Iringa crew makes a video

Staying at our favorite guesthouse, waiting for our shadowers and replacements to arrive, Sarah, Glenn and I make a video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F42l1wTe0wY&feature=youtu.be

Graduation!

As always I was put on the decorating committee for Form VI graduation. Every time we choose up committees I joke I should be a bouncer, DJ or MC and once I made it as far as being put with the cooks but for some reason I usually seem to end up mapamboni no matter what I do. This makes very little sense. The Tanzanian tradition of decorating everything in sight line with as many ribbons, draped clothes and bows as they can lay their hands on is something I find slightly repugnant to my American senses of both style and efficiency. 

My intrepid team of form four girls ask “Madam should we use green or pink bows here?... Madam where can we find more lace cloth?... Madam do these ribbons look right?” But the answer is always the same: I really couldn't care less. 

I do make an effort though. Friday night we stayed until eleven o'clock in the staffroom turning it into somewhere I might have been delighted to have my fifth birthday. I realize of course that American traditions are just as arbitrary and held just as dear. Why can't we have graduations without those ridiculous robes and hats? Why isn't Christmas Christmas without a tree? Why does Thanksgiving necessarily mean a turkey? Still, as a dispassionate observer it all seems utterly ridiculous.

The staff room when I was finished with it.

Graduation itself was long (starting two hours late) and mostly much more interesting than the average Tanzanian function, at least for me. My students sang, danced, made speeches and put on a thirty minute farce (komedi) which addresses the themes of sex, drugs, drinking, love. It included cross-dressing and some slapstick so realistic the first time I saw it I literally gasped and thrust my fingers to my mouth and ended with a joke about incest and mistaken identity. Obviously, it brought the house down.

The singing was moving. I've always been a sucker for all-men choirs, call and response songs and songs that include hand clapping, all of which were featured heavily. The song that contained a thanks specifically to me made me tear up and hate myself for not having my camera with me.

After the ceremony the graduates and the students who paid for the food piled into classes where rice, pilau, beans, beef stew, cabbage, bananas and sodas (what a feast!) are waiting for them. The invited guests had almost the same, except served from much nicer dishes and in the staffroom. As event coordinators, we teachers dashed about making sure that everything was as it should be. Only when the music was beginning out in the parade ground and all the official guests had left did we settle down for our own plates of food and beer/soda. 

Since very few people have cameras every party has a band of roving photographers who line up participants in the shrubbery to take essentially the same pictures over and over again with different people in them. As something of an oddity in my community I am a big star of these photos and almost the only one who ever smiles. The day after the photos will be printed in town and then sold back to the people who requested them. As an American living my life in the post printed photos paradigm I am sometimes scolded for taking pictures I never bring back.

The music is all gospel and Bongo Flavor (East Africa's idea of pop) and Tanzanians are pretty terrible dancers by American standards when they are trying to be polite. At the sketchy discos in the big cities people have seen enough rap videos to know how to really shake their booties. But in a village where there is no electricity and anyway everyone knows you, your mother and your wife, its mostly a lot of elbow work and shifting of weight from one foot to another to the principle beat. My friends are unduly impressed with my ability to mimic this behavior and I am always congratulated several times at any party on my dancing. As with a lot of things, when it comes to my dancing I secretly suspect that a lot of Tanzanian interest comes down to a sort of 'look-at-what-the-monkey-can-do' fascination. I'm never entirely sure what they're actually impressed with and what they're only impressed with because I'm American. Whatever. I'll take what I can get.

The teachers and staff dance the Tanzanian version of the twist to resounding approval from the school.

As I said, I like showing off my stuff. But as I walked back to the staffroom with the other adults I couldn't help but feel strangely envious of the kids. They let the music play until eleven (though they only had permission until nine) and then they piled back into the dorms, rowdy and elated. The other teachers all went back to their families and kids. I'm the only one who went back to an empty house (except for the lizards). Being a teacher is fun, being the center of attention is exhilarating, having people interested in me and being respected is great. But being an outsider is hard.

An Education

I am asked more often than you would believe about the American system of education: almost as often as I am asked what exactly we are doing with all the corn we grow if we aren't pounding it into cornflower and then making a flavorless paste the texture of play-doh to eat twice a day (look up Ugali on the internet... it's the national food of Tanzania). So it's past time I explained to Americans the Tanzanian system. 

When they are two years old Tanzanian's start nursery school which is called Chekechea. I like that because it sounds a lot like the word for laugh in Swahili and I always imagine them sitting around and laughing a lot as they learn to count. After nursery school, at about five, they go to Schule ya Msingi (literally “the important school”).

When they are twelve years old Tanzanians finish with Schule ya Msingi and mandatory education. Very few go any further in their education either because they didn't pass the national examination or because they cannot afford the school fees to continue on to Secondary School. School fees at Sadani (a relatively big government school) are 150,000 Tsh for the boarding students per term which is roughly 100 USD.

At Secondary School students do four years of O-level (ordinary level) education at the end of which there is another national exam to determine if they are fit to continue on to two years of A-level (advanced level).

In O-level, for the first time, English is the medium of teaching (at least in theory). If the teachers do speak English in the classroom often its would be almost intelligible to a native speaker. In college my friend Jackson once took a class on existentialism and taught us all what a simulacrum was (a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy...). Unless you really commit to watching foreign television (and have the resources to make that happen for yourself) your English is going to be an imperfect copy of your teacher's already imperfect copy.

In my opinion it's not fair to spring English on them in the secondary school. Swahili is a blessedly logical language. If you tell me the infinitive of a word I can (99.999% of the time) tell you every variation of it given enough time to mull it over. There are also only four possible tenses (the present, the future, the past and the recent past) and the last two are almost perfectly interchangeable. I suppose if you grow up speaking it, you must assume every other language is equally well constructed. The moment when you comprehend the devilry of irregular verbs and the pluperfect must be like a fall from the paradise of a straight-forward trade language.

In A-level Tanzanians choose a “combination” which determines which subjects they study. My school specializes in science and offers three: PCB (Physics, Chemistry, and Biology), PCM (Physics, Chemistry, and Math) and CBG (Chemistry, Biology, and Geography). And yes, the PCM students do look down on all the other combinations as being “soft.” My current favorite Tanzanian rap song contains the lyric “I studied PCM, not PCB!” as a cocky rapper boast. My current PCM students are forever slowing down my lessons by asking for derivations from first principles. Buncha geeks.

After A-level it's university if you pass your exam (and not many do even though the pass mark is 21%) and if not most people go to a two year teachers college and learn to be O-level teachers. Yet another depressing simulacrum.

Recently I was in my evening office hours and what started as a conversation about Logic Gates got sidetracked (evening office hours almost always do) into me explaining to Elia and Justin nursery school to college. When I said most Americans graduate university at twenty-two they both burst out laughing.

“But shouldn't you finish A-level by the time you're nineteen and college by the time you're maybe twenty-two or three?” I asked, pointing at the juxtaposed schedules of the two educational systems I'd drawn on the board in between a million truth tables.

This is the kind of naivete that I thought I'd left behind months ago. Nothing in Tanzania goes on schedule.

Every year the teachers at my school spend hours meticulously drawing up a schedule for all the classes and then spend the next year patently ignoring it. There are scheduled sports and games, scheduled times for maintenance and official people for electricity, plumbing and each dormitory. But life gets in the way.

This week we are preparing for the District Commissioner to visit the school. I asked who exactly that was for days before realizing that no one else on campus was a hundred percent sure what his job was. Despite this, it's a big deal. We've been almost literally painting the roses red for his arrival. Edging all the school's pathways bricks have been laid and then painted white.They won't last more than a week and a half since it's the rainy season. On Friday none of the O-level students went to a single class because they were all doing school maintenance work and all of the teachers were running around trying to supervise them.

“If you're very blessed; if you're very lucky you can graduate on time,” Elia said with a laugh. “Like my young brother. He is starting O-level this year and he's only twelve. I was twenty-four when I took my national examination for O-level.”

“How old are you?” I asked Justin, who I had log assumed was the youngest in my class.

“I'm twenty-three.”

I'm twenty-three too but I don't say so. We just go back to Logic Gates and hoping against hope, all of us, that they pass their national exams.

The most cheerful Christmas blog ever to begin with thoughts on Chinese water torture

A lot of the problems we Peace Corps volunteers find particularly troubling are in the Chinese-water-torture school of discomfort: anything done too many times becomes uncomfortable and then quickly unbearable. The same food, people, questions, clothes, problems with the phone network or spotty electricity or water (if you're lucky enough to have it). For example, I have recently become tired of every single article of clothing I have on this continent. My morning routine has become like dressing my own sullen five-year-old. I stare into my clothes cabinet and pout until I'm late for school.

The worst of the monotony-as-torture problems though is loneliness. We're all adults. We can go a whole day without seeing our mothers or our friends. But days become weeks, then months, then a year and a half. Around the holidays, an emotional landmine under the best of circumstances, this is particularly poignantly painful.

So when I made the decision to spend Christmas in my village, away from other Americans to commiserate with, away from skype or even a totally reliable phone line, I was nervous. I'd made precautions: found people to spend the day with, bought some small gifts for my neighbor children that I knew would be a hit, downloaded some Christmas music to listen to, and even bought a bottle of wine the last time I was in town. Historically however I've been excellent at tricking my father into thinking that I don't need to “do anything” for the holidays and then waking up all nostalgic and emotional on the 24^th and moping around until he buys a tree. If I pulled a similar bait-and-switch on myself I would have already missed the last bus out of my village. Stuck.

But the 25^th dawned clear and beautiful: a crisp seventy degrees with plenty of sunshine. I woke up, baked a Funfetti cake (the bag of premade mix had been a real splurge at about four dollars US), packed it into my backpack with my speakers, some presents and my bottle of wine and walked the fifteen minutes into Sadani metropolitan to visit Mama Benny.

We had agreed to start at nine o'clock but she called to say I should come at ten. When I arrived at eleven, the cake having taken longer than expected, I was only a little bit late. She'd cooked the rice and was just starting to make it into pilau.

Pilau! (That I ate!)

The idea of doing different things on different holidays has yet to reach these sunny shores. Depending on what we are celebrating Americans cook a turkey, drag a tree into our house and stick lights on the roof, hide eggs around our lawn, dress in costumes and give out candy or simply drink until we are sick and pour green food coloring into everything we can think of including the river. Whatever the occasion however Tanzanians cook a huge pot of pilau (a spiced rice), and invite their friends to visit. If you're flush you buy people you know soda or beer. If you're broke (or you don't know how to cook pilau) you walk around sampling what everyone else has cooked.

Being flush, we cooked pilau and some beef stew and had some of it with the cake I made (a huge hit even though I hadn't had the time to make any frosting for it). Having neglected to mail Christmas cards this year I had also brought over some poster paper and crayons to make some photo Christmas cards to email out. Benny and Imelda (a young girl of indeterminate relation to Mama Benny) helped enthusiastically. Some of my students, who had wandered by to charm some pilau out of me and Mama B, helped hold them up.

Then for the rest of the day we sat around listening to American Christmas music on my speakers on Mama Benny's couches and not “doing anything.” It was nice. Also sweltering after we polished off my bottle of wine, she bought us beers and then the neighbors came over with a bucket of Ulanzi, the local moonshine.

I suppose that's how you're supposed to spend Christmas. Not doing much with people you genuinely care for. Except for the Ulanzi, the endless pilau the neighbors heaped on me and the care packages I have been told are en route, I didn't receive a single present this year. But when Mama Grayson and I walked back to the school well after dark the moon was so bright we could see the road clearly and we were laughing hysterically and it was a very merry Christmas indeed.