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. 

doing stuff

I’ve been waiting for this water project to be completely finished before I updated my blog with an entry that’s been forming in my brain for a week or so now. The entry started brewing on the trip between my site and Dodoma. Dodoma, as a quick aside, is the actual capital of Tanzania, but one of those Brasilia-type capitals randomly built in the middle of nowhere. It looks like the cityscape equivalent of a skinny child wearing his father’s nicest suit. Besides the actual law-making, Dar Es Salaam is where the real action goes down.  Dar, in stark contrast, grew organically out of a small fishing village is as big for its clothes as Dodoma is small. Dar is more like a full grown man with a beer belly squeezed into a speedo.

Anyway, I was heading to our Dodoma Regional Gathering—a chance for the 20 or so volunteers in this area to get together and do some cross-sectoral best practice sharing. As I sat staring out the window during the billion-hour bus ride to my “nearest regional center” I thought about how great it would be to finally get a chance to write a blog about actually finish something. I would call it “getting stuff done.” I had just spoken on the phone with my counterpart at the secondary school and was fairly convinced that—for real this time—the tank was going to be done and ready to paint by the time I got back in the vil.

 Well here we are, several days back in the village, and I’m still unable to write an entry entitled “getting stuff done.” You could say we’re building at a steady but leisurely pace but you could also say we’re seriously dragging. My counterpart/carpenter/appropriate technology guru says it’s going to be about 3 more days. I’m not sure how to translate that into real time. He originally told me the project would take 10 days. We’re going on 3 months. So here’s an entry called “doing stuff,” which seems more appropriate to my life right now than an entry called “getting stuff done.”

At the beginning of Regional Gathering, we were asked to list our expectations for the two day gathering. One smartass replied, “I expect to learn more acronyms.”

I only stayed long enough to learn one new acronym because I had to leave for Dar to attend TDE (training development and evaluation; also known as “TOTOT”—Training of Trainers of Trainers—this is a funny joke to people who don’t have a lot to laugh about). Leaving Dodoma early was kind of sad, because I missed out the only mini-golf course in Tanzania, but I was excited for the opportunity to go to Dar and hang out with a smaller group of people. Only four volunteers were involved in the TDE-ing, compared to the usual group of 30+ volunteers that descend on Dar for various trainings and conferences throughout our terms here. Instead of staying at a hotel downtown, we all decided to stay with ex-pat families who generously open their doors to PCVs and offer us access to their unbelievable luxuries like refrigerators and washing machines (those things are seriously like magic, but I digress…)

           

I’ve been to Dar many times before (you may have noticed my complaining about the 2- to 3-day trip is a common theme in this blog), but I’ve never spent an entire trip on the Peninsula, the ex-pat area of town.

Here is my observation based on five days of going native with the ex-pat community in Dar: Ex-pats, awesome though they undoubtedly are, live the weirdest lives of anyone I know. And I know some weird people (see: “lifestyle-ists,” freegans, orthodox Jews, republicans).  They live in this bubbly world-within-a-world, but it’s impossible to create a complete replica of the worlds they left behind. Instead they’ve created this weird mixedmemoryland that contains selections from the various European, American, and other cultures they’ve come from—more similar to each other than they are to Tanzania, certainly, but still remarkably different (just look at how the French respond to a leader with a mistress while Americans are barely learning to laugh at ourselves over the Lewinsky scandal [on a related note: “Lewinsky” is in my Microsoft Word dictionary as a reminder of how much and for how long we all freaked out about that]).

While in ex-pat land, I spent an afternoon hanging out with Peace Corps staff at the yacht club while children of all shades of white (with a few tan-ish ones mixed in) ran around yelling in English and French and Italian—no Swahili, except a few words muttered between the Nannies as they chased after their hyperactive and (to my village-centric eyes) incredibly healthy looking children. I even went sailing on a catamaran! (And by “I went sailing,” I mean I tried to keep out of the way while Anna kept us alive and on course.)

The food in ex-pat land was enough alone to make me forget I was in Tanzania… and upset my stomach—shock and confusion registering itself loud and clear every time I ate a meal that wasn’t rice and beans. But no matter. It was all delicious and worth it. I enjoyed Thai food, yogurt, cheese, and homemade brownies with the incredibly generous couple that hosted me (what’s up Tim and Jill?), and splurged on incredible Ethiopian food with the PCV crew.

Then, in an event that captures the absurdity of ex-pat culture in its entirety, we went to the goat races.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Goat races.

I assume it was some kind of parody of horse races, but I’ve never been to those so I don’t know how much was serious and how much was ironic. Pretty much everything seemed hilarious to me, from the buckets of Miller beer with a complementary bottle-opener-ring to the cocktails costing a little more than my daily stipend. Did I mention that the goats were dressed up in costume, as were many of the attendees? Yeah. Weird. The event was ostensibly for charity, though I'm not sure which one(s). They certainly made a few bucks off of me, especially after the first bucket of beer. With the help of a buddy willing to put me on his shoulders like a child, I actually get a chance to watch the goats racing… though we stayed for hours, no one else I was there with managed to do the same. It pays to be small, sometimes. The goat outfits were cute, I’ll admit, but the whole thing would have been more realistic if there were skinny four-year-olds chasing the goats with giant sticks and screaming what sounds like but almost certainly isn’t obscenities in the guttural-sounding local language (ah, life in the village).

But Dar wasn’t all fun and goat races—I was there to do work. To get stuff done. Or at the very least, to do stuff.

TDE itself was a lot of work, but rewarding. Our job was to plan the schedule for the incoming training class and write up “session primers” to guide the various facilitators who will be teaching about everything from compost making to community entry strategies to HIV/AIDS prevention. Hyped up on sugar from American candy (thank you Mr. Honeyman!!) we worked long into the night (or at least, until the late afternoon) pounding away at the computers, trying to fit enough information to help these new PCTs survive and thrive for the next 2 years into just 9 weeks of training. But alas! Even TDE wouldn’t really fit in an entry about getting stuff done, because a lot of things were left shagalabagala [=chaotic] when I had to peace out to get back to the village and do more stuff that has yet to be finished.

So here I am. Back in the village. I feel like I’ve been in-and-out of here so much, it’s hard to remember that this is my home, and I’m not on some crazy 2-year-long roadtrip across Tanzania. But I’m finally here for a good long time now—no reason to leave again until November. The building crew will be coming on Friday to put the finishing touches (“finishing” is a relative term) on the tank and I’ve got the students brainstorming for an educational mural we’ll paint once the tank is ready. (Thank you to Ben Falik and the Summer in the City crew for helping me develop a healthy love of all things mural-y).  

For those who pay attention to this sort of thing, it’s Rosh Hashana today—the Jewish New Year. Maybe it’s because I mess up a lot, but I’ve always loved any holiday or event that gives me an excuse to begin with a fresh start. As I enter fresh start #4 of this year (the others being: January 1^st, anniversary of arrival in Tanzania, my birthday), I resolve to be less concerned about getting things done in my western conception of an appropriate time table. So what if the water project has taken 2 months? I could have come in with a set-in-stone timetable, hired a bunch of contractors and paid to get a bunch of materials brought in, but by waiting for the community contribution as it slowly, piece-by-piece materialized, we really built something together. Or rather, are building. Still.

For today, it’s time to get some smaller stuff done. I bought a bunch of apples and honey from Arusha on my way back, and I’m about to go next door to share it with the neighbors.

L’shana tova. May you all have a sweet new year in which you do a lot of stuff and don’t worry too much about getting stuff done. 

Who's in charge here?

Since my last update, I’ve had my first visitor from home, attending mid-service conference, and started/finished my first funded project. It’s been a busy month. Here goes my attempt to capture it without boring you silly. 

After weeks of being told by my headmistress that the community contribution was never going to come through, it actually did. Little by little, and mostly through students’ parents rather than the village government, we got all the materials we needed to start building. Who says Africans are lazy? We finished with the first part of the project—building the tank—and will be building the stoves this week.  It was great to go to mid-service conference feeling like I actually had an answer when people asked what I’ve done for the past year. It was also awesome to see what great projects they are all up to, from starting a pre-school to HIV/AIDS care groups to chickens and cows and more. It’s a diverse selection of projects—I liked seeing where everyone found the intersection between their skills and interests and their communities’ needs.

Anyway, back to me… By the time the community contribution materialized, I had rush to Kenya to pick up Cameron, my first American visitor and soon-to-be Peace Corps/Senegal Volunteer. So I put the project on hold for a few days and hurried across the border. 

I rather liked Nairobi, despite its reputation for being one of the most dangerous cities in Africa (hence, “Nairobbery”). Billboards advertising products that aren’t even available in TZ, huge buildings, clean parks, giant supermarkets… and many people speaking beautiful, fluent English with this sort-of-Britishy-but-still-African-sounding accent.

The highlight of the time we spent in Nairobi was visiting the park where Wangari Maathai and the women of the Greenbelt Movement successfully protected public land from being turned into a giant corporate building. It was great to see an African city where the residents have and use a large green space for recreation. Students doing homework under trees, lovers holding hands and sharing soda, parents running after escaped children… all framed by skyscrapers and the hustle and bustle of one of the business capitals of the continent. If anyone is looking for proof that we’re successfully exporting western culture, for better or worse, visit Nairobi.

After Kenya, we spent a few days at my site, met the neighbors, drank chai until we sweat sugary milk, started organizing for the building project at the secondary school (now nearly complete!!), visiting my site-mate, and hiking around the foot hills of Hanang. After being at site for a while, we headed to a small island called Pemba located on the archipelago of Zanzibar. I cannot recommend Pemba more highly. We rented bikes from a VSO volunteer and a random kid off the street, and in just a couple days were able to see pretty much the entire Island, including a lovely little stretch of rainforest opening out suddenly into a huge stretch of virgin beach. Rivaling the environment, the culture of Pemba is incredibly rich… a wonderful mix of African, Indian, Arabian, and something distinctly Zanzibari that’s hard to put a label on. Every night we went out and enjoyed the street food—octopus soup, shish kebab-y things, fish that’s basically still breathing it’s so fresh, spicy potato soup, and my absolute favorite: spicy ginger tea out of tiny cups, drank while making small talk with old men on their way home from mosque.

While not exactly a down-side, it is important to remember that Pemba is very conservative and not used to foreigners yet, so appropriate dress is crucial to avoiding offense and rude comments. This is rather difficult when you’re a woman who wants to go swimming. Traveling with a male companion, I definitely became more aware of the differences in how we were treated and what things we were allowed to do/comfortable doing. I had to find a totally deserted piece of beach before I felt comfortable getting in the water, whereas Cameron could have stripped down and jumped in pretty much anywhere. I also regularly looked around and realized that I was the only woman doing whatever I was doing—eating soup on the street, being out after dark, drinking tea with the elders, riding a bike.

It’s the same in the village; my white skin and foreign origins act as a sort of trump card that gave me freedom to do things women are technically allowed but not really supposed to do. I’m not treated like a man, but I’m not treated like a woman either. I inhabit a space where white privilege is so pervasive that gender has little room to make itself known. It’s not exactly bad, at least in terms of getting things done, but it’s just disconcerting. I really can’t complain because if I were viewed as 22-year-old women are here, the villagers would be too busy trying to marry me off to listen to what I’ve come to do.

Taking these thoughts back to the village, I had the privilege of watching, and translating for, two of my favorite debaters as they fought it out over gender roles. Cameron and Mama S. are easily the two most opinionated people I know. It all started when I told Mama S. that Cameron is a few months younger than me. She was vehemently convinced that that just wasn’t possible. Baba then explained that, even if a man is younger than me according to the calendar, I’m actually younger than him because he’s a man and therefore he takes care of me. He further explained that, according to the scriptures, I come from man’s rib, which means I was created after man was. Thus, I will always be younger than and submissive to all men on the planet. I asked if that held true for their two-year-old grandson and they affirmed that the toddler is, in fact, older than me. At this point I just had to start laughing, but Cameron was still ready to argue the point. At one point, Cameron made the argument that I run and hike faster than he does, but he bikes faster than me, so we really are equals physically. Mama just used the point he made about biking as an argument in favor of the “men are better than women” point. Baba S. refused to believe that it was possible that I had an easier time climbing Mt. Hanang than Cameron did, and later told me in secret that he thinks Cameron must have been pretending to make me feel better. 

The argument somehow expanded to talking about how we discipline children in the states, and who’s in charge of deciding the family’s schedule for the day. Obviously someone (preferably the father) has to be the stronger, meaner parent. And someone has to decide what the other does for the day. They asked what would happen if I woke up one morning and wanted to go to Katesh (a town about an hours’ bus ride away) and Cameron said no. Would I really still go without permission? Wouldn’t he beat me up until I agreed to stay? What terrible things would happen when I got home? We tried to explain that, at least ideally, relationships in our culture are based on mutual trust and equality—each partner does what they want, with respect for the needs and desires of the other partner. Baba and Mama S. just kept asking, “But who’s in charge? Who gets the final say?” 

As the argument wound down, Baba S. announced that he had just one question left to ask: “Who pays the bride price?”

“No one,” I replied.

He looked at me like I had just told him that all cows in America have three heads. And that’s when it hit me.

My Tanzanian parents don’t care who’s in charge as long as someone is. Yes, to some extent, it’s about men being dominant over women, but on a deeper level, it’s about societies and families having a rigid structure. For someone living in a very patriarchal society, the concept of a matriarchal society is more fathomable and comfortable than the concept of a world where everyone is equally free to make choices for themselves.

The debate between Cameron and Mama S. raises provocative questions about the way international NGOs approach women’s empowerment. Seeing the questionable way women are treated in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and the remarkable amount of work they do compared to their (often drunk) husbands, the development community has responded by distributing aid money so that it benefits women more than men. It’s absolutely logical, since they’ve proven more trustworthy as well as more in need. Microloans, community development projects, HIV/AIDS education, farming technology, fuel-saving stoves, small-scale income generation projects—the new trend is to focus the majority of resources on women in pretty much every development effort out there. While I definitely think that’s a step up from focusing mostly on men, I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of leaving the men out. And I do see the men being left out of a lot of development efforts these days.

What’s the danger of a woman-focused, woman-led development movement? Do I envision a future Africa where women call the shots and men are destined to spend their lives following after their wives’ skirt-tails? No, of course not. But if we really want to be promoting gender equality rather than just the almost vacuous concept of women’s empowerment, we have to promote equality in our work on the ground and not just in theory.     

Children of Ham

“You see now?” The Headmistress towers over me, all six feet of her glowing with triumph as though her long-argued point is finally indisputable. “You wazungu keep your promises and show up on time. That is why you are rich. We Africans are lazy and stupid. We descend from the bad son, the dark son, the slow son. That is why we are poor. That’s why the community hasn’t brought stones and sand for the project. If the project fails, it is a punishment from God for the Africans’ lazy ways."

The giant woman pauses, catching her breath. I narrow my eyes and prepare my response. How do you say institutionalized racism in Kiswahili?

Before I can respond, she dismisses me with a wave of her hand and the most frustrating argument ever: “It’s in the Bible.”

“Madam, we agreed the other day that white men probably had some hand in translating what is considered the word of God. Don’t you think they might have had a reason to convince black people that they aren’t as good? And after all of the colonialism and oppression and slavery, of course it’s hard to feel confident, and if you don’t feel confident, you lose hope, you don’t bother working hard because you don’t believe it will be worth it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do great things if you believe in yourself and…” She’s just looking amused. I pull out my last card. A desperate attempt. “What about Obama? You think he’s lazy and stupid?”

“Oh, daughter, your president is only half African. You are so kind to try to defend us, though. Thank you."

She sighs. I sigh. We’ve been having this debate for two weeks. I’m sick of it. As a last-ditch effort, I try pulling out whatever I can remember from the liberation theology course I took senior year of college. I can’t figure out how to say “God is on the side of the oppressed” in Swahili. And even if I could translate it, and convince her that people in this village count as oppressed people, I doubt she’d agree with the belief that today’s oppressed are analogous to the Bible’s Israelites. She is constantly reminding me of my superiority above other white people on account of my being a member of the chosen people. 

Let’s back up a bit. Here’s how the argument began.

Last week, funding for my “Appropriate Technology Training Program” came through. The plan is to train students how to build three kinds of fuel-efficient stove and a 40,000 liter rainwater harvesting tank. As soon as the funding arrived, two counterparts and I traveled to Arusha to buy materials. The trip went amazingly well—we not only found all the materials in one day, we also got great prices. My counterparts were dedicated and honest, carefully accounting for every single shilling. We’re all set to start…except. The community contribution.

In accordance with Peace Corps policy and general good sense, the community is required to donate in services or materials at least 25% of the total cost of the project. The theory is that they’ll feel more ownership over the project this way, be more involved and dedicated to its success, and more likely to do something about it if there are problems in the future. For this project, the community agreed to donate a few trailers of stones, concrete, and sand in addition to manual labor.

Every morning for the past week, the village chairman has said that he will be holding a meeting with all the sub-village chairpeople to delegate responsibilities. Every evening he says that the meeting will be tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow… We’re supposed to start building on Monday. Still no meeting. Still no stones.

Yes, I’m frustrated. No, I don’t believe this has anything to do with some kind of biblically mandated racial inferiority. Duh.

Madam tells me that I’m very good for taking two years of my life to try to help her village, but I shouldn’t be upset if I don’t see any results. Her people are just doomed to a life of wretchedness and poverty. It’s been that way since time immemorial. They are a less blessed people. God makes no mistakes, she says, so there is a reason for their misfortune. They’ve clearly done something wrong.

I can’t decide whether to scream or cry. This nonsense is coming from a brilliant, dedicated educator who has worked so hard to improve her own life—becoming headmistress of the secondary school and one of the wealthiest people, certainly the wealthiest woman, in the village.

The colonialists might be gone, but their presence isn’t necessary anymore anyway. Their legacy lives on in Madam’s fervent belief in her own inferiority. Their legacy lives on in Madam’s constant deferral to my nonexistent authority. I’m a 22 year old kid with no practical training in anything remotely relevant to the work I’m doing here. All I have is a liberal arts degree, idealism, and two years to spare. But she sees my skin and immediately decides that I’m better than she is.

This argument is making me question things I don’t want to question.

What am I really doing here? Every time I teach a lesson or plan a project, am I just reinforcing the idea that I’m somehow superior because I have education and resources?

By an accident of fate, I was born to a very comfortable family in a very wealthy nation. By an accident of fate, Madam was born into a poor family in one of the poorest countries on this planet. Perhaps in order to avoid accepting that the world is a cruel and random place, or else because of a legacy of instruction and intervention from people in whose interest it was to convince Africans that they are inferior, Madam doesn't see any accidents at all.  

How do you convince someone of their value when they comfortably believe that God has cursed them, their ancestors, and their descendants for all eternity? 

the big city

Stepping off the bus at the Ubungo Bus Stand in Dar Es Salaam, I’m immediately assaulted by thick moist air flavored with car exhaust, heated by the equatorial sun and millions of sweating human bodies. Screaming men greet me with cries of “Arusha!” or “Nairobi! Nairobi!” As the men try to grab my bags and direct me towards busses heading to all sorts of places I don’t want to go, I focus on keeping my wallet in my pocket and my temper under control. My track record is pretty good--I’ve never lost my wallet and only slapped a bus agent once. Upon arrival, my first thought (after “where’s the nearest bathroom?”) is usually, “why did I think this was a good idea?”

Over the past two weeks, I’ve traveled from my village to Dar twice. That puts me pretty firmly in the crazy category. Even before the insanity of arrival, it takes two days and up to four cars, vans, or busses to just get there. More often than not I’m basically sitting on my neighbor’s lap (if I sit on their lap completely, I might get to ride for free like the children). I’m frequently holding a child or a chicken or both.

Busses are bad, but nothing compares to the mental and emotional whiplash I’ve experience traveling between the multiple worlds that exist within this country.

I don’t know where I belong in Dar. I’m not like most aid workers, driving big white Land Rovers and checking email on my smartphone between meetings. I’m certainly not any kind of Tanzanian. I wear a khanga but I’m not a village girl. I wear jeans but I’m not a city girl. I wear a backpack but I’m not a backpacker. I’m not a tourist or a short-term volunteer, wandering around with eyes wide with pain at the first glimpse of an unfair world. I’m not a fashionable expat wearing big designer sunglasses and a bored expression.

Everywhere I go, I feel underdressed and tactless. My clothes feel frumpy and my Teva sandals just plain ugly. At up-scale restaurants and clubs, I feel like an mshamba (Tanzanian equivalent of hillbilly) who shouldn’t have been allowed out of the village. At the grocery stores I feel like a doe-eyed idiot salivating over the multiple cereal options. I can’t shake the feeling that everyone is staring at me and judging, but I’m also shocked and a little disturbed by the fact that a large number of people are totally ignoring me. I’ve grown accustomed to my fishbowl.

This year, Peace Corps celebrates 50 years of turning Americans into unclassifiable freaks in capital cities around the developing world. This month, I celebrate one year of joining the freak show and loving it. None of those years has been easy, but nothing worth doing ever is.

Yesterday I had the privilege of meeting the newly arrived Peace Corps Trainees (or if I may, the future freaks). Talking to them, answering their questions, hearing their concerns, I realized just how far I’ve really come. One year ago today, I was going through the same thing they are—freaking out about everything from squat toilets to Swahili to how to get my host Mama to stop feeding me so much. One year ago today, I was going through the most intense emotional rollercoaster of my life. Though the ride hasn’t gotten any calmer, I no longer require a barf bag and I’m comfortable throwing my hands up and letting out a triumphant scream.

I presented to the new trainees on the topic of diversity, which was incredibly relevant because this class could not be more representative of America. There’s an 80 year old man serving his second tour, a man who applied for Peace Corps on the same day he became an American citizen, energetic kids fresh out of college like me, people of every shape and shade you can imagine. They also seem incredibly cool, if a little shell-shocked. Before we started our session, my fellow presenter Katie turned to me and said something like, “Isn’t it weird that in a few months we’re going to be best friends with some of these people?” I really hope that’s true.

But for now it’s time to go back to my village. The grant money for my appropriate technology training program just came through and the secondary school will be opening up again in a few days. I’m ready to go back. I have to admit, before this little vacation I was losing steam. The cynicism that PCVs are famous for was setting in and I had forgotten why I came here in the first place; just going through the motions without my characteristic energy and passion. Celebrating the 50^th, celebrating my 1^st, meeting returned volunteers and hearing their stories, listening to the impassioned speech that our very own Dan Waldron gave at the party, meeting the newbies and feeling their energy and excitement, I remember again why I’m here. As awkward as it feels for me to praise the government, the mission of Peace Corps is something I really do believe in. Promoting world peace and friendship is a bizarre and daunting task, but there’s nothing I’d rather be doing right now, and no where I’d rather be doing it.

People keep telling me that I must be changing lives here, but the only thing I know is true is that my own life is changing. I’m only halfway to the person I’ll be when this is over. I’m looking forward to one more year living in the most loving village in Tanzania and fifty more years of unclassifiable freaks changing the world one village, one life at a time. Here’s to the future.

what we do for fun

Surprise extra blog this month due to an emergency trip to electricity-land to deal with an email hacking situation. Huge apologies extended to all my victims. I think it’s under control now.

Anyway, onto the blogification! 

As I’ve been staring like a deer in headlights at the one-year mark approaching unstoppably like a runaway train (but significantly less deadly), I decided to take some time to assess the last twelve months the way my generation knows best: by re-reading old blog entries and looking at facebook pictures. 

In the course of my reminiscence, I noticed a disconnect.  

I have plenty of facebook pictures of me having fun with other volunteers, but I pretty much never mention those not-exactly-Tanzanian experiences in this blog. I’ll admit, covering myself in soap and running head-first onto a very make-shift slip-and-slide isn’t going to win me a Nobel Peace Prize (although if I hit my head a little harder, it might have earned me a Darwin Award), but the crazy things I do to blow off steam with other volunteers are just as much a part of my Peace Corps experience as the painful, or touching, or inspiring, or endearing, or entertaining moments I have with my Tanzanian friends. I’m fine in the village most of the time, but once in a while I have to get out and have some American time. I honestly don’t think I’d survive the village life if I didn’t have my fellow volunteers to lean on, kvetch with, drink with, make inappropriate jokes with, and generally just be myself with.

One of the people who has kept me most sane since getting to site is my site-mate (PC lingo for “person who lives closest to me,” in this case about a 1 hour walk away), Dana Baker. This post is dedicated to her. I hope she’s not embarrassed that I’m sharing our secrets with the whole world wide web. The people have a right to know. 

So here’s a sample of Peace Corps reality.

Dana and I meet up once a week or so to go for a run and chitchat. This week, we decided to take a short loop and head back to her house early because her knee was hurting. Not one to leave an injured friend to face the day alone, I decided to invite myself over for the day to sunbathe in her courtyard, which is much larger and more secluded than my own.

“I’m going to be a health-hazard next time I go to the beach," I complained, "I’m literally going to blind people when the sun reflects off the whiteness of my legs."

“I miss the beach,” Dana replied, ignoring the rest of my statement, which was intended to provoke a compliment. I forgave her, though, because she just gave me an excellent idea.

We decided to spend the rest of the day pretending her courtyard was the beach. I spent hundreds of hours of my childhood pretending that my grandparents’ basement was a Floridian beach, why shouldn’t I spend at least a few hours of my adulthood doing the same thing?   

As we lay on her large straw mat and tried to imagine that the banana trees in her backyard were palms framing the ocean, we both decided that a day at the beach was incomplete without cold beer. Cold was out of the question, but beer was possible if we weren't too lazy to go looking for it. 

Being a good friend, and on account of Dana's injured-ness, I volunteered to go on a beer hunt. We may not have refrigerators out here in the bush, but beer is always available. Or so we thought. Actually it turned out that all (by which I mean, all two) of the stores in her village were out of beer. So I did what any self-respecting Peace Corps Volunteer who is pretending to have a day at the beach in her friend’s courtyard in the middle of the semi-arid lands of central northern Tanzania would do. I put on my hiking boots and went for a 40 minute trek to the nearest store guaranteed to have warm beer. It tasted like victory. 

The rest of the day we spent lying in Dana’s courtyard, listening to the breeze dance its way through the banana leaves, talking about how much fun it was to be at the beach. We even had music…though the solar-powered speakers would go off every time the sun fell behind a cloud. 

As if on cue, we got a phone call from our friend Sativa who was on the actual beach with her sister. We put the phone on speaker and placed it between us, chatting as though we were lying in three side-by-side lounge chairs. Sativa seemed not at all surprised that we were pretending to be on the beach, though she didn’t seem to agree that our imaginary adventure was more fun than her own, actual, beach excursion. That’s when we considered filling up a small basin with water kiddie-pool style. We ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the trek to go fetch enough water to fill up a basin.   

When the sun started to cool off, I decided to come home. My neighbor was extremely confused when I told her I was late getting back because Dana and I decided to go to the beach. Her five-year-old totally understood the concept of a pretend beach adventure, and asked if he could be invited next time. 

I’ve heard that a few members of the TZ Education class of 2011-2013 have found this blog. A special shout-out to you guys: I know you are probably freaking out right now as you try to decide whether or not to bring that adorable blue shirt to country. If it helps you decide, I did bring that adorable blue shirt to country and it’s currently somewhere between Arusha and Singida on the bus I left it on five months ago. I rarely think about it, but when I do I feel a brief pang of loss flitting like a moth in my chest. But more importantly, I hope you read this post and realize that you’re not going into this alone, you won’t be going through this alone, and you won’t be coming out of this alone. Peace Corps is tough, but volunteers find all sorts of creative ways to get through it, and we get through it together. Enjoy these last few weeks at home, and eat some oreos dipped in cold milk for me. But most importantly, don’t panic. You’re going to be fine and we’re really excited to meet you. Feel free to email me if you have any questions, no need to stalk anonymously. 

The boys are back in town...

Pictures from the conference can be found here: Facebook Album. 

I groaned as the alarm began to go off. Staring into the dark and lifting up the mosquito net half-heartedly, I tried to figure out why I was waking up before the sun. Changing my mind about waking up, I turned off my phone, put the net back down and snuggled into my blankets, trying to ignore how badly my nose was itching from breathing cold morning air. Seriously, cold air makes my nostrils itch. Is that weird? Pondering my nose-itching situation, I turned over and starting falling back into my bizarrely realistic anti-malarial-med-induced dreams. WAIT! The conference! The event I’d been anticipating with a mixture of excitement and dread since we started planning in January.

The five boys I’d chosen to attend from my village would be getting up now, maybe forcing down some chai their moms had boiled the night before and left in a thermos, packing their tiny rucksacks with a plate, gym shoes if they had any, and an extra shirt. They’d be hurrying out of the house, probably feeling just as excited and nervous as I was.

But I wasn’t hurrying. It was only a matter of time before my perpetually late self became a little overly accustomed to the Tanzanian concept of time which is, to put it lightly, flexible. The saying goes: “Europeans have watches, but Africans have time.” So I took my sweet time getting ready, ignoring my watch (that’s a lie—I lost my watch my first week here), and finally walked out the door only an hour late.  

I met one of my students along the road to the bus stand. He had hitched a ride on a bicycle because he was afraid of being late. I remembered the speech I had given the boys about how it was important that they were on time throughout the entire conference, because their behavior reflected on me. Oops. 

As I got to the bus stop, the teacher I was taking with me as a counterpart and fellow chaperone nonchalantly informed me that his wife was in labor and could he please have permission to go see her and the new baby in the during break time at the conference? After getting over the bizarre-ness of being asked permission to do something by a grown man with a wife and kids (three-and-a-half kids at that particular moment), I informed him that I’d be disappointed if he didn’t go see them and demanded details about the new baby and his wife’s health. (It’s a boy, by the way, and they are both doing fine.)

Anyway, we made it down to Katesh with hours to spare before our organized programming began so me and three other PCVs ended up and a roomful of teenage boys and a mandate to entertain. Finally, those summers working at the JCC paid off. Camp-Counselor-Lauren came out full force and got the boys to play some getting-to-know-you games. Then I noticed a PSI (Population Services International, an NGO I’m particularly fond of) truck parked outside the hall we were using to host the conference. Since we still had a few hours to kill, I decided to sweet talk the PSI community educator who was probably on a schedule and supposed to be doing something else (but again, it’s Tanzania, so who cares about schedules?). It didn’t take much cajoling to get him to agree to be a surprise guest speaker. The kids had a good time asking him about condoms, mosquito nets, and how he enjoys his job as a community educator. I was particularly pumped to have him as a speaker because a lot of students have told me they want to be community educators when they grow up... which might just be them sucking up and saying they want to be like me when they grow up, but anyway I wanted to show them that not all community educators are white foreigners. 

The next few days of the conference went by in a blur of lectures, games, insane amounts of poster-paper, reasonable amounts of well-deserved beer (after the boys went to sleep, of course), and awkward questions about sex. My session was on HIV/AIDS. In the album you'll see a pictures of the boys placing activity cards along a spectrum from “salama” (safe) to “hatari sana” (very risky).  After placing the cards, I gave them time to discuss and move cards around as they saw fit. I was particularly proud to notice that the boys from my school, who have been subjected to a semester's worth of my Life Skills/stand-up-comedy routine, were consistent accurate in placing their activity cards and changing around the misplaced ones. 

We had the luck of borrowing a projector from a nearby church, so each evening we treated the boys to a movie. The first day we asked them what kind of movie they wanted to watch. They all started miming gun fights and saying they wanted to watch anything starring someone they referred to as “short nigger.” Seriously. I was trying to explain why that wasn’t a nice thing to say, even if it is somebody’s name, until finally a fellow American clued me in that that’s how Tanzanians pronounce “Schwarzenegger.” I have so much left to learn in this country…

The best day of the conference by far was beekeeping day. We had a local expert come in to spend a whole day teaching the boys about bee behavior, health benefits of honey, products from beeswax and other byproducts of beekeeping. The boys were particularly fascinated by how bees have sex, which was good for me because it broke the ice on using words like “penis” before I had to give my AIDS talk. (In case you care: male bees, aka drones, have only one function. Once they’ve copulated with the queen, they die. Awesome, right??)

After the lecture, the boys were set loose with hammers and wood and set to work building their “modern” beehives and playing with the smoker, pretending to harvest honey. One of the kids from my group also got to try on the bee costume. (See Samweli rockin' the white overalls in the facebook album.)

At the end of the beekeeping day, the Bwana Nyuki (literally translated, this means “Mr. Bee” but it is what we call someone who is an expert in something) took some fresh honeycomb and showed us how to squeeze out the honey. It was possibly the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted.

The conference was insanely stressful, full of all sorts of problems and setbacks we couldn’t have anticipated, and definitely the longest three-and-a-half days in recent memory. But it was so, so worth it. I brought the boys over to the headmistress’s house when we got back to the village and they were so excited to start sharing the information they had learned and show off the beehive they built. Of course the information they were most excited about was the graphic details of how exactly drones die after copulating with the queen bee (it’s pretty gross)… I cringed at their mini-lecture, wishing they would talk about decision-making or goal-setting or nutrition or HIV/AIDS or pretty much any other topic, but the headmistress seemed impressed with their knowledge anyway.

As the year-mark has been approaching I’ve been having a lot of “what the hell have I been doing with myself for the past twelve months?” moments. I don’t feel that way this week. Looking back over the conference, I feel legitimately proud of myself. And of course, I’m madly proud of my fellow Hanang-ers: Dana, Justin, Duncan, and Megan—all of whom were absolutely essentially to making this conference happen. I feel super lucky to have such wonderful region-mates. I've heard horror stories from other conferences where the volunteers just didn't work well together, but we made an excellent team. 

And now it’s time to start planning the Girl’s Conference… oh dear.  

Why is this night different from all other nights?

It’s a little awkward how often I find myself writing about religion, but it seems to be a theme in my life these days. So bear with me, here comes yet another post about religion.

It’s Passover. A week-long celebration of the exodus from Egypt, a celebration of freedom from bondage, a time to remember that we were once slaves and now we are free (well, according to the torah at least). It’s my favorite Jewish holiday for a number of reasons. One is because of that DreamWorks animated genius, The Prince of Egypt, which I am only a little ashamed to admit is one of my favorite movies. I also love Passover because of all the theme of freedom and liberation, near and dear to my little progressive activist heart. I also happen to find matzoh (flat bread) tasty, which is not exactly the point since I think by eating it we’re supposed to feel deprived, but whatever. Matzoh pizza? Heck yes. I’ll eat that any time of year.

So. As the holiday approached I started to feel kind of down. At first I was planning to hold a seder (ritual Passover meal) in my village, translate the haggadah (instructions on how to lead said meal) into Swahili, turn it into an awesome cultural sharing moment. But I dropped the ball on that… my Swahili wasn’t good enough to produce a Haggadah much beyond “we were slaves, now we’re free, salt water tastes like tears, let’s eat flat bread!” So that failed. But, scary thought, I’ll still be here Passover next year so I can just do it then when my Swahili will hopefully be less embarrassing.

As today came to a close I was wandering back to my house singing “When you Believe” (embarrassing, I know, but that song is damn catchy) to myself, feeling lonely and all sorts of bad. I had tried explaining to a few different village friends why I was sad today but they just didn’t really get it. I got sympathetic texts from other volunteers but they didn't really get it either. I was feeling super alone and kind of stupid about it, considering all the times I've been away at school had to skip out on the family seder (sorry, Pahka and Gramma). 

Now, quick side story: Because I’m an idiot and didn’t realize that corn gets really big when it grows and blocks you out unless you make a path through it, currently the only way to get back to my house is to pass through my neighbor’s courtyard.

So, I was on that path, just getting to the particularly relevant “in this time of fear, when prayer’s so often proved in vain” part of the song when Mama Hawa came outside to greet me and ask what and why I was singing to myself.

“It’s a holiday for my religion,” I told her, holding back tears and trying to act like this was an exciting thing. My smile was, apparently, unconvincing.

“I’m so sorry,” she replied. “I completely understand. The first few Easters were really hard for me after I got married and had to become Muslim. I missed going to church and singing in the choir.”

Hold up. What? It had never occurred to me that Mama Hawa wasn’t born into a Muslim family.

“Why did you convert to Islam if you loved Christianity so much?” I asked, hoping desperately that the answer was something like “I loved my future husband even more than I loved Jesus.” I should have known better.

“There weren’t many men to choose from, I was kind of in a hurry, most of the available men were Muslim,” she replied.

Now I decided to get nosey. I asked why she was in such a rush. Turns out she was the oldest daughter and three of her younger siblings got married before her, which was a disgrace. She was 20 when she got married, by the way. I was somehow reminded of Fiddler on the Roof as she told the story. As I kept asking awkwardly personal questions, the answers got sadder. She had waited to get married because she wanted to go to Secondary School. She’d passed the exam but her father wouldn’t agree at first. So she tried to make some money as a dressmaker, hoping she’d eventually get back to school on her own, but in the end it didn’t work out and her remaining sisters (apparently she has a lot of sisters) and father told her that she absolutely had to get married as soon as possible or she’d be an embarrassment to the whole family.

Mama Hawa is beautiful, kind, smart, quiet and gentle (very positive qualities for women here), and heart-heartbreakingly generous considering she has pretty much nothing material to give. If she took her time, she’d have had no problem finding someone equally wonderful and kind to fall in love with and marry, even if she limited her choices to the Christians in the village. But she was in a hurry so she just married the first person who would take her, and he happened to be Muslim. And just like that, her days in the church choir were over. 

After she finished telling her story, we sat in silence for a while, but not that uncomfortable kind of silence, more of the "I get what you're feeling right now and we don't need to put words on it" kind of silence. Finally I had to go home, it was getting dark. As I left, she suddenly grinned and said, “Happy Jewish Easter!” We both laughed that kind of laugh you laugh when you were moments away from crying a moment ago.

Mama Hawa will never get to sing in the church choir again. She really had no choice when giving up her beloved religion. I, on the other hand, will be going home in a little over a year. I've got years of seders and opportunities to watch and unashamedly sing along to The Prince of Egypt ahead of me. In some ways, Mama Hawa and I shared something so special today. In other, more profound ways, her story eclipsed mine a hundred times over. Mama Hawa is not a slave in the technical sense of the word, but she is, in so many ways, bound. If nothing else, our conversation tonight fit the real spirit of passover--to share the story of bondage so that we will never forget what a blessing it is to be free.   

Sometimes, I am a cultural idiot.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming—apologies for the theological interruption.




Many of you know that in my former life, I was involved in The Vagina Monologues. One of the most memorable parts of the show, at least among the Wellesley crowd, is “The Happy Fact” – a pithy ode to that mysterious organ of pleasure known as the clitoris. So, deciding I was going to be a brave and empowering Life Skills teacher, I devoted a significant chunk of my female anatomy lesson to translating and reciting the Happy Fact with my students. We giggled, chanted, high-fived. It was pretty adorable. I left the classroom feeling particularly proud of myself—I had finally found something from my pre-Peace Corps experience that felt relevant here. Most of the time I feel like I’m totally unprepared, making everything up as I go.

A few hours later, a shy female student came up to me in private.

“Madam Lauren,” she asked, her mouth curling into an embarrassed smile, “is it true that men prefer women who are ‘cut’?”

My heart momentarily stopped. I felt like be most insensitive person ever. The student was using a local euphemism for female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) – a series of controversial practices which include cutting or removing part or all of the clitoris, sometimes going so far as to include the labia majora and minora. It dawned on me like a piano falling from the sky that some of the students I had just forced to recite an ode to the clitoris did not, in fact, have a clitoris.

I had been so apprehensive about approaching the topic, I had almost forgot about FGM. It seemed like the kind of cultural territory I was too foreign to be touching. But at this point it was too late, so I decided to go with it and try to turn my error into a learning opportunity—for me as well as my students.

The next class period, I held a session exclusively devoted to FGM, where we talked about the biological facts—how woman who are circumcised are more likely to die during childbirth or develop fistula, how there is no biological benefit to circumcision, how there are alternatives to the practice that are legal (FGM is technically illegal in Tanzania) and have been accepted by many tribes throughout the region. The students asked a lot of impersonal questions and seemed academically interested in the concept, but seemed reluctant to connect it to their own lives.

At the end of the session, I noticed that the girls had completely shut up, though they seemed to have questions left to ask. So we kicked out the boys and held a woman-to-woman heart-to-heart.

The girls told me that “the cut” is very underground, taboo, but still practiced in this community. It usually takes place during young childhood, though the age varies by tribe. Some of the girls were unsure whether or not they had received the operation. I suggested they ask their mothers. They laughed a “The mzungu’s being an idiot again” laugh-- I’m getting pretty used to it these days. I was, as usual, missing something.

“We’d get smacked for even mentioning it!” they told me, as though this was obvious.

So instead we drew pictures and talked about how they could find out for themselves.

Afterwards, I asked what they would do if they one day had a baby girl and their husband or mother wanted to circumcise her. “Waelimishe! Wataelewa!” they all responded in chorus. “We should educate them! They’ll understand!” I was floored, yet again. Critical thinking isn’t a normal part of their school curriculum, so my hypothetical questions are usually met with silence and exasperated looks.

I was beaming, legitimately this time, as I walked out of the classroom. I’ve had a few girls come up to me since and thank me for helping break the silence. Now that they understand the real dangers, they told me, they refuse to continue the practice with the next generation. I won’t ever know whether they were serious, but it felt good to hear it.



Less successful was my Life Skills session on masturbation. I tried to present it as a healthy alternative to “ngono zembe”—unsafe sex. We talked about the biological and health consequences (for those of you who don’t know, masturbation does not, in fact, lead to infertility or blindness). At the end of the session, a student raised his hand. “Even if that’s all true, which I doubt, isn’t it still true that God hates you if you masturbate?”

I tried to put my on “culturally sensitive” hat.

“I’m not a religious leader, I’m a teacher. Unless someone here has God’s cell phone number”—a stupid joke that got me a ego-inflatingly large laugh—“I’m just going to stick to biological facts.”

The lesson continued.

At the end of the session, I asked—“So, who still thinks that masturbation is a terrible sin and will bring disease and the wrath of an angry God down upon you?”

Forty out of forty-eight hands shot up into the air. The remaining eight were raised slightly slower, less certainly. Though that probably had less to do with their conviction and more to do with my broken and sometimes hard to understand Swahili.

I stared at them, hoping they were just trying to annoy me. They were all grinning, but looked somehow sincere.

Oh well. I'm learning.

Faith, Foxholes, and Loliondo

Maybe it’s a crude question, but I ask myself a lot: How can people who have been dealt such a discouraging hand in the game of life constantly praise the one they believe dealt it to them? Nine months living with some of the poorest people in the world and experiencing my own little tastes of desperation, I’m starting to understand things better. When there’s nothing left to hold onto, faith steps in. She takes you in her arms, intoxicates and comforts you with the simplest of words. “There is an answer,” she coos. “There is a reason. You are going to be ok.”

But is there a dose at which faith becomes toxic?

I intended this to be a post about the “Loliondo miracle cure”--a medicine “sent from God” that supposedly treats everything from AIDS to diabetes to TB to chronic pain and has people flocking by the thousands, several of whom have died in the process, to a small village in northern Tanzania. But we’ll get back to that later. Right now my mind is flashing-back to the child’s funeral I wrote about two posts ago.

As I was sitting there on the floor, desperate, terrified, miserable, angry… all of a sudden, the mourner’s kaddish started running through my mind. Yid gadal viyid gadash shmeh rabbah… I have no clue what those words mean, I didn‘t even realize I had the prayer memorized, but the words came to me and they comforted me. I pulled my knees in, wrapped my arms around myself, and whispered that ancient prayer against my skirt. My mind flew back in time, reconnected to memories I didn’t know I had. I sat again under the hot sun at Camp Tamarack and felt the itchy choir robes I once wore as part of the children’s choir at Temple Israel.

I’ve heard the mourner’s kaddish recited thousands of times for faceless dead. Very few times I’ve spoken it aloud for people I knew personally. Those words, the ritual of saying them over the dead, has become a part of me, an essential part of my ability to cope with death. That day, hugging myself on a mat, surrounded by women wailing, chanting, singing in Arabic, I too called out to the universe using a language I don’t understand at all, and I too felt better.

I guess all of this is to say that, even though I’m not a “religious” person, I really do understand the power of belief and ritual. I've felt it in my bones, in the deepest stores of my memory, in the saddest of my days.

Despite that, I simply can’t accept what’s going on in Loliondo. You can get the details from many different sources by googling “Loliondo cure.” Here’s the cliff notes: a former church leader had a dream in which God told him to take the bark from a certain tree, mix it up a certain way, and give it to people for the low low price of 500Tsh (less than 50 cents). The catch is that the cure will only work in that particular place and when given to you from that particular guy, so while the price of the actual medicine is low, the bus fare is not. Meanwhile, this formerly sleepy village is suddenly facing a public health crisis as sick people flood in by the thousands with no where to sleep, no sanitation facilities, and very little water. It’s been compared to the conditions in a hastily thrown together refugee camp. Pretty much all bus stations, from the capital city to my little village, are now offering direct transport to Loliondo. This is the rainy season and most of the roads in this country are a muddy, dangerous mess. There have been accidents, including at least 7 fatalities and hundreds of injuries, as people rush to get their hands on the miracle cure.

I don’t mean to sound entirely negative about this. First of all, I’m not a science-centric anti-herbal medicine kind of person. Plenty of plants have legitimate medical properties. This guy's concoction, or rather, his patients' faith in it, really has done some incredible things.

One of the students at my secondary school, Asteria, has a weird condition where she faints when she hears loud noises. I’ve been at school on a day where she fainted twice and was unconscious for a total of almost an hour after hearing desks being banged in the next classroom over. Asteria hasn’t fainted once since her trip to Loliondo a few weeks ago. Regardless of why, her quality of life has improved dramatically and I wouldn’t dare take that away from her.

But claiming to have cured AIDS is a different story. It’s a dangerous thing to do. Hundreds, maybe thousands by now, of people living with HIV/AIDS are abandoning their ARVs, declaring themselves cured. Some doctors, apparently forgetting that patients who have been on ARVs are at risk for false negative HIV test if their viral load has diminished sufficiently, are confirming the cure. When I try to continue with my lesson plans about HIV prevention, students rebel, demanding to know why I’m bothering to teach them about a disease that has such a simple and cheap cure. People are noticeably less excited about the free condoms I give out at the market. And pretty much everyone in the village thinks I’m an idiot for not accepting the Loliondo miracle.

Even though I consider myself an atheist, I found comfort in my ancestors' ancient prayer during a time when I felt hopeless, desperate, alone. I'm not trying and not willing to make an argument against faith, religion, or herbal healing. But the Loliondo situation isn't really about faith, religion, or herbal healing. To me at least, it's about the dangers of desperation. 

A positive outlook and belief that you will be ok can go a long way in curing or reducing the symptoms of many, many diseases. One of my favorite village elders, Waziri, struggles with diabetes. He hopped on a bus to Loliondo and now drinks soda and sugary tea every day, feeling great. Do I think he’s faking it? No. Do I think he’s really cured? No. I think Waziri, like Asteria, has had a powerful dose of the placebo effect and it’s doing good things for them--as of now. 

But what comes next?