Gari la moshi (Smoke car)

To kick-start our safari, we were the proud holders of first-class train tickets from Dar to the game reserve. For someone like me who never travels first-class anything, that seems a rare privilege, at least on the surface of things. To my initial delight, I also learned our tickets made us eligible to sit in the first-class departure lounge. This lounge turned out to be a musty old room painted in outlandish shades of turquoise and gold with banks of black leatherette chairs tilted at a 45-degree angle, and packed with a number of passengers who may or may not have actually had first-class tickets, but some of whom were definitely suffering from the effects of illegal drugs, severe tuberculosis, and/or an uncontrollable habit of leering at us. The first-class bathroom had one stall that had been so elegantly designed that there was no way to both sit down (or squat) and close the door, and there was no water, soap, or a trash can in sight. Nice touches.

Matt loves trains--here in Tanzania a train translates as gari la moshi, or "smoke car"--as much as or more than your average little kid, largely because it’s such an efficient and real-time way to travel, and who doesn’t love the rhythmic clacking of a train car along the rails? When it came time to board the train, you could see the excitement in his eyes, even as we were jostled among the stampede of passengers (first- and second-class) flooding through the doors of the station toward the quay.

Just to be clear, first-class train travel in Africa has absolutely no frills except for lessening the chances that your cabin will have more people and bags in it than is spatially possible. Tanzania has only two rail lines, both headed vaguely east-west, and only one train on each line an average of three times per week, so everyone in the station was waiting for our train that afternoon. On the TAZARA line, the rail line that provides a critical linkage to ocean ports for landlocked Zambia, first-class travel for a 4-hour trip cost about $11, which gets you your very own Chinese-made garishly-colored velour blanket to sit on, one small bottle of water, and a seat in a cabin with a maximum of 4 people and any children and baggage that might be traveling on their tickets. We settled into ours, along with an older gentleman and his young son (perhaps grandson), and another gentleman. They had brought bag upon bag of goods with them, stacked above our heads and filling the pulled-out couchettes to capacity.



When the train started rolling, we stared out the window and let the hours while by. Cheap beers and sodas didn’t hurt. Matt quickly made friends with the young boy in our cabin, despite the language barrier, and both enjoyed sticking their heads out of the window. Though our train was an express train, it still stopped from time to time, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, often at villages or crossroads lacking even a station.



We had been informed to disembark at Kisaki, but we weren’t due to arrive until after dark, so we wondered if we might miss our stop. As it turned out, the conductor gave us ample advance notice, and as the train screeched to a halt at Kisaki, we got ready to get down on the platform. Only there was no platform. There was only about a 4-foot drop from the train car to the bare ground. It was pitch black but for a few candles held by waiting vendors hawking fruits and snacks to passengers through the windows of the train for pocket change, We somehow both negotiated the drop in the dark, and then started following the herd of people walking along the gravel, dirt, and railroad ties alongside the train, presumably toward a station we had not yet seen and someone from the lodge who was to meet us. The only wazungu in sight, we were heckled the whole time. Matt managed to navigate this treacherous path with a 50-pound suitcase. We had been met initially by one man who seemed like a tout, muttering something unintelligible. Several others kept hollering, “Taxi?” “Guesti?” (“Guesthouse?”). We expected a signboard, an official T-shirt or nametag or something, but there was no such greeting in the chaos. As it turned out the initial tout was our driver after all, and we eventually sorted everything out and hopped into the Land Rover to make our way through the darkness to the lodge.

Even dogs don't get this sick...

One of the last places in the world I like to be is in a hospital. Add to that being in a hospital in Tanzania, and on top of that having a life-threatening illness, and the combination is as close as I have gotten in awhile to living hell. The whole experience was further enhanced by the fact that the week and a half I spent sick and recovering coincided perfectly with Matt’s visit here. Even better, he got to spend his birthday in the hospital wondering if his wife and/or unborn child were going to die.

For a few days as we traveled in an area without medical services I had been treating an infection I had presumptively with the antibiotics I carry, but by the time we got to Arusha for what was supposed to be a few days of relaxation to celebrate Matt’s birthday, my fever was going up, not down. Once it topped 102.5 (high fever is dangerous in pregnancy), we decided we needed to do something, so we went to the clinic in Arusha, where I was treated by none other than a Dr. Exorbitant (his real name). Completely self-important, he suited his name to a tee, ordering every test in the book – “just so people will know I thought to check that” – including a pregnancy urine test and an ultrasound. He didn’t believe that I was 15 weeks pregnant, despite my assurances to him I had been going to antenatal care in Dar es Salaam. The upshot is that Matt got to see the baby on an ultrasound. By the time we got back to our hotel I felt like death warmed over and crawled into bed to wait for the medicine to kick in.

But that night the useless antibiotic I had been prescribed had failed to bring any relief, and my fever shot up again. Quivering with chills, I was ordered into a tepid bath Matt had prepared, which felt like ice water torture. Care from Nurse Matt and a little acetominophen brought down my temperature. Our room and the place we were staying were lovely, and leagues above the other places we had stayed in Kilwa and Mtwara, so neither of us wanted to leave. But the fever came back in the morning, and we knew we had to fly back to Dar es Salaam, having spent only 24 hours in what is undoubtedly the most beautiful part of Tanzania. Dar’s infamously horrible traffic showed no mercy, even for a pregnant woman with a high fever, and it took an hour to traverse the 6 miles to the clinic. By this time I was pallid and shaking uncontrollably with chills, so the nurses whisked me back to an examining table and piled blankets atop me. Fever 104, pulse 120. After the lab work I was sent in for an ultrasound, and the looks on the nurses’ and doctor’s faces were somber. Before she put the wand on my belly she told us that I had septicaemia, a systemic blood infection, as a complication of a kidney infection. If I hadn’t come in for treatment the infection would have killed me in a matter of days, and my fever already posed a serious risk to the baby. To our relief, the baby appeared fine.

I, however, was not fine, and they told me I needed an IV drip for dehydration and a course of IV antibiotics, so we should plan on staying the night. After getting the IV (preceded by some urgent texts to my sister and her doctor-boyfriend in America to make sure the drugs were safe in pregnancy), I bedded down for the night on a hard examining table (that's me in the picture below), and Matt curled up on the counter next to the sink with a couple of sheets and a pillow. Friends came bearing dinner for Matt and get-well wishes for me, which helped lift the mood. My fever spiked to 104 again 6 hours after the IV, and I grew terrified the drugs wouldn’t work. The fever was not responding to acetominophen so I got a shot of something called Diclo-Denk in the butt, which worked beautifully. The next day was Matt’s birthday, and I woke up feeling much better and hoping I could go home so that we could go out for dinner or something. To my despair, the fever returned again, almost as high as the night before.



I got IV after IV, but the fevers kept coming in waves. Matt got progressively hungrier, sleep-deprived, and more strung out worrying about me, the lack of hygienic practices in the clinic, watching my IV for air bubbles in the line (and there often were), making sure that the medicines they were giving me were appropriate, and helping explore options for possible medical evacuation with the US Embassy. I must have started to get better because when friends showed up with pizza and groceries, I ate almost the whole pizza. I was still getting chills and fever, though, and so we begged for another antibiotic injection and settled in for another night. The nurse on duty that night, named Severa, was wonderful to both of us. She dramatically sang Happy Birthday to Matt, we introduced her to Pringles and M&M’s (Matt’s birthday treats), and she unobtrusively kept a close and watchful eye on my IV the whole night. (That's the two of them goofing off as she sings in the picture below). The recurrent fevers seemed to be getting steadily lower.



The next day my vein had given up the ghost and collapsed, so the fluids from the IV were causing my hand to swell up like a zombie. I was hoping to be discharged and so I asked for the IV to be removed. No fever, and a positive fetal heartbeat, so I was discharged that afternoon with oral antibiotics. Though I still got another couple of fevers over the next two days, they were much lower, and a hospital bed just can’t hold a candle to a real bed next to one’s husband. We managed to postpone our pre-paid safari by a day to give me time to recover. To make a long story short, I’m now fine, and we’ve postponed Matt’s birthday to August. And I’ve sworn off getting sick anymore in developing countries.

Surprise!

Finding out you are pregnant in the middle of the bush makes for a good story, if nothing else. In April, I had been wondering and hoping for several weeks but the two home tests a friend gave me came out negative—turns out they were expired by 4 years!—so my hypochondriac tendencies had me convinced that I had some rare untreatable disease causing my bizarre symptoms (some clues in my blog entries re: food).

While collecting interviews during the first phase of my fieldwork, I went to the small regional hospital in Lindi Town to meet with two German doctors about my dissertation research. Matt had mentioned that if I did happen to be pregnant they would be good contacts to have, and so I casually mentioned after our meeting that I suspected I was pregnant but hadn’t been able to find an accurate pregnancy test. One of the doctors said that the hospital is completely out of pregnancy tests right now (not unusual in these parts), but quickly volunteered that they do have an ultrasound machine, and would I like a scan? Part of me hesitated – no time to mentally prepare – was she really serious she would do an ultrasound right now? Right here, in the middle of this open-air hospital with signs everywhere posting “Free services for mothers and children”? But the suspense was killing me, so I accepted.

With German efficiency, almost brusqueness, she walked me the 50 feet to the radiology ward, a tiny 2-room concrete building with a worn red tile roof and the words “X-Ray 1” painted in large black letters on the outside. (Picture below) Inside was a completely modern setup that belied the humbleness of the outside. Almost as soon as I laid down, she had the ultrasound wand on my belly and on the screen we saw a tiny little jellybean with stubs of arms and legs, and a heart fluttering like a bird’s. I was almost embarrassed to register my awe out loud, with the doctor being so businesslike and matter-of-fact. The only thing I could say was “Oh my God.” It was certainly not the hand-holding cliché of movies, where two loving parents-to-be tearfully struggle to comprehend the miracle displayed on the ultrasound screen, but it was still mind-blowing. (Matt called 10 minutes later, as if on cue, so I could share the news). Thanks to the German-ness of it all, the whole process took less than 5 minutes. Everything looked normal and I am feeling fine. And very grateful to those two doctors.



Matt and I have jokingly teased that I should bring back a baby from Tanzania… I just didn’t expect it would be inside me!

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.

Worlds colliding

ONE WORLD

THE OTHER WORLD

Being home for two wonderful weeks [during which I ate lots of cheese, soaked up time with Matt and my family and friends, and it snowed—twice!] and returning to Tanzania served as a potent reminder of how the world in which I am doing my research is utterly worlds apart from the world from which I come. Thankfully the boredom and otherworldliness of two back-to-back overnight plane flights provides something of a neutral buffer that prevents complete overwhelm of worlds clashing together, but it is hard to ignore the differences.

When you consider that more than 75% of the world’s population lives a life much more similar to people in Tanzania than people in America—meaning no climate control, no running water, sporadic if any electricity—and that our global ecosystem would rapidly collapse if every person in the world consumed as many resources as your average Joe in America, it really makes me wonder if our predictable, sanitized lives with reliable power we use with abandon, water we don't usually conserve, restaurant delivery, big houses, fast cars and paved roads, and ability to get almost anything we want when we want it (provided we have the cash or the plastic, of course) is something of an unsustainable illusion. It certainly is a marked contrast to the way most Tanzanians must live. And while I believe that American consumerism and materialism are just repackaged manifestations of the universal human tendency toward greed (most Tanzanians would probably behave the same way if their country were as materially rich as America), it is shocking to realize from a distance how unconsciously and exuberantly materialistic most of us in America really are, and how detrimental that worldview can be environmentally and ethically. Even those of us who live relatively humbly, whether for reasons of relative poverty, moral rejection of consumerism, frugality, or environmentalism still have a standard of living and comfort that far outstrips that of most of the world’s inhabitants.

That having been said, it unsettles to me to admit to myself how uncomfortable I can feel on both a physical and psychic level being in Tanzania. Surely a goodly portion of that feeling is due to being far from what is “home,” what is familiar, the people I love, the language I know, the tidy streetscapes, the usual scenery. And the oppressive heat and humidity and torrential rains certainly don’t help. But another part of my discomfort stems entirely from being accustomed to a life that is much more comfortable, sanitary, and leisurely than most Tanzanians could ever afford, and to admit to myself that no matter my enthusiasm for learning about Tanzanian culture and ways of life, I am, and will always be, much more at home in America than Tanzania. That cognitive dissonance means that there is a strange—and perhaps unnecessary—guilt I feel in seeking sanctuary in the lobby of a nice air-conditioned hotel for a few hours on a Sunday, knowing that this is a luxury afforded to only a few here. I am not alone: lots of expatriates here seem to indulge—whether periodically or regularly—in luxuries, sometimes as a “coping mechanism.” The urge to soak up modern conveniences is even stronger on the eve of leaving for 5 months to live in small villages, many of them without any electricity, running water, or telecommunications access. My anthropological sensitivities have made me startled to realize how I almost unconsciously depend on and enjoy modern conveniences—air conditioning, lights that turn on when you flip a switch, flush toilets, remote controls, washing machines, blenders, computers. In some sense, these machines and ways of living have become part of Western culture. The unsustainability of it all, and the fact that I am so accustomed to these things that if given the choice, I would pick a life with quite a few of these conveniences, even though it demands an unfair proportion of the world’s resources, is troubling. I do also wonder what the end goal of development really is -- and doubt that the world will really be a better place if it becomes more like America!

The humble art of the bucket bath

Water is a precious commodity in much of the world. Even water that isn’t exactly potable. Or transparent. Or nice-smelling. Just water that is wet is often good enough.

In a country like Tanzania, where the coastal areas receive 43 inches of water per year and mud is such an integral feature of the landscape for several months of the year, it is sadly ironic that water should still be such a precious commodity. Dar es Salaam has a fleet of bright blue trucks labeled “Maji Safi” (Clean Water) that drive all over the city delivering water to—and other blue trucks labeled “Maji Taka” (Dirty Water) taking effluent away from—homes that aren’t connected to the city water supply.

The lightweight plastic bucket has revolutionized life for people in much of the world, especially in Africa where water can be the limiting factor between life and death, and where distances from water sources to homes can be large. In many African societies it is women who assume the laborious job of carrying water to their homes, often atop their heads. Even small girls can carry more than their weight in water on their heads – an admirable feat in my opinion, as I seem to trip over my own feet even without a heavy burden on my head.

Those who can afford to keep water around do. Many households keep large black plastic cisterns of sizes ranging from 1000 liters to more than 50000 liters in the yard or on the roof. Since the problem seems more one of distribution than pure scarcity (there is plenty of rain, too much mud, and not enough water for daily life), I am a particular fan of rainwater catchment systems, which work if you have a decent roof surface area and enough money for the pipes to collect runoff from your roof and channel it into your cistern, from which it is pumped into your home or drawn from a spigot at the bottom of the tank.

It has been good preparation for my life ahead doing fieldwork to get used to bucket baths early. For most of the past 3 weeks there has been no running water, a problem Shekha attributes to the road work going on in the area. Indeed, there is frequently pooled water in the streets from broken pipes, yet none in the house (again, a distribution problem!). So we have been taking bucket baths for the past three weeks. The picture above is the actual bucket and the actual bathroom.

Bucket bathing is something one easily gets used to, and seeing how little water is required for an adequate bath has made me painfully aware how much water is wasted in showering, particularly showers of the 30-minute-plus variety. One morning I woke up, sweaty from the night before without electricity, to find not a drop of water in the buckets in the bathroom, and no idea where the neighborhood communal tap was to retrieve water myself (this is a task Ahmed typically performs). Then I remembered a single 12-ounce bottle of water in my room from a conference the week before. Believe it or not, I took a whole bath with 12 ounces of water (of course, I had to use the first 6 ounces 3 times!). While it took a lot of effort and wasn’t particularly pleasurable, it sufficed, I was clean, and it gave me a new appreciation for the kinds of things we take for granted – and the resources we waste – on a daily basis.

Taratibu

While pole is the most commonly used word here to describe things as “slow,” my new favorite word is taratibu. Like a few other words in the very plastic and flexible Swahili language, taratibu has the multipurpose ability to function as several parts of speech (note that there are 22 different meanings returned on a search on the Yale University Kamusi Project website: http://www.yale.edu/swahili), among them:

• Adjectives: slow, composed, self-possessed, systematic, orderly
• Adverbs: carefully, systematically, quietly, in an orderly fashion
• Nouns: composure, collectedness, self-possession, method, structure, procedure, system

You get the drift.

The proverb Haraka haraka haina baraka (“things done in haste bring no blessing,” the Swahili equivalent of “haste makes waste”) is treated here as an almost inviolable code one should live by. I get weird stares all the time for walking quickly, a practice I just can’t seem to find the time or desire to change. It has often been written that in Africa time is conceptualized differently than in the West, and some scholars have speculated that it is tied to whether or not that time has a monetary value (i.e., wasting time means losing money). Perhaps the differences have been overblown, but there certainly are differences. Waiting and relaxing, practices that may have originated out of necessity and survival strategy here, have over time become exalted as almost spiritual virtues here. The relaxed pace of life is one of Tanzania’s greatest draws, particularly if you’re a tourist seeking to escape from the stresses of city life in America or Europe. The easy, convivial way people interact here presents a welcome reprieve.

But if you are trying to live in Tanzania and are beholden to a perhaps more Western sense of the value of time and efficiency (which I am, thanks to the terms of my grant, my degree program, and the fact that I left a life with another sense of time behind to do this), then the relaxed pace has its pluses and minuses. One minus being that one is no stranger to procedures. Confronting the labyrinth of rules and procedures to begin to get permission to do research here has revealed to me how ironic but also oddly apropos it is that taratibu means both “slow” and “procedure.” Most procedures are slow, usually the brainchild of a vast, multi-personed bureaucracy. Getting a residence permit, for an example, involves inputting a maximum of a one-page form into a computer, paying a fee, and stamping my passport. But the process requires going to the Immigration Office three times (once to drop off paperwork, once to pay, and once to pick it up), each visit spaced approximately 1-2 weeks apart. Extend the same logic to getting a driver’s license, paying utility bills, registering a business, getting a phone line installed, or renovating a property, and you can see why things happen a little slower here than what I’m used to.

But Heinz Law applies: good things come to those who wait. I got my residence permit and national ethical approval on the same day last week, so I'm ready to roll!

[NOTE: The picture at the top is of a giant tortoise on Prison Island, off the coast of Zanzibar, where I went for the Sauti za Busara (Voices of Wisdom) Festival two weekends ago. I would like to say I saw the tortoises personally on Prison Island, but I missed the boat...I must have been on Tanzanian time!]

A spoonful of sugar...or honey...

Ahmed stood before me while I sat on my bed, his tall, lanky frame leaned jauntily against the desk. In his right hand he held a small ceramic pot, a half-smile playing on his face. He was carefully stirring a dark, viscous liquid, lifting the metal spoon and pausing as the liquid ran off the spoon, blending the bowl’s contents. At first I wondered if he was just preparing a snack for himself, but then I remembered he was fasting today (Ahmed is an observant Muslim), and the sun had not yet set far enough for him to sate his hunger. I began to suspect the mystery concoction was for me, as I had been coughing and feverish all day. Sure enough, he offered me the bowl.

“Is this dawa [medicine]?” I hesitantly queried as I peered inside, lifting the spoon to test the texture of the strange liquid.
“Yes,” he answered.

“Dawa ya kienyeji [traditional medicine]”?
“Yes.”

“There’s a lot in here.” I couldn’t help but grimace. How, feeling so horrible, would I down a half-cup of this ‘medicine’?
“Yes, but you don’t take it all now. Some now, some later,” he assured me.

I still wasn’t convinced, but I sensed I had no choice unless I intended to offend. “What’s in it?” I asked, dubious. Would it turn my stomach (as had the lemon-juice-and-salt medicine for stomach upset I had been force-fed in Ethiopia)?
Ahmed wrinkled his brow. “How do you say, the thing made by bees?”

“Asali,” I guessed, offering the Swahili word.
“Oh, yes, honey. And garlic. And ginger. And black pepper.”

“Garlic??” I asked, incredulous.
“Yes.”

“Really, garlic??”
“Just try it. This is a medicine taught to us by The Prophet. It will help you, Inshallah,” he responded solemnly.

Dubious, I hesitated before taking a spoonful and allowing it to slide down my throat, truthfully more afraid of the garlic than anything else.

Not bad, actually. Honey here has a kind of smoky aftertaste, but it wasn’t any more unpleasant than Robitussin.
I dutifully swallowed another spoonful.
And another.
And another.

“This will really help my pain here?” I asked, pointing to my chest. “And here?” clutching at my aching throat.
“Yes, Inshallah.”

“Have I taken enough?”
A grin widened across his face and dissolved into mock sympathy. “I suspect you have already overdosed. I myself only take two spoonfuls!”

“You know, you really must stop drinking cold water. That is not helping you. And neither is having this fan on.” With that pronouncement, he switched off the stand fan, the only modicum of relief I was feeling from the oppressively still, hot air in the room. Shekha and Zoela echoed their concerns about using the fan.

After I thanked my mganga (traditional healer) for the dawa, I was left to rest. Shekha felt my forehead and announced that she was taking me to the doctor the next morning if I still had a fever. She’s had more than her share of encounters with illness and death, and after she lost an mzungu colleague suddenly to malaria several years ago, she doesn’t take any chances anymore. Including drinking cold water or using fans when sick. It is amazing how both spiritual and physical causes and treatments for many illnesses are understood to be intrinsically bound, even as allopathic medicine use increases here.

I don’t know if it was the dawa or the NyQuil I took shortly thereafter, or the threat of going to the doctor, but I felt considerably better in the morning. I went back for more dawa the next night. And it worked.

Inshallah.

Unafanya nini? (You're doing what?)

Given the fact that I’ve now spent almost 4 months in Dar es Salaam, it would be reasonable to ask, as several of you have, “But I thought you said you were working in Lindi and Mtwara?” Yes, those 100+ interviews with rural women still loom large on my radar screen, but before I can start my research, there are a lot of hoops to jump through, and that means navigating two very complicated bureaucracies (those of Tanzania and Johns Hopkins). I’m glad there are no windows to jump through, because I might have seized that opportunity on a couple of choice occasions in the last few months. There are two main classes of hoops: 1) getting a residence permit to clear me to do research in two specific regions of the country, and 2) getting ethical approvals from a number of different committees in the US and Tanzania. Even after waiting 4 months, I haven’t yet received my residence permit OR full ethical approval, and so can’t get started on the interviews.

Emerging unscathed from one’s struggles with the system seems very much a function of luck, and I’ve had more than my share of bahati mbaya (bad luck). A wayward letter of support got lost on someone’s desk in a government office 10 weeks ago, delaying my research permit by 2 months and, because a research permit is a prerequisite for a residence permit, delaying that too. Cross your fingers that I will get it before my visa expires next weekend! On top of that, the coordinator of the ethical committee here at my organization was brand new, and her learning the ropes delayed my proposal by a month. To add insult to injury, the ethical committee at Johns Hopkins just transitioned to a new online system this fall and the automatic classification system initially misclassified my proposal, delaying the review on the US side by more than a month. Bahati mbaya!

Facing known delays and wanting to do more with my time than just learning Swahili, I’ve gotten involved in a lot of the other newborn health programs, policies, and research that are ramping up here in my organization and at the national level, which includes key stakeholders including the Ministry of Health, WHO, UNICEF, and Save the Children. This has been my first exposure to the national policy and planning environment and a great learning experience. Working with a couple of other staff here, we got a 3-month mini-grant from Save the Children to analyze existing interviews that contain information about pregnancy and birth from several different regions in the country. The project has been a great introduction to the culture and reproductive histories of women in Tanzania, particularly in the area where I will be working. The mini-grant supports an assistant and a consultant to help go through and analyze the interview transcripts, which has meant that I needed to be in the office every day to train and supervise them.

Needing to be at the office meant that spending 3-5 hours commuting every day no longer made sense. Josh and Bre were very generous to house this wayfaring stranger for three months, but it made sense to move closer to the office. So for the month of February, I have moved in with one of my Tanzanian co-workers, her sister, and her nephew in a small 2-bedroom cottage in a shared compound 10 minutes’ walk from my office. No more daladalas or 40 minute slogs through mud on rainy days! They have been incredibly hospitable to me, giving me my own room (I suspect that I am sleeping in one of their beds but they are too polite to tell me whose) and sharing meals. I have also learned a lot firsthand about how relationships work in Muslim families and the richness of Swahili culture that I had only read about before. Living with them is something of a cultural exchange: I made tacos for my adoptive family last night and my co-worker’s sister, Zoela, remarked that she has never even tried mzungu food before.

I’m heading home to the US in a few weeks for a two-week visit before jumping into the fieldwork component of my research here, so my days left in Dar are numbered. It’s a much-needed visit to see Matt, my family, my dog, and my friends; to take a few warm showers; to take in a lot of cheese, chocolate, and wine; and to gear up for the next 6 months. Before I head home, I’m trying to line up a couple of research assistants for my fieldwork, as well as the specific logistics for how I get to and how long I will stay in each village, how I will charge laptops with no electricity, how to approach interviewees, how to manage my project budget, and what kinds of training I need to do before launching headlong into data collection. Overwhelming, especially as I am anything but a natural manager of other people (and Matt can tell you that planning ahead is not my cup of tea). But I’m spurred on by the hope of finishing everything by my anniversary in August…

So that’s my long-winded update – I’d love to hear what all of my friends are up to!

Maintenance

It is a fairly effective rule of thumb when visiting a city in Africa and looking for a place to stay not to ask for the best hotel but for the newest one. If open for less than a year, even the most basic hotel can be a pleasant place to stay. But the quality seems to tend to deteriorate rapidly thereafter; once broken, items in the rooms are rarely fixed, and if so, creative jerry-rigged arrangements are the norm rather than the exception.

We had a new daladala station open here 6 weeks ago paved with laid bricks and with raised islands to channel the buses. I was paying more attention to it than usual on my way home the other day and noticed that most of the concrete curbs along the raised islands are already chipped, crumbling, or missing, the casualties of foot traffic and the weight of too-wide buses attempting to force their way through. Only faint vestiges of the yellow stripes on the curbs remain, having been completely rubbed away by a combination of bus tires, shoe soles, and the gritty dirt that seems to cover everything here, despite the best efforts of the tireless women who toil in the hot sun as street sweepers. The whole station looks as though it could have been built decades ago and neglected ever since. 6 weeks--somehow I find that a bit disturbing!

Paul Theroux in Dark Star Safari (a rather sensationalist and stereotyped account of an journey across Africa by a rather unlikable man, but somehow memorable) laments that the school library he helped to build and set up in Malawi as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s has been looted for its books and left to decay. Theroux was far from the first to observe that things tend to fall into disrepair in much of Africa over time, but the Western world has tended to be content to stereotype this tendency toward entropy as a consequence of some culturally imbedded laziness or carelessness. Few people ever bother to look beneath these easy—-but oversimplified and very often wrong—-explanations. Surely there are lazy and careless people here, but Tanzania is no more special in that regard than the rest of the world!

Many, many people work extraordinarily hard to maintain their property in Tanzania. I have seen spotlessly tidy homes here, where floors are swept daily, clothes are washed by hand (each article meticulously ironed), and every item dusted daily. Even the sandy ground in my housing compound is swept to clean up the debris each morning. I would argue that laziness is certainly not the culprit in most cases (indeed, any impression of laziness one gets is generally explained by high rates of unemployment and a general shortage of jobs). Some actions I have observed may seem careless on the surface—such as daladala drivers driving over curbs, or people discarding their trash in the streets—until one considers that the daladala driver’s livelihood depends on extricating himself from the traffic jam as quickly as possible to pick up more fares, even if that means driving over curbs, and the fact that Dar es Salaam has no trash pick-up service, few public trash cans, and most trash is tossed into heaps and burned.

A significant fraction of the challenge of maintenance in Africa must be attributable to the poor quality of many of the materials from which buildings are built and the hot, wet, muddy climate. I often wonder how different Tanzania, Africa, and much of the developing world might look if only good quality cement, asphalt, and high quality paint were the norm (or even available). It is not uncommon that a road can be paved and have crumbled to bits within a season. Certainly, building to last is not impossible: the tarmac airstrip at the airport is miraculously smooth, and there are some roads that seem to last for several years. But this takes incredible investments of engineering, inputs into importing or producing quality materials, and the advanced equipment to do a good job. In just a year or two, a new building’s exterior paint is likely to be faded, chalky, dirty, and covered in mildew. Large cracks in the concrete of even the fanciest and newest buildings here are not uncommon.

Paying for and seeing a construction project through here presents other feats of coordination. It can take months or years to obtain permits, build, and finish a structure here. Since credit is difficult to obtain and interest rates are extremely high, most people build homes as they can afford them, meaning that many homes languish as cinder-block shells for years, crumbling in the sun, before enough money materializes to afford a roof, a cement surface on the walls, doors, or screens/bars on the windows. It is no wonder that it is hard to tell the difference here between a home completed 2 years ago and a home completed 20 years ago – indeed, ground might have been broken for both in the same year!

Yet another aspect is economics. Put simply, maintenance costs money and time, and it is hard in a country where the average income is a few hundred dollars per year for many people to afford the time and money to invest in maintaining their homes and businesses. Buying powerful and effective cleaning products is expensive; it is no wonder that many cleaning solutions are used sparingly or diluted with water (as is paint, for that matter). Ultimately, for the lower and middle class here, the effort needed to survive–-whether survival takes the form of pounding cassava or working long hours in a low-paying, unskilled job–-can easily trump the priority of a fresh coat of paint on the walls or mending a cracked windowsill.

Surely even these musings hardly provide a comprehensive explanation for why maintenance is often a losing battle here in Tanzania, but it seems only fair to recognize people's extraordinary efforts to work with what they have.

Errors of omission

One very important part of my life has been largely missing from these posts. I left a life I love dearly at home to occupy a strange new world here alone, one that oscillates between exotic and absolutely exhausting. And one very important person in that life -- my husband -- can't be here with me. I have joked to my friends here that “When I said ‘I do,’ I didn’t mean I do want to live a year without my husband!” In an absolute sense, Matt’s and my being apart now is voluntary, in that of our own free will one of us could get on a plane anytime and rejoin the other. But the painful calculus that went into making this decision rendered it the most logical option. Staying the course on significant investments of time, money, and effort will hopefully help us gain enough freedom and flexibility to live simpler lives long-term. But that is not to say that every day apart isn’t tremendously painful after putting so much effort these last seven-plus years to build a life together. We are certainly fortunate to have the benefits of multiple forms of fast and affordable daily communication – email, Skype, phone, text messaging – but all of these fall far short of being together, and I would never recommend this arrangement to anyone else.

Thankfully, after a number of trial-related tribulations at work, Matt was able to visit me for the holidays, including miraculously making a 6-minute connection in Zurich after a delayed flight from New York just to get here on time. We stayed in Dar for a few days so he could see my life (meet my friends, visit my office, see where I lived), and thankfully the weather cooperated so he was able to see Dar at its muddiest as well as Dar at its hottest, both of which are endearing characteristics! On Christmas Eve, we escaped to Zanzibar for 8 days, spending Christmas in Stone Town and New Year’s Eve on the beach on the East Coast at Matemwe Beach Village, the same place we stayed when we visited Zanzibar 4 years ago while living in Ethiopia. The beaches, scenery, and architecture on Zanzibar are breathtaking and almost stereotypically an exotic paradise. It’s hard to leave once you get there [the pictures below give a glimpse].




The fusion of Arab, Indian, and mainland African influences, particularly in Stone Town, is fascinating and beautiful.


We had wonderful multi-course dinners each night in Stone Town, one served sitting on pillows at low tables in an atmospheric Zanzibari-style rooftop deck [picture below is me there with the Indian Ocean in the background], and a formal Christmas dinner in a hotel on the beach with the windows open to the seabreeze, candles in hurricanes, and a Swahili gospel choir performing outside. Being a seafood lover I was in heaven. It felt like a true escape from the pressures of both our lives.



In the planning stages, we had had high hopes to go snorkeling or diving, take a tour of Zanzibar’s famous spice plantations (especially cloves, vanilla, and cinnamon bark), see dolphins, or take a forest tour to see monkeys. As it happened we didn’t do any of those things at all, as we were more than content just being together unfettered by schedules or obligations. Our rooms in both places were peaceful, spacious retreats and we rarely ventured out except to eat or walk on the beach, content to spend the days together making up for time apart. Below is a picture of Matt looking more relaxed than he has been in years!




On one occasion when we did venture out, Matt got a very memorable, if injurious, massage in a beach banda (hut) by the hotel masseuse. Having had a startlingly similar experience at a hotel in Ethiopia, he promises to write a guest blog entitled “The Lesser-Known Perils of Massage in Developing Countries.” At Matemwe, we were fortunate to have the run of a huge Swiss Family Robinson-style bungalow suite with a lounge area with swing-beds, and a very imaginative layout including open-air toilet and shower and a complete absence of straight lines, including, as it happened, the posts that held the thatched roof on the whole structure, which torqued rather noticeably after some strong winds one night while we were there [picture below]!

We had a curious monkey come visit one evening, swinging through the posts of our thatched roof and clearly perturbed we were there. Matt promptly ceded control of our suite to the monkey, retreating to the (ceilinged) bedroom. Monkey 1, Matt 0.

I couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present than to have Matt visit me, and while he is no longer physically here with me in Tanzania, he needn’t be absent from this blog…

Whatever the opposite of a White Christmas is…

Better late than never, right? I have a backlog of blogs I've written but not had time to upload... and I am shamefully late on the Christmas greetings!

Some of you have asked about Christmas here in Tanzania. Context clues when Christmas is approaching are few but oddly garish in tropical snow-less countries like Tanzania. Thanks to healthy trade with India and South Africa (and increasingly, China), we suffered no shortage here this holiday season of gaudy foil banners, tinsel, lights, cheap plastic ornaments, and unattractive plastic foil giftwrap to herald the glorious occasion of Christ’s birth. The intense heat, palm trees, and mud conflict with most stereotypical images of the Christmas season, seemingly provoking the irresistible urge to set out brash, non-biodegradable reminders of the holiday season.

Examples? A stubby—and slightly off-putting— 4’ mzungu Santa Claus figurine greets me with an electronic wave and a goofy painted-on grin outside the grocery store next to my favorite café. An ice-cream bike (yes, the Good Humor Man doppelganger in Tanzania works sans van, vending slowly melting treats from a bike-mounted cooler) rides by, emitting a shrill synthesizer version of the first two lines of “Jingle Bells” (the verse, not the chorus) on a persistently annoying loop. Strings of multicolored lights are everywhere, wrapped on trunks of palm trees along shop roofs, anywhere where there is electricity and spare disposable income. Even though I have no love for artificial plastic trees, the spirit was infectious, and I admit I was tempted to buy a small one here, if other Tanzanians hadn’t beaten me to it and bought the stores out. The Christmas spirit is alive and well here in Tanzania. We just have mud instead of snow.

Bre and Josh hadn’t executed any grand plan to decorate the house for Christmas, so they were surprised one evening to hear a loud thud outside followed by a car speeding off down the road in the dark. When they went out to investigate, they found a large loose evergreen tree had been lobbed over the gate, a last resort for delivery by our friend Paul after numerous efforts to rouse our guard from his slumber had failed. So the house was filled with the fresh scent of some unknown genus of evergreen, the look completed with a couple of 99-cent stockings from Target (as above, think garish/gaudy/China) brought by my husband Matt who came to visit me here for the holidays. And the highlights of my Christmas Santa bag, ferried over by my American Santa Claus/husband were beef jerky, Velveeta, stretchy headbands from Target, old shirts of mine that still smelled like laundry at home, a french press, old magazines, The Office on DVD, Skittles, nice-smelling girly things and a jar of pesto from Trader Joe’s.

Matt and I left Christmas Eve for Zanzibar – he had brought along a string of LED lights, which converted the palm in our room into a stunning Christmas tree (picture below). The hotel where we were staying in Stone Town (Zanzibar Town) had also caught the spirit, baking star-shaped cookies that said “Merry Cris” and “Merry Christas.” Even though Zanzibar is overwhelmingly Muslim (>95%), many people we passed wished us a Merry Christmas, as if sensing how difficult it might be for us wazungu to remember in such an exotic venue. But walking the narrow, dark streets of Stone Town, noting the faded splendor and Arabian influence in the ancient buildings, we found it strangely easier to imagine Christmas in Bethlehem than in America. It struck us as ironic how Christmas imagery is incredibly Western-centric (or perhaps Northern-centric, given the evocative association with snow), given that the Middle East two millennia ago hardly conformed to the Norman Rockwell or Currier & Ives stereotypes that come to mind during the Christmas season, even here in Tanzania.



Wherever you were for the holidays, I hope the spirit of the season depended on something much deeper than decorations or weather patterns. (A belated) Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!