Zoo animal

To be completely honest, I’m starting to get tired of feeling like a zoo animal.

In some ways the notoriety is completely like being a local celebrity. A few weeks ago I got on a 20-seat bus (which, like daladalas with 13 seats, usually hold at least twice that many people), and was shocked that the conductor of the bus knew my name. I had never seen him before. At first I thought he was saying a Swahili word that sounded like my name, but sure enough, he was saying “Rachel” and asking how I was. He must have known about me from a previous village – word travels fast. Ever since, every conductor on every bus along that road that I have boarded has known my name. Talk about a small world!

Another example: in the village where we are staying now, I was sick with a fever for a few days and lost my appetite, so I stopped going with Irene on our nightly foray to eat rice and beans on the street at a picnic table by lantern light. Everyone started asking “Where is the mzungu?” Irene explained I was sick, and ever since everyone—all complete strangers—has been asking if I am feeling better. Thankfully I have a huge stash of granola bars and dried fruit and nuts!

Already I’ve had to bow out of observing many of the interviews we do because we have determined that my presence there alters their quality – including respondents’ answers and the number of distractions – considerably. When I am present at an interview the assumption is that I am a doctor – what else would a white woman interested in health be doing in a village? Clinic cards come out spontaneously, and answers to wide-open questions are short, like answers you would give to someone in authority. All of these actions run counter to what we are exploring, which is how women understand and experience their own reproductive problems, in their own words. (Though certainly their hopes and expectations are highlighting an area of great need in this area – the need for affordable, good-quality medical services). In addition to my presumed clinical identity, my presence at a house for an interview is occasion enough for parades of curious “visitors” – hardly the ideal situation for private interviews that delve into a woman’s marital, sexual, and reproductive experiences.

Why can’t we just shut the door and go on with the interview? In Tanzanian culture it is the height of rudeness to fail to welcome someone – however unannounced the visitor – to your home. If a person says “Hodi” (basically “hello, may I enter?”), you have to say “Karibu” (“welcome”), then drop whatever you are doing to greet your guests. So a parade of people then enter, some just to gawk obviously at the mzungu, some to try to sell me things (an old lady tried to sell me a pile of oranges mid-interview), some try to show me to their children, some come bringing gifts of corn and rice, some invite me to their homes, some ask if I will be their girlfriend… suffice it to say I wish sometimes I could change my skin color. Obviously the interviews proceed with fewer interruptions when I am not there.

However, when I am not there, I have to be somewhere else in the village, and an unattended mzungu is an even more open invitation for unsolicited gawking and greeting. So I try to keep a low profile during the day, shutting the house where I stay and rarely leaving my room. In one house I even had to shutter the window because groups of kids kept coming by to spy and giggle, having cornered me in my room. Then I really felt like a zoo animal. I know sequestering myself is denying a level of cultural immersion I could be experiencing, but because we switch villages so often, the novelty never seems to wear off, and so the end effect is much too exhausting to engage with strangers for the whole day. I am a much more effective emissary from elsewhere when I’ve had my beauty sleep!


My "cage" in the house where I stayed

Chickens

The sounds of birds are everywhere in the villages where we are staying. But they’re not songbirds, they’re chickens – baby chicks cheeping on parade, roosters competing to win crowing contests, mother hens tutting to each other. (As an aside, I’m not sure I’ve seen a single songbird, but I have sighted an extraordinarily large hawk-like bird that purportedly eats – yes – chickens!).

Other than the dried fish I abhor, chicken, including chicken eggs, is the primary animal source of protein for people in the villages. Chickens outnumber goats and cows exponentially, probably because they take up less space and are fairly self-sufficient. They are still pretty pricey – about $2.50/chicken in most villages, which is a handsome sum for most people here. Many people can afford to eat chicken only once or twice a month. Chickens come in two varieties: kuku wa kienyeji (local chickens), preferred by most Tanzanians over the hormone-plumped kuku wa kizungu (foreign chickens) shipped in from commercial farms in Tanzania, for while kuku wa kienyeji in the villages are smaller and chewier, they have better flavor. Chickens are everywhere: you hear them rustling around in gardens, in the bush, pecking the dirt for insects and spare kernels of corn. Their sounds interrupt a good 80% of our interview tapes! It still seems dubious to me that people can know whose chickens are whose in a world without fences and nonstop egg-hatching, but people say they are like cats and never wander too far from their coop.

That is not to say that the chickens mind their own business. Chickens, especially hungry chickens, may well be the most meddlesome household animals I have ever seen. They invade houses uninvited if the door is left open, hopping up on tables and chairs. They gather close when you are washing dishes outside, hoping food scraps might be tossed their way (leave a pile of dirty dishes unattended for a minute and they will hop right on top, pecking the pile clean). One day I was cooking corn on the cob and left it covered and boiling on the charcoal stove outside for a few minutes – when I came back the lid had been pushed off and one cob rolled off the pile onto the ground. The culprit clucked with pride as he pecked at the corn. In addition to corn, they seem to eat almost anything, and have a particular penchant for coconut, cleaning the remnants of white flesh from the insides of discarded coconut shells. I watched a baby chick rolling around inside half a coconut shell, determined to get every morsel of coconut.

Chickens are also completely oblivious to their own mortality, becoming willing carnivores whenever chicken bones and parts are tossed out after dinner. When I first arrived in Dar, I saw a street vendor selling chipsi (French fries) and kuku (chicken) fried in oil. The precooked food was kept in a glass case on a table, under which pecked about 8 living chickens, wandering free. I thought in that moment how many Americans would be revolted, as we tend to feel discomfort associating the meat with the animal, inevitable in such close proximity, but I also thought it was bizarre that a chicken couldn’t sense certain—albeit eventual—death. In one of the villages, I watched one of the people we were staying with slaughter a rooster. It was a much less traumatizing event than I expected (having not grown up on a farm), because it was soundless. The rooster’s only angry squawks came when a young man selected him from the flock and picked him up. This man sat with the bird for a good 20 minutes, wearing a felt fedora at a jaunty angle and somehow managing to look oddly cool with this gigantic rooster on his lap, stroking the bird’s feathers like a pet. (I had no idea at this point that he would be dinner, I thought he was a pet – then I noticed another man sharpening a knife). This man then took the rooster, held him upside down, lay him quietly down on the ground, gently immobilized the rooster’s head and legs with his two feet, and cut off the rooster’s head with one clean, noiseless stroke. He stood there with the bird for a couple of minutes until it stopped moving – this rooster would have run around with its head cut off if given the chance. For all the noise and protests roosters can generate, the silence was palpable. A mother hen and her 8 chicks walked within a couple of feet of the slaughter, sensing no fear and expressing no curiosity. The men laughed when I asked if they noticed the rooster, and they answered, “Kuku hana kumbukumbu” (a chicken has no memory). I can at least affirm that chickens are not too bright!

The rooster was delicious, by the way – organic and free-range, and fresh from farm to table!

Noise

Tiny villages in Africa, and tiny villages everywhere, are often depicted as the epitome of pastoral peace – animals grazing contentedly, women cooking with their babies asleep on their backs, men skillfully working their fields or building houses. Sure, the scene might be punctuated every now and then with the bright laughter of small children, but most of the sounds in the scene are tranquil ones, the soothing rhythm of daily village life.

The reality is that villages in Tanzania are louder—and to my Western ears, more grating—places than anywhere I have ever been. Somehow they seem even louder than Dar es Salaam! There are no “quiet hours” or noise ordinances, though the default is that things calm down somewhere around midnight and pick back up around 4:30 or 5 am (this does not in any way guarantee that someone will not walk by singing at the top of his lungs, drunk on pombe, that a heated argument won’t break out in the next room, or that a cell phone might ring at 2 or 3 in the morning). Suffice it to say that a peaceful night’s sleep is something of a fiction here, especially for a girl like me who needs 8 or 9 hours each night.

Right now, there are two roosters crowing at the top of their lungs outside my window, a child screaming defiantly at its mother, a woman laughing hysterically outside with the teachers while they cook breakfast, a couple of people shouting obligatory good morning greetings three houses down, and a radio on full-blast in the next room (it has been on at this level since 6 am) broadcasting a Swahili drama that currently involves a heated argument between at least 8 family members all yelling simultaneously, trying to decide how to get a woman in labor to the hospital. I would pray for a commercial break in the program, but the commercials are sponsored by 2 competing soft drink companies (Pepsi & Coke), and 2 competing cell phone companies (Celtel and VodaCom), and all seem bent on message repetition as the best form of outcompeting their rivals, meaning that the same four 30-second ads repeat ad nauseam. Emphasis on the nauseam.

Many Tanzanians I have been around appreciate a level of volume on electronics that feels just one decibel away from eardrum-blowing. Cell phones ring at top volume, as if one might miss a call if the ringing volume were one notch lower. Televisions and radios blare, and many of them blare the same snippets (ads, clips, program theme songs) over and over again – whether because of consumer demand or because of economic and sponsorship concerns, I don’t know. I doubt it would be so annoying if the sound were clear, but a lot of the televisions and radios here are either second-hand or very cheap fabrications from China, which means the speaker quality leaves something to be desired. Poor radio signal coverage and lots of broken or improvised antennas mean that the sound quality suffers even further. In a way, the scratchy, tinny sound of cheap speakers and weak radio signals is somehow atmospheric, the sounds so often portrayed on documentaries of villages in the developing world, but every now and then I dream of setting up an NGO to distribute radios with good speakers and to widen radio signal ranges just to introduce a new standard of listening quality!

Tanzanians have a very effusive and ebullient culture, and by and large seem unperturbed by chaotic or noisy environments. Boisterous shouting is a common feature of the music and raucous laughter a regular feature of conversations, so perhaps the loudness is just a natural outgrowth of this zest for living. But my introverted side sometimes needs a little escape…I remembered last night that I had packed a pair of foam earplugs from my flight over here… while they did not cancel out the cacophony around me, they thankfully dulled it enough for me to sleep a full 7 hours.

Cooking lessons

[the charcoal stoves we used to cook]

Here in a tiny village called Nahukahuka, with no power or running water, we are staying with two secondary schoolteachers in a modest 3-room mud house with concrete floors. They have been incredibly generous to us, giving us our own room with a bed. Outside is a pit latrine with a palm-leaf privacy enclosure (picture at the end). In return for the place to stay, we have promised to cook for them while we are here. There seem to be no real restaurants or even much street food in Nahukahuka, with the exception of a banana-seller and a guy who reheats chunks of fried cassava, so cooking every night is our only real option.

Because there is no electricity and no cooking gas, all cooking is done either with firewood or using charcoal (mkaa). Because firewood is readily available in the forest, poorer people tend to use firewood. Cooking with firewood is a smoky affair and women who have cooked with firewood their whole lives tend to develop red, permanently irritated eyes that sometimes earn them a reputation of being witches. These schoolteachers we are staying with are comparatively better off, and they use chunks of charcoal placed in a concrete bowl, with three metal prongs on top to support a pot. The basic premise is something like a cross between barbeque-ing and campfire cooking.

Yesterday we cooked ugali (the staple for lunch), rice (the staple for dinner), squash greens, and a river fish and vegetable stew in coconut milk (which I would have loved but for the godforsaken fish!).

Preparing ugali is almost exactly the same as making very thick grits. You boil a small amount of maize flour in water, and when the mixture boils and thickens, you beat it with a wooden spoon to break up all the lumps and cook the mixture through. If it’s not thick enough for your tastes, you add more flour along the way and continue beating. No salt, no pepper, no nothing – I told Irene how we eat grits in America with salt, pepper, and butter and she thought that sounded crazy. When it’s finished cooking, you turn the mass out onto a plate and toss it up in the air so it lands on each side, eventually rounding the stuff into a ball.

When I learned to cook rice as a girl, I learned to carefully rinse the rice, measure the rice and water exactly to get the right ratio, add a little salt, bring the mixture to a boil, and then simmer at a very low temperature, covered, for 20-40 minutes depending on the type of rice. Stirring and peeking were off-limits and a surefire recipe for sticky, gummy rice, and too high a simmering temperature was a direct route to rice that stuck to the bottom of the pot and never cooked through. In Tanzania, all these rules go out the window – but I guess the normal rules couldn’t apply if you were trying to cook rice on a campfire! (The whole process starts with a tedious picking through the rice by hand to remove any stones, weeds, or unhusked rice grains, done on a large plate-shaped basket called an ungo). You still rinse the rice, but because you’re cooking over high heat, you stir the mixture constantly with a small amount of water, then add a little more water just before fluffing it and pulling it off the high heat. Then you take the pot and set it on the ground on top of a few pieces of charcoal, and on top of the lid you set a few more pieces of charcoal, to provide heat on both sides. Over the course of about half an hour, the charcoal bakes the rice completely.

Squash greens are hairy little buggers, and so you start by cracking each stem and peeling it back so that the hairy membrane on the surface peels off, making them more tender and mouth-friendly. They are then washed to remove the ubiquitous sand, then shaved with a knife into very thin strips. These are cooked with water and a little salt until tender. Then, in another pot, you fry onion and tomato in oil until the vegetables soften, and add to the greens. Then you add coconut milk and salt and cook until most of the liquid evaporates. Coconut milk here is made from scratch using an X-shaped stool called an mbuzi (a word which oddly also means “goat”); sticking out from one end of this stool is a platypus-bill-shaped serrated tool, which you rub half a coconut against over a bowl until all the coconut meat is ground up. Then you add water to the coconut meat, and after it sits a few minutes, you squeeze the meat to extract the coconut milk, and discard the meat. The coconut milk is a fatty layer that sits on top of the milk, so you take care to pour only the coconut milk into the food, and discard the remaining milky water. Very labor intensive process, but it deshrouded the mystery of how we get the coconut milk that comes in a can!

The fish sauce was very simple – fry skinned tomatoes and onion in oil until they form a sauce, then add coconut milk, vegetables (okra and eggplant) and fish and simmer until the whole thing tastes desperately fishy.


[the outhouse/shower]

Cooking one meal can easily take more than 2 hours even with 2-3 people cooking. The funny thing is that once we finished cooking, I had absolutely no appetite… though reports from our schoolteachers indicate the food was tasty…

Fish = homesickness

There is nothing like a steady diet of rice, beans and greens to make me miss home. Here in the villages in southern Tanzania, most meals are the same – rice, beans (on lucky days the rice and beans are flavored with coconut milk), greens, and a tomato-based sauce, that more often than not has whole small fish (samaki) in it. On lucky days the meat is chicken. Now I absolutely love fish, and some of the best fish I have ever had in my life has been here in Tanzania, fresh-caught from the ocean, but my passion wanes when said fish has been kept unrefrigerated and half-dried for days, and then transported in open trucks, to be sold several hundred miles inland in little piles set out on booths in the sun. Saying that dishes with samaki in them have a “fishy” taste is a massive understatement. But people here love it. A research colleague of ours arrived last night from Mtwara and brought Irene and me a gift of fish wrapped in newspaper, and the smell was so strong I had to beg Irene to take it away and hide it in her room. She held the oily package to her nose, inhaled deeply and said she couldn’t wait for dinner.

I literally cannot stomach eating samaki, which means that I usually have a choice of one of two meals: 1) rice, beans, and greens, or 2) rice, beans, greens, and chicken. On desperate occasions I will eat only greens and rice, or beans and rice. Occasionally ugali, a paste made from corn, something like thick grits, will be substituted for the rice, which is so bland that it does little to diversify the available flavors. I have skipped meals on more than one occasion, retreating to my room with a box of juice and a protein bar. What’s worse, I have daydreams now, starting as early as 6am, of eating fried shrimp po-boys with Remoulade sauce on crusty French bread, field green salads with fresh feta and apples and candied walnuts, pumpkin soup and rye bread, a Nathan’s hot dog in a squishy seeded bun, spaghetti with homemade marinara sauce and a glass of red wine, tomatoes ripe from the garden. And cheese. I really miss cheese. When Matt and I lived in Ethiopia a whole year, the only thing we really missed was Mexican food and a good burger. In Dar es Salaam there was enough diversity (and enough good Indian food) that again, all I really missed was Mexican food and a good burger. But here, in the field, even thinking about such foods is a recipe for homesickness.

Three and a half more months doesn’t seem so long, but when I consider that that is 220 of the exact same meal (not counting breakfast, for which I eat beans and a banana, and sometimes a chapati), August seems a long way away.

A world of spirits

People commonly explain all bad things that happen here in Southern Tanzania in one of four ways: 1) “bahati mbaya” (plain bad luck, which is most common, particularly for innocuous things), 2) “mipango wa Mungu” (God’s plans), or 3) “mashetani” (malevolent, invisible spirits), or 4) “wachawi” (witches, or bad humans, who cast spells on people). Sure, people often acknowledge that illnesses have direct medical causes, and relationship troubles can be traced to certain social events, but the spiritual realm forms the background of much discord and imbalance here that leads to misfortune of all kinds.

Irene and I had read through a lot of transcripts of interviews from this area before we arrived, and in those interviews many respondents mentioned the things people do to prevent themselves from becoming possessed by mashetani or becoming the victims of witchcraft, which frequently require consultations to a local healer (called an mganga or fundi), who chants spells and creates concoctions and medicines (sometimes herbal medicines, sometimes Islamic medicines, sometimes both) for people to take. Once possessed or cursed, people also consult the healer to divine how to appease the spirit or undo the curse. They exact significant sums from their clients, often just a hair cheaper than the cost of going to the hospital. It seems to me it makes for a very good business, and one that effectively competes for clients with the formal health system as well as religious counseling in most areas. Most babies under the age of two, and many women, wear mganga-made amulets tied around their necks, their waists, and their wrists (Even in church on Easter morning many of the Christian children were wearing these amulets). This is a world perceived to be full of threats, and so people try to protect themselves from as many of these threats as possible by as many means possible, which ironically sets God/Allah on par with the abilities of the local fundi.


[photo of a fundi]

As the South is an almost exclusively Muslim area, whereas the research team (my assistant Irene, as well the 4 guys on the larger project’s research team who we frequently travel with) is almost entirely comprised of Christians from Northern Tanzania, the contrast seems to have set us up for something resembling spiritual warfare. The whole team has complained to me of nightmares and strange things at night: Irene claims to have felt hands coming around her neck to choke her one night so she couldn’t breathe, and she swears she was not yet asleep when this happened. Albert says he saw a large dark object moving outside his room one night, and that the guesthouse where we are staying has a policy of not allowing lanterns to be kept on all night, which Albert and Irene believe is so we can’t see as many bad things in the night. One night a couple of weeks ago, Albert and Peter both claim to have encountered a being in their room one night and they swear they had to beat him to get him to go away. I don’t really know any other explanation other than that these are nightmares, simple manifestations of fear. Though in this less rational and individualistic world, sometimes I wonder if there could really be spirits out there, and what they are capable of doing.

Even the small and harmless take on new life in this spiritual realm. Irene had a rat in her room yesterday, munching on her soap and running around her mosquito net, and it made her so nervous she couldn’t sleep and she called me at 1 in the morning to come sleep in my room (which, thankfully, has remained rat-free the whole time). These strange goings-on make all of them rely heavily on prayer: Irene’s Bible is an amulet to her, and she frequently calls on the name of Jesus when she feels scared at night. For all her bravery and boldness, her one fear is the darkness, particularly sleeping alone in it, so she likes to sleep with the light on.

The strange thing is, though I too am a Christian, I feel oddly immune to this larger-than-life spiritual world. Most likely, I rationalize them away... in keeping with what I have been taught, I feel much more afraid of a vehicle accident or malaria. Certainly, I too have said prayers for safety, but I have had no nightmares, seen no strange things, had no trouble sleeping (okay, aside from the bat, but that was over soon and rationally enough). Irene says she thinks it might be that the mashetani are scared of an mzungu (white person)!

Super-sized

There’s at least one grain of truth in the stereotype of Africa being larger than life. On a continent where safari catalogues boast the opportunity to see the “Big Five,” I think it’s interesting that even the non-safari flora and fauna confirm the stereotype. There are centipedes and millipedes here as in America, though it is more common to spot them, perhaps because of their sheer size – the same millipede that might be an inch or two long in America is 8 inches long here and its shiny black segments almost an inch in diameter. (Having heard horror stories about the bite—or is it sting?—of one or the other of them, I keep a safe distance from both just in case). Moths and butterflies I have seen can have a wingspan of up to 6 inches. During the rainy season, snails abound, but here they are not the tiny, delicate creatures in paper-thin whorled shells I find in our garden at home. The snails that come out after it rains are at least 7 inches long, and I have often confused their discarded calcified shells for seashells, even 200 miles inland. They look almost like cartoon renderings of snails writ large, and their name (Giant African Land Snail) speaks volumes. One day last week when we were interviewing, my assistant Irene noticed a brown snake ahead on the path – while I have no particular phobia of snakes, this one was as thick as a man’s calf. Our best guess is that it was a python, but who knows if it is just what happens to your average garden snake raised on a diet of super-nutrients?

Two weeks ago, I was staying in a decrepit guest house, lying under my mosquito net and talking on the phone with Matt in the dark, when I began hearing an intermittent thunking, almost as if my ceiling fan was malfunctioning. When I turned on my flashlight, the thunking immediately stopped and a large object careened directly into my net, sagging a foot from my face. The outline was most definitely a bat, with a wingspan of 12-15 inches. (Apparently bats are drawn toward light sources!) He must have been napping between the interior shutter and the screen of the window, and so when I had opened the shutters for air before retiring to bed, he must have awoken and begun flying around, having a series of unfortunate collisions with my fan overhead. Matt (my internet-connected hero!) consulted Google, and divined that the bat was probably a fruit bat, which are one of the largest kinds of bats in the world. Coincidentally, fruit bats do not use sonar to sense objects in the night, which may explain his inability to detect the whirring death trap on the ceiling. I am sad to report that the series of ensuing events (including valiant long-distance problem solving on Matt’s part and some poorly-suppressed hysterics on mine, as well as continued fan-bat attraction) led to the injured bat’s untimely demise and unceremonious disposal outside. Rest in peace, giant bat.

Not only animals but plants are super-sized here. I have seen virtually all our houseplants at home growing here, only they are not the puny kind of plants that Lowe’s sells in 6-inch pots. Here, you find crotons that are towering 12-foot shrubs, and schiffleras 6-8 feet wide. I have seen aurelias that are massive trees (our aurelia at home is impressive for a houseplant, thanks to Matt’s green thumb, and yet in 5 years has only grown to be about 4 feet tall), and bougainvillea arbors that swallow whole houses.

I have yet to go on any kind of safari (that is a treat waiting for Matt’s birthday in June), but unless the giraffes, elephants, and wildebeests are much larger than at the zoo, there’s at least a small chance I will remain more awed by the sheer size of everyday animals and plants!

Easter

Irene is an observant Catholic and wouldn’t dream of missing church (and because none of the church services are in English, it doesn’t make much difference to me whether I go to a Roman Catholic mass or a charismatic Protestant service). So when Easter rolled around, there was no debate – we were off to Catholic mass. While I went to church occasionally in Dar es Salaam, I hadn’t yet been to a Swahili service in Tanzania, partly because I had been intimidated by the sheer length of the services, some as long as 3-4 hours, and partly because I had been sure I would be bored stiff by having to listen to a service entirely in Swahili.

We had tried first to go to Good Friday service but had finished our interviews late that day, and we arrived at the church just in time for the last hymn. The large Roman Catholic church (we were staying in a small village called Mtama) was set far off the main road. All the villages where we are working are almost exclusively Muslim, and so the number of Christians, mostly Catholics thanks to the missions set up in this area in the early 1900s, is rather small. The church building itself is a fairly large and imposing yellow-washed concrete structure, but the simple benches and kneeling boards inside hold no more than a hundred and fifty people.

We arrived on Easter Sunday morning at 10:30, when we had been told the service would start. The day was already swelteringly hot, and we had trudged through sand (there is a preponderance of sand in this area, even 100 miles from the sea) for 20 minutes to get there. After offering “Shikamoo”s (pronounced “shih’-ka-moh”, a term of respect for elders) to many of the older church ladies gathered outside, we found respite along a stone wall in the shade of a large locust tree. Just as in America, many of the younger girls and boys were clearly wearing new clothes (though these still likely second-hand, Africa’s biggest industry, albeit newly purchased), standouts in a part of the country where most clothes on most children on most days are little more than shredded rags. A pair of twin boys in primary-color-striped knit shirts and shorts, little girls in gauzy dresses with big clunky white patent leather shoes. We waited and waited and waited, and then Irene pointed at a house next door and asked the woman seated next to her whether that was where the padri (priest) lived. She answered no, that that was the home of the religion teacher, and that the padri lives in Nyangao, a town about 15 minutes away by car. After awhile, a man rode up on a pikipiki (small motorbike) with a helmet, greeted everyone in the churchyard, and walked inside. Preacher on a motorbike. Wonders never cease!

We went inside the church and found seats in front of a line of older ladies. The church was decked out for Easter, with large croton plants to either side of the pulpit, which was decorated with purple artificial roses and a couple of embroidered napkins. In a far corner leaned a scraggly artificial Christmas tree.

For being a small group of Christians in the middle of nowhere, the service was formal and the music was incredible. The padri, transformed now by having donned a long gold preacher’s robe and a tall white hat, led the procession, with a flank of altarboys behind, swinging smoky incense from a lantern distributing the familiar aroma of frankincense though the church. Frankincense has a scent that conjures up memories for me of Ethiopia, where it is ritually burned as part of the coffee ceremony. Four-part, five-part harmonies filled the church as people sang hymn after hymn by heart, the names of the hymns written in a column on a chalkboard on the side of the room, where the small choir sat, blending in with the congregants as they too faced the front of the church. I didn’t know a single one of the songs, but I didn’t care. The music was lilting, soothing, and encouraging. I closed my eyes and imagined the contrast of this worship with Easter church at home, and imagined God smiling at the diversity of styles of the joyful noises we humans make in thanks.

Irene

Limited by my project budget to hiring only one assistant for my interviews—I had originally envisioned a whole entourage of transcribers, translators, and at least 2 interviewers!—I was worried about finding someone who could do the work I had in mind. I knew my Swahili wasn’t good enough to do the interviews I had proposed on my own, but I also didn’t trust that I could find people who could understand the kind of exploratory research I had planned. I have heard nightmares about researchers who hire qualitative interviewers who can’t seem to develop a positive rapport with people, who can’t think on their feet enough to recognize new and interesting topics that come up in interviews and follow new lines of inquiry, and who aren’t sensitive enough when talking about sensitive topics (a category into which sex and pregnancy loss, both topics discussed in my project interviews, fall). My worries were intense enough for me to lose sleep over, and after doing a series of interviews in January to look for possible candidates, I felt discouraged.

Irene came highly recommended, having been the superstar of my friend Anne’s research project, which wrapped up a week before mine started. Given the fact that Anne sang her praises high and low, it is not surprising that there was a bit of a fight for Irene, as well-trained qualitative researchers are hard to come by. Apparently I lucked out, considering that the other job offered a longer-term contract and was based in Dar, which would have meant Irene could have stayed at home with her 22-month-old daughter Lucy, whom she adores, and her husband Paul (whom she adores almost as much as Lucy). The job I offered required Irene to live in tatty guesthouses without running water or electricity, with an mzungu she hardly knew, moving from village to village each week for 5 months. (Very tempting, I know!).

Irene comes from the Haya tribe in northern Tanzania, from an area called Bukoba (famous for its bananas) near Lake Victoria. Her family is devoutly Catholic, and her parents are teachers. Her father values education above almost all else, having told Irene “your first husband is your education. Tend to that first and then you can consider a second husband.” Even though Irene and Paul were in love 4 years ago, her father forbid them from getting married until she finished her bachelor’s degree. It turns out it was Irene’s father and Paul who encouraged her to take the job I offered instead of the job in Dar es Salaam. Hers is a rare instance of women being encouraged to pursue their education and career, and at the rate she is going, she will go far, especially in her dream to study and work in rural community development.

Irene makes up for my inhibitedness with a mix of grace and boldness. The woman gets things done! In the first village where we stayed, the only food option at night was chipsi kuku (fried chicken and french fries). I told her I thought I would die if I ate french fries every day for a week, and she immediately scouted out several places that serve food at lunchtime and asked them if they would stay open late for a special contract. She then drafted an order for complete meals for a week – including lots of vegetables and specifying details as minor as the kind of fruit we would have for dessert and the kind of tea that would be served – and then bargained the price they offered down to an incredible deal, all with a smile on her face. She has a cheerful, gentle spirit, but underneath her jovial exterior, she’s also a hard-driving businesswoman and problem-solver.

I had originally planned to do 1 or 2 two-hour interviews per day, planning for long walks between interviewees’ houses and trying to set aside enough time each day to debrief together about how the interview went and what was learned. But Irene has turned out to be a powerhouse – we routinely do 3 interviews, and sometimes 4, including at least an hour and a half per day per interview to discuss the findings from the interview. But she is equally concerned about interview quality, and devours books I have brought on interviewing techniques and data analysis, and is very receptive to advice and training to improve each interview. Because of Irene (sometimes I feel I am just sitting there, understanding about 40% of each interview while I jot some fieldnotes), we are ahead of schedule, and can probably wrap up this phase of data collection 2-3 weeks early. The reward for both of us is a chance to return to Dar early, her to see her family, and me to see my friends and colleagues. We have our fingers crossed…

The picture at the top is Irene on her first airplane ride in her entire life – she watched out the window the whole trip from Dar to Mtwara and marveled at how the whole world looked flattened into a map of geographical features that she had learned in school, and her eyes grew wide as the plane shook when we flew through clouds.