birth day

Yesterday I showed up at the clinic to weigh babies, as I do every Wednesday. This week, the nurse on duty had a special surprise for me: she asked if I wanted to help her deliver a baby. It was a morning of firsts—Mama's first time giving birth, my first time attending a birth, the baby’s first time venturing out of the womb. The nurse laughed at how excited I was. To a Tanzanian woman, the fact that I had made it to the ripe age of 23 without having witnessed a birth was kind of ridiculous. 

Staring into the terrifying mess between the soon-to-be-Mama’s thighs, I saw oozing gooey whiteness, chunky dark redness, and, lower down, dripping out of a smaller hole, mucus-y yellow-brownness with a distinct and unpleasant smell. I know I’m supposed to use positive adjectives to describe such a miraculous event, but my first thought was: gross.

Then everything changed. Hiding shyly behind this curtain of deeply human fluids, I glimpsed the tiniest hint of curly black hair. That detail, extraordinary and dizzying, turned the scene from disgusting to indescribably beautiful.

A brand new life. A tiny, helpless, wrinkled being in the process of discovering that his cozy little home—all he’d ever known—was merely the prelude to a grand and tragic symphony. As the soft walls that had held him in a tight embrace for the entirety of his being began to contract, pushing downwards and outwards, the little dude began to hear epic chords, the music of a world he didn’t realize he’d been preparing to enter ever since the moment, about nine months ago, when, through a serendipitous mix of timing and the idiocy of the young, sperm from a commitment phobic taxi driver met with and entered the egg of a pretty village girl with very dark skin, chubby cheeks, and deep black eyes. The girl, Amina, had run away to the big city to find a new life. And so she did, through not in the sense she had hoped. Now, back in the village, the new life Amina found in the city was ready to make his debut, and I was there to cheer him on.

The first thing I noticed after the nurse gently wiped away the blood and discharge was that Amina’s vagina seemed strangely one-dimensional. I saw what looked like two holes—the top one a few centimeters larger than the bottom one. The two holes were separated by an inch-and-a-half wide, half centimeter thick membrane. There was nothing else, just the holes. The baby’s head was now pushing against the membrane, stretching it and trying to rip it in two. The nurse tried to help the little dude get past this unnatural barrier. The membrane and the slit-like appearance of the woman's genitals is the result, the nurse explained, of a severe form of female circumcision that involves removal of the clitoris, inner and outer labia, and the sewing up of the remaining tissue. This form of female circumcision is fairly uncommon in Tanzania, and definitely against the law, but it continues to happen today, always in secret and usually to girls between ages 2 and 8. I fought the urge to go to the room next door where the woman’s mother was waiting and yell at her for letting her daughter go through that awful ritual however many years ago. The nurse seemed to think it more prudent to admonish the girl herself. 

“If you hadn’t been cut, the baby would have been born by now. Instead, it’s in distress and you’ve been in pain for almost 10 hours. If this baby is a girl, remember this moment when your mother tries to talk you into cutting her,” the matronly woman said with a disapproving scowl.

There was an awkward pause broken by another wave of contractions. More black hair came into view through the widening—but still not wide enough—top section of the woman’s unnaturally segmented vagina. The head floated into view. The area between Amina’s fleshy thighs began expanding outward, pushing… pushing… pushing… and then, suddenly, the baby’s head began to recede.

“I can’t do it,” Amina whispered as she collapsed back on the hard examination table. “I give up.”

“Not an option,” the nurse replied matter-of-factly. “Shut up and push.”

Unconvinced that this was a time for tough love, I moved to take the girl’s hand and tried to think of something encouraging to say.

“Your baby has a lot of hair,” I offered.  

Amina’s short laugh set another contraction in motion. As the baby’s hair slid back into view, Amina continued to whisper over and over again, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

I watched more and more hair slide into view and the head start squeezing into a cone-shape. The hint of a forehead peeked out uncertainly.

“You can, you can, you can,” I chanted in time with Amina’s protests.

“Shut up and push!” the nurse repeated sternly. I gave her a mean look and she grinned at me, then reached in with her hand to cup the awkwardly shaped head, twisting it like she was trying to unscrew a stubborn light bulb.

The unnatural membrane—leftover from a cruel needle stitching up a place that should never be stitched—began to stretch. Beads of blood appeared, much brighter red than the dark, chunky kind still oozing out from deep inside.

And then, suddenly, a face! A scrunchy, wrinkly, angry-looking face. Before I had time to fully register the bizarre sight of a squished head poking out between its mother’s thighs, the rest of the baby’s body flopped out and into the nurse’s practiced hands. I took a quick peek and informed Amina that she had given birth to a son. She smiled weakly. Three and a half kilograms of human being had suddenly joined the world, but something wasn’t right. The baby’s skin was rapidly turning yellow, chest and belly looking sickeningly deflated. I held my own breath as I waited, waited, and waited for the baby to inhale. He didn’t.

The nurse, unfazed by the infant’s terrifyingly lifeless presentation, worked quickly and quietly, placing the baby on Amina's chest, instructing her to hold him. Amina's lungs filled up with each breath as though she was trying to breathe for both herself and her baby. The nurse sucked out some yellowish goo from the baby’s mouth and nose and pumped gently against his chest. Tears began to spring to my eyes with the horrifying realization that the baby might be dead, and the nurse started blowing on his slack, yellow face. As she did this, she used both hands to tie off and cut the umbilical cord with a single graceful motion.

Suddenly, as though he had just remembered that he was supposed to breathe in order to survive, the little guy took the tiniest gulp of air and let out a strangled gasp. Tears of relief ran down my cheeks as the nurse kept up her regimen of blowing into his face and pumping his chest.

Once the baby seemed to have figured out the basics of survival in the world outside the womb, the nurse lifted the whimpering infant, wrapped him in a clean blue khanga, and placed him on a metal scale. His face turned from yellow to pink as she recorded his weight. Leaving the baby on the scale, she turned back to the mother to help remove the placenta.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the baby. Alone on the cold scale, he seemed impossibly small and helpless. He was breathing less deeply than he had been in his mother’s arms and the pinkness in his face was fading as quickly as it had appeared. I know absolutely nothing about newborns, but something told me he needed to be held. He had yet to open his eyes.  

“Can I pick him up?” I asked the nurse, both eager and terrified at the prospect that she’d say yes.

“Yes,” she said.

Carefully cupping his head, I lifted the baby boy and held him gently against my chest. I took a few deep breaths, hoping he would learn from my example. Color rushed back into his face and his big brown eyes shot open. He looked up at me and scrunched his nose as though he was trying to figure something out. Then he let out a loud, healthy cry.

“I’m here,” he announced in the ancient language of newborns.

“Karibu nymbani,” I replied. "Welcome home." 

empowered

A few weeks ago my fellow Hanang volunteers and I held a girl's empowerment conference. For four days, I watched 29 girls come out of their shells, make friends from other villages, put on plays about peer pressure and the dangers of unprotected sex, giggle hysterically at condom balloons, confidently answer questions during Jeopardy on the last day... it was a blast. Since the conference, I've been thinking a lot about women's empowerment, which got me thinking that I should write a blog entry about women's empowerment. But I didn't want to tell another sob story. There are so many sob stories out there about African women falling victim to some atrocity or another. After a certain point, sob stories are disempowering. Instead, I'm going to tell a story about a group of strong women who are kicking ass and taking names. And they didn't need an American to come in and tell them how to do it.

For months now I've been hearing about these infamous "Mama's meetings" taking place down at the grazing/market grounds. All women in the village are required to go (except me because apparently I'm not considered entirely female due to my foreignness...apparently). The women who attend the meetings are also required to keep their specific proceedings secret--which doesn't seem to stop some of the gossipier Mamas from telling me everything that happens after each meeting. At first all they did was sit around talking and talking and talking and talking about all the problems in the village. People in this village love to talk about problems and brainstorm solutions. Implementation of those solutions is a less common phenomenon. So I was pretty surprised when I heard that, on recommendation of the Mamas, a curfew has been implemented in the village.

How does a group of unarmed, technically powerless community members enforce a curfew? Anyone found wandering outside after 10pm runs the risk of being picked up by community patrol groups and, if they refuse to beg forgiveness and go home immediately, might find themselves thrown into the river and then forced to roll around the in dirt. Seriously. For women who have been drinking, the curfew is much stricter, 5pm. This is supposedly to give them enough time to sober up and cook dinner for their families, as well as to avoid becoming targets of violently drunk men.  

In addition to the curfew, the Mamas have succeeded in implementing and enforcing new prohibition laws, banning a particularly strong kind of local brew and restricting drinking before noon. They have also begun a particularly fierce campaign to combat the increase in "matusi"--bad language. I've greatly increased my Kiswahili vocabulary by asking the Mamas what kinds of words they mean when they say "matusi". I am now fully prepared to insult anyone's mother in all sorts of creative ways. It's probably best I avoid using my new vocab, though. The consequence of saying gross things about other people's mothers could range from paying a heavy fine to being exiled from the village to death by Barbaig tribal magic. Eek.

Those who break the new laws are brought to justice before the meeting-at-the-grazing-grounds--which, if they actually attended like they are required to, would mean every adult woman in the village and a few important men, non-voting observers. In this case, "justice" usually means paying a fine of one goat or sheep or, if the offense is particularly awful, an entire cow. The women at the meeting then call a man in to slaughter the animal and then divide up the meat amongst themselves.

Unlike in court, where a person can get off of any crime lacking in evidence by simply refusing to admit guilt, there is no escaping justice at the Mama's meeting. If a person refuses to admit to his alleged crime and pay the fine, he risks getting cursed by old women from the Barbaig tribe--who oversee the proceedings of the Mama's meetings as sort of mentors. Most people would rather pay a fine than get cursed by a Barbaig woman. Apparently really bad curses can lead to illness, starvation, and the death of a family member. If you're innocent and get cursed, apparently it won't stick. But still...who wants to risk that??

The system may seem a little far-fetched to those of us who don't fear curses, but it's working. The other day a young man made a particularly crude comment to my friend Mama Bulali and she just pointed towards the grazing grounds and said, "Do you want me to give your name to the Mamas?" The guy shut up fast.

It may be hard to understand how people believe in things that are, to an American mind at least, so obviously untrue. What's so scary about a bunch of old ladies wrapped in checkered blankets and smelly leather skirts, anyway? (Well, the atheist might say, what's so scary about an imaginary all-powerful being that we've never seen or heard from?)

This question makes me think about the time I had a particularly hyper bat in my house. I ran over to my neighbors house, screaming "popo kichaa!!!" (crazy bat!!!). She came over to help me assess the situation. After a few hours of trying to kill the awful thing, my neighbor announced, darkly, that this was not a normal bat we were dealing with... it was the work of a wizard, and had been sent to me by an enemy.

So I sat down and made a list of all the people in the village who might dislike me enough to send a wizard-bat to annoy me.  

I got about 4 names on the paper before I remembered that I don't believe in wizards.

The next day, the bat mysteriously disappeared of its own volition. Now, I'm not saying I believe it was a wizard-bat. Nor am I saying it wasn't. I mean, this thing was not acting like a normal bat. But I digress. The point is that the wizard-bat taught me how even an ever-so-practical college graduate could look at a perfectly ordinary situation and, with the counsel of a trusted friend who seems to understand these things better than she does, wonder if she's found some proof of magic.


Last week I finally got a chance to visit one of these Mama's meetings. My first thought was that I seemed to walked into a live filming of the Tanzanian village version of one of those daytime talk shows. Judge Judy or whatever. People publicly denounced each other for selling illegal booze, wayward sons begged their mothers for forgiveness after being found guilty of theft, audience members booed nasty characters and cheered when justice was served.  One woman was brought before the meeting after being caught tying her sick, confused mother to a tree. The old woman's son-in-law was sought at home and brought to the meeting, where he declared his willingness to take the old woman in to his own home and keep her safe. The audience cheered like he'd just announced that he'd been selected for the national soccer team.  

Then the Barbaig ladies started leading a very passionate prayer for rain and things got less like an American TV show. The women prayed in their tribe's language, Kibarbaig, and a young man, one of a small group of sheepish-looking men present to observe, translated into the common tongue of Swahili. After a few minutes everyone (self included) was cheering and screaming "mvua inyeshee! mungu mkubwa, mvua inyeshee!" (let it rain! great god, let it rain!). After a few minutes of this I got bored and started looking around at everyone else, wondering which God we were praying to anyway... or whether we were all praying to a different God. Most of the women present were from the Iraqw, Rangi, or Nyaturu tribe. Besides myself and maybe a few of the Barbaig ladies, everyone present was a devoted Muslim or Christian. Though the prayer was being led in the traditional style of the Barbaig, the vast majority of the attendees were not (technically) believers in the Barbaig tribe's particular brand of religion.

I later asked my neighbor why people seem so confident in the Barbaig prayers, rather than praying according to Christian or Muslim traditions, or using the traditions of one of the more popular local tribes. She replied that people respect the Barbaig because they hold so firmly to their ancient way of life and believe so deeply and completely, unlike other tribes whose beliefs have been spread out and mixed up with new religions. Though they have moved up into the mountains in order to continue their pastoralist lifestyle, the Barbaig are respected as the traditional inhabitants of this area, and thus have a greater understanding of the prayer style particularly suited to this land.  

After praying for rain, we got down to the business of distributing free meat and then the meeting was adjourned in time for the women to get home and cook dinner.

where were you when the road arrived?

            Summer in the southern hemisphere. It’s the rainy season, but it hasn’t rained in weeks. Exhausted bean plants whither and die. An old man naps under a tree, conserving his energy. The sun glares down relentlessly, angrily.   

Sitting atop a pile of hot mud bricks are four small Tanzanian children and one sweat-soaked American woman. The assembly is staring at the road in front of them, enjoying the free theater of development. They watch excitedly as big yellow trucks drive by, leaving smelly but welcome tarmac in their wake.

In addition to tarmac, the truck carries an assortment of young Tanzanian men transplanted unceremoniously from cities and towns all around the country. They listen to music on their phones, talk about their many girlfriends, and yell obscenities at the random white girl hanging out with snot-nosed kids in ripped, muddy clothes. The city-boy road workers look around this dinky little village and think; I am so much cooler than this place. Or maybe they’re thinking about dinner. Actually, being young men, they’re probably thinking about sex. Anyway, they’re looking around and thinking about something.

            I pull the bright fabric of my khanga closer around my head, blocking the twin glares of sun and men.

“Where do you want to go once the road is finished?” I ask my little companions.

            “I want to go to Singida,” 5-year-old Salima announces.

            “No rain in Singida,” her older brother counters. “We’ll go to Arusha!”

            The children begin to talk excitedly about all the great things in Arusha, especially the rain and fruit. Always appreciative of my little neighbors’ explanations for the great mysteries of the world, I ask the kids why there’s lots of rain in Arusha but so little here in the village. The children look up at wispy clouds floating pathetically against a background of shocking blue.

            “The Chinese wizards,” Hussein replies sagely. Hussein is eight years old. He’s been in primary school for almost a year, so he knows things like this. He explains matter-of-factly how the Chinese road engineers set off thunder-bombs at night in order to confuse God and make the rain stop. 

            I patiently explain that the thunder-bombs are just dynamite, and that no-one—not even a Chinese engineer—is capable of stopping the rain on cue. The kids look at me like I’m an idiot.

            I wrote the beginning of this blog update about two weeks ago, before I left for Dar Es Salaam to help with a staff diversity training. When I left, the tarmac was just reaching my village, but it was still drying so cars couldn’t yet ride on it.

Before coming back to the village, I stopped in Moshi to run my second half marathon. Pretty much nothing I’m doing in the village has a fully measurable impact… ye olde pre-test/post-test might tell me that 90% of my students now know how HIV is transmitted, but it doesn’t tell me how many are going to protect themselves accordingly. So it was really nice to see that at least my personal project of getting in shape is objectively succeeding. This year I ran 15 minutes faster than last year, reaching the finish line completely exhausting and with strangely tingly limbs at just over 2 hours.

I brought the medal back and tried to convince Mama Saidi that I had come in third place (I didn’t want to push it by claiming to have come in first), but she wasn’t fooled. Her exact response was, “You aren’t a Kenyan, Lauren. You mean you came in third out of the Peace Corps volunteers.” (Actually, I tied for 4^th.)

The marathon is completely unrelated to a blog entry about the road, but I felt the need to brag. We’ll now continue with your regularly scheduling programming…

I almost missed my stop on the way home because I didn’t notice my village bus stand rushing by while the bus chugged right along on paved road. The road is now paved all the way from the biggest city in Tanzania right to my doorstep. In a few years, we might even be on Google maps. Watching the road arrive and the rains depart, I realize what a unique opportunity I have here. It’s been over a year and a half, but I’m still wrapping my head around it. I’m watching a road arrive, watching a village go through a very serious developmental growth spurt.

And I’m seriously enjoying the new perks.  

I can now get to the nearest western-style coffee shop in half the time it took when I first got here, and every time the road inches a little closer to completion, the distance between me and pizza grows gloriously shorter. I’ve seen busses coming from Arusha pass by the village just 4 hours after leaving town. That same trip used to take 12 hours, and was impassible during some parts of the rainy season.

Considering the vaguely Luddite tendencies I started acquiring during my last year of college, I’m surprised by how unconcerned I am about the environmental externalities of the road. I’m just too excited about the economic and social possibilities (and, let’s be honest, my judgment is clouded by my serious food cravings). But even with this uncharacteristically optimistic perspective, I can’t help but worry. I worry about deadly collisions with daydreaming children unaccustomed to looking both ways before they cross the street. I worry about rapid population growth straining already tight resources. Most of all, in the short term, I worry about the road workers. With a girlfriend in every big town in Tanzania, they enjoy giving their STDs to local girls for the price of a soda and French fries. In a region that has managed to keep its HIV rate to a relatively low 2%, our road workers seem determined to bring this area closer to the Tanzanian average of 7%. I think about this statistic as I look at my students. There are about 300 of them. I look at their mischievous smiles, their too-cool-for-this-silly-white-girl grins, and I do the math. 7% of 300 is twenty. I can’t let myself fully digest the implications, but I’ve made a commitment to ramp up my Life Skills programming.

Speaking of Life Skills programming, I have to wrap this up. Tomorrow morning is the beginning of the Hanang District Young Women’s Empowerment Conference—an even that’s been in the making/on my mind since well over a year ago. Maybe I can’t bring back the rains and I can’t stop the road from being a vector of disease, but if all goes well over the next weekend, a few young women will come out of the conference feeling a little bit more confident, capable of protecting themselves from the struggles the road will bring and benefiting from the opportunities.  Here’s to cautious optimism and small victories.  

it takes a village

Pregnancy is not celebrated in this village. A woman with child is viewed with a simple, practical mix of pity and respect. 

There are no baby showers.

When you are expecting, you can expect to be cautiously optimistic at best.

Names are not discussed until weeks or months after the baby is born. The women here know all too well that infants can and will die. It’s harder to bury a child with a name.

Before I left for my American vacation, my neighbor whispered to me that she thought she was a few months pregnant and wasn’t feeling very well. She asked for advice, and I told her to go to the doctor.

Since then, every Wednesday, she walked an hour round-trip to the local clinic. Every Wednesday, she was told that the clinic is out of tests and medicine and she’ll have to come back the next week. 

Around 8pm on Monday night, I heard a tiny voice outside my door. I had spent a long time on the bus the day before and wasn’t feeling up to visitors, so I pretended to be asleep. When the little voice started sounding frantic, I yelled from my bed, asking who it was and what was wrong.

“I’m Hawa,” the girl replied. “Mama’s sick and wants you to call Baba and tell him to come home now.” She hesitated, and then she whispered, “I’m scared.”

I jumped out of bed and opened the door. Hawa, eleven years old with the body of a child much younger and the eyes of a woman much older, stood shaking on my doorstep. We called and called, but no one answered Baba’s phone.

“It’s ok, he’ll come home eventually,” Hawa said, uncertainly.

Adrenaline quickly killing my exhaustion, I told Hawa I’d be over in a minute.

Mama Hawa lay on her bed, emaciated limbs curled around her swollen belly, moaning softly as the waves of pain hit her. She’s 34, but at that moment she seemed no older than twelve. I asked what I could do to help, but she could hardly even reply.

A series of phone calls began. I called another volunteer to ask for advice. I called the village midwife. I called the doctor from the local clinic. I took my phone out of my pocket after mixing a sugar-salt rehydration solution and realized that I had also butt-dialed 911.

In the village, a scream for help is 911. Your neighbors are your paramedics. Anything with wheels is an ambulance. 

Mama Hawa rode to the clinic on the back of a bicycle with a flat tire.

Two other neighbors appeared at the clinic to help, and I held a bucket for Mama Hawa’s vomit while the nurse confirmed what no one wanted to admit we already knew.  

“You just wait. She will birth. No life birth,” the nurse said to me in proud, sing-song English. Her perkiness annoyed me.

“I know,” I replied in Swahili. “What can we do to help?”

“Do you have any medicine?” She asked. I knew better than to be surprised at the fact that this clinic had no medicine, and produced a few pathetic tablets of paracetamol and rehydration fluid. She seemed genuinely impressed.

“What kind of husband isn’t home by 9pm? Someone else will have to stay with her tonight,” one of the other women announced, looking at me.

During the awkward pause that followed, I reminded myself that these two women had children and husbands to go home to. I had half an episode of Gossip Girl and a skype date with my boyfriend. I agreed to stay, and the other women departed gratefully.

The hours that followed are a blur. While I fought off sleep, I heard the other patient, a woman suffering from pneumonia, talk comfortingly to Mama Hawa in their tribal language. Mama Hawa made a brave effort to communicate but mostly just moaned in response. After a few hours, her husband finally showed up looking frazzled and appropriately ashamed at his tardiness. Moaning turned to wailing and it became clear that we had to find transport to the hospital in town. Fast.

It took several calls to finally track down a functioning vehicle. The moans of a very sick woman mixed with the sputtering of a very sick car, and we slowly made our way to the hospital.

Sitting in a chair, waiting at the reception desk, Mama Hawa’s water broke. There was more fluid than I expected from seeing it happen in movies. Grabbing her to keep her from hitting her head as she collapsed on the floor, I yelled for the nurses.

When the nurses arrived, I finally took a good look around. The ward contained thirty or so other sick women, sleeping or coughing or whining, two in each twin-sized bed. Most women were being looked after by relatives. Others were being taken care of by slightly less ill patients. There was one clogged latrine and no sink, water or soap in sight.

While I wondered at the gross surroundings, a thin curtain was put up. There, on the floor, Mama Hawa gave birth to a fetus a little smaller than my hand. The nurses asked for whatever khangas we had brought as a pool of blood and amniotic fluid began to seep out from under the curtain. Minutes later, the curtain was removed and the nurse handed me a small bundle of fabric.

“I’m going to go get an IV. What should we do with the dead baby?” she asked me. I stared at the bundle of fabric and swallowed my vomit.

As the exhausted patient slept in a bed also occupied by an old woman whose cough I prayed was something other than TB, her husband and I took the baby home to be washed and buried in accordance with Muslim tradition. The trip was excruciatingly long. Baba Hawa sat next to me, holding the bundle of fabric and silently weeping. The car broke down twice. We didn’t speak.

When we finally reached the village, I looked up at the stars, slightly dimed by the light of a monstrously full moon. I tried to find the constellation Orion. When I’m lonely or sad at night, I like to look up at Orion and think of him as an impeccably constant companion—there for me wherever it’s dark and not cloudy. But it was already nearing 6am and Orion had set beyond the mountains. Rising from the other side of the skyline, the Southern Cross stared down at me. After a night spent entirely out of my comfort zone, those four stars officiously reminded me that I was very, very far from home.

By the light of the rising sun, I shut my eyes and tried to sleep.

A few hours later, I walked over to the neighbor’s house and found a gaggle of Mamas cooking and looking after the children. A group of young men were solemnly digging a small grave in the yard. Word travels fast in the village. Throughout the morning, friends and family continually stopped by to offer condolence and gifts.

I sat with Hawa and her six year old brother, Muku. Muku was staring at the men digging the grave with an angry expression. He refused to talk, but finally smiled when I showed up with coloring books and markers. Silently I sat and colored pictures of cars while the women cooked and the men dug. I showed Muku how to write his name and after several failed attempts he proudly wrote “WUKU” on top of the prettiest picture. Close enough. I promised to bring it to his mom when I went to see her in a few hours.

After collecting clothes, blankets, water and food—the hospital is “bring your own everything”—I set off again. Mama Hawa wasn’t doing as well as I’d hoped. While the miscarriage may have been the most traumatic of her problems, it turned out she was also suffering from dysentery and malaria. The nurses seemed annoyed at my desire to know what her diagnoses were. Patients here are expected to just shut up and swallow whatever pills they’re given and if that medicine isn’t available, find a relative to go to town and buy it.

In a state of exhaustion such that nothing felt entirely real and everything felt entirely overwhelming, I spent the day looking after Mama Hawa along with two of her relatives who happened to be at the hospital looking after their sick mother. 

Around 3pm, I realized that I hadn’t eaten or slept in a very, very long time. I had intended to sleep at the hospital to keep Mama Hawa company, but a fellow volunteer happened to be coming back from town headed in my direction and more or less kidnapped me for my own good. She used a Snickers bar as bait. I sobbed as I left Mama Hawa’s side, terrified that she would die during the night. The other women in the ward spoke comforting words to me, but laughed with each other behind my back. “Who gets so worked up over a simple case of miscarriage, diarrhea, and fever?” they might have been saying. I forced a smile as I left, promising to bring little Muku to visit the next day.

I just got back from the hospital again. Traveling with a six year old Tanzanian kid was interesting. People kept yelling comments—some of which were rather obscene—as we walked hand-in-hand to the bus stop. We caught a ride with a Chinese road worker, which was the first piece of news that Muku relayed to his healthier looking mother. Her niece, a woman about my age and toting a 2-month-old baby, walked from her home about an hour away to help cook and clean for the patient.

I went to town to find milk and fruit and when I came back, Mama Hawa was laying next to the sleeping baby, staring at her with a desperate expression. I asked if there was anything she wanted to talk about, but she said she was just tired. She didn’t take her eyes off of her niece’s baby as she spoke.

When Muku and I got home, I asked Hawa what she had done all day.

“Cooked, cleaned, carried water, and brought corn to the machine to be ground,” she replied. I looked at her with obvious pity, and she continued: “Lots of Mamas came to help me, and I played a little too.”

Throughout this whole experience, I’ve been constantly amazed at the way people help each other out here. A woman I’ve never met walked with me all the way to the clinic in the dark. Patients helped fellow patients. Women came from all over to help cook and keep the family company. Men showed up on a moment’s notice to bury the baby. Though the official mourning process would have been considered inappropriate, friends came from hours away to help the family mourn the hopes they had built over the past months.

We’ve all heard that it takes a village to raise a child. This week I learned that it takes a village to lose a child, too. 

I will never stop being American

Sunday, December 4, 2011

My bedroom in Michigan.

I’m sitting in a pile of my past, carelessly tossing things into a big plastic bag slated for give-away. Dresses and pants and sweatshirts and t-shirts and shoes and purses and pajamas. I work at a comical speed, feeling nothing but relief as my closet slowly empties. My friend Abbey catches the soon-to-be-forgotten items and places them in a giant black bag. Hours go by and we fill up two bags, three bags, four bags. I’m astounded and a little embarrassed by the sheer volume of crap I’ve acquired over the years.

                                                     

For a while we work in silence, sometimes we chat about unrelated things, and every once in a while I uncover an entertaining memory and tell her about it. But we’re working on a deadline and there’s no time to get sentimental. Eye on the prize: A clean closet, a fresh start, less crap for my parents to store when my mom moves to Chicago and I head back to Tanzania. We throw the broken or otherwise useless stuff away and I marvel at the quantity of crap that will very, very slowly decompose in some landfill somewhere. I try to imagine how much space a lifetime of my garbage will eventually claim.  It makes me feel a little queasy.

I get deeper into my closet and further into the past. 

Toss another shirt printed with inside jokes I no longer understand. Another homecoming dress. Another pair of high heels I bought specifically to match that homecoming dress and never wore again. Another hoodie with the name of a play I was in or a team I was briefly affiliated with. 

I wonder if I should save some of these things—relics of my high-school self. But I’m in the zone now, tossing away sentimental item after sentimental item. No regrets, no second thoughts. No first thoughts, either, really. Just the mechanical act of tossing away.

I don’t need stuff to have memories. I repeat this to myself when the regrets start to come, hours after the stuff has been hauled away for good.  

I can’t bring myself to toss my prom dress. For a while I leave it hanging on the shelf—the lone survivor of my war on the past. Later I decide to give it to my cousin, in the hopes that she can find it a happy home. That dress deserves to be worn.

Things get a little more personal as Abbey and I begin to attack desks and drawers. We go through books, notebooks, pictures, journals, old schoolwork. This time I’m careful to place certain things in the “keep” pile.

I carefully, almost reverently, collect my old journals from their various hiding places around the room and place them in a backpack for safe keeping. I take a moment to hold each notebook and flip through page after page of big, sloppy writing. Rather than read the writing, I try to remember the feel of pen on paper. Try to remember being the person who wrote those words. I can’t. I look at the pages and think about the young girl who filled them. I try to picture myself as this girl, or this girl as me. It doesn’t quite work. I have the eerie feeling that the girl who covered those pages in sloppy scrawl is not the same as the young woman who is currently home on vacation after a year and a half in Tanzania.

~*~                                                                                     

Since I’ve gotten back from my brief vacation, PCVs keep asking me what the weirdest thing about America was. There were definitely moments—hundreds of them--when I thought, “Wow, this country is super bizarre.” I was especially shocked by how easy everything was. Want Taco Bell? You don’t even have to leave your car. In the mood for a hot shower? Just turn it on and hop in. Bored? Turn on the TV, or computer, or Wii, or any of the million other entertainment options regularly available to you. Want new stuff? Hop in the car and go buy it.

That’s weird, right?  

But, really, America’s no weirder than it was before I left. More people have iPhones, fashion’s changed a bit (thanks letting me raid your closet, Mom), but the country is still fundamentally the same.

What’s changed is the way I look at it.

One day Abbey and I were driving down Orchard Lake Rd, and I realized that the two of us were not, strictly speaking, alone…but we sort of were. Sitting at a traffic light, I peered through the windows of the cars around us. Old men, teenagers, mothers. Very few cars contained more than one or two people, but when added together it turned out Abbey and I were actually surrounded by hundreds of people, each one alone inside her individual ton of metal, and we were alone inside our ton of metal, and no one was really alone but no one was actually together. My head hurt.

In my village, there is exactly one car and it’s currently broken. Walking at a leisurely pace down thin dirt paths, I come in contact with hundreds of people each day, and greet most everyone, friends and strangers alike. We exchange “the news of the morning” or confirm that we “woke up peacefully.” We see each other and, for a brief moment, we connect.

That connection between strangers exists in America, but it takes special effort to seek it out. You can smile at strangers, and sometimes they’ll smile back. Bartenders and baristas will pretend to be your friend as long as you keep buying drinks. You can make small-talk with the person next to you on the plane, but only until you’ve reached cruising altitude and you both put in your headphones and slip back into your independent worlds.

Maybe I’m being unfair. I actually had a wonderful time in America. But besides the incredible selection of delicious delicious food, the material aspects weren’t what made the trip worthwhile. It was the human connections... Hours spent looking at old photos with my grandparents. Answering insightful questions posed by West Hills 8^th Graders and Model High Schoolers. Reconnecting with my oldest friends.

America might not always feel like home, but the people there will always be my people. I will never stop being American.

                                                                                  

But something in me has shifted over the past year and a half. How weird and sad to feel like a stranger in your homeland. How strange to walk down the aisles of Plum Market and be torn between buying twenty different kinds of rice, just because you can, and running out the door screaming “do you people seriously need twenty different kinds of rice to choose from?” I will never be able to walk into a supermarket without imagining my neighbor’s children—eyes full of hope, bellies full of nothing. I will never be able to clean out my closet without being haunted by little Razaki’s bare feet.

                                        

I wish that last paragraph were true, but I’m almost certainly exaggerating.

Here’s the truth: A day will come when I will walk into a supermarket and feel only my own hunger. I’ll probably own an iPhone at some point, and I will talk on it as I drive mindlessly down a crowded, lonely street. One day I’ll have another closet full of clothes and nothing but pictures by which to remember little shoeless Razaki. 

Here's the truth: One day I'll read an article about something terrible going on in Africa, and I will feel nothing. 

Here’s the truth: I will never stop being American.

kind of like a ghost story (kind of like the crucible?)

A few months ago I was talking to my 10-year-old neighbor, Hawa, and she told me that her primary school had closed down one of the choo (latrine) stalls because it was, if I understood her properly, haunted by an angry spirit that was causing students to faint and speak in tongues.

This morning I asked her if the choo in question was still causing problems and she informed me that it isn’t. I asked her why not.

“The teachers prayed,” she stated, as though it were obvious.

“Where?”

“In the choo.”

I took a moment to visualize this. I imagined candles and elaborate costumes and leather drums. As Hawa described the prayer session in more detail, though, I realized that it probably involved more cell phone MP3 players and fewer tribal trimmings. Oh, development.

Apparently both the Muslim and the Christian teachers prayed together, because you never know if the spirit is a Muslim spirit or a Christian spirit. Hawa, who is Muslim, firmly believes it was the Christian teachers’ prayers that did the trick, though she was unable to explain why.

Regardless of whether it was the work of psychosomatics, Allah, or Jesus, being rid of the evil choo spirit is super good news for the primary school. There aren’t enough choos to accommodate all the students even when none of them are being frequently by angry spirits.

The bad news is that the spirit from the haunted choo has somehow traveled to the secondary school, becoming the latest in a series of unfortunate events preventing my Appropriate Technology Seminar from following anything resembling a schedule. The spirit has changed its tactics—rather than attack the unfortunate attendants of a choo at the secondary school, it takes the shape of “genies” that seem to prey exclusively upon girls.

The teachers informed me that the genie possessions occur about once a day now, and sometimes the girls will become possessed in pairs. Most of the genies have names and are capable of speech, albeit accompanied by a lot of foaming at the mouth and convulsing. Rumor has it that these possessions are also taking place at the secondary school in the next village over. That village is pretty sure that they have found the woman responsible for the curse that is causing all these possessions. She is allegedly the former mistress of a man who (again, allegedly) has a habit of “going with” secondary school girls.

I asked one of the teachers about this story and wrote down his answer word-for-word—mostly because the way he speaks English makes everything sound like a Bible story and I love it.   

“It is said that people who are religious came to know that this woman is not a human being and they warned the man and he decided to chase the woman away,” he explained. “The woman promised that the man will suffer and will be facing things which are not good. So it is said that every woman who runs with that man will get this problem [of losing consciousness and becoming possessed]. It is said that the one student who fell [today] had been with him for two days in the past. This is just what is said.”

The possessions have become so routine that the daily drama is played out without fuss or excitement among the bystanders. Rather, the genie attacks are treated with, of all things, a cautious lightheartedness and sense of humor.

Here’s how it usually works.

A girl faints in the middle of a lesson. Sometimes she starts screaming immediately; sometimes she goes limp for a while first. Either way, she is carried out of the classroom and placed on the floor in an empty classroom or under the shade of one of the few scraggly trees that grow curiously out of the desert-esque landscape of the school campus. At some point, the girl’s eyes roll to the back of her head and she starts foaming at the mouth, twitching, maybe convulsing and some of the girls look like they are legitimately having seizures. It’s pretty terrifying the first time you see it, but as cold hearted as this may make me sound, you get used to it after the first few times. Some of the girls start to kick and scream and have to be restrained by several male students. At this point, they finally start responding (sort of) to the stimuli around them, but will usually do so in the character of another person—the “genie,” they call it.

This is the fun part for the observers lucky enough to be permitted to leave class to help their friend regain consciousness. With a lackadaisicalness that seems a little out of place in this situation, they start asking the genie questions. What’s your name? Where do you come from? Why are you possessing so-and-so? Do you have any special powers? Does the God of the underworld demand that the teachers cancel exams, by any chance? Sometimes the genie just screams and yells profanities. Sometimes the genie tells an elaborate story about who she (or he?) is and what she’s doing here. One genie likes to demand a soda as sacrifice in exchange for the girl’s spirit. That genie gets laughed at more than any of the others.

If the girl is Christian, a teacher will donate his cell phone so her friends can play her MP3s of hymns translated into Swahili and accompanied by what sounds like a foreign missionary’s idea of “African” style music. If she hasn’t been cured within a few hours, the Pentecostal minister (who happens to be the Headmistress’s husband) might come to attend to her spiritual needs.

If the girl is Muslim, her friends will attempt to cast off the genie by reading certain passages of the Quran that are, apparently, good for this kind of situation.

Sometimes things get complicated. One of the girls who suffers from these attacks is a Christian, but she becomes possessed by a Muslim genie named Fatuma. Fatuma is, according to the girl’s unconscious outbursts, a princess from an underwater kingdom ruled by a man named Hamadi. His second in command is named Shaarif, and there are a few other members of the underwater royalty whose names and descriptions she can recite consistently when prompted. One of the princes (or something like that, I don’t have the lineage down exactly) is intent on marrying her (the student, not the genie) and is trying to carry her spirit down into the underworld with him. She doesn’t snap out of the possession until her teachers and friends grab hold of her and somehow convince her that they want her to stay here in this world.

In a school system that still teaches almost entirely through rote memorization, I’ve never seen such creativity from a student—conscious or otherwise.

         
You may be wondering whether the Christian student possessed by a Muslim demon can be cured with Christian or Muslim prayer. The answer, according to the teachers, is that you have to address the student, not the demon, in trying to bring her out of the possessed state. While explaining why this is, one teacher said that he believes the girls are just pretending and therefore there’s no point trying to pacify a non-existent spirit. I thought it was kind of odd that he believed prayer was necessary to cure the girls, even though he believed their ailments to be entirely psychological in nature.

The more I think about it, though, it’s beginning to make sense.

The teachers and I have launched a private investigation into the “genie situation.” We began by trying to find a pattern—what do these girls have in common? Pretty much every student at that school is dealing with what we Americans might call “serious issues at home,” but some issues are more serious than others. One of these girls recently suffered the death of her mother, another lost her brother, a third is discriminated against for having been born out of wedlock, etc, etc, etc. Even if these attacks are being caused by genies, our investigation team determined, it seems that the genies are particularly attracted to emotionally vulnerable girls.

This is a culture where crisis and trauma are expected to be forgotten and moved on from almost immediately. The young woman whose brother died a few months ago would not be expected to burst into tears and rush out of the classroom on occasion, the way that an American teenager might as she goes through the grieving process. But when that girl becomes rigid, collapses, starts speaking in tongues and demanding soda in exchange for her soul, no one is particularly surprised. She doesn’t get gentle pats on the backs and assurances like “we’re here for you” and “it’s ok to still miss your brother”; she gets a roomful of spectators who watch (and sometimes giggle) as she foams at the mouth and screams.

But really, what’s the difference? What the girl wants, and gets, is attention and the assurance that her peers and teachers love and support her. Every time her friends beg her to remain here on Earth rather than follow the genie Fatuma to the underwater Kingdom, they are reminding her that she is wanted here, she is loved. I want to believe that every time this girl comes out of her possession and rejoins our world, she is one step closer to growing more confident with herself and more able to ignore the horrible things the village gossips say about her.

Alas, this style of community psychotherapy is seriously disruptive to the learning process (and my appropriate tech project). One way or another, the genies have got to go. The various religious and spiritual communities are working on the issue from their end (though I desperately hope their chosen cure doesn’t involve sacrificing the “witch” who is supposedly responsible for this). Meanwhile, some of the teachers and I are looking into the possibility of holding group therapy sessions with the doctor from the local clinic, who luckily enough happens to be a rather young women who knows how to talk to teenagers.

           

I debated a lot about posting this blog… felt a little bad, like I’m somehow fetishizing or objectifying Tanzanian culture by telling you all about this particularly “exotic” situation. But, really, it’s not so exotic, is it? Everywhere in the world, teenagers are struggling to find ways to deal with the terribly difficult task of growing up and learning to express themselves when no one wants to listen. I know some of this is funny to us “Westerners”, but in between chuckles I want us to see that, even in a situation as seemingly strange as an outbreak of genie possessions, there is a common thread of humanity that holds us all together as one flawed but beautiful human race.

how to bake a cake (in an african village)

You will need:

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

1 cup milk

2 cups all-purpose flour

½ cup butter

1 tsp vanilla

Patience

Instructions: 

Take a deep breath. This might take a while.

The process begins the next time you go to a town with over 10,000 residents. You must find the only store that sells such western luxuries as shampoo and chocolate and buy some baking powder, creepy-never-goes-bad-on-the-shelf-no-matter-how-hot-your-house-is margarine (“Blueband”), and very chemical tasting vanilla “flavouring”. You will be tempted to buy powdered milk. Don’t. It costs more than you make in a day with your volunteer stipend.  (Unless it’s the dry season and none of the village animals are getting enough nutrition to produce milk, in which case go ahead and buy the powdered milk.)  

When you get back home, make sure you have enough charcoal. If you don’t, find the nearest child who is inexplicably but not unexpectedly at home in the middle of the day on a Wednesday. Ask the kid to go down to the road for you and stop one of the guys who rides by every few hours on his bike, selling charcoal. When you hear the child screaming “MKAA!! MKAA!!” it is time to run down to the road to help the man carry the large bag of charcoal up to your house. After he puts the charcoal down, suddenly realize that you should have agreed on a price beforehand. Barter futilely for a few minutes before paying him 10,000 shillings (even though you know your neighbor only paid 8,000 last week).

If your cell phone is charged, look at the time. If not, look at the sun. If the sun is already near the top of the mountain, you don’t have time to bake a cake today. Give the charcoal-finding kid a sticker for her hard work, find a neighbor to feed you dinner, and wait till the morning to try again.

In the morning, walk half a mile to find the Mama who owns a dairy cow (complements of Heifer International—www.heifer.org ) and ask if you can buy half a liter of milk. The cow may be sick, in which case you’ll have to go to another family’s house to see if you can buy some of their goat’s milk. It’s likely they’ve already sold today’s milk in advance. In this case, put in an order for the next morning. If you don’t have anything else to do that day, stick around, drink some chai, eat some ugali, and play with the kids. You might get the goat’s milk for free the next day.

Once you have acquired milk, start hunting for eggs. Four is a lot, so you may need to hit up a few chicken-owning houses before you get enough. Make sure to test them all before you buy them—don’t buy the ones that float. While wandering around searching for eggs, stop by the store to buy a kilo of flour and sugar.

When you’ve finally got three eggs, you may find yourself in the situation where the last available egg in the vicinity has not quite yet been laid. In this case, gratefully accept a cup of cardamom, clove, and cinnamon-spiced chai and prepare to make small talk while the chicken balks and prepares to relieve itself of your cake ingredient.

Once the final egg has been lain and purchased (try not to think too hard about it as you are handed the still-body-temperature egg), head home and prepare to light your charcoal stove. If there are any kids nearby, ask them to help you collect “taka-taka”—farm waste—to use as kindling. When the kids aren’t looking, pour some kerosene on top of the kindling. The kids would make fun of you because they consider using kerosene to start a fire serious cheating, besides wasting valuable lamp fuel. No matter what you do, do not let the children find out that you’re baking a cake. Tell them you’re cooking ugali (corn mush, the staple carb here) if they ask (they will ask).  

Once you have a fire roaring, mix the ingredients together and put them in a small greased pot. Take a slightly larger pot and place three rocks in the bottom. Place the small pot inside the big pot, cover the big pot, and put a little more than half the charcoal on top of the cover. You’ve just (sort of) made an oven!  Don't forget to lick the bowl--raw eggs be damned. This is no time to be wasting precious food. 

As you wait for your cake to bake, assess your water situation. Do you have enough water to do dishes? If not, find a kid to fetch you some water from the hand-dug well about a kilometer away.  Reward her with an extra-big sticker and make a mental note to give her a piece of cake later.

Check on the cake often to make any adjustments necessary to your oven-ish-thing.

When it’s done, let the cake cool off while you put on some drinking water to boil (can’t waste those hot coals!). Remind yourself that, even though it’s kind of foggy and brown, whatever bugs in there are plotting to hurt you are about to be destroyed by the wonder of heat. If you haven’t already decided what to do with the cake (eating it all by yourself is a totally legitimate option), try to remember if any of the neighbors have had babies or other cake-deserving life events lately. If not, share it with the neighbor with the fewest kids—bigger servings for the grown-ups.   

As the last of the sugary goodness melts on your tongue and the sun begins to slip back behind the mountain marking the end of a day entirely spent in pursuit of cake, it’s ok to feel incredibly accomplished. Your cake may not change the world, but it will make it a little sweeter.