Another Day

I thought the young woman who appeared in my office had come to complain about her exam results from last semester.
“Excuse me, Madam,” she said, “you have a class now.”
No, I said, the class didn’t start for twenty minutes.
“But the timetable has changed.”
“When did it change?”
“Yesterday,” she said.
When I arrived at the classroom with 51 students waiting for me, I asked them where the change had been posted.
“What is the meaning of ‘posted’?” they said.
They pointed to a central area where their exam results had been posted but it wasn’t the same location where the announcements about Easter break and the new deputy provost had been posted. I apologized for the delay to students.
Within two minutes of my lecture, the electricity went out.
While this didn’t affect the PowerPoint presentation that I wasn’t using, it did stop the ceiling fans. At 12 noon when the sun was high in the sky, when the rain clouds had gone and gathered in another region of Tanzania, the lack of air movement was deadly. Eyelids flickered and shut. It was as though a silent sniper above me picked off students.
I had a mental flashback at that moment. When I was a student at Midland Lutheran College, I taught a language skills lab directed by Pat Trautrimas. Her evaluation of each class period began with the classroom environment: “First, make sure the room is comfortable. Is it too warm? You will lose your students!”
Outside the classroom in the hallway, there were growing murmurs that I had to shout above.
A student said, “Madam, they are wanting to come inside.”
“But this is our classroom. We’re supposed to be here.”
“Perhaps you could tell them.”
I went into the hall where another group of 50 students stood. I looked at their timetable. Apparently in the middle of my lecture, between hour one and hour two, my class was supposed to shift from seminar room 1 to seminar room 2. All of us in my classroom understood this was absurd, but the students outside the classroom did not understand. I explained.
When I returned, the room was still hot. I had lost more students. I was recovering from the flu. I had begun the lecture exhausted and I would end it the same way. Time passed.

Muslim wedding on a Good Friday

I was walking down the semi-muddy roads of Njoro with my friend Happy. Still hanging over us was the somber mood of a Good Friday service, having crucified Christ once again. But in the distance we could hear drums and a lively song.

As the drums and song became louder, we could see a large crowd gathered at one small building where, each Sunday, we see and hear Muslim children being taught. Typically, the teacher gives an Arabic sentence and the children repeat as a chorus.

But this Friday, instead of Muslim children, there were Muslim men dancing outside, wearing white tunics. About ten of them were leaping energetically to the beat of the drums, and a master of ceremonies was leading a song through a well-amplified speaker system.

I stood behind crowd fascinated, but within seconds, the crowd became fascinated with me, heads craned backward to stare at me. I pondered their special radar that sensed me hovering behind them. Did I have a magnetic charge or had I stepped in strong dog poop? I waited a few moments for the crowd to decide I wasn’t as interesting as the dancing, but more and more heads popped around to look at me.

My head popped around looking for Happy who had taken off down the road. When I caught up with her, she explained that the master of ceremonies had improvised his song with the words: “And our Mzungu is now watching us.”

Delivered

During my second hour at the Moshi Town post office, I was staring out the window with the security guard, noting that half of the vehicles driving through the parking lot were white Land Cruisers, just like the one I was waiting for. The driver of my particular Land Cruiser had taken off for other errands with SMMUCo’s systems manager and a student, with the promise that they would return. Behind me at the counter were nine boxes stacked higher than the postal clerk, all boxes packed with English-Kiswahili dictionaries and novels from Sinai Lutheran Church of Fremont.

Eight months earlier those dictionaries and novels had begun their journey as an idea jotted down by Dorothy Jacobs of Sinai just before I left for Tanzania. I was about to step into the sanctuary for the 10:30 service, and Dorothy thrust a note in my hand. Since even the idea of e-mail sends Dorothy’s eyeballs rolling, we both knew this note was her last chance of quick communication with me before I vanished into the ether of East Africa. The note said Sinai wanted to donate teaching materials to SMMUCo and estimated a dollar amount.

After finding within the first three days at SMMUCo that the library was short of books, I sent an email to someone who wasn’t Dorothy saying that dictionaries and everyone’s discarded novels would be a great help. Dorothy must’ve gotten the word­--during the fall and winter, Sinai built a mountain of books in its sanctuary and collected money for dictionaries.

Now eight months later at the last leg of the trip, I waited at the post office window, the security guard beside me, pretending to help watch for the Land Cruiser. He wore sunglasses. His elbow rested on the window ledge, I think aiming for a cool guy pose in spite of the uncool hole in the thigh of his trousers.

He pointed to the next Land Cruiser. “Is this your car?” No, this one was much newer. The back door wasn’t held together with soldered parts of other doors. The windshield didn’t have a spider-web crack just above the dash. And probably both windshield wipers worked.

He made conversation. Where did I work? What kind of job did I do? Where was I from?

After three more Land Cruisers not from SMMUCo passed through the post office parking lot, he said, “Maybe you can call the driver?” I didn’t have the driver’s number, and I couldn’t really talk to the driver if I had one, the driver being a Kiswahili speaker only. The larger problem was that the post office would close in fifteen minutes. So the guard and I carried all nine boxes outside and stacked them next to a bench.

He joined me outside on the bench though technically he had ten more minutes to guard from the inside. I had told him I didn’t understand much Kiswahili, but he asked more questions anyway. If he repeated the question five times, I could get the gist.

Now he was asking me if I had a boyfriend. He knew “boyfriend” in English. Right then and there I decided I was married. It turns out the guard was married also. He wanted to know if I had children. Yes, I said, I had two, a boy and a girl. The guard also had children, four, but I wondered if he would’ve been willing to create a fictional life that erased the spouse and children if I hadn’t conjured up my own.

Just as I was working on fictional names (I had already decided on “Derrick” for a boy and possibly “Vanessa” for a girl), another Land Cruiser drove up. Again, the wrong Land Cruiser, but blessedly it distracted the guard enough to lose the previous topic of my personal, though fictional, life.

Now we were joined by three girls in school uniforms who looked about sixteen or seventeen. They arranged themselves among the boxes, me, and the guard. Again the guard spoke, and I had to say, “I don’t understand” three times. For him, it meant he should repeat his message again. I stopped saying anything and looked at the parking lot, now even more anxious for the College Land Cruiser to arrive.

One of the girls volunteered, “He is telling you that the car will come. Just wait. He will help you look.” I wondered to myself in English why I needed to know that.

I remembered that a friend of mine had the College driver’s phone number. I asked her to call him and see if he’d forgotten me. Within two minutes, the answer was no, he was coming.

I have learned that when someone tells you they are coming, it could mean in five minutes, fifty minutes or five hours. In one case, it meant five days. But at least I knew the driver still remembered me, that I wouldn’t be spending the night on the street with a persistent security guard.

At some point after the second hour, the Land Cruiser arrived. In the Cruiser were the systems manager and a student, both of them men who knew they’d be expected to carry boxes. As they stood before the nine boxes outside the post office, the security guard chose the moment to deliver a long reprimand about leaving me stranded. The systems manager politely apologized, and began carrying boxes, along with the student, the guard, and me.

After all boxes were loaded, I thanked the guard five times. He stood outside the Cruiser at my window, leaning against my door in another cool guy pose. “Could I have a soda?” he said. I asked myself what he had done to deserve the soda. I thought we had already evened out the bill, he by lugging the boxes and I by persevering for two hours in annoying semi-conversation. I handed him soda money. I wanted those boxes delivered, and I wanted to be delivered of that man.