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?