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.