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?

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.