The past two months have been very busy! Last month was IST, In-service Training, Peace Corps-speak for when our training class reunites for two weeks of further technical training. We learned about grant writing, project design, technical info about malaria, HIV/AIDS, education and etc. It took place in Morogoro, a beautiful town at the base of a mountain, and it was a busy two weeks that, for better or worse, felt a lot like summer camp. Returning to my village was a little overwhelming…for one thing now I’m back to only partially being able to express myself in Kiswahili and passing my evenings by lamplight, but also now is when volunteers are supposed to be ready to start projects.

The first project I’m going to try is a permagardening project at the primary school. After meeting with the teachers to discuss the benefits of a permagarden project, the teachers were so enthusiastic and supportive that they said, “ok this is great, we’ll start tomorrow.” Woah woah woah…hang on a second! My counterpart and I had to rein them in and explain that we all need a little bit of time to prepare and organize the students first. It was exhilarating that they wanted to run with it, but woah, guys! Pole pole.

The World Food Program provides corn meal, beans and fortified millet porridge to my primary school for free, so the students have food to eat every day, but they don’t get vegetables. They get calories, but they still lack nutrition. Also, a few people in my village have said that vegetables just can’t grow in our soil. I made a demonstration permagarden at my house, and vegetables indeed can grow in our soil. So the permagarden will teach about nutrition, soil health and vegetable cultivation, and hopefully also demonstrate to others that with a few soil amendments and a bio-intensive garden design, they can grow beautiful vegetables for their families and for sale.

I am happy to report that bees have moved into both my hives! I haven’t been into the hives yet to see how they’re doing, but I see them coming and going, way up there in the trees. Next month we will lower them by the cover of night and get some honey and I can’t wait! Next month is when the rainy season ends. The beekeeping schedule here still confuses me, considering it is the opposite to beekeeping in the US or Europe, where we harvest honey when the environment is green. Here the honey season is when the environment starts to dry up.

It is interesting to experience a rainy season where the rain has such an obvious impact on every day life. For the entire month of February it didn’t rain at all. Many farmers’ corn fell over and was ruined. It was so sad to see the plants’ leaves start to brown, the pumpkins’ leaves collapsed like a closed umbrella (because after all what use is an umbrella with no rain?) And when it finally did rain, in March, the farmers were in their fields almost immediately, trying to replant their ruined fields of corn with sunflowers to try and make up for the loss.

I went to a nearby Gogo village for the Easter holiday with some friends from my village, and I got a new Kigogo name there. In my village I am “Rain” because I arrived with the rains. In this other village, I am matika, or “When the corn is yea-high [holding hand to hip-height]” in Kigogo. I am fascinated by the specificity of certain words that some languages have. As far as this suburban-raised gal knows, in English, corn is corn from the kernel to when it’s grilled on the cob. In Kiswahili, there is a word for a fresh coconut that is mostly water and a different word for a coconut that is dried and mostly meat. A different word for cooked and uncooked rice. There is a name for each individual type of ant but no word for a generic ant. And there are many different kinds of ants here. I have only been able to commit siafu to memory, probably just because those are the ones that bite. But these differences are becoming more important as I become increasingly conversant in Kiswahili, and as I see that ants of various kinds are just more prominent in every day life--at least one day a week a temporary river of ants courses through my house, each time in a new location. Similarly, there are many names for aunts as well. A paternal aunt is shangazi and a maternal aunt is mama mkubwa, also reflecting the environment here in Tanzania.

I recently installed my two beehives! And by that I mean I oversaw the installment of my hives. In order to do this, one must climb a tree, so I enlisted a kijana (youth) to undertake this task for me. Most beekeepers over 30 enlist a kijana to do the more athletic aspect of beekeeping in Tanzania, but even though I am still in my (now late, ack!) 20's, I get special permission because I am a wimp. These hives were put up in a tree that is about a 5 minute walk from my house, on the edge of the forest.

The traditional hive--a hollowed out log that will be fastened together. The bees will build "burr" comb (what beekeepers call wild comb) attached to one side of the log. When it is time to harvest, beekeepers open the hive and cut out all of the comb, brood included.

Top bar hive. The sticker says "We should protect forests for our own development" And the picture has a beehive hanging from a tree.

The inside of the top bar hive. These are just wooden slats. The bees will build walls of comb on each of these bars. Harvesting from a hive like this, it is easier to just take honey and leave the brood. This is the type of hive that I am trying to promote because it is healthier for the bees and it should help increase honey production.

The traditional hive, fastened shut with wire. There are several holes for potential entrances, the one on the end and a few on the side.

A kijana (youth) climbed the tree to install my beehives. They are installed in trees because there are many critters in the forest who also think that honey is delicious. Monkeys are known perpetrators, and honey badgers are particularly notorious (for not giving a... : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg)

Kosma securing the top bar hive to a branch and hoisting it into the tree.

Securing the top bar hive to the tree.

Kosma getting the traditional hive ready to be hoisted up into the tree.

The kijana installing the traditional hive, the top bar hive installed.

So now that my beehives are installed, I just wait for bees to move in. If you build it, they will come. Unfortunately, bees are more likely to swarm if there is rain, and we haven't had a good rain in more than a month, so it might take a little while for the bees to move in. Considering that the hives are installed in a tree and also that African honey bees are notoriously aggressive, this makes performing hive maintenance a bit more of an ordeal. Which is probably why not a lot of people do perform hive maintenance. Most beekeepers access their hives only to take honey and only at night.

People often ask me about the Africanized honey bee--the "killer bees." Africanized bees are a hybrid of European honey bees and bees that are coincidentally from Tanzania that were accidentally released in Brazil. They are more aggressive than African bees, but African bees are still very aggressive. In fact, sadly, a man was reportedly killed by bees in Tanzania just last month.

The big months for harvesting honey begin next month until August. There will be more pictures and more news soon hopefully, once the girls find their way over to their new homes.

As I have mentioned before, house visits make up most of my days of late, and there are two customs relating to the house visit that I find particularly charming: pokea and sindikiza. To pokea is to receive someone, and in this context, it means relieving someone of whatever they are carrying. They will receive a sack of groceries if you happened to have hit the veggie stand before visiting a friend, or just your notebook if it’s all you’re carrying. Most helpfully, often if I’m walking to my house carrying a lot of stuff, someone will pokea me and help me all the way home. To sindikiza is to accompany a visitor part of the way. At the end of a visit, a host will gather whatever they pokea’ed you and escort you on your way home. When they have decided they have sindikiza’ed you enough, they will hand off your things—groceries, notebook, what-have-you, and wish you well on your way. Some people will just walk some 20 feet, and some people will send a child to do the sindikiza’ing for them. Some people have sindikiza’d me almost all the way home, as a very kind gesture of friendship. Then I feel the need to sindikiza them since they’ve gone so far from their home, and I can imagine this going on and on and neither of us ever gets home.

Most mornings I have taken to jogging into the fields along a dirt path. Not too many people live out that way, but I often pass a few people going to their fields or to a neighboring village. The other day I passed a Gogo man of about 40 years who was walking, dressed in the typical Gogo fashion: red plaid cloak draped about him, wooden staff in hand, sandals made out of repurposed old car tires. After a morning greeting, he asked me where I was going, and I breathlessly replied, “Not too far!” He said, “You’re doing exercise?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “I see.” And without any other words, car tire sandals and all, he ran to catch up with me and he sindikiza’ed me on my jog. He sindikiza’ed me for more than 15 minutes until I had to turn around to go home. A few days later on another jog, I was on my way home when I passed a few schoolgirls carrying buckets and school things. One of them also wordlessly decided to run with me, and the others joined. Along the way, each schoolgirl that we passed joined us as if there was some tacit obligation, and by the time we got to the school, I had a pack of 15 girls sindikiza’ing me.

Finally I got another cat! It is a nice kitten that sits on my lap and purrs and it hasn’t run away yet. I am very grateful for these things, but I am sort of disappointed that it hasn’t really been doing its job. I’m still finding mice droppings in the corners, and in an even graver lapse in felinity, the cat failed to alert me to the 3-foot snake in my kitchen last week. The cat was sleeping in the other room when I came across the black snake slithering amongst my coffee mugs and cans of oatmeal (still no furniture). I ran, terrified, out my front door to get a neighbor, but when the neighbor came with his wooden staff to kill it, it was nowhere to be found. After an extensive search, I left my house still terrified, and not long after, students said they saw the snake leave my courtyard, and at which point they ID’d it as the spitting cobra. I kept on thinking of the turn of phrase people use when you’re looking and looking for something and it’s right in front of you—“If it was a snake you’d be dead by now.”

That night and every night since, I slept with my wooden staff, and now I enter every room with my head first to survey before stepping. Even so, I am often tricked by things like backpack straps, shoelaces. Just this morning, my heart did a cartwheel when I walked into the kitchen to find a serpentine white line curving across the floor like a sine wave, like a perfect negative of that haunting black cobra. Upon investigation, at the end of the twisting trail I found a half-empty bag of salt with little rodent teeth marks. I don’t know what a mouse would want with a bag of salt, but it’s just more proof that that cat is not doing its job.

Last week I gave myself a haircut, my first haircut in ten years that wasn’t given to me by my sister. Since I have yet to see a mirror, I still don’t know how it looks but I am sure that my blind attempt at a coiffe would make sister balk. Beyond not having a mirror, my house is still very unfurnished. I have some orders in at the carpenter’s that are already tardy, but I have low expectations for any timeliness in this country anyway. I also still have a mouse problem.

I got a cat after one week here. I walked across the village and chatted with some old Gogo ladies, and after about 10 minutes one of the ladies slipped into another room in the hut and came out with a hissing and mewling sack. It was about a 10 minutes walk home and once in the house, the cat timidly made its way out of the bag (there is a pun here somewhere but I’m not up to it right now.) It seemed distressed at the lack of furniture to hide behind, but it quickly found a nook between my bed frame and mattress. I fetched it some fresh cow’s milk that it didn’t touch, and I eventually went to bed with the kitten hiding behind the mattress. I woke up in the morning and lit the stove for tea, came back inside and the cat was nowhere to be found. I’m not that surprised that the cat would run away, it was a pretty old kitten, but I am dumbfounded as to how the cat escaped. The door from my house to my courtyard was open for all of 2 minutes as I lit the stove, and even so I should have seen a cat darting out. And the only way out of my courtyard is the drain in the shower. The cat could have fit through it, but it is a pretty long tube, and I’m convinced this kind of jailbreak would have required some calculated premeditation. Now three weeks later, I still wake up to the sound of the mouse eating giant millipedes behind my desk, and I still expect any day to see this cat come sauntering out of its hiding. If I ever do, I will call it Houdini.

I’m trying to learn basic Kigogo and Kisandawe, the two main languages that are spoken here. Of course everyone speaks Kiswahili as well, but it really tickles people if I greet them in their tribal language. Kisandawe is truly a click language, and I can really crack people up when I attempt to make those impossible sounds.

A lot of my job right now is to wander around the village and talk with new people. This often means going up to a house and saying “Hodi! Hodi!” I don’t knock, I just say these words and if people are about, they say, “Karibu!” to welcome me in. If they are cooking, they will invite me to eat. If it isn’t mealtime, they will likely send a kid out to buy a soda for me. Or, if I am visiting a beekeeper, they will bring me a bowl of honey. The first time this happened, I didn’t really know what to do—about ½ a liter of honey and a spoon! That’s gluttonous, but if I only take a few spoonfuls, not only might it be rude, but the precious stuff might go to waste. Well, after a few bites, I wasn’t worried about any of that because I knew I could easily eat the whole bowl. I had been told that my Peace Corps service would change me forever; I had no idea it would just be Type II Diabetes.

A particularly industrious beekeeper had me taste the honey from nyuki wadogo, little bees, which I think are some species of dwarf honey bee. The plastic water bottle hissed releasing pressure as the beekeeper opened it, which would normally be a red flag alerting me to Something I Shouldn’t Eat, but being a profligate lover of honey, I sallied forth. It had a texture and buttery sweetness like warm caramel, a slightly tart taste like an apple, and it was curiously bubbly with carbonation. It might have been slightly alcoholic. It was delicious.

Last week I made an attempt to climb the tallest mountain in my beautiful skyline. (I told everyone I wanted to go in order to see the surroundings but really I just wanted to try and catch a glimpse of the chewi a.k.a. leopard) Unfortunately we departed too late in the afternoon, so we didn’t make it all the way to the top. News of my excursion spread, as all news does in the village: like wildfire. Now when some people ask me about my plans, they’ll say, “Are you free Thursday? Or are you going to go climb another mountain?”

When I go to visit houses, I try to ask them survey questions about what problems they are facing and what sort of work they would like to see in their village. This is an important yet frustrating exercise because their suggestions are very valid, but often too big for me to help with, which I think this is a common struggle at the start for Peace Corps volunteers. For instance, many people want me to help their group get a tractor, or access the international honey market while circumventing the price-slashing middleman in Dar es Salaam. Some of the other things they suggest are very feasible, like setting up beekeeping workshops, creating other income generating projects, and etc. Nonetheless, I am trying to do research on all these ideas so that I can tell them just how realistic the possibilities are.

What a relief to have passed the one-week mark of being at my site, and not be evacuated! It has been a refreshingly uneventful introduction to my new village. For whatever reason, I did not bring as many things to my site as I should have. I have a generously sized house with 3 rooms, but only enough things to fill ½ of one room. My first two days were spent evicting the spider and dust bunny squatters—never before had I mopped and swept walls. I also mopped the floor twice but it still doesn’t shine. Since I didn’t have any charcoal for my stove, let alone any matches, my first night’s dinner was peanut M&M’s. Finally on my own without Mama Halima, I felt like one of those poor freshman who discovers they don’t actually know how to take care of themselves in the least, they helplessly just need a mom to feed, water and clean them. The fact that the peanut M&Ms were sent to me from my dear real mom might have underscored this feeling. Don’t worry, I promptly got charcoal and matches the next day, and have since been managing, in my own way, to take care of myself.

My village is nestled into some low mountains Northeast of the city of Dodoma. In a breathtaking country like Tanzania, I’m sure there are more beautiful sites than mine, but I sure do think my village is pretty. There is a spring that is apparently full of water dependably, a blessing that is unusual for this region—many other villages have to dig in empty streambeds to get murky water. There is also a little stream (might be better called a glade? It doesn’t really move…) that I have to cross every day to go to the village, and I am thankful for the well-constructed footbridge that (for the most part) keeps me from getting worms in my feet. My house is part of the school’s compound, so my neighbors are primary school teachers and their families. A little further up the road is a Catholic missionary, where several sisters and two priests live, preach, and run a health dispensary. Behind my house sits the back of a mountain and just a wall of forest. One of the sisters, while walking me to my house after a visit, gave me a friendly warning to be aware of the leopard that lives in those woods. She insisted that it’s much more aggressive than a cheetah or lion (someone want to google it and prove this nun wrong?) I don’t think she realized how much she completely freaked me out with that friendly warning. Now I both really want to see it and hope I never ever ever see it.

The whole village actually seems to have undergone a transformation since my arrival because that is also when the rains started. Everything is green and vibrant, all the trees have leafed out, and the fields are a rich rusty brown with moisture. The predominant tribe here is Gogo, and some of the villagers have given me the name Mwamvula, which means “rain” in Kigogo. I find it delightfully cheesy. There are also Maasai and Sandawe tribes here, but they haven’t given me any Kimaasai or Kisandawe names yet.

And beekeepers! Many beekeepers! There is a women’s group, as well as another coed group. All around the village there are towering baobob and acacia trees with their expansive domes of foliage. The beekeepers climb these trees to hang hollowed out logs up on the branches, which the bees eventually move into. The bigger trees have several of these bee cartridges in it, well-disguised amongst the branches. The beekeepers only seem to visit their hives when they are ready to harvest honey, and then they seem to cut out everything including the brood, basically evicting the bees. I would really like to see this, because I have a hard time imagining destroying a hive this way. The hollowed-out log design in itself makes it difficult to access the hive without destroying it. These are all things that I am going to try to develop—increased knowledge about the biology of the bee, a shift towards hive maintenance instead of hive robbing, which probably means a shift towards top bar hives, all of which will result in increased honey production and more sustainable beekeeping practices. I haven’t done any beekeeping here yet, though, this is all what I have gathered from talking to people. Once I do get to work with the bees, I will have a much clearer idea of the situation.

The beekeeping should be my primary focus for work, but I will also start teaching an environment class at the secondary school when the term begins in mid January. I will teach mainly about deforestation, permagardening, soil and water conservation. The role of an Environment Peace Corps Volunteer is a very fluid one…I don’t technically have any obligations, so for some people, I think it is easy to feel aimless. I can decide what I want to do, how I want to spend my days, so I will only be as productive as the projects I line up and carry through. Right now my only job is to make an assessment of the village, get awesome at Kiswahili and integrate into my new community, and the projects will come after I have accomplished these things to at least some degree.

To sign off with: my first day, as I was cleaning my house and some of my bags had been partially unpacked, my two little neighbors, 3 and 6 years old came over to see who their new neighbor was. They were fascinated by the few objects that I had out: a tin box with a Victorian painting on it, a tape player, my shampoo… I knew what a situation like this would bring but I didn’t want to kick these kids out right away when I was just sweeping. Well they wanted to touch and play with everything and it was infuriating because I would be sweeping and turn to find that they had spilled my shampoo trying to figure out what it was. I’d yell at them, but it went on--they unzipped a bag, pulled things out, saying what’s this? They picked up the toilet paper and asked, “what’s this?” I said it’s paper for the toilet. They were shocked, you do what with it in the toilet?? (Tanzanians, like a lot of people in the world, use their left hand and water for their toilet needs) I got cross with them, “NO! DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING! THESE ARE NOT FOR PLAYING.” They would look really sorry, but then inevitably they’d continue their inspections once their curiosity got the better of them once again. I was sweeping the walls when I heard a gasp behind me, and turned to see the little 3-year-old, horrified, holding a pair of my underwear. She quickly dropped it and they stopped looking through my stuff.

Last night brought a huge rain with thunderclaps and lightning--a mild storm that wouldn’t get a weathered Midwestern gal too excited. But this Midwestern gal had never before weathered a 3-hour storm under a tin roof. From 2am to 5:30 am it sounded like there was a damned Metra train passing over my bed! This evening it is pouring again, and the rain sets everyone in motion collecting the water. Apparently Mama and my sisters did this last night, too, but I couldn’t hear the activity over the racket of the rain: Outside the back door hangs a gutter that empties into a plastic bucket. As the buckets fill up, we fire-line them into the house, emptying them into a large drum. Once that is full, we fill the buckets (most Tanzanian homes have many, many buckets) and once those are full we fill up pots, and once those are full and we can’t find anything else to fill with water, we watch the rain. When you typically carry all your water on your head from the well, the gallons flowing freely from the gutter across the ground and no empty buckets to catch them can be a poignant sight. I was called to my bath this evening during the downpour and Mama Halima made me take an umbrella for the walk to the shower, my bathwater being a bucket of freshly harvested rainwater.

Only a few days ago, I returned to my host family in Tanga from a trip to the southern highlands where for one week I shadowed a volunteer at her site. It was beautiful in the small village just north of Njombe, with weather in the 70s, gorgeous amaryllis blooming alongside footpaths, and a confusing coexistence of pine trees and avocado trees. It was a welcome respite from the heat and the demanding training schedule.

The highlight of the week in Njombe was our excursion to the “traditional forest,” an ample patch of native forest in the middle of acres of white teak tree farms. We walked 45 minutes to meet a man who would guide us through the forest. We waited an hour for him, and when it was suggested that we just go in without him, the volunteer’s Tanzanian friend from the village said, “oh no, no, no. We can’t go in without him. The spirits will choke us, because they don’t know us.” She said there were miracles that happen in the forest. Ohhhh, well no one had told me it was a magical forest! Well a miracle did in fact occur—the guide showed up after all! And he was wonderful. Upon entering the forest, we had to remove our shoes and we walked to the trees where decedents from three families perform rituals and make sacrifices to honor and appease the dead. The huge tree was wrapped in black fabric, draped in black and white beads, and there were three-legged stools and various traditional tools gathered around it. He went on to point out the trees that had previously been used for worship. They were all massive and fallen on the ground—they have been using this forest for worship for over 800 years. Leaving the forest, we saw the black chickens that are reportedly endemic to this traditional forest; also they are magic.

Then he took us to some caves where people “a long long long time ago” hid during wars. It was an impressive network of chambers with spring water running through it. It was pretty fun scrambling through the caves until I realized that the rocks were so soft and cushy because they were covered in bat guano.

So… my site will be in the Dodoma region! It is in Central Tanzania, Northeast of Tanzania’s capitol, Dodoma. This is a semi-arid region, and many communities here struggle with water issues. I’ve heard that there’s actually a river in my village, so I don’t really know what to expect. I am very excited that there is a women’s beekeeping group with which I will hopefully be working! Can’t wait to report back on what my village is like.

Swearing in is in one week, and now I have to say sad farewells to Mama Halima and the rest of the family.

I don’t remember who it was, but before leaving, somebody told me that Kiswahili is an easy language to learn. I wish I could remember who that was, because I have a noogie for that person. Kiswahili is hard. Case in point: there are several different ways to say “it” depending on what class the noun falls into. Some classes are logical, like living creatures, trees, or (most) fruit, but others you must simply remember where they belong. For each noun class, there is a different way to say “it,” “of,” “my,” “which,” “that,” “all,” and etc., plus the adjective agreement, and it’s different for singular and plural—It’s enough to just make you sick! So whoever it was that said Kiswahili is easy, please feel free to come forward here and we can have a pity party for me in the comments section.

I complain about the noun classes, but it is nice that there is no formal/informal--“you” is the same for a child as it is for an elder. But for anyone older than you, you should first greet him or her with “shikamoo!” to express respect. This is for elders, yes, but also people who are even 5 years or so older than you. The correct response is “marahaba!” Good kids will say this to me all the time, so walking to and from my house, I am usually saying “Marahaba! Marahaba! Marahaba!” because there are a lot of good kids in my neighborhood. I was really tickled to read that “shikamoo!” literally means “I touch your feet!” and “marahaba!” means “Delightful!” So, I stroll through my neighborhood saying, “Delightful! Delightful! Delightful!”

Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out who should be shikamoo’d. A lot of Tanzanians look younger than they are. But it’s easy to razz age-phobic Americans with this custom--I bristled when a fellow trainee, 23 years old, greeted me with “shikamoo!” Not delighted.

Before coming here, I was familiar with “African time,” meaning that you might schedule a meeting for 8 and people don’t show up until 10. Well, I’m pretty sure that Tanzanians do read clocks on “Africa time” but they also read them in “Kiswahili time.” Here at 4 degrees latitude, the days are split pretty evenly between hours of daylight and darkness. So at 6am, the day starts, and so does the Kiswahili clock. 7am is 1 in the morning. 8 is 2 and so on and so forth, until 7pm when it becomes 1 in the evening. So if you ask someone what time it is at 4:30pm, they will say it is 10:30 in the afternoon. It is taking some getting used to.

So, I should probably take this opportunity to brag about some of the cool stuff I’ve done during training. At my homestay village’s primary school, a few trainees and I led students in building a compost pile, and on another occasion, a permagarden. PC Tanzania has a permagarden specialist on staff, who gave us an excellent training. It is an awesome design of double-dug beds, berms, swales, and holes that make for a soil and water-conserving, high-food-yielding, pretty-good-looking-nutrition-machine. Hopefully I can get some pictures up here. Mama Halima wanted one, and we wanted more practice at building one, so we made one for her, too. The damn chickens promptly rooted through our terraforming, but I was so happy that the next day Mama Halima and Fatouma spent the hot afternoon building a fence around it! Mama Halima was really interested in the idea of redirecting and conserving water. Also, I showed my family how to make a mosquito repelling lotion with neem tree leaves. Fatouma is planning on making more and selling it. Today is Thanksgiving, and I am feeling thankful for my families--my family at home, whose love and support I am so grateful for, and also my Tanzanian host family for their effort and patience.

Coming up next…the big reveal: where is Nora going to live for the next two years? Site announcements are on Saturday!

Slowly, the Kiswahili is coming. Sometimes the conversations go really smoothly, but in others I miss a lot of information. The kinds of conversations that I’m really good at are usually some variation of: “Do you like oranges? Yes, I like oranges. I like eggs. Do you like eggs? We like oranges and eggs.” The conversations that still need improvement…are most of them. A common failed conversation is one in which Mama Halima tries to explain to me what we are going to do later that day. Last Sunday was Id al Haj, a day of celebration and feasting in Islam, and apparently my Mama wanted to take me to visit her sister in a nearby village. I got the part about visiting a sister, but I thought we were just walking across the village and I was very confused when she was squeezing us onto a crowded dala dala (bush taxi)—I didn’t have any money for the ride and I had no idea where we were going. Or better yet: my first weekend at homestay, I thought we were going to the farm but I ended up at a funeral. The moment of realization was wonderful… “ahhh,” I said to myself, “that’s why Mama made me wash my feet and wear this fancy outfit.”

At the funeral, we joined a group of women sitting in the shade outside a house where the deceased’s close family was seated. Food was brought to all 50 or so women. The mood was light, women were chatting and laughing. The men were seated somewhere where I couldn’t see them—this was a traditional Muslim ceremony. Eventually some men came, entered the house then came out carrying a coffin, causing a wave of wailing. Suddenly the mood was sorrowful, the women around me were crying silently, while the people closest to the house wailed. I felt ashamed of having chatted so cheerily just minutes before. I had never met her, but I was sad for the 30-year-old woman; she had died of malaria and had young children.

My Mama said she died of homa, which means fever and is usually malaria. This brings up an interesting issue about data on malaria deaths and HIV/AIDS. I am not saying that she had HIV; I have no idea what her status was. But I asked my teacher about this event, and this was the discussion that it led to: when someone dies from AIDS in Tanzania, this is rarely if ever openly admitted, and they usually say that it was homa, even though it was really AIDS. So if homa is malaria sometimes, but other times it is any number of other things including AIDS, this issue not only demonstrates the HIV stigma problem in Tanzania but also the difficulty of quantifying the malaria and HIV epidemics.

In my last post I promised that I would write about 3 weddings and a funeral, which, I must admit, was misleading. There was only one wedding, but I went to three big parties for this one wedding. The first party, the “kitchen party” was for women only. The bride sat at the front of the room, looking like a fabulous 80s prom queen. She was not supposed to smile, but every once in awhile she couldn’t hold back a smile as different groups of ladies travelled up to the bride to deliver gifts for her new kitchen, dancing all the way. A poignant moment was when her mom was gifted with new kangas, (basically skirts) Ladies danced them up to her and wrapped her in them until she was buried under so many kangas you couldn’t see her face. When they took the kangas off of her you could see that she was crying.

The next day, again only women gathered outside the groom’s family’s house to dance to the traditional drum music in the late afternoon. Guests brought firewood on their heads, offering them to the family by entering the dance circle and dancing a little, then removing the cumbersome load from their heads. The mother of the groom eventually took a seat in the center of the circle, other women close to the family sat around her in a half-moon-shape. A very short very old lady blew a train whistle in an unpredictable but very danceable rhythm as she bounced around inside the circle. Three women from the family of the groom came out of the house and danced, shaking their butts (in kiswahili a big butt is called a wowowo) in the mother’s and other ladies’ faces. This dancing is similar to bounce if you’re familiar with the American dance. They would go back into the house, then return, this time to shake their butts even more in their faces, eventually even lifting their skirts over the mother’s head and shaking their wowowo’s way up in her face. Women here are generally very conservative, but get some women at a party where there are no men, and they will really let loose. I knew this already because I had seen these women really dance at the women-only kitchen party the night before. But what they did next, I could not expect at all. The ladies came out of the house, this time wearing only underwear. One lady had a corncob between her legs, and they dance-acted the many ways to do it! My jaw nearly hit the ground as I realized what I was witnessing (I was like, wo(wowo)). I feel a bit guilty writing this here, like I’m telling the ladies’ ancient secret, but it’s too good not to share.

Later that night was the send-off party, which is a party for the bride and her maid of honor. It was basically the same in that presents are danced up to her and the mother is wrapped in kangas, but this time men were there, too. There was constant spotlit video of the event being projected live onto a huge screen, which can make someone (me) uncomfortable if they don’t like being videotaped (I don’t) and if they are in the front row on the center isle (I was) and if they are for some reason being treated as an honored guest (I Don’t know.) After some delicious food, there was some more dancing that night. Then there was another party the following night, a dance party for both men and women. Finally, the couple got married the next morning in a traditional Muslim ceremony. I couldn’t even go to the actual wedding ceremony although I made it to all the other celebrations, but I heard that it was very traditional compared to the 80s prom-ness of the kitchen party and send-off party.

This post is very long! Thanks for reading and I appreciate your comments a lot!

I wrote this a week ago and I am currently working on a new post--coming up next: 3 weddings and a funeral.

Two and a half weeks in Tanzania! The first 5 days were spent at a convent/hostel in Dar es Salaam, where we sat through a bunch of Peace Corps administrative sessions that seemed oddly familiar… and a quick and dirty intro to Kiswahili. Then we took a bus to Tanga district, about 5 hours north of Dar, where I was dropped off at my host family’s house in a small village between Tanga and Muheza. Our training class of 40 was split up into groups of 5 or so, each group placed in their own village and each trainee with a family of their own. We five will have class together with the same instructor for the entire training. Luckily I got a great teacher, a capital-L-Lady named Rahema as well as a very compatible group.

My host mother is a widow named Halima. Mama Halima has five children. Fatouma, 19-years-old, lives at home, as well as Jeska, the 11-year-old granddaughter of Halima’s son. They are exceptionally patient and helpful. I love making them laugh, which I can do without even trying to be funny. Just cutting an onion is like the most hilarious thing they have ever seen, not because I’m doing it funny, but just because I am cutting an onion. So they almost died laughing when they were teaching me body parts and I pointed out the only body part I knew at the time—the butt. What? It’s “tako” like “taco al pastor,” so now go ahead and try to forget that tako means butt in Kiswahili.

The tin-roofed house has two bedrooms, a pantry, and a living room. No glass in the windows here, just metal bars, a screen if you’re lucky. The toilet and shower are outside, and although there is no running water, I do have electricity! We listen to Tanzanian radio and tapes all the time. Sometimes American country music I’ve never even heard of comes on and I don’t like that as much. There are banana, papaya, orange, and coconut trees within spitting distance of the back yard, and I enjoy the fruit from all of them with every meal. Last year in Niger, getting my hands on a banana every other day was lucky. Here I’m actually having too many bananas. I always have a banana with breakfast and the other day I had boiled bananas for lunch, and boiled bananas for dinner. That is too many bananas, and I won’t go into why at this time.

My village for training is in rolling hills between the mountain and the ocean, so the climate is very tropical. I am dripping in sweat the whole day long. But it’s okay because, you know, my mama makes me shower at least twice a day. I wake up at 5:30 am to the sound of Mama Halima banging on my door, hollering “NORA! KUOGA!” : “NORA! BATHE!” For the first few days when my Kiswahili was limited to only a few greetings, you can imagine I was pretty frazzled trying to find the words to say “yes, I’m up, I’m coming!” when really I just wanted to say “oh hell no!” I was pretty amused on my first night, when I was going outside to brush my teeth, Mama Halima took my toothbrush and toothpaste from my hands and showed me how I should brush my teeth. I have had to relearn almost everything the Mama Halima way…how to sweep, how to eat an orange, how to pour tea, how to wear my hair…how to wash my clothes (but that is something I was and still am bad at anyway--I’ll be walking around with soap-stiff clothes for awhile). Several times now Mama Halima has told me to fix my hair, but I haven’t yet figured out how to say, “mama there’s no fixing this mess” in Kiswahili.

I give mama a hard time for being a micromanager, but really she’s been great. Not only has she been an invaluable help for my Kiswahili, but she also spoils me. She warms up my bathwater every morning, she serves me delicious food, she teaches me how to cook, she buys me sodas, and she finishes washing my laundry when she sees how terrible I am at it. Today she took me on an excursion to her farm field, about a mile from the house. Dennis the neighbor came with us, and I realized why he was invited soon after we arrived at the field—he promptly climbed a 40ish foot coconut palm and started sending coconuts down. We gathered the coconuts and sat under a mango tree cracking open coconut after coconut with a machete, drinking the milk and scraping out the meat with a spoon fashioned out of coconut shell. I was delirious with delight, and meanwhile Dennis the neighbor grabbed a palm leaf and quickly wove a basket. We put coconuts in the basket and I carried it home on my head.

One third of the way through training, there will be more stories from Nyumbani Mama Halima to come. Please leave any comments or questions!