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.