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.