Cutting a cake

My African friends here have difficulty believing I can do anything practical. I cannot carry a bucket of water on my head. I do not chop wood for the fire to cook with. I do not mop my own floors (the cleaning staff does it). I do not cook since I don’t have a kitchen. Mostly they’ve observed that I read and write. So when I announced that I knew how to bake bread and a cake, they double-dared me to teach them.

Baking bread and a cake seemed possible here at the college because it has a degree program in Hotel and Tourism Industry, which comes with a classroom full of ovens, stoves, and sinks. Unlike this very convenient set-up, many or most kitchens in the homes here are nomadic. The charcoal or wood-burning container travels from inside to outside as does the cooking pan that rests on top of it. The water is already outside, having been carried by a member of the family from the nearest outdoor tap. And when the meal is over and the dishes are cleaned, all of that moves back inside.

The regular kitchen staff here at the College also work in a large kitchen with plenty of electric stoves (no ovens), but with the frequent power outages, the staff continue to use charcoal burners outside to fry donuts, cook rice, etc.

The three of us—Rehema, Mama Catherine, and I—planned to do the baking on a Saturday when the classroom was free. But we all understood that the plan would only work if God willed it. I’m beginning to understand this. Getting the ingredients for bread and cake was a challenge. I carried sacks with two bags of flour, sugar, baking power, yeast, vanilla on a bus so crowded that I did not have room to carry the bags where I stood, wedged between a hip and a stomach. As is the custom, a polite seated passenger carried the 20-pound bag on her lap, and after 30 minutes, with a deep groan she passed it on to me as I squeezed out of the bus. That was the first grocery shopping trip. The second shopping trip, I was lucky—a bus seat was open.

The key to the classroom was in the hands of a student named Doris, but on Saturday at the appointed time, Doris was nowhere to be found. After texting her on my cell phone, I learned she’d had a family emergency and had to be away. She had arranged for another student to unlock the kitchen.

Then the bus that brought Rehema to campus broke down somewhere after Moshi Town. After an hour of waiting for the bus not to be repaired, Rehema boarded another bus and arrived a half hour after that.

At the classroom kitchen, the Rehema, Mama Catherine and I found an electric mixer, pans, bowls, mixing spoons and more. I texted Doris to ask where the measuring cups and spoons were. Doris texted back to explain that they only measured using a scale, and so I returned to my apartment to find other possibilities. I decided that one of my coffee cups was about the same size as a measuring cup by imagining a measuring cup, something I haven’t seen in three months, and comparing it to the cup in front of my eyes. It seemed close enough to me. So did the non-measuring spoon that I used for stirring tea.

Back in the kitchen, the first step for the bread was to melt butter with milk, sugar and water in a saucepan, but none of the stoves would offer any heat after I turned, pushed, and pulled knobs. Once again, Doris came to the rescue long distance by asking a fellow student to help. The student appeared, turned on a button behind the stove, and soon we were heating up butter, milk, and water.

After finishing the bread dough, we started making the cake. The first step was to cream the shortening with the electric mixer. The electricity went out just as Rehema plopped the butter in the bowl. My mind suddenly moved forward twenty steps to the part where we actually needed to bake the bread and cake. At that moment, I saw everything falling apart.

Rehema saw all of the things falling apart in my mind and announced loudly that we would continue and worry about the baking part later. Really, we had what we needed at the moment: two women accustomed to chopping wood and carrying water who could whip the hard butter into fluffy cream, no problem. After a half hour of whipping, it was good.

At that point, Nickson showed up. Nickson is a third-year student here at SMMUCo who wants to be a gospel rap singer in the States. His first week here, he asked me if I would give him lessons in English to prepare him for his career, and he has faithfully appeared every week. He is the rare kind of student who asks twenty more questions than the teacher. Nickson reviewed the recipe and wanted to know the definitions of “shortening,” “beat,” “yeast,” and so on. Plus each word reminded him of something else he’d always wondered about.

Before we succeeded in throwing Nickson out, we’d arrived at the moment when baking was imminent and electricity was not. Someone who shall not be named said that if the American (Jeanne) went to Mlay, the security guard, and asked to turn on the generator, he would do it. But I did not want to ask for the generator. It’s extremely expensive, and the College struggles to make ends meet. But the shadows were lengthening, Rehema needed to be home before dark, and we’d done so much to arrive at this point.

Nickson accompanied me to translate. Mlay said we had to ask the campus manager. Then he would find Kimbori, another security guard, to turn on the generator.

Getting deeper into unethical waters, I went back to the kitchen to make sure that this request was really worth pursuing.

Absolutely, this was important. I was teaching. Wasn’t teaching how to make a cake important? If it wasn’t important, why had I worked so hard to get there?

I made Nickson go with me to the campus manager’s house, even though the campus manager speaks fluent English. The campus manager was eating dinner with his family and graciously invited me to join his family six times. But when I asked permission to have the generator turned on for one hour, his enthusiasm fizzled. Reluctantly he agreed, and off I went with Nickson, wondering how I would pay for this misdeed. When we returned to the security guard’s station, Mlay was nowhere to be found, Kimbori was off in the village, and so we left a message with the only person there, a student worker.

By now the bread had risen well above the loaf pans, and I punched it down, and it seemed a good time to eat at the dining hall. Through the dining hall windows, I could see Kimbori walk into the maintenance building to turn on the generator after I’d taken three bites of food. I zipped back to the kitchen to heat up the oven.

Both the bread and cake needed to be baked at 375°F. The oven knob had numbers 1-11, most of them faded or invisible. I turned the knob to the random number of 8, zipped back to finish my dinner, and after returning, decided 8 wasn’t hot enough and moved the knob to 11.

Not surprisingly the heat was uneven, and both the cake and the bread developed black blobs on top. Several times during the baking, we shifted pans. The public electricity returned after an hour of expensive generator power. As we pulled the bread and cake from the oven, fully cooked with black blobs on top, we declared it all to be good especially after tasting the layers underneath.

And then it was time to cut the cake. We cut a piece for Kimbori and Mlay who caused the generator to turn on. We cut pieces for the campus manager, his wife and two children. We cut a piece for Doris, one for Nickson. We cut a piece for Esther who had saved us food from the dining hall. We cut some for Rehema’s family and Mama Catherine’s family, one for me. The cake was now totally claimed by all who had helped to make it work, not including the bus drivers and the one passenger who had to carry my 20-pound bags of groceries, or the student who turned on the stove for us. We also excluded the fifty or so students who walked past the kitchen all afternoon, stared at the cake I carried to the various people around campus.

I have now accepted an invitation to teach the same lesson again (God willing), this time using the charcoal stove with a closed box that serves as an oven. If I can get an oven to bake bread at the temperature of number 11, I can surely make a box over charcoal do the equivalent. I also have the comfort of knowing that if the electricity goes out, we will not have to resort to unethical means.

A Slippery but Insistent Hand

In the book of Matthew, chapter 5, Jesus delivers a series of laws that aren’t particularly pleasant, one of which is, “Give to him who begs from you.”

When Jesus wants to dish out a nuanced message, he serves the finest. In the parable of the talents, he tells the guy who buries his talent in the ground, “For to everyone who has, more will be given, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” If someone has nothing, how can you take anything more away? Clearly the message here plumbs well beyond earthly laws of cause and effect, adding and subtracting. And that’s the nuanced message.

The law about giving is glaring sunlight in its simplicity. Jesus doesn’t say, “Give only to the people who will actually improve their lives with the money that you give them.” He doesn’t say, “Don’t give to the guy whose breath registers a blood alcohol level that’s lethal even just to smell it.”

Every time I take a walk in the village of Masoka, I am asked for money. Little children yell, “Mzungu! How are you, Madam? Geeva me mahney!” Old women point to their stomachs, then mouths and put out their palms. One woman grabbed my hand and refused to let go until I tore it away. If that woman could speak English, she could give a message as simple as Christ’s: “You’ve got money, I don’t, that’s not fair. Now make up for it by giving me what you’ve got in your pocket.”

That woman would be simply correct. Is that what Jesus meant with “Give to those who beg of you”? Here’s what I know: giving out of a sense of guilt doesn’t make me feel expansive toward anyone, let alone love.

I once asked Happy, the bursar’s assistant at SMMUCo, if she ever gave to the people sitting or lying on the sidewalk in Moshi Town begging for money. For these people, their disability is visible: eyes that are milky white, legs missing or misshapen. Happy said if she happened to have some coins, she put them in the cup provided.

But very simply, I do not have the money to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the people on the sidewalk or those yanking my arm. Yet, guilt doesn’t make me feel expansive toward anyone. Yet, I have; they don’t, and Christ said I should give.

Perhaps the simple command isn’t meant to even out any unfairness. At some point, I had the idea that when I took a walk in the village, I could bring some coins with me, like the offering I take to church. I had five coins. I had no idea who I would give to until the young guy came along with three friends asking for money for a drink. I didn’t ask a drink of what, I just gave. Then there was a child who wanted my mahney. Then there was the man with the bullhorn who advertised some local political meeting. I came up from behind him, and as he saw me, he hollered through the bullhorn, “Ah, Mzungu! Karibu!” (European! Welcome!) As we walked together, he asked (without the bullhorn) if I had money for a soda. His throat was dry. I gave him my last two coins, and he told me it wasn’t enough to buy a soda. He was very forgiving when I told him that was all I had left. We visited a little while. My two coins gave him no soda, no reversal of fortune. There was just the dust of the road and the rest of the walk home.

I’m not sure Christ’s simple sentence always means money either. On a walk through the village of Masoka, I met up with a gazillion children walking home from school. They rushed to greet me and then said, “Geeva me mahney.” Even if I had mahney, I didn’t have enough to divide a gazillion ways, but that didn’t discourage any of them, and they turned to walk beside me, shoulders and heads surrounding me. I struggled to find a place in the road to set my feet with each step, but gradually we found our stride as a swarming, walking whole. I also had nowhere to put my hands, and so I took the two hands half an inch from mine already and held them. Since I had no Swahili sentences to utter and they’d already run out of their English ones, we walked in silence.

Soon a bus came, and we all ran to the banana trees for cover. After the bus passed by, we searched for each other as the dust settled. The two girls whose hands I held before now took my hands again, as though it were their rightful place. Occasionally the hands would slip from sweat, but they would not let go. I wonder, who did the giving?

Here in Tanzania, I watch people give without being asked to do so, saving the recipient the indignity of having to ask. It’s simply an act of compassion.

I sat with Happy one day at the security gate while she waited for students to register. The guard brought us both overloaded plates of food. Happy had been watching a girl just outside the gate selling bananas. She hadn’t eaten all day, and now Happy scraped some of her food onto another plate. The girl refused the food three times, but when the food was set before her, she ate.

For Happy, giving is a daily practice as ordinary as breathing. And yet it allowed her to see the girl’s need. I only understood this when I went to visit Happy at her home. Of her family, I knew she lived with her mother and a sister. When I sat down to eat, the neighbor boy was called to the table. He seemed to know exactly where he stood in the pecking order: after Mama Happy, after Happy, after Happy’s sister Neema, and definitely after me. But the family made sure he ate, and he was included in the conversation. I found out later that he regularly ate with the family because his stepfather was abusive. Since Social Services isn’t an option, he found a sanctuary in Happy’s household.

Later, another young woman arrived and helped herself to food—Happy’s cousin Dora. When Dora’s parents became disabled with AIDS, Happy’s mother brought her and her twin sister into the home when they were two years old. Mama Happy worked a very small shop selling basic goods, but she journeyed to Dar es Salaam to collect the girls and provide for them indefinitely in spite of an income that would not have been enough to support three or four children. At age 20, Dora is now finishing her last year of secondary school. (Her twin returned to the parents when she was five.) I have not met a household that didn’t have extra children or relatives folded into their lives, and I can only wonder whether they ask themselves if they have enough income and space in the home to do so.

Like the affection of a child that seeps through a slippery but insistent hand, the command to give is simple yet loaded with mystery. The complexity waits to be discovered by the Christian pilgrim in daily life with daily giving.

And while I can only make up answers about what Christ was thinking or intended, I do have the certainty of plentiful opportunities to give, I have an unnuanced command from Christ, and I look at giants everywhere who give as though it were simply the folding of a hand into another.

The Tailor

Time and again, I have found myself waiting. Sometimes I know what I’m waiting for—a bus, a signal to do something, an event to begin. Other times, the waiting, which begins as ho-hum, minute-ticking endurance, snaps into high drama, leaving me with a case of whiplash. This was the case when Happy, the bursar’s assistant, and I waited on the porch outside the tailor’s shop on a Tuesday morning at 9:00 a.m.

Happy had wanted me to have a kitenge, a traditional skirt and blouse that requires sophisticated tailoring. One woman cannot borrow another’s kitenge, no matter how similar they are in weight and shape. We’d gone to the tailor on a Saturday with fabric that Happy had bought for me. “Fundi” is a Swahili term for a skilled worker that includes not only tailors but also electricians, plumbers, landscapers, and so on. Despite knowing her tailor for a year, Happy doesn’t know his name. It’s a Muslim name, she said, Haji or something like that, but she only calls him “Fundi.”

On one wall of Fundi’s shop, two large posters featured photos of women in about sixty variations of kitenge, and I got a little dizzy after looking at forty. Along another wall, pinned to a string were dresses already sewn, and we looked at some of those, plus some that Fundi was pulling out from a mystery pile. Helda, the provost’s secretary, also happened to be in the shop, and suddenly the choosing turned into a group activity.
“What about this?”
“No, I don’t want to show that much bosom!”
“What about this?”
“Will I be able to walk in that?”
“Of course!”

After Fundi opened a large hardbound notebook, he took my measurements, recorded them and quickly drew the style of dress I’d chosen next to my measurements. Using scissors large enough to perform surgery on a cow, he cut off a tiny snip of fabric and taped it to the page. The dress would be ready in three weeks, which he also recorded along with Happy’s name and cell phone number.

Three weeks later, Fundi called Happy to tell her that the dress would be ready a day later, Tuesday morning. So we waited on the porch at 9:00 a.m. Across the street another dressmaker’s shop displayed a white confirmation dress hanging on the store front with shades of red dust creeping up the hem. Happy wanted to know if I’d worn one of those for my confirmation. I learned then that Lutherans in Tanzania wear white confirmation dresses, similar to the ones worn by Roman Catholic girls at their first communion. A few shops down was something called “Chinese Restaurant.” I asked if there were any Chinese in Moshi, and Happy said no, why did I ask? I pointed out the restaurant name and asked if they at least served Chinese food. “No,” she said, “it’s just a name.”

Soon someone not Fundi appeared and unlocked the shop. Happy exchanged Swahili words with him, and we moved from the porch step to the bench inside. There was more waiting, and Happy texted someone on her phone and then later called. At about 10:00, the tailor appeared, looking very tired. He shuffled over to a sewing machine next to Happy and murmured something. Without shifting or changing posture, Happy launched into a rapid-fire speech full of artillery. Fundi’s head drooped. Possibly he looked at the floor strewn with scraps of fabric or possibly his eyes looked at nothing. At one point, Happy fell silent, the air clearing of smoke. I thought the speech was over, but no, she was only re-loading. Occasionally she seemed to require an answer from Fundi who could only mumble until Happy forced him into answering his feeble excuse clearly and loudly.

When her fury had spent itself, I did not need Happy to tell me that the dress was not finished. But I wondered how far the fundi had gotten. Possibly we could stay in town for a while longer. When the fundi retrieved the fabric and unfolded the piece whole, I realized he hadn’t even started. So much for having the kitenge finished Tuesday morning.

I was puzzled by the fundi’s behavior. He had struck me as someone with integrity the time before. Clearly he loved his work, charged reasonable prices, and made sure he gave himself time to do good work. I thought it odd that he looked so tired at 9:00 in the morning. Then I remembered that the fundi was Muslim, and this was the month of Ramadan, a month of spiritual discipline much more intense than the Christian Lenten season. Muslims cannot eat or drink from sun-up to sundown during this month. Though they eat at night, some or many Muslims do not have much energy to function during the daylight hours.

Happy agreed that this was the case with the fundi, but she wasn’t going to forgive him for telling her that the kitenge was ready when it wasn’t. I had spent two hours either waiting or traveling on a bus to meet Happy in town, Happy had spent half an hour on a bus to meet me, plus we had waited another hour at the fundi’s shop staring at a non-Chinese restaurant.

We left the fundi, his head still hanging. In four more days we would return, the fundi would give a quiet speech of apology, and Happy would tell him that the dress looked bad. Because I can’t speak Kiswahili, I would be unable to assure the fundi that the kitenge was exquisitely made and fit like a glove. Instead I would only say that Happy was a liar, and the dress looked good.

A Simple Phone Call

The inner workings of the bursar’s daily toil at SMMUCo are not only visible, they are cumbersome and have monstrous proportions. One wooden table in a corner holds about fifteen ledger books. When the bursar, Tumaini, opens a ledger book, it spreads across the desk like a fold-out cot. Next to the table with the ledger books, a bookshelf looms large from floor to ceiling. It’s sole purpose is to support three-ring binders that have bank receipts and other necessary things snapped and bound into them.

The monstrous proportions mean monstrous tedium. For the last quarterly report, Tumaini and her assistant worked day and night in high gear for a full week, poring over books with tiny squares and tiny numbers. So when a computer software program arrived last week, Tumaini was overjoyed and immediately called the Information Technology man, Baraka, to the office to install it.

Then began a series of hurdles, small and large. First Baraka wasn’t answering his phone. This was small. When Tumaini wants something, Baraka drops whatever he’s doing because he and Tumaini belong to the Muhehe tribe in the Iringa Region, far away from the Chagga tribe here in Masoka. Soon Tumaini was leading Baraka away from his desk to her office.

As Baraka navigated through screen after screen to install the program, Tumaini was bubbling over with possibilities, some in English. A major report due in November that otherwise takes three months to prepare would now be a manageable task. Tumaini would no longer have to deal with accountants who complain her reports are so late. In the middle of Tumaini’s litany of possibilities, Baraka reached the step to register the program. It instructed the software owner to call a toll-free number in the U.S. For those of us outside the U.S., we could call a not-free number. Baraka, Tumaini, and I madly searched the screen for an email option but found none.

The problem with a not-free telephone number was not the financial part. Land lines in Tanzania have not been effectively established, and most of the country operates by cell phone. I explained to Tumaini and Baraka the problem with cell phones and international calls—you can lose the call at any instant with a rude beep, and often one or both voices break up. I also did not know how long this call would take, and once an international call has ended abruptly, one never knows if a second call is possible.

Tumaini’s euphoria wasn’t even slightly diluted. She was convinced that once she had the software, life would work out. Tumaini’s cell phone ring is a recorded voice of an inspirational singer calling out to the cheers of an audience, “God is good, all the time!” Jeanne, dreading hurdles all along, might as well have Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh as her cell phone ring.

We came up with the idea to email someone in the States to make this call. I volunteered my mother. But on campus that day, internet was not working. Still riding a wave of euphoria, Tumaini decided we would drive twenty minutes into town and use an internet café to email Mom. At the internet café, email was slower than usual. After fifteen minutes of not getting email, I asked Tumaini about using a phone with a landline in town. It would cost money but it would be simpler and hopefully faster. Tumaini was ready for the faster part.

Off we went to the post office where a man in a booth just outside the office operates the phone and sells stamps. An adjacent booth sat empty except for a telephone secured to a wooden box on a ledge. Tumaini paid for ten minutes and made sure we could add more when our time ran to seven minutes. Between the two booths, Tumaini stood ready to signal to pick up the phone. At this moment, she chose to teach me the Swahili words for “pick up” (“nyanyua”) and “put down” (“weka”). I dutifully repeated both, but I knew I’d never hang on to these words, mostly because I was thinking of all the things that could go wrong with this call: 1) I would spend the entire ten minutes on hold, 2) I wouldn’t be able to hear over the people passing by and greeting each other, 3) the line would be cut off in the middle of getting the secret authorization code and I’d never get the connection again.

At Tumaini’s signal of “nyanyua,” I picked up the phone and recognized an automated voice system. The first automated request was to press one for such-and-such, two for such-and-such, three to register your software. “Press three!” I yelled to Tumaini. “Tatu!” Tumaini yelled, and then a beep sounded in my ear. Next the automated system requested that I press my telephone number on the key pad now. Since my telephone had no keypad and I knew we didn’t have time to tell Phone Booth Man to press all of the numbers, I waited. Luckily the system gave us the option to speak to a customer service representative. “Press zero!” I yelled. “Sifuri!” yelled Tumaini.

Within a minute, a human began speaking, and just as I feared, I had trouble hearing. Both the customer service rep. and I repeated everything five times: What is your name? What is the business? Who is the contact person? How do you spell her name? (My mother would not have been able to answer any of these questions.) We’d managed to get through six questions five times each when the line was disconnected. I hollered to Tumaini who hollered to Phone Booth Man, and in half a minute, the connection returned and I was amazed to find the same customer service rep. still on the line. We got through two more questions when the line was disconnected again.

With the next call, I spoke to a different representative who saw on his computer screen that we’d gotten through the first six questions of the registration. About three more questions down the line, the service rep. asked where Tanzania was, followed by, what was Africa like? Was it all jungle? Did they have wild animals? In my mind, I was certain that the only thing connecting me and that service rep. were ten tiny threads of electric fibers, worn to shreds from millions of international calls. I was dangling by my little finger, desperate for the secret code that potentially could wipe away monstrous tedium for the bursar, and he wanted to know if Africa had only jungles. Not soon enough, the representative told me it would take two minutes to get the secret authorization code, please hold. The line was disconnected.

I wasn’t screaming, but I was pulling my hair out. With calm that passes all understanding, Tumaini said, “Jeanne, please come out here and sit on the bench for a while. Please.” Phone Booth Man needed to leave his station to get more change, and Tumaini clearly saw I needed to stop the anxiety attack that had rushed to a feverish pitch during the first and second calls. Now, sitting beside me, Tumaini read the newspaper, and I looked at words I didn’t know. Outside Western tourists looked at paintings that a walking vendor was rolling out on the sidewalk for them. Tumaini turned the page, and asked me if I liked football. I said I didn’t.

I wondered how it was possible for Tumaini, who two hours ago was so overjoyed she couldn’t think straight, could now read about a football match; how on the verge of a pivotal phone call, she could think to teach me two more Swahili words. It occurred to me that for Tumaini, a process like this happened all the time: a walk along a short path that only opened the way for another corner to turn, a downhill climb, an uphill climb, a tree to climb, and a boulder to roll up a hill.

In the booth again, I pleaded with the third customer service rep. to hurry, and she did. I read back the secret code, but I couldn’t hear the code numbers accurately. The rep. and I repeated the code several times until she believed I’d said the right code. As we rode home, Tumaini returned to the wave that carried her high above the clouds, stopping to buy chocolate for both of us.

A half hour later we were back at the office. Baraka had returned, typed in the code, and the code was not valid. Nor were the twenty other variations he tried. Now we waited for the weekend and Monday to arrive without knowing whether the road was up, down, or even existent.

In Kiswahili, “tumaini” means “hope.”