins and see sculptures of the gods, temples, and nobles’ quarters and the statues of cross-eyed kings. (The kings were depicted as cross-eyed, as this was a major mark of beauty. Our guide said they even placed pendulums so they would touch babies’ heads and cause their pupils to cross.) A successor of 18 Rabbit, Smoke Shell, built a gigantic staircase/bible, which deteriorated enough that it hasn’t been deciphered. It’s still really impressive.

Apparently the Mayans invented a sacred ball game that was the precursor to soccer, but with a couple of twists. The main one is that the MVP was sacrificed to the gods (in your face Darwin! Looks like mortality of the fittest).

So what happened to the Mayans of Honduras? They didn’t just disappear completely. Their descendents are known as the Maya Chortí. Tourists visiting the ruins of Copan may not be aware of their presence in the region, but the reality is they are in a long, intense battle for land the government promised them in the 1990’s. Chortí groups do not receive any benefits from the profits made at the ruins of their ancestors; instead these funds are destined for support of other protected areas of Honduras. From my own experience, racism against the Chortí is rampant, and their attempts at taking over the Ruins in the past to demand the land they are owed has resulted in brutal police retaliation. A major Chortí leader, Cándido Amador, was murdered in 1997, allegedly by local land-owners (*Chandler & Prado, 2006). Several government employees, in charge of working with local groups, have told me of the existence of many groups registered as Chortí who are taking advantage of the label to tap government funds. Due to stigma, many who are probably of Chortí heritage do not openly identify with the tribe. It’s a complicated problem.

One thing that needs to change is the racism. One person at a time, I’m fighting the custom to use the word “indio” as an insult, which essentially equates “indigenous” to “uneducated” or “backward”. A lot more needs to be done; maybe if enough tourists realize the injustice of the system, something can be done.

*Chandler, Gary and Lisa Prado. Honduras & the Bay Islands. Lonely Planet. 2006

August Medical Help

2009-11-21T12:00:00.007-09:00

Here is the link to NY/Help's report from their Honduras trip in August.

http://www.ny-helphonduras.org/2009-Aug-trip-rpt-1109.htm

Also see my post from August 10 - Earwax and Bear Hugs.

Ok, but what do you actually do?

2009-09-06T13:12:00.001-08:00

On Monday I had a meeting for what my host mom calls “cooking with garbage.” Technically it’s called a biodigestor, a giant bladder filled with a slurry of organic waste, from which methane is harvested for cooking. I am waiting for funding to come through for the first biodigestor in the region.

On Sunday I met with a group interested in starting forage banks and stables for their cattle; many of the hillsides in the area resemble grassy bleachers as a result of compaction from the repeated passing of skeletal livestock in search of food. If the project works out, it will be the first project I’ve committed to in which none of the beneficiaries can read or write. The project aims to help the farmers raise healthier animals with less daily work, provide more vegetative cover in this important watershed, and make it easier to collect fertilizer.
That afternoon I met with my worm-composting/organic garden group to organize the building of compost receptacles. The compost is excellent, but even more lucrative is the business of selling worms; they go for a handsome $25 per kilo.

On Saturday I coordinated a day hike with 13 high-school students to the micro-watershed that supplies them with water and to do a mini-study on the trees in the area. 15-year-old girls amaze me the same way mountain goats impress me; they are sure-footed on even the most challenging of rocky or muddy mountainous slopes, despite insisting on wearing strappy fashion sandals. Their communications also amaze me in the same way the Khoisan languages impress me; instead of a dialect riddled with clicks, it’s punctuated with goose-bump-raising shrieks.

On Friday I helped lead a group of high school students to the Biological Reserve to teach them about map-reading, acquaint them with the reserve, immerse them in mud, and orient them for the model-biological-reserve competition coordinated by a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer. The kids were happy to be tuckered out at the end of the trip, but the next day one of the teachers wrote me a message saying “Girl! Everything hurts down to my fingernails!”

On Thursday I traipsed around a part of the reserve I hadn’t yet been to with the forest rangers, exploring options on where to put a trail in the reserve’s buffer zone. We were charged by some bulls, who had been happily grazing in the part of the reserve where all agriculture is prohibited. Luckily, one of the forest rangers is somewhat of a cow-whisperer, and knew they were bluffing. We passed through fields being burned in order to plant cabbage, and entered the forest, coming upon the delicate tracks of a young white-tailed deer (which is endangered in this part of the world).

On Wednesday I worked on an environmental education grant with a local teacher and got myself involved in a baseline study for a latrine project the municipality hopes to carry out (or to put it bluntly: I have to go around and ask everyone if they have toilets or if they poop on the ground). I am bewildered by the prevalence of this problem; as far as I know in Tanzania, even the poorest households would dig a hole and raise a wall of dry grass to deal with their necessities. Here, there are entire communities where latrine culture hasn’t caught on. I made the rounds to see the results of a latrine project carried out 3 months ago, and one woman was using hers for a doghouse. She kept referring to the latrine as “este animal,” or “this animal,” and saying how she just wasn’t used to it.

On Tuesday I taught an agroforestry workshop to women from a flower-growing micro-enterprise. The group is one of two flower-growing groups I work with; attempting to help their businesses become more sustainable by incorporating trees strategically into their fields, composting, and experimenting with integrated pest management techniques.

My work isn’t always this varied and exciting; I left out some days in which I get to do the mundane stuff (scaling cliffs to rescue endangered wildlife, saving babies from burning buildings and abandoned mine-shafts, high-speed car chases to escape corrupt police, etc.).

Earwax and Bear Hugs

2009-08-10T15:36:00.002-08:00

When you’re covered in a tiny 83-year-old Honduran woman’s earwax, it can really make you think. The wax is probably older than you; the woman probably started to go deaf from the buildup before you were even born. You hope that just continuing to flush the ear with a giant syringe of warm water (which occasionally jettisons the waxy-water out onto your clothes) will excavate enough gunk to let her hear things that aren’t shouted in her face. And you marvel at how you ended up in such a random situation.

Medical brigades encompass all types of short-term medical relief, from high-tech lab-equipped groups of 10 or more doctors who rush through patients at high-speed, to simple primary care brigades of 1 or 2 doctors who take their time with each patient. I just returned from a week of translating for the latter type of brigade, which is how I met said sweet, deaf, 80-pound great-grandma. The doctor snapped a picture of us, and the woman may have been partially blind as well, as she asked which one of us was which.

The brigade was up in the pine-forested mountains where people make their livings from corn and bean-farming, lack electricity, cook on open fires in their mud-walled houses, and often haul their own water and lack latrines. The majority of older patients seen were illiterate, and some didn’t know how old they were. Many people walked for 3 or 4 hours to get to the brigade, in order to tell us that walking makes them feel weak and achy. It’s much closer to the way of life in my village in Tanzania than to what I’ve seen so far in Honduras.

The majority of patients complain of chronic headaches, backaches, and weakness, while making swirling gestures around their bodies. It is rarely simple to root out the problem, except when the answer to the question of how many cups of coffee one drinks per day is “about ten.” I also got to see a quick-fix of back problems from a misaligned spine; solved in 3 seconds by the doctor with a bear-hug. Other common diagnoses were urinary infections, high blood pressure, and arthritis.

The brigade I went to is run by an organization called New York Help, which comes down twice a year. Information on how to be a volunteer can be found at http://www.ny-helphonduras.org/, and a report of this brigade will soon be posted there with pictures.

I’ve never officially done any translating before, and I was afraid it would be difficult. It turns out that it comes pretty naturally, the only problem being that at the end of the work day I have a hard time snapping out of it; when playing cards or chatting I still absent-mindedly parrot everyone in another language.

Current Events

2009-06-30T15:32:00.001-08:00

I got back from a morning run to find my host family wide-eyed and listening to the car radio at full blast. The occasion? The power was out and the president had been whisked away from his mansion in his pajamas by the army. “There has been a coup,” my host mom said, smiling as she does whenever she delivers news, good or terrible.

Like many of you, I have never been in a small isolated community in a developing country when a military coup is taking place. There is a cloud of confusion, and an ever-increasing tangle of rumors.

Ever since the now-exiled president announced his plans for the “cuarta urna,” this confusion has predominated. The streets were abuzz with opinions, but few people here could actually explain what a “cuarta urna” was. Many thought it literally meant the extension of presidential term-limits, when in reality it referred to a proposed formation of a general assembly which would have the power to change the constitution and possibly increase presidential term-limits. It was the president's unpopular push for the "cuarta urna" that eventually led to his removal from the country. BBC news has a good explanation of these events if you're really interested.

Other than a lot of interesting conversation (among the supporters of the different sides) and a slight feel of anxiety, my little community remains unaffected by the current political situation. We are all simply hoping that in the coming days events occur peacefully.

Peace Corps and Glimpse Announce Winners of Global Food Crisis Story and Photo Contest

2009-05-28T16:07:00.010-08:00

Click on the title above for a link to information on the contest.

I was one of the finalists in this story contest. Click here for my submission.

The Road Less Traveled

2009-03-09T16:05:00.002-08:00

Giant oaks all dressed up in red and green epiphytes hover over a graveyard of their ancestors in various stages of decay. Everything in the cloud forest is green and slippery with different species of moss. Young vines stretch up out of the ground, seeking a host. Mushrooms poke their vulnerable heads out of a blanket of damp leaves. This is a comfortable forest; you could bed down on some sphagnum moss for a nap.

Never before have my arms ached after a hike. That’s what happens when you set off up a steep trail-less mountain led by a former soldier, and a handful of fit farmers and park rangers. We ventured into the Erapuca Wildlife Refuge, first winding through pastureland, then young regenerating forest, and dodging hidden holes and scaling steep mucky slopes in the older cloud forest. We wound through the “midget forest” where you have to crouch to get through the maze of lichen-draped trees, stopping a few times to motivate those in our party who didn’t want to go on. We finally emerged above the clouds to a view of the whole valley and a lunch of veggies and pasta that tasted like pure bliss in Tupperware. Then we monkeyed our way down, swinging on the reliable trunks and slipping on the misleading terrain back to the truck. I’m left with good memories, complaining muscles, a pound of forest mud in my clothes, a bottle-full of mountain spring water, an urge to sleep for three days, and a bottomless hunger. This is my first trip to this wildlife refuge, and many who are working to manage it have never entered. It is nice to know what we’re trying to protect.

Ranchera Mornings

2009-03-05T15:22:00.003-09:00

It’s another bouncing ranchera music morning in my kitchen, complete with sugary coffee and pale tortillas streaked with black patterns from being warmed on the crackling fire. It’s another morning of gathering the machetes, the donkey and the hoes to be taken out to the farm. It’s my host mother sternly, lovingly calling people in from morning chores to take their turns fueling up for the day’s work.

It’s her low “let’s just keep this between you and me” voice, confiding in me about worries with her family, health troubles, the latest news on the disappearance of the town’s token insane woman.

It’s my gentle old host father and his brother unraveling the secrets of the coffee farms and Honduran politics for me, celebrating the outcome of yesterday’s soccer game, reminding me proudly that Spanish has at least three different words for every object. It’s my host brother and his son hauling in red buckets of milk to be turned into four different types of cream and cheese. It’s the 2-year-old, seeing me with my backpack, asking me if I’m going off to kindergarten.

Through it all it’s the classic old-timey Mexican ranchera soundtrack on the radio which seems to have been written to accompany just this type of morning.

The World Needs More Weird People

Let’s take a putrid-smelling liquid from cow intestines and mix it into some perfectly good milk. Let’s take some ripe-looking berries, remove the fruit from the seed, dry them, pound them to remove the remaining skin, roast them, grind them up, boil them in water, and, after all that, throw them away. Let’s take some sedimentary rocks and chuck them in the pot with the dry corn to boil. Thanks to some weirdos a long time ago, we now have cheese, coffee, and tortilla flour. So if you get the urge to stir hair clippings into your oatmeal, or fry up your toothpaste with seeds of baby African-Violets, I say go for it! I’m sure when someone suggested grinding up horse bones and adding sugar, the last thing his friends were expecting was to be served Jell-o. We need to encourage creativity. Creativity, and the acquisition of very gullible sidekicks who will ingest or slather on your products.

If your invention doesn’t end up being appealing enough to make it in mainstream Western society, there’s always a market for witch-doctor potions, as long as they are backed up with a couple of convincing anecdotes. “That woman you saw walk out was here just last week with a similar rash, but after 12 bowls of this oatmeal (only $13.95 each) they disappeared in a flash! Of course she had to come back for a special follow-up hairball treatment, but doesn’t her skin just shine?” You can also demand livestock for payment if you like—you will seem more authentic. And if your cures don’t work, of course you can just shake your head and say you’re onto the person, and he’d best leave and never come back or you’ll tell his neighbors the truth about him (he’s a witch).

That was just a little bit of advice inspired by being involved in the bizarre processes that produce my food in Honduras, and witch-doctor mentality I encountered in Tanzania.

Honduran History: The Untold Story

2009-03-02T16:51:00.002-09:00

Honduras is the little rumpled-underwear-shaped country in Central America with El Salvador and Guatemala sticking out the western leg-hole, and the fat thigh of Nicaragua stuffed in the other.

The piece of land that is Honduras and Nicaragua didn’t finish swinging into its current place until 22 million years ago—pretty recently. While the continents were bumping around the globe, getting acquainted at the geological party known as Pangea, Honduras wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. While the dinosaurs were roaming around, the pre-Honduras chunk of land was hanging out in southern Mexico (can you blame it?), and slowly broke away and rotated into place, all the while acquiring some sedimentary deposits that would come in very handy later on. It’s these deposits that make Honduras the proud owner of cement, ice cream, sheet rock, tortillas, pesticides and caves. Let me explain.

Shallow seas covered the pre-Honduras piece of land during the Cretaceous up until about 90 million years ago, very conveniently depositing evaporites like gypsum and limestone. Gypsum is added to ice cream for texture or something like that, and is the main ingredient in everyone’s favorite building material, gypsum board.
Lime is used for everything here: throw it in with corn and it dissolves the outer bran (so it can be used for tortillas), it’s painted on the bases of trees to prevent certain pests, and sprinkled on your farm it raises the pH of your soil. Limestone also dissolves readily in water which results in some awesome caves.

Throughout history, there has been a lot of pushing and shoving of different plates in Central America, which continues today. And this type of tension tends to produce faults and volcanoes. Honduras doesn’t currently have any active volcanoes, but it’s not jealous of its neighbors and their smoking mountain-tops because it has a bunch of mountains, a lake and some hot springs. But holy cow, 19 million years ago there was all kinds of volcanic action in Honduras which covered the eastern part with ash. This is responsible for the abundance of exfoliation-stones that make this great country what it is today. The most dramatic part of the national anthem brags about a volcano, but I think it just fits in the song better than the word lake.

Stay tuned for more exciting installments of Honduran history, the untold story…

If You've Never Lived ina Hot, Humid Climate . . .

2009-02-25T20:35:00.005-09:00

There are a few things you should know.

1. You may think you are eating alone, but really, hoards of ants are watching every bite you take. If you leave so much as a morsel of food or a molecule of sugar lying around, they and all their buddies will arrive on scene immediately, having activated the same mysterious system that makes sure your entire college campus knows the instant someone even thinks about throwing a kegger. I guess the Alaskan insects are uncoordinated and stingy by comparison… I grew up leaving cereal and cracker boxes open; if an ant ever did find them, he’d probably feel like he’d won the lottery. But he wouldn’t share, and he’d probably eat just enough to get a tummy-ache.

2. Your clothes and shoes are harboring a tiny odor-causing ecosystem, ready to wreak havoc on your nostrils when the temperature rises. A pair of shoes that you wore running only at -40 degrees, fooling you into thinking it was harmless, suddenly blossoms into a stunner of a stink-bomb with the 120F degree difference.

3. The people who live in these humid climates have magical sweat glands that they can close, much like their eyelids, on special occasions for which one is not supposed to sweat (conferences, festivals, TV appearances and dances). If you have not grown up here, chances are you haven’t mastered sweat-gland-control techniques. This could earn you some unpleasant nicknames.

4. If you have never lived in such a climate, you may reach a temperature in which you are no longer able to function coherently. You may become disgusted by the thought of interacting with people, even really attractive ones. People won’t take pity on you, or even understand you when you tell them that you’ve been denatured. They will look at your sweaty hair in disgust and tell you to get back to work. Worst of all they will remember everything you say as if it were said by a sane, sober person. Best to hide in your house until night-time.

5. People will tell you that you shouldn’t do certain temperature-related things, like get caught in the rain, drink cold things in the morning, or take a shower after exercising. You will scoff at them, and then promptly come down with whatever disease they said you would get. It may be karma, or it may be science.

6. Alaska has no snakes, but hot places generally do. And because indoor and outdoor temperature is the same, wildlife likes to waltz in like it owns the place. This is fine when it’s something cute and cuddly, or inherently cool, like a frog, but when a snake is doing the waltzing it’s not so great. People are supposed to have an innate fear of snakes, which makes them react even to something long and coiled that only remotely resembles the shape of a snake. You may have lost some of this reaction due to lack of use, which could be dangerous. Try having a friend place some shoelaces or hoses in different places around your house and practice shrieking with fright every time you see them.

In summary, in order to fit in when you find yourselves in steamy weather, you should probably practice obsessive cleaning, refrain from showering after exercising, keep your shoes in the freezer, and hide in your house while learning to blink your sweat-glands and screaming at your shoelaces. Otherwise people will think you are a freak.

Dear Every Sixth Man on the Street,

I know I’ve been playing hard to get, but I finally want to tell you how it touches me every time you shout sweet nothings at me as I walk by. It must have been love at first sight. How do I know? Well, it could have been the way our eyes met. Or it could have been the way you called out “I love you, little gringa” from 50 meters away from the back of a pickup that was pulling away on that first encounter. I wasn’t totally convinced, until, after calling my attention with a sound that doubles as a dog-shooing command, you said “what a beautiful little thing you are.” The originality of it just gets me you know? Every time. I know that every time you toss a “Beautiful little doll!” my direction, what you’re really saying is “I respect you for your mind.” And when you told me I looked pretty, well, that’s probably the moment I began to suspect we were meant for each other. I’ve got to say I was a bit confused at first as to who you were in love with, because you said “Hello babies” and “My loves” a few times when I was walking with my friends, but I knew you really just meant me. And of course I was SO impressed that you said it in English… I never imagined you knew English! By the way I’m sure your wife really doesn’t suspect anything when you make those kissing noises and call “Come here, my precious!” at me from your doorway while she’s washing your clothes. I have to say it wasn’t until the day you pulled up your shirt and inserted your ring-finger right into your belly-button that I knew I was smitten. And that thing with the eyebrows? Others might call it creepy, but I think it’s really one of your best attributes.

I know others probably don’t understand the depth of our complicated relationship, or might argue that you’re old enough to be my grandfather/use 2 pounds too much hair grease/view me as an object, but please just let me know how we can take it to the next level.

Love always,

Gringita preciosa

*Note: The majority of Honduran men I actually know are wonderful, bright, respectful people who are disgusted or at least amused by the actions of their peers.

Lessons I Missed

2009-02-21T10:06:00.002-09:00

I kind of skipped kindergarten. But from what I'm told, they teach you that "sharing is caring". Hondurans are catching me up with what I missed.

Almost every day, a kid will come up to me and hand me a piece of candy, or an old man waiting for the bus will give me some bubble-gum. A neighbor will come over to give me some cucumbers or tomatoes, or a stranger will offer to pay for my internet time.

It's nice. I'm getting into the habit. But don't expect me to keep it up once I'm back in the States.

Cage of Gold

2009-02-16T09:06:00.003-09:00

The itch must be terrible. Every day Central Americans are bombarded with the same message from the media and their peers, "The US is a paradise. Money flutters around; if you can just get there, it will fall into your hands." I imagine the idea seeps into their subconscious. It's tough to think of anything but the United Moneybags of America. Central America starts to look like some form of hell compared to the shiny pictures in their heads.

A shaggy man in a cube-truck gives me a ride and explains his plans to go to America. This job pays the bills, but to him it's not enough. He's going as a mojado, he says, using a term for illegal immigrants referring to being wet from crossing the Rio Grande. He knows the dangers; he's been to the states before. He has relatives there who are earning far more than they could in Honduras. I ask: will he go with a coyote? These are the people who will take a large chunk of your savings in exchange for smuggling you all or part of the way north. He crinkles his nose and shakes his head; he's just going to ride trains. I swallow.

He knows the danger. Train-top riders risk amputation from falls, discovery by officials who take all they have and/or send them home, violent gang-members who beat them and take their belongings and leave them to die, starvation and dehydration. The journey can take months, and require you to stop and earn money for survival. Just riding the trains is treacherous, clinging to the tops of the trains despite exhaustion, anticipating branches and thugs and la migra, migration police. Many are jailed in Mexico until their families can raise the money to get them out.

In training I helped some workers on a farm stringing up tomatoes. Soon after, they decided to try and make it to the states, but called from a Mexican jail.

I've heard so many stories of people whose family members are in the States. A few are building the lives they dreamed of, but many who made it are still struggling in a strange place. So many promise their wives or kids they will be back in a year or two, once they've made enough money, but end up stuck in a cycle of earning and spending that never lets them get ahead. Julieta Venegas has a catchy song about a family of illegal Mexican immigrants in the US in which she declares that golden bars don't mean it's not a prison.

The stories that stick in my mind are of those who failed. The truck-driver remembers the stories of glory and riches. It rings of the prospectors in my hometown, Fairbanks Alaska, during the gold rush. Just a few success stories are enough to keep the people flowing.

I can understand poor urban-dwellers who own no land and see no hope of getting a good job when they are allured by the promise of the US. But the driver of the cube truck is doing well for himself; he has a lot to lose. I ask if he has any kids. A boy, he says. I try to convince him that being there for his kid is much more important now than sending him money.

I feel the familiar ache of guilt, simply for being from circumstances most of the rest of the world envies. The ride ends and I wave 20 lempiras his way, about $1, but he won't accept it. I thank him, wish him good luck, and swing down out of his rig. I just hope on his trip people will be this generous to him.

Another man who pulls his tired trap to the side of the road to offer me a ride turns out to be a (self-proclaimed) legend. He is a coyote. According to him, he is a hero in his community for the money he has donated, all of which he has made from this lucrative secretive business. He's enigmatic; he seems almost benevolent but not quite, almost slimy but not quite. I restrain myself to keep from asking the hundred questions swirling through my mind. I want to know how he smuggles people, how much it costs, how many people he takes each year, how did he get into the business, just how dark is this business, what's his success rate, etc. Instead I nervously answer questions about the fiancé I have just invented. As I clamber out of the beater, I thank him and hope out loud we shall meet again, and hope inwardly I'll get to grill him with all my questions next time.

Creepy, Sketchy, Slimy, Cute: Thoughts on a Visit to America

2009-01-10T17:30:00.005-09:00

Would you spend money on nothing? It is normal in America for people to spend money onnothing, or less than nothing. I think most of the world’s other 6.7 billion inhabitants would think it’s crazy to pay someone to help them lose something. But we spend money on diets, personal trainers, diet pills, liposuction and magic foods that trick your body into thinking its ingesting more than it actually is. My friends in Tanzania would beg me to tell them how they could get fat. They don’t see any point in expending energy on something that’s not purely entertaining or doesn’t benefit their survival. Forcing yourself to do an activity that will land you in the same place you started without having acquired something seems an act of insanity. On my daily runs, people would ask me “what are you running from?” I might point to some cows or goats in the distance, and they’d laugh, still confused. Maybe, in order to fit in with the rest of the world, we’d be better off paying someone to convince us that it’s okay not to be skinny.
Creepy, sketchy, slimy, menace, hilarious, holy cow, freak and cute are wonderful words in English that just don’t quite translate into Swahili or Spanish. I’m really enjoying using them.
Americans tend to think they should be able to eat whatever they want whenever they want (but I think this is changing), and it should be seedless and boneless. There’s not much thought put into what is in season (at least in Alaska, but right now in Alaska it’s snow season, so maybe we’re excused). If a recipe calls for leeks, we don’t try and figure out if it’s leek season (in fact, we don’t even really need to know what a leek is), we just go to the store. Expiration dates seem like distant threats due to refrigeration. Grapes naturally have seeds, chickens have bones, but we don’t have time to pick those things out, so we buy previously de-boned poultry and fruits bred not to produce seeds. We don’t expect that there are plants that naturally produce non-fertile ovaries or boneless chickens flopping around somewhere, but we don’t associate our food much with the real world. In contrast, most people of developing countries eat fresh corn when it’s ready or avocados when they’re in season, and they acquire it in small amounts or preserve it so that refrigeration is unnecessary. They’d look skeptically at any food that was too blue or too perfectly round, wondering how it was made and if it was truly edible.
Hot showers are pure rapture. In both Tanzania and Honduras, only senior citizens indulge in hot water, and youth are expected to chatter through freezing baths.
Some Americans do Tai Chi, some play the jaw harp, some practice Voodoo, some collect antique spittoons, some run ultra-marathons, some hate road salt, some knit, some read Kafka, some break-dance… in short there is so much diversity of tastes, and it seems most Americans are relatively open to new experiences. My family here loves ugali from Tanzania, Honduras-style tortillas, and Canadian music (I’m still working on broadening their musical tastes).
Americans tend to rely on a cocoon of complicated things they have no hope of understanding or controlling. In Tanzania there wasn’t a thing in my house that I didn’t understand, and most things could be fixed with some cement or bricks. Village households are their own simple self-sufficient entities, built from the ground up by their owners. In my parents’ house in Alaska, the number of objects I couldn’t fix if they broke is probably a 3 digit number. In the winter in Alaska, power-outages are a matter of survival for many people. People don’t understand their plumbing, televisions, electrical wiring, cars and sewage tanks and must freak out when they break. If the experts or companies in these areas all disappeared or decided they hated you, you would be in deep yoghurt (as my Dad would say). If I am ever one of the few survivors from a monster-virus that wipes out 90% of the world, I’m headed to rural Tanzania, where life won’t be that different.
Freedom of the press is a wonderful thing. I’ve been enjoying SNL and Capitol Steps skits which shamelessly mock even our most mavericky political leaders. Sure this freedom is relative, but comedians in other countries must sit on their hands even when someone with the misunderestimated speech-making skills of G W Bush rises to power. Imagine that.

You Might be Drinking Coffee I Picked

2008-12-15T17:19:00.004-09:00

If, for some reason, you are ever forced to choose to do some sort of manual farm labor, I highly recommend coffee-picking. The fact that coffee farms (well, the good ones) are tucked under a mix of timber and fruit trees makes them pleasant to work on, especially for the wildlife that you won’t find in the typical farm field. Iridescent blue, orange, lime-green and yellow birds, whose names I only know in colloquial Spanish, flit overhead. The coffee itself is beautiful: bright yellow or crimson with dark green leaves. Typically in this season families go out to the farm together and pick the day away, building a fire at midday to heat their tortillas.

I was lucky enough to engage in very fulfilling intellectual conversations with my good 8 and 10-year-old-friends… “I say Gail in jail!”, “I say Nicolle in jail!”, “I say Veronica in jail, singing and dancing!” “I say Nicolle in jail, telling a joke!” and so on.

Most adults picked 3 or 3.5 buckets full of coffee. The kids picked a half or one bucket-full. I was a happy medium with 2 buckets-full. Each bucket picked will earn you $1. It’s not a great way to make a living (although I’ve heard of people who have been able to pick 20 buckets worth in a day), but it’s a nice way to pass the day if you have good company.

For me, it’s interesting to wonder who’ll end up drinking this coffee that I picked. Could he identify a coffee shrub in a line-up? Does he know where Honduras is?

The dreaded grocery-store synopsis
I’m finally going home for a visit, after 2 ½ years of Peace Corpsing. I am so excited I can’t sleep through the night. I think of all the friends and family I haven’t seen, and how incredible it will be to reconnect with them. Of course thoughts of eating bagels with salmon and going skiing bring a smile to my face as well. But I’m also filled with a dull sense of dread.

What I’m scared of isn’t the commercialism or the advances in technology or the development in my home town or my long-time friends who have joined cults or dinner clubs or become nudists or Republicans, although these things make me uneasy. I’m scared of the grocery-store.

I’m worried about all those people I’m going to run into in Fred Meyer who will ask me how “Africa” or “Tanzania” or “the Peace Corps” was. These people are asking the only appropriate thing there is to ask, fulfilling their curiosity and their duty to ask. But I’m sure they won’t realize that it would be easier for me to give a synopsis of War and Peace in 2 minutes (although I haven’t read it) than try to give a meaningful statement about my Peace Corps experience in the unspoken time limit. I’m scared of leaving these people with a generic or inarticulate or gushingly-positive or unnecessarily negative report. I think the only true thing I can say about it so far is that it has been incredibly . . . . . I’m sorry, just one sec, I should really get this. Hello? Right, just a minute. . . . I’m really sorry, that was my Mom, and she really needs me to go, we’ll catch up some other time, ok?

Party in the Dark

2008-12-06T11:21:00.002-09:00

When you feel like the world is plagued with hypocrisy, greed, and evil, sometimes the only medicine is a little girl bringing you flowers. The community I live in boasts a high proportion of kids who are sweet to the bone.

The other night I was about to head off to teach English when the power flickered off. Thinking of how hard it would be to teach by candle-light (and admittedly how delicious it would be to stay in and read by candle-light), I headed to the school to cancel the class. I thought I was going insane when I heard voices coming from inside the classroom, which was locked from the outside.

The kids had spent all afternoon decorating the classroom, arranging refreshments, and locking themselves inside in order to orchestrate a surprise birthday party for me. The lights went out just after they were locked in. The little ones cried, but soon were mollified. I was rushed in to have a confetti-filled balloon popped over my head while they sang (in perfect English, yay!) Happy Birthday. We ate chips, drank Pepsi and played musical chairs, telephone and tug-of-war by candle-light. There hasn´t been that much shouting, laughing, screaming and even crying (inevitable when little kids play games) at my birthday party for at least a year... maybe 15.

These kids know just the remedy for feeling like you’re getting old.

Who Wants Pudding?

2008-11-28T12:56:00.004-09:00

You would think these kids were lining up for free chocolate pudding, the way they get to class before me and push as I unlock the gate. It seems unnatural for children to be so excited about an evening English class. Then it’s such a mad rush for seats in the cotton-candy pink classroom that I’m scared someone will hurt himself in the chaos. These kids are, in some ways, opposite of my Tanzanian students. They are loud and bossy and outspoken and curious and they have no fear. I, on the other hand, am terrified.

I saw from the very first class how much energy they had, and I wanted to go home and crawl under the bed. I somehow got a harness on the class. Not only are they rowdy and hyper, but they can be respectful, polite, and focused.

After about a month they have learned their numbers, simple greetings, personal pronouns, days of the week, months, foods, and a handful of verbs. But they have learned also that whoever invented English was trying to play an evil trick on the world: you have to learn 2 languages in 1. You have to know that to write what sounds like “naym” you must write “name”. They learned this disappointment early on, and are coming to grips with it.

Kids know that teachers don’t like games. A teacher LOVES to give boring homework, make you repeat things a thousand times, and write, write, write. You must pry the games out of a teacher, usually by begging, whining, or making really cute pouty puppy-dog faces. As a last resort, you have to behave really, really well. My kids have tried all this, and assume it is by some amazing coercive powers on their part that we end up playing a game or two every day. My secret is that I actually enjoy having them play games, but I can’t admit it! If they find out, I’m done for.

But these kids are thirsty for education. Their teachers spend most of the time either on strike or in workshops so that they’ll be better teachers. Meaning that Honduras may have some super-trained teachers, but the kids never SEE them. Strange strategy. Last year, I’m told Honduran school kids missed 100 days of school, and that’s not including when their teachers just didn’t show up for personal reasons.

BYOB
If you walked into the room, you’d think that you were at a cocktail party (well, one in which the alcohol hasn’t arrived yet). People are milling around, talking on cell phones, munching on snacks and hitting on each other. But no, this is a typical official meeting here. It started an hour late, most everyone listened to the first bit, but then a snack arrived, and it was as if someone held up a crystal, scattering peoples’ focus points in a million different directions. People wander in and out, talk over one another, and wonder if we’re getting free lunch.

I’m not exaggerating. A man raised his hand after coming in late to the meeting, and apparently desperately needed to hear the sound of his own voice. This agitated another man who was also, apparently on the verge of cardiac arrest if he didn’t hear the sound of his own voice. Man #1 began to speak of his background on environmental issues, very, very passionately. But his phone rang. He answered warmly, then asked who was calling him. Meanwhile the other man had grasped some tiny controversial thread of the first man’s rant, and was running with it, triumphant to have the podium. Man #1 continued talking on his phone, but kept nodding and smiling at Man #2 as if he could actually possibly be listening to him at the same time. While Man #2 seemed as if he might be reaching what could possibly resemble a point, a secretary came in to deliver him a cinnamon roll. This caused him to forget that he was in the middle of a very important point, and thrust the roll in my face because he had gotten it especially for me because I was, apparently, very beautiful. I tried to decline, but he was getting louder and pushier, and I had no choice. Then, as he tried to glean my political stance on Obama vs. McCain, I luckily had my mouth full and was unable to reply, so he struck up the conversation with someone else. Soon, everyone besides the presentation-giver had had enough, and were apparently all out of passionate rants that had nothing to do with the topic. The meeting, as usual, disintegrated bit by bit, like a napkin in a bucket of water.

That was a slightly extreme case. But I have never been in a meeting with more than 1 other person here that doesn’t have the same feel to it. I need to get used to it, or it will drive me batty. I think Americans spend too much time glued to their seats come hell or cinnamon rolls during boring meetings. Looking on the bright side, at least here it’s ok to mix it up with a little refreshment, a little political chit-chat, and a little inappropriate flirtation.

Mine

2008-11-18T09:05:00.003-09:00

This weekend I hiked to the largest waterfall I’ve seen in my life. It is in the reserve, and the hike there requires passing coffee farms, abandoned gypsum and gold mines, and splashing from one side of the river to the other more times than I could count. It was a beautiful hike, and amazing to see the mining tunnels built over 70 years ago.

A few years ago residents of this area organized a protest that stopped international traffic on the highway. It was to prohibit a Canadian silver-mining company from entering the reserve, while the president of Honduras had given the go ahead. This is pretty amazing, and shows the power and the will of the people in this zone.

2008-11-03T16:01:00.005-09:00

A Little Bit of Ugly
The man was well-dressed and attractive. After first handing out carsick bags to the rows of passengers on the bus and quoting raucously from several parts of the bible, he unbuttoned his shirt, causing his audience to draw a collective gasp. We were given a glimpse of his well-toned abs, with a gruesome picture that barely registered in my mind due to the chilling words “Mara Salvatrucha” inked across them in rolling blue script. Mara Salvatrucha is one of the biggest and most ruthless gangs in Central America; supposedly the only way to leave it is to switch gangs or to die. The gang originated in Los Angeles with Salvadoran immigrants in the 80’s. As they were deported, the gangs took root in Central American countries, becoming highly involved in drugs and armed theft. One of Honduras’s heavy-handed former presidents took a stab at crime; among other things making it illegal to have any sort of tattoos and over-stuffing the jails with anyone remotely associated with the gang activity. These days the gangs are still thriving. I prepared to have to give up all of my belongings to this gang member.

But this man said he had found God and renounced his former lifestyle, and was asking our help with building a rehabilitation center for former gang-members. Many of those on the bus were touched enough to hand him a few bills.

This is the second testimonial I’ve witnessed in Honduras by a former gang member. The other was a friend of a friend, who grew up neglected in a poor neighborhood, where drugs were hawked like candy on the playground. Soon his only friend was crack, his allies solely pawns in acquiring more of it. Unspeakable crimes were the only way to feed the addiction. As he was on the brink of death, a mere skeleton sleeping in the streets, using all his stolen money on drugs, passing in and out of consciousness, his mother returned from the US and forced him into an intensive rehabilitation program. We saw him a year after “graduating,” clean and healthy-looking, praising God for saving him. I just hope it sticks.

2008-10-27T18:03:00.003-08:00

Can Someone Just Fill Me in Please?
After a month at my site, I'm slowly getting some idea of what I dove into, what my role here is. I've come into the middle of the movie. I have to keep asking people what’s happened, and they just kind of want me to hush so they can focus on what's going on. I get filled in on bits and pieces, but the story gets jumbled, and I generally feel like I'm just pestering them.

This is what I've figured out: I'm in charge of a small but jolly crew of park rangers, I’m supposed to support a group of women flower-growers, collaborate on a project with honey-water-disposal (nothing to do with honey, it’s coffee waste) in the buffer zone, and try and bring an organic compost project back from the dead, among other things. It's not horribly glamorous, but it's busy and interesting.

Maize Again?
I was lucky enough to be able to participate in the event of the year in my municipality: the annual Festival del Maiz. It could have been a parade in any small town in the US. There were marching bands complete with tasseled caps and baton-twirlers, dancing horses and imitation N'Sync backup dancers. The floats were adorned with maize products and frowning girls perched atop wearing costumes their mothers spent half the year stitching, and towers of cotton candy. I wrestled with people for a good view, stuffed myself full of corn-based treats, and complained about the heat, just like a good spectator.

The nighttime entertainment was a well-known Punta band. If you haven't seen Punta, it's a sexy dance that was designed to make norteamericanos look ridiculous. It involves shaking your hips faster than humanly possible, balancing on your heels and then doing aerobic moves. I made the mistake of going to the event with two married couples, who left me to watch the dancers bounce around the stage like Gumbys on steroids while the town drunks used their never-failing radars to hunt me down and ask me to dance. Which I did. They would say things like "Isn’t it too bad that Punta is illegal in the US?" and then pull their shirts up to their chests and stick their fingers in their belly-buttons. I escaped and found one of my host brothers and his wife outside (he'd just spent an hour explaining to me how he wasn't going to the dance so as to avoid his friend, the mayor, who always pressures him to drink) having a beer with the mayor. All in all it was a fun night, and I learned a lot.

Storm
In a nearby town, an entire neighborhood and all their farms oozed down the mountainside and dammed up the river. There are at least 400 people left homeless. Honduras is in the tail end of a tropical storm, which, according to the locals here, has caused more damage than Hurricane Mitch, which devastated Honduras 10 years ago. Luckily people in the region are being very supportive. In my municipality there was little damage, but a lot of complaining about the rain!

2008-10-04T19:49:00.004-08:00

Still not in Kansas
As I grabbed for a grapefruit that zinged through the air over my head in the Ambassador’s private pool in Honduras, I realized once again with a certain twist of my stomach that my life was not going to be normal again for another two years. The ambassador lends his mansion every year so that the newly sworn-in Peace Corps Volunteers may run amok (including playing monkey-in-the-middle with fruit in his pool) together for the last time before they are scattered about the country. One of the volunteers broke his nose playing volleyball in the ambassador’s beach volleyball court, but at least he’ll have a good story to tell about it.

My site is a cute little pueblo in the mountains near a beautiful cloud-forest covered national reserve. The community turns out to be far, far flung from the pictures I had in my head of grandmothers in hand-woven shawls slapping out tortillas by candlelight, wizened farmers, tired but content with their life’s work, keeping their families just afloat over the threat of hunger. Nada que ver- nothing to do with it. Rather the little town has electricity, running water, abundant cars and trucks, a handful of university degrees, a wealth of knowledge on large-scale farming, people who eat cornflakes for breakfast, and a pool. Yes, a pool. They fill its hospital-blue cement basin with water from the river on Easter and charge tourists to use it. My host brothers can talk over my head about cooperative administration and accounting. It’s an intimidating change from my village in Tanzania where having graduated high school set you apart from the rest of the world. Yesterday I helped a women’s cooperative plant lettuce and cauliflower in soil imported from Canada. The finished products will end up in El Salvador and Nicaragua in none other than that gaudy pillar of western commercialism: Burger King.

What am I going to be doing here? I’m working with an NGO that co-manages the reserve to better the farming practices in and around the park. But in short, so far I have absolutely no idea of what I will actually be doing. I’ll keep you posted.

2008-09-19T09:43:00.001-08:00

Quiz: Know Honduras

1. Everything in Honduras—cream, soda, water, milk, popsicles—is sold in:
a. aluminum cans
b. glass bottles
c. Tupperware
d. Plastic bags
e. Styrofoam cups
f. Clay pots

2. The most normal means of transportation among large cities is:
a. VW bugs with the tops cut off so they can fit up to 8 people
b. Old school-buses from the US that didn’t pass inspection
c. Slick Greyhound-type buses
d. Over-crowded mini-buses

Answer to #1: plastic bags. One of my favorite memories is of an ice-cold Pepsi in a plastic bag served to me after I volunteered to help my neighbors raise tomato-beds all morning. This practice would never go over well in Tanzania, where strangely enough it is illegal to give away plastic bags at the store due to the environmental implications.

Answer to #2: Old school buses. It was odd for me at first to see a line of school buses on a Saturday morning on a busy road. When I got closer and saw the majority of the passengers were bearded, grey-haired or carrying babies, I got even more curious. Before long I had become one of these regular passengers, holding in the urge to start up a camp song or look over my shoulder for bullies.

2008-09-17T08:52:00.002-08:00

Pueblo
My host mom just laughed as a stream of milk cascaded down her arm where she squatted below the cow. My first few attempts at milking gave only a few measly drops, and finally, a small squirt came forth, but unfortunately was aimed at my host mom rather than the pitcher. I stood back to let her empty the udder, bringing forth a high-speed dollop of milk at every tug- reminding me of a soda fountain at a fast-food restaurant.

I’ve never met people with such a blend of mischievous sarcasm, curiosity and unfaltering, deep-down goodness, as in my field-based training site. I lived with a middle-aged, childless couple who had converted their living room into a bedroom for me, while they slept in a tiny windowless room. Hearing the fizzle of a match in their room at midday sent pangs of guilt through me. I often robbed my host mom of a few precious hours of sleep by dragging her to the neighbors’ houses for guitar sessions or chatting with her by candlelight until her eyelids drooped.

My host dad kept busy on his cucumber and corn farms, making people chuckle, and playing soccer in the evenings. For my host mom, the world revolved around keeping the house clean, keeping bellies full and people smiling, and being up on all the latest happenings in the town, and at this I have never met someone more capable.

Before I knew it I had fallen in love with the pueblo. It’s a place where the sweat of the morning’s farm-work is forgotten with a cool drink of fresh-squeezed mandarin juice. The evening entertainment is soccer and visiting, and nobody’s too cool to visit his aunt or grandma for a kiss and a coffee. They’ve got their own charming style—every man I asked claimed to have invented the fashion of wearing a radio on a string around his neck that has been adopted by all the young men in town. The farm-work is not seen as drudgery—teams of men work together and crack jokes and whistle in their secret whistle-language to those working on neighboring farms. At our goodbye party, the men of the village (ages 13-60) kept us always on our feet as they danced us around the school lawn.

I’m gonna miss that place. I’ve never gotten so attached to a town in such a short time. I will keep many of my host mom’s lessons on hand—not hanging your underwear outside because someone might steal it, and not bathing just after eating or working hard. I’ll remember the handy lesson from my host father on how to trash-talk on the soccer field. I just hope I will feel this comfortable in my new home, way out in the West.

2008-08-16T10:53:00.005-08:00

Americans Walk Fast (and do other ridiculous things)

I’ve been hanging out with a bunch of Americans, and I miss Tanzania. The only times you would hear "God Bless you" so many times in a day from Americans is if you were having a sneezing fit. I miss the interesting habits like keeping guinea pigs as garbage disposals and pigeons as decorations for the house. And the way everyone holds up their fingers and says “this many” instead of voicing the number of eggs he wants or wives he has. I miss the kids wondering over the weird material growing on my head (nothing gross, just my hair), and counting my toes to make sure I had the same number as them.

I may have taught them how to make a solar purifier, but they taught me the fine art of carrying things on my head. I may have shown them how to make a simple compost, but they taught me the importance of the kanga... it’s a skirt, now it’s a shawl, now it’s a diaper, now it’s a backpack!

And Americans walk fast. They don’t pick their noses in public. They don't greet everyone they meet, spending an hour inquiring about the health of each family member. You can’t judge someone’s gender based on whether they’re wearing pants or skirts. They don’t intersperse a lot of noises in their speech, and they tend to look at you funny if you do.

I’m a stranger to my own culture. But it’s ok. I just have to learn to walk all over again.

2008-08-02T13:22:00.001-08:00

Tangles

A sweet British lady I met on the plane nearly choked on her ginger ale when I told her I was en route from Tanzania straight to Honduras. She had just been explaining that she felt uncomfortable anywhere outside of London, and looked at me as if I had just told her I eat children. She was one of many interesting characters I met on the journey—from the Caucasian girl decked out in full Masai garb, to the cheerful young couple from Benin who gave me their CD about Aloe Vera products and wanted me to go into the business with them, to the lady who yelled at me in Arabic when I asked her to get up so I could maneuver into my seat on the plane.

The highlight of the trip was definitely the pretzels on the plane to Nairobi. Just kidding, Mom, the highlight was getting to see you in Miami (but the pretzels were delicious)! Who else’s mom would fly all the way from Alaska to Miami to see her daughter for 2 hours in the airport (and bring homemade rhubarb squares)? She deserves a prize or something. The lowlight of the trip was not getting to see my poor brother and sister-in-law who waited for me at the London airport for several hours two days in a row with homemade pancakes. Sorry!

What looks like Miami, smells like Miami and sounds like Miami? It’s downtown San Pedro Sula, Honduras. I have to say I was a bit disappointed. They have all the American chains one could possibly imagine. I looked for any sign that it was not Miami, so that I could rest easy I hadn’t been duped. I saw a guy on a bike holding on to the rear fender of a pickup to catch a ride, and decided it would have to do as proof.

Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, looks a bit more… authentic. One glance and you know you’re not in the states with the colorful cement buildings stacked on the hillsides.

Now I’ve time warped back to being a new awkward exchange student at school. I live with a host family who pack my tunafish sandwiches in a lunchbox and make sure I’m up on time, do my homework and take an umbrella. I was nervous but luckily on my first day of school I made some friends, the teachers were nice, and nobody made fun of me. I catch myself before sharing any details of my previous life that would make others brand me as a weirdo. I never expected this type of routine to be a part of my life again after high school. I luckily didn’t get any zits or embarrass myself in front of cute boys.

The language is tough because nobody speaks the dialect that has taken up residence in my head, which is a mix of Spanish and Swahili, spiced with Kihehe and a pinch of Portuguese. I can understand most everything, but what tries to come out of my mouth is completely unintelligible to anyone.

My host parents are cool, as are my host brother, host Rottweiler/Dalmatian, and host parrots. It’s a different world in this affluent pocket of Honduras. Every day in training the last two years of my life swirl through my head and I come to new conclusions about them.

2008-07-13T18:49:00.003-08:00

Weduneral

My village goodbye party was a hybrid of a wedding and a funeral.

It was like a wedding because:

There was upbeat church music playing and a high table decorated with a nice tablecloth
A party of about ten people came to escort me from my house to the meeting, singing songs about me in Kihehe
They danced their presents up to me (wrapped me in a nice kitenge and put a basket on my head)
They danced up money, eggs and beans to give to me
They hired a photographer and I was the only one who smiled for the camera
We ate rice and goat meat after the meeting

It was like a funeral because:

People gave speeches praising me
Some people were genuinely sad and others were there out of obligation
The village leaders read a history of my life and work in Nyakipambo
There were village announcements after the ceremony
I was in the process of willing all of my stuff to friends of mine (example: Mama Luti- one bucket, Mama Neema- wash basin)

Many people came to my house; those who were genuinely sad to say goodbye, and those who came to see what presents I would give them, but were never satisfied with what they got. I had decided to avoid the frustration of trying to sell my things. I gave all my extra clothes and my kitchen things to orphans. I donated my furniture to the library the priest is setting up.

2008-06-25T16:40:00.001-08:00

I started to cry… which started the whole world laughing
“You would have given them doughnuts instead of a beating,” said a teacher as she took a break to rest her beating-arm.

“We’re beating them because they ran away from school. They ran away from school because they were starving. We don’t have any money or food for them. So we had to beat them. Now they won’t run away again. You would have bought them doughnuts.”

Then she laughs. This isn’t a cruel laugh; it’s the ever-so-common laugh that you hear when circumstances are so messed up or desperate that you have no other option but to laugh. Africa has taught me the art of this healing laugh. But this time I couldn’t laugh.

Bad things happen to good people
Why is it that 95% of all the people I’ve ever met who have HIV are unbelievably sweet, hard-working, and genuinely nice? My new friend, Dama (not her real name), invited me to her modest little house so she could ask me how long she could expect to live. She’s a widow who, four years ago, was “inherited” by another man as a second wife. Her husband tested negative, but seems to be supportive of her and was receptive of the idea of using condoms. Dama has shown no sign of giving up hope, and seems generally encouraged when I tell her that having HIV does not mean she will die tomorrow. She also cooked me some delicious pumpkin and gave me some bambarra nuts to take home. I had brought a gift of two eggs, but ended up smacking myself on the forehead when I saw the number of chickens running about in her courtyard.

On Friday I had HIV-testers come out to the village again. This time, 144 people tested, and 9 were positive. I was really encouraged by the fact that Dama came to me looking for help, and has decided to join our club of PLWHA (People Living with HIV/AIDS). Things are slowly changing.

Let them drink pombe
Tanzania’s first president implemented the idea of ujamaa, or “familyhood,” which instructs that development should be carried out in villages just as in the home, with everyone contributing to the projects in the society like one big jolly African extended family. It’s Tanzania’s flavor of socialism. Unfortunately, in my village, the idea that everyone should strain their backs for the greater good has somewhat been lost. Instead there is a bitter sentiment that arises for all the people who didn’t show up to make bricks or haul rocks, a cry for implementation of fines, and constant whining about who will bring the pombe (local brew) and when.

On Tuesday I went to help build up the village’s water intake. The men were cleaning out the existing tank, hauling cement, and whining about the lack of pombe. The women were piling rocks on their heads, transporting them to the intake, and whining about the lack of pombe. Apparently the priest had promised some pombe, but when I left the intake, a few people were still working, some were resting, and all were still whining about the lack of pombe. I sure hope in the end the pombe showed up. My villagers are completely up for this familyhood idea as long as it’s not a sober family we’re talking about.

2008-06-24T18:22:00.003-08:00

Teeth
Of course there are many elders whose tired gums cling to only one or two remaining teeth, but in general, Tanzania seems to have an uncannily high proportion of Crest-commercial-worthy smiles. But even more surprising is what they are able to do with these chompers. They can peel and gnaw through sugarcane the length, diameter, and texture of a flagpole. I’ve been handed thick sections of it, and encouraged to beaver my way through it—a task which I see as being about as possible as reducing a 2x4 to sawdust with your mouth, if only slightly more rewarding. If I do manage it, my jaws feel as if they’ve just chewed a marathon.

The other amazing thing is what happens when there are no bottle-openers around. Tanzanians barely think twice about punching into the bottle with their canines—a sensation about as tantalizing to me as licking a chalkboard.

Fingernails
There is one weird thing about fingernails here- men tend to cultivate one fingernail, leaving it much longer than the rest. I’ve asked about it, and some people say it’s for scratching phone vouchers, but I’ve seen people without phones sporting the single talon. I think they’re hiding something.

Leg Hair
I don’t know any Tanzanians who shave their legs. They are naturally hairless! It’s unfair.

A Little Beard Never Hurt
It is not uncommon to see women, particularly ones with steady, salary-paying jobs, sporting a few tufts of wiry, black chin hair. Some let it grow right around the undersides of their jaws just as it pleases. I’ve been told it’s good luck to marry one of these whiskered ladies, and one source claims that just as long as she doesn’t have a full-out beard and sideburns, her attractiveness isn’t diminished.

2008-06-16T09:21:00.005-08:00

Why you shouldn’t get cocky in Tanzania

Me: I just biked to Makambako and back (80 hilly kilometers).
Villager: Huh, I didn’t see you there… I just went there to visit my sick nephew. On foot. With a 60 kilo bag of maize on my head. And a baby on my back. With no shoes.
Me: Doh.

Me: I just harvested 30 liters of beans. That’s more than I could eat in a year!
Villager: I just harvested 800 liters of beans in my farm in the next village over and hauled them back to my house. And I have malaria.
Me: Sheesh.

Me: I just ran to the road and back (20k).
Another Peace Corps: You are Shira, you are God, you are my idol. Let me cook you some food.
Villager: Why’d you do that?

Me: I’m so hungry. I haven’t eaten since tea.
Villager: That’s strange. I haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon and I’m not hungry.
Me: Iyiyiyi.

Me: Look at me! I’m carrying a 5-gallon bucket of water on my head!
Villager: Walks by carrying a 5-gallon bucket on head, and 2 smaller buckets, one in each hand, and (of course) a 2-year-old on her back.
Two-year-old: Sticks tongue out at me.

Me: Maybe someday I’ll bike to Mafinga (at least 100k away).
Villager: I just biked there yesterday with my sick pregnant wife on my bike with no gears.
Me: I give up. You win.

Who’s on First (in Tz)?

Note: All of the italicized words are ACTUAL Tanzanian names translated into English. The names are real but the story is fictional.

I entered the class and noticed all of my students crowding around the window.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“Leaves,” said one student.
“God,” said another.
“Love,” said another.
Another student just uttered a four letter expletive meaning feces.

When I looked out the window, I saw why they were so interested. Five students were standing around looking like they were about to get into a fight. I saw that God and Sh@# were being held back by Leaves and Love. I ran down to the road where they were.
“Stop It!” I yelled. They paid no attention. But Stop It came running from the classroom.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Sorry,” I said, “I mean them.”
“Right,” she said, and ran back to the classroom, only to appear two seconds later with Them, who looked confused.
“No!” I cried. “Stay in the classroom! I want nobody to come out! And nobody should make any noise!”
They walked sheepishly back to the classroom. Just as I was about to separate God and S#*@, Nobody came out of the classroom barking like a dog.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked angrily.
“You said I should come out of the classroom and make any noise.” I sighed and sent her back.
“This is no good!” I told the students who were about to fight.
“Where? This Is No Good is my sister. What does she have to do with anything?” asked God.
“Who started this?” I asked, ignoring God.
“I didn’t see,” said Leaves.
“God,” said I Didn’t See.
“Nobody,” said God.
“Enough!” I said, “I don’t believe Nobody started it. She was in class. Let’s begin with S@#$. Why do you want to hit God?”
“He wrote a letter to let us pray.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Let Us Pray is my girlfriend!” he cried.
“Not true!” said God. “I don’t want her!”
“What?” S@#$ and I said in unison.
“I wrote a letter to I Don’t Want Her, not Let Us Pray!”
Just as I thought we were getting things straight, a couple of students bolted out of the classroom.
“Come Closer and Scare Me!” I yelled. They didn’t hear me, but Love and Leaves moved in on me baring their teeth.
“Everyone go back to the classroom,” I ordered. To my surprise, they did.
“Thanks,” I began. Maybe I could finally take attendance. But a boy stood up.
“Yes ma’am?” he asked.
“Oh sorry, Thanks. Have a seat, I was just thanking them for coming back to the classroom.” Them looked proud.
“It’s No Good, I’m Useless, I Can’t Handle It, I Don’t Care,” I began.
One student stood up and headed to the door. I asked him where he thought he was going.
“It seems you have given up on teaching. You need a break.”

I told everyone I was ok. I was just frustrated by S@#$, Regret, Problems, Grudges, and Issues. But I would try to focus on Love, Blessings, Grace, and Comfort. Today it just seemed that it was God who was acting in unusual ways. Mysterious ways, if you will.

2008-06-09T09:39:00.002-08:00

The Blasphemous Festival
There are unspoken rules of any event here in rural Tanzania. There must be a special group of well-dressed invited guests who sit at a high table facing the audience and looking snooty, and any performance must be directed toward them, meaning the performer’s backs are to the audience. The most important person invited is the ‘special guest,’ and can talk at length about whatever he wants. The festival/party/graduation must be formally opened by a chairperson, and formally closed by the same person. If there is no chairperson available, one must be elected. If the event isn’t formally opened, it never officially happened. If you don’t officially open the meeting, people freak out. Or people will be called back with great urgency after dispersing so the meeting can be formally closed. Most importantly, all of the invited guests at a festival must be served rice, meat and soda, even if the masses leave with grumbly bellies and parched throats.

On Saturday, I held two AIDS awareness festivals, one in my village for the primary school kids, and one at the nearest secondary school, which broke all of these sacred rules.

First, I moved the high tables so they flanked the stage, meaning all performers could be seen by the audience. At the primary school, I invited the village nurse to be the special guest, as she is a strong female character who has overcome many challenges in her life, even though she was not the person with the highest status. The primary school festival was only a ghost, as it was never formally opened or closed. And at both festivals I insisted that everyone be fed the same food. On a low budget, this meant we could only afford to make ‘kande’— a mix of corn and beans. I think this was my most blatant heresy. This is funeral food. When I told people of the plan, they usually laughed out loud that I would dare to do such a thing. But after a little thought they would agree that it was the right thing to do. We had to get a 50-gallon drum to boil the kande for 350 people. We used 4 buckets of fresh corn, and 1 of dry beans (from my farm! shown in the picture), and then added some peanuts, oil, salt, and onions. It had to be cooked overnight. In the end it was delicious, and for me it went down more smoothly than the customary lump of oily rice.

The goal of the festivals was for students to show off what they’ve learned in reproductive health and life skills classes I’ve been teaching. There was a mix of plays, songs, poetry, and raps about AIDS. One of my favorite teachers performed some really stunning gymnastics. I was particularly impressed with a poem sung by a large group which included a stanza about how teachers need to stop having sex with students. How brave! And necessary! It’s a huge problem in secondary schools, as at least 50% of male teachers I know are guilty of this. To hear it from the students’ mouths gave me chills. At the primary school, the confident little 5th grade kids rapping their hearts out really made me proud. When you are used to seeing kids at their least creative and most submissive, it’s uplifting to get a taste of what they’re capable of.

The special guest at the secondary school was the most important guest there, which was a mistake on my part. He was a dinosaur who spent most of his speech warning boys and girls not to walk alone together, as that is Satanism. He urged them to forget condoms, abstinence is the only answer.

The other major thorn in my shoe was a teacher from the primary school who showed up at 10:00 am drunk (not unusual) and started beating the kids when they were inching in on the stage. I called him over and took the stick from him and told him there would be no beatings today — this festival was for the kids, and if they wanted to crowd the stage they’d do so. Unfortunately, later, when I had left, he showed up on the netball court and threw rocks at the students until they had to stop their game. I expected to have to supervise the kids rather than the teachers!

There were so many things at the festivals that would have been alien in America — perfectly harmonized 4th graders, sixth-graders unabashedly doing plays about delaying sex, and last-minute firewood runs. I was also guilty of several Tanzanian faux pas, but at last after 2 years I am finally committing them on purpose.

Head Teacher and a Way to Help
Running a school with 650 students, 7 grades, and 6 teachers is not a job I’d wish on my worst enemy. I’m certain if I had to be the head teacher, I’d surrender to the never-ending work load and problems that just keep piling up. Our head teacher at the primary school is an amazing person. He’s helped with my projects, and is a wonderful guy to debate with — open and fair. It is very common to find male villagers who treat their wives like slaves, ordering them around and even beating them. Our head teacher is a terrific anomaly. His wife sings his praises about how he helps around the house and treats her like an equal. He was very receptive to a seminar I did on how to teach kids to love learning instead of fearing beatings. He recently told me how he is looking for a pen-pal in an English-speaking country. Many of you reading this have been so helpful by sending money here for projects, and I thank you for your generosity. Here is an opportunity to help just by sending some letters to a nice hard-working guy in a little village. It would make him so happy just to exchange ideas with someone overseas. His English is pretty good, and he can tell you all kinds of interesting stories about rural Tanzania. If you are interested in having an old-fashioned pen-friend, please post a comment on my blog, and I’ll pass his address along to you.

2008-05-20T19:33:00.002-08:00

Quiztime

These are all examples of suprising things people eat in Tanzania… except one. Go ahead, try to guess:

a. cornstalks
b. bean leaves
c. pea leaves
d. pumpkin leaves
e. tomato leaves
f. raw sweet potatoes
g. termites
h. dirt

Letter (a) saved my life. The other day I went on a long hike to all of the sites for the water project. I started to get dehydrated, but luckily this is the perfect season for migagi, or cornstalks. You pick out a juicy-looking stalk that has failed to produce corn and you munch away on its sugary pulp. It’s like a lame version of sugarcane.

Bean, pumpkin and pea leaves are perfect greens to fry up with some oil and tomatoes. But I’ve never heard of tomato leaves being edible. So the answer is (e).

People eat raw sweet potatoes much like we would snack on carrots. I don’t enjoy them.

Termites are a nice snack, raw or fried. 'Bite them before they bite you' is the only rule.

Dirt is sold in cigar-shaped moulds at the market, and is coveted by Tanzania’s many pregnant women. In some places, I’ve heard, it has become illegal to sell it due to health concerns, but I still see the reddish-brown sticks for sale all the time.

2008-05-14T16:49:00.017-08:00

My kaka (that’s older brother in Swahili)

Scanning the herd of wazungu who streamed out from the baggage claim area, I saw a few who, from a distance, could have been my brother. Starting to sweat, I worried about not recognizing him after two years. If I ran up and hugged the wrong mzungu, how on earth would I live down the embarrassment?

But he was the same good old brother, only a fair bit thinner, with a more European style (he lives in London now), speaking with the slightest tinge of a British accent, and throwing in ridiculous words such as “crisps” and “trousers.”

With barely a moment to breathe, we hurried away to the ferry dock and just made it onto a morning ferry headed for Zanzibar. I had heard many things about the island of Unguja (the bigger of the two Zanzibar Islands), from spice heaven, to tourist trap, to rip-off, to paradise.

These were the top ten things that surprised me about Zanzibar:

1. The dhow fishing boats being thrown about on Indian Ocean waves, packed full with as many people as can fit without sinking the boat (much like the minibuses on the mainland), and the fact that net-fishing appears to involve several people actually jumping in the water

2. The irritating inevitability of meeting with street touts wanting to take you on tours for “a good price, as you are my friend”

3. Octopus: yes, it’s rubbery and tentacly, but it’s absolutely delicious

4. Meeting Masai men on the beach who have given up a life of cattle-herding on the mainland to sell jewelry to tourists

5. Chatting with these same Masai salesmen about AIDS and learning that they believe the Masai are immune to it

6. The energy and boldness of our stout taxi driver, whose confidence with the traffic police (demanding to see their identification, a preemptive strike) prevented him from having to give any bribes

7. The beauty of Stonetown, with the windy streets, ornate wooden doors, and many mosques and churches, and the ease with which we got completely lost in it several times

8. The difficulty we had when attempting to find the exact spot Freddy Mercury, the singer from Queen, was born (we found only a poster explaining he was born in Stonetown, but the shopowners dismissed me when I asked them for more details)

9. Mangrove trees: the most amazing part of the trip for me was walking down a boardwalk completely surrounded by mangrove trees with their tentacle-like roots. They’re on a floodplain of an estuary, and when the tide is up they’re immersed in seawater. The seeds are like little spears that germinate first on the tree, then fall down and stick in the mud. We planted a few on our walk.

10. Red Colobus monkeys. They’re bold, they’re adorable, and half the time I was gawking at their cute antics, and the other half I was praying they wouldn’t jump on me. They often jumped right over our heads from tree to tree.

So that was Zanzibar. I can only take so much of being a tourist and having people yelling “Jambo mzungu!” at me, so we headed back to the mainland to begin the journey to my village.
Our return ferry trip was crazy, as we got to sit on the bow, dangling our feet over the edge while simultaneously earning nasty sunburns.

In Dar es Salaam we met up with a friend for dinner, accidentally met a famous Bongo Flavor singer named Banana Zoro, and got caught in a traffic jam with the only female taxi-driver in the city.

Then we were off on a high-speed safari to Iringa, catching glimpses of elephants and giraffes, and my brother got a chance to try his hand at bus-window bargaining for bananas and cashews using sign-language.

That night my brother (finally) agreed that I was a genius. I had the idea of getting some tandoori chicken and taking it to a place that serves awesome peas and rice, and we feasted.

Then it was off to the village. I’m used to introducing all of my male visitors as “my brother,” so this time I had to stress that he was from the same mother, same father, or from the same belly.
I had to go teach a lesson at the secondary school, so I left my brother at home. When I came back I found he had already made friends and was touring the village. I found him nodding and smiling at people who would chatter away at him in Swahili, or punch out some sentences in English.

A live chicken
We were supposed to go to lunch with some friends of mine. When we showed up they hadn’t prepared the meal, and felt awful about it. So they stuffed a chicken in a basket and told us to go cook it at home. While thanking them profusely, we exchanged dubious looks, but luckily the eldest son and daughter came to help with the slaughter. It was quite an event. The result was something that resembled maktak or chewing gum in consistency, but with a strong chickeny flavor.

The next day we set out on an all-day, work-related hike, where I visited several people I needed to see about the water project and AIDS activities. I met a little woman who demanded,”Gimme a present!” when she saw me, to which I replied “You give ME a present!” in an equally loud and rude voice. I never thought a friendship would result from the meeting, but we ended up laughing and chatting. It turns out she has AIDS, and is brave enough to be open about it, and I promised to help her and others get help from the district government. She’s actually a very strong, kind lady, despite my first impression of her.

The hike was tiring, but along the way we were given little gifts, some roast corn and a gigantic custard-apple. We got home and dug up some sweet-potatoes from the farm, and cooked them up along with sweet-potato leaf sauce. As expected, we had a few visitors, who were delighted to have another mzungu to chat with.

Low-rider
The next day we set out for Lake Nyasa, meeting my friend the taxi driver, Onne, to drive us to Matema Beach. This time there was less trouble with the traffic police, but we never expected it would be a terribly treacherous ride. Just as we turned on to the dirt road about 2 hours from the beach, the road turned to a complete bog. A flock of young men were hanging around, waiting for cars to get stuck and helping to push them through for a small fee. Onne bargained with them, and soon we were off on a side path being pushed through the mucky parts. Having lived here for almost 2 years, I didn’t think that this agreement was anything out of the ordinary, but my brother was getting nervous at the thought of these people we didn’t know leading us through the bush where the possibility of getting stuck was very high. Emerging triumphantly on the other side, we picked up a teacher who was going our way. He said that last week the road was completely impassable to traffic, but he had to take some documents to town. He hired a man to carry him on his back through chest-high water so the forms wouldn’t get wet, but the man stumbled, and they both fell in, submerging the documents. We were lucky to go when we did! We made it to the beach having crossed several rivers in the car and bottoming out from time to time. The nice part was that we had the whole beach to ourselves, as nobody else dared to risk the road.

Matema was beautiful as usual, and telling stories with Onne is always enjoyable. We rode in a dugout canoe to snorkel and look at the fish, but as it has been rainy, the water wasn’t clear. At night we ate fish from the lake, but, just as last time, I “gave back the change.” I guess Lake Nyasa fish just doesn’t agree with me.

On the way out we got stuck, and my brother and I pushed while Onne steered. I fell in the mud, right in front of a big group of secondary students who had refused to help us. Finally we got towed out of that hole, and once again hired some young guys to push us through the detour at the bog. We got stares from everyone once we reached the main road, until we could make it to the carwash.

So my advice to anyone who wants to have a good time is to go into the Peace Corps in Tanzania and then invite your brother to come visit for two weeks.

2008-04-19T11:16:00.003-08:00

A change of scenery

It’s official, in July I’m done being a mzungu, but not done being a Peace Corpse! I’m trading in my kofia for a sombrero, Bongo Flavor for Punta music, my shilingi for lempira, and my ugali for tortillas. I’m putting off actually having to figure out what to do with my life for another 2 years. On July 15th I’ll leave Dar es Salaam heading for Tegucigalpa, Honduras as a Protected Areas Management Volunteer.

My biggest fears are of becoming that annoying girl who is constantly mocked for the phrase “And this one time in Tanzania...” and being socially inept among other Americans who haven’t been immersed in Tanzanian culture for 2 years. I was complaining to my best friend the other day that while my friends back in the states are getting smarter (taking higher degrees, getting challenging jobs), I’m getting dumber (unable to construct sentences in English, forgetting everything I learned in college). He pointed out that it is ok, as I am getting stronger! By the time I get back home I’m going to be a muscle-bound mute much like a cavewoman. I jokes.

I read a book by a deaf Peace Corps Volunteer in Zambia, in which the author quotes that "Peace Corps Volunteers in Asia come back spiritually aware, volunteers in Latin America come back politically and socially motivated, and those in Africa come back drunk and laughing". So expect the arrival of a drunken activist in 2010.

2008-04-17T11:10:00.001-08:00

Slow Progress
The village’s jolly nurse and I pedaled our bikes up the hill in the heat of the midday sun, with only a vague clue of where we were headed. We were looking for two certain people and knew the name of the sub-village where we needed to go, but we had to be discrete when asking villagers where the people lived. The nurse rarely leaves the dispensary, as a pregnant mama or a sick person could turn up at any moment, so it was an odd sight to see her riding around in the bush.

On a journey that took us in a few circles, we finally ended up at a small mud house in the forest, where a very kindly couple in their sixties lives. The woman is one of those people for whom a slight smile permanently brightens her face, and the man has an easy flowing way of chatting. The couple is HIV positive.

I was worried that this visit would be awkward, as it was my first meeting with them. It wasn’t. We inquired about farming and kids. The nurse and I teased ourselves about being wimps for having our small farm plots so close to our homes. The couple has to hike far up a mountain to get to their farm, which is losing fertility.

Then we brought the subject around to their health. The man does not look at his wife or address her directly, and refers to her as "my friend." He says "I’m doing all right health-wise, but I don’t know about my friend." This is normal. She is one of his two surviving "friends," and he married her after she had been widowed. They are currently taking ARV’s, and are healthy enough that they had just come from the farm.

We gave them some sugar, salt and soap. They were gracious hosts and sent us on our way with a basketful of fresh corn to roast. We made plans to meet up again. Some places in Tanzania it is relatively easy to be open about having HIV. Not in my area. I’ve tried all kinds of things to get people who know they are positive to come out of the woodwork. Finally the nurse got some names of people and asked them if she could share them with me. I hope it will be a great first step in getting help for those sick with AIDS and getting rid of stigma.

Top 5 reasons why it will be hard for me to leave Tanzania
1. Here tooth-brushing is not confined to the bathroom and does not prevent you from carrying out other activities. You might find someone brandishing a hoe, washing clothes, or cooking with a foamy toothbrush hanging off his lip.

2. Kids are left to their own devices as soon as they are able to control their own bodily functions. I like this philosophy.

3. You can accuse people you barely know of being liars. It’s not nearly as rude as it is in our culture. A good example would be when the bus conductor tells you the price has gone up 500 shillings because the price of oil went up. Then you are allowed to call him a liar.

4. There are convenient and normal phrases to say "welcome," "where were you just now (before coming here)?," "my condolences," and "you have tried your level best." In English these phrases sound awkward/too formal/exchange-studentish, but in Swahili they are more than normal.

5. Bongo Flavor. This is the popular Tanzanian music. Many foreigners find it repetitive, boring, or whiny. But I’m addicted.

2008-04-15T15:58:00.000-08:00

Dinosaurs
I started trying to explain dinosaurs to a friend, and before I could mention that they were extinct, he exclaimed, “Oh yeah, there are a bunch of those on the path from here to Kimilinzowo!” After sorting out that that was pretty unlikely, I decided it might be interesting to teach the seventh graders about them.

One of the quickest ways to cause villagers to doubt your truthfulness is to tell people about dinosaurs. The kids were sitting in class on a Sunday, waiting for a teacher to come. A friend of mine had taught dinosaurs before in his primary school, and had come armed with a National Geographic about them. It showed artists’ renderings of what some of the weirder dinosaurs might have looked like: some looking ferocious except for two puny little arms, some with sharp spikes protruding from their shoulders, and others smaller than a rat but with ridiculously long fingers. It felt as though we were showing them pictures of Transformers and trying to convince them that they were real. Whether or not they were convinced, they were definitely amused.

Priorities
A woman came to my house asking for money. She explained that she needed to buy corn which would then be made into “Common” (vomit-like alcoholic beverage) which she needed to take to a funeral so she could dump it on her deceased relative’s grave. Once I had heard her plea, I reiterated the statement, just to see if she realized exactly how bizarre it sounded. This particular woman seems incapable of talking about anything but sick people, hard work, and a lack of money. She began talking about how hard life was and how her kids had just washed their clothes without soap. When I heard this, I said I would give her the money, but she had to use it to buy soap for her kids, rather than alcohol to dump on the ground.

Scare-human
There is a section of my farm which I just call the “bird-feeder” now, due to the fact that all of my giant sunflowers have been completely destroyed by crows. A friend helped me construct a scare-crow, using some of my old clothes and stuffing them with dried bean-plant residue. The plants are still being attacked, but half of my visitors show up slapping their thighs and saying they’ve just greeted my guard. Most of the time I’m the one who gets startled by the scare-crow when I make my way home in the evening.

Quiz time
What would you consider the weirdest occurrence you might come across in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania?

a. People on the bus asking you if you’re married, and if so then when is your husband’s contract up.

b. People walking for miles and miles along the side of the road completely laden with live chickens which they are taking to sell to expensive restaurants in Dar Es Salaam which pay high prices and pride themselves in serving chickens which have never been transported by car or even bicycle.

c. Grown men hopping like frogs in front of the police station.

d. People walking backwards on Sundays for good luck.

e. Old women spitting on young kids they think are bright or handsome.

And the answer is… well it could be (a) or (c), depending on which you think is stranger. I’ve met several people here who are under the impression that Americans get married for a set amount of time, and after the contract is up, they divorce. I’m not sure where this idea came from, but it may be a product of our high divorce rate. Also you could find people doing a number of degrading things outside the police station, many of them forced to do so until they give in and give a bribe. Letters (b) and (d) are completely made up. I borrowed (e) from my Turkish friend who says that it is a custom there to spit on these people to bring them luck (at least in Ankara).

2008-03-23T23:30:00.003-08:00

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.

2008-03-13T19:33:00.001-08:00

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.

2008-03-03T16:41:00.001-09:00

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.

2008-02-25T09:31:00.000-09:00

Powdered-Milk Guitar

When I was growing up in Barrow, Alaska, I waited excitedly for my birthday or a holiday which would warrant a splurge on real milk. With a gallon of milk costing about $7, we instead bought giant boxes of Milkman powdered milk, which came in bright orange boxes with a picture of a young brunette with a milk moustache, looking ecstatic to be drinking the stuff. I choked down a chalky cup every night with dinner, wondering how that little girl on the box gained so much enjoyment from hers.

Here in Tanzania, I spend a large chunk of my monthly allowance to feed my addiction to powdered milk. It adds the necessary substance to a mug of chai, or a bowl of rice pudding. Suffice to say my relationship with milk powder has turned 180°. A can of the stuff costs about 6 dollars US, and I go through about 2 of those per month. I have built up quite a stash of the cans.

I left one can outside my house after planting some seeds that I had stored in it. A seventh grader who stopped by told me not to leave it there or it would be stolen by someone who wanted to make a guitar.

A guitar!? Cool, I said. Why don’t we make one? In fact, why don’t we do it as an environmental club session on recycling?

So I became the student. They poked a hole in the side of the can, and drove a stick into it. Then they poked a hole in the bottom of the can and fed a string through it, and tied the other end of the string to the stick. It has only 1 string at this point (but we could add more), but the pitch can be altered by increasing tension on the stick. One of the kids was a pro at plucking the makeshift guitar. I’m still working on it and planning my debut in the primary school.

2008-02-15T21:39:00.002-09:00

Saloon
The barber nervously admitted that he’d never cut mzungu hair before. I had finally decided that I couldn’t live 2 years in Tanzania without enjoying the services of a hair saloon (it just sounds exciting, doesn’t it?). This one bragged that it specialized in “all types of hair.” I thought it was safe.

I explained I wanted about two inches off. I should have explained that this was 2 inches from my entire head of hair, evenly. The barber deftly whipped a cloth across my shoulders, grabbed a lock of my hair, and poised his scissors about 7 inches from the end. “Two inches!” I screamed, just seconds before the damage could be done. He wiped the sweat from his brow, repositioned his weapon, and hacked off 2 inches. Then there was an awkward pause, and he asked “should I continue?”, as if I seriously might be satisfied with this and walk out. He continued to grab random locks of my hair and lop off a couple of inches, pausing now and then to ask if he was done. I was tempted to ask just to borrow the scissors. Once my hair was roughly 2 inches shorter, and I’d gotten him to trim some missed spots, I freed the man from his drudgery. I was relieved that not too much damage had resulted, but a little disappointed at the lack of action at the saloon.

Burn
When my environment kids finished their little experimental garden, I noticed that the little Tupperware I had given them filled with sunflower seeds to plant was empty. I realized it was a dumb move to give them the whole container if I wanted the extra ones. I wasn’t mad—how could I be when some of these kids hadn’t eaten since the night before? But I told them I needed everyone who had eaten seeds to raise their hands immediately so I could rush them to the clinic. I told them I’d sprayed the seeds with pesticides, and we’d have to hurry up and get them treated. A few of the kids, looking rather worried, tentatively raised their hands, while the very clever ones realized it was a trick. When I admitted my fib, they fell on the ground laughing.

No More Zombies
The kids in my sex ed class shocked me last class. When I arrived, a shy but creative student had a greeting he had prepared to take the place of the normal comatose recitation. (See Saturday, Feb. 2 - Zombies entry)

“Gail Norton (clap, clap), AIDS and youth (clap, clap, clap), we are learning (x3) each and everything, YEAH!”

At first my name was pronounced so strangely that I didn’t recognize it, but once I did, I nearly choked on my own saliva. I still find it startling when I receive this little cheer session, but have learned to take it as a much-needed confidence booster before a class I still get nervous about teaching.

In the previous session three boys had volunteered eagerly to prepare a skit to perform in front of the class. I hadn’t talked to them since they had agreed, and I was convinced they had changed their minds, and were too shy to perform a play about misconceptions about sex and pregnancy for their peers. Boy was I wrong. These kids attacked the play with such enthusiasm, adding their own style and details, down to hilarious walks, that we asked them to perform a second time. I can’t wait until the next skit.

2008-02-09T10:51:00.000-09:00

ZigZaga
At this little restaurant in town, every visit is an adventure. You never know whether you will ushered in like a long-lost friend, or disdainfully ignored like a dirty sock on the floor. Often you try desperately to get the tired waiter’s attention as he serves someone else, who walked in 15 minutes after you, the last plate of whatever it was you wanted to order. Then there is the fact that if you do not repeat your order 8 times, you could end up with 15 slices of white bread and an egg instead of the yoghurt you asked for. Then you have such an array of choices. Will you have the pizza (an interesting variation on an Italian delicacy- no bread, tomatoes, or cheese, but it does have ground beef and egg and is deep fried to perfection!), or the “humbuger” (yes, an actual hamburger, but it’s been sitting on a plate in a display case for 6 hours)? I always swear I will never go back after waiting 2 hours for a dish that was “almost ready” when I arrived, but as soon as the cardamom-enthused milk chai touches my lips, I know I’ll be back for another roller-coaster of emotions.

Cacophony
I seem to recall that back home, whenever a non-professional group comes together in song (at church or baseball games), there is at least one over-enthusiastic and under-talented individual belting out a dissonant caterwaul, or somehow more subtly ruining an otherwise decent attempt at music. Then a polite but perturbed individual (generally a plump middle-aged woman) will take it upon herself to “resolve” the problem non-confrontationally by simply singing louder than (and often an octave above) the rest of the group. The original offending singer is cheered on by her enthusiasm, and sings with renewed strength, delighting in the building camaraderie.

In Tanzania I have yet to experience this phenomenon, despite countless public singing events. Every morning my routine is accompanied by a harmony of voices wafting from the primary school grounds 50 meters from my house. Only recently has it dawned on me that it is odd that this is such a pleasant experience. They even play the flutophones decently! Where I come from, looking forward to a 3rd grade flutophone concert would be akin to excitement over a hysterectomy. Here they play those things and music comes out. These kids are musical prodigies; by the time they’re in the 4th grade they have learned 2 and 4 part harmonies along with dance steps.

This all has caused me to fear there may be a vast graveyard somewhere of the young and tone-deaf. It just can’t be natural for an entire society to be so musically-inclined.

I Repeat, Tanzania is a Peace Country
This is something I’m reminded of constantly by strangers on the bus, old women selling papayas, young kids practicing their English, as well as close friends. One teacher in particular, while indulging in his post-work bamboo juice, likes to yell this phrase at me, his volume and enthusiasm increasing with every intoxicating mug of the liquid.

It is true, though. For anyone getting nervous for safety here in Tanzania due to the riots in Kenya, I’ll stress that Tanzania is a totally different story. Here, the legacy of the country’s first president may be one of mixed merit, but he did manage to build a country virtually devoid of tribal tensions. For one thing, the universal use of Swahili has prevented language barriers from becoming a political problem. Traveling for work became very common as the country industrialized, and inter-tribal marriage is completely normal. There are the occasional jokes among tribes that smack of racism, but I have yet to see these get too out of hand. Mostly people are quick to criticize their own tribes, or to apologize for traditions they now see as out-dated.

Kenya is another story, with two major tribes that have aligned themselves politically. This may not be the whole reason behind the violence, but it is definitely a contributing factor. There is palpable pride when Tanzanians describe the Kenyan situation, and detail the reasons that it is not likely to happen in Tanzania.

Instincts
After being in Tanzania for a year and a half, I’ve been afflicted with many new habits, which I will inevitably be made fun of when I get back to the states. These include:
1. Curtseying (when shaking hands)
2. Burping with reckless abandon even in formal situations
3. Saying “even me” (what Tanzanians say instead of “me too” due to direct translation from Swahili)
4. Escorting people leaving my house so far they will probably think I’m following them home
5. Letting out high-pitched noises like “Kaa!” especially when confronted with nastily priced items
6. “Eheee!”… a heartfelt utterance of agreement
7. Being late, oh so late
8. Ignoring children unless they greet me first
9. Feeling like an unwholesome character when wearing shorts
10. Being a nervous phone-talker incapable of having relaxed phone conversations-- sputtering out information as quickly as possible, having realized that each second means more shillings running down the drain

2008-02-02T18:13:00.000-09:00

Zombies and Permaculture
I had a rough landing back in my village. The rosy picture that had been painted for my relatives revealed its thorns almost immediately. Two weeks after school had started, I found 600 restless students stuck in their classrooms while 4 teachers sat in the office, apparently unperturbed by this picture. A meeting I had been trying to plan for weeks to discuss the water project evaporated without a trace and in its place I found a trial to determine the fate of a man who had impregnated a 6th grader. Farms were washing away, with no attempt to follow my advice of digging contour ditches. I found comfort working with my awesome 7th graders.

If you had told me 10 years ago that one day I would be teaching sex ed, I would have had a rough time swallowing it. Somehow I myself managed to avoid the dreaded class, probably by fault of moving to Calgary for a year in middle school, and opting to do my high school health class by correspondence.

I realized the class was essential, as teachers seem to skim over this topic, and parents wouldn’t touch it with a ten meter pole. A bright, brave young seventh grader came to me asking some very basic questions about puberty, and I realized that teaching sex ed and life skills might be the most valuable thing I could contribute to the school.

It is customary, whenever a teacher steps into a classroom for all the students to stand up and recite in the most oppressed-sounding of voices, “A good education is the right of every child. We respect you, teacher.” I explained what zombies are, and that if they kept up that greeting, I would be reminded of zombies, and wouldn’t be able to teach because I’d be too scared. My first order of business was to challenge them to come up with something more exciting and motivating to say. We’ll see what they come up with.

When we got to the lesson about puberty, and how girls produce one egg per month, it made them laugh. They decided girls were much like chickens. We also got into a heated argument over whether puberty makes boys more conceited.

The environment club students were asked if they wanted to be farmers or scientists. When it was a unanimous call for “scientists!” we decided to make a garden with half permaculture beds and half traditional beds, and compare the yields. The kids loved learning the English word “double-digging,” and I’d find them practicing it as they worked. They were shocked when I kicked off my shoes and grabbed a hoe to help dig, as it is customary for the teacher just to stand by and bark orders. By the end of two classes we had two beds each of sunflower, wheat, peas, pumpkins, and carrots.

2008-01-21T10:01:00.000-09:00

Mama and Dada
Today was the end of a two-week visit from my mother and sister that was SO… well let me just tell you what happened. I’ll start from the end and work toward the beginning in the spirit of the last Seinfeld episode.

Animal Soaps
I’d bet most people who go on safaris in Africa are really excited about seeing certain animals, chirping “we want to see lions and leopards!” in the ears of their tourist-weary guides. But we were more interested in animal drama than sighting a particular animal. On my wish-list were elephants knocking coconuts from trees and giraffes giving birth. While our guide seemed programmed to zip around Ruaha National park chasing down the big predators, he seemed baffled at our excitement at baby elephants scratching their toes on sharp sticks, impala males bashing heads over a female, giraffes snaking their crazy black tongues into their own nostrils, hippos courting and zebras flapping their lips in our direction. He seemed disappointed at the end of the trip that the lions had been hiding, but we were satisfied. Our guide was a nice guy, at least I thought so until I heard him yell “Bastard!” as we barreled down the dirt road. Nobody else was around so I figured he was referring to one of us. It took me quite a while to figure out that he was referring to a bird, which is in fact a “bustard,” which was munching happily on dung in the road. So the guide and I were friends again. He seemed to think that our fascination with lizards was as odd as being enthralled by the light fixtures at a theme park. We had an excellent time, and I still have the Indiana Jones theme song stuck in my head (inspired by a suspension bridge we walked along over crocodile-infested waters).

At the lodge we stayed in we were greeted with moist towels and passion-fruit juice. It was quite a contrast to normal Peace Corps life. A group of Masai dancers were introduced by the host as a “tribe who have consciously rejected modernization and retained most of their traditions.” My sister almost peed her pants laughing when in the middle of the dance, one of them answered a call on his cell phone. If you ask my sister what animals she saw in the park, she might start the list with “jiggers.” These are the little black insects that burrow into your feet and lay their eggs. She showed me her foot, and when I congratulated her on a classic jigger case, she acted like I had given her a present. Due to her incredible ability to pick up Swahili and Kihehe, her experience with jiggers, her penchant for the squat toilet, and her ever-improving attempts to carry water on her head, I would say she should be an honorary Peace Corpse.

Fresh Fish
Paradise is on the northern shore of Lake Nyasa in Mbeya. At a little resort at Matema Beach with our taxi-driving friend, Onne, we relaxed on the water at the base of the Livingstone Mountains. An incredibly patient guide there took us out on a fish-scale-covered dug-out canoe to a perfect snorkeling spot, where we stalked bright blue and gold fish, and hunted for crabs under the rocks. I showed a couple of kids how to put on the masks, but they seemed to think it was more fun to look at the world above the water with them on, and I thought it might not look good if I forced their heads underwater. I was allowed to try and paddle the canoe on the way back, but apparently the laws of physics do not apply to me, and I was unable to keep the boat from wandering off wherever it wanted to despite following the guide’s exact directions. Despite this, he didn’t fire me, instead letting me take all the time I needed to maneuver us onto the beach. On the way down, Onne had bought enough fruit to feed all of Iringa for a month, and on the way back he replenished his supplies, unable to return from such a trip without presents. And he finally accepted the fact that he couldn’t keep fresh fish in the trunk for the 6 hour drive back.

Sunrise over Lake Nyasa

Fish from the lake for dinner

Sold for 20,000
“Your mother drowned the dumb ones,” was one of the many catch phrases we taught Onne on the road-trip down to Lake Nyasa. As anticipated, we ran into some “police” on the road who were looking for bribes. One of them started asking us all kinds of questions, and inspecting everything on the car. He finally decided that because the windshield was a little bit cracked, he would fine us 20,000 TSH (about $20). We were stewing with anger in the car as Onne went to negotiate and presumably to pay the fine. But as he came back we saw him and the cop smiling, shaking hands and exchanging phone numbers. After the cop questioned us a bit more (Where are you from, how old are you, etc.), he merrily told us to go on our way. We didn’t pay at all. It turned out that he had told Onne that he wanted to seduce one of his mzungu passengers. Onne had said it would be ok for him to try to seduce my sister, except that our mother was in the car. They decided to exchange phone numbers so that the policeman could talk to her later on when she wasn’t with her mother. That night, Onne dutifully called the guy and had my sister talk to him. “I love you! What is your name? When are you returning to Iringa?” were among the only things she could understand from the garbled monologue. All we could hear was her yelling “I can’t understand you. I’m married!” They were cut off when the policeman ran out of money on his phone, and the blossoming romance was no more. It seemed we got off easy, so we congratulated Onne, telling him that his mother must have drowned the dumb ones.

Tanzania is a Peace Country
By the stash of eggs we had acquired by the time we left my village, it was clear that my mom and sister were very welcome guests. We had received a total of 50 eggs from various people. The last night in my village, 15 people showed up to socialize one last time with my guests. Some decided to leave because I didn’t have anything for them to sit on except for buckets.

My mom and sister got to meet all the characters in the village. My neighbor told me my sister and I didn’t look alike—she was pretty. She also said I looked older, because Kerry has a “babyface.” Another lady told her 2-year-old that we had candy in our bras, and to go and get it. She is always making fun of how we wazungu are so ashamed of our breasts, while African mamas will whip them out shamelessly to feed their babies. Another time we made pizza on the charcoal stove, and gave some to a farmer that I often work with. He said he loved it, it was so great he just had to start making it himself. Except that instead of bread, he’d use eggs, and instead of having beer with it, he’d have ugali. Hmmm.

We had the most delicious ugali and greens I’ve ever tasted at my friend’s house, and learned about witchcraft and the one-winged bat legend. Another friend honored my relatives by killing a chicken, which we ate with steaming ugali as well. She is a sweet, very motherly woman with two giant scars on her upper chest given to her by a local doctor in an attempt to cure whatever ailed her in her younger years. My mom and sister have an unrealistic impression of Tanzanian food, and a realistically positive impression of its people.

Ugali & Greens

Pounding Coffee Beans

My mom and sister, long time addicts who reportedly turn into werewolves if they don’t get their morning coffee, are used to stumbling to the kitchen in the morning to flip a switch on the coffee-pot, and pouring themselves a steaming cup of the humanizing substance. But they got a chance to see how grueling the process of making their favorite drink can be. We were “helping” to turn fresh beans into a dark roasted powder, but of course we kept being fired from everything we were “helping” with, from whacking the beans in a giant mortar and pestle to stirring the beans and sand in a pot over a charcoal fire to keep them from burning.

People kept asking what my sister does for a living. We’d look at each other nervously, and attempt to explain massage therapy, until the looks of bewilderment turned into relieved recognition and our listeners would exclaim “oh, a doctor!” or “oh a witch doctor!” I tried to encourage the latter understanding, in hopes that we’d have villagers knocking on the door wanting to pay us in cows for my sister to perform a ritual to remove the hexes bestowed on them by dead relatives.

I doubt that my mother really wanted to leave the village where she was constantly being told she was young and vigorous. My sister liked the fact that fatness is revered, and also had fallen in love with some of the children in the village, and was actively trying to bargain with their parents to let her take them home with her. She had also developed an obsession for Tanzanian bugs; even enthralled by the nasty biting ants that often invade your house.

There’s a Dikdik, or… an Elephant?
The first leg of our trip was a bus ride through the more tropical parts of Tanzania, a high-speed safari as we sped through Mikumi National Park and caught glimpses of zebras, baboons, warthogs and elephants. My sister was very impressed with Iringa town, but made the mistake of waving to a little kid from a second story window, flapping her hand in a gesture that in Tanzania means “come here.” It was clear we had to get out of there before we got into any trouble.

No Surprises
I want to end the description of the trip with a happy memory of meeting my mom and sister in the airport for the first time in a year and a half. I hadn’t slept in three nights (too excited) and neither had they (they were on a plane). I was relieved to find they hadn’t undergone any drastic changes like ballooning up 300 pounds, starting dreads, or letting their personal hygiene go in an effort to conserve water. And we had a year and a half to catch up on, so of course it was quite a sweet reunion.

2008-01-02T12:54:00.000-09:00

The other day our bus stopped as I was going back to my village, apparently because there appeared to be a fight on the side of the road. All of the other 20 passengers got off, leaving me alone on the bus, drawn by curiosity. I watched as a large muscle-bound man holding a scrawny guy by the collar appeared to defend his actions to the gathered group. The skinny guy occasionally screamed, and the burly man occasionally took a swing at him while he talked to the crowd. I couldn’t hear what was going on, but eventually everyone got back on the bus, and I got the story. The little guy had stolen the big guy’s cell phone. The passengers became the improvised jury, and their unanimous verdict was “guilty.” The most bone-chilling thing was that each passenger was shaking his head as he boarded, saying “he’ll kill the guy.” Their verdict meant that the big man was free to deliver whatever punishment he desired, and they all agreed that this would be death.

I’ve seen mobs chasing after thieves in this country (makes you think that a person must be either very desperate or very self-confident to steal anything), but I guess the passengers thought that the buff guy could handle the punishment himself. I’ve heard many stories of thieves being burned alive. Before I had time to get my thoughts together, the bus was on its way again. I’m left to wonder if I could have done anything to help the situation. A friend later told me that it was best not to get involved because the people could turn on me. My friend reassured me that the little man wouldn’t be killed because of the fear of retaliation from his friends, but that could have just been to make me feel better.

Here’s another quiz:

Which of these are the most common phrases shouted at me in English when I’m in town:
a. Good morning sir!
b. Welcome to Tanzania!
c. Give me my money!
d. What is my name?
e. Long live Bush!

The correct answers are a, c, and d. It can be any hour of the day or night and I can be wearing a dress and I am peppered with shouts of “good morning sir!” There is some problem in the school English program that causes people to mix up personal possessive pronouns. A girl told my friend “give me my money!” He replied that he didn’t have her money. “Do you have my money?” he asked. She thought for a second, then said “yes.” “Well then, can I have it please?” he asked. She didn’t give it to him.

Here are some facts about America are sure to shock people in the village:
a. There are other religions besides Christianity and Islam.
b. There’s no ugali (stiff corn porridge) in the US.
c. Bin Laden isn’t American.
d. Not everyone in America is a farmer. In fact, only about 1% of Americans are farmers.
e. We aren’t worried whenever we go up to the second or third floors of a building that they will cave in.
f. When actors on television kill each other, it isn’t real.
g. Americans don’t all own guns

Here are the top 10 most common conversations I have with villagers:
1. Difficulty of English vs Swahili and unintelligibility of American accents (and inevitable imitation of a common phrase such as “Get me some water” pronounced “Gemme smwadder”)
2. How long have you been in the village and what are you doing here (and why the hell don’t you buy a car)?
3. My name is Gail, not Girl
4. How much does a plane ticket to America cost (and will you buy me one if I’m really good?)?
5. Tanzania is a peaceful country, not like America (and my answer always points out that you won’t see teachers beating students or men openly beating their wives in America).
6. Farming in America (you are all rich, you must all have tractors!).
7. I’m on a two-year contract, and no, I won’t be staying longer.
8. Education in America
9. Are you married? Are you getting married in Tanzania? Will you marry me?
10. Gender equality (and my explanation of why you would not want to marry me… you’d have to do at least half of the housework).
11. What kind of oil do you use on your hair?
12. Do you drink bamboo juice or “common” (fermented corn drink with the consistency and taste of week-old vomit)?

2007-12-23T23:52:00.000-09:00

My water project was approved and I need your help! Your donation is tax deductible and 100% of it goes to help provide clean water for the village. For a description see Nov. 24 blog entry.

The rains are here! So here's a quiz.
Which of these animals can be found on my farm?
a. chameleons
b. monkeys
c. cows
d. donkeys
e. frogs
f. crows in tuxedos
e. chickens
f. lions
e. drunk people

If you guessed all of them, you would be close. There are no lions, and I haven't seen any monkeys yet. People say that monkeys are around, though. The cows and donkeys are unwanted visitors; I have to chase them away so they don't devour my sprouting crops. Usually this is a result of a careless cattle rancher (a five-year-old with a stick who is supposed to keep the cows OFF other people's farms). The chickens, who belong to my neighbors, come along to eat up the bugs from the freshly-dug ground (the same phenomenon that happens right after a person has been buried). The crows in tuxedos may look elegant from afar with their white collars, but they are just as annoying as regular old crows. They sometimes carry off baby chicks. And I have to be very careful not to accidentally slice the frogs and chameleons with my hoe (I've come close many times). Finally, the drunk people often wander onto the farm to help me dig for a few minutes. Notably, there are also sober people who do this, but not quite as often.

2007-12-09T21:56:00.000-09:00

My Water Project was Approved!! Your donation is tax deductible and 100% of it goes to help provide clean water for the village. For a description see Nov. 24 blog entry.
LEARN MORE/DONATE
I apologize to Canada. I have been told that online donations to the water project from Canada do not work. You have the option of writing a cheque to "Peace Corps Partnership", referring to Project #621-156, and mailing to:
Peace Corps Partnership Program
Paul D. Coverdell Peace Corps Headquarters
1111 20th Street NW
Washington, DC 20526

Time for another quiz: In the Southern Highlands, what can you look for to indicate whether you’ve stumbled upon a wedding or a funeral?

a. Enormous vats of food being cooked
b. Women wearing swathes of bright, patterned cloth (vitenge)
c. At least two people who look incredibly unhappy
d. Drum-dancing
e. There are several people with little notebooks collecting donations
f. People are laughing, joking and telling stories

And the answer is… b. If all the women are wearing vitenge, usually one wrapped around the waist and one covering the torso and/or head, it is most likely a funeral. These are normal-wear in the village, but especially important at funerals. At a wedding, people tend to wear skirts and shirts that have been sewn from these swathes of cloth.

At weddings, the two people who are obligated to look unhappy are the bride and groom, and in addition the bride’s family members are not supposed to be happy as their little girl is leaving the family.

At first, I thought it was disrespectful to be cheerful at a funeral. I soon found you should be solemn when inside the house where family members sit with the corpse, but outside it is normal to be social. A large portion of the village shows up to each funeral, therefore not all of them are terribly close relatives of the deceased.

In some parts, the Wahehe relatives shave their heads completely bald the day after the funeral. Then it is easy to tell who the bereaved are.

A particularly beautiful part of the culture is the drum-dancing. At funerals, they sometimes wear bells on their ankles and dance all night, singing songs about the deceased.

2007-11-24T09:29:00.000-09:00

My Water Project was Approved!!
LEARN MORE/DONATE
Your donation is tax deductible and 100% of it goes to help provide clean water for the village.

Most of the small talk in my village, especially in the dry season, revolves around water problems. When all of the water taps are broken we must haul water from the river. I am lucky to live only half a kilometer away. Few of the villagers have this advantage. Many women spend several hours a day just making the trip to the nearest stream to get water for household use. With a single primary school serving an area that takes 2 or 3 hours to traverse, children are forced to spend sunrise to sunset away from home. I often see these children drinking from the streams they cross on their way home, where floating cowpies decorate the streambeds. Often villagers spend all day at their farms, rarely returning home for a safe glass of boiled water. Diarrhea is one of the most common complaints at the mission hospital (where 1 health-care worker is responsible for an area of about 10,000 people), most likely as a result of a poor source of drinking water. Most villagers cite the lack of a reliable source of water as one of their major challenges. The proposed project aims to provide at least 6 functioning public water taps. If you would like to help provide clean water for these villagers, please visit the link above.

2007-11-23T22:35:00.000-09:00

Poor Poor Mr. Condom
I was informed yesterday that the man who invented condoms was a Russian whose name was “Condom” and he forgot to put his condoms in the refrigerator so he died of AIDS. I had been invited to teach about HIV/AIDS to a group of about 30 young people who were having a religious retreat at the Roman Catholic Mission. I knew it would be a challenge to tread lightly on the subject of condoms and family planning, and I had devised a strategy of asking questions and emphasizing that the only sure way to avoid the disease was abstinence. I didn’t count on the fact that the kids would start a barrage of questions and unsubstantiated, hostile convictions (for example white men invented condoms but they only work for people who have access to refrigerators to keep them cool, so they are useless in Africa), expect me to magically know answers to vague questions such as “why do women give birth prematurely and have miscarriages,” and respond to claims that birth control makes you sterile for life. Despite the mis-information brought by my audience, I think I managed to get the vital message across: if you don’t want AIDS don’t have unprotected sex with people whose status you do not know. If you don’t trust condoms, don’t use them but don’t have sex. I must have repeated variations of these messages about 20 times over the course of an hour. It didn’t help that I had been notified that I was needed to teach the AIDS seminar 5 minutes before they wanted me to start. I kept finding myself responding to condom questions and praying the priests wouldn’t choose that moment to walk by the classroom. I kept an eye out for them and planned to say “Many people choose not to use condoms due to their religious beliefs,” very loudly just to be safe. It will be very telling whether I am invited back to teach the next group of young Catholics.

More Names
I have a couple more names to add to the list: Sickola and Moody. The search for a “Fungus” continues.

Nighttime at a Glance
Sometimes as I sit by candlelight I imagine what’s going on in the homes around my village. Young kids put the cows to bed and head home to their one meal of ugali (stiff boiled corn flour) and fried greens, cooked on a firewood stove in a smoke-filled kitchen, digging into the communal bowls with greedy fingers. Fat mission employees finish off their beers, then clasp hands in prayer before digging their forks into slabs of meat and rice. Elementary school teachers tune into the news on the radio while they stir their ugali on charcoal stoves, then study for their high school exams late into the night. The small-shop owners sell portions of cooking oil and salt to customers cloaked in colorful kangas emerging from the night into the glow of the shop’s kerosene lantern. Women who have slaved all day collecting firewood, hauling water, cooking, farming and cleaning, wrestle unwilling children into wash basins to scrub the dirt of evening playtime from their skin, then slather oil on their shining shivering bodies. The hard-working men arrive home from the fields or pastures to a steaming bucket bath and a meal. The lazy men are still at the club where local brew will be served until 10 pm, and then they will stumble home in the dark. Children will squeeze 7 at once into a little room on bamboo-frame beds or grass mats. If there is a funeral or a wedding, large groups will be up late into the night, crying, singing, drinking, telling stories. And I sit with my book and my journal, relaxing to the familiar tunes of American and Latin music or strumming my guitar, waiting for a pot of potatoes to boil.

2007-11-13T09:10:00.000-09:00

Let's go to the Funeral
When people saw my hair last week, most burst into laughter. They never thought braids could happen to a mzungu, with our slippery hair. The unfortunately named “Tuende kilioni” style (meaning let’s go to the funeral) was right on, as this week I attended two funerals. I think next time I’ll get the “Kilimanjaro” style, which involves your hair ending up on the top of your head like a mountain peak. There’s another style which is named something having to do with getting revenge on your husband’s other wife, but I can’t remember exactly what it’s called or what it looks like.

Maize and Beans
Most people cannot fathom that maize and beans did not come from Africa, as they are so much a part of life in the Southern Highlands. This week I had the students draw a rough map of the world on the board and had them guess the origins of the commonly-grown crops of Tanzania. I liked that I could shock them by moving the papers around on the board. They were surprised that beans and maize came from Central America, cabbage and sugarcane from Asia, and coffee originated in Africa. The only crop with African roots that is still grown in our area is cassava. Then we had a very ruthless competition, in which two teams of students had 10 minutes to collect samples of different native plants with uses for humans. They came up with about 20 different plants, with uses from stomach medicine to natural pesticides.

One thing I enjoy so much about Peace Corps work is the variety. My work in one week has involved teaching Mamas about the dangers of drinking while pregnant, teaching about the manufacturing industry to secondary school students, convincing women that birth control pills are used in the US (and are not poison that Europeans have forced upon Africa), leading a seminar on emotional support for orphans, and teaching English and permaculture. If only real jobs could be this varied.

A Young Composer
“Gailo will be so happy when her mother comes to visit! She will throw a party because there will be another mzungu in the village! We will come and drink soda!”
(A song, translated from Swahili, composed by Lightness, my 4-year-old neighbor, when asked what she would say to my mother when she visits. She was lying in the sand in my garden, a stuffed bear tied to her back like a baby, getting ready to go dig up sweet potatoes I planted early this year.)

2007-11-11T22:26:00.000-09:00

From Donkeys to Heroes

As soon as I stepped in the classroom I could sense my students were abnormally happy. Either I had gotten chalk all over my butt, I thought, or they were about to get me with some practical joke (maybe they had rubbed the cow-itch plant all over the piece of old mattress we use as an eraser). I thought they had finally realized how powerless I would be if they all turned against me, the soft teacher who doesn’t beat kids, my thin façade of control breaking down. I asked them what had gotten into them, and (as usual), 40 heads turned down to their desks and after a good 30 seconds one kid raised his hand. “The rains are near,” he mumbled. That was a relief! I should never have doubted these incredible kids. As we waited for some students to bring us some bamboo rods for the days lesson I gave an impromptu speech about Alaska—I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that here nobody bats an eyelash when I say that’s where I’m from, but these kids were a captive audience so I babbled on and on. Even as it started to rain and the bamboo arrived, the kids managed to pay decent attention to the task of building an A-frame. I love these kids who seem a different species from some of the monsters I tried to teach in the States or Mexico.

Just after the lesson, two men came up the hill toward the school leading two children whose hands had been shackled with heavy rusty chains and secured with a giant lock. I recognized one of them as a kid from my environmental club who had skipped the session. They must have stolen a bunch of chickens (a high crime in our town) or were caught with marijuana, I thought. The grandfather of one of the kids addressed the teachers. “These children were caught skipping school and playing cards!” he announced. The reaction wasn’t quite what he had hoped. I was a little hurt that the kids would rather do this than attend my club meeting (which usually involves a game or competition), but the shackles on these docile children seemed as necessary as harnessing a dead dog. I left at this point, only to hear the beating stick echoing from the school grounds, and to see an excited mob run onto my land after one of the boys and drag him back to the school by the hands and feet.

You might feel outraged at how I could just stand back and let this happen. But what I know about the system is that it is going to be a long slow transition. More than just a shift from corporal punishment, it will take a shift from people viewing children as pack animals whose wild spirits must be broken, to fostering respect for them. We are taking minute steps.

The headmaster at the primary school is transformed every Tuesday and Thursday when we teach 1/3 of the 6th grade class “Hero Books.” These are books that should help the students pick out goals and figure out what the obstacles are to getting there. They should also help them psychologically to realize who they can go to for help. The headmaster, usually feared by the children, reminds me of Beauty’s Beast as he tames his natural tendency to intimidate the kids, and calls for mutual respect. I explained to him that I think children need to learn out of a desire to reach goals, and earn praise from others, rather than the fear of being beaten so it hurts to sit on the hard school benches. I think most of the teachers agree in principle, but behavior change is very tough to bring about.

A 20-year-old villager told me that until he was in the 5th grade, he would run off with his friends and gamble with whatever they could find—100 shillings, a piece of sugarcane, an egg. One day he was caught, and the headmaster gave him the maximum beating allowed. He said he is so glad, as ever since that day he turned into a studious and diligent student, often coming home from vacations from boarding school and locking himself in his room to study for 16 hours a day. He was the top student in his class all four years of high school, and from my view is on his way to being the most educated person in the village. There goes my theory out the door.

2007-11-03T11:06:00.000-08:00

Magic
I tried to introduce the concept of grafting to a (hilarious) health volunteer friend of mine, who told me to stop making up Lord-of-the-Rings magic-type lies. How could you take a piece of one tree and stick it on another, improving the trees and even changing the type of fruit it produces? Grafting is pretty much the coolest thing I’ve done in my life. Yesterday we started the grafting of 800 avocado trees, the first step in my master plan to turn my village into the hub of guacamole-making in Tanzania.

Amazing Guests
“If you saw me on the street, would you ever believe I have AIDS?” the young woman asked a group of my villagers. They adamantly shook their heads. How could such a stunning, cheerful, confident young woman be infected with the deadly disease? I invited two people living openly with HIV to come to my village and talk about their experiences with the disease, and halfway through the young woman realized that her audience thought she was acting. She then pulled out her record of CD4 (white blood cell) counts at the hospital to prove it to the group of women she was addressing. More self-assured than the vast majority of females in the village, our guest shared her story of getting married, falling sick with tuberculosis, the death of her husband and youngest child, getting tested for HIV, and how she now lives positively with her remaining two children. Stories like hers are so common among young women. The difference is that she is one of the few who has been tested and has begun to take antiretroviral drugs, which have changed her life. She appears strong and healthy, and asserts proudly that she could now ride her bike all the way to town without any problems, while in the past she was bedridden. The two guests made quite an impact on me, and I hope the villagers were as moved as I was.

Yet More Fatness
While filling out the cards used to chart the weight of growing children, I asked the nurse what she intended to name her future kids. She said it was funny I should ask because she had just been telling someone the other day that if she has a girl it will be named Gail (but spelled Gell so that people will be able to pronounce it), and a boy will be named “Beckham.”
I will add to the growing list of excellent names: Redness (and her brother Swelling?), God, Nitishie ("Scare me" in Swahili), Rechina, Bathroomeo (ok, maybe it had only 1 “o”), Enjoy.

2007-10-20T10:48:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-10-13T10:38:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-10-05T08:53:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-10-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-09-21T09:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I solved a mystery. Just recently the local store has started carrying toilet paper, which I found weird, as I am the only person who would buy it. It was a mystery. Then I went to the seventh grade graduation, and was made to sit up in front of the graduating class and their parents in a special little lean-to made for the day. It was all decorated with brightly colored kangas (a sheet of fabric worn by women in East Africa) and also with none other than bright pink toilet paper. Mystery solved.

Last year I showed up to the graduation and was handed a schedule that had my name on it, and a word I didn't understand in Swahili, which I soon found out means 'speech,' and an allotted time of 10 minutes. I was fresh out of training, so it was a blundering, half-English attempt, which lasted about 30 seconds. Which is probably why I was not invited to give a speech this year.

2007-09-15T10:23:00.000-08:00

Notes from a visit to Dar es Salaam

9/15/07
Today I made a friend. She came up to me at the orphanage while we were doing some permaculture on the grounds. She held my hand, and swung from my arm, and rode around on my hip. I figured the tiny little girl was about 4, but she would suddenly burst out with incredibly confident instructions for her friends: "get that water" or "let me see what you're holding." She said she was 7, but it's hard to tell when nobody celebrates birthdays, and many don't know when their birthdays are. We spent the day at the orphanage here in Dar and were part of an ongoing project to turn the grounds into a thriving, food-dense farm and gardens.

9/14/07
I'm in the land of giants. Living in a village where I can see the tops of almost everyone's heads, it's striking to come to Tanzania's biggest city where I'm not towering over the majority like an awkward snowman. And there are so many melanin-lacking individuals who I have never met. People like Dar because you can get anything you could ever imagine here, but you can also get anything you could ever imagine stolen here. My friend just bought a cell phone for a villager, and had it for 5 minutes before he was ever-so-gracefully relieved of it while using public transportation. I like to stick to splurging on food (from ice cream to elegant Ethiopian food), as it's safe once you get it in your mouth.

One thing I like though is the feeling of meeting a Hehe person here in the melting pot, and the feeling of solidarity that grows between us when they realize that I live with other Hehes. Strangely enough it's a stronger feeling than when I meet another American.

9/11/07
It's time for another quiz:
What is the most culturally inappropriate thing you could do in my village?

a. Pick your nose while giving a speech

b. Ask someone his religion when you've only just met him

c. Ask a pregnant woman when her baby is due

d. Tell your friend she is fatter than a barrel, an elephant, a blimp, etc.

To be honest, I have been involved in all of these situations. I have not, personally, picked my nose during a speech, but it will surely be some sort of rite of passage. I am constantly having to fend off offers to be baptized at the Roman Catholic Church or be saved at the Pentecostal one; usually by people I've just met. And I have, of course, been compared to all-things-fat in this world. I'm told I must stay in Tanzania, because the weather here likes me, which is why I am so healthy and plump. But I have avoided the embarrassing subject of pregnancy, which is referred to as an illness. The correct answer is therefore d. A pregnant woman hides her belly as best she can, coming down the path suddenly with a newborn, causing me to suspect delivery-by-stork or baby-stealing. It is best to also avoid asking people directly about their husbands, instead referring to them as the father of their mutual child, as in "Baba Gail". That would be my father. Many of the very traditional women are more likely to utter the word "my fungal infection" than the words "my husband."

2007-09-10T08:44:00.000-08:00

Livestock, Love and Bricks

It is the cows' job to stand looking radiant and expensive. It is the female guests' job to cut up onions and greens, pick rocks out of the rice, and gawk at the radiant cows. It is the male guests' job to become intoxicated and be impressed by the magnificent cows. It is the bride's job to hide in her room, pretend she has no affiliation with the groom, be completely bored with the entire event, and eat half of a fried chicken. She does not get to look at the cows. It is the groom's job to become intoxicated, pretend the bride does not exist, and to consume the other half of the chicken. The couples' parents' job is to negotiate the price that will be paid for the girl, to stomp-dance to drum music, and to become less intoxicated than the guests. At this particular bride-price-reception party it was my job to try and say interesting things about America, eat rice with beans and chewy meat, gawk admiringly at the cows while trying to pretend I was unfazed by the trade of bride for bovine, and to fry up the chicken in a smoke-filled little kitchen. I'd say it was a successful party.

Also, I have recently acquired livestock. Well, a livestock. I have a pig, which now doubles as a garbage disposal. It is the type of pig that apparently comes from Guinea. My seven-year old neighbor likes to bring his Guinea pig over and exclaim "They love each other!"

The future president of Tanzania is a 7th grade girl in my village. She revealed this to me in one of two life skills lessons I was teaching before their graduation. I'm not sure if anyone has ever asked these kids what they want to be when they grow up, but there are potential doctors, drivers, pilots, politicians, and a single scientist. We also got to play "Vichwa juu, saba juu" or "Head's up Seven up." I was also treating them as Guinea pigs, figuring out what works and what doesn't. It was the only time I've ever been clapped for at the end of a class. So I think I probably did all right.

I will never look at a brick the same way again. No, not because I was hit in the head with one, but because I now have learned the art of brick-making. It was a job that I actually did not get fired from, despite warnings from villagers that it would be impossible/hilarious for me to try. The bricks will be a drop in a bucket towards building a secondary school and a dispensary. To make bricks you need water and clayey soil. You pour the water on the soil and stomp around in it until it is a consistency somewhere between that of playdough and applesauce (much like ugali, if you are familiar with that). Then you must slap it into a brick frame and plunk it onto a flat piece of land. After the bricks have dried out a couple days, they must be stacked into a giant kiln-like structure into which firewood can be loaded. Then you have bricks!

2007-08-23T20:26:00.000-08:00

This week I played a role in the fate of a six-hour baby, survived a midnight attack of carnivorous ants, and jumped out of a bus window.

I remember once when I was taking role for a class on AIDS and one girl would write "Lukia" as her first name one day, and "Rukia" the next. It unfailingly alternated. Spelling here is like the points on "Who's Line is it Anyway"; it just doesn't matter. So I shouldn't have been surprised when I asked the new mother her 6-hour-old baby's name, and the nurse recorded it without asking how it was spelled. Then, when I read aloud what she had written, she said "Oops! Oh well."

If I had woken up 20 minutes later, it probably would have been to the tune of ants munching away at my toes. Luckily, for some reason I scanned the wall, or what was visible of it under the wallpaper of ants, with my flashlight. Scanning the floor, I saw I would have to make a dash for the living room as they were starting to cover that too. Soon after my escape, they were marching across my bed as well. My entire courtyard was throbbing with them. Environmentalists, skip to the next paragraph: I draw the line at attacks in my bed. I had a spray can of Raid, and let loose on the ants, finally able to return to my bed about 2 hours after I was so rudely awakened.

Usually I like to pretend that I can blend in with a crowd here, but last Wednesday I didn't even try. The bus conductor's generally foul mood changed to astonishment when I motioned to him that instead of force my way through a thick crowd of people, chickens and donkeys (ok, no donkeys, but there could have been), I'd simply jump out the window when it came to my stop. The other passengers thought this was a riot. The pressure was on, and I worried a little bit about hurting myself or chickening out. Luckily, the only thing bruised in the process was my papaya.

For those who enjoyed the quizzes earlier, here's another:
Which of these have I carried on the back of my bike?
a. a kindergartener
b. 6 chickens
c. a pregnant woman and a baby
d. a Wisconsonian
e. an 80-year-old farmer
f. an 80-year-old nun

Here's a hint: There's only 1 wrong answer. Giving "liftis" is part of the culture here. I have never carried livestock on my bike (so letter b is out), but I can't say no if someone is walking down a hill that I am biking down. I wanted to ask the nun if I could try on her nun-hat (wimple?) but I was too shy. Probably for the better, but I couldn't help think that it would be a fair trade for the ride I gave her. There is constant controversy among non-nun villagers about what their hair looks like under there. I've never been friends with any nuns before I came to Tanzania, but the ones in my village are really cool. There's one who punches me in the arm if I say "Shikamoo"(the Kiswahili greeting of respect) instead of Kamwene (the tribal greeting) to her.

2007-08-15T23:03:00.000-08:00

A Fish Tale

Generally whenever I try something new here, be it digging a garden bed, washing my clothes or adding salt to a dish, I get fired. My host family would take the knife from me if I tried to cut cabbage, or the jam-making instructor would snatch the spoon from my hands (who knew that stirring was a talent? Apparently I don’t have it). Finally I tried something that didn’t get me fired yesterday... and I’m taking it as a sign of my fate. I think I’m destined to be a fisherman (fisherperson?) in Tanzania.

Obviously the adventure was a spectacle: definitely the first time anyone in my village has seen a mzungu waist-deep in the water, covered in muck, grabbing at fish and wearing pants. Net-fishing in stocked ponds is a far cry from the idyllic image that the word “fishing” conjures of waiting patiently on the river for a bite, beer in hand, but it was one of the most fun things I have done at site. There are three fishponds in my village, the largest of which is about 6 meters by 6 meters. It took about 9 people every time we dragged the pond. Some held the net to the bottom of the pond, and others walked along the edge holding the poles at the end of the net. The excitement began as we all lifted together to see whether we’d gotten any fish. Then there was chaos as fish flew through the air: small ones were chucked into a holding pond, larger ones into a bucket for dinner. Frogs unwittingly caught in the net jumped to freedom, crabs scuttled away, some of the largest beetles I’ve seen (easily as big as the mid-sized fish) dazedly made their way back to the pond. It's tough and dirty work, and one of the fishermen kept saying "Its nothing like raising chickens!" over and over. I nearly gave the chairman of the fish group a heart attack by trying to hand him a frog instead of a fish—he has no problem with fish, but he acted like the frog was a handful of raw sewage. If only frog-legs were a delicacy here, the group could have been rich. It was a learning experience; we chalked up a poor harvest to the fact that we hadn’t let out enough of the water to keep the fish from hiding in holes on the edges. We got enough fish for dinner though (I fried mine up with butter and spices), and it was delicious!

2007-08-11T10:50:00.000-08:00

Ten ways to know Tanzania is seeping into your subconscious:
1. The sight of a 20-liter bucket perched on a stool by the side of the road makes you salivate (obviously there must be delicious fried food for sale inside)
2. When a guest comes over, you immediately abandon him so you can prepare a meal or at least some chai
3. You sweep the dirt outside your house to keep it nice and clean
4. Elbows and determination are more important at the store than lines
5. You refuse to eat bananas before they’ve been washed
6. You feel uncomfortable leaving the house in pants, and shorts would be almost as bad as going naked (for girls anyway)
7. A kissing noise makes you automatically run to get out of the way (of someone on a bike with no bell)
8. You chop vegetables in your hand, and chop them really, really tiny
9. When kids come running at you with dirty hands outstretched, instead of fleeing, you bow down so they can touch your head (respectful way of greeting)
10. You turn down wedding proposals by telling the guys they don’t have enough livestock to satisfy your parents

And a good indicator that the Southern Highlands are affecting you is that you can’t give a handshake without bending your knees (the curtsey is something I’m going to have to work to kick).

2007-08-08T16:05:00.000-08:00

On Monday I may have acquired a reputation as a pathological liar when I co-taught my first environmental lesson at the primary school. One girl sitting at the back wore the expression you'd wear if someone told you that in their country fish rode bicycles and spoke Chinese, and many others looked quite skeptical. I noted this just after I had explained hibernation and the fact that it's only around the equator that day and night are roughly 12 hours each year round. I tried to describe how cold it gets in northern regions, but all I could think of was to say "you have to wear loooooooooooots of coats." Most of the kids have never been anywhere outside of the Southern Highlands, have never seen ice or snow, and cannot possibly imagine anything colder than June in our district. I'm lucky to be teaching with a really energetic young teacher, who helps to explain things that I probably didn't grasp fully until I got to college (such as the relationship of earth and sun and its influence on climate). The class/meeting went much better than I expected (much better than attempting to teach English as a third language to a special education class using Swahili as the language of instruction-blog entry Sept. 18 2006), and most of the sixty-one 5th-7th grade students who signed up actually showed up.

Yesterday I had just finished an agroforestry consultation visit and the farmer I was visiting wanted to thank me for coming by giving me some eggs. So he called his 4-year-old son and hoisted him through a small window about 4 feet off the ground; the only entry into the grain storage hut to search for eggs. I realized a little detail about Tanzanian rural life: It is possible to rely on a structure that requires a small child for its use because there always seem to be plenty around! In my experience, the average family has 7 or 8 children, and they are always shocked that I am one of three kids in our family.

Today I'm getting a "shadower." This is a new Peace Corps trainee who comes to my village to see what I do every day. Compared to other Peace Corpses' houses, mine is not set up at all... I crouch next to a bucket to do my dishes and sweep with a grass handle-less broom, for instance. But I made a chocolate fudge cake, hoping to pull an “Amelia Bedelia.”

2007-07-28T11:53:00.000-08:00

Last week I found my self in the middle of a crowded bus stand, telling people I didn't want to get tested for HIV because my husband would think I was a prostitute. And no, I'm not crazy. It was part of a community theater workshop in Iringa town. First we did research by going into the community and asking people if they had been tested for HIV, and finding out what prevented them from getting tested. Then we wrote interactive plays to persuade people to change their minds. On the day we went to perform, we marched into the bus stand and started playing the drums and dancing in a circle. People started to gather around, and when there were about 60 people, we began our plays. Ours involved a group of people who saw a poster about HIV testing, and had various reasons for not going. One man thought it was a conspiracy, one said he knew he was infected (a true story from the research we did), one woman had no time due to her many kids. Then a friend came to convince us that we should get tested. When she failed, she went to the crowd for help. They argued with each of the actors until each of us was convinced to get tested (also realistic, as often during our research people claimed that they would get tested later that day). The second group of volunteers and counterparts did a fantastic interpretive dance, in which the main character, a beautiful girl, refused to "dance with" a guy who wouldn't get tested. I used to scoff at interpretive dances, but I got chills when they did it, it was that good. Then the crowd tried to convince him to get tested. When he was still unsure, the dance continued with another guy coming into the picture, getting tested, and getting the girl. Now I am really excited to try and use community theater in my village, even though many of the things we did in Iringa town would not go over well in our conservative little village.

Last Sunday I was part of the receiving party for the Tanzanian Torch of Freedom. From what I gather, the first Tanzanian president started the torch as a symbol for freedom, and now it travels around the whole country each year, passing through different villages, with a certain message that they want all Tanzanians to know (this year it was "Get tested for AIDS" and "Down with Corruption"). I expected it to be kind of like the Olympic torch, and maybe we'd get to hold it and run around a bit while some people waved gigantic flags, but I was let down. The preparations for receiving the torch took several weeks. They decorated the streets, fixed roads, and had matching (hideous) suits sewn (yes, I wore one too). I was surprised to see that the torch itself was rather small, and it was so windy that several people had to stand around it blocking it from the wind (and also from sight). I was with the AIDS choir, and when the fifteen cars showed up with various government officials and other important people, we sang some songs about being really happy to get the torch. Then they gave some speeches and jumped in their cars to go to the next village on the list. The singing and dancing were fun, and the speeches were really good, but I expected to feel just a little more like an Olympic athlete.

I just made a new friend with beautiful green eyes and a Hitler moustache (although thankfully none of his tendencies so far). Her name's Johnny, and she's been living with me for the past week. I think she's pregnant. Most of my dialogue with her consists of me saying "Leave that frog alone. Do not eat that frog," to which she generally just meows or purrs in response. Upon my return from Morogoro, I found it impossible to sleep as my house was overrun with rats due to the departure of my old cat last month. A volunteer who's leaving invited me to take her cat, and I gratefully agreed.

This morning as I was biking to the main road I was passed by two large herds (swarms?) of sugarcane boys; the largest herds I've ever seen. The sugarcane boys travel in flocks of 2-15, and are usually between the ages of 6-14, I think. They ride on wooden downhill bikes (two-wheeled things that you sit on to go down hills). I think of them like sleds but scarier. Even the wheels are made of wood, often with old tire-tread nailed to them. I got out of the way as they barreled down the hill, some of them greeting me in Hehe or Swahili, others going too fast to say anything, and others grinning ear-to-ear and shouting "Good morning madam!" or "Good morning sir!" They transport sugarcane from the village on their wooden bikey-things to the main road (for sale in the bigger towns I think).

2007-07-17T18:08:00.000-08:00

As I navigate treacherous footpaths on my bike while balancing a 6-foot long bamboo contraption tied together with string, the majority of villagers guess that I'm either mad, going fishing, or trying out a new torture device. The truth is much more mundane, so I like to make them guess first. The bamboo, when assembled, is actually a magical device called an "A-frame," which allows farmers to redecorate their farms so that not only are they much more aesthetically pleasing, but much less prone to erosion. The A-frame is used to measure contour lines, so that ditches can be dug or vegetative strips can be left on the contour. I feel like some kind of opposite Santa Claus, as I show up to peoples' homes bearing strange gifts to the tune of children fleeing, and neighbors peeping warily out of their doors at me. One of my main priorities in the village is getting people to stop flat-farming on the slopes, and watching year after year as their topsoil is flushed into streams and rivers. I have set up a schedule with everyone who was interested, to visit their farms and come up with a plan to plant long-lived nitrogen-fixing trees or shrubs, and to dig contour ditches and plant or leave vegetated strips. As I mentioned, I got people to come to a seminar by advertising that they should come if they had trouble with fertilizer. Many of them thought that I was going to give out bags of free fertilizer. I was a little worried that this would lead to some hostility when they found out that I was just going to teach a session. But when I showed them the math on how much money they would spend on fertilizer for an acre, and how much they would spend on intercropping nitrogen-fixing trees on their land, and the subsequent benefits, they stopped clenching their fists under the table and thanked me for the ideas. The message was that you can spend the American equivalent of $2.25 to plant trees on one acre (instead of $25-50 on commercial fertilizer), and over time the benefits can reach $2,000-3,000.

2007-06-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-06-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-05-24T16:09:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-05-08T16:44:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-03-23T09:57:00.000-08:00

The rainy season is nearing its end, and it’s not looking pretty for the people in our region. Last year the rainy season was too short, leading to bad yields, and this year the rains were on time, but much heavier than expected, and the flat-farming of maize and beans practiced on our rolling hills suffered, and has led to predictions of famine. The yellow bean leaves and corn that tassled at the height of my knees are a hauntingly common sight. You can see that the topsoil has been washed away and there is devastating erosion in some places. The saddest thing though, is that a lot of it could have been prevented by a little bit of terracing, and digging ditches on the contours. I have my work for this year cut out for me.

Yesterday my Country Director and the Permaculture Specialist came to my site on their rounds of visiting all of the volunteers. They were very happy with my farm, which I never really considered Peace Corps work because it’s just something I do in my free time. They recognized it as just the first attempt a green farmer (green because I’m a novice, green because it’s organic, and maybe green due to weeds), and definitely found a lot of things I could work on to make it more productive, but said that it was a great example, especially due to the central location (right outside the school on the main road where everyone can see it). Who knew that it’s considered work just because I can’t go 5 minutes without talking to the people that pass by the farm and exchange advice? In the past 4 months I have progressed from being shocked every time green things come out of the ground because I put seeds in it, to having to plan my diet around what's ready. The list of things growing now includes corn, beans, cabbage, pumpkins, peanuts, garlic, onions, Chinese cabbage, broccoli, carrots, bambarra nuts (yeah, I didn’t know what they were either! They grow like peanuts), lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, cilantro, basil, nasturtiums, mango trees, pigeon peas, and soy beans, and the sunflower and wheat have been planted but have yet to sprout.

I did get the kitten I had mentioned, but so far her contribution to my living situation has not included killing any rats. Her pastimes do include climbing me, eating enough food to make her stomach almost drag on the floor, and stealing sponges.

Small projects I am working on are a brief lesson for all the Mamas in the village about respiratory tract infections, an AIDs seminar for the teachers, a primary school environmental club, and a tree nursery group.

I recently had a good conversation with our new head teacher, as I had planned to discuss the problem of elementary school students who live far away. Just like many American students (especially Alaskans in winter), these kids get up before the sun rises, but then they walk an hour or an hour and a half to school (or run some of the way), endure beatings if they’re late, spend the entire day at school (even the 2 hour break which should be for lunch), and walk all the way home, arriving after dark for their 1 meal of the day. It would be incredibly hard to orchestrate a school-lunch program that would be sustainable, but we are going to try and get parents to start packing lunches for their kids, and the teachers will put the lunches in a safe place.

2007-02-02T09:14:00.000-09:00

Projects

On Wednesday I did my first project requiring grant money. It required bringing 350 fruit tree seedlings to the village to be sold (we bought for the US equivalent of 50 cents each, and sold for 5 cents each so that everyone could afford them). I went in the morning with my village's Agricultural Extension Officer to pick up the trees, and upon returning to the village, found that a thief had been caught. All I could think was "Oh no, I left 200,000 shillings (about $150) in my house for the project because I didn't want to travel with it, and now it's been stolen." But it turned out he had just stolen some chickens and a small radio. The thief was not from my village; he was from a village about 5k away. They were taking him to the village office to deal with him (yell at, beat, psychologically harass, and negotiate a punishment). Incidentally the village office was where the tree project, which consisted of a short seminar on seedling outplanting and care as well as the selling of the trees, was to take place. This was both good and bad. It meant that there were a lot of people at the office, but they were mostly distracted, and had not really come with the intent of buying trees. They all decided to take a small break from the thief and sit and listen to the Agricultural Extension Officer give his spiel right outside the office, while the thief was locked up inside with the windows open. People were showing up to look in the window at him while the lesson was going on. All in all, the project went well, and despite everyone telling me how few trees we had bought, it turned out to be the exactly perfect number. Now we will see how many of the seedlings survive!

My other main project right now is a seminar to teach the leaders of the AIDS Committee in my village about AIDS and how to teach about it. It is going pretty well, though a couple of the people have to walk from about an hour away to get to my house where we are holding the seminar, and sometimes communication is difficult.

I am going to get a cat next week which should help because my house is overrun (that is not an understatement) with rats. They don't even mind when I'm around anymore, they just look at me and continue chewing whatever random thing they might get their teeth on (toothbrushes, toothpaste containers, my phone, potatoes, plastic bottles, iron supplements, etc.).

It's good to be busy, but it means I have had very little time to work on my farm, so it is looking very neglected!

2007-01-18T18:15:00.000-09:00

A PEPFAR Grant and Training

My first grant went through! It's only for about $180, but it went through just fine, so next weekend we are going to sell fruit tree seedlings in the village (orange, lemon, passion fruit, custard apple, guava and a few more). We are buying them for the equivalent of 50 cents and selling them to villagers who attend a seminar for 5 cents each. We're doing a seminar on how to care for seedlings properly, so that hopefully they will all survive. The grant is PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), so I had to make the project relate to AIDS as much as possible. There's a group that takes care of orphans by providing them with a plot of land to farm and seeds when they graduate from the 7th grade, and they get to order seedlings first. Then the seminar will include a little spiel about how fruit relates to proper nutrition, and how proper nutrition is so important for people with diseases like AIDS. I'm excited.

We are in Iringa for AIDS education training, so today we went to an elementary school and taught two lessons. It was surprising to me how much the kids already know. I think what is really needed are more life skills lessons, where they learn and practice skills like saying "no" assertively, having positive role models and developing goals. I hadn't really thought much about how important those things are until recently. I can see how much easier it would be to do the right thing in a tough situation if you'd done a skit about it in class, or if you had some lines prepared to say to someone who was pressuring you. It is a lot like the DARE program from elementary school (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). My counterpart and I are thinking about how we are going to teach when we get back to the village.

It is nice to be in town and get things like cheese and chocolate, but it will be nice to get back to my little farm!

2007-01-15T09:09:00.000-09:00

HAPPY NEW YEAR

The past month has been so busy, with our in-service training, a visit from my friend Rafael on his winter vacation from Nova Scotia, and now a President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief seminar. We are now allowed to start projects, so I am working on trying to get fruit tree seedlings to plant before we get too far into the rainy season.

Rafael was a terrific guest; we didn't actually do any of the typical touristy things. Instead we spent the majority of the time in my village, meeting villagers (a few of whom spoke English with him, a few of whom rattled on in Swahili or even Kihehe heedless of his confusion). He even tagged along to another subvillage where I was doing evaluations of permaculture seminars, and got a tour of some farmers' fields. My friend, who owns a little shop where she sells maandazi (fried dough) and milk, was very impressed when he quickly learned to fry the maandazi. It was nice because men in the village don't cook if they are married, so to see the mzungu frying maandazi was quite a wake-up call. I explained how men in Canada and the US often will cook, clean and even do laundry for themselves, even when they're married! They thought that was hilarious. We have a long way to go.

It was also really nice to have a friend helping out on the farm. I have only a half or a third of an acre, but it's taking me quite a while to get the whole thing prepped and planted. I have about 1/3 of it done so far, but will get back to work when I return next Saturday. It is nice because people come by and ask me why I'm farming the way I do. This year the rains are incredibly heavy, and many many people have lost their bean crops and have had parts of their fields washed away. I've had a number of people say that if they'd known the rains would be so strong, they would have done their farms like me (that is with contour ridging and ditches). I am currently on a campaign to get everyone to dig ditches, which I think is the most important thing I could possibly get them to change at this point.

Me in my contoured and ditched garden.

We spent Christmas with about 25 other wazungu at my friend's village in Njombe. It was a lot of fun, and if the idea of a fat man who lives in the North Pole and spies on you all year to judge your behavior and then comes around to put presents or coal in your socks isn't weird enough, we decided to have a Christmas pinata. We hung it out on a tree and a bunch of villagers gathered around and watched us beat the thing. Some even joined in. It was a blast. We also had a deep-fried turkey.

I hope everyone had as lovely and interesting holidays as we did here!

2006-12-19T17:24:00.000-09:00

Peace and Season's Greetings to All

I can't believe it's Christmastime! That seems so bizarre right now. I think we are getting a turkey to cook on the charcoal stove.

We have been having an in-service training this week. I returned to my village with a friend who lives in Njombe, because we had a free day on Sunday. It was really cool getting to show him my village. Plus he is one of the most hilarious people I've met in my life. I got a chance to work on my farm a tiny bit, but it was the Sabbath and my farm is right on the road, so I got lectured by several people passing by that I shouldn't be working. I really wanted to get a little bit of a start though, and won't be back in my village for a long time, so I felt it was necessary.

My corn is healthy, my garbanzos and beans are growing, the Chinese cabbage is up but being ravaged by something, half of my peas were eaten, half survived, and the tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, onions, basil, mint, beets and eggplant have yet to come up. We'll see. I plan to plant pumpkin seeds, potatoes, peas and beans on my farm.

The major thing that came out of training was a rough plan to buy seedlings and plant them in January. I'm still working out the details with my village executive officer. The training was fun, and it was good to work on planning a project.

2006-12-06T13:03:00.000-09:00

Permaculture, Rain (Hooray!!) and the Answer to the Rooster Question

I had 3 days packed full of permaculture fun. The first day, we went to one of the subvillages and 80 people showed up for the meeting. It went pretty well. Then in another subvillage we showed up and nobody was there, so we moved the meeting to the kilabu, which is a cluster of buildings where the local brew is sold. People showed up expecting to while away the afternoon and maybe get a bit tipsy, but we sat them down and started the class. There were 15 people, and I have to say it was probably the best of all our sessions so far. The next day we had invited tons of people from all kinds of clubs, but only 6 showed up. But they were a jolly group of elders, very excited about the seminar. My counterpart had to translate everything into Kihehe though.

Here's the good news: it's the rainy season!!! Such a relief. It has been raining for about a week now. It rains for a couple of hours each day usually. And when it rains it pours. The first day it rained I stood in my enclosed courtyard under the roof and took a shower!

The downside to this is that I felt a panic to get my garden planted. I set about permaculturing the entire thing, which involves double-digging all the beds and digging swales and ditches, and the clincher is that I don't have a shovel, just a hoe. But I think it is important that I used only a hoe, because that is the only implement at most of the villagers' disposal. I didn't realize how big my garden was until I began this formidable task. It was probably one of the more difficult physical accomplishments I have undertaken in my life. I didn't have any compost, but I will get some. I have planted carrots, lettuce, eggplant, beets, kale, peas, a few potatoes, garbanzo, corn, beans, basil, mint, and tomatoes. We'll see what works. Some of the seeds are a little iffy.

Oh yeah, and finally in answer to the question posed in my first blog entry, roosters say "Kokolikoo".

2006-12-05T15:41:00.000-09:00

Here are a couple of pictures taken during training in August.

2006-11-24T13:39:00.000-09:00

A Wedding and a Funeral

I went with my neighbor to a wedding in Iringa, and it was pretty normal: you know - started a fight, had more relation to Kevin Bacon than to the bride or groom, toured around the city in a daladala (microbus) crammed full of people singing send-off songs in Swahili, when arriving at the church could not identify the bride or groom whose wedding I had been invited to, and was amazed at how bored and unhappy the bride and groomed managed to appear throughout the wedding and the reception.

There were about 150 invited guests at the wedding, and we were hanging out in the bride's mother's courtyard for a good chunk of the day, preparing food, getting fed, chatting, dancing, drinking the local brew and the like. That was pretty normal. Somehow though, some drunk and crazy people made their way in, and two of them were quite obsessed with the fact that there was a mzungu (Caucasian) there, and decided it would be necessary to push through some people to try to touch me. They jostled a friend of mine and she jostled back and one of these crazy people punched her in the head. Luckily that was all that it came to, and they were quickly kicked out.

Apparently I was there because my friend's husband is the groom's brother-in-law. Nobody seemed to mind though.

The reason I couldn't identify the couple was because there were two couples getting married at the same time (to save the priest’s time?).

The daladala ride was pretty normal for Tanzania, and actually incredibly fun.

The reason the couple looked so unhappy is because I guess there are some rules to weddings here. They are supposed to act like it is the most painful torture they must endure. Hopefully they were happy on the inside. We were happy-- there was good food and music and dancing.

I slept in the bride's mom's house, and I think maybe in the bride's mom's bed, which she insisted on while she slept on the floor. I was too tired to protest at the time. All-in-all it was a pretty good time and I made some friends.

Also, my neighbor died and I went to his family's house. It is tradition for people to arrive on the day of the funeral, and walk in a big procession with the coffin to the burial site, and then return to the house where they sit around cooking, eating, drinking, crying and accepting donations all day long. I went over after the funeral was done because I had to teach in the morning. I was glad to be a little late because the crying had stopped and been replaced by drinking, and they were very glad to receive me and ask me some questions about America and the like. I arrived and gave my condolences to everyone, gave my donation, and sat with the women awhile.

2006-11-15T21:02:00.000-09:00

A Day in My Village

I have been asked to describe a typical day in my village. There haven't been any typical days; every day is different. I wouldn't say I have a routine, so let me just tell you what I did one day, and wouldn't be surprised if it happened again.

I got up around 6:00am, and cleaned the house a bit. After cooking and feasting on rice with powdered milk and sugar, I hopped on my bike to go to the one remaining water pump that still works in the village. The water flowed so slowly that I was there for an hour, 40 minutes of which was waiting for my 20-liter bucket to fill. Some kids arrived, and of course were very shy. One started drumming on his empty water buckets, so I joined in, and soon we had a small band going. After returning to my house, I bathed quickly in about 2 gallons of water, and then headed to the mission, where I had been invited to see the monthly clinic, where all the kids under 5 years old are taken to be weighed. It was jam-packed with mothers and bawling babies and toddlers running around poking each other. They put me to work recording the health status of the kids, which apparently you can tell just by their age and weight. They are given a color-code which corresponds to their health. To weigh the kids they stuff them into over-sized underwear and hang them from a scale like the ones at the produce section of the grocery store, but it has a hook to hang the underwear on. After all the kids are weighed, there is usually a nutrition session where the mothers are instructed on how to make nutritious baby-food. The nurse then gives shots to all the kids who need vaccinations (polio, measles, diptheria, etc.). It runs pretty smoothly considering the number of babies and little kids all crammed into such a little space.

After this I went home and felt too lazy to cook, so I went to my passion-fruit vine in the backyard and made a lunch out of a few of the fruits. I was waiting for a woman who used to be the chairperson of a mama's group in the village, which was disbanded after the departure of my predecessor. I want to start the group again, but I don't want it to by MY mama's group, so I am working with her to get it going again with as little input from me as possible. I want them to get the idea that I will help them but will not run the group. We were supposed to meet with the village executive officer about getting all the mamas together for a meeting, but there was a death in the village, so he was out. This is very common- meetings and important dates are often put off because of deaths in the village, as graves must be dug, and other arrangements made.

In the afternoon I holed up in my house for a while to paint, then went out to visit neighbors and teachers. I returned home to translate a session on AIDS from English to Swahili, as I said I would do for the chairperson of the AIDS education club. The story on the AIDS club parallels that of the mamas' group-- after the previous Peace Corpse left it no longer met. Now I have met with the chairperson to advise and motivate him to get the group going again with as little involvement from me as possible.

On my rounds in the village I met a woman selling bread, which is akin to finding clementine oranges in the grocery store for the first time around Christmas-time. I was excited, and bought up the remaining 4 rolls she had. I ate these for late-afternoon snack. I usually eat a little better than this, and intended to cook up some Chinese cabbage I bought, but I had a lazy food day.

By 7:00 pm you need a lamp to see anything, so I usually water my "garden" (which right now is only 2 small beds) before this. Realizing I didn't want to waste any of my clean water on the garden, I went down the hill to haul water from a ditch where the water is dirty, but I don't have to wait in line. I hauled it back up to my house, and decided that it was too late to go for a run, and I had gotten a bit of exercise anyway. I read and painted by candlelight until 9 or 9:30, when I went to sleep.

A typical day usually consists of me running around the village chasing people down and setting up meetings and then going to those meetings and then waiting for hours for those meetings to start. Now I have the work of translating AIDS sessions and planning of permaculture sessions. I don't feel like staying in my house all the time, and of course there is no library where I can study, so I was thinking of trying to use the teachers' office as a less solitary workplace. Yesterday was atypical only in that I got away with very little cooking, didn't wash any clothes, and I didn't have very many visitors at the house.

I hope that was at least a little informative!

2006-11-07T09:11:00.000-09:00

Up a Hill - and Down

I just spent several days at meetings in the town of Morogoro. We got a free day off, because they changed the schedule of the monitoring and reporting seminar, so we decided to climb one of the beautiful Morogoro mountains. We knew that people often get robbed when they climb, so we decided to play it safe and take a large number of people and pay for 2 experienced guides. It was absolutely gorgeous; a mix of natural acacia forest and cultivated land; land that was so steep you wonder how you could possibly hold a hoe over your head and not fall off. There were plantations of everything from cabbage and carrot to bananas and even peaches. There was a beautiful waterfall that we stopped at to rinse the sweat off our faces. We climbed for about 6 hours, in one of the harder hikes of my life. It was very hot and humid and quite steep in some places. Possible more amazingly, at the top, after winding our way up steep switchbacks of a narrow but well-travelled path, we arrived at a cellphone tower, where a few of the tower guards were hanging out. I guess the climb was probably no big deal for them because there were sodas and water they had hauled up the mountain and maybe were selling, and there was a loud generator going so maybe they hauled the gas for it up the hill as well.

I have to say that the hike down was much harder, and today I'm feeling pretty wrecked.

2006-10-24T08:56:00.000-08:00

Ants, Gardens & Wedding Cakes

This has been an exciting week, starting from the biting safari ants that took up residence in my house, to a successful permaculture seminar, to baking a wedding cake.
I woke up one morning before dawn and stumbled out to my bathroom, where I was greeted with a pinching sensation as I sat. Upon my return with a candle it was clear I had an infestation of the bathroom and living room. I went on a killing rampage, and decided after my morning teaching I would seek advice from villagers on how to rid myself of the beasts. They suggested everything from diesel oil to smelly plants, and I settled on a tactic of kerosene and charcoal ash. I was informed by one villager that the ants could crawl into my nose and kill me, so needless to say I didn't sleep well that night. But they didn't return. They are still in my garden, and have invaded my bathroom once, but I drove them off. Once in a while I find one in my room which makes me nervous. They have now moved on to pester my neighbors, who are having a terrible time getting rid of them. If you're having second thoughts about visiting me, don't worry, they're really not that bad.
The permaculture seminar was good-- we started in the classroom and then went to my garden for the practical part. People seemed bored but everytime I thought we were losing their interest they would ask very good questions.
Today there is a wedding in the village. I was invited to help the village nurse make a cake, and we failed miserably the first time, burning the thing black. So I tried again on my own, and the thing didn't rise at all, so it is a small, dense, sweet loaf. I'm too embarrassed to show my face at the wedding, and hopefully they won't know it was me who made the cake!

2006-10-06T08:22:00.000-08:00

Exciting New Ideas

We just got done with a 3-day training on permaculture, which was pretty fantastic. I went with a counterpart from my village, whom everyone calls Babu (grandfather in Swahili). The idea is to learn to grow more vegetables close to your home in a small amount of space using water conservation and double digging and other cool tricks. My counterpart is so excited about it that while others were hitting the bar after the session, we were planning permaculture sessions for when we get back to our village. We are setting up a meeting with all the village leaders to organize seminars. I am excited to get back and plant my garden!

2006-09-28T09:15:00.000-08:00

Guests

Yesterday I got the rare chance to see the Prime Minister, as well as the ministers of water, education, and various other things. They came to the next village over (Mtambula, about 2.5k away) for a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a small bank and maize-storage building. They have a generator, so they had a microphone and music playing. I showed up with a friend of mine, and was hanging out in the crowd hoping not to be noticed, but I guess I stick out and the agricultural extension officer called me up to stand in front with the village leaders, school principals, and bank officials. I had heard that the visitors were arriving at 11:00 am, so I showed up then. At 1:30 they arrived, and I had been standing in the line of village leaders ready to shake hands with the ministers for about an hour and a half in front of about 500 townspeople, while a couple of choirs stalled for time by singing welcoming songs. When the ministers finally did show up, they were pressed for time, so they cut the ribbons, took a few questions from the crowd, and were off within the hour (without the long awaited shaking-of-hands). It was an interesting experience, as people here will do ANYTHING for their guests, and often end up waiting for hours for guests with unspecified arrival times. I'm afraid this is what happened when I showed up in my village a day late.

2006-09-18T08:40:00.000-08:00

Teaching & Learning

Tomorrow will be my one-monthaversary in my village! Every day I find out new things about Tanzania or my village/villagers. I am still very impressed at their hard work. One of the teachers told me the other day that on the rare occasion that he doesn’t have work to do, he likes to sleep in… until 8:00 even! (That’s a.m.) Mostly people wake up at 6:00 and start cooking and cleaning, and then head to school or the farm or garden. I feel lazy when I don’t get out of bed until 7:00.

I began teaching English (which is not part of my job here) last week just to help out a local teacher. It is one of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had because the kids are terrified of me. They are also incredibly obedient. If asked a question, they automatically stand up, even if they then have no idea of the answer or are too nervous to speak, which is usually the case right now. I got them to loosen up a bit when we played Simon Says. I know they will warm up to me because a few of the kids who started out like that now frequently visit my house. One girl in particular I caught in the act of counting my fingers and toes… she seemed surprised when they totaled 20—just like hers!

On Saturday the monthly market came to town. People came from all around the area to buy clothes and food and basic necessities. I went with a few teachers and enjoyed myself, besides feeling a little uncomfortable at being the only one who is greeted by everyone in either Kihehe, Kiswahili, or English. I bought a cabbage for 10 cents (haggled down from 15c) and a liter of tomatoes for 10 cents.

I am in the process now of finding out about the community and getting to know leaders. It is interesting because there are a few barriers, like the fact that people are busy in their farms, visiting their multiple wives, tending their cattle, going to funerals, etc. I will keep you updated!

2006-09-01T08:28:00.000-08:00

Settling In

I had two meetings last Tuesday, which gave me a really good first impression of my village. People were on time and motivated, as well as patient with me. I know a lot of people have trouble getting projects started, but I have already been on a tour of all the water sources in the vilage, which need major repairs. It should be a good place to get work done. This week I also figured out how to make bread on my charcoal stove. It should be good to experiment because the mamas in town like to learn to bake new things. They got a taste of my cornbread last week, and said they wanted me to teach them how to make it. Go figure! Me? Giving baking lessons!?

2006-09-01T08:23:00.000-08:00

New Beginnings

After an intense two-month training period I am finally a real Peace Corpse (that's what we're called here)! I arrived at my site last weekend and began to settle in. The people of my village are very friendly and hard-working, the house I stay in is spacious and has a beautiful view of the next mountain over, and there is a lot to be done in the way of projects. I live right next to a primary school, which I will no doubt work very closely with, though right now I'm pretty sure the kids are mostly just terrified of me. They performed a welcome dance and song for me when I arrived, which was really beautiful, but I still sense fear.

So far I am healthy and happy, and just trying to adapt to the abrupt change in lifestyle from the training-site homestay. I had a lovely host family, with many kids who helped me learn the language, as well as how to cook, clean, dance etc. Tanzanian style. Leaving them behind, as well as the other volunteers and trainers was a bit hard. The Swahili training I got was excellent, but it is a bit different in this region. Most of the people in my town are Hehe, and the elders mainly speak the local language Kihehe.

My job right now is to talk to people and get to know their challenges in the village, because we are not allowed to do any projects until after our first in-service training in three months. I am sorry for being a poor correspondent for my first couple of months here, but there were no computers in my training site.

2006-06-07T16:05:00.000-08:00

Thanks-giving

There are a lot of people I want to thank, and I can’t wait until fall. I made a concerted effort not to use anyone’s real or full names, so you may have to look carefully. Here they are in alphabetical order:

305 Patterson: I made it through a year without catching malaria—let’s see if I can do two more. Thanks for your endless patience and support!
Acadia ENVS, Geologists and others: Thanks for swimming, snow shoeing, free-style rap and carrot cakes, 400 AD parties, occasional study sessions, button mushroom extravaganzas, Iron Chefs and Spidermanly expeditions.
Acadian Somalis: Thanks for the encouragement, Swahili lessons, and teaching me how to cook Somali pasta!
Acadia Tanzanians: Thanks for making me feel welcome in Tanzania long before I ever set foot there!
Acadia WUSC & Amnesty: Thanks for being beautiful people. Inside and out.
’banksians: Thanks for not being too cool for me four years after we graduated from high school.
Calypso farmers: Thanks for teaching me the dual arts of broad-forking and scuffle-hoeing, and for being incredibly wonderful people!
CEDUAM: Gracias para la introducción a México, a la agricultura orgánica, y al Chavo del Ocho.
Cousins: I’d probably be bumming around if it weren’t for the example you’ve set… you are all doing cool things, and I didn’t want to be left out! Thanks for the inspiration.
Former teachers: Thanks for putting up with me and imparting your knowledge on me. Your influence allowed the alphabetization of this list, among other things.
Horse: Thanks for the ride! And for putting up with bad Mexican music and a concerted lack of Feng shui.
Irmao: Thanks for putting up with me, giving me Portuguese lessons, and teaching me the wonders of Bangu, the Smiths, and caipirinha.
Jackie Chan: Thanks for being an inspirational role model.
Mom & Dad: Thanks for everything! Don’t take it personally that yet again I seem to be trying to get as far away from you as possible.
Nortons and the Chalmers: I wish I could have seen more of you! Thanks for the support!
Old Roomies: You are all brilliant, blinding lights from heaven. Only one word could possibly come close to describing you: scrumtrulescent. The only problem is that I feel my luck on roommates can’t possibly hold out. I’m in for a doozy.
Peace Corps in Fairbanks: Thanks for having me at your meeting and giving me great advice—thanks to you I will not be lacking peanut butter and blow-up globes in Tanzania.
Queens of the WIC: Thanks for your general amazingness!
Sis & Bro: So glad we had a little bit of a reunion. Some day we’ll make it to that bus.
Valdivians and Gringuitas: Thanks for helping me get the travel bug!

2006-06-06T10:52:00.000-08:00

Hello all!
First off, can anyone guess what the roosters say in Tanzania? I will let you know when I get there! Thanks for visiting my blog. This is where you can find out about my adventures in Tanzania, where I will be in a week, working as an environment volunteer for the Peace Corps. Right now I am preparing for the trip by trying to scrape together everything from "business casual" clothes to pictures of my family that they don't hate to ziplock baggies. I am ecstatic to be going to Tanzania, but of course I will miss all of you! The first question is: will I survive the 11 hour time difference and transition from Fairbanks (where it snowed this weekend!) to Dar Es Salaam? Time will tell...