A Year in Tanzania

Going to Loliondo

2011-03-31T00:03:00.000-07:00

Loliondo is the last place you’d expect a miracle, an area in northern Tanzania so remote that there are no signs of civilization. The roads that do exist are so rocky, any car that ventures on them inevitably suffers at least one punctured tire.

But Loliondo is where a retired Lutheran pastor lives in a one-room mud home near a tree with a miracle cure. In 1991, the Babu (“grandfather” in Kiswahili) had a dream telling him to cure people. He ignored the dream. A few years later, he ignored a second dream with the same message. In 2002, in another dream, he was told to cure people by giving them water boiled with the root of a special tree. The instructions also included a specific plastic green cup. When the Babu awoke, the cup was in his hand. This time he paid attention to the dream.

First he began with the people in his village, but they tended to dismiss his dream and his miracle cure. However, others did not, and word spread gradually. Per the dream’s instructions, the Babu focused on five main diseases: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, and asthma. The dream also told him to charge only 500 Tanzanian shillings for each person, the equivalent of less than 50 cents.

In about February of this year, someone¬—not the Babu—told journalists that he would stop curing people the day before Ash Wednesday (an utterly false rumor). Suddenly the fame of the Babu spread nationally, not to mention internationally. People came in droves. Stories of miraculous cures became the daily story in the news. In one case, a woman with cervical cancer was hemorrhaging so much she had to change adult diapers eight times a day. The day after she took the miracle water, she changed diapers twice. The day after that, none.

Since February, an entire sector of the Tanzanian population has been lined up in cars for weeks at Loliondo. There are now 24,000 people in about 6,000 vehicles, and the Babu has asked for assistance from the government to stop allowing people to come so that he can catch up on the 24,000.

People now come to work and find co-workers absent for days because they’ve gone to Loliondo. Mama Viktor, one of the cleaning ladies at SMMUCo, took her father-in-law. She was gone for three days. When her father-in-law returned with the ability to walk and leap for the first time in years, Mama Viktor turned around and took her mother-in-law.

Besides stories of miraculous cures, there are daily stories of conditions at Loliondo. People in cars wait up to seven days before they are served the miracle water. Some people try to butt in line, and the Babu warns them that the water will not work for them. People are forced to sleep in their cars and relieve themselves outside, creating foul conditions. Yet the flow of people seeking the miracle cure from the Babu has not waned. He works from sun-up to sun-down boiling the tree roots and serving from a plastic green cup.

No one complains of going to Loliondo and not being cured. No one tries to explain the miracle. They only wonder if they can make it to Loliondo before the miracle runs out.

The Complicated Act of Sharing

2011-03-02T03:18:00.001-08:00

At the Mwika campus of Stefano Moshi Memorial University College where I teach English courses, I found my students studying for a phonology test. They had removed desks from the classrooms, put them under the shade of the trees, and quizzed each other over the fine details of tongue frontness, lip rounding, allophones and phonemes.

Joseph, the class representative, called me over and said he had questions. After I clarified more details about the allophones of /t/, Joseph wanted to know if America had as much corruption as Tanzania. This was when I knew they were tired of phonology. I said we did, but probably not as much as Tanzania.

Then I launched into my ever-evolving theory of why corruption is so prevalent in Tanzania. I said to Joseph that corruption begins as a way of thinking that isn’t necessarily bad. In Tanzania, children are taught to share—-share the food, share your clothes, share your bedroom, share the money that you earn to pay for your younger siblings’ school fees. During a test, students share their rulers, their white-out, and their extra pens.

This is a way of cultivating a care for others, but it has a sinister under-side. The other day, I sat on a bus and watched as a secondary school student boarded the bus with a small bag of peanuts. Four of his fellow classmates immediately put their hands out. I could see his whole body droop as he distributed his peanuts to yet another insistent hand, emptying his bag to three peanuts. But if he hadn’t, he would’ve been cast into the outer darkness.

Any adult fortunate enough to buy a car must absolutely give free rides to his or her friends and enemies. And the freeloaders feel no shame, no sense of responsibility in helping to pay for gas. The driver must carry all of that burden because he or she has the car, and the rest do not.

Students must also share the answers on a test. Joseph and his fellow students, though most of them have already taught in secondary schools, are notorious cheaters. Some of those who are tired of sharing, like the boy with the bag of peanuts, sit in the very front so they cannot be disturbed by the person behind them who wants to the phonemic symbol for the “th” in “thy.” When someone becomes president, he--so far, it’s only been “he” in this country as in the States¬—he must share his advantages with his friends who helped him become president.
Then Joseph complained that no change can take place unless it happens through government mandate. I disagreed. I said, if you’re a teacher, you have 70 students in one class. If you teach them a new way of thinking, you will change how they think. Then they will change how their students think. And after five years, you’ll have changed hundreds of students who will change hundreds of thousands of students. Teachers, I said, have more power than presidents.

But Joseph didn’t like that answer. First, it makes him responsible. Second, it gives him a lot of work to do. I did not tell him this, but the biggest impediment to corruption is accepting that it happens with every individual on a daily basis with the simple act of sharing, whether it’s a bag of peanuts or the answers to a test.

The Song of Faith

2011-02-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

Every evening, I eat with Edda, the assistant bursar at Mwika, and her husband Godrick. As part of the evening routine, Omega the house girl feeds their baby Faith.

When I first began to eat with the family, Faith at eight or nine months did not mind the evening porridge. But soon she got fussy. She knocked away the spoon, and porridge usually flew in all directions, primarily on Omega. Someone now had to distract Faith while the spoon slid into her mouth.

It would not be Edda. Edda had survived nine months of a wretched pregnancy with Faith with many hospitalizations, anxiety, pain and suffering. Edda made it clear to her husband that for the rest of Faith’s life, Godrick would now have to do the work. She, Edda, was too tired after all of that.

At times, the distracting of Faith during porridge would fall to Omega’s sister Lea, who also lives with the family. She would sing a song called, “Piga makofi,” which means “clap the hands.”

Sometimes Godrick would be disturbed during the meal to see the first five spoonfuls go everywhere else but his daughter’s mouth. Concerned that his daughter would not survive without that porridge, he would rise up and sing and clap. His song, unlike the song of Lea, was created spontaneously and repeated many evenings of flung porridge. If this song had a title, I would call it “Faith.” The first verse is “Faith, Faith, Faith, Faith, Faith, Faith, Faith.” The second verse is “Faith, Faith, Faith, mtoto mzuri (good child). Faith, Faith, mtoto mzuri.” In the third verse, the words of the first are repeated and then Godrick claps his hands and says, “Ah!” in a treble voice. Sometimes verses 1 and 2 are combined. Possibly Godrick has forgotten where he is in the song, but he has distracted his beloved daughter long enough to push that porridge down.

Last week Godrick was not around in the evenings. Omega had started to encourage Faith to walk. She also discovered that when Faith was balancing herself, her concentration was distracting enough to feed her. So one evening Omega’s sister Lea plopped Faith far enough away to force concentration. Omega slipped the spoon in, and Faith stumbled towards them, falling into Lea’s arms. After 15 times of this, the porridge was gone.

On Feb. 14, Faith will turn one year. Her steps are still faltering, but in a month, they won’t be. Who will run after Faith with a spoon of porridge?

Water water everywhere

2011-01-30T20:56:00.000-08:00

At the College, they thought I--the only native English speaker on campus--should be the one to teach phonetics and phonology. Phonology is the study of the sounds in English, how you anatomically make them, and the rules about them. It’s not my favorite topic. It resembles science: you have to learn an entirely new set of vocabulary, and by the time you know the topic well, you’ve left out all the words from your previous life sitting dormant on a shelf. But I said, “Sure, I’ll teach phonology.”

The other day my class and I were learning about the “t” sound. (Since it’s been about 20 years since I studied linguistics, I’m including myself as one of the learners.) I was telling students about allophones – variations of a sound. For example, the “t” in “toe” is different from the “t” in “stow.” I told students to put their palms to their mouths and say “toe” and “stow.” The puff of air is less with “stow.” Since my Tanzanian students are game for anything, no matter how silly it looks, forty of us with hands in front of our mouths repeated “toe” and “stow.”

Then I told them about the “t” in “water.” I said while the “t” in “toe” is an aspirated stop, the “t” in “water” is an alveolar flap. With the word “water,” the tip of the tongue touches the ridge on the roof of your mouth right behind your teeth. “Flap” refers to the fact that your tongue does this much more quickly with “water” than “toe.”

Then I pronounced “water” for my students--wadder. Suddenly the room erupted in wadder-wadder-wadder-wadder-wadder. I wrote “wadder” on the board and then “water,” pronounced them one at a time and asked if they could tell which one I was pronouncing. They failed every time.

I had not realized how vital this difference in “t” was -- the aspirated “t” in “toe” and the alveolar flap in “water” --until I first arrived in Tanzania. I had asked for a "boddle of wadder" for the first two days and discovered no one understood me. I told my students this story. Then I heard boddle-of-wadder-boddle-of-wadder-boddle-of-wadder for ten minutes. Then I gave them the native version of “I want a bottle of water” –I wanna boddle of wadder.

With that, I lost all classroom control. They all flowed out of the room repeating, “I wanna boddle of wadder.”

Through the metal grate

2011-01-16T21:29:00.000-08:00

At the small shop near me, an iron grate set in a large window solidly separates me, the customer, from anything in the shop that I want. Many, and probably most, general stores here bar any customer entrance. All exchanges pass through the holes of that grate.

My shop is run by a young man who’s about 20 years old. In the rooms adjacent to the shop, his mother, father and sister come and go, cook, clean and do other living. But this boy runs the shop from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. every single day. The exception is Christmas and New Year’s Day when his sister helps him run the shop from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. This explains why the clerk returns my greetings when I approach the grate with heavy lethargy. When I tell him what I want–matches, soap, green Christmas wrapping paper, sugar, oil–he rises from his chair sloth-like. I don’t know if sloths rise but if they do, they look like this clerk. When I ask for a half kilo of sugar, he retrieves a wrinkled piece of wax paper and lets it flutter onto a metal scale, then plops metal weights on the other side of the scale, and pours the golden brown grains of sugar onto the paper. Three sugar grains before the scale drops down, he stops pouring and begins to shake the sugar onto the paper. The instant the scale has dropped, the shaking stops, and he lifts the wax paper by two opposite corners, pouring the sugar into a bag from a third corner.

Even though ten customers have arrived and shouted out their requests–I want a cigarette! I want a bar of soap! You didn’t give me the right change last time!–he moves through the weighing of sugar just as slowly as when he began. To assert their position in line, each customer thrusts his hand through the grate waving money at him. The customer returning an empty soda bottle shoves that through the grate.

But while the customers and their demands with their thrusting hands are gathering like thundering clouds, the clerk is sorting in his mind who he can get rid of quickly and whose demand will take time. The soda bottle comes first, the cigarette comes second. The right change will take some thinking, calculating and jousting.

Requests for cooking oil or kerosene are usually last on his list because those, like the pouring and weighing of sugar, take time. Though the customer has brought her own container, the shop clerk has his own standard measuring containers–a soda bottle for the oil and a beer bottle for the kerosene. With a small metal dipper, he pours the oil from a large drum into the bottle through a funnel. Not one drop of either oil or kerosene is spilled onto the floor. (He does not work for British Petroleum.) After he’s poured the liquid into his soda or beer bottle, he pours it into the customer’s container, usually a left-over jug of oil bought a year ago. Both the clerk and customer deliver the jug, which usually doesn’t have a lid, through the grate at the only angle it will fit without spilling a drop.

When the bread man delivers 25 loaves of bread on his bicycle stacked sky high with milk crates full of bread with more loaves tied and swinging on the crates’ sides, each of those 25 loaves is passed one at a time through the window grate. The clerk could let the bread man through the back door to deliver ten loaves at a time, but he doesn’t.

In this way, we do our small shopping.

Shine

2010-12-03T22:25:00.000-08:00

The guest for dinner that evening was named Shine (pronounced SHEEnay). He was a third-year Bachelor Degree student who had sticks for limbs; the largest part of him was his smile. It wasn’t my home we were having dinner at. Edda, the bursar at the Mwika campus, and her husband Godrick serve as my hosts every evening, my own house lacking cooking equipment. Edda introduced Shine as the minister of housing for the students, and I wondered why the student government needed a housing minister.
I also wondered how one might put more meat on Shine. So did Edda. She heaped his plate with cooked bananas and stew until Shine’s eyes became larger than his smile.
It turns out Shine had the monumental task of finding housing for degree students. Ever since the government of Tanzania restructured its loan program last year to provide more loans to anyone majoring in education, the Mwika campus has been inundated with degree students. Instead of 35 education students, Mwika now has 250, but doesn’t have resources and time to build on-campus housing.

Shine’s job was to go from door to door in local villages and ask if people would be willing to rent a room to a college student. Very likely not everyone would say yes although many would want the extra income. This meant Shine would have to knock on many more doors than 250. This, I thought, was not a good way to add more meat to Shine. He would dissolve into thin air. But Shine had already found rooms for 75 students. Perhaps he had begun the week a clothes-size larger.

The next morning I saw Shine on the main road on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, venturing out to knock on more doors, still smiling.

Practicing English

2010-11-05T03:42:00.000-07:00

I did not know what my students and I would talk about at lunch, but I figured if we had nothing to say, we could at least eat.

I have learned that the opportunity to practice speaking English with me elicits two responses: terror and delight. This group of first-year Diploma in Education students had been thrilled the week before when I asked them. So thrilled they were sure that Mama Somebody who runs the off-campus canteen would bring the food to us in our classroom. It seemed a huge inconvenience for that mama, so I nixed the idea, especially after Malekea, the guy who sits in the back of the room where the sun beams the brightest, shook his head. Of the 12 or so students in the room, his feet were solidly on the ground.

I could’ve planned topics for discussion, but that seemed like work. Plus, if I plan things, it limits the possibilities of what can happen. (I do not apply this same rule to my classes, though I have abandoned parts or all of my plan after discovering students didn’t understand something critical.)

What did we talk about on the dusty road to Mama Somebody’s canteen? Njau wanted to know how I could expect to teach English and learn Kiswahili at the same time. Based on the fact that he asked this same question 26 times, I decided he really wasn’t interested in my answer; he wanted to practice asking the question. By the time we hiked up the steep short hill to the canteen, he was still asking that question, and suddenly and fortunately, he disappeared.

Outside the front door, Mama was serving food from steaming tables. Inside were about three coffee tables and one tall bar table. Ten of us joined the 3 or 4 people who weren’t expecting to practice speaking English while they ate. Neither was Mama Somebody, judging from her own startled look.

I wasn’t sure about the canteen’s serving system. People were clearly going out to the mama and ordering what they wanted. Bongole was eating rice and meat with sauce. Joseph was eating rice and banana stew. I announced I wanted rice and meat. I stood outside thinking there was a line of people waiting to order and collect food right by the steaming tables and Mama Somebody. But no, Bongole told me to sit down and after a while, the food was brought to me. (I’ve discovered if you don’t know the main language spoken in a country, events appear surprising, fraught with either divine mystery or frustration. Today it was mystery.) All of this was part of a whirlwind of excitement. Bongole, sitting beside me on the bench against the wall, launched into a series of statements about not knowing the local tribal language, he was from the southern region of Iringa, and so on. When I asked him how long it took him to travel to Mwika, he said he didn’t understand the question. Irambo, sitting across from him, did. But Irambo had a mouth full of rice and meat. And apparently, judging from the silence in the room, he was the only one who understood. So we waited.

When Bongole finally explained that it took him 14 hours to travel to Mwika, three other students began to argue, calling him a liar. Bongole, an excitable guy to begin with, could not be contained in his space on the bench. I had to tell him to be quiet three times in English and finally when I said it in Kiswahili, he stopped. Kissima, sitting at the bar table, explained that she had just made the trip from Moshi Town to Iringa and it took her ten hours. After sorting out the details, it was revealed that neither Kissima nor Bongole were lying.

From there we hopped around topics. By the time we had walked back to campus, I was explaining how our large buses in the States have toilets--I used the word “latrine” because they’d just learned it that day. Temba wanted to know where the poop went. How much were people paid to remove the poop? Bongole said he would never do such a job. Kissima said he would if he were paid good money.

At that point, our roads diverged, mine to my apartment, theirs to their next class. Next week, I will write down Mama Somebody’s real name.

Wake, awake!

2010-10-30T04:30:00.000-07:00

The Mwika campus is an active one. It’s a combination of two or maybe three educational institutions – Lutheran Bible School, a school of theology, and a third campus of Stefano Moshi Memorial University College. At its center is a church. There’s also a kindergarten and just beyond that past the hedges is a primary school. All of these form a collective routine.

At 5:00 a.m. the church bell rings, signaling all sleepers to wake up and pray. It rings 100 times, and then we are wide awake. At 6:30 a.m. it rings again. Perhaps that’s when our prayer should end. Or that’s when the hard sleepers should wake up.

At 7:30, the school bell is sounded. The bell is actually the rim of a car tire hanging from a tree. A teacher takes a stick and whacks away at it, but there’s a rhythm to the clanging. First, two short clangs when the rim sways. Then there’s a clang!clang!clang!clang!clang!clang!clang! finalized by CLANG CLANG.

At lunch, we hear the same clang thing all over again.

At 4:00, the primary school assembles outside and a student or two with snare drums tap out a cadence that the children sing to. All over Tanzania, children are taught to sing with all their might, which comes across as a sing-shout. This means that each song has the same melody and differs only by rhythm. At 5:00 p.m. a small brass band practices outside the church. They also have drums. By 6:30, the only ones left singing are the cicadas, who will sing all night.

Waiting for change

2010-10-22T03:24:00.001-07:00

Hilary, the provost’s personal driver, had stopped the SUV at a butcher’s shop. We were on the way to Mwika, to the third campus of Stefano Moshi Memorial University College, where I would begin my second year of teaching. All of my belongings rattled in the back because Hilary still had the SUV in idle while he talked to the butcher. In a few minutes, Hilary returned, and we waited in the car still burning up fuel.

We were not waiting for meat. The butcher owed the provost money. A few weeks ago, the provost had wanted four kilos of pork, but there were only two kilos of pork available. The butcher also did not have change that day. He promised to return it another day.

Hilary had tried to get the change from the butcher on previous trips, but apparently the butcher had had enough warning to run away before Hilary’s arrival. Today Hilary had surprised him. Now the butcher left to collect the change, going from place to place asking others for donations. (He was probably telling them he’d pay them back later.)

Once I rode in a taxi and upon giving the driver my money, he said he didn’t have change. There were two other passengers in the taxi waiting to move on, and rather than argue with him, I left seething.

After about 15 minutes, Hilary turned off the engine, resigning himself to uncertain fates: the engine might never start and the butcher might never return. A collection of children arrived and stared at me for a while. Some dared to greet me and then ran away. Others with courage stayed behind. Hilary got out of the vehicle and talked to the butcher’s friend who’d been standing at the counter. Finally the butcher arrived with the change, but it wasn’t enough. This was all he could get at the moment. Hilary told him to get some more. We waited.

On another day, the taxi incident still sizzling in my memory, I rode a bus that goes up to Masoka, but I got off in Moshi Town at the Uhuru Hotel. I handed the conductor a 500 shilling note and asked for change. He said there was no change. He asked other passengers, and at that moment, no one felt like coughing up change. I said, “No change, no money!” I grabbed the money I had just given him, and repeated, “No change, no money!” I stared at him with nostrils flared and eyes bulging, waiting for a protest.

Inside the bus, the passengers were saying, “What did she say? What did she say?”
“She said, ‘No change, no money.’”

The bus roared away, the passengers roaring with laughter.

Somewhere inside of Hilary, a clock was ticking, and he decided he’d waited long enough. The SUV started with only a hiccup, leaving the remaining change to fate.

Waiting for change

2010-10-22T03:24:00.000-07:00

Much more than an answer

2010-10-16T05:55:00.000-07:00

I was looking for Gate F-8 at the Schipol Airport in Amsterdam on my way to Tanzania, the journey to my second year teaching at Stefano Moshi Memorial University College. On the 8-hour flight from Detroit in a seat built for someone taller than six feet, my head slanted by the neck pillow, my tray dangerously close to my boobs, I dozed enough to make me drowsy and weary. In the airport I schlepped two laptops and a back pack through moving electric walkways that ended with an automated voice that said, “Mind your step! Mind your step!” I leaped off one and leaped onto another. I followed arrows with signs that said F-H, past shops with displays of tulip bulbs, Van Gogh memorabilia, and leather briefcases. I knew that after I found Gate F-8, I would cross another 4,000 miles in an equally uncomfortable 8-hour flight to Tanzania.

Then I found myself in a room with luggage carousels. Some part of my cerebral cortex or latex or whatever up there was slowly grinding knew that this was the end, and there was no turning back. But most of my brain slept in fog. I slogged toward a group of airport personnel visiting in and around a glass booth. I put down the two laptops and said to the men in uniform, “Can you tell me where Gate F-8 is?”

One of the men spoke. “Good morning!”

And then I remembered how the rest of the world has a civility that we in the States do not have, or no longer have. While we walk up to the bank teller and say, “Can you deposit my check?”, while we yell into the drive-through speaker, “I want a Big Mac and a large fry!”, while we ask the store clerk, “Does this blouse come in shiny gold?” the rest of the world begins by saying, “Hello, how are you?”

In Tanzania, this civility is multiplied times twenty. The first 100 words I learned were greetings. One greets an elder by saying, “Shikamoo.” Otherwise, there’s, “How are you? How is the day? How is the morning? How did you wake up? How’s yourself? Any problems? Any problems with your family? How’s your home? Your mother? Your father? Your children? Your work? Are you okay? How are you since I last saw you? How are you since the day before yesterday? How are things? What else?”

Then I learned the responses: fine (nzuri), okay (mzima, poa), peaceful (salama), very peaceful (salama kabisa), clean (safi). (I can’t explain “clean” as a response.)
When I first became aware of the necessity of greetings in Tanzania, I had to practice deep breathing and counting to ten. But store clerks are much friendlier if you first greet them. People on the bus are much friendlier. The stranger on the road who is about to show you where to find the Mbuyuni bus will be friendlier if you first greet her.

These greetings would not help me get a loaf of bread or roll of toilet paper. They would not tell me whether this bus went to Rombo or Mwika. I felt I was just doing a little dance to please someone before I was allowed to ask for what I wanted.
The irony, I eventually learned, was that these greetings forced me to recognize that the store clerk was a human being, as well as the postal clerk and the stranger on the road. They had feelings, problems, mothers and fathers, and they had lived yesterday, live today. They breathed, they woke up, they slept. Even if the answers always started out positive, the truth could emerge in the next three greetings at which time I would learn that the clerk had a headache or his mother had just died.
In the two months I had been in the States, all of that civility disappeared in a snap without my notice. In the Schipol Airport, I only felt weary and lost with more hours of weariness to follow. So when I passed the group of airport officials, I was only thinking they could give me an answer, not that they were human. And when the one official said, “Good morning!” in a cheerful voice, my weariness was released like air from a stretched balloon. I laughed and replied in kind. The men said, “Where are you from?” I told them America. They said, “Yes, we can!” For the life of me, I had no clue what they were talking about until I remembered Obama’s campaign slogan.

Then I tried the question again. Yes, they knew where F-8 was: go out these doors, go upstairs, enter the big doors and walk through the entire airport. But by the time I’d gotten this news, I was buoyed enough by their good cheer and the gentler reminder of how to be a human.

A brief and fond farewell

2010-06-18T02:06:00.000-07:00

It is the time of the semester when every brain cell I’m using has been borrowed or rented for the sole purpose of grading 250 tests, essays, revisions, etc. Those cells will remain that way until I board a plane on August 2nd for the States.

Bottom line: no blog for a while.

I could not have imagined a more glorious adventure than this year in Tanzania. I am grateful to divine, ecclesiastical and other powers that got me here and sustained me. I am also very grateful to various churches, groups, and individuals who donated money.

Gladly, I will be returning to Tanzania at the beginning of October to teach again at Stefano Moshi Memorial University College. Again, I will be serving as a volunteer, with funding from the Nebraska Synod of the ELCA. If you’re inclined to donate toward this cause, the Nebraska Synod and I would be delighted.

If you wish to host a $1,000-a-plate banquet, I would be happy to provide entertainment, but only of a dignified nature, and not on a Sunday. Don’t forget to put my name on the memo line of your $500,000 check to the Nebraska Synod.

Or you can send a check (with my name on the memo line) for next year’s venture to:
Nebraska Synod ELCA
4980 S. 118th St., Suite D
Omaha, NE 68137

If you do send money, I cannot guarantee you less time in purgatory or your own chamber in heaven with a coffee bar and 24-hour massage service, but you will get a heaping thanks from me.

Let me now give at least twenty spoonfuls of thanks to the bevy of loyal followers of this blog. It has been a treat to get personal messages from you. I thoroughly love being here, and sharing all that I love with you has been simple unadulterated joy.

Until October, adieu!

Where it stops, nobody knows

2010-06-09T02:09:00.000-07:00

When a ball starts rolling down a mountain road with large rocks jutting out, who knows where it will go?

One might say this particular ball started with Zareke, the boy at Sinai Lutheran Church who raised his hand after my presentation of Tanzania pictures. “What kind of toys do the kids play with?” I hadn’t really paid attention to toys but I did see little boys running down the hill with a stick they used to push a wheel. Clearly all parts of it had been something else in previous lifetime. I’d also seen boys kicking a ball made of thirty miles of string.

Like that ball of string, Zareke’s idea was passed to Pastor Ostrom who thought surely it would be easy enough to send a soccer ball to Tanzania, and probably a pump. Yes, I said, that sounded good. I’d find a place for it when I returned.

When three soccer balls and a pump arrived in Tanzania, I wondered who on earth I could give them to. Suddenly the Kirima Primary School up the hill floated in my mind. Village schools often do not get the same benefits as city schools, and I decided they could use three soccer balls and a pump.

The balls and pump sat in a box in my house for about three months until one day, I was sitting in the shelter of the village bus stand, a hut with a roof made of dried banana leaves. Ferdinand, the shoemaker who uses the stand as his shop, was sewing up a shoe when I plopped myself on the bench next to another man. School children passing by greeted him, “Shikamoo, Mwalimu.“ I perked up. “Mwalimu” means “teacher.“ This mwalimu taught at Kirima Primary School. His face lit up when I told him about the soccer balls, and then it radiated like neon when I mentioned the pump. I would come on Monday, I told him.

On Monday, I decided arbitrarily that noonish would be the time to come with the soccer balls. I also had a gazillion pens from my good friend Debi, who teaches English at an elementary school. I also decided arbitrarily that Debi, formerly of Verdigre, Nebraska, where it doesn’t get more rural, would want the pens to go to children in a rural school.

Noonish was actually a good time. There seemed to be a kind of recess going on, with children darting about outside like heated molecules. Soon a small parade formed behind me. The air that had been full of shouting and laughter now quieted to hushed whispers. In Tanzania, someone always offers to carry my bag, and sure enough, one child formed the head of the parade beside me, proudly carrying the plastic bag with three soccer balls.

At the far side of the school, we were eyed carefully by four school teachers, one of whom had a short cane in her hand. When I explained that I had brought a gift from my church in America, I was happily whisked into the main office where I signed my name in a book as big as the desk. For the sake of posterity that probably wasn’t called for, I wrote a paragraph explaining that Sinai Lutheran Church of Fremont, Nebraska, USA had given a gift of three soccer balls, a pump, and many pens. Then I added, “God bless you!” because surely primary school teachers need a blessing every now and then.

I said I wanted to take a picture of the children. The teacher hostess, who had me sign my name, told me to wait, she would arrange for a picture. With a stick in hand, she beat the school bell, which wasn’t a bell but the metal inside part of a truck tire which hung from a tree. (Obviously I have no clue what you call that tire thing.)

Streams of children flowed by. The ones who had misbehaved at an earlier time were snagged by the hand of a teacher who shouted, “You!” and whapped their fingers. The stream flowed toward the assembly area, under the shade of the largest tree on the school grounds. They lined themselves up into columns, each child with his hand on the shoulder in front of him.

The head teacher now told the children about today’s guest. They were to greet me on the count of three. Then I made my entrance, following the hostess teacher, and stepped in front of 436 children. Most of them wore a school uniform--sweaters of green, blue, black, and yellow, the colors of the Tanzanian flag. Many of the sweaters had sleeves or necklines that were threatening to unravel, clearly having been passed down by older siblings. One in the front row only had horizontal threads across his right shoulder. His sweater had been worn by every generation since independence.

The children greeted me according to plan. But I wasn’t prepared for their song, something pure that could not be touched by grime and dust, by harsh words or a stinging cane. This song had a purity of 436. Which was just enough to tip me over into gulping sobs until I realized that every single child and teacher would wonder what the Sam Hill was wrong with me, and the whole event would be ruined.

When the head teacher announced the gift of three soccer balls, a great murmur moved through the sea. Another murmur after the pump was announced and another with the pens. For the picture I wanted to take, the children sat down. Actually it was five pictures in order to get all 436.

On my way out, I was escorted by three of the teachers. They were grateful for the gifts. As we stood at the road, we lingered there for the last thank you and the last goodbye. Just before I stepped into the road, one of the teachers said, “Can you help us? We really need toilets.“

And that was where the ball rolled.

Church of the psychic pastor

2010-06-02T02:43:00.000-07:00

On the morning we went to see the psychic pastor, Happy’s sister Neema slipped me a handwritten prayer to give him. I had been ironing my dress on the foot of her bed while she sat curled up at the head, writing.

She had heard the same stories I had from my friend Edith about the pastor. One woman had asked him to pray for her brother, and in the midst of his prayer, he understood the brother was near death, which turned out to be true. Another woman asked him to pray for her husband, and in the midst of calling on God the Father, the pastor knew the woman had threatened to leave her husband. While these stories piqued my curiosity, they spurred Neema to see if the pastor could use his divine influence on her behalf.

Happy and I took scarves to wrap around our heads before we entered the church of the psychic pastor. Edith had said covering the head was required because women did so in the Old Testament. My scarf was the nearest thing I could find: a flashy yellow and black sarong still damp from being used as a towel an hour ago. When Edith joined us at the bus station, she looked at my necklace and earrings and said no jewelry either.

On the bus toward Arusha, I unfolded my sarong on my lap. It was almost dry when the bus broke down in the middle of nowhere. People got off the bus and waited for another. I found a tree on a knoll and answered a call of nature. Another bus arrived. As we mashed ourselves into it, the bus conductor counted us - 26, 27, 28... Happy and I shared half a seat. Edith shared the back row with eight others.

When the bus stopped at a lonely row of shops with two huge boulders by the road, we got off. Across the road was a mirror image of shops without the boulders. Out of the silence, a motorcycle materialized. Edith had told me we’d be riding one to the church.

As she negotiated the fare, two more appeared, rumbling loudly. The three of us stood with our arms across our chests while negotiations were in progress. Happy and Edith wore faraway looks. This was necessary lest the cyclists think we really needed the ride, giving them the upper hand. While the driver of the first motorcycle talked to the back of their heads, Edith and Happy said a few words to each other quietly, and suddenly Happy climbed onto a motorcycle and rode side-saddle. Edith pointed for me to climb onto another motorcycle with a solid foot platform while she took another.

The church itself was a solid brick building, a rectangle with a metal roof. Long open-air windows on two sides of the rectangle provided the only light, but it was plenty. The doorway too provided light since there was no door. When we walked in, the congregation was singing, rocking to the music, hands in the air, swaying and clapping.

When the music ended we searched for places to sit. On the left side of the sanctuary, people sat in plastic lawn chairs. On the right side others sat on back-less benches. Along the sides of the brick wall were rough-hewn logs sliced in half, the flat side resting on rocks piled up. Edith and I sat on one such log next to a row of little boys. We faced the side view of people sitting in benches.

The woman nearest me had eyes sunk in deep sockets. They rested on my face for a solid two or three minutes. I felt somewhere on me was a bull’s eye and somewhere in her eye was a bullet. Her aim moved to my throat, my left arm, my right arm, my chest, my stomach, my legs, my ankles and my toes. And then she repeated the same slow sweep over Edith. Finally, I had the nerve to stare at her face - long and thin with cheek bones protruding like rocks jutting out of a road.

A woman at the front led the singing. Sometimes her singing melted into wailing, and then the congregation knew it was time to stop. After all, it is difficult to follow along with wailing. Later in the service, there was more wailing when the pastor prayed what Lutherans call the Prayer of the Church. In this Pentecostal-type service, the prayers are a loud chanting with the name of God repeated in many ways, many times while we all raise one hand in the air.

As the pastor began the prayer, others whispered their own and soon there was more wailing. One woman on the bench near me began to repeat the same syllable and I’m pretty sure it didn’t mean anything in Kiswahili: “ku-ku-ku-ku-ku.” Then “chi-chi-chi-chi-chi.” She swayed. The woman beside her was overcome with sobbing.

Even though this was the prayer, I opened my eyes and saw from the woman’s mouth a string of drool lengthening. I would have been terrified if either Edith or Happy had started doing the same thing, but both had closed their eyes and seemed as they usually were.

After the service, the pastor gave a general announcement asking us to raise our hands if we wanted him to pray for us individually. Then we rushed to the front of the sanctuary and stood before the chancel, a raised concrete platform with an altar and flower petals scattered on the floor. I had clung to Edith who would translate for me, and I managed to get a front row position with Edith directly behind me and Happy beside me.

Down the row from me, the pastor had started praying over a woman, his hands on her head. Soon other church leaders swarmed around her. She was wailing and the others were shouting loudly over her in angry voices. I turned around and asked Edith if they would do that to me. “Don’t worry,” she said, “she has a demon. They are taking out the demon. You don’t have one.’” I thought, “How does she know?”

Now the woman collapsed, and luckily the church leaders, still shouting, caught her and lay her on the floor. In spite of the less than meditative atmosphere, the pastor began to pray quietly for another woman in my row. She did not have a demon. I took comfort in that. Now the pastor took a bottle of oil from the altar, put a little on his palm and placed it on the woman’s stomach. I asked Edith about that. The woman wanted a baby. Since I didn’t want a baby, I figured the hand on the stomach was one less thing to worry about.

When the pastor stood before me and put his ear next to my face, I asked if he spoke English. He pointed to Happy standing beside me to translate. I handed him the prayers from Neema. Without unfolding the paper, he explained that Neema had a vision to study in America. He prayed that her wish might come true. Then he said she had a problem with her stomach. He prayed over that. I was glad that my own stomach was not the surrogate for Neema’s.

It was late when we arrived back in Moshi. I asked Neema what she had written in her prayer. She said she wanted to get a master’s degree, but that it didn’t matter whether it was in America or Tanzania. I asked about her stomach. She said the pastor was right about the stomach problem.

Only time will tell whether she will get a master’s degree and whether the stomach is healed. If these things happen we will wonder, were the prayers of the psychic pastor so potent, or does God listen to the daily prayers of ordinary mortals?

At the clinic

2010-05-26T02:52:00.000-07:00

I sat across the desk from the doctor who wrote notes on a prescription pad. He asked my name.

On the walk with Mama Happy to the clinic, Happy had called and said, “Tell the doctor you’re married to an African! He will charge you a lot of money if you don’t!”

I did not like this idea. This would mean I’d have to keep track of my fake identity if I ever went back to the same clinic again. It would become exhausting and if I were really sick, my story would surely fall apart with more probing questions.

But I also had a total of 15,000 Tanzanian shillings, the equivalent of $15. So I decided I would be married to an African. I would use Happy’s last name and say that my husband was a lecturer at a college in Masoka and that I taught at Kirima Primary School.

The doctor misspelled my first name as “Jane,” and I didn’t correct him. I could later explain to government investigators that it wasn’t my fault he’d gotten the name wrong. When I spelled Happy’s last name, the doctor corrected my spelling. He should’ve been suspicious, and maybe he was, but he neither blinked nor paused in his routine.

He asked if I had a fever. I said no. I waited for him to pull out a thermometer, but instead, he wrote, “No fever.” I was amazed I was that credible. I told him I had no appetite and was extremely tired. I told him what I thought was wrong: a tapeworm or malaria. Mama Happy added to the list: a glucose problem. He wrote these things down.

Then he sent me to the nurse across the hall who knew no English. She expertly took blood. Then taking a box of Lucky matches, she emptied it, saved one match and handed it with the box to me. She said “stool sample.”

I was mystified. Would I be lighting this one match to dynamite for stool? Outside the nurse’s office, Mama Happy sat on a bench and did some talking and gesturing with the box in hand. From that I understood I needed only a little sample in the box. I put the box under my bottom and said, “Like this?” She laughed. The teenage boy sitting next to her turned his head away.

I walked to the toilet still mystified. At least I knew the sample would go in the box. Even so, I was pretty sure nothing would happen, since this was the wrong time of day. And it was.

Back in the doctor’s office, the doctor informed me I had malaria. I did not have a glucose problem, I did not have typhoid. And if I really wanted to know about tape worms or any other kind of worm, I could return to try again with the stool sample.

We walked to another room just down from the doctor’s office and there was the nurse again, dispensing medicine. She did not charge me an arm and a leg for the malaria pills, perhaps because she thought I was married to an African. Or perhaps it was because Mama Happy had pushed me aside at the window and demanded to know from the nurse what each medicine was, how much it cost, and why did it cost that?

As Mama Happy and I walked away, I looked at the prescription slip. All evidence of my visit, both true and false, was there: symptoms, test results, failed test results, and fake name. I was free.

A complicated course

2010-05-19T02:49:00.000-07:00

It is Wednesday morning, and for the fourth time, I have just distributed the course outline (syllabus) for Basic Communication Skills II to about fifty students. I have made changes to the outline given to me by the College. Under “Required Textbooks” I deleted all ten book titles listed. It did not make sense to me to require students to buy multiple books that looked very similar--Practicing Communication, Communication Skills, and Basic Communication, etc. Secondly, it made no sense to require nine of the books since they are not in the library nor in the bookstore. (The bookstore clerk spends most of her time photocopying pages rather than selling books.) The book that is available--seven copies for 250 students--did not have contents that matched the prescribed weekly lessons.

In light of the textbook scarcity, I asked students a few weeks ago how they wanted to fulfill the course objectives: prepare and deliver speeches, argue and defend points in debates, write good reports, use the internet. Did they want to debate interpretations of a novel or short stories (which we would photocopy illegally)? Or, I asked, did they want to debate about historical events? Or current issues?

The majority chose current issues. None of them wanted to practice oral skills by performing one-act plays (my preference). They physically shrank in their seats when I suggested the idea. And then when I said they could invite their friends and family for the performances, they slithered to the floor.

The next week I presented on the white board a large plan that entailed group debate teams, group topics, a written speech, a test, the actual spoken debate. I pointed out that this plan fulfilled most of the objectives but not all of them. I asked if they had questions or concerns. They were quiet.

This morning the class is looking at the same course objectives that I have now typed and photocopied 250 times. Are there any questions, I ask? One young man raises his hand. “Why aren’t we doing advertisements? I don’t see any assignments for advertisements.” I explain that I can’t teach advertisements because we don’t have a text book for advertising. Further, not all Basic Communication Skills students are business majors.

One student wants to know why they are not writing memos in this course, or minutes to a meeting, or advertisements. I repeat again: we do not have a textbook that covers memos, minutes, advertisements. I do not tell them, that I am grateful I have been saved from having to read 250 memos and meeting minutes.

A third student raises his hand. “What about advertisements? Why aren’t we learning advertisements?” I wonder to myself whether he didn’t listen to what I said the first and second time, or that he didn’t understand what I said. Understanding is slow because students are translating from English to Kiswahili as I am speaking. They have not gotten to the point of fluency where they do not need to switch back to Kiswahili.

When I give a set of instructions, I have to write them on the board. Then I read them out loud, then I ask whether students want me to repeat again. Yes. Then repeat again. Maybe this student who asked about advertisements for the third time wasn’t concentrating the first two times. Maybe he didn’t like my answer. I repeat again.

Finally, a student has noticed that the course description says the course will focus on the fax, as well as oral skills, reporting, library skills. “Why aren’t we learning how to fax?” he asks. I explain that we don’t have a fax machine to demonstrate it.

I suppose I could take 250 students to visit the secretary to the provost in her office which is barely larger than her desk. She could demonstrate the fax 200 times, but that seems an improper use of time and human resources. Short of several fax machines for teaching purposes, I don’t have a textbook that shows a picture of a fax machine. I tell them they can learn how to use a fax machine on the job in two minutes.

It is the first time I have had students ask why I was covering or not covering something in a course. Unlike my former students in the States, these students take an interest in what will happen. Nevertheless, trying to make an impossible course outline possible given the lack of textbooks, no internet on campus, a library with very few books, and students with little money to spare for photocopying and internet café use take their toll on my energy. So does repeating again.

The same student raises his hand again. “But can’t you teach us the theory of the fax?”

Day of the Pig

2010-05-12T02:38:00.000-07:00

Normally at the household of Mama Happy, the first one to make a sound on a Sunday morning is Happy’s alarm clock at 5:30. She re-sets the alarm for another 15 minutes, after which there’s more silence until she realizes it’s Sunday morning and church starts at 7:00. On this Sunday in April, Mama Happy and her daughter Neema crashed around in the kitchen at 5:30, Mama Happy issuing orders.

By 6:00 when I went to shower, Mama Happy had a vat of water over the cooking fire outside. She poured some of it into my bucket which I then used for my own shower (my mother calls this a pour-bath, with a small plastic pitcher that one uses to pour water). By the time Happy and I were putting on clothes, one large pig was screaming in the raised wooden pen.

Usually in the evenings all of those pigs are screaming when they’re hungry. Mama Happy has to fight to lower a pan of pig slop from her tiptoes while I or someone else shines a flashlight. Sometimes they get too raucous and Mama Happy can’t lower the pan. I’ve learned to fool the pigs by shining the flashlight into a different corner where they scramble, giving just enough time for her to plop the pan down. By the time we walk away from the pen, my ears are ringing.

This morning, only one pig was screaming. The smaller pigs were huddled at the other end of the pen trembling. Two men outside the pen had poles that they were using to maneuver the pig into position to eventually slaughter it.

The pig would’ve been calm if Mama Happy had been right there. But today she watched from the hallway window. Normally she has guts of steel about these things. When it’s time to butcher a duck, she wanders casually near the flock and swoops down on one, grabbing the feathers on the back of the duck and marching with it to its final end. When the dog lingers too close to the food prepared outside, she’ll whip it or throw a rock at it. I usually wince at these things, but this morning, Mama Happy was wincing from the hallway window. The three-year old pig had given her 30 pigs.

Happy and I left conveniently for church at that moment. When we returned, walking through the metal gate two hours later, the pig had been butchered, now hanging in two lengthwise sections from a makeshift wooden scaffold. One butcher scraped off the pig’s hair with a razor blade.

From one of the bedrooms, Mama Happy had taken a wooden table and put it near the hanging pig sections. People had gathered to watch Mama Happy and the butcher take turns whacking away at the hanging parts of the pig, which meant chopping into the bones. All of us standing nearby soon learned to take cover from the showering bits of meat. When they weren’t whacking at the pig, the butcher and Mama Happy whacked at smaller sections on the table and plopped them onto the metal scale on the table.

Early on one boy had come to buy the head of the pig. The head had been placed on a gunny sack, steam rising from the neck. Later the boy returned with the head and asked to have it cut in two because the boy’s mother had arranged to buy the head with others.

At one point, the houseboy of Mama Kennedy staggered in through the gate. “Houseboy” is a job title that includes domestic outdoor chores, like digging a garden and fixing things. It has nothing to do with age Mama Kennedy’s houseboy appears to be 50. “Houseboy” also does not indicate sobriety, which he is not, frequenting Mama Happy’s garden to relieve his hangovers with a lime or two plucked from her trees. And usually he needs help with the plucking due to balance issues.

But today the houseboy of Mama Kennedy wanted meat. He was sober enough to help Mama Happy carry the pig’s stomach and intestines to the far back of the yard using a gunny sack as a litter, sliced off what he wanted and left the rest for the flies. The entrails seemed like something from a science fiction film, a gigantic worm larger than the pig, curled in upon itself. That evening, it was still there, but by morning, there was no sign that it had ever existed.

By 1:00, the pig was mostly gone. The metal gate was spotted with meat stains. So too was the notebook paper with names of customers. So too was the paper money in Mama Happy’s pouch tied at her waist. Within an hour, the Sunday returned to its usual self, with one less pig in the world.

Waiting at the depot

2010-05-05T02:17:00.000-07:00

Being diagnosed with a terminal disease is perhaps like being at a train depot. Despite the company of friends and family who have come to see you off, you will board the train alone. And now you know the train has just left the other station to collect you.

For the 800 patients of Machame Lutheran Hospital diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, the future means waiting and wondering. When will the disease claim them? Who will take care of their children? And in the meantime, while they are still alive, how will they have the strength to care for the children?

Anti-viral drugs have worked to delay the train‘s arrival. Parents can care for their children for years, rather than weeks or months. But this life with a slow-moving train is fragile for those also afflicted with poverty. Periods of illness mean that a farmer returns home after weeks in the hospital to find all his chickens dead. Children are sent to relatives who can care for them, but who takes care of them when the relatives have died?

Palliative care and treatment at Machame Lutheran Hospital includes counseling and giving ongoing care to patients. But like the friends and family who linger at the train station, the waiting can be uncomfortable. What to tell the woman who desperately wants to know that she didn’t get the virus from sexual contact but from the blood transfusion in 1998?

What to tell the woman who asks, will I have to take this medicine if there’s a cure? How tempting it must be to tell her a cure means she can stop, praise God, dance for joy. But her thoughts have gone down an insidious trail: she’s thinking that she might consult a wizard for a cure, or someone in a white lab coat may come along and have a cure if she pays the right amount of money.

The people who offer palliative care and treatment understand that waiting at the train station does not always mean giving comfort. It means breathing in the silence of someone devastated not only by disease but by loss of a spouse, parents, and fears of an unknown future.

Palliative care and treatment at Machame Lutheran Hospital has branched into the building of homes that are simple, but warm and dry. The alternative--houses insulated with synthetic gunny sacks and thatched leaky roofs--are welcome places for tuberculosis in this damp cold climate on the edge of the rain forest.

There are other difficult questions that crop up for these patients: How can I make an income if my life’s work is physically difficult, like farming or selling banana beer?

And then there are the questions of how to be a human: Can a life extended by anti-viral drugs also mean marriage again? Can it include children? Does someone with AIDS only live partially or can one live fully?

In the month of April, during the four-month rainy season, men and women dot the mountain striking the soil with spades, planting their crops, and watching them grow. And for others, there is the waiting at the station.

Note: If you or your congregation or other group wish to donate a House for Health, please contact Rev. Martin Russell at the Nebraska Synod (mjruss@mac.com) or Bob Kasworm at Machame Lutheran Hospital (bkasworm@yahoo.com) . Currently one house can be built for $4,000. One hundred percent of the labor is provided locally and 99% of the materials used are local. Houses for Health is building its 19th house.

Another Day

2010-04-21T01:57:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-14T02:09:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-06T03:48:00.000-07:00

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.

Go fish!

2010-03-26T05:06:00.000-07:00

As a principle, buses in Tanzania leave when the bus is full, not when it’s time. They do this to make the maximum amount of money. The bus conductor begins his pursuit of passengers as though casting a line into a lake.

Standing near the buses but not too near, conductors eye potential catches. Like wary fish, we passengers sidle through hoards of people at the bus terminal and angle to find one of about four competing buses with the most passengers. We want the bus that will leave first.

It’s best if you can hide your identity as a fish, but as a Westerner, I might as well be a whale. Unlike a whale, I am easy to reel in because I usually admit I’m going to Arusha or wherever, and then like a wriggling catch, I find myself in the hands of one conductor who ushers me to one bus, and then another conductor who points to a bus that’s fuller. I step onto the bus, and often the conductor will shout something like, "We have an Mzungu on board!"

Sitting quietly on the second bus, I overhear the bus conductor reeling in the next wary fish by telling her that the fare is only 800 shillings today, rather than 1,000. This is the Shannon Spinner of lures, three hooks with each hook made of three. Your finger or arm gets caught and sliced just by looking at it. While the lower bus fare catches quite a few fish, I realize how the conductor and driver have won once again: a lower fare means they will need more passengers to make up the difference. The fish will have to sit in the tank just as long as those in the next bus with the higher fare.

In the meantime, all these buses want the fish to believe they are about to leave. Despite the high cost of gasoline, all of their engines are running. Conductors periodically pound on the bus, the standard signal for the driver to go, but the bus goes nowhere.

Inside the bus, a catchy song over the stereo keeps the caught fish happy. And the driver needs to keep the fish happy: they can flop out at any moment, deciding they’ve been duped and the next bus is better. But it’s always a risk. The other fish tank looks fuller but it could be worse maybe five of those passengers are friends of the driver keeping him company.

As the bus begins to fill, the driver watches the progress of the conductor outside as he is about to catch more fish. When it looks like the conductor can pull in three to five fish, the driver will roar out of the parking lane and rush toward the terminal exit. This catches even more fish who suddenly hop on board. I get my hopes up. After the five are safely netted, the bus jerks us backward, and we are parked in the same place once again.

Finally, at last, when the bus is more than crowded with passengers standing in the aisle, the driver heads the bus out of the exit gate, turns the corner onto the main road and stops once again we have caught three more fish.

The journey begins. The conductor squeezes himself among the standing passengers and rests only until the bus reaches Arusha, when the conductor and driver will have to work once again to fill up the bus.

Names Can Never Hurt Me

2010-03-19T06:17:00.000-07:00

Generating a list of my students has been a tortuous hand-wringing affair. At SMMUCo the admissions department does not generate a list. The student appears and then one writes that student’s name down. At least, as far as I can figure out.

I decided that if I wanted to know who was in my class, I should assign something. I assigned a business letter. Without any instruction on my part, 90 percent of those business letters came with a cover sheet, complete with my name and the student’s name, the college name, the major, the class, the date, and anything else the student thought appropriate.

As I entered student names on a spreadsheet, I made assumptions. For example, if the last name written in a series was “Njivaine,” I assumed it was the surname. If “Ayubu” was written as the first name, I assumed it was the name given to the individual and not the family.

But after the second writing assignment, I began to discover some mysteries. In many cases, students left off one name and decided to include their middle name on the cover sheet. It was as though students believed they were given a whole wardrobe of names, and they could select any names on that day depending on their mood and whatever was in the wardrobe. Pesambili Pesambili decided he was now Pesambili George for the second assignment. Ayubu Hamisi felt he should be Hamisi Ayubu.

Then there were shifts in spelling. The letters in the name “Gerald” morphed into “Jerad.” “Matthew” became “Mathew” in later assignments, and “Innocent” lost an “n” and found it again in January.

On the last day of class, students reviewed my spreadsheet with their semester grades on it. One of them appeared and said, “I think I should tell you my name isn’t John Fadhili but Fadhili Salumi.” I said yes, that would be good for me to know and even better for his grade point average. Four other students announced similar name changes that day.

And when it came time to reckon my list of students with the college list, it took four of us to solve many identity mysteries over the course of three days.

The victory of molecules

2010-03-11T06:14:00.000-08:00

It was late afternoon, and the sun was sinking, and as I walked through the bus terminal to the Moshi-Kirima bus stand, I found Mama Vanessa standing outside the bus. But neither she nor I would be getting on this particular bus because it was packed with people, and more people were shoving madly to squeeze themselves in. There’s a time to fight for space and a time to give up.

Within two minutes, another bus appeared, and this time Mama Vanessa and I held our breath as we now elbowed and jabbed and shoved our way into the bus. Not surprisingly, Mama Vanessa took a seat first, since too many of my polite practices still linger deep within me. But she had craftily moved over in the seat to save me a space and I sank in beside her, both of us pleased with a major victory. In about two more minutes, the bus filled again, all of us like molecules of a rockno one would be moving except when bounced by the bus. However, there was one woman who complained to the man that his arm was crushing her chest. For a second he didn’t move it, but when a few more molecules adjusted, he found another place for his arm.

The bus fare from town to Masoka is 500 Tanzanian shillings. Often conductors will force passengers to pay more, claiming that the fare has gone up due to increases in fuel prices. Sometimes the entire bus complains and the conductor is cowed into relenting. Sometimes the conductor stops the bus and forces one passenger out. When I handed 1,000 shillings to the conductor and told him it was for me and Mama Vanessa, he handed it back and said a few sentences in Kiswahili which I didn’t understand. Mama Vanessa argued back. The lady behind us argued. I still held my wallet in my hand, and now Mama Vanessa put her hand on it and told me to zip it into my purse. But she unzipped her own wallet, pulled out two coins, and held them.

I knew the essence of what the conductor saidhe was telling me I needed to pay 1,500 shillings for the two of us. Since I was the Mzungu, I should pay 1,000 because I had money. This has happened many times. I try to pay for another person and suddenly the money that I hand over is not enough. I cannot argue back since I don’t have the language skills, and if the friend doesn’t have the gumption to argue back, a good deed becomes a low moment in life.

Now a second time, the conductor shook the change in his hand at me - the signal to pay - and I handed him my 1,000 bill. He threw it back. So Mama Vanessa and I stared out the window or talked, both of us avoiding any eye contact with the conductor. Since we couldn’t see him through all of the molecules, this wasn’t difficult. As the bus continued to roll closer to the college campus in Masoka, I figured that if the conductor threw us out, our walk would be shorter and shorter.

We arrived at the college campus, the molecules on the bus shifted, and we plopped out of the bus. The conductor, the primary molecule, stood outside of the bus waiting for my fare. I handed him my 1,000 bill and marched through the gate without looking back. A few steps into the gate, I asked Mama Vanessa if she had paid anything. She shook her two coins.

Notes on an a capella tradition

2010-03-05T06:01:00.000-08:00

As a member of a non-a capella tradition, I have made some observations of how the a capella tradition works at a church service here in Tanzania, or at least at SMMUCo.

First, before church begins, there is no organ prelude. Instead, of those who gather early in the sanctuary, one person calls out a hymn number, waits for others to look it up, and then he or she throws himself into the hymn. There is no vocal searching for a good singable key with “hmm, hmm, hmm.” The others fall into harmony as easily as swinging the arms while walking.

During the liturgy, the pastor leads the antiphonal singing in the same way, no testing out notes, no tiptoeing in, just lead onward with confidence. At SMMUCo, there’s a woman who adds harmony to the pastor’s part. If I tried to do that, there’d be that wispy first-verse-harmony, where I’m singing and learning where the notes are. No, she nails every note despite the fact that she is the only one adding harmony and the whole room is listening. As far as I can tell, she didn’t ask to do it, the pastor didn’t tell her to do it, and he didn’t tell her to stop. It happens magically and wonderfully.

In the chapel at SMMUCo, a student has brought his own electric piano, and he accompanies the church service. This is when the a capella tradition clearly stands out. No one expects this accompanist to introduce the hymn. Hymns begin the same way without accompaniment: the pastor sounds the first three notes and the rest fall in swinging with harmony. It is the accompanist who tests out the notes on the keyboard, searching for the key that was magically chosen by the pastor. After happening upon a key, the accompanist follows along.

In the Western tradition, if there’s any slight disagreement between the accompanist and congregation, the congregationlike dutiful foot soldiersfollow the organ or piano. Not here. The odd note sounded by the piano throws off no one. The congregation sticks very firmly to the first key chosen, and the accompanist sticks to his key a half-step away, and the two stomp in parallel jarring lines. Through all five or seven verses.

This is hard to do. It is one more reason to admire those of the a capella tradition.

Click!

2010-02-26T02:28:00.001-08:00

On a visit to Tanzania, my parents wanted to see the market at Moshi. I’d been there twice with friends and when I tried to find it the third time on my own, I didn’t. My plan was to ask someone at the bus terminal and follow the pointed finger and then ask again if I needed to. I did not tell my parents this.

On the ride to Moshi in the college Land Cruiser, we rode with Spenciosa, secretary to the head of the humanities department, and it just so happened that she was going to the market. Embracing her role as market guide, she helped me buy several items at one stall. When my mother took the bag of items to carry, Spenciosa quickly took it back and explained that the mother did not carry anything, the children did. The children in this case were Spenciosa and me.

At one point, my mother stopped to admire the long row of women seated behind neatly piled mangoes, avocadoes, and oranges. My mother asked for her camera from my purse. She clicked a picture, and the row of mango sellers stood up in concert and began a long stream of angry charges with shaking fingers and hands on hips.

“Oh dear,” said my mother, “I think I’ve just started World War III.”

From the words that I could recognize, I understood that the woman whose image was now captured wanted ransom money. I could feel my mother slipping into the shadows, while my father watched in fascination.

My mother wanted to know what was wrong with taking a picture. I can only guess: to be clicked at by a wealthy foreigner is to be selected as an object of interest or fascination. If you’re tired or exhausted from carrying a huge bag of mangoes to the bus stand, tired of hauling the bag onto the bus along with 40 people crammed in there, tired of thinking of that journey back home, tired of wondering whether your ripe mangoes would be sold that day, whether you’d make enough money for that dayhaving someone merely fascinated by you as an object wouldn’t make you happy.

Then again, these women knew that foreigners will pay money for their picture, especially if they get angry. People of the Maasai tribe near Arusha have cashed in on this tendency. And everyone in Tanzania knows this. When I had friends from the States take a picture of me in class with my students, one student came up to me later and wanted to know when he’d be collecting the money. If the Maasai got money for their pictures, why wouldn’t he? (He was joking.)

Mixed in with all of that, probably, is a resentment that foreigners have money and the mango women do not. The finger of fate does not seem to care about justice when it chooses those for poverty and those for wealth.

So we were left to face charges of injustice and image theft by an irate mango woman. Spenciosa began to apologize, but it was clear that apologies weren’t enough. I walked over to the mangoes and asked the woman which one would be good for tomorrow. Immediately she began to press the mangoes one by one and selected a large one. I handed over the money. She had asked a fair price.

The camera remained in my purse for the rest of the journey through the market. We did not take a picture of the ladies now seated, clucking in contentment. We did not take a picture of the rows of small cages with chickens and roosters. We did not take a picture of enormous bags of lentils and flour, stacks of smoked fish.

The next day we ate the best mango we‘d ever had, fruit for the gods.

The Wrong Person to Help

2010-02-19T06:27:00.000-08:00

On the bus from Arusha to Moshi a few weeks ago, a young woman carrying a baby sidled down the aisle with umbrella, baby blanket, and purse. As she headed toward the back where I sat, I put up my hands to show I could hold her purse and blanket while she folded down the aisle seat. The soldier on the other side of her did none of these things, nor did the two mamas in the seat in front of me. Her face brightened at my offer, and she handed over her huge umbrella with lethal metal point at the end, the blanket and purse. She folded down the jump seat and loudly harrumphed in Kiswahili that it was a sad day when the only person on the bus to help was the Mzungu. The two mamas in front of me jerked their faces toward the window and fumed. The soldier beside her continued to look apathetic.

After she situated herself and her baby beside me, the young mama happily chattered even after I explained in cave-man grammar that I didn’t really know Kiswahili. The bus stopped, and the people in the back row behind the young mama needed to get off. She stood up and waited for the soldier to fold up her seat, but he had no idea that he was to do anything except sit in his own bubble of solitude. Perhaps it was the way she harrumphed again when she folded up the seat, but the second and third and fourth times she had to get up, he caught on.
At some point, the woman began to nurse the baby. Another someone from the back row shouted that they needed to stop at the next point, the bus bounced to a stop, and suddenly the woman unhooked the baby and stood up. By then the soldier was trained to help, but the woman was half naked in the process of getting herself arranged to stand aside. She returned to the seat again, and to nursing the baby. The mamas who had been fuming earlier now stared at her, breast and all.

By the time we arrived at the Moshi bus stand, she must’ve stood up more than five times. She charged out of the bus with the baby, leaving me to gather up the blanket, purse, and umbrella. When I found her outside the bus, she was arranging a kanga, a traditional cloth, around the baby on her back.

I’ve seen this done alongside the road. The mother bends over, while another woman holds the baby against the back. The bending mother ties the kanga in front. The helper makes sure the baby’s feet are free so that the kanga cups the baby’s bottom.

As the young mama bent over, I knew I was supposed to act the helper. But I was no more effective than the soldier and the two fuming mamas. I knew the part about the feet, but exactly where should the baby fit on the mama’s back? Below the shoulder blades? At the shoulder blades? And then the head wobbled as the woman walked away. This did not look good. I stopped another woman and asked for help. She rearranged the head, but then rearranged it again and said it was fine. The three of us parted ways, and as I turned to say goodbye, I saw the little head bouncing again.

Clearly that young mama lived in a world of apathetic and pathetic helpers.

The Mattress

2010-02-10T23:17:00.000-08:00

Weary from many nights of feeling bed slats under a thin mattress, I asked Rose, the matron at SMMUCo, for a new mattress. Rose jumped on the request and informed me that I would be getting a new mattress in two days. Two or three days later she said I’d be getting the mattress in a couple more days. The next week she told me that she was waiting for money from the assistant bursar to buy the mattress. Finally a few days later, she told me she had the money, and I’d be getting the mattress the next day.

She was right the last time. At about 5:00 in the evening, she and the college driver Haji arrived with a 6 foot by 6 foot mattress. I had hauled off the old foam mattress by the time Rose entered with the new one still sheathed in plastic. We quickly slid off the plastic, plopped the new one onto the wooden slats, and saw that the mattress hung over one side by about six inches. By then Haji had entered the room, and we three stared at the too-big mattress in silence. I tried to squish the mattress down into the frame, but it was impossible. It was then that Rose decided the frame was not 6-by-6 but 6-by-5.

After some Kiswahili words were exchanged between Rose and Haji, the three of us put the mattress back into the plastic, Rose said they’d be coming back with a smaller mattress, and I made sure she repeated the word for “today” - leo.

It was well after dark and I was fighting bed-time yawns when they arrived again. We did not take the plastic off the mattress but plopped it onto the slats. Now there was more silence as we stared at the extra 3 inches of slats exposed on either side of the mattress. Rose and Haji exchanged more words. Haji and I repeated that the mattress seemed to be 6-by-5 ½. I said it wouldn’t be a problem and repeated that several times to Rose who stared and stewed at the exposed slats. Then Haji had the idea of cutting off foam from another mattress and sewing it onto the new one.

Haji, master of jerry rigging, would know. The college Land Cruiser has received much of Haji’s creative solutions that hold the thing together. The hand brake is kept in place by an oil can secured under it. There are always at least two bottles of water lodged under the hood, possibly to cool down a radiator. Above the driver’s seat, a stick is secured between parts of the ceiling frame to hold up I-don’t-know-what. The back door of the Cruiser has been an endless source of creativity for Haji. It never stays closed. After a month of almost losing the back passengers closest to the door, Haji used a strap of rubber to secure the door like a hinge. Then it only banged open and shut on the large boulders along Kibosho road. Eventually, someonepossibly Hajisoldered a latch onto the door. Now the only one who can successfully close the door is Haji.

So it was no surprise that Haji arrived at the idea to cut off foam from another mattress and sew it on. I was informed that the foam strip would arrive the next day.

And that was two weeks ago.

You Must Pay the Rent

2010-02-04T06:48:00.000-08:00

As a non-academic staff member of SMMUCo, the monthly income of Baba Samwel does not provide enough for rent. Since Baba Samwel has no land or resources to make extra income by growing and selling bananas or by raising chickens, Baba Samwel waits for opportunities. When I first arrived at SMMUCo, he offered to marry me, my sister, and then any or all of my sisters-in-law.

The other day an opportunity for rent money arrived. Baba Samwel was assigned to travel to Makumira University College to deliver a small piece of equipment to an administrator there. It’s about an hour and a half journey by bus one-way. He was given an amount of money from the College for food and travel. From the amount given, he figured he could cheat the bus conductor out of some of the fare and buy cheap food.

But his plan was foiled when he saw that the administrator from Makumira had unexpectedly arrived at the gate of SMMUCo that day. What to do? Before anyone from SMMUCo could stop him, he raced out of the gate, hid himself at the nearby bus stop, and threw himself onto the next bus out of Masoka.

On the large bus to Arusha, Baba Samwel convinced the conductor to charge him less by telling him he didn’t have the money. But about half way to Makumira, college personnel from SMMUCo began to call his cell phone repeatedly. For the first ten calls, he avoided answering. Then with certain dread, like the sentenced man walking to his execution, Baba Samwel answered the call to return to Masoka.

This did not mean he had given up entirely on the opportunity. Even though he had paid some of the bus fare and cheated the conductor out of the rest, Baba Samwel told the bus conductor that he’d received an emergency call, please stop the bus and let him off. Then he convinced the conductor to give him half his fare back.

By the time he returned to Masoka, Baba Samwel had calculated what he could add to his accumulating rent money, but he had to return some of it in order to appear honest. A week later he was ordered to return again to Makumira to deliver another piece of equipment. This time, the administrator remained at Makumira.

Staff Lessons

2010-01-28T23:18:00.000-08:00

Staff Lessons

Twice a week, in a room that serves as the cleaning office of SMMUCo, I give English lessons to cleaning and kitchen staff members. Like large imposing sentries, two wooden cupboards from floor to ceiling stand solidly on opposite walls. (Unlike sentries, the cupboards hold linens.) A stack of foam mattresses sags against one wall.

When I arrive for class, we begin by removing various things left on our study table: keys, a pile of folded laundry, an electric tea kettle, the college iron, or someone’s forgotten cell phone. Once we clear the table, I find myself fascinated by the worn table cloth underneath-it’s covered with pen drawings. I never knew doodling on a table cloth was allowed.

Because our table sits against the only window in the office, we watch with dread when someone approaches from the other side. In middle of a drill on interrogatives (who-nani? what-nini? when-lini? where-wapi?), Innocent from the library comes to tell Catherine, the assistant cook, that he wants to buy cell phone credit. Just when I’m about to shout a big hooray after all five students have done the interrogative drill in lickety-split speed, a college student wants Anna to clean up someone’s vomit. If the request comes from a college student, I use an authoritative voice to say we are in the middle of class and they should come back later.

Despite various agents that threaten our efforts, we plod forward. After I write each lesson in a spiral notebook, after I give the lesson out loud during class, my students will pass the notebook throughout the next two days to each other. By the time the book travels from the cleaning office for Anna and Mama Vanessa, to Eliasante at the provost’s office, then to Catherine and Upendo in the kitchen, the book’s lesson has been copied and then slightly altered by grease or tomato stains and the general dust of Masoka. By Wednesday morning, hours before the next lesson, Mama Vanessa brings it to me, and I begin again on the next lesson.

Lately my lessons focus on the ongoing saga of Kimbori, the security guard rumored (falsely) to have two wives. After Kimbori asked me to be his third wife one evening at the dining hall, I had excellent material for drama: one wife is a thief, another makes horrible food, another one hates to work, and Kimbori ends each episode with a sigh. My students now know what a sigh is, and they understand how to make a possessive with an apostrophe s because the thief-wife stole quite a few belongings of the other wives for at least three weeks in a row.

The other day, I arrived earlier than my students, having whipped out the latest episode in the life of Kimbori and his three wives. With the extra time I studied the table cloth once again. Written neatly among the lines, squares, stars and circles already drawn, I found “who-nani? what-nini? when-lini? where-wapi?”

Lovesong of Tanzania

2009-12-26T09:32:00.000-08:00

“Let us go, then, you and I.”
From “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

Going in Tanzania is mostly communal. A small bus bouncing on a rocky road groans with the weight of too many people packed elbow to cheek, cheek to cheek, stomach to chin. Men and women march together by the road balancing freight on their heads.

If people are not going, they are waiting, and their waiting becomes going.

One day I arrived at the college campus in Moshi Town expecting to teach at 8:00 a.m. and learned from students that the schedule had changed, that our classroom had changed, and now I had four hours to wait. I graded essays under the canvas roof of the makeshift canteen, situated on the only grass on campus, until my feet were so bitten by insects that I had to move. I needed to shop for Christmas gifts, and I had time. Going seemed to be the thing to do, but it meant some uncertainty. While I knew where the closest bus stand was, I did not know what bus to take to return back to the campus. When my colleague James stopped to ask me a question, I asked him for directions.

James is basically a snake in character, which isn’t being kind to snakes. In the past four conversations I’ve had with James, nothing he has said turned out to be true. At tea time once, he stopped our conversation abruptly to say he had a class to teach. Two minutes later I found him in the hallway of the administration building pacing outside an office. Another time, he had informed me that the new schedule for teaching was posted on the bulletin board. I found no such schedule.

But the real reason not to trust James had to do with a much earlier incident a couple months ago when I was having tea with a student worker. James came into the dining hall and reminded the student, Sarah, that as his African sister, she should serve him some tea. She did it. I asked James what he did for her as her brother. He came up with a good list and I asked him how many of those he had already done for her, which brought about a change in topic. At another tea time when he told the student again that he wanted her to serve him tea, I reminded him that he had a healthy set of arms and legs to serve himself. And then at another tea time, James walked to my table where I sat sipping tea and told me that since Sarah was not there to serve him, he would go out and find her. I knew then that James did not like me.

Last week I found out James would be my tutor for my seminars. This means I have to work with James. I will tell him what material he should cover with my students who will be grouped into sections much smaller than 160 students in my lectures. It also means that when James told me he had a master’s degree, he was lying because people with master’s degrees are lecturers, not tutors.

When I asked James what bus to take for the return from bus terminal to campus, I knew James would not recognize the truth if it struck him down. James’s instructions were long and tortuous, but when I started to write down place names he mentioned, the instructions became more focused: take a bus that says “Mbuyuni.”

To worry about whether James’s advice was good or not—that would’ve been a definite refusal to go for the ride.

At the bus terminal, I stopped and asked a man and woman seated on a bench where the Mbuyuni bus was. They pointed to the end of the terminal. Then the woman said a few words, some of which I understood: “wait” and “let’s go.”

She took me by the hand and led me across the street. The person who takes me by the hand, despite the sweat and dust of my fingers, is the one who wants me to find the way, the one who walks the distance in the hot sun to make sure that I have gotten what I asked for. This woman who took my grimy hand would not let go until we had crossed the street, until she had hailed the Mbuyuni bus, that is, the second Mbuyuni bus because the first one took off after briefly stopping for two seconds.

The bus traveled to the right section of town, but I did not see the Moshi Town campus anywhere. I saw the Tanzanian Breweries Limited factory near the Moshi Town campus. But I didn’t know what to ask for. Maybe the bus would arrive at a place that I would recognize. Soon enough, I was the only passenger, and the conductor said another word that I recognized: “mwisho,” “the end.” The end was a little subsection of Moshi with chickens and goats and a field of some crop I didn’t recognize and a road and shops that I didn’t recognize.

The conductor pointed to another bus headed in the opposite direction. I boarded it and after greeting a friendly woman beside me, I managed to ask about the Moshi Town campus. A man in the front seat seemed to know it and after the bus made its first stop, he told me to go with him. Though he did not take me by the hand, he led me through long passages between houses at a very fast clip, and after we managed to exhaust our foreign language supply, we walked at a fast clip in silence and burning sun. Suddenly the Moshi Town campus appeared. I was led once again by someone who merely said, “Let’s go.”

“Let us go, then, you and I” is a call to go to the unknown, to knowingly follow the advice of a snake, not with trust but out of the yearning to go. The call is also a hand that takes my grimy one because it wants me to go where it takes me. To answer the call is to discover what love is.

Cheated and blessed

2009-12-15T01:08:00.000-08:00

Arusha is a big tourist city near Moshi. When I take the bus from Moshi to Arusha, I take a huge bus at the terminal where small and giant buses roar in and out, all of them blowing black smoke behind them. In the huge buses, there’s an aisle down the middle, and when seats are filled, middle seats are folded down. When those are filled, the conductor orders people to share the fold-down seat. Sometimes it’s done thoughtfully. That is, the conductor has taken into account the size of bottoms that need to share. Other times, the conductor has ordered two people with very large rumps to split a one-rump space. Usually the two passengers complain and figure out how to rearrange themselves, and everyone is mildly content.

Buses don’t follow a schedule as far as I can tell. I climb onto a bus, and when it is full, the bus departs. Time is not of the essence; money from passengers is. While the first passengers wait, vendors walk around with goods to sell: bottles of water, cookies, sunglasses, underpants—whatever can be carried over to a bus and thrust through a window.

A few weeks ago, I wanted a bottle of water, normally five hundred shillings, the equivalent of fifty cents. I handed the vendor a ten thousand bill. He left to get the correct change and when he returned, he handed me the bills and disappeared. I looked at the change, subtracted in my head, and realized I had just paid two thousand shillings, the equivalent of two dollars rather than fifty cents.

Local customers here are very savvy about any transaction. They scrutinize any shoe, any bucket, pushing and prodding at potential weak joints. They argue prices down, or they walk away in disgust. If I get a fair price out of anything, that’s because the Tanzanian standing with me has done all of the work. Or the merchant wants me to return for future business.

But these roaming vendors figure I won’t return. I’m on a bus, I’m clearly a tourist, and they can get away with taking an extra two thousand shillings. So I sat on the bus seat and stewed about being cheated, but only briefly. I was sitting on a bus after all, and the cheater had to work every day pushing his goods on people who mostly didn’t want to buy them.

About a week later, I took another ride to Arusha, boarding the huge bus. On the way, we stopped at the bus terminal in a nearby town called Boma. For reasons that remain a mystery, the bus to Arusha always stops at this terminal, and some official-looking person at the gate is handed money. In the meantime, while the bus waits in line before the gate, vendors swarm about us.

That day I decided I wanted a package of sweet cakes, which cost five hundred shillings, but I had only a thousand shilling bill. The vendor—who looked like a teenaged boy—shook a second package at me and gave a look of pleading, but I shook my head, I only wanted one package. As I handed him my bill, the bus started to roll. He slapped his packages onto the chest of the guy standing beside him, dug into his pockets, and jogged beside the bus. I hung my head out the window, and the bus shifted into second gear. The boy now shifted into a sprint. Just as I mentally let go of the five hundred shillings, he thrust a bill into my hands.

I poked my head out of the window even further. The boy stood behind a cloud of black exhaust, his body heaving with each breath. And I did the only thing I could do at that moment—I blew him a kiss.

In spite of the dust

2009-12-01T01:46:00.000-08:00

This morning, I am teaching Basic Communication Skills to at least 100 students at the Moshi Town campus of SMMUCo. The campus opened last week, a month after classes started.

Three buildings on this campus, a former brewery, are still being transformed from beer-making activity to learning activity: the administration building, the cafeteria/library/classroom building, and a large lecture hall. The other buildings have not been transformed at all. An architect has yet to inspect one building to see if it has potential to be a dormitory.

The streets in this area of Moshi are a fine powdery dust, with large manufacturing enterprises making up most of the activity. Large lorries barrel in and out, stirring up large clouds. The campus grounds are also the same powder. Workers shovel the makings of concrete. Others pound away at old concrete, throwing out more dust. The small act of walking stirs up small billows.

When I dressed this morning, I thought of wearing a handkerchief over my hair. I thought of wearing worn-out clothes that I could easily wash and wouldn’t worry about preserving. If I had goggles and a face mask, I could wear them also. I chose instead a simple wrinkle-free skirt and wrinkled blouse.

The large lecture hall where I teach looks more like an airplane hangar with at least two sides open to the air and sunshine and dust. A chapel service is still in progress when I arrive, so I sit in a seat and discover that there’s a fine layer of dust on the desk, and I imagine that my skirt has nicely removed a layer for the student who takes my place. The evangelist says a final prayer, and I move to the front of the class arrangement. I would call it a classroom but it’s more an island of desks and chairs in a sea of concrete floor, all of them facing a white board.

The white board still has the previous class’s lecture on it. As students begin to wipe off their seats and chairs, I wipe off the white board and realize that really I’m erasing two or three lectures underneath the current one, plus the latest layer of dust. Finally one kind student takes the eraser from me, moves just beyond the hangar, dips the eraser in a water puddle and returns to wipe off the board. Now the board has smeared into it a layer of puddle. Later a second volunteer student will take the eraser to a room in the next building and return with a cleaner, wetter eraser. That will wipe out three layers of letters. And by creating a film of blue and black gray, this latest smearing will give a nice contrast to my blue letters.

Very little can happen in an airplane hangar with over 100 students. Surely the last row cannot read my handwriting mixed with dust, three lectures, and puddle. Surely they cannot hear me shouting above the workers pounding in the unfinished building next to us. Surely the dust already clinging to their fingers, their pens, and papers drives them nuts. Surely they have better things to do than wait ten minutes for me to wipe off the board.

But they have come wearing their finest clothes, the men in pressed shirts and ties, the women in dresses and scarves. Somebody’s perfume wafts pleasantly from the front row.

I am telling them the parable of the talents because I have witnessed two weeks before a pathetic set of student presentations. I tell them that as future teachers, they will be given five bags of talents and they should understand how powerful and life-giving those bags are. Their focus in preparing these presentations should not be fear, but the importance of what they do.

And in saying this, I see them lean forward. Some of the students in the back have turned one ear toward me. After I finish telling the parable, I will begin a painstaking process of writing on the board a sample essay rather than giving them a handout because circumstances discourage me from making over a hundred photocopies. And they will write patiently. The students in back will occasionally stand up to get a better view of what I’ve written on the board. Other students will help the ones beside them by showing their notes. Someone will ask me to explain something again. And afterward, students will come to me with drafts of the next assignment even though I hadn’t finished explaining it.

Next Monday, I will take extra care in pressing my skirt in spite of the dust.

Communication Failures

2009-11-25T02:19:00.000-08:00

At SMMUCo, I teach Basic Communication Skills. Since failure is an excellent teacher, I assigned students the task of writing about a communication failure. Here are a few samples that I have modified and added fictional names and place names:

Poor eyesight
A Tanzanian man who worked in the States was contacted by his parents in Tanzania to send money. They needed it to pay the electricity bill which was about to be cut off. At the Western Union station in Tanzania, the parents read back the control number of the receipt to the agent, who told them the number was incorrect and sent them away. After they called their son again, they learned that due to their poor eyesight, they had misread an 8 for a 0. In the meantime, the electricity had been cut off, and the parents now sat in the dark, their poor eyesight reduced even more until the next day when they could return to Western Union with the correct number.

The daughter from Dar es Salaam
Mama Linda received a letter from her daughter Helda in Dar es Salaam, but she did not know how to read. She called upon her neighbor to read it. He then informed Mama Linda that her daughter in Dar had died. Soon Mama Linda’s granddaughter came home and found her grandmother sobbing. Now the granddaughter read the letter and discovered that the letter was announcing Helda would be coming to visit the following week. At this point, the neighbor confessed he too was illiterate.

Thief!
One night in the village of Kirima, a woman shouted, “Thief, thief!” Amani told his son to get up and help catch the thief. Other villagers appeared with sticks and long bush knives. The thief ran quickly but not quickly enough. Villagers soon gave him a royal beating until Amani persuaded them to stop by telling them that they should call the police. But when Amani called the police, they did not answer. When Amani tried again, his cell phone did not have enough battery charge in it and failed to make contact. Upon learning this, the fury of the villagers came upon them once again, and now they beat the thief to death. Having killed the thief, they turned on Amani who fled successfully.

Fire!
There was a fire accident at Majengo. The fire caused much loss because after the villagers called the fire extinguisher, the fire extinguisher was confused about the specific direction to reach the fire. Accordingly, the fire extinguisher used much time on the way to reach the fire, which caused some of the houses and all the property to be destroyed. It would be better for citizens to get different seminars on how they can overcome different accidents regarding their environment.
(Take note that the author has absolutely no confidence in giving a seminar to fire extinguishers.)

A Passport

2009-11-15T23:12:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday I went with Happy, the bursar’s assistant at SMMUCo, and her sister Neema to church. Since it’s impossible to pretend I’m not a visitor, Happy accurately anticipated that I would be asked to introduce myself, as is the custom. But my nickname at Happy’s home is “Sija elewa” which means “I don’t understand.” At times Happy, with hands wringing, announces it’ll take me ten years to learn Swahili.

On the walk to church at 6:45 a.m. Happy reminded me of key phrases I would need. Since I was familiar with these phrases, I rehearsed them a few times mentally, a few times out loud, got them wrong, and Happy corrected me. In a few more steps, Happy led us into the front of the church, five inches from the pulpit. I looked back and saw 400 people facing me.

After the sermon, the congregation filed to the front to give their offering. At this point, the pastor seated at Happy’s right called her over for a five-minute conversation. Happy returned to report that the pastor wanted me to introduce myself. He did not know enough English to help me, and so the two of them decided I would do it myself, but only briefly. The briefly part was Happy’s idea.

I had spent the length of the hour sermon picking out words I recognized, much like chasing butterflies. Neema had brought an English New Testament, so at least I could get the gospel for the day. So when the pastor invited guests to stand up, my only clue was the word “wageni” and the fact that he now stared at me. I stood up, faced the sea of 400 and performed three sentences, mixed with English prepositions, all with confidence. The congregation applauded enthusiastically. As soon as I sat down, Happy let out the air that her lungs held during my three sentences and then collapsed in my lap.

All of that had been thoughtfully orchestrated by Happy. She had helped me rehearse to the point that I was confident when the time came. And she had made it possible for me to reach a congregation who were truly pleased and grateful that I had managed to say something to them in their own language. Maybe it seems like a pocket-sized gesture, but multiply that times 400, and it opens up a whole world.

Clawing hands that pull you down

2009-11-08T23:39:00.000-08:00

At tea time, I sat next to Mama Nasari the other day, not necessarily because we could say a whole lot to each other. My Swahili has not moved beyond basic caveman gruntings. Rather, I sat beside her because I learned a few weeks ago that she is envious of the women who have socialized with me at tea time since I arrived in August. These are secretaries, like Mama Nasari, who were part of daily life on campus when no faculty or students were around. At that time, Mama Nasari was on leave and, upon returning, found that others had developed friendships with me as well as greater ease in speaking English.

One day I listened to some of them encourage her to speak with me. But, she said, she felt foolish speaking broken English. Yes, they admitted, and so did they, yet no one made fun of them, and it was more important just to practice speaking English, broken though it was. You can’t get past broken to whole without the broken part. And, they pointed out, one could observe my own enthusiastic Swahili gruntings.

A few conversational topics later, Mama Nasari told me she wanted to learn Excel. I said I could teach her quickly in a half hour, maybe at the beginning of the day. No, she said, that wouldn’t work, she’s too busy at the office. What about after tea? No, she’s too busy, too many interruptions. She suggested I come to her home on a Saturday. I could take the bus, and she has a computer.

Using the bus requires waiting a half hour up to an hour. And then a half hour ride to the bus stand near Mama Nasari, and then a little walk to her housing compound. This seemed a little extreme to me for a half hour lesson on Excel, but I said nothing.

Tea ended and Mama Alfa, who runs the internet café, followed me out apparently with an ulterior motive. As we walked farther away from the administration building, she explained that the real problem was that if I taught Mama Nasari at the college, the other secretaries would criticize her for trying to rise above the rest.

I have seen only glimpses of this in action, but it has incredible power among a group of people who are miserable. Women here are second-class citizens in many ways. I don’t know how it’s fostered exactly but I do know that all of the administrative leadership at SMMUCo is comprised of men. Of the faculty, the large majority is men. And those who serve at the socially lower ranks are women. Men seem to enjoy a freedom from criticism. In a marriage, a woman is expected to serve the husband and not the other way around. A man will leave his wife in his rural village home to care for his parents while he takes a job and a mistress or second wife in a big city.

I do not know how prevalent this is, but it is prevalent enough to have dug a deep pit of misery for women. This misery is intensified when others try to get out of the pit.

Education can be a powerful tool in raising the status of women. But the woman who sacrifices to save for a refrigerator or an education falls prey to the criticism of other women. While women can mouth words of encouragement, they are also capable of dragging another back down. Mama Nasari is therefore terrified of those who will claw at her with words.

After telling me of Mama Nasari’s fear, Mama Alfa turned to me and said, “So what will you do?” I can and will help Mama Nasari learn Excel. I can and will take the bus on a Saturday. But I do not know if my help will give her what she really needs: the courage to rise out of the pit. Each time she allows her fear of petty criticism to pull her down, the fear itself accumulates power and so do the clawing hands.

Mama Nasari could use a prayer for courage and a lesson on Excel. Hopefully the lesson can become another lesson on refusing to give in to clawing hands from the deep pit of misery.

Cutting a cake

2009-10-28T23:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-22T01:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-15T00:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-08T02:20:00.000-07:00

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.”

The desk drawers of my brain

2009-09-28T02:31:00.000-07:00

There are three language drawers in my brain. The first drawer has a bottom panel with many holes cut out of it. If I put a word in there, it quickly drops out. These are words I just heard and repeated ten times. A second drawer has words securely stashed away. In a third drawer, the bottom panel is warped, and though words drop out, I can retrieve them quickly. I cannot explain how words from these last two drawers are sorted and distributed, with one exception: words associated with a moment of extreme emotion.

After a month and a half in Tanzania, I went for yet another walk in the village and stopped at a fresh fruit and vegetable stand with a small crowd of about ten people. Both children and adults seemed to be passing the time visiting, and I interrupted by asking the woman behind the counter if she had any cookies, which was what I really wanted. I’m often surprised by what happens so I was willing to be surprised again. But no, they didn’t have any cookies. So I started asking the small crowd the names of the fruits and vegetables displayed.

Having people teach me Swahili words seems to be engaging – in two seconds I can have an entire room focused on teaching me every word they know. I cannot imagine Americans being this generous with a foreigner, but the Tanzanians have abundant generosity when it comes to teaching their language. I had actually been introduced to the names of the fruits and vegetables in front of me, but they’d all fallen out of the drawer with the holes in it. Having rejected the produce seller by asking for something she clearly didn’t have, I thought I’d at least make a gesture toward kindness or something like it. So I started reciting, once again, tomato (nyanya), carrot (caroti), cabbage (cabbagi), cucumbers (matango), and orange (chungwa).

Let me explain that I always get the word for “fruit” (matunda) and “orange” mixed up because at some critical point in my Swahili acquisition, whoever was teaching me at that moment used the word “fruit” for orange and I didn’t learn until later that “orange” was something else. From left to right on the shelf in front of me, I reviewed the carrot, cabbage, etc, and got to the orange. I fumbled around in my brain for an approximation of “matunda” which mysteriously shuffled with “matango” and came up with “matako.”

The group erupted in gales of laughter, and then I realized I’d given the word for “buttocks.” Faced with a group seizing with laughter, a group who knew I knew what I’d said because I can’t hide anything, I had no words in my head, all three drawers dumped out. So I shook my head and walked away, my face as red as the nyanya, and they were still laughing when I disappeared around the corner. And now I have a few more words added to the secure drawer.

By the light of a full moon

2009-09-22T04:31:00.001-07:00

I don’t think Tom Boyle, director of the library at Midland Lutheran College, had any idea that the two decks of playing cards he gave me as a parting gift would become a great gift to many others (or maybe he did). My first week here at SMMUCo (Stefano Moshi Memorial University College), I found those cards handy when the electricity went out almost every evening, the only thing I could see with candlelight and my cell phone flashlight strapped to the desk lamp.

When I played solitaire, I could look out my apartment window and see Johnny, the security guard, at his post by the entry gate. Besides visiting every villager and bus driver that passed by, Johnny had job duties to keep him occupied during the regular week – registering all campus visitors, watering flowers, putting up the flag of Tanzania, pushing the Land Cruiser out of the gate to start the engine, and so on.

However, Saturdays were slow. Both pedestrian and vehicular traffic almost vanished, especially from the campus side of the yellow gate, and Johnny patiently waited out the twelve-hour shift, sitting on a wooden desk, one leg swinging, one dreary endless stretch of nothing.

I thought of Johnny one night as I played solitaire by candlelight. If I didn’t have those cards at such times, I’d go nuts by myself with nothing to do. The next Saturday, I brought one shiny blue deck down to the entry gate with the idea that if I taught Johnny how to play solitaire, it would spell the long day. But the teaching was delayed. After I shuffled the cards, half the deck in each hand fanned through the thumb tips, Johnny spent some time laughing heartily. And then laughed again when I bent them back for the bridge, both making a shuffling, farting sound. For a while, I thought I’d never get around to teaching him anything because I had to shuffle ten more times. When his stomach hurt from laughing and he could no longer see through the tears in his eyes, I laid out the cards for solitaire, and by the second time round, someone else had come along who could translate much of what seemed a mystery for Johnny. However, translating was delayed—I was required to shuffle the deck for that person. After an hour, I left Johnny with the cards and wondered if he understood enough to play solitaire or whether he even wanted to. But it was a gift, no matter how Johnny would use Tom Boyle’s deck, and I only hoped it would ease the boredom of a Saturday.

While Johnny never did play solitaire, he played with everyone else that day. The cards magnetically brought people off the road, crowding around the wooden table on the platform. All day, players slapped cards on the table, winners shouted and leaped, losers pounded the table, accusing someone of cheating.

After several Saturdays, I remembered a game called Spoons. One sets spoons on the table, one less than the number of players, like musical chairs. The players pass cards to each other, one at a time, and the first player to get four of a kind, grabs a spoon. And like musical chairs, the others grab also. The person who doesn’t get the spoon is given an S. The next rounds occur the same way until one unfortunate player has lost enough rounds to spell out “Spoons.”

One evening after supper, the moon was full and the evening was slow. Johnny had finished his daily chores, and instead of using spoons, I brought out blue caps from water bottles to Johnny, his friend Innocent, and another guy who came from I-don’t-know-where. I had brought notes of Swahili words and within about five minutes, we were playing the first round of Spoons. Once again, a howling success. First, there’s the thrill of being the one with the four-of-a-kind, grabbing that cap before anyone else. Then there’s the thrill of seeing that one person with a stunned look when they realize they have failed to notice the caps are gone. When I showed the group how to remove the cap slyly enough so that people passed the cards a good two minutes before noticing, that was even better!

So there we were, lit by the full moon and the orange globes on the security posts. On one round, the cap flew off the table and two people leaped up to scramble for it on the ground. Soon we were joined by a teenaged boy. The next night it was the same group plus Haji the driver, plus a friend of the teenage boy who clearly did not have as much adrenalin as the rest of us—he lost the first ten rounds.

In the process of playing cards, interesting benefits came from it. The first teenage boy—fascinated either by my white skin, age spots, or gray hair—had many opportunities to stare at me. Secondly, I could listen for any Swahili words I might recognize and use. And everyone feels compelled to teach me, especially the teenaged boys. Third, both boys have started to use more English and ask for more English. They’ve picked up “next” as in who is the next loser, and we all point to the person across the table. They’ve picked up “winner” and “loser,” and I’ve picked up “mshindi” (winner) and “mshindwa” (loser).

By now, Tom Boyle’s cards are black with grime around the edges, and at night, they are damp from the dewy air. I can’t shuffle them as well, and dealing them out one by one takes a little longer. But in the light of the full moon, they haven’t lost the magic of creating marvelous communal fun.

By the light of a full moon

2009-09-22T04:31:00.000-07:00

Bus Ride: A Royal Banquet

2009-09-15T01:09:00.000-07:00

Varying levels of buses carry thousands and probably millions of Tanzanians every day. There isn’t a bus that doesn’t have pressed against its windows ten elbows, five hands, and heads. Here at Stefano Moshi Memorial University College (SMMUCo), there’s a bus stop just outside the gate. But you would never know it. A little wooden structure nearby, with banana leaf thatched on the roof, looks like a bus stop, but I discovered that if I sit in that little hut, the bus will roar on by. I have to stand on the road at the right unmarked spot and only that spot.

For me, taking the bus meant a little freedom, but it also required an attitude adjustment. As a Nebraskan, the sight of packed buses made me gulp. In a church pew, I scoot over for the next two or three persons, allowing them enough room for ten. I noticed I had this need for personal space on a trip to India. I was the first one to arrive at the baggage claim area in the Dehli airport. Soon crowds of Indians planted themselves next to me, and I gave way, allowing them the personal space I thought we all required. In a few minutes, I found myself thinking, how can it be that I was the first one here and the farthest from the baggage claim?

There’s a parable in the book of Matthew that portrays the shift that I needed in order to appreciate a bus ride. In it, the kingdom of heaven is likened to a wedding banquet. A king invites people, I suppose his aristocratic friends and relatives, and they all disregard the invitation as nothing worth going to. Or worse, they abuse and kill the wretched servant who delivered the wedding invitation. They are later murdered by the king’s troops. Having eliminated his guest pool, the king sends out another series of invitations to the regular folk, who appreciate the fine opportunity and appear. However, of those regular folk, one makes the mistake of wearing non-wedding clothes, and that fool is cast into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Since I’m unequipped to comprehend the kingdom of heaven, I think of education as a wedding banquet. Education raises humans to greater levels of confidence, dignity, and freedom. It allows them to become more human. An inspiring example comes from the Washington-Midland Connection, a program where Midland and Fremont community members tutor parents of students of Washington Elementary School. These parents come after long hard days at work and put their hearts and souls into learning. They come in their finest sequins and silk bow ties.

But too often students do not understand education as a wedding banquet. This is not true of all students, but in my experience, it’s true of too many of them. They come to class not having purchased a textbook, or they haven’t done the assignment, or they text-message someone else instead of paying attention to the class session. They come to my wedding banquet in acid-washed jeans! When it came to riding buses in Moshi, Tanzania, I was guilty of wearing my own threadbare jeans.

Mysteriously, my attitude shifted, and I’m not sure whether it happened before or during the trip to town and back, but I finally understood that a bus ride was one of the greatest adventures ever. First, when you’re standing at the bus stop, you never know what will stop and invite you in. This sounds dangerous. Don’t get in the little car with four energetic men yelling, “Mzungu, come join us!”

Today, when the pickup with ten people in the back honked and beckoned me to join them, I climbed on board. Bolted onto the pickup bed was a frame of metal bars that we all clung to, except the young mother who sat on the wheel well holding her baby. I planted my feet on either side of two large buckets and wrapped my upper arms and hands on the metal frame to keep my teeth from being knocked out. With occasional lurches, I was shoved into the guy in front of me who had offered to marry me moments ago. When we stopped to pick up others, we all shifted even closer and at one point, I was able to look around and see that a mountain of people had grown up behind me.

On the way back to the college, I climbed into a van that had the official markings and right destination painted on its front. (Also, the passenger in the front seat grabbed my wrist and said, “Where?”) Inside, I stood against a wall, hovering over the heads of seated passengers. The only thing I could grip was a ledge inside the van from a defunct ventilation system—the grip bar was already covered in hands. The man in the seat below me had his ear in my stomach. When we added more to the van, all of us against the wall shifted even more and now I had a nun’s shoulder. Her head bowed over the seat in front of her, either to pray or make room or both.

I’m not sure what maximum capacity is in these vans. I thought we’d reached maximum capacity until we stopped four more times. After counting 30, I stopped because I couldn’t see. And then the pressure inside was eased when two and then three people squeezed out. They were greatly helped by me, the only one along the wall willing to move out of the van to make way. That’s another part of the adventure – stepping off and getting back in before the van takes off without you. And I did it! Even better, the nun now patted the seat beside her, inviting me to join her. So one-fourth of my rump carried the load for the rest of the way, relieving what had carried the load earlier: my neck, knuckles and elbow.

In the parable of the wedding banquet, the banquet is an invitation. It is clearly up to those invited to choose how they will respond. For me on this day, perceiving this trip as a miserable crowding of people, of bad smells (someone had stepped in dog doo), of total discomfort and undignified positions, was to arrive at the wedding banquet in ordinary clothing. The outer darkness would be the misery that I could easily suffer and appreciate.

In Tanzania, many, most, or all who ride those buses have no choice. For those who are weary or sick, can a bus ride be an invitation? And for those who need to get somewhere urgently, is a sense of adventure possible? I have to accept the fact that I had an invitation for adventure while many others did and do not. Also, I do not know if I’ll have a right spirit about the bus ride after the tenth or fiftieth trip to town.

It appears, then, that the kingdom of heaven, as far as I can tell with mortal dim eyes, comes as a momentary glimpse, one light beam cast through a window into a dark house. And of the glimpse that I got, here is what I saw: riding public transportation in Moshi, Tanzania, is to discover who will stop for you. It’s to discover how many of you will fit together. It’s to discover how you can hang on. It’s to discover who will help whom. It’s to discover how humanity folds together and to join in the communal act of folding.

Hanging on to the rope

2009-09-07T03:39:00.000-07:00

In the midst of learning greetings, I’ve watched how Tanzanians communicate physically. Whenever I make a joke, someone not only throws back their head with laughter, but they also raise their hand to slap mine. The raised hand seems to mean that the person laughing acknowledges that the joke was a good one, and the joker receives the appreciation by putting out the palm, and the whole thing becomes a physical exchange. It looks like a horizontal high-five, so I figured out the response quickly. It was either that or have some other part of me slapped.

This week I happened upon a colleague named Ebenezer who was standing in front of the administration building waiting for the electricity to return. We exchanged pleasantries, and I don’t remember Ebenezer’s joke, but I laughed heartily and suddenly my hand was slapping Ebenezer’s. It startled me, finding Ebenezer’s hand under mine and then realizing that I must’ve done that raise-the-hand thing without thinking.

Unlike the hand thing, the verbal part of learning to communicate has been tedious. First, let me say I only know one language fluently (English). I took a year of German in high school, a year of Spanish in college, and promptly forgot 99% of what I had learned through no fault of my teachers. Once again, I’m starting from scratch with Kiswahili, acquiring basic greetings and responses, and as many nouns and a few adjectives that my brain will take. But the basic greetings still feel like a stylized dance. If someone offers “How are you?” I can respond with “I’m fine.” On my walks down the road, I mentally rehearse “How are you this morning?” or “How are you today?” or “How are you za guaco?” I still don’t know what “za guaco” means, but when I tack it onto a sentence, people say they’re fine.

I remember certain words out of necessity. The word “wait” came in handy this past week as I’ve been proctoring semester exams. I needed the word “wait” when a student tried to exit to the bathroom without signing out. Students had to wait before they could begin taking the exam. I also witnessed a young boy yell to a driver to wait—Subiri! Subiri!—so that a car passenger who had just disembarked could retrieve something from the car.

This initial stage of language acquisition reminds me of learning to water ski, way back in time when my body was elastic. In the cold Minnesota lake water, I strained to control two long skis bobbing on the ends of my legs and at the same time untangle my head or arm out of the rope. Meanwhile, some grown-up was holding me up by my life jacket far enough out of the water so that I didn’t have to think about how I would breathe underwater as well. Usually the grownup gave advice—“Relax your knees! Keep your head up! Bend your legs! Lean back! Not too far! Don’t pull too hard on the rope!”

There was no way I was going to hang on to that advice. After I yelled “hit it!” through chattering teeth to the boat driver, I hung on to the rope. If I was lucky, I could manage an excruciating 35 degree angle for a while and then crash. One time I forgot to let go of the rope and found my nostrils thoroughly irrigated. Eventually I actually emerged from the water to a vertical position, defying all likelihood that it would ever happen.

For 3 ½ weeks, I’ve been dreading the likelihood that I’ll never get beyond, “How are you za guaco?” But at the last part of this week, something happened that seemed to shift me a little more out of the water and closer to a 45 degree angle. I, along with about nine other college personnel, took a trip to town in the College’s Land Cruiser, driven by Haji. Haji had made the first stop, two people leapt off, and the vehicle began to roll away with the back door swinging wide open. Mr. Priva, who is no spring chicken, sat on the end, and I dreaded watching him try to retrieve the door in a vehicle bouncing down a road paved with boulders. Without thinking, I yelled, “Wait! Wait! Subiri!” There it was, that moment I emerged a little from the water, defying all odds. Even better, the group recognized the miracle and applauded—they too are tired of “How are you za guaco?”

Linguistic note ONLY to English teachers and grammar tsars: I realize the second sentence in this post violates the pronoun-antecedent agreement rule. One of the most valuable things I learned from a graduate course in linguistics is that the prescriptive rules of language are arbitrary. Second, the rules of language constantly change. Back in the day, we would’ve said, “…someone not only throws back his head with laughter, but he also raises…” Gradually custom has changed so that girls and women are no longer excluded in sentences with singular pronouns. I heartily support that. However, sentences with clunky she/he constructions drive me nuts. I could’ve avoided the clunky she/he by using the plural, as in “people not only throw their head back with laughter…” but I wanted to emphasize the one-to-one exchange in the hand slap. Therefore, I have purposefully used the singular “someone” with the plural “their,” hoping that the rules will change. They will change, not by any announcement (at least, not that I know of), but by frequent use. Perhaps I can convince you to keep it up.

Finding a seamstress

2009-08-31T04:24:00.000-07:00

Before I left the States, I had bought about five skirts from Goodwill that all needed pockets. In lieu of pockets, I’ve been using a zippered pouch that my good friend and Midland colleague, Alcyone Scott, had loaned me. She had gotten it from a Sigma Tau Delta convention, and I initially used it to carry a passport since it has a handy cord to hang around my neck.

Essentially I’ve become a kangaroo. I carry my keys in that pouch – huge skeleton keys for both interior and exterior doors to my apartment. I carry my cell phone. I carry scraps of paper with vocabulary words, someone’s cell phone number, or a note I wrote in Swahili for Kimaro, the cook. I also carry a priority list of who I need to email first, second, third, etc. in the off chance that I can get internet.

I’ve been eternally grateful to and for this pouch and Alcyone. However, it lacks aesthetic appeal. Its bright red color and Steven Barclay Agency advertisement does not in any way work in design or color with my pale green, blue, green blue, and burnt orange skirts. I’ve tried to hide it under a light weight jacket, but the fact of the matter is, pockets would be better. For one thing, I wouldn’t have to remember where I left my pockets each morning before I left my apartment.

Before I left the States, I told my mother about the pocket problem. She assured me Tanzania would have many seamstresses who would be able to sew pockets. She was right! (I cannot tell you how many times my mother has been right!) When I take my daily walks down the red dusty road, within a half hour of walking, I’ll have found ten seamstresses. They each sit at a treadle sewing machine under the porch of a stucco building. Sheets of bright fabric hang from a string along the porch in front of them, and if a bus isn’t roaring down the road, you can hear their machines whirring away.

I chose my seamstress by her smile, which brightened even more when I ventured off the road one day, into her yard and onto the porch. At that point my Swahili was still at the how-are-you stage, and she helped me with “I am fine.” We both tried for more communication, and the best we could do was smile and shrug.

Then I discovered Happy, the bursar’s assistant, was an excellent resource for writing notes whenever I needed help in communicating. I had initially used Tumaini, the head bursar, as a translator. Her method was to call up the other party on her cell phone and deliver my message in rapid-fire sentences at full volume. Not only did the poor ear on the other end get the message, so did everyone in the building. But Tumaini left for a week-long business meeting, and so I turned to Happy. Happy composed pithy messages in her head, I wrote them down, she explained each word, and then I put each note in my bright red pouch.

For the trip to the seamstress, Happy had thought of two sentences I would need. Also, she knew I would need to clarify that I wanted two pockets, and that the pockets should go inside (ndani) the seam. Finally we worked on how I would ask the seamstress when she’d be able to have the pockets done, which turned into a lesson on the seven days of the week.

So it was, I appeared at the whirring machine of the seamstress, bright fabric hanging above and a bright smile radiating from within her. I pulled out my scrap of paper from the red pouch, and in my best Swahili accent, I asked the first question dictated by Happy. And then I wondered why the bright smile vanished into thin air. And why didn’t she take the skirt from my hands and look at pocket possibilities? I looked down at the words thinking I’d mispronounced them, and then at the translation below: “When can you have it finished?” I slapped my paper over and read, “Please put pockets in my skirt,” the bright smile re-appearing. The rest of the transaction happened according to plan. Happy had given me all the right words.

Not only had Happy given me all the right words, my mother had given me the right advice, Alcyone had given me the pouch, the Nebraska Synod of the ELCA and SMMUCo had given me the job here in Tanzania, Midland Lutheran College had given me the year off to do it, and the Lord had given me the wisdom to recognize the radiance of a seamstress, dimmed only momentarily by linguistic confusion.

Rhythmically hard of hearing

2009-08-24T02:34:00.000-07:00

Having attended two wedding receptions, I’ve decided my favorite part occurs at the beginning, or sort of beginning, after the guests have been waiting in the parking lot an hour or two for the wedding couple to arrive. Throughout town, a ten-piece brass band riding on the back of a pickup has blasted celebratory songs, leading a long train of cars. The wedding car, easily identified by an arrangement of roses and bows on the hood, parks at the entrance to the YMCA reception hall. The band now assemble themselves on the steps nearby, the bass and snare drums on one end, the trombones and trumpet on the other.

Unlike the police band of last week’s wedding, these musicians wear red satin shirts and black ties. They are a group much plumper than the police, and this band has energy. Before the trumpet player sounds the first note, he feels the beat in his body by swaying from side to side, closer to a bounce with loose hips. While he’s been swaying, his trumpet has been pressed to his lips and just at the right moment, music somersaults into the wedding air. The whole band now sways, loose hips and all, waiting for the right moment, instruments poised and ready. Their sounds tumble into the air, and I am giddy.

Now the women whoop, holler and form a line, dancing around the wedding car. The more sedate ones bounce from foot to foot, some add a bounce of the hip, and some put shoulders, hips, and shaking head into the rhythm.

I wish I could join them. For eight years, I studied piano. When I became proficient at breaking down measures into four beats, three beats, or some other variation, I couldn’t keep the same tempo. My teacher tapped the end of the piano with a pencil and counted out, “ONE AND TWO AND THREE AND FOUR AND.” In marching band, I listened for the bass drum’s downbeat, planting my right foot on a yard line in the football field in time with it. My feet learned how to make eight equal steps for every five yards, and I learned to listen for that bass drum.

At the wedding reception with hips and shoulders and dizzying music, I am bumping shoulders out of time with the woman next to me. I stop and watch. Clearly she feels the rhythm. I listen for the bass drum, the snare, and then each brass player. There’s not a downbeat to be found anywhere. All I can do is match my swaying visually to the trumpet player’s.

I remember a line from a book about the history of jazz that describes African rhythm, the seeds of jazz. In African drumming, syncopation layers upon syncopation. The intent is to mesmerize and disorient listeners, but not enough to alienate them. So, imagine a knot, and imagine that this knot is made up of six strands. Imagine that each of these strands has already formed a knot. Then imagine each of those knots has six strands that form a knot. Then imagine all of those knots have been looping around you. It’s impossible to follow them, yet you are the center of those knots.

Later at the wedding reception, I happily tapped my toe to popular recorded music with downbeats obvious and clear by Michael Jackson, Abba, and African artists I didn’t know. But this other music, this spell of silent downbeats that left me with the euphoria of having the bottom drop out, of floating with bouncing shoulders and swaying hips—that was intoxicating—sway, though I did, out of time.

Water, hot and cold

2009-08-17T00:15:00.000-07:00

At the college, the bursar’s office is directly below my apartment. When I first arrived here, Tumaini, the bursar, told me that if I wanted hot water for a bath, she would turn on the switch in her office to heat a huge metal tank hidden in her closet. The trickiest part was remembering to tell her to turn it off, which meant that when I forgot, the closet doors were also heated by morning. Soon I adjusted to that system.

In the following days, I studied the larger rhythms of campus life beyond my own. Mama Viktor and the cleaning crew began sweeping the sidewalks at 6:30 a.m.; Haji, the van driver, drove through the campus gate at 7:00 to collect college workers in Moshi Town, about a half hour away. By 8:00, Kimaro had served my breakfast, and at 11:00, the campus converged into the dining hall for tea.

All of these activities were stepped into high gear this past week when a conference of 95 parish workers and pastors arrived for four days. Tea in heavy kettles were rolled over to the group at the chapel. For meals, colorful linens had been unfurled over the tables, place settings arranged, and goats roasted.

In the evening Mama Viktor and the cleaning crew were still on campus. At 8:30 p.m. I noticed they had been heating water in a huge vat over an open fire behind the chapel. Soon I saw two of the crew (all women) carry between them large buckets of steaming water from the fire to the dorms, where the guests were staying; then another two women, and then the first two women returning with another bucket. At this point, they couldn’t carry the steaming bucket without stopping to rest a time or two.

It wasn’t until later I learned they were providing hot water for the guests to bathe. The single water heater on campus leads to my apartment only.

Not Going to a Wedding

2009-08-11T02:16:00.000-07:00

My dear friend and colleague Allyson Backstrom, professor of chemistry at Midland Lutheran College, says it’s neither wise nor intelligent to make conclusions based on one-point data sets. But I’m no scientist; I’m a dreamer. I can conclude all kinds of things based on a one-time occurrence. And like any dreamy fool, I’ll announce my conclusions and wait for further clarification.
Based on a wedding that occurred this past Saturday, I’ve arrived at my Theory of Relativity of Organized Time in Tanzania: often—but not always—organized time known as a schedule is fluid and organic here. It follows naturally that I might or might not have attended that wedding.
The invitation came to me as a general announcement at 11:00 a.m. tea on Friday. This brings me to my first law of organized time: the Constancy of Tea, which says that eleven o’clock tea is constant and never changes during the work week. All office workers and faculty abandon their desks; John, the security guard leaves his post at the gate as do the plumber and electrician who moments earlier were sitting at a bench talking to John; Mama Victor and her cleaning crew set their mops against a wall, and I race out of my apartment. All converge at 11:00 to the dining hall where boiled tea in a heavy kettle waits for us with a large bowl of half-cakes.
On Friday 11:00 tea, Mr. Priva stood up and reminded everyone, first in Swahili then in English, that a lecturer at our college named Gidion was getting married. Mr. Priva came over to my table to make sure I understood that the college van would leave at 1:00 p.m. We repeated 1:00 p.m. several times. I understood, he understood, 1:00 p.m.
At 1:00 p.m. Saturday I stood in front of the main campus building where the only ones to show up besides me were two mockingbirds. At about 1:15, two young men appeared on the front steps, both in non-wedding jeans. After they exchanged a few words, one of them asked me where I was going. I said I’d shown up for the wedding, repeated “wedding” in Swahili. It turns out, one of them was the van driver hired to take us to the wedding and the other his friend. I asked where the others were. “Ah, this is African time,” the friend said. “We never come on time.”
Since I was the only to show, they decided it was a good time for tea.
This brings me to my next law in the Theory of Relativity of Organized Time in Tanzania: when something doesn’t happen according to schedule, it’s a good time for tea.
At the insistence of the van driver and his friend (“Please, come with us, Madam!”), I followed them to the men’s dormitory. It wasn’t as though I’d miss the van. The van driver introduced himself as Haji, the English-speaking friend was Hassan, and I was Jeanne whose head was full of thoughts about the impropriety of fraternizing with students and van drivers in a men’s dorm room. In Haji’s cramped room, I sat on the only desk chair, the other two stood beside me at the desk against the wall. I ate one boiled egg and the other two split the second boiled egg, and we all drank tea and ate half-cakes. As Haji cleaned up our dishes in the washroom, Hassan sat on the lower bunk of one bed with his head bent forward by the upper bunk, explaining to me that he was a frustrated author. I gave him some tips, and by 2:20 p.m. we were back at the main campus building where I discovered that the assistant to the bursar, Happy, was waiting for us. It’s always a good sign when Happy is waiting for you, as opposed to mockingbirds.
On the way to Moshi Town, I learned that the wedding started at 1:00 p.m. Our first stop though, was not at the church but downtown Moshi where we parked and found the secretary to the provost, Mama Cate, with her hair in curlers. After Mama Cate and Happy talked for a bit in Swahili, they urged me to go with Mama Cate to the hair dressers, Happy would go home and get ready for the wedding, and we would meet back at some point. It was 3:00 at this point, and if the wedding had really started at 1:00 p.m., surely it would be over. (I later learned that it ended at about 4:00.)
At the hair dresser’s, I sat on a chair with one of those hair dryer domes that I avoided by sitting closer to the chair’s edge, my head bent forward by the dome. The shop’s proprietor sat at the far end of the room on a stool. Between her legs another woman sat on the floor handing strands of fake copper-colored hair to the proprietor who braided them into endless rows along the scalp. Bits of black hair littered the floor along with paper and plastic packaging and a roll of black yarn that the only male hair dresser was using to tie up hair and secure an extended length of false hair. He also used a lot of goo to form complex curls in what looked like a gift-wrap bow.
Apparently—to my lack of surprise—no one had made an appointment. The room was crowded with people waiting. Occasionally someone walked in from the street with a plastic bag stuffed with wrinkled clothes. She pulled one out and held it up for those waiting under a dryer or on a couch or large stuffed chair. When one woman held up her hand, the merchant casually tossed the blouse to her and continued unpacking her merchandize.
At about 4:15 I followed Mama Cate out of the salon, her hair coiffed into a French knot, a strand of curled hair spiraling down from one temple. We stood by the Leopard Hotel and waited for Haji, Happy, and the van. (Hassan had left earlier.) Mama Cate made several calls to Haji who assured Mama Cate he was almost there.
This brings me to my next law of the Theory of Relativity of Organized Time in Tanzania: “almost there” means “not there.” It has no reference to time. I had a professor like this in graduate school. It was her way of encouraging me to keep going and not worry about the end, whatever the end may be. I think that definition works for Tanzania also.
About 20 minutes later, Haji really was there. Then it was time not to go to the wedding again, but to Mama Cate’s house so she could finish dressing. At Mama Cate’s house, I met many of her family, who came in an out of the living room where I watched what looked like a Tanzanian revival meeting on TV.
At 5:00, we arrived at the reception hall. We waited one hour for the wedding car to arrive and another hour for the wedding couple to enter the reception. But for most of the college folks, this was the real wedding, the thing worth attending. By 9:30 that night, the wedding attendants had sung and danced around the wedding car accompanied by a ten-piece brass band, and we’d waved our wedding handkerchiefs in rhythm to the brass band. The roasted goat, mouth stuffed with folded banana leaves, had danced along the red carpet on a rolling cart. The bride and groom had fed each other and their parents, and the guests had danced up the red carpet to offer gifts and shake hands with the bride and groom. Finally back at my apartment, my head literally hit the pillow.
I never saw Mr. Priva that day. One o’clock indeed.

Taking a walk at SMMUCo

2009-08-05T01:56:00.000-07:00

At the entrance of Stefano Moshi Memorial University College (SMMUCo, pronounced “SeeMOOco”), a large yellow gate stands between the campus and the road. After I pass through the gate and greet John, the security guard, I can either go left—an uphill climb—or go right, downhill. Either way, the road is a red dust that coats the corn stalks and banana leaves, and I think to myself that corn stalks and banana leaves deserve to be clean and green. If I had a water hose, I would spray them to their proper green. As buses rush by, pedestrians fling themselves against the side of the road, billows of red dust swirl and settle, and then I know that I have just become a banana leaf.
Since I am the only Caucasian on the road, passersby often stare without any attempt at subtlety. School children call out, “Good morning, Madam!” or “Good evening, Madam!” Three little ones tiptoe beside me for a good bit of the way, staring and listening in eerie silence for any behavior from me that might offer insight into the species of English-speaking madams. Later, teenagers, who walk in swarms, rush across the road to greet me. One gives me a high-five and throws her head back, laughing hysterically.
As for the older, more sedate folk, I greet them and they return my greeting with something I’ve never heard of, so I suspect our conversations could be translated like this:
Jeanne: Hello, Madam! (“Hujambo, Mama!”)
Other person: Hello! It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?
Jeanne: Thank you. Welcome! Teacher! SMMUCo!
By the end of the walk, I am swirling with call-and-nonsensical-responses. When a VW bus stuffed with passengers roars by, one man thrusts his torso out the window and hollers, “Sorry, Madam! We have no more room for you!”
I throw my hands up in the air and yell in my best Swahili, “No!” After the red dust settles once again, I am still laughing hysterically.

A note on Swahili

2009-08-03T03:34:00.000-07:00

In Swahili, many foreign words are adopted by adding an "i" to the end. "Hotel" is "hoteli," "change" (monetary change) is "chenji," "bank" is "benki." An American here in Tanzania named Bob told of the time he was in a shop and asked for a receipt using the Swahili dictionary term.

"What?" said the shop owner. "We haven't used that since Nyerere (first Tanzanian president). It's 'receipti.'"

Bob explained that after eating at a restaurant, one asks for the "billi." Another American named Mabel said the best one she'd heard was from a pastor who began a prayer with "Dear Godi."

At the Uhuru Lutheran Hotel, Moshi, Tanzania

2009-08-02T23:35:00.000-07:00

Since I arrived here at the hotel at night, I had no clue who my neighbors were until the middle of the night when dogs barked and goats bleated. I was even more puzzled at 2:00 a.m. when a trumpet blasted out a reveille nearby and later a capella singing of men. When I got up in the morning, I saw signs of a farm just beyond the hedge that surrounds the hotel grounds. Outbuildings of wooden planks and rusty tin roofs housed chickens and goats, and a shepherd whistled to the herd of cows, goats, and ducks, urging them across the pasture, but I saw no sign of singing men in uniform. Later I learned that there's a police academy just beyond the farm, and occasionally I see two or three men in uniform march down beaten dusty paths through the farm.

Besides the bleating of goats, lowing of cows, and crowing of roosters, the Muslim imam adds to the evening chorus when the sun goes down. The imam wails out a mournful call to prayer at sunrise, noon, and sundown over a loudspeaker. The call I hear is the evening one. Just when all is quiet on the farm, the imam does his thing, and then the dogs begin to howl. As suddenly as he starts, the imam stops, and fortunately so do the dogs.

The days have been cloudy, and I realized one evening that Mount Kilimanjaro hovered beyond the farm, slipping through the clouds at the end of the day calmly and quietly, a striking contrast to the goats, dogs, trumpets and imams.

Where is the toilet?

2009-07-23T08:33:00.000-07:00

I leave for Tanzania in a week, and at the moment, I’m envisioning some “what ifs” that take on bizarre dimensions the more I imagine. What if I arrive at the Kilimanjaro Airport and need to use the restroom before I find my Tanzanian host? Although many people in Tanzania speak English, not everyone does. My Swahili dictionary says “toilet” is choo. I suppose I could tap someone on the arm, and say “choo choo.” Even better, I could say “choo choo” while I cross my legs and wince. Somehow this lacks dignity.
Even if I manage to get across my question with or without my dignity in tact, will I be able to understand the answer? In Teach Yourself Swahili, the taxi driver (teksi dereva) in chapter two conveniently gives three directions: left, right, and straight ahead. But what if the choo is around the corner, through the alley by the Kwik Shop after two traffic lights, and don’t mind the chickens in the road? How do I communicate to someone that they have only three choices for an answer? Multiple choice works on paper, but in an airport when I have to go to the bathroom? So on the airplane, I’ll write kulia, kushoto, and moja kwa moja and then I can point to each term, raise my eyebrows after I point, and move on to the next term.
That should do it.
Now I’ll have to figure out how to get back to the airport, having passed the two traffic lights, the Kwik Shop, and the chickens in the road.

Adding a gardener to Tanzania

2009-06-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

As a child of Lutheran missionaries, I can remember watching my father demonstrate to rapt American congregations how the Malays took a bath by way of a roadside spigot. With a sarong hoisted up and held between gritted teeth, he explained that the dirty sarong served as shower curtain while the bather took a bucket of water and dumped it over him or her. Then the clean sarong was shimmied up the dried bather under the old sarong and deftly secured. After amazing or amusing congregations with this bathing demonstration, my parents would’ve sung “Jesus Loves Me” in Chinese and showed slides of Chinese babies in baptismal gowns and Indian brides in dazzling saris. In this way, my parents, Rev. Robert and Shirley Kocher(pictured above with me), kept Nebraskan congregations connected to the sights and sounds of Malaysia where they served from 1958 to 1972.
This was an era when neither Internet nor 24-hour TV news brought the world to the average American household. My parents and many other missionaries served as a live connection between foreign lands with roadside bathers to the U.S. congregations who would’ve been stunned to find that one Lutheran family in Malaysia consisted of an Indian household with two women married to the same man and 16 children between the two of them. This connection was absolutely vital in sustaining U.S. support. More importantly, this connection was vital in helping American congregations realize their neighbors lived in Tanzania, Singapore, Thailand, India, Taiwan, Argentina, Malaysia, and so on.
By the early 1980s, that connection weakened as missionary furloughs were reduced from one or two years to two months. And then that connection ended altogether.
Enter Bishop Richard Jessen after a newly merged Church who sought to build a new kind of connection. As a part of Bishop Jessen’s Global Missions Committee, my parents helped to establish two overseas companion synods, one in Argentina and one in Tanzania. Instead of sending missionaries into the field, the companion relationship set up exchanges—pastor exchanges and teacher exchanges. Instead of meeting others through slide shows and amusing bathing demonstrations, members of Nebraska congregations now go to Tanzania and Argentina themselves.
When I asked Pastor Martin Russell in the fall of 2008 if anyone in Tanzania would be interested in having me teach English for a year, I had no idea I was tapping into the fruits of a garden long cultivated by my parents and countless others. As of August 2009, I will be teaching Communication Skills in the English Language at Stefano Memorial College University in Moshi for six different programs. I also hope to connect my new students in Tanzania through email to students at Midland Lutheran College where I currently teach writing. In doing so, it becomes clear to me that the beauty of this new garden, tilled and cultivated by the wisdom of many, invites many more gardeners into the garden.