I’m seating at the head table as the guest of honor at a graduation party for a bunch of kids I’ve never met. Someone gets up to give a speech and I listen for the first few seconds, then decide that I’m too lazy to try to pay attention to a speech I only understand about 30% of. I’m zoning out when suddenly I hear some weird words and notice that everyone is staring at me. If my Swahili isn’t failing me (which it very well could be), I’m fairly certain the speaker just said “Jewish,” “Jesus’s tribe,” and “great blessing.”
I had a lot of expectations coming in to the Peace Corps, but there are some notions you just can‘t preconceive. I didn’t have any idea how to respond, but they were staring at me like they expected me to give a speech so I stood up and said, “Congrats to the graduates. God bless everyone.” At least, I think I said that. I might have said, “I like oranges. Where is the bathroom?” Either way, everyone seemed happy enough and applauded a lot.
That’s a fairly representative snapshot of life in my new village. People compliment me and are very excited by my presence, and I smile and am confused most of the time. But most of the time, I love it. My village is about half Muslim and half Christian, and though everyone gets along wonderfully, they have very strong ties to their particular religious communities. As such, “What is your religion?” is one of the first questions I get asked by everyone I meet. At first, this question made me very nervous. Many Tanzanians I meet have never even heard the Swahili word for the Jewish people, “Wayahudi,” or they’ve seen it only in the Bible or Qur’an and assume that Wayahudi are some kind of mythical extinct population. I get very long, very awkward, very strange looks from pretty much everyone. And then the questions start coming.
“Who is a Jew?” is a question that entire college courses, none of which I’ve taken, are focused on. So when I find myself struggling to explain, in Swahili, what it means to be Jewish, I feel a little overwhelmed. I also end up using the word “we” for things that I myself very rarely do.
“We pray on Saturday,” I’ll start, and the Mama will interrupt me: “Ah yes, you’re a Seventh Day Adventist.”
It’s a long process, but can be very rewarding. I’ve actually found that being Jewish provides for good balance in my village, since neither the Muslim nor the Christian communities can claim me as exclusively their own. I fasted with my Muslim neighbors during Ramadan and partied it up on Eid--sort of like Halloween except instead of getting candy, you go door-to-door and eat ungodly amounts of spiced rice and beef. I also spend every Sunday zoning out during a sermon I don’t understand at one of the many Churches in my village--so far I’ve hit Lutheran and Pentecostal, next weekend I’m going to Seventh-Day Adventist and next up is Catholic.
My Muslim neighbors are delighted to hear that Jews don’t eat pigs either, and my Christian neighbors think it’s badass that I come from the same “tribe” as Jesus, in their words. One of my Mamas has taken a particular interest in learning about my religion. Having conversations about topics as intense as religion is not easy in a language I’ve been learning for only three months now, but she’s patient and we spend a lot of time flipping through dictionaries and apologetically grinning at each other. After I managed to explain Rosh Hashana to her, she gave me a papaya “for a sweet new year.”
One of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in Tanzania so far came when the same Mama asked me why there are so few Jews. I explained that we aren’t into proselytizing, and also that a genocide was committed against us during World War II. Having to boil the Holocaust down to concepts simple enough to explain with my shitty Swahili was tough. In the end I just said something like, “A bad man with a lot of power didn’t like Jewish people. He didn‘t like people who look like you either. They were forced to move to special villages where they were forced to work like slaves. Then they were killed. Six million were killed.” She held my hand for a very long time and said something very fast in what I think was a mixture of Arabic, Swahili, and her local tribal language.
Later that day, I was listening to my shortwave radio, and they were talking about the Rwandan genocide. I realized that I’d never really thought about the Holocaust in the context of other genocides. I also realized that it's really bizarre that I'd never seriously thought about the Holocaust in the context of other genocides. Jews like to think of ourselves as special, removed, our experiences separating rather than uniting us with other peoples - but wouldn't it make more sense for us to emerge from that experience with a sense of profound solidarity? When we say "Never Again," shouldn't we mean Darfur, too? Just some food for thought.
