90 days left. I suddenly got a hankering for a pizza today. Naturally, this is not something that can easily be gotten here, nor is there an easily gettable substitute good. This is really fueling my desire to get home. Just the sheer number of awesome things to eat and things to do/watch/listen to is starting to boggle my mind.

I often get the desire for good American food. Usually I can approximate this with a pasta or chili or mashed potatoes. But it occasionally comes to that moment when I feel the perfect combination of severe flavor deficiency and total abject cooking laziness. The worst is when it hits in between meals. Most weeks I spend a lot of time hanging out at friends' houses and eating dinner with them. While none of them cooks a good pizza, the food is good (in a different way). Yet, when that trifecta of desire, laziness and timing hits, I feel like I'm in this wasteland of foodage. That's when the homesickness hits. Going to Little Caesar's and getting one of those $5 hot and ready pizzas. Damn. That's my plan for day #2 when I get home.

* * *

I've finally come to codify the thing I dislike most about life here: the passivity of the women. This is the number one complaint about life I have here, because I see how it permeates so much of what sucks.

Firstly, my students. This became painfully obvious one day last week. I've been doing night classes for some of the dormitory students, since they asked me to teach them how to speak English. Except getting them to speak is a complete pain in the ass. I constantly have to force them to answer questions, and getting them to volunteer to speak, or actually be active, is far more of a pain than I can handle. I spend most of my mornings and afternoons forcing kids to pay attention, to write notes, to attempt a few words in English; no way no how do I want to spend my free time in the evenings doing the same thing. Contrast this with the boys: most of the boys don't give a crap about learning, but at least they are active about it. Then there are the few that actually try, and they are great. These students ask questions, and participate, and are actually active in the learning process. They rock. With the girls, even the best female students, they are incredibly passive and insist that everything be explained and done for them. And that is not the way you learn a language.

Then there are the bad teenage boys. They piss me off to no end as well. Cocky little...I can't finish this sentence in anything remotely approaching a civilized tongue. And I think part of the reason that these boys are such little shits is because the girls are so passive, that in many ways it facilitates/encourages the boys to be more aggressive. As they become more aggressive, they become self-assured, but their self-confidence is a cancer that can't stop growing, until every worthless little turd thinks he is the next Mick Jagger. And then I have to come in and try to teach them. Did I mention I have 90 days left?

Lastly, my own epic failure at trying to get a girlfriend. In America, the theory goes like this: meet a girl I think is attractive and cool, ask for her number or ask her go to dinner, she responds in the affirmative or the negative. Done. Simple, clean, American. If a girl says no, I do not think she is being coy, or making me work harder, or other such inane crap, it just means that she isn't into me. Then we get to the Tanzanian style of asking a girl out. Which is: pester the living crap out of her until her choices are to either kill you or agree to your sexual advances. My problem is that I cannot reconcile approach #1 with living in land #2. To me, a woman should be mature enough to make her own choices, and not worry about the appearances she gives to other people because of those choices.

Now, my mom had a good point about why the women are so passive; violence against women is much more common here, to the point where it is far more accepted here than in America. That is not to say that people view such violence as acceptable; rarely have I seen people say such things. Rather, there is nowhere near the stigma or intolerance for violence against women that exists in the states. So the women here have little choice when it comes to the sexual advances of the men: they either say yes, or say no and subject themselves to annoyance and possible assault at the hands of the men.

Seen in this light, I feel even less desire in trying to pursue a woman here. At all times, in the back of my mind, will be the thought, 'did she say yes because she was afraid of me?'

Thank god I will be soon returning to the land of self-confident (at least relatively speaking) women. And pizza.

Wow. I came back from Tanga last weekend, via daladala as usual. Typically it's an hour long ride. As we are going, we get a flat tire. As we are repairing that flat tire, we notice that the front wheel also has a flat. So we wait for an hour until another car comes with some extra spares. We eventually replace that tire, and keep going. About 20 minutes later, that tire gets a flat again. Luckily, the guys had thought ahead, and the car had brought us an extra spare, so we were able to fix that flat too. Then, not 5 minutes later, we get another flat, on the same wheel. 4 flats on a 1 hour trip. Except that it took us 3 hours this time. Really can't wait for American transportation.

* * *

We are currently in the month of Ramadhan. This means that all the Muslims have to fast from sun-up to sun-down. This has some unfortunate side effects. Most notably, a huge percentage of restaurants and business are never open, or only open for short periods. Combine this with the typical Tanzanian tactic of never posting store hours, and you become pretty much screwed if you want to buy something and don't have inordinate amounts of time to wait.

Additionally, this has disrupted the dormitory girls' food schedule. So now, the Christian girls get their regular food at the regular time. But the Muslim girls have to cook for themselves because of the changed schedule, so now I have the luxury of a coven of 15 cackling teenagers cooking right next to my house for 4 hours everyday.

I guess this is as good a spot as any to give my thoughts on living in a Muslim-heavy community. In many ways I have found my Muslim friends and acquaintances easier to live with than many of my Christian friends. The Christians here always seem to take things too seriously. Not to mention that church services here are way over the top. With the Muslims, it's pretty straightforward. One thing I really appreciate is that the Muslims don't seem to care about my faith. With the Christians that is definitely not the case. People are constantly judging me about my decision not to attend church here, and I occasionally get pamphlets from people about how I should switch to their denomination, or some obscure article on why evolution is not true. I can't tell you how much I appreciate this; it's not at all intrusive or annoying.

One thing I have come to terms with is the headscarf. There are in fact several ways to cover oneself here, the most common being called the hijabu. This involves a scarf to cover the head, only showing the face, and long sleeves that only show the hands. Additionally, a long skirt, or loose fitting pants (as part of the school uniform) so as to not show the outline of the legs. Occasionally I will see a woman wearing the full on, covers everything but the eyes. I'm not sure the correct name for that, but everyone hear calls it 'ninja,' (yes, like the Japanese martial arts assassin types). This is pretty rare though.

I will admit that my perspective before coming here was pretty dim. I'd thought that wearing the headscarf was a sign of female submission in a male dominant society. However, while I admit that it is a male dominated society here, I no longer see the headscarf in this way. There are a couple reasons for this.

First, my community is definitely a mixture of Muslims and Christians. And so there are a mix of women who choose to wear the hijabu and those who don't. In fact, I have many female Christian students that choose to wear the hijabu, just because they want to wear that. As well, there are many Muslim students who choose not to wear the hijabu.

Secondly, men suck. After living and traveling here, I've realized that a large percentage of men feel totally comfortable cat-calling and harassing women in public. Some men can be really aggressive in this, even grabbing women and making suggestive hand gestures in very public places. Now, the initial response to this is “The men are the one's behaving badly, why should the women be punished?” This is a valid point, but for the individual woman, the choice is this: cover up to reduce unwanted advances, or somehow change the behavior of the 18 million men in this country? When viewed in this context, I totally understand why women choose to wear the hijabu.

This also explains why women will wear very dressy outfits underneath a drab black ninja outfit. They want to look good and feel good when they are at home, or at their destination, but they don't want to deal with the crap they would get while walking on the street. As a white dude, I totally understand this desire. If I could somehow mask my skin color while walking down the street, only to reveal it when I got to where I was going, I would do that in a heartbeat. Hands down. It doesn't mean that I'm subjugated or ashamed of being white, it just means that I'm sick of being stared at or hassled because of my skin color.

That said, I can't judge the wearing of hijabu in more closed societies, like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, where there really isn't an option of not wearing it.

Ok, my computer time is running low. As you may know, my laptop has a problem with the DC jack on the motherboard, meaning that it is essentially defunct until I can get it fixed back in the states. So I'm stuck using my school's computer, meaning that my available time for blogs and emails is considerably less.

I've been co-opted as a translator. For a soap opera. My headmistress' sister has been living with her for a couple months, and she is really into this Mexican soap opera. Though it's hard for me to admit, I'm somewhat into it myself. Probably the biggest selling point is the ridiculously attractive main star. The actual translating can be a little annoying, because every 2 seconds its “what did they say? What did they say?” Well, it's kind of hard to listen to what they are saying, and be translating at the same time as well as type a letter that my headmistress wants for tomorrow. Not to mention its a soap opera, so explaining the relationships between the myriad different characters is a challenge. “Well, now the daughter is talking to the angel of her grandmother about her 'returned from the dead but not really because she was lying about it all along' mother.” Needless to say, I think I lose a lot in the translation.

* * *

I've begun taking on more responsibility at school. Not because people are giving me responsibility, but more because I see situations where there needs to leadership and so I take charge. It took awhile to reach this point, mainly because I'm living in a foreign culture speaking a foreign language, so it's taken awhile to adapt to the point where I feel comfortable yelling at people and being a disciplinarian. That said, this does feel kind of natural. Not that I am having some power trip; rather, I enjoy setting things right, and having the confidence to take charge and make things the way they should be is pretty nice.

One of the new things I've started doing is supervising the distribution of food for the girl's dormitory. Before I started doing this, it was a chaotic mess. As I've previously reported, standing and waiting in lines is not something people here are very good at. Combine that with teenage girls, and you have a recipe for disaster. These days, whenever I show up, they line up well and stay generally quiet. However, twice a month they are given rice instead of ugali (the fact that rice is a treat speaks volumes about the average diet here). It's a little bit more rambunctious when the rice is being distributed, but after a few yells and threats they fall in line. However, when the rice is finished being divided out, there is always a little bit left in the pot: it's usually the burnt rice that's partially stuck to the bottom of the pot. Now, since there isn't enough of this burnt rice to go around, the girls go crazy. They start clawing at each other trying to get their hands into the pot to get that sweet, sweet burnt rice. Eventually I get caught between the girls and the pot. And instead of being afraid of me, as they usually are, they start crushing me between themselves in their mad dash to the pot. I have to start grabbing girls' arms and pulling them away in order to extricate my legs. It's completely insane. One second they are afraid of me, the next I'm just another obstacle between them and their handful of rice.

Eventually they will start pulling the pot in a certain direction so as to keep it away from the other girls. It reminds me of lions fighting over a kill. Except that the lions try to preserve their energy, and so don't get too into it with each other. Not so with the girls. They get pretty physical.

At first glance, you might think they are just really hungry. But there really isn't any rice to be had in the pot. At best you might get half a dozen grains of non-charred rice. That ain't much. Really, I think the girls enjoy a little brawling. And once they realize that if they all rush me at the same time I can't do anything to stop them, they cut loose.

It feels a little like “Lord of the Flies” at times. Except that with teenage girls, they would kill Piggy on the first page, and not drag it out for chapters and chapters. I could write the novel right now: “Some teenage girls were stranded on an island. They found some burnt rice. There were no survivors.”

Some of the girls I get along with. The not-crazy ones. I occasionally take advantage of their shitty diets to get some free cooking. Rather than cook something like pilau myself, I buy a lot of the ingredients and then invite a couple girls to come do the cooking. It works fairly well, since they are generally sick of eating ugali and beans, and I'm sick of cooking by myself. One time I had some girls cooking while I went off to play soccer. When I came back two hours later, my house looked brand new. I hadn't told them to clean; in fact, I'd told them to bring their books and study while cooking, or they could listen to music on my ipod. Instead, they chose to clean. Strange, but awesome.

I also had a brief stint of talking to the dorm girls about HIV and boys. Imagine the most awkward conversation you could possibly have, then do it in a foreign language in a foreign land. Then do it again and again. It's possible I would have been more effective had I been a woman, but I'm not quite that dedicated. Thinking about it again though, I think I might give it another try. One positive thing about this is that I'm getting really good at working on futile tasks over and over and over again. The fact that my head hasn't yet exploded despite trying to teach 20 year-olds how to multiply year after year with little effect testifies to this (not that I'm a terrible teacher; my students will learn it when I teach it, then forget it by the following week. My students have chronic short term amnesia).

* * *

When I was playing soccer today, I rubbed my hand on my face to remove some dirt. I was then astonished by some really awful scent. Turns out I had gotten chicken shit all over my hand from grabbing the soccer ball, and had proceeded to wipe it all over my face. It will be nice to return to an environment where chicken shit is not an actual daily hazard. Or chickens in general. God, don't even get me started on chickens. I could write reams on my loathing for chickens.

I had a fun trip the other day. I was taking a daladala from Tanga back to my village. During the course of the trip, the car died 4 times, the door fell off and the conductor had to hold it on his shoulder the rest of the trip, and we got two flat tires. All in the course of 80 minutes. Luckily, the second flat tire happened when we were about a mile away from school, so I was able to walk the rest of the way home. Needless to say, if I ever see that dala again, I will steer clear.

* * *

Over the past two and a half years, I've gotten pretty good at Swahili. Yet, in my never ending battle to win the respect of Tanzanians (and by respect I mean the acknowledgment that I am a smart, competent human being) I think my language proficiency may be backfiring.

As an example: a few weeks ago, during the world cup, some of the kids here started calling Germany 'their team.' This was after Germany started doing really well, and the kids hadn't cheered for them up until this point, so I made the comment to the effect, “If I gave you a map, you still wouldn't be able to find Germany.” Yet, I confused the word for map (ramani) with the word for flag (bendera) so what I ended up saying made no sense. Now, had my Swahili been totally broken, people would be more likely to write off my words as a simple lack of language proficiency. But since I only screwed up one word, I ended up looking quite senile. And I always seem to realize my mistake at least 10 minutes later, so any attempt at correction would be even more weird.

The most annoying part is that no one corrects me, or gives me any indication that I've made a mistake. I understand that people don't correct me out of respect, but I end up in this weird land, where I'm not sure that what I'm saying makes sense. It reminds me of that Twilight Zone episode, “Eye of the Beholder,” where the woman wakes up from reconstructive surgery to find herself beautiful, but everyone else is grotesque. I'm worried that I'm going to wake up and realize that a simple phrase I've used a thousand times is totally nonsensical.

This all ties back in to my role as an old man with dementia. On the one hand, I get respect because I'm a foreigner and a teacher, and yet people always chuckle under their breath when I screw something up; 'there goes that crazy white guy again!' Case in point: a few weeks ago, one of our students died. She was a sophomore, so I'd never taught her, yet everyone was going to the funeral service, so I went along with them. It felt a little strange, but not more strange than an average day, so I didn't think too much of it. However, once we put the casket in the ground, and buried it, we put candles into the grave, one at each corner and then one in the center. Even though there were about 700 people there, and I hadn't known this student at all, I was asked to put the center candle into the grave. Weird. But I couldn't very well refuse. So there I am, pushing this candle into the grave of a student I didn't know, when the candle breaks. Naturally there breaks out a round of snickering, and I've been here long enough to know that that kind of snickering means “look at that incompetent white guy! White people are so incompetent.”

It's really annoying. I even get this from some other teachers. Which makes no sense. For example, tabulating the attendance registers for a month. Just saying “tabulating the attendance registers for a month” is sufficient instruction for any person I know, yet half the other teachers seem to think I need a 5 minute lesson on how to add. And yet, these same teachers will then ask me to help them put songs onto their cell phones. Or, back in the day, when I started a garden, the number of people who would come by and yell in astonishment, 'You know how to use a hoe?!' Yes, strangely enough, the physics teacher does understand the lever arm. The Tanzanian image of westerners is, to put it bluntly, weird.

I've run into some pretty comical perspectives here. For example, questions like 'Why aren't there any white singers or athletes in America?” or statements like “All black Americans are rap stars or professional athletes.” These inevitably lead to drawn out conversations where I try to explain that, strangely enough, MTV-Africa is not an accurate depiction of life in America. The best part is when people respond with “no, I know, it really is like that.” The fact that they have never been to America, or even outside Tanzania, and that I'm an American and I lived there for 23 years (and, god willing, will soon live there again) never seems to make a difference.

Another personal favorite is the 'America is part of Europe' perspective. I'll get that a lot with questions like, 'so, how is Europe?' Umm, I think she's doing well, how's Africa hanging? One thing that seems hard to explain is weather. I often get “it's really cold in America, right?” or “does it rain like this in America too?” I then try to explain that America is a huge country, and, because of it's latitude, experiences a range of seasons and therefore weather. This is usually met with a blank stare.

I think this has taught me a lot about human nature. Places that are outside of our experience always seem static, and that it is difficult for a person to see the entire world as a constantly changing place. I remember in physics we do this, with differential equations: you have to keep all other variables constant in order to solve a problem for a single specific variable. So I guess I shouldn't be too hard on Tanzanians for their lack of understanding of America.

That said, I think I'll leave you with the most annoying stereotype: when someone says “I don't speak Kizungu” which literally means, 'I don't speak white person language.' There really isn't any excuse for that crap.

Watching television in Tanzania is...an experience. There are really three things to watch: the news, soccer matches, and soap operas. Soccer matches are rebroadcast from Europe, so there isn't anything particularly interesting about them. The news, however, has some things that you wouldn't see in the states.

One of the most glaring differences is their presentation of material. Oftentimes the camerman on the scene will only get about 10 seconds of usable footage. However, the actual story that accompanies that scene might take 60 seconds. What do they do in this situation? Naturally, they loop the footage six times. So the story will be about a new factory being opened in Dar with money from USAID, so they will have a shot of the factory and then a shot of some U.S. Dignitary giving a short speech. And then they will have it again. And again. And again.

Combine this with their willingness so show somewhat graphic scenes, and you have a recipe for some seriously disturbing television. They often play scenes from a nasty car wreck on the highway (seeing as there really is only one highway, a wreck is a big deal). Once, one of the shots they had was of a stretcher carrying a body away from a car. The body was draped in a sheet, but the person's hand was hanging lifeless off the side of the stretcher. And then we saw it again. And again. And again. As I recall, it's actually forbidden for a U.S. News station to broadcast shots of real dead bodies. On other occasions you will catch sight of a bloody mass near a wrecked car. Again, not a common occurrence in the States.

Sometimes they will run a story on some criminal, usually a thief, who has been caught by the police. However, instead of the police escorting the thief away from the scene, or protecting the thief, the scene usually plays out more like this: The thief is sitting on a tree stump in the village, there are 2 or 3 cops standing near him, with a crowd of 50 people in the background shouting insults at the thief. The cops stand around, looking bored, while individuals from the crowd dart forward and start hitting the thief, either with their fists or with sticks or blocks of wood. And naturally the police do nothing.

I'm not sure which is more ridiculous, that the police don't do anything, or that they aren't doing anything while being filmed on national television. I can't imagine what kind of a storm would brew if that happened in America. I also can't imagine what's going through those cops' heads. 'Hmm, it'll look really good if I stand around bored while tacitly condoning mob violence. I better make sure they get my good side.'

And then there are the soap operas. These come in three distinct flavors, none of which can be considered good. The first are the locally made dramas. I'll get to those in a minute. Then you have the South African and Brazilian imports. Wow. Pure gold. The South African ones (really, there is only one that I can think of) stick to the tried and true '20 year long series that has become so intertwined and byzantine as to be completely incomprehensible' formula. On the plus side, there is one great character, a fat mob boss that wears brightly feathered hats and shirts that look like a potpourri catalog, and yet is always taken seriously in the scenes he is in.

The Brazilian soap operas are pretty formulaic. Essentially, they get 2 really attractive people, surround them with an ensemble of less attractive people, and then shoot scenes of them being brooding, sad, or angry. Occasionally they change the background scenery. Oh, and don't forget the great dubbing. The best part is how often people here love to watch these programs, even though they can't understand what's being said. However, having seen these shows a few times, I can agree that actual dialogue is not a requisite in these shows. The focus is usually more on the pensive looks, and those seem to translate well into any language. If only real life were so easy, where all the bad people broadcast their evil intentions with near continuous sneers and were significantly less attractive than the good people.

The third kind are imported from the states. And are also pretty lame.

The local shows are fantastic. I can't always follow the plot, but the cinematography (or more accurately, the lack thereof) is always entertaining. One of my favorite things is when they show a gang of people who are about to go break into a house, or kill someone, they always slink along, and deliberately try to look as sketchy and as up-to-no-good as they can. Really, if I were a hired killer, I think I'd have enough sense not to walk at 0.5 mph down the street, looking around me constantly with shifty eyes, all while dressed like a hoodlum.

Or another classic is the elongated scene-of-nothing. For example, a person will be dropped off at the bus station by her boyfriend. Rather than show a quick shot of the car coming in, just to give the scene, you have 3 minutes of the car pulling up, parking, then nothing, nothing, and then they get out, go get the bags, then nothing, nothing...riveting stuff.

The greatest theme, by far, is the soundtrack. I blame these on low budgets. Usually, in an American show or movie, the music will change to go along with the level of action in the scene. However, I think that kind of editing breaks the bank on these shoe-string shows, so oftentimes they have the same score going throughout. A show I saw last week kept playing one of the themes from Lord of the Rings, but one of the really tame, 'Frodo goes to the market' ones. And yet, the scene would be a man finding his girlfriend passed out on the floor, or the scene would be two people talking at a bar, or two men arguing over a woman; whatever the material, Frodo just kept going to market in the background.

The craziest thing comes in this one show, called 'Bongo Dar Es Salaam,' the gist of which means “you have to have brains when living in Dar because people will try to rip you off/screw you constantly.” For some reason, the producers think it is a good idea to have a voice-over pop in at random times during the show. But instead of a voice-over, its some dude doing his best impression of a police siren in falsetto. I guess this is supposed to illustrate the 'gotcha!' moment of the skit, but they never seem to coincide. Instead, its,

Woman: 'How much does this necklace cost?'

Man: '20,000 shillings.'

Voice-over: WAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

Woman: 'Really? Can't you do 15,000?'

Man: 'Hmmm, make it 18,000.'

The real gems of TZ television are the commercials. Not because they are necessarily cheezy, but because they are so incredibly repetitive. And I don't mean 3 times in an hour. I'm talking 15 times an hour. One cell phone provider, TIGO, plays the same commercial twice for every break in a program. Sure, it was entertaining the first 200 times, but it's gotten rather stale the last 1500. And Pepsi. Man, for a multi-national, multi-billion-dollar conglomerate, they make some really terrible advertisements.

There is a lot more to be said about the programs here. 'Ze Komedi Show' deserves it's own dissertation. But I don't seem to have the time, or willpower, to plow through that now. Perhaps in the future.

I'd planned to write this entry earlier, but I came down with a rather nasty upper respiratory infection. Combine that with the Gastrointestinal infection I'd already had, and I was a rather coughy, sneezy, headaching, malnourished mess for the last 3 weeks. But, seeing as I'm on the mend, I'll finish up this entry.

My last entry was kind of serious, and the next entry will be serious too, so I figured that it's best I write a more light-hearted one today. So today's entry will focus on English, more specifically the butchering thereof.

Greetings are big here, so the most common mistake you hear is saying 'Good morning,' when it's evening, or good afternoon in the morning. My personal favorite is when I got 'Good Morning Madam!' at around 7 p.m.

Most of my students' English skills extend to incorrect greetings, and that's about it. However, among the better students, personal pronouns always pose a challenge. I think that they then teach their younger siblings, who then assail you with 'What is my name?' or 'Give me my money!' when you are walking down the street. A few weeks ago, I was talking with a Form IV dormitory girl just before school break, and asked her 'Where will you go for break?' to which she replied 'I will go to your home!' I'm flattered, but that's highly inappropriate. Another personal favorite was when a student came to my desk and said 'Give me my punishment.' What he was trying to say was 'Give me permission to wear sandals' but somehow ended up with that instead.

Two Fridays ago, (Friday being the 'religious day') we had some kids stay after so they could pray in one of the classrooms. This is pretty standard. Two of the girls then got possessed by demons. Again, pretty standard. However, they were really getting into it this time. My house is a good hundred yards away from the school, but these two girls were so loud that I couldn't take a nap in my own home. So I decided that now was the time to strike, and get a video of a demon possession/exorcism, since my words don't quite accurately describe what's going down here. Off a trundled with my camera, and waiting outside the classroom until I could talk to someone to get permission to video it (since it was after school, I felt I had to ask permission. Next time a girl does it during school hours, I'm going paparazzi whether they approve or not). This kid comes out, and just insists on trying to speak English to me. Or something like English. I had to speak in Swahili since I had no idea what he was trying to say. The only phrase I could understand was 'the weapon of God,' repeated several times. I took this as a no, and decided to wait on the video till another day.

I've started randomly stopping students I know and interrogating them (What are you doing? Where are you going? What is your name?). Most of the time the kids just stare at me for a long time. Occasionally they actually try to answer, and I get some real gems.

The most common go like this:

Me: Where are you going?

Student: No.

Me: What Are you eating?

Student: No.

The best came when I stopped a student who was buying foods for some of the teachers. I asked what she was buying, and who they were for, and she answered reasonably well. To which I asked,

Me: What are you going to eat?

Student: Staff.

I think my all time favorite comment came when a form IV wanted to leave the classroom.

Me: Why do you want to leave?

Student: I want to go urine.

That one made me realize how hard english is. He came so close to the right phrase, but just that little slip up made the whole sentence sound ridiculous.

At night, the dorm girls, and some of the younger siblings of teachers who live on campus go up to the classrooms so they can study together. I go up on occasion to see if they need help, or more often to pester them with questions in English, on the offhand chance that they actually try to do some real practice. One day, this student Ally was studying history, specifically about the establishment of colonialism in Tanzania ('history' here is really just a code word for 'how to institutionalize the feeling of victim-hood'). Looking down at what he was studying, I asked:

'So, when was colonialism established?' The heading on the page was called 'Colonial Establishment.' He didn't understand the question. So I went through and explained the meaning of the word when, figuring that he had written 'Colonial Establishment,' so he should know that.

I asked again, 'When was colonialism established?'

'Oh. Friday.'

Really? You'd think someone would have notified us about that. He was trying to say they had an exam on Friday, but...yeah, my student's English skills leave a lot to be desired.

Wow, I thought I'd be able to remember a lot more of these. I guess I'll need to start writing them down.

Again, sorry for my extended absence, I'll try to get a few more entries up in the coming week.

Ah, so many things have happened recently, I'm not sure where to start. I think I'll start about a month ago, when we had a soccer match at a nearby village.

I like soccer. I like playing soccer. I like watching soccer. But watching away games with my school is like having nails slowly driven into my skull. It starts with the drive over. We were going to a village about 40 minutes away from us, so we had to charter a few cars to ferry all the students. Naturally, the process to board the buses was ridiculous. Chaotic would be a compliment. Because, naturally, we planned to get 4 cars, but never really put a cap on the number of students allowed. So in a car the size of a minivan, we stuffed about 30 students. That, however, isn't that bad; I've had worse on public transport in Dar. Except that in Dar, the people boarding the cars are human beings, with at least some semblance of sanity and respect. For the soccer game, they were my students, for whom traditional rules and norms don't seem to apply. The entire ride there (and later, the entire ride back) the students sang, screamed, grunted, verbally ejaculated; pretty much anyway a person can be annoying with their voice, my students tried and perfected.

Then we got to the game. I'm not gonna mince words: a soccer match (really any large gathering of students outside of school) is an excuse for the kids to run off and have sex in the bushes and get pregnant and get HIV. Now, my school has 800 students, so it's pretty hard for me to watch after all of them, and try and protect them from their own self-destructive instincts. Instead, I've decided to limit myself to the dormitory girls, who total about 75 (only 19 of whom went to this game).

Another problem with these soccer matches are the teachers. Quite a few of my teachers are great, and I like them a lot. However, most/all of the 20 something male teachers are slimy slime balls (What's the line from that movie? 'That's what I like about high school girls, I keep getting older but they stay the same age.' That pretty much epitomizes the ethos of 95% of the male teachers in this country). Naturally, the teachers who go to the soccer matches (ostensibly to watch over and take care of the students) are the 20 something males. True, I fall into that category as well, but really only physically. In reality, I'm a middle-aged dad. I fuss and fret about my girls having sex and getting pregnant, and always give them stern looks when they flirt with boys, and give speeches about how they need to study hard to safeguard their futures. Contrast that with the other male teachers, who are more likely to be the one's trying to sleep with them (more on that later). All this leads to the fact that I'm the only responsible adult at a soccer match. What fun.

When we arrived at the field, I gave the girl's strict instructions that they needed to check in with me at half-time, and that when the match finished, we would all get on one bus together, so we could return home straightaway (otherwise they would get lost in town when we stopped there to drop off the other students). As you can probably tell by the tone of my writing, they didn't follow my instructions. More on that later.

The actual soccer match is a real cultural experience. There's cheering like crazy, people form crowds that run around the field chanting, and half the time there is a brawl. Now, I don't want to come off as a total party-pooper, but I really think there is a fine line between appropriate celebration/cheering, and being royal pains in the ass. Some people come to the match to socialize/go crazy, others actually come to watch the match. When the crazies start being so crazy that it inhibits other peoples' ability to watch the match, that's when it's crossed the line. I won't go into specifics, but I spent most of the match trying to keep my jackass students from being their jackass selves. I was unsuccessful.

The actual matches are...interesting. World Cup this is not. Individually, my students have some decent ball control skills. And they are all in fantastic shape. Yet put them all on a field together, and it's like watching three dimensional pinball. I think a significant percentage of the blame lands on the girls.

The girls here go to the soccer matches to socialize, flirt/sleep with boys, and be obnoxiously loud. Yet, they don't seem to grasp the basics of how soccer is played. So they cheer really loudly when someone kicks the ball really hard, or does a header, even when the actual header or kick is a boneheaded move. I could be on the field, and if I kicked the ball as hard as I could, straight out of bounds, each and every time it came near me, I would be the hero of the match, at least in the girls' eyes. Now, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that teenage girls pretty much own 90% of teenage boys' brains. So all the players get self-conscious in attempting to look good to the girls, and play like five-year-olds. Except, they have adult bodies and do their best to imitate WWF wrestling moves while playing soccer. Again, World Cup this is not.

So that was the match. Then the inevitable semi-brawl as we are going back to get into the cars, and when we reach the cars, more craziness trying to round up the students and make sure that they are all there. Except, one of the cars isn't there. It left early. One of the teachers, Mr. John (*See below), decided to go back early with some of the students. Except, since they left early, they didn't put that many students into the car. So with the three remaining cars we had to pack in 90% of the students.

Eventually we headed back, this time the kids even louder, since they had gotten all riled up from the game, and there were more of them stuffed into the car. I think maybe 5 dorm girls got into the car we had planned on taking. So when we reached town, we stopped to let off the other students, and waited to collect the others. We eventually hooked up with Mr. John and the other car. John was hanging out with some other students that he had come back with, including one girl who I'd seen him talking to earlier. Yet talking in a manner that did not seem fitting for a teacher. However, this by itself wasn't an surefire indictment. That comes later. When John came walking up to talk to the other teachers, the girl, Amina, started walking away to join her friends. At this point, John calls out for her to wait for him. Boom! That cinched it in my mind. A male teacher telling a female student to wait for him, at night, after they had just prematurely left a soccer match together? Game, set, and match. He was definitely (and almost certainly still is) sleeping with her. And then it made sense why they left early: he wanted to go get a room.

In the past, I was pretty sure that teachers had been sleeping with students, but this was the first time I'd had evidence so readily presented to me. Eventually I talked to some other teachers, and asked one of the female teachers to talk to the girl in question, since she is a pretty good student, and if she studies hard the next few months, may actually be able to go on with schooling. I'm not sure anything came of it though.

We eventually made it home, and I gave the dorm girls a piece of my mind. Still, getting through to teenagers is like digging to China with a blunt spoon. Especially about sex. I think that's what my next blog entry will be about, all the ridiculous things about sex here.

To end, I'll toss in an anecdote I heard from another volunteer. At this volunteer's school, there had been a teacher, and he'd been caught sleeping with a student (namely, the student was caught naked in his bed). The teacher was arrested and barred from returning to the school. The next week, however, the teacher returned, led by the District Education Officer (akin to a superintendent), who ordered the school to let the teacher back in. The corruption and cronyism knows no bounds. But can you imagine what would have happened if this had occurred in America? The PTA would have the District Education Officer's balls slowly roasting on an open flame. I love America.

*Peace Corps advises us to keep our blogs neutral, on the offhand chance that someone from our school or village would happen to stumble upon it and be offended. As well, I thought about keeping this story about Mr. John quiet, since I figured it might alienate my standing among the 20 something male teachers, and even by telling the story and complaining I knew nothing would actually happen. Yet, I have had a good education, and it only took me a few seconds to decide that the thing to do is not what is comfortable or the way to make more friends, but the right thing. And it seems that the right thing in this situation is to call the teacher out. And if more people find out about this, that's good, since accountability is sorely lacking here, and yet it is essential if the education system is to improve.

I went to another wedding last night. Naturally I was stupid and didn't really eat anything in the afternoon, planning on gorging myself at the feast for the wedding. Stupid, because if an event is supposed to start at 6, it won't really start until 8, and then who knows when you will actually eat. I eventually ate at midnight, though I think I got a few low-blood sugar hallucinations in before then. On the plus side, this was the first time I ate rice with my hands (since I was kind of forced too. I'd always avoided it before, mainly because I knew I would get rice all over my pants. And I was right).

In truth it wasn't an actual wedding, rather it was a send-off party, where the bride and groom are given gifts and they say goodbye to their friends in the village before going off to the city to get married during the weekend. The majority of the send-off party consisted of the MC making a few jokes before calling up a specific group of friends and relations to give gifts to specific people: the bride first, then the bride's parents, then the groom's parents, then some other people, and a few other people after that. The process of giving gifts involved the d.j. striking up some tunes and people slowly dancing up to the front to drop off their gifts and shake the hands of the recipients. Most of the people giving gifts were overweight women. I don't mean to say that in a disparaging way, but the entire gift-giving process lasted 2 hours (2 *&()*& hours!!), and once the novelty wore off there wasn't much there. With 20 something hotties, at least I'd have gotten some eye candy to go along with my starvation, boredom and exhaustion. I didn't think that was too much to ask.

When Edina (my date) made me get up to drop off my gift, halfway to the table the M.C. interrupted the d.j. to start some other session of the gift giving. There I stood, trying to figure out the least awkward/embarrassing solution to the problem. If I went up while he was talking, it would be weird, and extremely awkward. If I went back to my seat, it would give the impression that I was some cheap bastard who decided against giving a gift. I eventually made the wrong choice: I went back to my seat. This was bad in two ways. Firstly, Edina was ahead of me going to table, and was none too pleased that I left her in the middle of a mission. Second, there was the distinct impression I got from the crowd of 'what's that cheap white guy doing?' During the next session I was able to go up and drop off my gift, but the damage was done: I was now an idiot.

The entire celebration lasted 4.5 hours. My Swahili is good enough that I can grasp most of what is said during ceremonies like this. But while my language skills are up to par, my attention span is seriously lacking. Any ceremony or t.v. show or meeting that lasts longer than 30 minutes is pretty much game over. It takes a lot of focus and attention to understand and stay up with group conversations, and unless I'm really interested in what's going on, my brain poops out pretty quickly. For the next 4 hours.

There was one 30-something woman who was part of the bridal party. At the start of the party she seemed pretty tame, and like everyone else. After about an hour though, you could tell she was totally smashed. I felt pretty jealous.

From everything I could tell, the M.C. was quite good. I could only determine this second hand though. Comedy is one of the hardest things to grasp in another language. In the last two years, I've probably accumulated a lifetime of awkward, 'jokes that flew over my head' situations. Pretty early on I had to confront this problem directly. Since it happens often enough, you can't really ad-lib your reaction. Invariably after a good joke is told, someone will be laughing and look at me for my reaction. Staring stoney-faced is a bit of a buzz kill, but fake laughing is lame, so I had to strike a middle ground. I usually go for a smile that says, 'I'm glad everyone is having a good time, even if I have no idea what the hell is going on.' Works well enough.

On the flip side, whenever I make even the lamest of jokes in public, people eat it up. I sort of feel like I'm a two year old saying something that isn't really that funny, but because I'm still a baby people crack up. It's nice with respect to my students. All that it takes to keep my students somewhat happy and non-suicidal in class is for me to throw a few wild gesticulations and say something in a high-pitched voice. Naturally, I leave my self-respect at the door when I go into teach.

***

I've been eating cereal and cold milk. Let me repeat that. I'VE BEEN EATING CEREAL WITH MILK!! That's one of the more ridiculous things I've seen myself write. One of the juice guys (dudes that make juice in town, refrigerate it, then bring it to school in ice chests to sell) recently approached me saying that he could bring half a liter of cold milk to me everyday for 500 shillings (about 35 cents). At first I was skeptical; the milk here is not homogenized or skimmed for fat, so it tastes pretty meaty most of the time. Also, cereal is expensive, usually running around $8.50 for a box. I found some uber-generic frosted flakes in Tanga for $2.50, and decided to take the plunge. So far it's been awesome. Like having a slice of America in my own backyard. The only problem is that by the next morning the milk starts to get chunky, and I have to remember to shake it a ton before I pour it out, or I get chunks on my flakes. And call me a puritan, but I don't like the adjective chunks; not about my food and certainly not about me.

**

They fixed the power yesterday. That was pretty sweet. I'd noticed something strange when the power had been out. During the day, my house seems pretty sparse (let's be honest, I'm a single male who isn't getting any; maybe after I get a girlfriend I'll start caring about decorating my house, but I'm not holding my breath). I can navigate my house easily, and I like the spartan nature of my abode. All is right with the world. Then, at night, when the power was out, it was like I'd been thrust into Home Alone (with a smattering of Jumanji; this is Africa after all). I'm honestly kind of surprised I didn't suffer and more serious leg injuries.

**

I noticed that I can load movies up to my blog in addition to pictures. For Chrismas I got a new iPod nano, 5th generation, which comes with a video camera. Since it's so small, I can take it around to my usual haunts and surreptitiously take videos without looking like a tourist. I'll see what I can scrounge up for my next posting.

Most of these are random thoughts. I'll try to string them together (but I'm typing on my phone so editing abilities are limited.). The power went out yesterday at around 11am. This is relatively common, the power probably goes out for an hour at a time every other day. But this time it was just my school; my village has power. Which means that the school's transformer blew, and who knows when they will fix that. The power goes out often enough that I'm used to it, but not so often that I make actual contingency plans. It's a bit of a quandary. So instead of actually learning to live without power at night, I just sort of half-ass everything till I get bored and go to bed at 8:30. And I don't mean that without electronics my night is boring; rather, if you can't see anything, it gets pretty lame, pretty fast.***I'm going to a wedding tomorrow. With a girl. With a girl I've been hitting on for a long time. In preparation for that, I had to shave. I shave every other day: the first day, when I'm clean-shaven, I look too young, but on the second day I've got a bit more of a rugged look, which starts turning gross by the third day at which point I shave again. Shaving in the dark, of course, presents its own challenges. This strategy, though, may not work so hot. Really, you couldn't swing a stick here without hitting half a dozen men who actually are rugged, in the fullest sense of the word, so my faux-ruggedness might go unappreciated. Then again I'm almost certainly fooling myself if I believe that people here see anything past my skin and the fact that I don't look like the elephant man. *** I had another encounter with a drunk in my village. These almost always play out as the guy stumbling into some establishment to ask the owner for money, then catching sight of me and making a bee line. 'Yeah, sure, I'll give you a buck to buy some food. Oh wait, what's that you're holding in your not-outstretched hand? Gosh, it's a beer bottle.'. Seriously dude, give it a little strategy first. This encounter was slightly different, and more intricate. I was sitting at a little seamstress shop where Edina works (the aforementioned girl); there were a few other women there, chatting it up, when this 40-something man comes and sits down at one of the free chairs. He fixes me with an intense stare. This is when I know that he wants me to give him something. Mind you, he was well dressed, and I couldn't tell at first that he was a drunk. Then he starts in saying that I need to give him money for beer. But all in English! And pretty good english at that. So there I am, with 4 other women around and this dude trying to shake me down in a language that only he and I understand. It was weird.Luckily, before I started to tell him off, Jestina, the owner of the shop, came in and started talking to me. At this point I found out that the drunk was her brother. Now, I could tell that she wasn't really respecting him, rather ignoring him when he talked, but I wasn't sure if me disrespecting him would be crossing a line. And this being Edina's boss, I didn't want to screw things up. So I just sat there.Well, I guess the guy got pissed that I wasn't forking over any money, so he starts saying, 'you shouldn't be here, leave now, if I see you here again, I'll punish you (ie beat you).'. Now I was perplexed. Naturally no one else understood what was said. And in my head I was thinking 'I've been here two years, I'm sick of this kind of crap, I'm just gonna leave.'. But I didn't feel like caving. In the end I just didn't feel like dealing with it, so I got up and left. At this point everyone could tell that something was up. I heard later that Jestina gave her brother some serious crap for that. It ended well though, as Edina came all the way to my house to talk to me about what happened (a rather rare one on one conversation). So I lucked out.The best part though: I asked Edina how the guy had such good english.'Oh, he's a doctor. He's drunk all day, from morning to night, even goes to work drunk.'. Have I ever mentioned how awesome America is? A guy like that would have his ass sued into the ground faster than you can say 'abscess.'. *** I remember now that I promised a story about ladies and cutting in line. Let me say up front: line etiquette is non-existent in the country. As an example, let me run through a situation that happens all too often.I walk up to a small store (most closely resembles a concession stand at a little league game, except in lieu of starburst and twizzlers they sell beans, sugar, pencils, ya know, basic stuff) and there is one person ahead of me already ordering their stuff from the guy behind the counter. I take up position a comfortable foot away from the person in front.Then someone (old women are the worst at this. When they hand out AARP cards, do the backs say 'be a dick to everyone, as often as you can?' I'm dying to know) comes and stands in line behind me. It's pretty clear from the start that they aren't really cool with the whole waiting part of the process. Before, when I would get cut in line, I would stare disdainfully at the person and hope they felt some shame. And that never worked. Now my strategy is 'I've got shoulders; use them!'. So what traditionally follows now most closely resembles a showdown between two male deer fighting over the prize doe.The woman's shifty demeanor indicates she's ready to throw down. I respond by shifting a little left and right, maybe moving a little closer to the counter. The message is clear: I aint's giving up without a fight. At this point the old hag is sizing me up: 'what kind of gumption has this white boy got?' she asks herself. Too often my pasty skin and nice shirts give the false impression that my gumption level is low. Sometimes she backs down, and coolly holds her place in line. Most of the time, however, she throws down by taking a decisive step forward, preparing herself for the lunge. This is a rookie mistake, one that almost always assures my victory. By so blatantly announcing her intentions, she's revealed her hand too early. So when the first customer leaves, and she tries to swoop in front all she finds is my left shoulder, calmly checking her grotesque ambitions. Immediately she goes for the coup de gras: start ordering immediately. Like I didn't see that coming. I just answer by talking louder and more decisively, a position easily attained by my obvious moral superiority in said situation. Game, set, and match. Some women get tricky though. After the size-up, they quasi back down, and then at the right moment go for a decisive strike at the attendant, catching me off guard. At this point it's a crap shoot. I have to throw my order at the guy now, putting the right mix of justified decisiveness and betrayed martyr. It's really up to the guy behind the counter at that point.Other times you get the mid-order interrupt. The guy will be getting my order ready, say measuring out two kilos of beans, when someone comes up to the counter and orders something else, usually something small. It's a clever gambit: hoping to catch the server in between tasks with something small and manageable. I usually respond by then telling the guy about something else on my list of needs. So an exchange might go:Me: 2 kilos of beans, 2 kilos of rice.

(Man starts working).

Miscreant child: Give me 500 shillings of cell phone credit, you pitiful lackey, and mush!

Me: Also, half a kilo of sugar, kind sir. (But very determined and with an air of urgency. This usually keeps the guy on track).Between these two strategies, I tend to do pretty well. Soon, though, I have a feeling that someone will get the better of me, and I'll have to dole out a serious tongue lashing. Not that that's a bad thing; I'm actually somewhat looking forward to it (won't I be a great dad someday?)That's all for now. Hopefully the power gets fixed tomorrow so I can do some more writing.

So the day after I arrived, I was confronted with many of the things that are annoying in this country. Naturally, all of this occurred at the big bus stand in Dar Es Salaam. The bus stand is crowded with lots of men, most of whom have Phd's in pissing people off. Theoretically, I have nothing wrong with their business model. They stand around the bus stand and offer people help getting to their buses or carrying their bags. Of course in reality they are awful, because they never take no for an answer. So invariably (since I am a white male) I get surrounded by a small crowd of half a dozen men trying to grab my bags or direct me to a certain station. Sometimes I get lucky and they get into fights with each other. Sadly, none of them bring knives or guns so they can't do any permanent damage to one another. Sometimes I've thought about bringing some mace with me to the bus stand, and just blasting anyone who tries to grab my bags without my permission. It would be worth the interview with the cops. Though, I'm not sure I'd know where to find some mace even if I tried.

Then, of course, is buying the ticket. I've traveled quite a bit here, but I can only remember two occasions when the seller didn't try to rip me off (on the big buses that is). Usually they give in after a little bit of bargaining, but in Dar they are notoriously stingy. The funny thing is that I know how to win, in the end. All I really need to do is pay the inflated price, get on the bus and then look at someone else's ticket and then start screaming bloody murder at the conductor. When confronted with the evidence that what I paid wasn't the real price, they will either cave or have to start thinking fast to come up with an excuse.

The sad thing is that I've never actually done this. It always pisses me off when I get ripped off because I'm white, but never quite enough to legitimately throwing a fit. Occasionally I actually get into a mood where I want to give a conductor a piece of my mind, but so far, those moods have always coincided with situations where I'm not getting ripped off. Maybe they can subtly tell that I'm itching for a fight and so cave in preemptively.

Once you get out of the bus stand though, life here is pretty nice.

*** Interlude: I'm in my school staff room as I type this. I'm doing some computer classes for the other teachers and I'm waiting for them to get off from teaching. One of the other teachers is compiling the grades from last years' finals from the form III students, and I had to give them the grades from form III math. I printed it out, not realizing that they would put all the information into the computer. I was trying to help him take the info off this computer and put directly onto his computer, but I ran into a problem. The information I had was a mix of boys and girls, while his excel document had the girls and boys separately, so I couldn't just copy/paste the info. I was struggling with a way to undo the mixing, since typing by hand all the 250 kids' grades would be a pain. Then I realized: out of 250 students, 225 of them had F's. So we just put F's for all the students and then went back to the few students who didn't get F's and changed those specific grades. Now, I realize I'm not a great teacher, but even Socrates would have trouble with 250 kids, 90% of whom just don't give a shit. But at least it makes my paperwork easier.

*** I've gotten a lot better at bargaining than when I first arrived. You have to bargain for most items if you don't want to get ripped off. My initial strategy had been to be aggressively upset about the initial price offered. Only lately have I realized that this is a bad strategy. This tact immediately puts them on the defensive, and they start to dig their heels in early. Instead, a better tactic is to start out smiling, and act like you are both friends. That way it doesn't turn adversarial, and you have a bit more room to play. I find I get better deals this way. The biggest advantage is that you can keep bargaining for longer. And the longer you bargain, they better chance you have of them actually lowering the price. If you go in guns blazing, it pretty quickly turns into a stalemate. I think this strategy also applies to other aspects of life beyond bargaining.

I'll write more soon, specifically about waiting in lines and fighting with old ladies.

I finally got to go to a Tanzanian wedding last weekend. Needless to say, weddings here are a slightly different affair than in the states.The wedding was held for Ally's uncle who lives in a village a half-hour bike ride away. I wasn't invited, per se, but it only took a little bit of nudging before Ally's family insisted that I come. A lot of volunteers here go to weddings all the time, and it would have sucked to have spent 2 years here without experiencing a wedding. Plus, I figured (rightly, as it turned out) that a wedding would be a good venue for trying to find single women. The way the weddings around here work is somewhat in reverse to what they are in the states. On Saturday afternoon Ally and I arrived in Mhinduro, the nearby village, where we walked around greeting people before getting dressed up for the party. Instead of having the wedding ceremony first, the night before the wedding there is a big dance party at the home of a relative, in this case the house of the mother of the groom.And when I say at a home, I really mean in the dirt in front of the house with a tarp hung on some wooden poles in the ground. A decidedly low tech, but effective, dancing solution.Some of you may find it hard to believe, but I really do like dancing. It's a little hard to get started, since I was the only white male in attendance, and as soon as I start swaying my hips there are 50 pairs of eyes focused intently on me. However, after a little bit of motivation, I was cutting a rather tepid rug (except the rug was dirt).Another thing that's different here are the number of children. When I started dancing, there were approximately 50 children between the ages of 4 and 10 dancing, with perhaps 20 people between 15 and 30. Naturally this meant that after I started moving it became 20 people dancing and 50 children standing and staring at me. Slightly unnerving, but I haven't lived here for two years without getting used to it.One of the high points of the night was when I was calmly dancing, and two 40 something (large) mommas decided to come 'Night at the Roxbury' me. One second I was coolly swaying to the beat, the next I was sandwiched between two ginormous women intent on crushing the last molecules of oxygen from my lungs. One of the women (accidentally I hope) hit my head with her hand and sent it careening into the cantaloupe-sized left breast of the other woman. This was not the female encounter I'd been looking forward to. A short time later there was an announcement from the D.J. that there would be a dance contest, and a prize for the winner. We shortly learned that 'dance contest' meant putting a table in front of the speakers and judging who was best at shaking their ass to the music. So there we stood, watching this man standing on this table shaking his butt in front of maybe 300 villagers in the middle of nowhere. Naturally, I decided that the next man to do that should be me. (Let me come back to why in a second). So That was probably the highlight of the night: me, the one white male, shaking his butt (quite well, I might add) in front of a huge crowd of villagers. Unfortunately, I think I ran through my butt-shaking repertoire quite fast and felt a little awkward going back through the catalog, so I got off the table a little too early. Oh well, there is always the next wedding. As to why...when I told some of my friends via text about it, they naturally assumed that I was totally smashed, which was not the case at all (I hadn't had a drop the whole night, or the preceding month in fact). I have a strange sense of the awkward. If I notice a situation where I could do something that would be mildly awkward, I tend to avoid it like the plague. But if I see a situation where doing a specific action would be so awkward as to be funny, some voice from the deepest recesses of my soul commands me to go forth with that action. I think I'm a slave to comedy. Not that I'm complaining; it certainly keeps things interesting. Another interesting note about dance parties here: they don't stop. Seriously. They started the music at 6 p.m. on Saturday and didn't turn it off till 10 a.m. on Sunday. In a small village like Mhinduro, that can get annoying. Ally and I were sharing a bed in the groom's house (which had bed bugs, damn those things are aggravating). In addition, whenever I rolled over to face towards the wall, I got a seriously rancid whiff of something. At first I thought it as wafting from the bathroom which was nearby. But as my olfactories acclimated, I pegged it as more akin to chicken shit. Eventually I got control of my faculties and used my cell phone's back light to determine that, yes, in fact, several adolescent chickens had hid themselves between our bed and the wall and had proceeded to defacate all over the floor. So between the chicken shit, the bed bugs, and the blaring music, I didn't get much sleep Saturday night (that would be the low point of the wedding).The next day we got to head to the Anglican church off in the woods for the actual wedding. I've generally avoided churches since being here, since I've yet to experience a church service that hasn't taken either 4 hours or ended in me seriously embarrassing myself. This wedding service was no exception. The actual wedding portion was of suitable length, and seemed just like a wedding in the 'States. Then came the actual service of the church, which entailed the wizened old pastor (ancient, decrepit, mummy-like; really, I don't think there is a way to overstate this) detailing some passage from Matthew for three hours, with the occasional hymn thrown in. Now, my Swahili has gotten pretty good up to this point, but I'm still at the stage where I need to be paying attention to actually follow what's going on to understand. That doesn't work well with ridiculously long winded preachers, so that was a pretty fun three hours. On the other hand, I've gotten really good at zoning out and generally being bored, so it wasn't too terrible an experience. Not that the bride and groom didn't give it their best shot. I'm not sure why, but in formal ceremonies like weddings, everyone here seems to believe that you have to look like you are heading to the gallows. For example, during the bridal procession, the bride is escorted into the church by a huge crowd of family members and friends dancing and singing with her in the center, meanwhile the bride is doing her best impression of a suicidal marble statue. The groom looks the same way, as though he has resigned himself to the firing squad. I don't really get this. If I'm not ecstatically happy the day of my wedding, one of my sisters had better slap some sense into me. After the church everyone headed back to town for lunch and giving gifts. I skipped out a little early; I'd gotten too much sun and needed to go home and rest (but I still gave a gift, I'm not that much of a loser). Oh, and Ally's really cute cousin was there, and we chatted for awhile, so we'll see how that goes. It's gonna be a little awkward with me in the states for a month, but hopefully the image of me shaking my butt on a table will keep me fresh in her mind.

This week we have exams, so I have to do proctorring, which is rarely fun. However, reading through roll calls made me think of a good blog post about names.A lot of kids here have two names: their religious name and then a tribal name. In almost all circumstances they use their tribal names. But if you ask for their name, they will tell you their formal name, and on tests they will write their formal name. Except when they don't. And suddenly you have a bunch of tests with totally random names that don't match up to any lists. Fun! Or you get that one day when you realize that Mary and Latoa are actually the same person, and that mary wasn't some ghost-child. What's also fun is spelling. Oftentimes kids will spell their names in 6 or 7 different ways, depending on the weather or how tired their hand is. So Mary can also be Meri, Mari, Mery, Merii, or maybe even Maeryi if she is feeling particularly adventurous. Combine that with tribal names and the occasional totally made up nickname, and each student has a dozen different aliases. That makes me feel inadequate. Here I've just been Matt for 25 years, and on rare occasions Matthew. I think I should branch out; maybe a mathyou, matthyew, mat, maat. Then I can go tribal. How does Otieno sound? Ideally I can craft so many names that introducing myself becomes a serious impediment to actually knowing who I am.What is also fun are translations. One hotel in Dar has two receptionists, named Happy and Happiness. This naturally prompted the question of whether it is better to be a noun or an adjective. Of course, the answer is obviously adjective. Nouns are just too limiting.There are quite a few names like that here; actual swahili words that are taken as names. They run the gambit from cute to bland and eventually plain ridiculous. The cute ones are usually for the girls: Zawadi (gift), Bahati (luck/fortune), Upendo (love). Then you have the bland ones like Jumanne (Tuesday) Jumapili (Sunday) or Tatu (three) that describe the day the child was born or which child it is. Occasionally you get the kind of cryptic ones, like Msafiri (traveler) or Mawazo (ideas). Sometimes you get the really out there ones, like Shida (problem). Doesn't really leave much to the imagination, does it? One of the kids I was proctorring yesterday is named Jaribu Fikiri, which means 'try to think.'. I like this because it took some. planning: the last name didn't just come out of nowhere. Plus its it's own phrase, that can be imploring (please, try to think, what's the antidote?) Or slightly condescending (can you at least TRY to think?). It's not often that a name conjures up so many different emotional states.My friend, who teaches at another school, says she has one student with a particularly crazy name. I don't remember the word itself, but I remember it translates as 'To wipe your ass with your hand after going to the john.' Yikes. His parents must have pretty high hopes for him.So yeah, while Matt may seem bland at times, I guess all in all I'm happy my parents weren't too adventurous in picking my name.

Here are some random anecdotes that have happened in the past week or so.Last friday was the lab practical section of the Form IV national physics examination. This meant I got to setup the practical as well as proctor when the students were actually taking the exam. During the setup phase I was working with the other physics teacher, Mwl. Mgonja, and at one point I decided to ask why Tanzanian women (I was only thinking of one in particular) didn't like it when I cooked Indian food for them. She didn't seem to believe this was true, but it started up again the conversation about me looking for a woman, and her usual refrain of 'What about Hamza's daughter, she's really attractive,' to which I finally had to respond that I did not, in fact, find her attractive.I explained that I thought she was a little bit big for my tastes. 'Ahh,' she nodded, 'You want someone portable?' Of course, she said all but the 'portable' in swahili, so it was actually 'Unataka msichana portable?' I thought, 'Yes, that's my criteria for a woman: Attractive, smart, funny, portable, plays DVDs and VCDs. That would be quite the catch.' As an aside, I think my students didn't do too hot on the practical, since they had forgotten how to read logarithms from a table in a book. That pisses me off. When was that last time that figuring out how to read logs from a book was a legitimate skill? World War II? Arrgghhh.Last thursday I had an unfortunate encounter. Next door to me is the school kitchen (what passes for a kitchen, at least until the new one is built). We have a cement platform raised about two foot off the ground with a spigot off to one side for washing dishes. Quite a few of the dormitory girls use the spigot to wash their hands and face before going to the makeshift mosque to pray. I occasionally use it to wash my feet since the dirt here is rather invasive. So on Thursday night, around 8pm, I go to the spigot to wash my feet. There is a girl there washing, but I couldn't see her since it was dark, and she's African. I absent-mindedly turned on my flashlight so I could see who it was. Then she said 'Mwalimu?' in a slightly trepidatious voice. It took my eyes a second to adapt, but then I noticed that I could see her white underwear and nothing else. At that point instinct kicked in, and I pivoted 180 degrees and dashed back to my house while muttering some choice phrases. The other girls hanging out started bursting out laughing. I really wish I had somehow had the opportunity to chew out that girl. Come on, bathing naked 20 feet from a male teacher's house? That's totally unacceptable. I never saw her face, just those white underwear before my flight instinct took over, but remembering her voice I have a hunch as to who it was, and the girl in question is 20 years old. The question is what to do now. I really don't want this to be acceptable behavior, because it isn't. Having 20 somethings bathing naked 20 feet from my house crosses the line in a big way. Then again, bringing up this topic to other teachers and discussing it will be pretty embarrassing, both for me and the girl. However, I will need to do something, because I think too many of my older students are starting to get crushes on me, and I need to very obviously make it clear to them that that is not kosher. Ideally this would take the form of getting an actual girlfriend, but c'est la vie. This past weekend we had a get together in Tanga. This usually means getting good Indian food and having a few drinks to blow off some steam. One of the tricks is that we almost never drink at our sites, and when we go into town, I always seem incapable of calculating the appropriate volume of alcohol to buy. So come sunday morning I had a full bottle of gin that I had to take home with me. My friend Leiha and I were eating at the restaurant near the bus stand before getting on our buses to return home. We sit, eat and talk for about half an hour, and when I stand up and look down at the bag with the gin in it, I notice the liquid that has spilled all over the floor. My mind pretty quickly runs through the situation.I'd just finished eating breakfast at one of my favorite restaurants in town after having spilled half a liter of gin on the floor of an establishment owned, operated and almost entirely frequented by Muslims. By itself this could be ok, maybe I could escape into the night and nothing major would come of it. But of course, I'm a white guy, the only white guy in the restaurant at the time, and quite possibly the only white male who frequently eats there (in fact that's quite probably true). So I'm standing there, considering the possibility that I have ruined my ability to return to the restaurant that serves the best beans I've ever had in country. Meanwhile Leiha is staring at me, laughing her ass off. I'll probably wait a few weeks to head back there, just in case anyone did take offense and I need to let them forget. On a last, upbeat note, I think I have a date tomorrow night. This terrifies me. Though, on the plus side, I feel as though I've exhausted all my options for embarrassing, confidence-wracking failure, such that success necessarily becomes more likely, based solely upon probability.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Life continues. We've had a bit of a water shortage recently. In truth I'm not entirely sure what the deal is with our water. We have two water sources, the first is water that is pumped directly from the river that's a few hundred meters down the hill from our school. The second comes from town, and is much cleaner (though I'm pretty sure it's somehow connected to the river, either they filter it a bit or they only take the top most layer of the water to cut down on the sludge). Unfortunately, for the last few weeks we have pretty much only had access to the straight-from-river water, which is opaque and smells like a swamp. That's the water I've been bathing with. I always have enough clean water on reserve for drinking, so that's not really a concern.As a side note, you really get a better picture on how much water you use when you have to carry it in buckets everywhere. For example, I now know that I use almost no water for drinking, a little bit for cooking, and lots for washing clothes, washing dishes and bathing. That said, 'a lot' is not that much by American water consumption standards. I usually bathe twice a day, and each bath takes between 6 and 8 liters of water (assuming I'm decently dirty, if I'm fairly clean its closer to 4). Thats about 2 gallons for you Imperial system heathens. On random occasions the good water will come back for short periods, and then all the wives and house-girls at my school rush with their buckets to the spigot to get it while it's there. That is, wives, house-girls and me. What's funny is that they usually let me get my water first, even if I come late and people have been waiting for half an hour. I think its a combination of respect and pity. Respect in that I'm a teacher and a foreigner. Pity, because they seem a little astonished that I can somehow live here without a wife. I get the usual, 'how do you eat without someone to cook for you?' or 'why don't you have some girl come wash your dishes for you?' At times having someone wash up for me sounds appealing, but one thing I don't want to do is give the women here more physical labor, because they do ridiculous amounts of it as it stands now. I'm getting a little off topic, but I think the pity extends into the fact that I'm an American. Not that they pity my American-ness, but many people here have the impression that Americans are incapable of doing anything on their own. That we live in some fantasy world where machines do everything and even the minutest quantity of physical labor or exertion will break our feeble spines. I get a bit annoyed at this attitude, and often times want to shout 'Do you really think that America has a GDP more than twice the size of the next biggest economy because we are all lazy?' Of course, I can't translate that into Swahili, because their isn't a simple word for 'GDP.' So instead of a pointed rebuke it would turn into a long-winded, unintelligible lecture about GDP. The best example of this phenomenon was when one girl asked me 'Did you learn how to wash dishes here in Tanzania?' I should have replied, 'Yes, I traveled several thousand miles to come study in the birthplace of dish-washing, to understand and live the philosophy of dish-washing that was pioneered oh so many eons ago in the dish-washing mecca of Tanzania.' The flip-side of the 'Americans are lazy' philosophy is the 'life is incredibly hard here' mantra. Now, I will admit that this is somewhat true for a segment of the population, namely the women. But when I have some of my bad student tell me, 'Mwalimu, maisha ni magumu hapa Tanzania (Teacher, life is hard here in Tanzania),' and then nod knowingly, I can't help but say to myself, 'Between skipping class, smoking pot and playing soccer in the afternoons, where do you find the time to have a hard life?' Some of the best moments are when I go to the bike mechanic. There will be the mechanic, sitting in the shade, or occasionally working on a bike. Then there will be his entourage of between 3 and 5 guys who, as far as I can tell, do absolutely nothing. The only time I see women sitting around doing nothing are when they are trying to sell vegetables in the market, and they have to sit there and do nothing while they wait for customers. Ok, I notice this tone is becoming a bit too negative. I'll switch to something more fun.Cleaning. I've become much better at cleaning, to the point where my house is clean everyday (Dad, please try to resuscitate Mom). I'm not entirely sure why I started being more fastidious about cleanliness, but once I started the ball rolling, it became a bit of an addiction. Now, things belong in places, and they must return there, because that's the way the universe has to be. Partly this came about as something to do. Getting all the rooms of the house really clean has been a project, and gave me something meaningful to invest my time in. Partly I'd convinced myself that I was never gonna get a girlfriend if my house wasn't clean (I may still never get a girlfriend, but at least I'll be not getting one in style). Whatever the motivation, I'm glad it's there, because having a clean house is inherently calming. Unfortunately, now that the extent of my cleaning is just the occasional sweep, mop and tidy-up, I have to find something else to do with my time.On the last note for this entry, I learned how to make a broom today. Last week some of the teachers announced that every student had to bring a broom to school to leave in the school's store room, since our brooms get worn out or stolen periodically. Naturally, only a small handful of students actually brought brooms, so for the last few days most of the students have been getting beaten for not bringing brooms. One of the dormitory girls who had gotten sick of being beaten was sitting by the kitchen making a broom, and I decided to pitch in to help. The process is quite simple: you take the leaves from the branches of a coconut tree, and for each individual leaf you cut off the flimsy part to leave a long, sturdy fiber a few millimeters across. Do that about 50 times, wrap up the fibers together, and you have yourself a broom. Really, does it get any more exciting?

I apologize for the extended leave of absence. Many things have happened here, some for better, some for worse, so I will try to start updating this blog twice a week to keep you appraised of my goings-on here in Maramba. So here is a short anecdote of something that occurred a few weeks ago.

I was sitting in my school's staff room, writing up a lesson plan, when some of the students started making noise. At first I assumed it was a run of the mill demon possession, since that is the most common disturbance at the school. However, they started getting louder and louder, so I (as well as the other teachers) started to wonder what was going on. We go outside to see the students had found this:

That's a pretty big snake. Every so often, since that day, I've absent-mindedly started checking out the windows and doors of my house, to make sure there are no possible access points for a behemoth such as that one. Freaky spiders I can handle, but waking up to a fifteen foot snake in my bedroom? That might be one step too far.

Here is the list of my embarrassing attempts at getting a girlfriend.The first was a trainee teacher. Students who don't score well enough on their exams to go to University can opt to go to a TTC, or Teacher's Training College. Part of the curriculum involves actual time spent teaching at a Secondary school, so every year we get a few Teachers-in-Training. The way it was supposed to work is that the teachers would come for the second semester of a year, go home for break, then come back for the first semester of the next year. This teacher, like most women here, was very religious, so I had to do my do-diligence in order to win her affections. Yet, I've had some practice in this regard, so nearing the end of second semester last year, I felt that I'd established a real connection, and had a good foundation from which to build on for the first semester of this year.Then, first semester rolls around. I'm advised by Peace Corps not to discuss politics in this blog, so I will simply note that the government was unable to pay the Trainee Teachers' salaries starting the beginning of this year. So, the teacher with whom I'd spent a lot of time hanging out and becoming friends with, and whom I'd expected to spend more time with this year, was not coming back. Shot down by the government. Fast forward to mid-February. She was hanging out at her home in Dodoma, waiting for the regular session at the TTC to start up again. Dodoma is really quite far from here (about a 28 hour round trip) but I had a PC conference in Dodoma that I had to go to anyway, so I contacted here and we made plans to meet up. The second night of the conference my counterpart, Mwl. Zahoro, and I went to her house. We were planning on staying for about half an hour, just to catch-up before heading back to the hotel, since travelling at night requires taxies, which can be quite expensive. Of course, half an hour stretched into 4 hours, most of the time spent with Zahoro and I waiting on the couch in the living room while she was in the kitchen with her sister in law. After about an hour of sitting there, I heard some squawking coming from outside, and thought to myself, 'that sounds like a chicken being slaughtered...uh-oh.' Sure enough, 10:30 rolls around and we are served rice with bananas and chicken. That was the first time (but hopefully not the last) that a woman has killed an animal specifically for me.I eventually had to return home, and she stayed in Dodoma, and I think you can imagine the prospects of a long-distance relationship aren't particularly enticing when neither party shares a common language. So that one died on the vine.About a month ago, my headmistress' daughter turned 7, and so we had a birthday party. This involved lots of singing and dancing, as per usual. There was a woman there, one I'd had my eye on for awhile, and after seeing her dance and flirt with me a little, I figured I should take a shot. I'd been reticent up to this point, because she worked as a house girl for one of my neighbors, and I felt somewhat weird about dating a maid. However, I eventually realized I'd be a total jerk if I didn't date someone I was interested in based solely upon socio-economic status. I'd forever after have to equate myself with some dim-witted parent from a Jane Austen novel.So in my mind I crossed the bridge, decided I'd try to make a go of it. One of the first orders of business with any woman here is to confirm age, because something about the women here is very deceptive, and someone you think is 30 turns out to be 15, and a squat 15 year old is 28 with three kids. And it's best not to leave these things up to chance.I'd pegged this woman at about 25, which, in retrospect, would be quite old to still be a house-girl. But seriously, I was fairly certain that she was actually older than me. Naturally, it turned out she was 16. Wow, talk about a depressing piece of knowledge. While I'd never made a move, and only talked to her a few times, in my mind I'd played out scenarios of how my cunning machinations would work out (I am, after all, a man), only to discover that she was, in fact, 16. It is something awful when you realize that you have had sexual thoughts about a 16 year old. This voice in the back of my head kept whispering accusatorily 'Humbert, Humbert, Humbert...' So for the next week or so I spent most of my time hating myself. Fun.Round two ended with me feeling like a lecherous, dirty old man. Round three was even better.My counterpart, Zahoro, had for some time counseled me on the Tanzanian way of finding a girlfriend, specifically sending a third party to go meet the girl in question and having that diplomat set up a date for us. But that's kind of tricky, since my school is far enough away from town that strolling around town with my buddies isn't particularly feasible. And I didn't want to ask someone to go into town with me to help me buy bread, purely on the offhand chance that I spot a woman I'm attracted to and coud send that person after her.Eventually we decided that we would head into town on a Saturday and help me find a girlfriend. Sure, sounds a little strange, like we were out trying to find a good pair of pants, but at this point I was getting pretty desperate.We go into town, and Zahoro says he has a friend in town who knows a lot of the 'good girls' (i.e. not prostitutes) and will help me. We go to a juice shop to wait for his friend. After half an hour, it seems the friend is late, so we go watch the local soccer match before returning to the juice stand. We waited some more, but the friend wasn't showing. In retrospect, I think it was getting late, and Zahoro was feeling a little desperate to help me out, so he struck out at the closest thing available.Zahoro starts talking to the lady working at the juice stand (who I pegged at around 35) in hushed tones. I picked up parts of their conversation, something about him wanting her to meet a friend of his. Now, my momma didn't raise no fool, so I was figuring out what was going on. Yet, my brain has some built-in defense mechanisms, such that when I'm hearing something I don't like, or don't want to hear, particularly in a language I don't fully understand, I start playing dumb, and intentionally neglect the information being fed to me. Selective ignorance in the hopes that I can glide through the storm unscathed.Around this time my friend Aaron calls, so I go outside to chat for a few minutes. Upon re-entering the juice stand, my defense mechanism crumbles as I fully understand that they are discussing having her come out to my house at around 8:30 (she works until 8pm every day it seems) so that we can talk, and then having me pay for a motorcycle to drive her back to town. Having your friend setup a date for you is one thing. Having your friend setup a date for you while you are in the room with the girl you are being setup with is somewhat more awkward, but still within tolerable ranges. Having your friend setup a date for you while you are in the room, and the girl neither looks at or talks with you while they are discussing the particulars of your late-night rendezvous crosses all boundaries of sensible conduct, at least in my book. Selective ignorance gave way to pure ignorance, as I sat there dumb-founded, not knowing how to interject myself into the situation yet retain some dignity, while the instinctual part of my brain was telling me to run far, far away. Eventually she gave me her phone number, and we headed back to school. I've yet to call her, but I don't feel bad. When someone barely acknowledges your existence, do you really have an obligation to contact them later?Oh, and she said she was 24. Maybe if those were Martian years I'd buy it. But Earth years? That would mean she is the same age as me. If we went on a date I'd worry people thought she was my mother (except for the whole skin issue; someone might catch on to that).Third try was not the charm. In fact, it was probably the most awkward experience of my life. Fourth try was quick and to the point. I won't bore you with the details; it was the typical 'I just want to be friends' line. In some ways I guess I should be flattered, that my Swahili is good enough that people actually want me as a friend to hang out with and chat.However, despite the setbacks, I'm soldiering on, if for no other reason than to gather good material for this blog. Hopefully my next entry will have something really uplifting in it. But probably not.

For the last week I've been at a COS (Close Of Service) conference, designed to wrap up our time in Tanzania and give us information about returning to the states. Of course, I'm extending for a third year, so most of that information wasn't relevant. Luckily, unlike most conferences, most of the sessions at COS were optional, so I could spend my time on more important activities, specifically sleeping and lying on the beach.

The strange part of this conference is that it was at the same place that I stayed immediately after leaving Kenya. It felt like a complete circle when, on the second night, the DJ for the resort's dance floor started playing the same series of Kenny Rogers songs as he had played nearly two years prior. Luckily we were staying for only three nights, so we didn't have to hear 'The Gambler' thirty-five times.

One of the other unfortunate features of this resort is the prostitutes. Prostitutes are a common theme in African towns, especially in places frequented by foreigners. Let me be clear at the outset: I have never, nor will ever, sleep with a prostitute. That said, prostitutes here are a different bag than in the states. Here, being a prostitute can be one of the most lucrative jobs available for an uneducated woman (and uneducated women outnumber educated by a healthy margin). So prostitution tends to attract quite a few women.

Combine that with hotels like the one we stayed at, the Jangwani Sea-Breeze resort, and you have women with movie-star good looks flirting with fifty year old German men who haven't seen their toes in a decade. None of this particularly bothers me. However, prostitutes act differently than other women. The prevalence of prostitution creates two classes of single women: prostitutes, and women who won't talk to me. That is, prostitutes tend to be very aggressive flirters. In order to distinguish themselves from this, and make absolutely clear that they are not prostitutes, the other women are downright rude in their interactions with a single man. Combine that with the fact that the afore-mentioned German men cultivate a strong correlation between foreigners and sex-tourism, and any single, non-prostitute will barely give me the time of day, because they don't want to be seen talking to a white guy. If it sounds like I'm complaining a lot, I am, and I think I have legitimate cause to.

But back to the prostitutes themselves: I don't mind them, per se. But they can make life very difficult. In addition to being very attractive, these women are generally very good dancers (if your profession involved going to dance floors to attract customers you would cut a good rug too). In addition, they tend to stare. I'm a man, so when a gorgeous woman walks into a bar, I check her out. Unfortunately, for a prostitute, this is like dumping blood into a shark tank. If a prostitute catches me checking her out, the rest of the night I'll have her staring at me. And that is not something I can handle: A drop-dead gorgeous woman, tearing up the dance floor, all while staring intensely at me. So I didn't spend much time on the dance floor, instead preferring the comfort of a cold shower, or lying on the beach staring at the moon.

Oh, and not to mention, throughout most of this I had pretty bad Giardia. The primary symptom of Giardia that has been getting to me has been the gas. I can eat a 500 calorie dinner, and within 5 minutes I'll look like I'm 8 months pregnant. I'm pretty sure I've had these parasites for awhile, but while living in my village my food is pretty bland, and so doesn't seem to upset my intestinal lining too much. However, while travelling, or spending time at swanky resorts, the spice count sky-rockets, and so does my bloating. I'm waiting for my lab results to come back on Monday, but even those aren't always accurate because of the particulars of how these parasites lay their eggs. Either way, I'm going to start on some kind of regimen, if for no other reason than I love Indian food too much to let some microbes get in the way of that.

I'll write another post soon, probably concerning my comically embarrassing attempts to find a girlfriend.

For the past month I've been travelling off and on. Two of my friends from college came to visit, so we hit up the major hot spots in Tanzania. I'd classify the trip a resounding success, especially considering the incredibly small amount of planning I put into it. I almost feel ashamed that I left so much up to last minute, 'figure it out when we get there' type arrangements. However, that's one of the great things about being a Peace Corps volunteer: you have friends (friends you may not have ever met before) all over the place. My college friends arrived in Dar early June, and we then headed over to Zanzibar (the big island, Unguja), where we met up with some other volunteers who had already been there for a few days. This made things easy, like not having to find a hotel on our own. We did a spice tour, which was pretty fun. I foolishly thought most of these spices, when in their pre-dried stage, would taste pretty good. That was not the case. Fresh nutmeg was one the worst things I've ever tasted. The next day we met up with my friend who lives on Zanzibar, and he showed us around a bit. One of the highlights of Zanzibar is a place called Forodhani Gardens, which is a sort of food bazaar in a garden (but the garden is under construction now so it's been moved to the beach). You walk along these little stands where people are selling fresh seafood of various varieties (swordfish, shark, squid, lobster, you name it) and after you pick out what you want they cook it up for right there. It's a great little spot, but the hawkers can be a little too persistent.After Unguja we headed to the smaller island in the Zanzibar archipelago, Pemba. Pemba is a bit more off the beaten path, since very few tourists visit there. The ferry ride was pretty rough. I stayed at the side of the boat the entire time, because whenever I even looked away from the ocean I started feeling on the verge of throwing up. We met a PCV on Pemba, Mike, who was really awesome and accomodating, especially considering that I'd only met him once before for about 10 minutes. He showed us around a bit and hooked us up with a really nice hotel where they served some fantastic squid (or calamari, or something with rubbery limbs that had once been alive). Justin and I were able to go snorkelling in an amazing coral reef the next day (after another stomach turning boat ride). What was really great when leaving Pemba was that we got to fly from Pemba to Tanga, so I could see part of my city. Plus, since I have a resident permit, I got to fly for about $40.After spending a few days in my village, we went to Arusha to start our safari. We were meeting a friend of Noah's in Arusha, then planning on going to see my friend who lives near Arusha. Noah's friend came in late, so we had to take a cab to my friend's village. I think I managed to find the one taxi cab driver in Arusha who didn't know where this town was. We spent a good while orienting ourselves (I still think we were going the right way from my directions) when the driver asked some random dude on the street to help give us directions. The man offered to get in the cab with us. The consensus later was that we managed to find the town drunk, who was incredibly generous and happy to help, but at the same time completely clueless about directions. At one point, he insisted that the Teacher College (where my PCV friend teaches) was on this goat path/road that crossed a creek that a hummer would have had trouble passing through. After about 20 more minutes of being lost, we arrived safely (at about 10 at night mind you). The next day we went for a hike and saw lots of Elephant poo, about which my friend Kit was none too happy (Elephants being a pretty dangerous animal). We went back to Arusha in the afternoon to meet up with our safari company. Part of the package was putting us up at a really swanky hotel for the nights before and after our safari. The safari itself consisted of sitting in a really nice Range Rover and driving around the parks for hours, followed by returning to 'camp,' where we had a personal cook prepare tea and dinners for us. Mind you, this was a budget safari, yet it was the poshest experience I had yet had in this country. It seems funny that a safari, one of the most 'African' things a tourist can do, reminded me far more of the U.S. than Africa. Considering that 1: We ate good food, 2: We had comfortable transport, and 3: The people spoke English, it really had more in common with the U.S. than my life here.For the actual safari, we spent a day each in Tarangire, Lake Manyara, and Ngorongoro Crater. Each park had its own flavor, and I'm glad we didn't just go for one. We got to see pretty much every animal: Elephants, Giraffes, Zebras, Wildebeast, Buffalo, Lions, Hippos, Ostrich, Hyenas, Flamingos, Baboons, Antelope, Cheetah, and even a Rhino from about 3 miles away. Unfortunately, we did not get to see the Lions or Cheetah actually kill anything, which would have been pretty fantastic. We did, however, get to see some lions stalking a group of Zebra but then never actually make the move. Alas, you win some, you lose some. In the end, it was a fantastic trip.Here is a photo of the cheetah I spotted. I hope it looks good since it was taken from pretty far away.

Tuesdays are always an interesting experience for me, at least from a teaching perspective. I teach all of form III math, which is split into three different classes, or streams. In the morning I start with Form IIIC.Form IIIC are the....under achievers. There are a few kids in the class who try, maybe 2 or 3. Out of the 40 who show up on any given day (the enrollment is like 75) that's a pretty bad ratio. So in the mornings I'm always distraught, fed up with my lazy students, and wondering why I'm wasting my time. Form IIIC is always depressing.After a 40 minute break, I then have Form IIIB. They are a step above, with most of the kids trying, to varying degrees. In math, I usually do some short lecture, followed by a few example problems, then I give the class problems to do in class. As they are doing them, I walk around and help them out, nudging them in the right direction. This works well with IIIB, since they actually try, as opposed to IIIC. Still, after IIIB, I feel a little frustrated.After IIIB is tea break. After tea break, I teach form IIIA. IIIA is the science stream, those students that did well enough on the Form II national exams to continue studying science. The difference between IIIA and IIIC is like night and day. The kids in A try, and are eager; when they don't understand, they continue to try and want to understand, as opposed to resigning themselves to ignorance. (Form IIIC is especially like this; if they don't understand it on the first pass, without actually inputting any effort, they just stop. Like my job is to pour information into them through some magic pipe in their brains.)So I love IIIA. Unfortunately, as I near the end of the period, it will have been 4 hours that I've spent teaching, in Swahili (with some English), and my voice can't really handle that strain. Which is unfortunate, because I would love to stay with IIIA and just teach and teach and teach, but I simply can't keep it up.What I really find interesting is how this pattern is followed every Tuesday. I get angry in the morning with C, frustrated at 11 with B, and euphoric but tired with A at 1. I've always been impressed with the human ability to learn. How a single person can, in the course of one lifetime, learn several languages, learn how to run a computer, learn how to use the Schroedinger equation without even thinking about it...the human capacity for learning is awe inspiring.And yet, I'm also impressed with our ability to not learn. I've been here, teaching at Maramba Sec., for 14 months, and I've been confronted with apathetic students nearly every day of that period. But I've yet to learn and get used to it. It still, always, gets under my skin and irritates me. So I'm impressed with humans' ability to learn new things, but also our inability to habituate to things we find distasteful. Perhaps what I need to do is make my students no longer find the learning of math distasteful. But I'm pretty sure teachers have been struggling with that since the beginning. It seems, for the time being, that my Tuesdays will remain chaotic.

Seems it's been awhile. One of the constraints with posting via mobile internet is that typing out whole entries is a pain. However, with a little help from my dad, I'm now able to post via email, which should save some trouble. And, as Google advertizes the feature, I should be able to post pictures now. So, I've got a picture, and decent-ish story to go with it.The rainy season is back upon us. Along with rain and the greenery come the bugs. Ants, cockroaches, termites, praying mantises; we have the whole gamut here. And especially spiders. However, having been subjected to the spiders on numerous occasions, I've become somewhat accustomed to them, and they no longer have the same effect they used to. This is a good thing.However, it seems the spiders have also learned this lesson, and are adapting new tactics to startle me and get under my skin. A few nights ago, I was getting ready for bed, and instinctively reached for my toothbrush, which I leave leaning against the side of a glass. And there, to my total shock, was a large spider hanging from the toothbrush. I have to give that spider credit, he managed to find a location that would startle me, while also giving himself some safety (hard to smash a shoe against a toothbrush, and I didn't want to spray Raid on something I would later put in my mouth).I eventually scared that one off, cleaned my brush, and went outside to brush my teeth. Upon returning to my bedroom, the spiders let loose their real weapon. The toothbrush-spider was just a scout, an expendable shock troop to rattle me before the real thing.Despite its massive girth, a spider had managed to suspend itself on the curtain behind my bed (about 2 feet from where my head lies). But lo, this was no ordinary spider. It had antennae, really big antennae actually, sticking out straight out to the sides. Ah, but then the coup de gras. Claws. This spider had claws, real freakin' claws. It's back six legs were typical for a spider of its size (it's size being gargantuan), but its front two were about three times the length of the other legs, and jointed so that they bent back 180 degrees to rest at its mouth. Have you ever seen photos of those crabs that live on the ocean floor near the volcanic vents? That's what came to mind when I saw this spider.

I had to Raid it, since I didn't have the courage to come close enough to engage in fisticuffs with the beast. Watching spiders suffer the effects of Raid is...interesting. They start twitching and flailing, such that you can almost see the chemicals destroying their primitive nervous systems. Watching this spider, with its claws extending and retracting in it's death throes, was an unsettling experience.I left the room to get my phone, to share my near-death experience with family members, but when I returned the spider was completely gone. I didn't have the guts to search under my bed or in the small crevices around my room, since I would very likely find what I would be looking for, and that wasn't really what I wanted.I'm assuming the spider died, but I think he made a noble sacrifice. The rest of that night, as I lay reading (not quite mentally prepared for sleep) I kept fidgeting and flinching from possible spider attacks. 'Crap, what just touched my leg? Oh, it was my other leg, not another hell spawn.'

A couple weeks ago my filter broke. I was pretty heartbroken at first; I'd developed a close relationship with it over the past year and was sad to see it go.

But I didn't have much time for grieving, because I needed water. What to do? The obvious solution was to boil water; it's the only way to be totally sure it's safe. However, boiling water takes a lot of effort, especially considering the heat here and the amount of exercise I do- I drink 3-4 liters of water a day. Boiling that would be a serious pain.

So I decided that I was done with treating my water. I'd talked with a few other volunteers that don't treat their water, and other teachers that don't as well. However, for the first week I had a lot of doubts, as I was potentially opening myself up for a deluge of stomach problems.

It's been 3 weeks, and no particular problems. But last week I realized that I've been drinking untreated water for at least 8 months. At school, during lunchtime, we have a few guys from town bike in with coolers of juice they have mixed. It's cheap, its good, its cold, and I love it. But for some reason, only last week did I make the connection: there is no way these guys treat the water they put into the juice they make, and I've been been slugging it back every day at 11 am since last October.

However, having said this I'm betting the indigestion gods strike me down right after I hit 'post'.

One of the dormitory students had a birthday last night, so they decided to cook up some special food. What did they cook? Rice. Gives you some perspective when rice is a specialty food. Granted, they were frying it so it wasn't just boiled rice. Usually, the girls rotate between 2 meals for lunch and dinner: ugali and beans (ugali is a stiff maize porridge), or makande, which is a mix of whole, boiled beans and corn. For breakfast they have uji, which is a porridge of corn and perhaps another ground staple, like beans or peanuts. Sounds pretty bland, and it is. Not sure I'd be able to stay sane eating that everyday.

The Pope is visiting Africa. One of his first orders of business, naturally, was to denounce condoms, and say that they very likely make the HIV epidemic worse. Instead, he championed abstinence and fidelty.

Through many conversations with locals, ranging from health workers to teachers, the general consesus is that abstinence is a pipe dream that will never work here. People are going to be having sex, no matter what the Pope says. The best strategy is to educate people on ways to protect themselves when they do have sex.

And then the Pope, God's infallible messenger on Earth, goes and says condoms are a sin. So let's say next week, when I'm teaching my students (who will, Pope or no Pope, be having sex) to use a condom, which could very well save their lives, a student says that the Pope calls condom use a sin; how am I supposed to respond to that? 'Well you see, I'm a 24 year old with very little life experience, so you should trust me over his Holiness, the Pope.'. That's gonna go over real well.

Aww, the ole' gripe session. I wouldn't be a real Peace Corps Volunteer if I didnt indulge in the occasional long-winded rant. So without further ado, I present my top two gripes.

As a forward, I will note that there are many other things that get to me (the heat, the transportation, people speaking Swahili too fast, malaria-med induced hallucinations) but nothing as consistently or annoyingly as these two.

The first, and worst, are students that dont care. As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Thats a decent synopsis of many of my teaching experiences here. I show a certain mathematical procedure, give several examples of how to use it (step-by-step, very slowly) and then I give sample problems. A lot of the kids, at this point, will try the problems, and most of them will fail. This is when I go around, looking at their answers and procedures, and point out where they went wrong and nudge them in the right direction. But with a significant percentage of the students (and disproportionally more girls than boys; Im not sure why that is) they just stare blankly at the board. If I come close and ask them why they arent trying, they say they don't understand.

The thing is, if they cared an ounce, they would try it, fail, and I'd have something to say, some guidance to give them. As it is, I'm explaining things as simply and in as easily digestible terms as I can possibly do. If they feel incapable of at least trying it from that point, there isn't much else I can do.

What perplexes me most about these students is the expression of their uncaring. In America, from my experience at least, if a student didn't care about the lesson being taught, or cared about it less than many other things, they would be doing something else: talking with other students, doodling, sleeping, actively rebelling against the teacher. In my own education, when I either wasn't motivated enough, or too tired, I would nod off, or doodle, or maybe try to talk to my friends. But with these students, they would prefer to do nothing than to even trying some simple math. That I don't understand. I don't do well with boredom. I like to have my mind doing something, even if its meaningless or futile. My students don't seem to have that stumbling block. They can, and do, stare off into space, doing nothing, and seemingly thinking nothing, for long stretches at a time.

It certainly stings a little. At least if they were talking with their friends, I'd understand; they made the choice that socializing is more in their self-interest than learning math. Yet with my students, they choose nothing over doing math. Nothing. 'Would you rather have the lasagna or the pizza tonight?' 'Hmm, I'd rather have nothing actually.' Come on! It would only be worse if they preferred pain to my teaching. 'Why weren't you in class today?' 'Oh, I was flagellating myself for my sins; you know, just in case God decides to send the Black Plague again, Id like to be prepared.'

Ok, on to gripe #2. Ants. There are ants all over my house. Houses here arent built with insulation in mind, so my walls are pretty porous. And I live on the edge of a forest, so hunting down their main nests is impractical. So my strategy has focused on prevention. If I can isolate the things that attract them, then maybe they will leave me alone.

Unfortunately, I've found out that one of the things that attracts them the most is sweat. Good luck trying not to sweat on the equator. If they just got on my skin and were mildly irritating when they walked around, that would probably be tolerable. Annoying, but within the range of tolerable annoyances. Yet these ants bite. They dont get on your body with biting in mind. Rather, they are exploring, and occasionally the urge strikes to bite into what they are walking on (like the scene in Empire Strikes Back: 'The cave is collapsing!' 'This is no cave.' (I get bonus points the more SW references I can weave into my writing)).

Man do those little buggers hurt too. I would never have thought such tiny little mandibles could pinch so hard.

On the plus side, I think I'm starting to cohabitate better with the ants. They seem to have confined themselves to my kitchen table, and various other strategic locations, so as long as I hide my foodstuffs in locales they haven't breached, life can continue. My students, on the other hand...

Is it strange that some of my best english teaching tools are Chinese Kung Fu movies dubbed into English? The action keeps them paying attention, and they hear English, which is a gaping hole in their language education.

Had a good scare yesterday. It's the rainy season again, which means it rains a ridiculous amount. We were having our early afternoon thunderstorm, and I'd had to go the restroom, when the lightning and thunder started. Most of it was about 1-2 miles out, and not much of a concern. But then, whammo, a monster blast perhaps a quarter mile away. And there I was, squatting in my metal-roofed latrine, thinking 'what a crappy way to die.'. Thoughts like that tend to make you move pretty fast; I managed to extricate myself from the john in record time.

My soccer adventure's didn't turn out so hot. Soccer here is more like greco-roman wrestling, while running, with a ball thrown in there somewhere. And surprisingly, it seems I'm not as strong or fast as a gaggle of teenage African farm boys. So I've decided that I will stick to my pick-up games with the local boys, at least until I get in good enough shape to be competitive.

On the plus side, as of Friday, my fellow teacher, Fadhili, has a new daughter. I was considering going to visit them in Tanga on Saturday, but then figured it was a time period best left to family. Plus I was too lazy to travel.

I learned on Saturday that next week we have a holiday, supposedly on Monday. Naturally I learned from another volunteer, since no one here informs me of these things. I guess people don't realize that I'm not versant in the Islamic calendar.

There is also the fact that people aren't really sure when the holiday is. As I understand it, the holiday is for Muhammed's birthday, and depends on the lunar calendar, so there is a bit of leeway, specifically whether the holiday is on Monday or Tuesday. Most people I talk to say it's Monday, but my friend's village is celebrating on Tuesday. I'm guessing it will morph into a two-day long holiday, particularly for schools. If the students don't show up, there's no classes, and I find it difficult to believe that many students will actually come on Tuesday. Not that I'm complaining. Perhaps I'll use the time to start my war on the ants.

My school was scheduled to have a football match against a school in the nearby mountains. Since it's about 20km between them and us, I figured they wouldn't be showing up. So when it fell through, on the day of (today) I stepped in and suggested we have a regular match pitting form 3 versus form 4.

Of course, I have an ulterior motive. I want to play in a real football match. My first time I played during a school match (it was prefects and teachers versus the rest of the school) I didn't play so hot, because our school field is on a 30 degree incline and the terrain is composed mainly of holes. This makes speed and luck the primary attributes of success, of which I had neither.

Today, however, we are playing on the army base's field, which is flat and nice. Plus I've been playing soccer for an average of one hour a day for several months, so I'm confident in my own ability.

I'll bring my camera along so I can get some good 'where's waldo' shots going.

A couple weeks ago, someone (almost certainly a student) stole all my clothes pins. Total cost came to about a dollar.

What I don't understand is that they didn't steal my pants that were on the line, instead choosing to throw them down into the mud nearby. Once upon a time those pants cost thirty dollars.

Maybe my students are trying to send a not-so-subtle hint about my fashion choices. Or maybe they figured a pantsless me was too terrible a situation to contemplate.

Or, as Fadhili put it, they feel comfortable stealing in small quantities, little by little. That stealing some clothes pins is ok, but stealing pants is crossing a line. This behavior seems somewhat common among people, but where does it come from?

I think it goes along with the idea of a proportional response. I really don't quite understand these. For example,you are targetting a terrorist organization for a proportional strike after they bombed your country. What I don't understand is the proportional part. If what they are doing is evil and needs to be stopped, you should go all the way and stop them fully. If they aren't being evil, and don't need to be stopped, it's immoral to forcibly stop them. Where does this halfway, 'proportional' part come from? To do, or not do, depends on specifics of capacity and ability, but to consciously do it only halfway doesn't make much sense.

I know the world isn't black and white, but some distinct actions are. Killing and planning to kill innocents is wrong, and needs to be stopped. Stealing clothes pins is wrong. There isn't a critical mass when it comes to morality.

Wow, that last paragraph turned really preachy. Sorry.

As I'm writing this, our school's librarian is performing an exorcism on a student. No, that's not a joke. He's shouting things like 'toka mapepo!' and 'ushindwe!' which translate to 'out demon' and 'you are defeated.'

I'm not a religious man. But I enjoyed the Inferno and the Purgatorio (not so much Paradiso) and St. Augustine's writings on the nature of sin are enlightening. But I'm not sure how exorcisms fit into my worldview.

Even more, I'm not sure how most people view demons and exorcisms here. Most of the time, when a student passes out, and I ask another student, or a teacher, what has happened, I get 'oh, it's demons,' and then they chuckle. What does that mean? If my friend got taken over by a demon, I'd be a little concerned (not that I wouldn't make fun of him later for it. 'Remember that time you had a demon and were writhing on the floor like an idiot? That was classic').

The contrast is especially sharp to me. Next week I'm supposed to start teaching the form IV's about electromagnetic induction, which I didn't learn till sophomore year in college. And yet we have demons invading students' bodies.

All I can say is they better not try any of that when I'm lecturing, or those demons are gonna see how we secular humanists role.

I finally decided to write a blog. Ive been writing emails about my misadventures in Peace Corps for about a year now, and the guilt of clogging peoples inboxes has finally gotten to me. Now my only fear is that I'll spend hours writing here, only to have my parents, and perhaps a sister or two, read it, and get bitter and spiteful at the world passing over my so readily apparent genius.

On the offhand chance that some poor soul who doesn't know me, lost in the void of the internets, stumbles upon this, and either pauses long enough to read, or has an acute onset of carpal tunnel syndrome and is therefore stuck reading, I feel I should give some background.

My name is Matthew, I grew up in the States, went to a college, majored in a science that was several levels above my then work ethic, and, not knowing what to do with my life, but hoping to find some meaning in volunteer work, joined the Peace Corps.

I landed in Nairobi, Kenya, sometime in Mid-September. My women's intuition tells me the 19th, so I'll go with that. I did a 10 week training, along with my fellow Peace Corps trainees, in a small town called Kitui, about 2 hours southeast of Nairobi. I made some memories, some friends, some enemies (sadly I think the latter outnumber the former, and will likely remember me longer) and learned the invaluable skills of 'the squat,' the bucket bath, washing clothes by hand, and getting used to being stared at wherever I went.

After training we were sent to our sites. My sector is education, specifically teaching Math and Physics. I was sent to western Kenya, the province of Nyanza, and my site was at a school about 30-40 kilometers south of Lake Victoria. I arrived in December, during the school's break. I quickly found out I was the only teacher who lived on the school grounds, and so had to make friends with my nearest companions, the goats that grazed around there and the cows penned up for the school's milk (no, we weren't that kind of friends, you perv).

Three weeks went by, as I slowly acclimated to relying on my rain-catchment for water, eating badly cooked meals, going to bed at 7:30 because I was too cheap to pay for more kerosene, the ever present specter of diarrhea...you know, the good life.

Then came Christmas. I travelled up north to my friend Lew's house, a swanky pad owned by a fellow American who ran an NGO setting up computers in Kenyan schools. Lew had electricity, running water, a wall with a guard, a dvd player with projector, a fridge, and lastly, the all mighty oven. At the time, Peace Corps was worried about the election that was going to take place on the 27th of December.

To make a long story short, they were right to be worried, and western Kenya pretty well blew up. We were sequestered in Lew's house, which was probably one of the safest places we could have been. The entire scenario was quite surreal. Outside the walls of the community where we were staying there were riots, buildings burning down, the occasional gunshot; while inside, we baked all day, watched badly dubbed versions of movies pirated in China, and occasionally went across the compound to the community's clubhouse, a bar/Indian food restaurant that had all you can eat buffets on Friday nights. But it became rather tiresome not knowing what our future would hold, including whether rioters would try to storm the gate and get some of the riches hoarded away inside. Shortly after new year's, Peace Corps informed us that we would be leaving by plane from the nearby runway. We were transported by a private vehicle, then flew from Kakamega to Kisimu, then Kisimu to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. At the time I felt strangely confident that it would be a short stay in Tanzania, and then we would be sent back to Kenya to start our work. Logic, on the other hand, should have told me that widespread civil strife and ethnic clashes don't tend to work themselves out in a few days. I think I was just hoping that all my stuff wouldn't get stuck in a small shack on a hill in Nyandiwa, Nyanza. At the time I had two small pieces of luggage with me, cause I had just been planning on a three hour tour. How could I have known?

Peace Corps treated us really well during the evacuation. We were put up at a swanky beach resort that came complete with table tennis, a wii, and a dance floor where they played the same 4 Kenny Rogers songs 3 times a night, every night (it's only a matter of time before one of the big record companies discovers that d.j. and makes him the next greatest thing in pop music).

After a few days, it started to become clear that none of us would be going back to Kenya anytime soon, at least not while riding the Peace Corps gravy train. The choice came down to: go home, go home and wait for Kenya to clear up/get a new assignment, or get a direct transfer to a new country. Again, I felt strangely confident that I was going to get what I wanted, a direct transfer to Tanzania. This time, luckily, I was right. I was transferred, complete with a 10 day mini-training, along with four others, also teachers: Lew, Aaron, Joe and Katie.

After a bit of research, I realized Tanzania was a pretty sweet country to be in. Among its attractions are the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, Mount Kilimanjaro, the Zanzibar spice islands, and of course, Maramba. My village. My home. For awhile at least.

In the next few days, I'll try to add more, assuming Peace Corps doesn't shut me down because of my fiery political rhetoric and untamed, rebellious spirit.

* PC requires that I add the following disclaimer:

The contents of this website are those of Matthew S. and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or the Peace Corps.

I should probably put that somewhere special, but I'm limited to mobile internet, and this blogging service doesn't get along well with my phone, so here it is. I'll try to feng shui it up a bit when I reach an internet cafe. Someday.