Harambee!

Wow. The response to my last post was incredible. Your emails, comments, facebook messages and texts lifted my spirits and made me feel like, even if I can’t stop the painful things I’m dealing with here, at least I can bear witness and bring attention to them. I’ve passed on your warm thoughts to the family the post was about and they send their love and appreciation. Thank you.


About once a month here, I have something like a breakdown. I don’t know what else to call it. Usually I handle it in private, sit in my house and sob my eyes out as I think of all the things I’ll never be able to fix in this world and how desperate and pointless and tiny it makes me feel.

Last week, for the first time, I let myself go to pieces in front of a Tanzanian. I was standing in the middle of my backyard with my neighbor, ankle deep in mud as we transplanted vegetables into warm, wet, inviting earth. The rains had finally returned. I looked down at the soil and thought about how dry it had been just days before. I thought about the mercilessness of weather. I thought about my own complicity in the matter. The droughts in this region have been linked to climate change, among other human factors. I saw my American life flash before my eyes--hours spent spewing carbon out of my car, lights left on all night, computers eternally plugged in, hours in the library printing out ream after ream of tree flesh.

Sobs of laughter and pain forced tears down my cheeks. The tears mixed with sweat rain, still lightly falling like post-coital caresses on exhausted but satisfied maize stalks. I sobbed and laughed harder, started to hum to myself and dig into the earth with my bare feet. I tried to dig myself roots. I stared up at the sky and let the rain fall in my eyes; I stared out at the crops and felt their relief flooding my body and mixing with my own; I stared at my Mama and realized that she seemed confused and sort of embarrassed for me.

All I could say was mvua -- rain.

And then she understood. Having lived her whole life at the whim of the rain, Mama Hawa is not thrown into hysterics by its irregular behavior. But for me, this was a novel and incredible feeling. After a terrifyingly dry January, the rains were back. But were they back for good? The corn lifted up its browning leaves, tentatively promising to give it one last shot. The village elders shook their heads and told me that God was tricking us; He made us think we were going to starve this year. But may He be praised! He wouldn’t really do that to us.  

Maybe God wouldn’t, but climate change, deforestation, and desertification would.

Two years is a very short time. If I’m lucky, the students I teach will protect themselves from HIV and pursue their dreams of being nurses, doctors, pilots, and teachers. If I’ve done my job properly, the groups I organize will keep planting trees after I leave. If I can break through the stigma, the young women I hang out with will feel empowered to choose the number of babies they bring into this world. If I give it my all, this village might be a little bit greener and a little bit healthier in the years to come.

I know I should think about all that and feel good. And sometimes I do. But it’s all about perspective and my particular brand of perspective is, to be honest, not well suited to this job.

I’ve been told before that I’m the kind of person who sees the forest and doesn’t realize that it‘s made up of trees. I’m a big-picture person. Yet here I am in the middle of Africa, literally and figuratively planting tiny little seedlings that will hopefully one day be part of a global forest of change. And it sucks. I feel like an idiot most of the time. Every class I teach or tree I plant feels like a stupid little drop in an infinite ocean of problems.

But that’s how it has to be. That’s how we’re going to repair the world. Poverty and inequality and cruelty and climate disaster and corruption and hunger and AIDS and preventable death and overpopulation and environmental exploitation and insane republicans who think that the road to freedom is paved with the blood of our nation’s natural resources … these problems won’t be solved by one person with a sudden revelation about the path to a feasible and sustainable utopia. If we’re going to save this world--and I’m assuming anyone reading this understands that the world as we know it is in danger and needs to be saved--it’s going to take a lot of seedlings of all different sorts. It’s going to take people all over the world planting seeds of knowledge, seeds of peace, seeds of trees and seeds of nutritious and affordable vegetables. Sometimes it‘s going to be fun, sometimes it‘s going to suck, and most of the time we‘re going to feel like we‘re just running in place. But we’re not. What we’re doing is planting a forest whose canopy we won’t live to see.

But we have to keep planting. We can’t afford to give up. My neighbors can’t afford for you to give up.

As you read these words, a Mama just a few yards from me is worrying about whether she’ll have enough corn to feed her children in June. If her vegetables grow, she’s going to have to decide whether she’d rather sell them to buy shoes so her kids can go to school, or keep them so her kids can eat nutritious food. I’m not telling you this to make you feel guilty. I’m hoping that you can imagine me, a fellow First World-er, hanging out here and being friends with that woman. I’m hoping that will make her more real to you.

A few of you have asked me what you can do, specifically, to help my village. I don’t really know what to say. I’ve spent the last 9 months staring at bone-dry water pumps generously donated by the Danish people, so I’m not going to ask you for money. At least not right now. For now, I’ll ask you to think about your impact on the planet. When the snow melts or if it‘s the appropriate time wherever you are in the world, I’d also like you to plant a tree. I know you know that climate change is a problem, but take a moment, close your eyes, and imagine what its like to live at the whim of the rains. Then plant another tree.

Swahili has a nifty word with no good English translation. Harambee -- it’s sort of like “Let’s all pull together and get this job done!” That’s what we need right now. A worldwide Harambee. Harambee isn’t about people coming together with one mind and similar skills--its about the whole community, each person contributing what she has to give.

Now, when I have my breakdowns, I take a deep breath and imagine the tiny seedlings, the little efforts I’m making here, joining up with the efforts of people all over the world. I imagine them growing into a beautiful, better world. I imagine three generations from now looking back and thanking us as a collective era for saving the world from destruction. And then, when I’m ready, I stop looking for the forest and focus in on the trees.

learning how to grieve

I’m sitting on a mat on the floor, eating oily rice with my fingers and trying not to cry.

A stream of old women walk past to greet me and the girls I‘m sitting with. One has her head resting on my legs and her shirt open as she breastfeeds her newest baby.  Maimuna, my best friend and surrogate sister, is stifling a sob and wiping a tear as she rests her head on my shoulder. I keep shoveling in the food, even though I‘m full and I don‘t like the taste. Maybe it’s a Jewish thing. Grief makes me hungry.

I want to vomit. I want some water. I want fresh air. I want to be anywhere but here.

But this is exactly where I need to be today. I need my Tanzanian friends to teach me how to grieve for a child. I need Maimuna to teach me how to go on living and laughing and working to make this village a better place when a tiny, lifeless body lies before me covered in a shroud. A tiny body that used to be a tiny person I knew, a tiny person I exchanged high-fives with and made funny faces at. I’ve never had to do this before, but my Mamas and sisters are old pros. They will show me how it’s done.

Step one is wailing.

Step two is eating some pilau and accepting that it’s a fact of life.

Step three is going back to the farm because there are weeds to pull and beans to plant.

It’s been a week now since the funeral. The official mourning process is over. But I can’t get past that empty space between step one and step two. The space where you are done crying and done feeling angry and done wanting to vomit, but you can’t yet accept that we live in a world this cruel.

“It’s God’s work,” my Mama keeps saying. “Praise him.”

Those words don’t comfort me; they make it worse. They make me want to scream.

I try to say, “No, Mama, it’s not God’s work. It’s the work of malnutrition and dirty water and broken promises by NGOs and governments and water pumps that have been dry for a year and Mamas that have to carry their babies in the hot sun for hours to fetch water and babies that don’t even have the strength to complain and men who are supposed to be leading this village but actually spend all day in the bar. It’s the work of years of people watching babies die and saying ’it’s just the work of God, what can we mortals do?’ rather than saying ’no, really, what CAN we do?’”

I wanted my words to have an impact, to rally her, to catalyze a movement of angry Mamas that would fight for food security and nutrition, stop blaming God, save the babies and hold the real culprits responsible.

But the Swahili that stumbled out of my mouth sounded feeble and broken. Or maybe my argument was feeble and broken, regardless of the language. Mama just gave me that “Are you seriously questioning God right now?” look, and we switched topics.

We talked about what the harvest might be like this year. We talked about the rains and we whispered in nervous tones about drought. Mama didn’t acknowledge my little rant against the “it’s all part of God’s plan” theory. But if she did, she might have said there’s no time to search for root causes and start a movement. She might have reminded me that there are weeds to pull and beans to plant. Maybe she’d tell me that if we don’t get over this and get our asses back to the farm, more babies will die. And she would be right and I would realize I was wrong.

Time passes slowly in the village, but it passes. The rainy season makes the mountains bloom, bursting into greenness like they are finally waking after months of brown, rocky sleep. My Swahili improves and I get closer to my village friends and slowly, painfully, I start to understand this place a little better. I also start to realize that there are things I’ll never understand.

I came here to change lives and make a small corner of the world a slightly better place. I came here to teach and to mobilize. In the classroom I’ve had fun watching my teenage students gain confidence, beamed as I’ve overheard them explaining important details of HIV/AIDS to their younger friends.  But I also came here to learn.

In the classroom, I am a teacher. At the funeral, I was the newest kid in class. This week I learned how to bury a child and go back to the farm with tears still wet on my cheeks, grateful that the hot sun will dry them.