By the light of a full moon

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.