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.

Termite Day

So this yesterday morning I woke up and found my living room floor crawling with insects. A particularly unpleasant experience since there are no lights in my house and I found this out by stumbling onto a couple of them on my way to open a window. But things like that have long ceased to bother me and I had already cavalierly swept them outside and started cooking breakfast when my phone rang.

“Geneva come to the water spout. I want to show you something?”

“Okay, coming.”

What Mama Benny wants me to see is the two enormous buckets of the same insects I just got rid of that she and the librarian have gathered up in the girl's dormitory and are washing the wings off of. Ah yes... I had forgotten that the mating/flying stage of the termite life cycle (arguably the grossest stage) is a delicacy in Tanzanian cuisine. The occasional days when they all spring forth from the damp earth like a zombie hoard are almost holidays. Neither Mama Benny or the librarian do much work and even my grading is periodically interrupted when I am called to the school kitchen (a shack where the school lunches are prepared in pots the size of small hot tubs) to look at something particularly interesting. Maybe its just that Christmas is looming.

The strangest thing about the day, except for the half pound of bugs in a frying pan, is how I behaved like a tourist in my own village. I squirmed, giggled and finally went to get my camera to document the cooking. I made five or six tentative gestures to my mouth with the first one before finally popping it in (Simon, watching me do this, remarks “Madam you are funny!” and Elisius shouts out “Don't eat them Madam! They are bugs!” before breaking into laughter).

The second strangest thing is how delicious termites actually are. They are nice and fatty (you don't even need to add any oil to the pot to cook them), the perfect size for snacking and they have a nice crunch but it's the flavor that really make them. Not exactly spicy but there is a definite zest to them: the closest thing I can think of is puffed pork cracklin's. I think they could catch on.

Anyway...pictures:

 

Mabadiliko Yanaweza/ Change is Possible Boys Conference

The first official Boys Empowerment Conference in Iringa Region Tanzania happened this year the week after Thanksgiving. If you notice a peculiar upswing in your mood (or possibly your libido) that week its likely it was due to the psychic energy of the forty teenage boys we crowded into a small conference room in a Catholic Mission just outside of Mafinga to talk about HIV/AIDS, alcohol and drugs, fatherhood , gender versus sex, gender roles, condoms, masturbation and of course girls, girls, girls, girls! 

It was our second gender empowerment conference in the region (Girl's Empowerment happened in June) and so of course it was a study in contrasts. The essentials were still there: a talent show (including a skit that could have been a three act opera and half a dozen rap songs), opening and closing speeches, certificates of completion, sports and games, and a question and answer session that covered a shocking amount of ground. But in a lot of ways it was really different.

The Girls Conference was an amazing, transformative, near-spiritual experience that culminated in a dance party the likes of which will never be seen again. It was also the logistical equivalent of a week-long game of a whack-a-mole. I am happy to say that Peace Corps volunteers are pretty quick studies though. Boy's conference was exhausting, but it wasn't quite the mad dash we all knew it could have easily been. We also moved away from having a lot of guest speakers and let our Tanzanian “Counter Parts,” the friends and colleagues we brought with us from our village do most of the heavy lifting. 

But of course the biggest difference, no matter how much we talk about gender equality, was that we were dealing with boys and not girls. Tanzanian boys have a wonderful assertiveness and confidence. Not to say that the girls don't have it at all but they don't have it in the metric tons, cartloads, bushels and barrels like the boys do. The boys have machismo, panache and the ability to ask the question “how much masturbation is too much masturbation?” with a completely straight face. It's impossible not to love them for it.

Enjoy some pics below: 

Maxing and relaxing outside after a hard day's condom demonstration.

Can you name all the parts of the penis? In Swahili? These boys can.

The whole gang!

What's in a name?

My next door neighbor Upendo has three boys: Derrick, Dennis and Davis. My academic mistress has a girl and a boy: Ester and Elia. The swahili/english teacher has a boy and a girl: Frankie and Faradja. The school secretary has only a girl but her name is Brightness Bahati Bange. I have two students who sit right next to each other whose names are Katemi Katemi and Juma Juma. In the classroom next door there is Abhassan Hassan, Nock Nock and Raymond Romance. There is Mr. Tayari, whose name means Mr. Ready and of course I round out the the hilarity by having the funniest possible name for the only white teacher in sixteen hundred square kilometers. 

Of Upendo's boys Derrick is the oldest: seven and very solemn. I like to ask him how his problems are (a common greeting here) because he always looks so world weary when he says that they are fine. He is the most respectful, well-behaved seven-year-old I have ever met too. He is enormously kind to his younger brother, very respectful with my things when he comes over to play and how excited he gets when he sees his mom and dad when they come back from work is frankly touching. 

Davis is not quite a month old and obviously excruciatingly adorable. He and Upendo are spending her maternity leave lying together in bed almost all day, nursing, sleeping and snuggling. I've seen them apart exactly once so far. But they welcome visitors at any time of day and he is developing quite a bag of ticks to entertain. So far he can open his eyes all the way, yawn, grab your fingers, mew softly, smile and sigh.

But however much I love Derrick and Davis, Dennis is my favorite child in the world. He and I both arrived in Sadani on the 24^th of November but his birthday is exactly one year before the day I moved in. Dennis isn't an angel like Derrick. He's a little brother and a little spoiled by Derrick, who almost always lets him have his way. He's only just learning to talk and sometimes he comes over while I'm working to play various games with me. In one game we call each others names for an extended periods of time in various emphatic ways: “Neva.” “Dennie.” “NEVA!” “DENNIE!” “Neva!” “Dennie!” “Neva.” “Dennie.” “Nevaaaaaaa.” “Dennnnnnnnnnie.” and so on. In another he touches his nose and I make a beeping noise until he stops or until I run out of breath. In another he points at various things and asks “what?” and I tell him the word for it. In another he sits on my chest and we roar at each other with lions. In another he simply tries to knock the breath out of me while I lie on the floor by sitting on my stomach as hard as he can. For some reason I am actually a huge fan of that last one.

Fire!

The Rolling Stones are my go-to soldering artist. I was singing Honky Tonk Woman pretty loudly when Hussein knocked on my office door. He raised his eyebrows for just a fraction of a second but I just smiled placidly back. There is no way he's going to catch me being embarrassed.

“Afternoon Madam.”

“Good afternoon Hussein, how are you?”
“I am fine. How are you too?”
“I am just fine. How may I help you?” I pronounce every word as slowly as I can when I speak to my students. Hussein is one of my best students and his English is very good but he still appreciates it when I use what volunteers call “special English.” Right now there is a little hue and cry about introducing the term “level-appropriate English” instead but I'm keeping special English. It makes me feel like it's the nice English my grandmother gave me and that I only get out on Thanksgiving.

“Yes Madam. I wish to do the practical about which we were discussing earlier.”

He handed me the procedure he had copied down in his meticulous handwriting and I skimmed it. Its a chemistry practical and I understood very little of the theoretical basis but the experiment itself seemed simple enough. The trick was that we need to compare the reactions of two chemicals and we had only one. I had called another Iringa volunteer the day before and he'd told me that we could make the other by slowly heating something we had. “It should turn white. If it turns black you've irreversibly made blah blah blah blah blah...” He'd said. “But if you heat it gently you should have no problems.”

I fetched the chemical and got Hussein the bottle of Motapoa and a bottle cap to pour it into as well as the matches. Motapoa is a kind of semi-solid fuel I've never seen anywhere but in Iringa, Tanzania. It is the color of lemon-lime Gatorade, the consistency of sickly snot and has a smell that stings the eyes. But it is much simpler than getting out one of the kerosine stoves and I thought it should give Hussein better control of the heat.

By this time Bahati Joseph had joined us. He and Hussein run practicals together a lot. He isn't a star student like Hussein but he is much more charismatic and he takes his studies very seriously. He has a really deep voice and a lot of confidence. He also picks his nose a lot while looking me straight in the eye, which I have come to find oddly charming. Nose-picking isn't taboo here (sometimes, just to scandalize myself I try to do it while meeting someones eye or in my classroom which I'm pretty sure I am going to regret when I get back to the states) but Bahati really stands out in my mind.

“Afternoon Madam.”

“Good afternoon Bahati. How are you?”

“I am fine. How are you too?”

“I am just fine.”

I repeated the instructions for heating to both of them. Since Bahati's English is slightly worse than Hussein's I slow down even more and I start to think very hard about my word choice. “Are we together?” I asked when I finish at the end.

“Yes Madam.” They both say.

But I have learned to read Bahati's body language fairly well in the last few months and I could tell I'd lost him somewhere. I went over it again in Swahili and he seemed to perk up a little bit.

I went back to soldering, watching them out of the corner of my eye as they work.

Hussein and Bahati are my children. Even though they are my age, both taller then me and I suspect, at the least in Hussein's case, much smarter than me, I feel like their mother. They are so handsome in their school uniforms--white, button-up t-shirts, black pants and shoes-- and they are so serious as they weigh out the chemicals, discussing in Swahili as they do. They look like scientists and when I look them my heart beats a little faster with pride. Some parts of my job are torturous, frustrating and heartbreaking. This is not one of those parts.

I worry about the fumes from the solder. I've been breathing them for hours in this cramped office but now that they're here it seems somehow more dangerous. I want to take it outside but I don't like to leave them alone with a flame so I open all the doors and windows and tell them they must let me know if they start to smell it.

I was back to thinking about soldering when suddenly there is a noise like an enormous fart and both Bahati and Hussein shout. I jerked my head up and found that there was a burning pile of motopoa on the table and on the ground and (thank Jesus) not on either of them. I could see instantly what had happened from the twisted plastic bottle in Hussein's hand. The motopoa had run out in the little soda bottle cap they were using as a stove and they had tried to add more without extinguishing the flame first. The fire had shot up the stream of motopoa into the bottle, causing Hussein to jerk his arm away, spilling it.

For what seems like forever they both looked at me warily as the motopoa smolders on the desk. They expected to be shouted at for this I could tell. A Tanzanian teacher would certainly shout at them, possibly beat them. Instead I laughed. I couldn't help myself. I quickly went to blow out the flames on the table and the floor.

“Well,” I said when nothing is on fire, “today we have become more educated. Now we know something that we should not do with motopoa.”

Bahati laughed a little too but Hussein still looked stricken as they clean up the spill and I helped, giggling to myself. “Madam, why are you laughing at me?” He asked, sounding genuinely hurt.

Instantly I stopped laughing. “Hussein I am not laughing at you.” I said firmly. “I'm laughing at myself. I should have been watching you more closely. You are students and there is no reason you should have known that could happen.”

The next day Bahati and Hussein came back and took the chemicals they'd made to perform the lab. Since none of the chemicals are toxic and there is no heat source in the experiment I let them go by themselves to the lab while I staid in the office to grade the quizzes I gave Form V. About an hour later I hadn't finished but I had gotten bored so I wandered over to the lab to see if they have questions or if everything is going smoothly.

To my surprise it wasn't just Hussein and Bahati who are crowded around the lab bench. About ten other students were watching them as they work. I'm not the only one who has figured out that Hussein is brilliant. For a second I just watched from the door as they watch him work. They were almost completely silent. There were too many of them to comfortably fit around the bench. One of the nearest had been forced to put his head down almost to the lab bench so the student behind him could see better. These are my children and I am so proud of them. They're so smart and so dedicated and when they help each other it almost breaks my heart with how sweet it is.

I think I am going to try to figure out how to download a video from Youtube of someone pouring gasoline onto a flame and it shooting up into the gas can. I bet Hussein would like to see that.

Speaking of fire... here's a video of my next door neighbor burning her corn fields!

The toughest rat around

I had just beat one of my duffel bags for half an hour with a shoe and the rat inside was still alive when Rahema knocked on my door. For a while I had thought about letting him out and letting him run away while I shouted, “okay...okay little buddy that was impressive.” But I'd only poison him later. I really didn't want him breeding more superrats in my kitchen. So I opened up the zipper a sliver and dropped in two pieces of poisoned banana and closed it with the luggage lock.

I had also considered inviting one of the boys from the dormitory to open up the bag and hack him to death with a hoe. But the duffel bag is where I keep my emergency stash of packets of cheap gin. No, the real solution was the poison. I'd thrown another shoe at him that morning several times, chasing him out of his hiding place first by whipping a bright african-print cloth at where I thought he was. But he'd only run back into my spare bedroom and into the duffel bag and I'd had to go to parade at school. The poison or a cat. I'd gotten a cat for a few months and he had been great. He'd killed five rats that I'd seen him eat (and one song bird that he'd chased all over my living room and finally devoured under my couch because I gave up on chasing him out). But he'd lost an eye and subsequently his life probably to one of the mangy, wild dogs circling my house at night. It hadn't felt right to replace him and I was still insisting to Mama Benny that he'd probably just gone to Dar es Salam to greet his parents.

But I picked up the duffel bag and threw it into the back part of my courtyard where no one ever goes but me and let Rahema in.

Rahema is one of my favorite students on campus. We met when I took her to the Iringa girl's conference a few months before and she was the girl who had taken her role as “peer educator” most seriously. Also, for some reason I like that she calls me teacher and not madam, which even after eleven months still makes me feel like I run a whorehouse instead of an advanced physics classroom. She is the student in charge of the food for the boarding students, one of the loudest talkers I have ever met and almost comically fat and short. I am allowed to say that because 1. Tanzanians think of “fat” as a descriptive word like any other and not an insult and 2. her only comment on my photo album was that I had really gotten fat since coming to Tanzania. She presented it as a reason that I should stay in Tanzania forever.

She came in and we sat on the floor. No one sits on my furniture. I am not sure how it's possible or why it's true but it's infinitely more comfortable to spread the cushions on the floor and recline on them. I like to think of this as lending a certain urban and bohemian ambiance to my house. I like to think it makes the mat that is printed to look like tile and the scattered buckets and cardboard boxes used as actual containers seem intentional and ironic.

She wanted to talk about the life skills club we've been trying to start with limited success and our plans for it over the break. Mostly we just look at my photo album and talk about how things are going for her at school. But we do decide to postpone anymore meetings until after the midterm exams and then she presented the idea that we could do something for the form four graduation ceremony, like a song or a skit. I said I'd get her space in the schedule for it and help her choreograph it.

Then we walk up to the football game together and sit on an old dead log and watch the boys play. We talk about her future and what she plans to do in A-level and afterward. We talk about America and her tribe the Wabena. And then we walk back a little before the game ends because she needs to check on the food in the kitchen and I need to get back and start cooking and heating my bathwater.

Rahema is everything that I hope the next generation of Tanzanian women is. She is not exactly a radical departure from the culture and she's the opposite of the archetypal revolutionary. If she went to Hogwarts instead of Sadani Secondary she would be in Hufflepuff for sure, not Gryffindor. But she's incredibly smart and motivated, especially for someone her age. And she's outspoken and strong in this way that frankly leaves me speechless. She knows how to command the men around her in a way that doesn't make them resent her, but love her. She is going to be a great wife and an even better mother someday. I don't think that Rahema would ever burn her bra but I hope she raises daughters who do.

The next morning the rat is still alive (too smart to eat the bananas) so I carry the duffel bag out to the road and let it run out into the bushes, hoping its too far for it come back to my house.

Photos since the last post

Tumaini and the girls from the dormitory cook for a party we had. That first big pot is just a huge vat of oil that not a single thing we ate didn't go into.

This is the party we were cooking for above. Couldn't figure out how to work my camera but I like this picture. The woman whose face you can see is my adorable secondmaster's wife Mama Grayson.

Grayson is just the cutest. Especially when he wears this coat when it's like 70 degrees out.

My livingroom!

View out my door into the courtyard.

This is what my window looked like a couple of months ago. There is now corn as high as an elephants eye all the way down to the river.

Just rubbing it in a little bit...

The view from my door looking out towards the school.

My courtyard. The door goes to my kitchen and back behind the wall are my bathroom and toilet.

More of the Sadani Secondary School.

Every morning the whole school lines up around the flagpole to do parade and sing the national anthem.

The staff offices

More of the staff offices

One of my classrooms. It's usually much neater but its post-finals so kind of a mess.

Again...sort of in a post-finals mess.

The front of my house seen from the school.

Hi mom and dad! Don't pretend like this post isn't just for you. No one else is REALLY interested in what my courtyard looks like and I know it. Love your guts!

Let's talk about kids...

I can't tell who is more obsessed with whom...me or the Tanzanian kids.

It takes a while to notice this specific difference because so much here is different; and pointing out one difference seems...silly. But after a while it starts to dawn on you that a huge differences between the US and TZ is the number of children.

Most people I know in my village still make a living from farming. Even the teachers here all have farms on the school property. Two kids is almost unreasonably small (not nearly enough to help with a farm) and so there are kids everywhere and they do the absolute funniest, cutest and weirdest things you can imagine. Some of the village kids, the young ones who have never seen a white person before, burst into tears when they see me. This is my least favorite. Their mothers mostly think this is hilarious and I guess I understand that it is a little funny. But, secretly, it actually does hurt my feelings.

My next-door neighbor Upendo's littlest Derek (he's one year old) was like this at first; but now we're good friends. Upendo lets me carry him on my back in a sling. Derek has the nicest smile and he loves the game "this little piggie" even if he doesn't speak Kiswahili yet, let alone English. I'm still working on my second master Robert's kid Grayson. He'll come close to me now and he doesn't scream. When he's in a good mood he'll crawl towards me and even let me touch his hands; but he won't let me pick him up. The older village kids stare at me as I walk by and shout "Mzungu! Mzungu! Mzungu!" It translates as "European" but it really just means 'white person'. If I don't respond they get together in a group and chant this at me...which can get surreal.

When we were in training I was walking with my friend Sarah. When some kids chanted "Mzungu!" at us she turned around and haughtily corrected them, saying we were "Wazungu," which means more than one white person instead of just a single white person. She is pretty much famous in my host family for this.

Tanzanian children are, as far as I can tell, the cutest kids in the world. Maybe it's because kids back home didn't pay much attention to me, but I find that I am much more interested in kids here than I ever was in the US. I smile at them; I ask them questions until they run away; I see how close I can get to them without them bursting into tears; and I coo at them in Kiswahili. Kids in the US don't stare and don't point, don't ask rude questions or shout "how are you teacher?" so quickly it sounds like one word or scream in joy and fear when you look at them.

I'm never going to like American kids after this...I've gotten used to being the most exciting things children have seen all day. I'm spoiled rotten.

Also, it should be mentioned: kids here are allowed to ride the motorcycles when they're old enough to hold on (like three years old) and I have to wear a helmet when I ride a bike. All I'm saying is that anyone who tells you that there are rules in Tanzania is lying.

Photos Galore!

(Almost) the whole gang at the Ambassador's House looking at these photos.

This is my whole host family at the going-away party. Aren't we cute? Tanzanian ceremonies are super formal and super awkward for Americans but I was glad to be with them/awkwardly feed them cake and stumble through a thank-you in Kiswahili.

Mike is asking himself the question "how much vegetable oil went into this food?" I know better. Ignorance Mike...it's bliss.

Sarah's host sister and I share a giggle.

This is my house! Just kidding...it's the ambassadors. Mine is slightly modest.

Don't we look respectable? This was the day right before I moved into a house with no electricity and running water.

Thanksgiving dinner at the Ambassador's house. After two months of rice and beans we were way more excited about the food than anything else (swearing in and meeting the US Ambassador included). Whatever...there was pumkin pie and unlimited apples.

This place is real. And they serve pumkinpie and turkey.

Swearing in! I'm a real volunteer now!

The dream team at the Embassy after swearing in. This was the group I went through training with. Sarah (on the far right) is my closest neighbor and pretty much a goddamn riot. From left to right they are Lisa, Carly, Mike, Kondo, me and Sarah.

This is my headmaster! His name is Bonus Ndimbo and he's straight up the best.

Site so Far

So I'm at site finally (a school called Sekondari ya Sadani or Sadani Secondary School) and it's lovely so far. My village is a little outside of Mafinga (and by that I mean an hours harrowing charge down a dirt road on a rickety bus) and it's charming. The list of things you can and cannot buy in my village is a little surprising. Fruit is rarity, pombe (the local beer that they brew from bananas) is a ubiquity, but salt, sugar, tea and flip-flop shoes you can almost always find in the tiny little shops that are scattered down the main road.
My house is enormous (two bedrooms and a private courtyard) but has no electricity and until the rainy season I have to carry water up from the river which is kind of a hike. I never make it up the hill with a bucket of water though...someone always comes to help me carry it part of the way. I am trying to learn to carry water on my head with no hands (for now because it's much easier and maybe the local women will stop laughing at me and for when I return to the United States because it will be an excellent party trick).
My other enormous comedy success (the struggling-to-carry-water routine is a smash hit that could basically debut in Madison Square Garden as far as the Tanzanian villagers are concerned) is the fact that I'm scared of rats and bugs. Everyday in Tanzania is a new opportunity to ask myself the question "is that the scariest bug I've ever seen?" and the answer is always "yes... until tomorrow." Yesterday I saw the biggest cockroach of my life outside the staff office during chai break. When I pointed it out to the other teachers and ran away the biology teacher picked it up and started showing me that it had all the characteristics of an insect, which was totally just an excuse to get it close enough to me so I would squirm away and the other teachers could laugh at me more...wherever my brother was at the time I'm sure he was smiling.
Since I'm teaching A-level physics(advanced level is sort of between an AP level high school physics class and the first year of a bachelor's degree: no calculus involved but some fairly advanced applications) I've already taught some classes. The students are all men, all my age or older and they all wear uniforms. They are intimidating and their English is good but not great.
I was lying to you by the way when I said I would be teaching in Kiswahili: all classes in Tanzania past primary school (when the kids are about 12) are taught in the official language of the country, English. That does not necessarily mean that the kids speak English...at least not English as you would recognize it. Here we call it "special English" and when you try to explain something like the Young's Modulus or Stress-Strain curves in it things rapidly tend towards the utterly ridiculous.
What else do you want to know about site? I love it. I'm safe. I'm happy. I'm eating a lot of rice and ugali.

Pictures from Mikumi National Park

So the weekend before last we went on safari in Mikumi National Park. This is a small selection of what I saw. My friend Mike took all these photos (fifteen minutes in it started to feel a little stupid taking photos when Mike was just leaning over my shoulder taking much better ones). I might photobucket the other photos later because Mike took a lot of great photos...

The guide said we weren't allowed off the bus to see if he wanted some friends in the watering hole. Maybe that had to do with the lions though.



The classic no-hand water carrying.



Dinner at Mikumi.

This isn't even the coolest twiga we saw...I'm just saying.

Mike says I should start a blog called 'Things I do in my Obama T-shirt.' It really was the only clean thing I had though.

Uhg this is not the photo I wanted gosh darn it. Oh well...slightly out of focus.

This place is a total snooze fest.