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.