Reality

I haven't spent a lot of time in this blog talking about the difficult times. Maybe I've been misleading you, in which case I'm sorry. So here's the truth: At least once a day, the thought runs through my head--"I could go home right now. I could call it quits and be eating a goat cheese salad [or pizza, or thai food, or mint chocolate chip ice cream, or...] in 72 hours." That's the sort of thing we're not supposed to admit, but it's true. It doesn't mean I'm going anywhere anytime soon. At least once a day I also think, "I'm the luckiest human being in the world." The combination of these two thoughts, and the short time frame within which both of them float through my mind, is referred to by volunteers as the "roller coaster." The thing about roller coasters, even emotional ones, is that they are simultaneously thrilling, terrifying, fun, and nauseating.

Some days I would rather sit in my house and stare at the wall than attempt to have a coherent conversation in Swahili. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the cultural barriers separating me from my new friends--it has become apparent over the past few months that there really are some things that can't be understood cross-culturally. As close as I am to my Mamas, there is so much about me they will never understand. And I'm sure they feel the same way about me. And sometimes I just want to sit in my house and sob hysterically about the things I've witnessed here, and the fact that there is so, so little I can do to help. Other times I just feel totally numb. I find myself making really off-color jokes, which I guess is my way of trying to deal with things that are just beyond my comprehension. AIDS? Food insecurity? If I can't laugh, I'll cry. Sometimes I do cry. The realization that, statistically, at least a few of the children I play with on a daily basis are going to die of preventable disease. How are you supposed to deal with that? Everyday, I rotate between feelings of anger so intense I think it might eat me alive and numbness to the point of boredom and sadness so deep I might get lost inside it.

The roller coaster has been getting faster. The twists are more nauseating, the rails a little rickety-er, the drops are more dramatic. I find myself overwhelmed by the simplest decisions -- do I hold on or throw my hands up? Do I scream with joy or scream with fear? And really, is there even a difference?

Eid Mubarak and reflections on integration and success...

I pull the hem of my dira over my bare feet and hide my hands beneath my shawl. My hijab is tight and itchy around my neck but I don't pull my hands out to adjust it. Even if I wanted to, I'm practically sitting on top of the women next to me so any unperscribed movement is a poor choice. As the service begins I mimic my Mama's actions--standing, kneeling, endlessly repeating "Allah Akbar." I try to pay attention, stay open and aware of the culture, spirituality, and beauty of this event I am honored to have been invited to. But all I can think about is keeping my white hands hidden and how, for the first time in 5 months, I might, maybe, blend into a crowd. The kids in front and to the side of me can still see my pale face, but to the rows and rows of women sitting and kneeling behind me, my colorful hijab and dira won't warrent a second glance. I feel relieved, free, and human in a way I suddenly realize I haven't felt in a very long time.

But for every other hour of my life here, I will never blend in. And if anyone was watching closely they noticed me fumble over prayers, motions, the itchy hijab situation.

I'm doing what I can to integrate here, but there are some barriers I will never cross. One minute I feel like one of the gang, laughing and drinking chai with my Mamas, and the next minute I notice that a kid has burst into tears at the sight of my strange pale eyes and freckly nose, or a teenage boy is staring at me like I'm a dirty picture in the bathroom who can't see his objectifying gaze.

One story which nicely illustrates the stage of integration I'm at took place last week as i was returning home from a long and poorly planned thougrh, thankfully, safely fexecuted hike up Mt. Hanang with, no joke, 50 secondary school students. I was exhausted and grumpy and ready to be home, alone, far away from the nearest teenager. As we reached the base of the mountain, we still had another few hours of walking back to the village. So, please don't judge me for this, I left the kids with their other chaparone and made my way to the main road to try to catch a ride. (Yes, I hitchhike here sometimes, but if you saw our busses, you'd understand why.) So a young man finally picked me up and immediately started doing what most men here do upon first meeting me--talking about marraige. Usually I just laugh it off and let him off gently by saying something like "That's very kind of you, but right now I'm focused on my studies." (Which has led to a running joke in my village where the young men ask me everyday if I've learned everything there is to know yet.)

But that day, I was in a particularly irritable mood. So the driver ends up asking if I have a husband, but instead of saying "mume" he says "mzee," which works in context but literally means "old man." So I decide to mess with him and tell him I'm married to a wonderful mzee named Saidi Jumanne*. Saidi Jumanne, in reality, is my favorite "mzee" grandpa in the village. So the driver and I have this long chat where I make up all sorts of ridiculous stuff about my fictional marraige.

Finally we reach the village and I hop out of the car to a crowd of the same young men I mentioned earlier, who like to joke about when I'm going to stop studying and settle down. So they're all boisterously welcoming me home and the driver turns to them and asks if it's true that I have an mzee named Saidi Jumanne. It turns out the real Saidi was standing about ten feet away, perfectly in sight and very much in his mid-70s. The men, laughing hysterically, point in his direction and vehemently affirm that he is, in fact, my husband. The driver drove off, utterly confused.

During Peace Corps staging (the three days of logistics before we boarded the plane to TZ), we were asked to write what would make us feel like we've "succeeded" in the Peace Corps. Knowing my tendencies to be a stressed out ambitious freak, I decided to write something simpler than "when climate change halts and all of Tanzania is reforested." I wrote, "When I laugh with my neighbors." Mission accomplished, now on to deforestation...


*Not his real name, but it's equally Tanzanian

Life is so easy in America--they drive CARS to fetch water from the river!!

Finally found some of that internet stuff again!! Welcome to Month #5. I’ve officially gone from counting days to counting weeks to counting months--the next logical increment is years. That’s kind of terrifying, kind of awesome, and makes me feel like I really haven’t done a whole lot to write home about yet considering I’ve almost been in this country for half a year now. Either way, there’s been a request for more information about what I actually do all day, so here we go.

I’m still in the “first three months at site” phase during which Peace Corps discourages starting projects. Basically my job is to just get settled in, make friends, and integrate. I’m also slowly but surely gaining confidence in Swahili and starting to be able to really get to know people in a way I couldn’t before. In the meantime, I’ve learned a lot about myself. For example: I don’t want to be a preschool teacher. It seemed like a good way to practice Swahili, but it turns out I have no patience and I’m really, really bad at controlling a room of screaming children. Another example: I am not a collectivist--my neighbors think it’s insane that I live alone and feel really bad for me because of it, but I rush home at the end of every day to enjoy my few hours of solitude. Political inclinations aside, living in America for 21 years instilled some serious individualist tendencies in me. I‘m slowly getting used to collectivism, though--if it’s 7pm and I haven’t got my charcoal stove started yet, I don’t hesitate to pop by my neighbors and guiltlessly enjoy her ugali. I’ve also been known to show up at Mama Hawa’s to ask for help with things like spiders, ant infestations, cleaning up the kerosene I spilled all over my floor, etc.

But if I’m honestly integrating, that concept has to go both ways, right? So last night a sixteen year old girl I’ve talked to a few times before showed up at my house with her one month old baby, saying she had been kicked out and had no where to sleep. She definitely wasn’t lying--I had heard from other kids that she had some serious problems at home, had dropped out of school to work after second grade, and had very little family left in the village to help her out. This was exactly the sort of “Lauren has a chance to be someone’s hero” situation that I was looking forward to. But when the time came, I am ashamed to admit I hesitated pretty seriously before taking the girl in for the night. In the end we had a peaceful evening, though she seemed very suspicious of the brown rice I cooked. I asked her what she would do if she had unlimited money and she said she’d build a three-room brick house with a tin roof and buy a plot of land near the river to plant cabbage, carrots, and green peppers (particularly lucrative crops here). Insert reality check here.

And now in no particular order, examples of the other exciting things I‘ve done in the past few months:

- Spent a day hanging out at the local water source talking to people as they washed clothes and fetched water. During this time a long group of kids came to stare at me and after about half an hour I finally turned to them and said, “I’m a human being, not a TV” and then they screamed and ran away. I also overheard my favorite quote so far: “That’s the new mzungu (white person). She lives in America. Life there is so easy--they drive their CARS to fetch water from the river!” This was followed by a very confusing attempt by me to explain indoor plumbing. I’m always surprised by the things I’m incapable of explaining… pathetically, it’s partly because I don’t actually understand how many of our modern conveniences work. Air conditioning, airplanes, the internet… as far as I know that stuff runs on magic.

- I hang out a lot with the local wazee (old people), talking about their lives and all the things they remember about the village. Lately I’ve been on a tree kick, so sometimes I ask them to take me around and show me their favorite trees and their medicinal and technical uses. The younger community members tend to know a lot less about these sorts of things, partly because the area has been pretty badly deforested so there just aren’t as many trees to use anymore. I think this might be the start of a good project that will involve collecting this information (maybe with the help of the school kids through the environment club I am slowly in the process of organizing) and putting it into a booklet type thing. The booklet will serve partly to educate people about their local resources and partly to demonstrate the importance of reforestation and of reforesting with native species.

- I’ve started a girl’s exercise club that mostly involves me attempting to teach yoga to a group of Mamas and girls who are falling all over each other and laughing hysterically at my instructions. Some things just sound bizarre when you translate them into a language you’ve only been learning for four months… I end up saying stuff like “Now you will start as a dog which has down and then slowly turn into a child.”

Besides that I pretty much just walk around and meet people, read a lot, practice guitar, and spend way more time doing household chores than you could imagine. Washing clothes by hand is a full-day job…especially since I live 2km from my nearest water source. I’ve also been doing a lot of running--there are a lot of beautiful trails through the hills behind my house that I’ve been exploring. I’m hoping to run the Kilimanjaro half (or maybe (big maybe) full) marathon in February. I’m mostly posting that here right now so I’ll feel social pressure to actually do it because I’ve just announced to the whole wide internet that I’m going to--so be sure to make fun of me if I give up.

"Maendeleo" (Development)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the concept of development. Before I came here, my belief system, peppered with radical ideology and salted with a nagging pragmatism that I can't seem to get rid of, put me pretty firmly in the "skeptical of development for environmental and cultural reasons" camp. I was, and am, incredibly disturbed by the fact that if everyone in the world lived as we do in the US, we would require something ridiculous like 7 and a half Planet Earths to sustain our destructive communities.

So here I am in a little village in Tanzania. You may be thinking of some sort of "land before time" traditional situation where people have a deep ancestral connection to the earth and everyone respects the environment and communities have lived here sustainable for thousands of years. Sorry to dissappoint, but it's not quite like that. My village is a mish-mash of many tribes, all of whom get along splendidly, but very few of whom have a traditional ancestral connection to this land. Many people I've met wound up here during the "villigization" process (Tanzania's experiment in socialism) or migrated to work on sisal plantations during the colonial period. The original inhabitants, pastoralist Barbaig, have emigrated. While many of my friends do have an environmentalist outlook, many of the villagers are just like Americans--they look at trees and see lumber, they look at all their natural resources and see ways that they can use them to make money. And why shouldn't they?

But let's pretend for a moment that community development follows a similar trajectory as individual human development. I would say my village is stuck in the middle of a very awkward pre-teen stage. Most of my neighbors live in mud or brick huts with grass roofs, but many have corrogated tin roofing, a fair few have electricity, and I know of at least five with satellite TV. Satellite TV! But no one has running water and clean water can be as far as 3 kilometers away. See what I mean about the awkward pre-teen stage of development? Here's the scary thing about comparing community development to human development... once we pass our prime, we continue "developing" until our bodies can no longer support life. Then we die. And so will our global community if we continue on the road to "dirty development" at home and abroad.

Of course it's ridiculous to say that my villagers, who have a vague idea of what life is like in the "First World," shouldn't be allowed to work towards achieving it if that's what they want. Above all else, I believe that all human beings have a right to self-determination. And many people want dirty development, at least for now. But what's the point of having highly developed, technological, advanced societies if we don't have a planet to enjoy our success on? The only possible solution I see is for a serious and fundamental shift of values to take place in our already "developed" communities. If we want our friends in the global south to live in luxury and comfort the way we do, we need to find a way to make "luxury and comfort" sustainable, starting with our own lives. Or we need to consider the real possibility that our very understanding of luxury and comfort is the problem.

Who is a Jew?

I’m seating at the head table as the guest of honor at a graduation party for a bunch of kids I’ve never met. Someone gets up to give a speech and I listen for the first few seconds, then decide that I’m too lazy to try to pay attention to a speech I only understand about 30% of. I’m zoning out when suddenly I hear some weird words and notice that everyone is staring at me. If my Swahili isn’t failing me (which it very well could be), I’m fairly certain the speaker just said “Jewish,” “Jesus’s tribe,” and “great blessing.”

I had a lot of expectations coming in to the Peace Corps, but there are some notions you just can‘t preconceive. I didn’t have any idea how to respond, but they were staring at me like they expected me to give a speech so I stood up and said, “Congrats to the graduates. God bless everyone.” At least, I think I said that. I might have said, “I like oranges. Where is the bathroom?” Either way, everyone seemed happy enough and applauded a lot.

That’s a fairly representative snapshot of life in my new village. People compliment me and are very excited by my presence, and I smile and am confused most of the time. But most of the time, I love it. My village is about half Muslim and half Christian, and though everyone gets along wonderfully, they have very strong ties to their particular religious communities. As such, “What is your religion?” is one of the first questions I get asked by everyone I meet. At first, this question made me very nervous. Many Tanzanians I meet have never even heard the Swahili word for the Jewish people, “Wayahudi,” or they’ve seen it only in the Bible or Qur’an and assume that Wayahudi are some kind of mythical extinct population. I get very long, very awkward, very strange looks from pretty much everyone. And then the questions start coming.

“Who is a Jew?” is a question that entire college courses, none of which I’ve taken, are focused on. So when I find myself struggling to explain, in Swahili, what it means to be Jewish, I feel a little overwhelmed. I also end up using the word “we” for things that I myself very rarely do.

“We pray on Saturday,” I’ll start, and the Mama will interrupt me: “Ah yes, you’re a Seventh Day Adventist.”

It’s a long process, but can be very rewarding. I’ve actually found that being Jewish provides for good balance in my village, since neither the Muslim nor the Christian communities can claim me as exclusively their own. I fasted with my Muslim neighbors during Ramadan and partied it up on Eid--sort of like Halloween except instead of getting candy, you go door-to-door and eat ungodly amounts of spiced rice and beef. I also spend every Sunday zoning out during a sermon I don’t understand at one of the many Churches in my village--so far I’ve hit Lutheran and Pentecostal, next weekend I’m going to Seventh-Day Adventist and next up is Catholic.

My Muslim neighbors are delighted to hear that Jews don’t eat pigs either, and my Christian neighbors think it’s badass that I come from the same “tribe” as Jesus, in their words. One of my Mamas has taken a particular interest in learning about my religion. Having conversations about topics as intense as religion is not easy in a language I’ve been learning for only three months now, but she’s patient and we spend a lot of time flipping through dictionaries and apologetically grinning at each other. After I managed to explain Rosh Hashana to her, she gave me a papaya “for a sweet new year.”

One of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in Tanzania so far came when the same Mama asked me why there are so few Jews. I explained that we aren’t into proselytizing, and also that a genocide was committed against us during World War II. Having to boil the Holocaust down to concepts simple enough to explain with my shitty Swahili was tough. In the end I just said something like, “A bad man with a lot of power didn’t like Jewish people. He didn‘t like people who look like you either. They were forced to move to special villages where they were forced to work like slaves. Then they were killed. Six million were killed.” She held my hand for a very long time and said something very fast in what I think was a mixture of Arabic, Swahili, and her local tribal language.

Later that day, I was listening to my shortwave radio, and they were talking about the Rwandan genocide. I realized that I’d never really thought about the Holocaust in the context of other genocides. I also realized that it's really bizarre that I'd never seriously thought about the Holocaust in the context of other genocides. Jews like to think of ourselves as special, removed, our experiences separating rather than uniting us with other peoples - but wouldn't it make more sense for us to emerge from that experience with a sense of profound solidarity? When we say "Never Again," shouldn't we mean Darfur, too? Just some food for thought.

Pictures from Kibaoni!

Here are a couple pictures from my training village. Still no pictures from my new village, it takes forever to upload them so it might be a while.

Two of my favorite people, Logan and baby Batuli:

Me and my hot mess of a host family, making "funny faces":

Kusema "kwa heri" (Saying goodbye)

Two months ago, I was dropped off at a burnt orange hut dwarfed by coconut trees in the picturesque village of Kibaoni. As the village kids crowded around me and stared, Baba gave me an orange peeled in the Tanzanian fashion. I had no idea how to eat it. I felt myself start to tear up as I stared at this fruit that was simultaneously so familiar and so, so foreign.

Flash forward two months. Last night Mama challenged me to peel an orange, TZ style, with a single knife stroke. When I succeeded, she grabbed my hand and she exclaimed, “You are Tanzanian.” Then we sang the Tanzanian national anthem together. Seriously.

I sat with Mama for several hours last night as she cooked dinner on the fire. She asked why I was being so quiet and I said I was sad to leave and scared to live without her. She said, “You’ll get used to it.” and continued to give me a pep talk about what a great Volunteer I’ll be and how she’s sure I’ll be ok because I am able to cook ugali. Then she teared up a little bit as she complimented me some more about how fat I've gotten. I seriously have no idea what I'm going to do without her.

Our goodbye this morning went like this: "My child! I will remember you so much! I have gotten so used to you." "Mama! I will call you and I will say, 'Help! how do you cook Ugali?" "You lie! You already know how to cook ugali! You are so ready." (We both start crying.)

Training is now over. Having passed the Swahili exam and proven myself to have enough common sense to not be a danger to US interests abroad, tomorrow I will be sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I have yet again packed up everything I own and am leaving the place that has truly begun to feel like home.

My last week at homestay was amazing. Ramadan started on Tuesday, and I decided to join my family in fasting during daylight hours. In a weird way, I think it was the most important decision I’ve made since coming here. It‘s hard to explain why exactly I decided to fast, but it was mostly an impulsive response to the sudden realization that I have a limited number of hours left to spend with my host family. The family will keep fasting for the next 30 days, but I'm waiting till I get to my site to decide if I'm going to keep it up. I think it might be a good way to help with the integration process, as my new community has a large muslim population as well. Ramadan with my host family was a lot of fun. We fasted all day and then ate a gigantic and incredibly delicious meal at 6:30. Then we hung out for a bit, cooked some more, went to bed early, and woke up at 2 or 3am to eat again.

A few days ago she explained to me the purpose of fasting during Ramadan. From the every-third-word I understood, it sounds a lot like Yom Kippur--repentance, purification, all that good stuff. Today I told her that I am fasting because people from my religion (she’s still not sure what Jews are, but she gets that I’m something other than Muslim or Christian) have a holiday that is like a one-day Ramadan, but I don’t like to celebrate it alone. I’ve been bumming a bit about the fact that I’m the only Jew in my training class--I’m not religious in the “pray to God on a regular basis” (or really ever) kind of way, but after spending nine summers at Tamarack, four years in BBYO, and countless hours in Temple Israel’s youth choir, Judaism played a role in many of my best memories. Jewish rituals have so many warm-fuzzy associations, but for me, practicing religion has never been about connecting to an external deity -- I practice Judaism as a way to connect to my community. Here in Tanzania, my community is Muslim. So ramadan it is.

I have to wrap up now... time for dinner and then my last night as a trainee--tomorrow I become a real volunteer! wooooooohoo. I'll be getting to my site sometime between the 19th and 21st... still not sure on the specifics there. I have my super safi new cell phone and would love to hear from anyone. My number is ** EDIT: cuontry code is 255, not 855!!** 255-782-496-513. You can call from skype for pretty cheap. My birthday is September 10th... Tanzanians aren't really into birthdays, most of them have to think really hard when you ask how hold they are... so you know, hint hint...