A brief and fond farewell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.