My First Village Wedding

I woke up early, at the same time I always wake up in Africa. 6:15am, without an alarm. It's about the time the light in my East window intensifies as the sun rises up and out of the early morning fog. Because it was Saturday, though, I decided to lie in bed for an extra few minutes. At 6:30 on the dot, I heard footsteps coming from up the road.
Many Peace Corps Volunteers in Tanzania suffer from what we have unofficially termed "Hodi Anxiety." As I've described in past blogs, "hodi" is a called word used in lieu of the Western knock on the door. In our inevitable and often unintentionally-used Kiswanglish, "hodi" may be used as a verb (e.g. I heard him outside, and I was afraid he would hodi, so I crouched down on the floor so he wouldn't see me through the window and I could pretend I wasn't home.), a noun (e.g. I think 6:30am is a little early for hodies.), an adjective (e.g. And then I did a hodi dance because she didn't want to stay and talk; she just wanted to give me a cob of corn!), or pretty much any other part of speech you creatively want or circumstantially need. Anyway, Hodi Anxiety, as I'm sure you've begun to deduce, is a fretful apprehension induced by a suggestion (such as footsteps) that a person is on the point of hodiing at your house. Hodi Anxiety is, I'm sure, spawned from some deep insecurity we all developed growing up in modern America and learning the culture of never, ever knocking on someone's door unexpectedly, since that necessarily means you are a solicitor or a psycho.
So naturally, when I heard the approaching footsteps at 6:30am, I was seized by an attack of Hodi Anxiety. I lay very still in my bed, careful not to make a sound. I breathed shallowly, since the concrete walls conduct sound inordinately well through their gaps and apertures. At 6:30 on a Saturday morning, I wanted the hodier to think I was still sleeping and go away without too much effort (the longer they try, the guiltier you feel). And then it came.
"Hodi!"
I shut my eyes and waited.
"Hodi!" It was familiar voices. I groaned. It was the oldest two of the four little girls who live next door, Neema and Martha. They're absolutely adorable, not to mention two of my best Tanzanian friends. As if that wasn't guilt enough, Neema has recently been diagnosed with some unmentionable disease, about which I can get no information other than that it is "incurable."
"Hodi!"
"I'm coming!" I finally called as I threw back the covers and climbed out of the opening in my mosquito net. On my way to the front door, I stepped into some sweat pants, since I had been sleeping in shorts, which are entirely unacceptable attire, even when alone. I opened the door.
"Laula," they said in unison, with two L's and no R's. They like to say my name. I don't know why. Every time they see me, they say my name and wait, as if I'm suppsoed to respond in a certain way.
"Mambo?" I said.
"Safi. Shikamoo."
"Marahaba." It was a quick greeting; after these simple exchanges, they jumped right in.
"Why aren't you dressed?" Neema asked.
"For what?" I said, as I suddenly noticed that they were wearing their best dresses and matching shoes.
"The wedding."
"What wedding?"
"Teacher Mdeka's wedding."
"That's not til tomorrow."
"No, it's today."
"At school they told us Sunday." (People get married on all days of the week here, even Tuesdays.)
"They made a mistake. It's today."
"How do you know?"
"Baba and Mama are the wedding sponsors. They left yesterday. The wedding is today."
"Does everyone else know it's today?" I asked, suspicious that I hadn't been informed.
"They'll figure it out," said Martha.
At the girls' urging, I got ready. I tried to wear my best Tanzanian "suti" (suit), a matching "sketi na sheti" (skirt and shirt), which I wore for my Peace Corps Swearing-In Ceremony last year, but as I was opening the shirt to put it on, the zipper broke. I had to settle for my other "sketi na sheti," which is, from a Tanzanian perspective, not as pretty because it's white and "white people don't look good in white clothes."
By 7 o'clock, I was ready. "So, where do we get the bus?" I asked the girls. Mdeka's wedding was in a village about fifteen kilometers away.
"At school," they told me. "But it's not coming for us until 9 o'clock."
"9 o'clock? Why'd you wake me up so early?"
"We wanted to make sure you were ready. We're going to go make sure Teacher Kapinga is ready now!" And they ran out the door, leaving me with two Saturday morning hours to kill alone in my second-best Tanzanian clothes.

Anyway, that was a very long preface to what this blog is actually about, which is the village wedding of one of my fellow math teachers. When I at last arrived at school, at 9:20 (I try to keep a somewhat Tanzanian schedule of lateness or else I'd spend half of these two years just waiting for other people to show up or for meetings to start), I was the first one there. Since I had still been suspicious that a 7- and a 9-year-old were better informed than me (although, I am a foreigner, which, in terms of information and understanding of my surroundings, ranks me somewhere between newborns and my water pipe), I had called a few friends to verify the "leaving at 9 o'clock" rumor. They had confirmed it, so I knew that I was not early and that the wedding was in fact not on the day they had originally said it was on. The Tanzanians were just all later than me.
It ended up that I rode with Neema, Martha, two other female teachers, and the school nurse not in our rented bus, but in the LandCruiser of our school's patron, who is a bigshot but was a biggershot in the leading party of Tanzania's national government. During the course of the half-hour ride, our patron told me three times that I had broken a rule by wearing Tanzanian clothes to a Tanzanian wedding. Apparently, I should have worn American clothes to demonstrate my unique style and draw even more attention to myself than I do normally simply by being white. After driving, lost, down a few random bush roads, we arrived at the church.
Outside, a large group of people were - in my best Kiswanglish - chezaing ngoma, or dancing to traditional African drumbeats. Except the traditional African drums had been preempted by large, generator-powered speakers thumping the "ntz ntz" bass sound we Americans associate with dance clubs.
Around the church were parked several flat-bed lorries, which had brought several large groups to the wedding. We were the first to arrive in a private car, with the exception of the bride and groom, who were driven to the church by my headmaster, a rarity with his own car.
The bride and groom began processing into the church together, arm in arm, while the crowd of dancers continued to stomp and shake, periodically approaching the couple to wave hands and ululate in their faces. If it had been my wedding, I certainly would have burst into delirious laughter at such a happy sight (I did this anyway), but Tanzanian cultural precepts demand that the bride and groom abstain from laughter and merriness on their wedding day. Friends, relatives, and crashers are welcome and in fact expected to dance in a frenzy, laugh uproariously, and cheer hysterically, all to the point of mayhem and pandemonium, but through all this, the newlyweds must crack nary a smirk nor a simper. Moreover, they are not permitted to speak to or look at one another. And since the Christian ceremony in Tanzania does not call for a kiss, this is but a matter of iron will power and self-control.
As the ceremony progressed, a number of things occurred that visitors might find strange. First, there was the steady whurr of the generator, powering the "ntz ntz" of the oversized speakers, which played during every musical interlude, even the relgious ones. It also powered the microphone, which was necessary so the priest could be heard by the guests who arrived too late to find a pew to sit on in the small, rectangular church. (Although we arrived later than most, we were called by the priest to sit up front because we're teachers.) Next, there was the recognition of our school's patron as the guest of honor, and the relocation of his chair to a spot on the altar beside the priest. This was promptly followed by a district head's public plea into the microphone for money to buy textbooks; he even cited two other occasions on which our patron had donated to different schools. Finally, our attention was directed to the bride and groom, who were patiently and solemnly sitting in their chairs facing the altar. Periodically, the sweat on their faces was dabbed away by the handkerchiefs of my neighbors, the wedding sponsors, who sat behind them.
The content on the wedding ceremony was quite like those in America, with one notable exception. Immediately before the vows, the priest gave his speech about the expectations and roles of each - the husband and the wife - starting after the wedding. The roles of the husband were brief: to love his wife, to understand her, to care for her and provide for her financially. The roles of the wife, however, required a history. The priest recounted in detail how woman was made from a piece of man and therefore is not as whole as him. But that is ok, he said, because she was created only as a helper. Man is the head of the household, and a wife's duty is singular - to obey her husband. Like the husband must try to understand her, she must try to understand her husband - although, as the priest understood, it would be harder for her, given her naturally inferior intellect.
Then the couple vowed to meet these expectations, fulfill these roles, and be faithful to each other until death. The guests shouted and sang and danced, crowding the newlyweds. They blew whistles (yes, whistles, like referees' whistles) and ululated and generally brought the house down. After a time, order was restored so that a few short speeches could be made and a few irrelevant autobiographies recounted. And then we were whisked away to the reception on our own sets of two feet each.

The walk was about two miles in the beating equator sun, but when we arrived, we reclined restfully on hard, backless benches made out of bisected logs. The benches sat underneath makeshift canopies of straw and old burlap maize bags, which were balanced atop bamboo crossbeams held aloft by heavy branches, carefully chosen for the v-shaped forks at the tops and hammered into the ground.
The bride, groom, wedding sponsors, their families, and our patron the guest of honor sat up front on wooden couches that had been borrowed from living rooms. The wedding chairman, who was also the MC, made it his first order of business to announce that he was ready to return the flashlight he had borrowed the previous night, and he asked its owner to come forward to retrieve it. His second order of business was to say, in Swahili, "I might have to speak some broken language or some French today. We have a white person here." Everyone looked at me, laughing, and I waved both my hands with disguised consternation. We continued to celebrate, eating with out fingers for lack of utensils and listening to various choirs perform. Then we offered our gifts.
Giving gifts at a Tanzanian wedding is one of the most unambiguously, outrageously fun experiences available in our perplexing little world. A line of people forms at the entrance to the bamboo/straw/burlap canopy and dances toward the still unsmiling newlyweds. They approach the couple as a collective, stomping, screaming, and dancing the color out of the flattened grass under their feet. The gifts are passed above heads, backwards and forwards among the processing dancers until the celebrated couple is reached, at which point everyone continues to dance while everyone else is shaking hands with the wedding party. Eventually, one group clears out and allows another to offer their own gifts. When our group of teachers frolicked up with our offerings, we made such a hullabaloo of screaming and banging sticks against our gifts of kitchen pots and hoe blades that the MC was moved to accusations. "These teachers act like students," he said into the microphone. "We should hit them with sticks."
Everyone laughed, and we left. We wanted to get home to bathe before Zee Comedy Show, Tanzania's primetime version of SNL. On the way out, I was stopped three times by people wanting to tell me how funny they found my (apparently unsuccessful) efforts to "cheza ngoma." Tanzanians, by the way, are not shy about laughing at a person. They'll do it right to his or her face, and even unabashedly ask you to repeat your feat of humor. One woman even yelled, laughing, to her friends as I passed them, "Tell the white person to do her dance steps again so we can watch!" I went home with my colleagues and friends to watch Zee Comedy Show and laugh at someone else.

Below is the promised video of my students singing to welcome their president. Short, but sweet.

Mheshimiwa Kikwete, Rais wa Tanzania

Welcome to my school.

The classrooms and the quad are empty.

The teachers' room is empty, except for the lone globe with pencil holes punched in it and the old clock on the wall that perpetually believes the time is 9:07.

Whatever could cause such a stir/lack of work ethic in a Tanzanian school (besides a regular workday morning)? The president of Tanzania! Jakaya Kikwete, Tanzania's democratic leader since 2005, was scheduled to visit our school at 11:00am. The "Rais," or president, is a member of Tanzania's most powerful party (by far), which is called CCM.

As happens with any national figurehead, his posse preceded him. Below, you can see Njombe district chiefs, Iringa regional representatives, and, of course, the headmaster of my school, mingling in and tingling with anticipation of the president.

Rais Kikwete's arrival brought sundry sorts of people from the school, the village, and the surrounding bush. They woke up early and walked, barefoot, for hours just to secure a good viewpoint from which to see their "Mheshimiwa" (respected) leader. They waved party flags and prepared native African chants or songs to welcome him.

The teachers at my school, including me, arrived from across the street hours after the villagers had already recovered from their miles-long pilgrimages on foot, but because of our status in the immediate area, we just took the front row standing room only stretch of school grounds that had been reserved for us.

The primary school students sat in front of us, at the edge of the school entrance.

Everyone worked hard to prepare for the mheshimiwa mgeni's (respected guest's) arrival, but, in a contest mediated by a totally unbiased judge, my students would take the cake for putting the most effort and time into creating a presidential atmosphere. They constructed two full-sized, Land Cruiser-accomodating arches from tree bark, banana leaves, and - well, tree bark and banana leaves, they lined the road with yellow flowers, and they painted a huge welcome sign that hung over the road, suspended from tree leaves. How do you suspend a heavy cloth sign from nothing but the leaves of trees? I don't know. Tanzanians have a mysterious, idiosyncratic brilliance for doing seemingly impossible things like hanging heavy cloth signs from tenuous twigs and leaves.

I haven't even mentioned the time my students spent digging out the old Tanzanian flag, washing it, and raising it on the usually-empty pole in front of our school.

They also whitewashed the brick-curbs of every path on the school grounds, trimmed all of the nearby hedges, and watered the road so that the dust wouldn't dirty their Rais' no-doubt immaculate suit. When I joked to my students that maybe Rais Kikwete has one relatively inexpensive suit to wear on his village visits so that his really dapper outfit doesn't get ruined, my students simply laughed. "Don't be silly, Miss Laura," one reprimanded, "the president can only wear his best clothes to our school." And another added, "He'll wear the same suit he wears to America." This started a discussion about how frequently Rais Kikwete visits the preeminent U.S. of A., and it was generally agreed that Kikwete must take at least a full-day trip to America once every week or so.

In anticipation of the president, there was a sort of party. I suppose it was a little like the cheering before a rock star takes the stage, but more organized, more practiced, and yet somehow also much more irregular. Students and villagers sang the songs they had prepared for his welcome, often with competing volumes, and an MC blasted bongo flava (that's the Tanzanian version of hip-hop) from a black Ford Explorer with speakers mounted on top. Below is a video of my students singing the songs that they composed and practiced (endlessly...several days until after midnight) to flatter the mheshimiwa upon his arrival.

Ok, in the interest of finally getting this post up, I'll add the video later, since this computer doesn't like moving images.

The Njombe district head, in the green skirt, encouraged the primary school students to "cheza ngoma," or dance to drumbeats. She wasn't bad, but the kids' rhythms left something to be desired. Their off-beat steps, uncomprehending frowns, and and hands-in-their-pants moves in no way, however, detracted from their irresistable cuteness.

Finally, after hours of waiting and hours of singing/dancing, the president's security guards finally walked through the arch that my students built. Anticipation skyrocketed, as the arrival of the president's secret security force should mean that the president is not so far away. Right? Right?

Not right. The arrival of the armed security guards preceded the arrival of the president by nearly an hour. So we continued to wait, watching empty space under the arch.

Finally, after keeping us waiting, Rais Kikwete rolled onto school grounds exactly on Tanzanian time: 90 minutes late.

Instead of getting out of his car and off his wheels, however, Kikwete preferred to avoid touching our bush-turf by climbing out of his sunroof and sitting on top of his car.

After embarrassing village leaders and telling the villagers that he was powerless to help them with their most pressing problems (i.e. water, electricity, roads), the president waved and smiled. To my surprise and disdain (as well as that of some of the more worldly teachers), the villagers actually cheered.

He did, however, do me the gallant favor of realizing that I had a camera and posing for a picture.

My Tanzanian "besti" (who, by the way, deserves a huge congratulations because she just got married - she hasn't had a wedding yet, but her fiance just bought her from her father for 1,300,000 Tanzanian shillings, or about $1,000) smiled in amused disbelief at his irreverence.

Even his body language was uninviting. Crossed arms, disapproving downward gaze.

But still, I couldn't resist the urge to take a self-portrait with the "elected" leader of any country, regardless of his attitude toward those who were forced to elect him or brainwashed into electing him.

That's how close I was to the president of Tanzania Ndugu Rais Jakaya Kikwete.



Before he ducked back down into his Land Cruiser and was driven away, leaving only the chaos of unrealized expectation and some lingering body gaurds in his wake.

I’ve let a lot of time slide on by since I last updated this abridged and incomprehensive log of events that impress and/or terrify me here at my camp-style home in the Tanzanian bush. A large reason for that is the simple fact that I haven’t spent much time in the village recently. Instead, I’ve been tour guiding and translating for bemused visitors for whose company I can hardly express my appreciation, even though one of them claimed that using my impeccably clean but in-ground toilet was “the most disgusting thing [he’s] ever done in [his] life” (my brother Matt, circa June 8^th, 2008) . And then I accepted my dad’s invitation to gallivant about, roaming as far as Marseilles, France, and even Monte Carlo, a small section of the already-minuscule Principality of Monaco, where I used my undeveloped but undeniably promising gambling prowess to win 30Euros/45USD/54,000TSH in the skill-intensive game of slots (my Peace Corps pittance did not permit me, in good judgment, to try my novice hand at any table games) at the splendid casino made famous by the one and only James Bond. It was ballin’.

But just over one week ago, I returned to my lovely 2-bedroom, 1-choo house in the rural suburbs of Njombe, Tanzania, and my oh my what an eventful week it has been. I intend to make up my long absence from this blog to my loyal readers – who, from careful perusal of the comments, I can see consist almost solely of my loved and loving maternal grandparents (Hi Grammy and Grandpop!) – by posting a verbal and photographic summary of my first week back in the village after my European adventure.

The week started with me, all alone in my house, but within one day, it escalated to thirty-one confused and terrified teenaged girls, ordered to school during their mid-term break for reasons they weren’t quite sure of, plus three mostly-prepared American Peace Corps Volunteers and their more-or-less informed Tanzanian counterparts. For months, my two closest PCV neighbors, Ben and Nicole, and I had been planning a Girls’ Empowerment Conference, aimed at teaching thirty Tanzanian students from three different secondary schools about life skills – decision making, relationships, self-confidence, self-defense, etc. – and giving them basic information about how to help fight the HIV/AIDS crisis in their country.

Ten girls from my school assembled before 3pm to arrange the dormitory and wait for the guests. The guests (twenty-one students and four teachers) arrived, fatigued, after 3 hour and 3-1/2 hour walks from Ben's school and Nicole's school, respectively. We had a bland dinner of rice and beans, and then we played a lovely, hilarious game of Two Truths and a Lie. Because some of the guests were already lolling in their hard-backed wooden chairs, drifting into a non-listening abyss of semi-consciousness, we called it a night.

The next morning, Ben and I woke up early to rearrange the desks into a multifarious formation appropriate for activities such as lectures (the inner rows of desks), discussions (the outer circle of desks), theater performances (the large area in the front of the classroom), etc. We also equipped each desk with a notebook, a note-taking pen, and a special colored gel pen from America. Observe:

The students got settled in quickly, and the brave girls who volunteered to prepare a skit for Monday morning set the stage with the first theater performance of the week.

The skits were based on the themes of an organization called "Theater of the Oppressed," and each day's skit was performed two times: once first thing in the morning and once in the afternoon after lessons had finished. In the morning, each skit was performed without interruption. It demonstrated an aspect of problematic behavior (i.e. choosing a bad role model, putting yourself at risk for HIV/AIDS), which the non-acting students were required to try to fix during the afternoon performance. Anyone from the audience was permitted to stand up, shout "Acha!" ("Stop!"), and change the skit for the better.

Throughout the week, lessons covered a variety of topics and used an assortment of different teaching strategies. Below are some examples:

Building a Bridge: Steps to a Healthy Life
I'd just guided the students to build a bridge from knowledge to a healthy life (the colored strips of paper on the board) by effectuating the skills we plan to discuss during the week, and then Ben transitioned to the first important topic: decision-making.

And later, during a break, the students wrote their thoughts about the "Jambo la Siku," or "Topic of the Day," a controversial statement which coincided with the day's lessons. On Monday, for example, the Jambo la Siku was: "Having an education is the only way for a woman to become independent."

A review game: Hot Condom! Pass the blown-up condom until the music stops, and when it does, the condom's unfortunate possessor must break it open (not as easy as it sounds!) and answer the question inside.

Speaking of contraception, how can we protect ourselves from HIV/AIDS? This student knows for sure, and can even demonstrate on two vertically-stacked bottles of facewash!

Even in other, less interactive lessons, we kept them riveted:

Unfortunately, that's going to be all for pictures, since I had to switch computers and this one refuses to recognize my camera. I would love to continue this post for pages, because the conference was happily fascinating and festive, but that's going to be all for now. Feel free to post questions; I'll try to answer them next time.

And now, back to the bush!

Part I: Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

It's wintertime here in the Southern Highlands, which means morning and evening weather that merits wearing a hoodie to bed. I bet you didn't know winter existed in Tanzania, but that's probably just because they refer to it only as the "cold, dry season." My little Fromer's travel alarm clock (courtesy of my hellish publishing internship two summers ago) has a little digital thermometer on it, so I can keep careful track of the coldness of my bedroom. Upon waking up, the lowest temperature I've noticed so far (the coldest month will be June) has been 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Before you scoff at how I've softened since my wind-tunnel Bostonian years, consider two things: 1) No electricity/gas = No heat; and 2) Solid concrete walls and a tin roof = No insulation. Also, I'm 11 degrees of latitude off the equator, so my mental thermometer refuses to register any temperature below 80.

We even had our first frost this week. No, don't get excited. We're not defying physics by having frost at 55 degrees. In fact, I have spent six months plublicly doubting the possibility and causing riotous laughter among my teachers when I disbelieve their "frost" stories. Although I did, until this week, secretly fear that my site would get cold enough for frost when I heard the stories about winter near Njombe. But then I woke up one misty morning, put on my mandatory ankle-length skirt, a long-sleeved t-shirt, and my EMS shell, went to school, and was greeted by gleeful I-told-you-so voices funneling out from inside of ski jacket hoods. One teacher even scoffed, "I can't believe you didn't think there'd be frost." I looked around, eyeing the tin roofs and the broken glass windows of the school, but I didn't see any frost. Some condensation, maybe, from the excessive moisture, but no frost. So I said, "No, look at the windows. There's no frost." And the scoffy teacher said, "What are you talking about? You only have to look at the air." So I did. It was misty. And they thought that mist was frost.


Part II: Simba/Brod

My new cat has two names, Simba and Brod. She is just over a year and a half old, and when I got her, she was named Lion by an environmental volunteer who never actually used the name Lion but instead referred to her as "the cat" or "Cat." Still, I thought I might induce a sort of identity crisis by changing her name AND her residence all at the same time, so I just translated her old name Lion to its Swahili equivalent, Simba (which just so happens to also make her the namesake of the huggable runaway cublet-turned-valiant-jungle-king-of-the-Serengeti in a Disney animated feature I'm sure you've identified by now). I also gave her a brand new name, Brod, for one of the main characters in a favorite novel of mine (because the cat reminds me a little of the character - who is a human). So, I alternate using Simba and Brod, plus sometimes "Cat." Maybe she'll have an identity crisis after all.

Simba/Brod is an adventurer. She can't stand to be trapped indoors unless my lap is also indoors for her to sit on. My neighbor came over one day, poked her head around my open front door, and said, "How's today?" I said "Clean, how's your home?" She said, "Safe." And then she cut our greeting short by saying, "Your cat's at my house." I panicked, because Tanzanians don't like animals (that Simba/Brod sits on my lap is strange for them and makes me a little bit uglier in their collective eyes). Also, the Wabena (the tribe which occupies nearly all of my district) eats cats. So I apologized profusely as I ran to put on my shoes and save my new furry roommate from a terrible beating and/or death. As I passed my neighbor in the doorway, she grabbed my arm and broke into the large, white-teethed grin she had only ever shown me when killing spiders. "She killed a rat," she whispered, and did a little dance on my porch. "You have to send her over to my house more often!" And then my neighbor left.

Simba/Brod returned about an hour later. I always know when she's home because she comes meowing to either door (she can jump my courtyard wall to get to the back one). She whined for her dinner of tiny raw fish, and after she got it and ate it she curled up safely in my lap, uneaten and unharmed.

The First Time My Bus Got Stuck in the Mud

The first time my bus got stuck in the mud, I had no idea that on my next bus ride to town, just two weeks later, it would happen three times in one trip. Still, the first time was a thrill. Observe:

If you had been in the bus when it fell into this position, you would have been sure it was tipping over completely. And yes, that's the door out of which we had to step to get to dry land.

First instinct: Move forward at all costs, even if there is a giant sloshpit in front of you.

There is a rule that only men help to push the bus. It's the only time I've ever been happy to be considered weak. Although one day, when I'm not wearing a white skirt, I'm going to help them push just to prove I can.

And they actually succeeded in getting it a little further into the middle of the puddle.


So they dug the tire out and drained the puddle a little bit.


And went back the way we came.

If you look at the rear wheel, it doesn't look very promising.

But, by draining the puddle a little more, and pushing a little harder, they rolled the bus back out of the mud!


And we're off! So load the hoe-shovel back into the bus.

Another post to come later this week, since I will be in town with internet for six whole days!

Before I left America in September, I was gung-ho for a moneyless African adventure - roughing it for two years on the world's second-least developed continent. I packed so lightly that I had extra room in my suitcase for a smushy bead-pillow, selected specifically to fill the space because Peace Corps instructed me to bring "an item which can comfort me and/or make me feel at home." I said my goodbyes, collected snail-mail addresses, and jumped feet-first out of my comfortable American home and into a world I could previously only imagine. I arrived with precisely zero expectations, having no idea how hard the language would be, what town I'd be near, or which Western comforts I'd have access to regularly, seldomly, or never.

Now, six months after arriving in Tanzania, I've gotten used to what I can and can't find; I know where I can get cheap candles, the best rice&beans or a plate of so-called "pepper steak," which shops in town will charge my phone for free. I know that unless I take a 5-hour bus ride, it's impossible to get ice cream or a salad, buy computer supplies, or cross an intersection of two paved roads. I've increased my limit for staying in the bush without a break: so far, I've made it three weeks. But there are some things I've begun to expect when I come to town, like a hot shower, a movie on the tiny hotel TV, a chance to read/send emails, a full PO Box. Last weekend, I came all the way to Njombe and got none of those. The water wasn't running, the electrical outlet in my hotel room was broken, the entire town's internet was down, and my PO Box was rusted shut. If I had not had any of those things from the moment I set foot in Africa, I might not have been quite so woeful. When I arrived in Tanzania, I didn't expect anything; I had braced myself for an emotional impact the size of the volcano collapse that created Ngorongoro Crater. I was ready. But now, after four months in my new house, I was devastated not to have these little American luxuries. Although it's become normal not to have electricity at home and to bathe using a bucket and a pitcher, I also expect to have internet access and a hot shower once every few weeks. These are my new standards, my new bare minimums of survival...even though not one of the other teachers at my school has ever used the internet, and most have never seen a full-length movie.

I'm an intruder in someone else's world. These familiar luxuries I enjoy in town are those that remind me home and are available. Other aspects of my American culture, though, are just plain laughable to Tanzanians. I'm like Fez in That 70s Show. I'm weird. The following is a brief list of things I do or have done that, to Tanzanians, is the equivalent of a foreigner in America sweeping the grass of her front lawn with a branch of a pine tree or walking down the street with a hoe slung over his shoulder and a stick to hit the two goats in front of him:

• Carried a water bottle around and claimed it was good for my health to drink a lot of water.


• Taken a special trip to town to buy myself toilet paper when the village shop ran out.


• Allowed my Peace Corps friend and neighbor Nicole to sleep on the couch when she visited instead of insisting that she share my tiny bed with me.


• Used wine and soda bottles as candle holders.


• Refused rice&beans.


• Worn a bike helmet.


• Run for exercise.


• Been upset when everyone in the teachers' room agreed that I had gotten "very fat."


• Done school work at home.


• Made a huge burlap bag of charcoal last four months (because I don't sleep with the stove in the room next to me to keep me warm and intoxicated with carbon monoxide).


• Read novels.


• Baked cookies.


• Claimed I could be just friends with men without having any other interest in them.


• Claimed that it was possible, but extremely difficult to contract HIV/AIDS from sharing toothbrushes.


• Explained skydiving.


• Used a world map to locate not one, not two, but all twelve countries featured on my new travel calendar.


• Packed a backpack to go on a weekend trip.


• Been upset when school didn't start on time.


• Eaten porridge as a grown-up.


• Allowed my friends to come into the kitchen and cook with me when they've visited instead of leaving them alone in my living room while I cooked for them and served them.

• Disliked my current president.

I could probably keep adding to this list until the moment I board the plane back to the US. Let me know what else you want to read about; I'm running out of ideas fast. I'm not a very exciting person.

Laika, Tanzanian Wondergirl

I dedicate this entry to my paternal grandmother Nana, who, each time I leave the good old East Coast USA, expresses her deepest concern that someone in a faraway land will sweep me off my feet and keep me so enamoured by foeign charm that I will never again return home to my dear family. Now, Nana, I must apologize, because after all of my reassurances that this is a total, utter impossibility, I have gone and fallen in love with a Tanzanian.

Her name is Laika. She is 15-years-old and lives with a married couple of my teacher-colleagues. She does not go to school now, but she finished the primary education that is compulsory for all Tanzanian children.

What is so appealing about Laika, you must be asking, since if you know me at all, you have already used your no-doubt superior and refined deductive reasoning skills to surmise that I have no romantic interest in her.

Well, she cleans my house.
And my clothes.
And my dishes.

Laika is my new housegirl, who visits each Tuesday and Saturday morning. She is the live-in housegirl of the teachers who live on the exact opposite end of my row of houses, and full-time nanny to these teachers' (incredibly) beautiful almost-one-year-old daughter Nancy. Mere hours after Laika and I finalized our arrangement (twice weekly visits at 2,000 Tanzanian shillings a pop), I found out that in exchange for her (maybe) six hours per week (so, let's say 24 hours and 16,000 Tanzanian shillings per month), I am paying her double the salary of her full-time job up the road. Probably, I should go into some sort of money-handling business when I'm done lining the pockets of out-of-school Tanzanian teenagers.

Really, though, she is worth every penny. I have clean clothes for the first time since arriving in Tanzania (it's not that I didn't try to bucket-wash my clothes by hand, just that I was bungling and inept at it). I don't have to rudely instruct all of my well-intentioned guests to remove their shoes upon entering my house because cleaning my floor with a handle-less rag instead of a Swiffer is a foreign and intimidating concept to which I cannot adjust. And, the dishes...I really don't have an excuse for that. In fact, I didn't even ask her to wash them - she just does.

Laika the Tanzanian Wondergirl usually comes while I am at school. She is like a phantom that glides unnoticed through my house, leaving everything scrubbed to a shine. I come home and everywhere I had left a mess is astonishingly clean; all of my once-dirty clothes are hung systematically on the line. If I happen to be home when she comes on a Saturday, she is a pleasure; if I am home on a Tuesday when she comes, I get to sit on the floor and play with Nancy while Laika does my chores.

Like I said, she is worth every penny. And every little piece of my heart.

FINALLY! Pictures of my house. Unfortunately, I haven't taken any photos outside of my house yet, since I've been reluctant to let people in my village know that I have fancy things like an iPod and a camera. But I'm getting to know everyone well, and soon I'll be able to whip out my camera at school events. For now, though, you'll have to make do with only my house. And only parts of my house, since the internet is way too slow to load photos of every room. Here's the outside:

And this is my floorplan. I was surprised after I drew this to see that it was surprisingly accurate and to scale. The doors even open in the right directions.

Karibuni ndani!

A better view of my living room:

When I first arrived:

Now:

That's Simone's old license plate on the door.
Stalk her.

Bedroom:

What my bedroom used to look like:

What it looks like now:

On one wall I hung all of your beautiful pictures and decorative contributions. The empty rectangle to the right of the desk is for a vertical mirror I haven't bought yet.

This is my most illegal wall decoration (I have cropped the rest of the note to protect the author):

And this I had to post just in case a PBS talent scout is looking for emerging child artists. I think Catherine would be an awesome candidate...if she weren't 22 years old.


I am so proud of myself for making this hanging basket shelf. If you ever send me a letter, it will go in here until I write a response. It's very official...like an inbox/outbox.

Coming out of my bedroom, a before and after:

To the courtyard!

One end, on the left...with my toilet and bathroom doors, plus the door that leads to my water tap and beyond that, the outside world. The other end, on the right, has my kitchen door, clotheslines, and accidental garden. Really, who needs to hoe when stuff just sprouts in your backyard?


Ok, I have come to the internet many times just to post these few photos and arrange this aesthetic-less presentation of them. I'm almost out of computer time now, and I'm going back to the village for awhile...probably two weeks. So that's all for now. Any other photo interests?