I apologize for the nearly two-month gap between posts. My final few days in Dar Es Salaam before coming home were fairly hectic (I became seriously ill, nearly hospitalized). I'd written a "final" post to give a sense of closure, but the computer crashed as I was finishing it, and I was too frustrated and tired to write another. Sorry!

As things stand now, I've just moved in with my brother in Ashland, Oregon (home of the regionally-famous Shakespeare Festival). The previous two weeks were a whirlwind of travel, friends, family, and food. Seriously, I could not believe how much fudge was all over the place around Christmas time. What's up with that? Can anyone eat so much fudge..? Anyway, it was amazing to see everyone again after such a long hiatus. A week back home and a week in Seattle ensured that I had a chance to catch up with nearly everyone I'd been missing (notable exceptions aside: Kent Naegeli and Brandon Schaefer, who were in Tokyo which is a bit too far away).

It's a good feeling to finally have a solid ground to stand on, though. It will be fantastic for me to live here with my brother, whom I haven't seen that often for the past...7 or 8 years. I'll commence looking for an interim job in Ashland while I eagerly await hearing back from business schools (update: I'm a fellowship finalist at the Moore School of U. South Carolina; wish me luck!). My goal is to become an apprentice baker for the next six months. I'd dig that.

That's about all I have left to say. To everyone who has read my posts, whether you made it known or not, thanks. I really appreciate those of you who've told me how you enjoyed what I wrote. It wasn't always positive, but what a great means of expression! I wish you all the best, and feel free to email me whenever you'd like:

farris.r.s@gmail.com

(since I'm no longer in Africa, I thought a change might be prudent).

Cheers

Rob

Scott Boyd came. He conquered, and then he left us in awe. Honestly, having such a great friend come here and see the life I’ve been living was as good as making a stew and then realizing you have enough stew to eat for two days instead of one. Maybe it was even better than that… I would write a post about his visit but for two reasons. First, words will never do Scott Boyd justice. Second, pictures always tell the story more vividly. Look at what he decides to post, you’ll find yourself satiated. Scott Boyd, you rock.

In lieu of Scott/Rob adventure tales, I want to drop one more about the education system here. I’ve almost filled my invective-quota; hopefully this will be the last. Several weeks ago, my headmaster invited to his office and presented me with an honor: I had been chosen to write the governmental mock examination for the entire Kagera region (of which Bukoba is the chief town). This exam is given to the form six students three months before they finish secondary school and take their final exams, and is meant to prepare them by showing them where they need to focus their studies. Last year’s physics mock was garbage and I often railed against my students relying on it. I kept telling my boys, “If I could write this test, I would make it much better” by making it less erroneous and more representative of the final physics test. Now, I was being given the chance to put up or shut up.

Several days later, I’d produced a massive test of which I was proud. Honestly, I believe it good enough to be used even as the final national exam. I’d researched nearly twenty physical constants (acceleration due to gravity, speed of sound in air, and so on) which would be necessary to answer many of my questions. This had been a major problem area in the previous year’s mock exam- no constants were given, yet it was impossible to answer some questions without them. Imagine being a capable physics student, frustrated and unable to answer problems which you comprehend because of an error in the test itself. I wanted to be sure that this wouldn’t happen again. With the advent of Scott Boyd, I knew I would be otherwise occupied and so I passed the completed test- constants and all- to my friend Mr. Omali, the academic master here at Ihungo.

Two weeks later, I went to visit my headmaster and to pay sympathies to his wife (she had surgery and is fine, but Tanzanians like to give their condolences for the surgery itself). Over a beer, he told me that the mock exam coordinator called him to say that the physics test I’d written was missing an instruction page. The coordinator had then talked with the other physics teacher at my school (more on this champ in a bit) who advised him to use last year’s instruction page. Why is the instruction page important? It contains the necessary physical constants. This was the most critical part of the test, the page without which the test would be impossible to complete. And my exhaustive instructions had been replaced by those of last year, those which I had repeatedly condemned. Ultimately, this means that throughout the entire Kagera region, not a single student will be able to successfully complete my test. Despite my efforts, despite doing everything I could to avoid it, my test is now the same as last year’s.

You might be asking yourself several questions, such as “why doesn’t Rob call the coordinator and give him a proper instruction page?” or “who is this other physics teacher who gave such terrible advice to the coordinator?” Let me tell you: the physics test was proctored this afternoon, and I only found out about the full extent of this problem this morning. As much as I wanted to do something to change the outcome, there was no way I would have time to get the proper instruction page to every A-level school in the entire region. Hello, helplessness.

The second half of this story has to do with this other physics teacher, whose background is necessary here. I’ve written a bit about him before, but let me refresh you. He came to Ihungo last year and began teaching conjointly with me. After several months, it became evident that he was an incorrigible drunk who would often miss class to sleep off his benders. In the evenings, he would force our students to pay him to attend tutoring in which he would cover the material which he had failed to teach during the day. Upon learning this, I resumed full responsibility for physics, and he eventually found a job elsewhere. It’s important to note that he wasn’t fired, but left on his own volition to pursue a position with a larger salary. A year passed, and he came back. He returned fresh-faced with assurances that his binge-drinking days were behind him. In retrospect, I believe he only made this claim because at the time he couldn’t afford that enough liquor for binging. Since coming back, he’s been slowly and surreptitiously returning to his former habits. I told him early on that I wouldn’t tolerate his making the students pay extra for their educations, but he still often skips class. In short, this is a man who would last roughly eight minutes as a teacher in any Western education system, but due to the severe lack of teachers here in Tanzania, he and his predilections are in high demand.

So now that we are familiar with my fellow teacher, let me continue the story. I said that he had advised the mock exam coordinator to use last year’s instruction page. As frustratingly stupid as this was, it pales in comparison to the second trick he had up his sleeve. Due to the difficulty of writing such a comprehensive and important examination, there is remuneration available to the mock exam authors. Volunteers are not allowed to receive any additional financial support outside of their salaries, so I requested that mine go towards the Positive Reinforcement Project which I initiated last year. While I was busy severely rocking the world with Scott Boyd, this other teacher was asked to proofread my test to ensure there were no mistakes. At this point, he was given the monetary reward for my work. What then followed was ajabu-ajabu kabisa (completely freaking ridiculous). Dude took the money intended for the school and went on a drinking spree to end all sprees. Two days passed and he hadn’t returned to the school. The following morning, a staff member who commutes from town told the headmaster that he saw someone resembling our wayward drunk. This person he saw was passed out on the side of the road with no shoes on, covered in bruises and reeking of alcohol. Yes, it turned out to be our physics teacher. Eventually, he made it home and slept for at least five days. When I saw him for the first time yesterday, his face still looked like hell and it was more than a week after his triumphant return. I asked him what happened, and he told me “I had an accident.” I’m sure you did bro, I’m sure you did.

To me, the most amazing thing in all of this is the fact that he is not going to lose his job. Can you believe it? The headmaster told me that he would “sit him down and counsel him to drink less.” Oh, good idea. I guess we can forget that upon my departure, all 140 physics students will have to rely on this champ. It’s a tragic truth that Ihungo would simply not be able to find another A-level physics teacher and so they can’t fire him, even if he is a drunken, corrupt thief. Welcome to the developing world…

As a final note, remember that this is a (fairly) unique situation with a particularly unreliable teacher. There are other teachers at my school, such as Mr. Omali, who inspire me on a daily basis. There are my students, who persevere despite the bad tests and the drunks. There is good in the education system here, really, but some days it just seems hard to find.

...and its called "Scott Boyd".

He'll be here in t-minus 2 hours, and then we go immediately to a Halloween party. I'm sure being the fancy pants blogger that he is, he'll upload some high-def streaming video nonsense for you all to enjoy.

I think Scott Boyd and I are about to ruin this town.

Two months. That’s pretty much all that I’ve had on my mind lately- how close I am to coming home. Over the last few weeks, Jodi and I have gone to two school graduation ceremonies (this is a bit of masochism, seeing that they tend to be six hours of bad speeches and kids trying to emulate Akon or Beyonce) and each time I found myself daydreaming about coming to America. No, not the Eddie Murphy movie, although I can dig it. Maybe I should move to Queens..? With such a short amount of time left, I feel like I’m almost in two places at once: my heart and mind are eating pizza with Andrew, while my body is still taking cold bucket showers. I try to remind myself of the aspects of life here that I’ll miss upon my return, but I find it hard not to take everything for granted when I stand on the precipice of such a drastic life change. It was the same before I left the States, I focused solely where I was going and not on what I was leaving behind. Perhaps that makes it easier to leave?

One part of my life here that I’m sure to miss is my site mate- Jodi. She teaches ordinary level (the first four years of secondary school; I teach the advanced levels which follow these), and her school term will end shortly. This means she’ll be able to head home a month prior to me, as I’ll still be in session. Jodi and I have been together since day one- we were in the same training group in Morogoro, and then we were stationed together here in Bukoba. Despite Andrew’s occasional idiosyncrasies, I’ve never known what it would be like to have a sister. I suppose I think of Jodi as I would a sister; she’s been my rock for a lot during these past few years. During the hard times, it was great knowing she was in my corner. We’ve developed all sorts of routines to make Bukoba feel like home: spicy Indian food on Tuesdays, playing cribbage on the beach, trying to ride our bikes up our respective hills. Knowing that she heads out in a few weeks is a bittersweet thought- I’m excited for both of us to be back among family and friends, but the bonds which are fostered through adversity tend to be the strongest ones (a lesson I learned by watching Vin Diesel movies) and I’ll miss my sis.

When I was asked what I’ll remember about Tanzania during that conference a few months ago, I immediately thought of my students. Even if I have profound, fundamental issues with the system of education here, even if I never truly adapted to my role as a teacher, even if I can’t stand them at times, I know how much I will miss my boys. Its ironic, but now that I’m on the cusp on leaving, I’ve begun to impart as much of my knowledge as I possibly can to them. Yesterday in class, they were complaining about an poorly made administrative decision (in their eyes, of course), and I spent half of my lesson making an impromptu speech about how they have every right to stand up for what they see as right. Since I’m not prone to being long-winded (excepting this blog, naturally), my students actually listened. They nodded, they smiled, and maybe they felt inspired. Or maybe it was that empty smile that they do when I ask them if they understand about how the terminals of an operational amplifier act as a differential input. “Sure, Mr. Masanja, we understand completely…*cough cough*” I’ve said it before, but the students at this school, and probably country-wide, really get the short end of the stick. If nothing else, I want to leave them feeling proud of themselves for how far they’ve come. I guess that means more Mr. Masanja diatribes are soon to be delivered.

By the way, one thing I know I’ll miss about my students, and about most Tanzanians, is how mellow they can be. Granted, at times the laissez-faire attitude can be frustrating as hell, but sometimes it was their saving grace. Picture this: I’m in front of the class teaching, and it’s a rainy day. There is a hole in the corner of the roof that’s leaking, and my boys are all shivering from the brisk wind coming through the broken windows. All of a sudden BAM! out of the hole comes a bat. I’ve never had any problem with bats, but many people do (especially Americans, probably thanks to legends inspired by Bram Stoker). I wasn’t sure how my students would react to this disease-bomb swooping over their heads. When I paused the lesson to see what they would do, they looked at me like “why are you stopping, is it too cold to teach or something?” They had hardly noticed the bat. I chuckled to myself and continued lecturing as the bat kept swooping and they kept taking notes. Imagine what reaction this would inspire in an American high school. I can picture the screams, mainly coming from the teacher… What a difference! The bat made several repeat appearances, and I thought about adding him to the attendance roster. Anyway, its this mellowness that I tend to take for granted. I know there are other parts to life here that I don’t appreciate as much as I ought to, and I’ll try to enjoy life here as much as I can for the next two months. But good grief, I’m so damn excited to have a cheeseburger and a porter.

Update: after writing this, I was going around town and had an opportunity to be reminded of what I'm not going to miss. I was just walking, minding my own business and a man came up to me. Somehow he knew I am teaching at Ihungo, and since he teaches at a nearby school, we are best friends. Now, since I'm white, he assumed I would give him money for his hospital bills. Of course he'll pay it back tomorrow, being my best friend and all. And when I said "no, sorry" the fifth time, he got pissed and told me how he is a good Christian and I'm going to hell. Yeeeeesh...not gonna miss that at all.

Well, it finally happened. Push-reel mowers are now in action at Ihungo Secondary! It took more than six months of planning, fund-raising, and hoop jumping, but at long last, this project has reached an end. The Ihungo students now have ten new push mowers they can use to maintain our expansive grounds. We are giving them names of animals found in Tanzania: Simba (lion), Tembo (elephant), Twiga (giraffe), Kifaro (rhino), Naegeli (dogg), and so on.

Once more, let me extend a profound thanks to everyone who helped us out on this. I gave a "big speech" to the boys before presenting the mowers to them, in which I explained where the funding came from. I wish you all could have been here to hear their cheers and whoops of appreciation.

Look on the pictures page to see some pictures of the mowers that I've taken over the last few days.

Before my volunteer training group came to Tanzania, we were asked to name reasons why we chose to sign up. Some people came for the altruism, some as a career move, but a surprising number claimed that they’d signed up in order to have two more years to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. Its interesting, the decisions we make based on the fact that we have nothing better to do (this was my rationale for co-inventing drinking Scrabble in college). While hangovers only last a day, or two at the worst, a Peace Corps contract lasts twenty-seven long months. It’s not really one of those “nothing better to do” type of choices, and yet so many of us found that to be our primary reason for volunteering. Ironically, while the past two years that we’ve been here have helped us to grow as people, they have not helped us decide what direction we choose for our lives.

Case in point: my graduate school application process. Over the last six months or so, I have spent a horrid amount of time on Bukoba’s lethargic internet researching viable options for pursuing a master’s degree. Initially I opted away from physics, remembering the grueling late-night study sessions with Ivan; physics made me want to cry. At some point, I found that Peace Corps offers fellowships opportunities with a number of universities. The only problem is that each university has its own specific degree program to be followed in conjunction with the fellowship; I had my choice from education to engineering to public service management. While variety is the spice of life, what I found during my time poring over these programs is that they were too diverse and too many. I couldn’t choose. I’m not sure I joined Peace Corps to “find myself” or to put off deciding what path my life should take, but as I neared the end of my tenure, I realized that the path in front of me is still hazy. The programs which appealed to me included political science, urban studies, international studies, and international business. It took me two months to narrow down my choices to a top five.

Then a friend clued me in to a fellowship program offered through the National Science Foundation which offers unbeatable benefits and a chance to study cutting edge technology. For example, nanotechnology has held my interest since I was in my early teens and read sci-fi stories about its possibilities. Through this NSF program, I could try to manifest those inchoate dreams into a semblance of reality. Again, there were numerous schools and programs which I had to spend weeks sifting through. By this point, I’d used about four months researching all these graduate school options, and I was pretty burnt out. Trust me, trying to find all the logistical information for these programs with limited internet access and time was an unmitigated frustration. Whenever I see tourists in the internet cafés here, I try to guess how many minutes it will take before they begin complaining of the sluggishness of our networks. The average is around five minutes. At least I had some ten schools that I planned on applying to. Now here is the true indicator that I have no idea what I really want to do- the programs I plan to apply towards are remarkably disparate. In my final listing, I have an international business school, an advanced physics laboratory with emphasis on terahertz technology, several political science choices, and a program through MIT that focuses on integrating emerging technologies. Yikes.

Oddly enough, I’ve found myself drawn more and more towards the business school option. My closest high school friends were incredulous and stunned when I told them I’d joined a fraternity. I’d imagine most people who know me will be just as flabbergasted by this new propensity of mine. Why business school? To be honest, I suppose the main reason would be to ensure that I’ll be able to support a family when I need to. I once asked my longtime roommate and great friend Nate Fisher what he thought were some of my character flaws (long story…). His first answer was that I am too prone towards wanderlust. I know that about myself, and I know that at some point I will have to choose between my desire to inveterately jump from one job to another, one country to another, and the demands of raising children. When the time comes that I settle down, I don’t want to be in a position where I am unable to provide for my family due to my past choices. Hence, business school. To be honest, I’m eager to try my hand at business, economics, and management.

With this in mind, last weekend I went to Kampala to take my GMAT, the test required for admissions into business school. For those of you planning to take the GMAT, study hard; it was one of the hardest tests I’ve taken in a long time, much more so than the GRE. Fortunately, ever since those Iowa Tests of Basic Skills which we had to take back in elementary school to prove that the American education system works, I’ve had an uncanny ability to do well on standardized tests. The GMAT was no exception, and my score was in the 99th percentile. This means that I should be able to get some scholarship offers! Or at least, my high GMAT score will offset my low GPA (thanks a lot, fraternity). As soon as I got my results, I went to a fancy Indian restaurant where I drank cold beer and ate palak korma (that’s Hindi for “bombastic creamy spinach creation”) in celebration.

I’m still planning on applying to some of the other programs I mentioned, but at this point it looks like business school is in my cards. My hope is to be accepted to an international MBA program so I can combine my inclination towards travel with such a useful degree. Wish me luck in admissions huh…?

One last thing…while I was in Kampala, I found a Mexican restaurant. Jodi and I made fish tacos once, and I’ve created some sort of burritos, but I haven’t had true Mexican food in a long time, and I miss it. The restaurant was called “Fat Boyz,” how great is that? Fajitas were on the menu, and I was getting pumped up to have some legitimate delicious food. When I ordered, the waiter looked at me for a while, then looked at the menu, then back at me. After a full minute or so, the light turned on and he said, “Oh you are wanting the chicken fajitas then!” However, I had pronounced “fajita” as fa-hee-ta. The waiter said fa-jite-uh. As soon as he spoke, my hopes for deliciousness began to ebb. When the food came, he proudly announced the arrival of my fa-jite-uhs. At this point, I tried explaining that in Spanish the “j” is pronounced more like an “h”, to which he responded, “This is a Mexican food called fa-jite-uh. In English, it is called The Sizzler.” Wow, awesome. The next time you go to a Mexican food joint, try ordering The Sizzler and see what happens. If you get slapped, blame it on the guy in Kampala.

Why triumph? I don’t know, really. Today, I decided to write to title before the post. Apparently, “triumph” is my current state of mind, albeit with due cause. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had some major and minor victories which seem to have put me in a triumphant mood.

When Joseph (ex-volunteer at Ihungo) visited about a month ago, we discussed transportation around Bukoba. You see, my school is situation at the top of a fairly steep hill, overlooking the town and some five kilometers from it (Davis, five kilometers is still three miles; you stopped reading didn’t you, you fair-weather friend?). To walk to my school from town takes a little over an hour, taxis are outrageously expensive, and public transport is unscheduled and unreliable. Where does that leave those of us who are not only stingy, but also in a hurry? Velocipedes. Beautiful, 21-speed machines. Every volunteer is outfitted with a (mostly) new bike when installed at site, as my Trek 820 proves. I haven’t bought a bike since I was around 10, when I got some grey Japanese hybrid at a shop in Eugene. It’s been a comfort to have this Trek, though for a long time, I didn’t take advantage of it. You see, since my arrival at school, I’d been regaled with the legend of Joseph, Biker of the Gods. According to the tales, this man-beast was born with his feet clipped into pedals, and could bike across Lake Victoria if he so desired (he didn’t desire; too banal). For real though, I have heard the story about Joseph biking from here to Karagwe (some 120 kilometers distant) at least ten times. Let me tell you, being slammed with the exploits of another like that has one immediate effect- I stopped wanting to ride my bike after only a few weeks at site.

A year and a half passed, and then came my conversation with Joseph about getting around Bukoba. He told me it used to take him about 15 minutes to ride home from town and, more importantly, that he could bike the entire hill without stopping, wheezing, crying a little, and then falling over. By the time he told me this, I had attempted to bike up the hill, that sloped demon, only once. I stopped, wheezed, and I swear I never cried but I did fall over. Hearing his dismissal of the hill as “easy to climb” flipped the that’s-it-I’m-gonna-do-it-too switch in my brain, and I geared up for the challenge. Get it, “geared up”? That’s a joke. It’s funny because bikes have gears.

Since his departure, I have made the attempt to surmount this monster of a hill twice or three times a week. On two occasions, I’ve passed out from exertion. On others, when I arrive home, I flop onto my bed and lay inert for hours, too tired to do anything but stare at the American flag waving majestically in my window. On all occasions, I could not get past this one stretch that is like a 20-percent uphill grade for a kilometer; it was too steep, too long. Note I used past tense in that last sentence, and here comes the method behind the mayhem of my “Triumph” title- last week, I conquered that son of a bitch. I deserve to call the hill that, after being beaten by it so many times. Here’s how my victory came about: Jodi and I were hanging in town the other day, cruisin’ around on our bikes like a two-person gang (by definition, the smallest possible gang). We reached this one area with a bit of a climb, and I shifted down to 3/1. I asked Jodi what gear she was in, assuming she was rolling 3/1 also. She replied “1/1, and it feels like I’m just walking.” What’s this..? 1/1? In all my attempts of scaling the son of a bitch, I had never shifted below 3/1. I don’t know why, it just never occurred to me. The next time I reached that diabolically difficult stretch, I kept it at 3/1 until my quads exploded, then dropped down to 1/1. Ha-HA, hill! When I reached the apex and neared my house, I cheered wildly for myself in between ragged and desperate intakes of oxygen. Sweet satisfaction. Since that day, I have only had two other opportunities to try again. On one, I was in a state of minimal sobriety and I’m fairly certain that I was secreting vodka through my pores. I didn’t quite make it that day, and I do not recommend rigorous exercise after beer and vodka. The other time, I breezed up the hill in a solid twenty minutes. Rad.

Since I’ve already written a lot, I’ll try to be brief about my other triumph- climbing a tree. Don’t laugh, I’m scared of heights. Don’t laugh, lots of people have vertigo. I’d bungee jump, would you? Anyway, the rainy season is-a comin’ here in Bukoba, and if old hillbillies lived here, they would be in rocking chairs on the front porch talking about feeling in their bones the changin’ weather. So in a fit of unusual preparation and planning, I decided to clean my gutters. Recall, roughly 50-percent of the water I use is rainwater. Dirty gutters equals dirty water for washing, cooking, and bathing. I don’t have a ladder, and my roof is high (this seems to be a common trait of roofs). I had to get onto my roof to clean off all the leaves and debris, but how? Well, one of my big avocado trees has a branch which abuts the edge of the roof. I’ve seen students get up there when stealing my avocados. Again, that’s-it-I’m-gonna-do-it-too came into my mind. Having long arms is a blessing for climbing trees, but weighing 190 pounds is not. Halfway to the roof, the branch I was on started cracking. I performed a monkey-like swing grab onto a higher branch and dangled there, twenty-five feet up. Hand-over-hand I managed to secure the roof and drop to relative safety. Then I sat and trembled for a good ten minutes. Don’t laugh. Two hours later, I’d accumulated an enormous pile of dirt, leaves and fear. But mission accomplished, my gutters are now clean. I think the last time they were cleaned was during the days of German colonialism. That was another joke. This time, it’s funny because Germans colonized Tanzania over a hundred years ago. To descend from the roof, I had the opportunity to utilize all my lankiness and monkey skills. I crouched on the edge, stretched out one arm to its maximum, then leapt, soared, and grabbed a branch five feet away. It was terrifying. I wish someone would have been here to take a video, I’m sure it was the most awkward attempt to be agile, ever. Triumph.

One lesson I’ve taken from my time in Tanzania is how to take the good with the bad. Examples are abundant: the social openness of my neighbors (good) coupled with a severe lack of privacy (bad); my ability to solicit funding in attempts to ease the burdens of life here (good) contrasting with people viewing me only as a dollar sign (bad). I could go on. Over the last week or so, I’ve had yet another opportunity to see this dualistic nature of life and people. Ever the optimist, let me start with the good.

My previous week was fantastic. Peace Corps arranged a seminar for my training group, a chance for those of us who stuck it out to meet one last time in order to exchange stories, ideas, and advice. The seminar was ostensibly to serve as a preparation for our inevitable return to the (relatively) fast-moving and chaotic life awaiting us back in the States, but this facet was eclipsed by our joy in seeing one another one last time. One last hurrah for the battered veterans of two years’ struggle in a foreign land. As a parting gift, the seminar was held in a picturesque lodge at the base of Mt. Meru, Tanzania’s second highest peak. Each day, we were rewarded with stunning views of both Meru and Mt. Kilimanjaro that would have made a National Geographic photographer green with envy. As hard as it was to know that we would shortly leave one another to pursue our individual dreams, those few days of the seminar were blissful in the company we shared. The last day culminated with a slide show of pictures aggregated from so many cameras, a visual record of the group’s two years in Africa. For the last time, we laughed and reminisced as one.

I won’t say it was easy to return to bucolic Bukoba after this brief interlude of camaraderie, but the work awaiting me necessitated my focus that I couldn’t dwell on the solitude. After a short time, I was gregarious, happy Masanja again. Talking with my brother a few days ago, I vehemently argued against the Buddhist ideal that all life is suffering; there is too much beauty in the world for it to be so, I said. I only mention this as a glimpse into the outlook I was maintaining at the time. Simply put, it was that life is inherently good. Now as I mentioned, the duality of the world doesn’t tend to accept such a polarity without producing a counterpoint: joy and sorrow; pain and pleasure (although to some…); electron and positron. Enter the bad.

Whether it was disrupted plans, a work overload, or a smelly dead rat that my cat left under my bed, nothing seemed to ruffle my feathers. Even now, I’m in that mental state of tranquility, but it is becoming harder to maintain. Let me explain: for the last six or eight months, a local boy has been coming over to my house to hang out. At the risk of sounding vain, let me say that I thought of him as a protégé of sorts. I tried teaching him as much as I could, from Pokemon (Jodi still can’t believe that one) to cooking Asian food to world history and classical music. I enjoyed the time this boy spent with me, for his focus was phenomenal. Here, I thought, was a Tanzanian unencumbered by a lack of attention span or an absent desire for edification. The boy would study my physics books and ask me pertinent questions; he would read about America in magazines and look to correct his false impressions. For over half a year, we continued this relationship, mentor and pupil. He was a sponge that absorbed all the knowledge and ideas that I immersed him in.

However, during this time, my personal belongings began to go missing. First it was a box of Aplets & Cotlets that I was saving for a guest, vanished silently from my kitchen. Then a small amount of money I had set aside as a gift for a friend joined the ranks. Over time, the list swelled, reaching an apex when my cellular phone disappeared (ironically, the phone was defunct and I had stopped using it). I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that this same boy managed to convince me that it was my house help who was responsible. To my credit, the circumstances were overwhelming that it was she who had been slowly, cautiously relieving me of my material possessions. One day, I sat her down and told her my suspicions, and asked her to return my missing phone or hit the road. What followed were several hours of her in overdramatic throes, violently protesting that God would clear her name and strike down those who had cast this fate upon her; I decided not to fire her. In retrospect, it was an honest mistake to first suspect her and a fortuitous decision to then believe in her innocence. The question remained: who could be stealing from me? Perhaps it seems obvious to you reading this, but understand I trusted this boy implicitly. Until this last week, that is.

In Tanzania, electronics are still a luxury and therefore are sold at a premium. Any informed thief would not settle for a bicycle or basketball, but would search out an mp3 player or thumb drive. As an American, I am a gadgeteer. We all have them- our ipods, blackberrys, and cell phones. Over the months this boy visited me, he had the privilege of being taught how to use a digital recorder, an mp3 player, and even a laptop (to some degree). When I returned from the seminar at Mt. Meru, in my blithe mindset I failed to notice some things were missing. Expensive, electronic things. Things that only he and I know how to use. Worse, he came to my house recently wearing a new coat, new jeans, and toting a new CD player. As a boy from the village, those are not easily affordable commodities. When I came to the realization that my electronics were missing, and the pieces started to click, I found myself face-to-face with the ugly, vile side of life.

Even without my having any appreciable attachment to material possessions, this hurt, bad. It threatened my calm, realizing how I’d been deceived and used for such a long period of time. Here comes the bad, hunting me and my bliss, seeking to claw, rend, and drag me from this exultant state back down to reality. I’m trying not to let it, but I can’t help continuing to reflect on the time we spent together, everything that was invested in that relationship, and the now-apparent falsehood of it all. In my wool-covered eyes, it had been great, something to take pride in. Now I’m left facing a betrayal, and I hate it. Why does the bad have to bring itself to bear on the times when life is good? Is life suffering for that reason? Is that the result of what is referred to as original sin?

Everyone has his/her own answer to these questions. Georg Hegel claimed that any thesis must naturally have an antithesis, the two opposites somehow integrating to form a whole. Paraphrasing, he said by understanding and accepting these dialectic aspects, we gain a more real view of the world around us. That was his answer, what’s yours?

Today I have some good news to drop, but as a warning the last paragraph gets a little heavy.

Let’s start with the crowd-pleaser: the push-reel mower project. For those of you not in the know, Ihungo Secondary and I worked in concert to raise funds to purchase a number of these manually-powered mowers. The raison d’etre was to assist Ihungo students, who currently use blunted hand sickles and bent scythes to mangle the grass to death. The benefits of upgrading are too many to mention, but let me just say that after nearly two years here, I feel the mowers are a necessity for these boys. Ihungo had set the goal of obtaining ten of these push-reel mowers, and together with the school’s minor contribution, we just reached that goal. Two days ago, I went to the mercantile which carries them, and placed our official order for ten of the machines. Here at school, we’ve arranged a meeting time for all the teachers concerned to learn how and where to use them, and how to maintain them properly. When they arrive, I’ll take some pictures to share with you all. Needless to say, my sincere thanks once again to everyone who donated. For real, thanks.

Second and almost as enthusing, yesterday I got a call from the head of our grants committee. She told me that another grant proposal I’d been working on was approved to receive the full funding requested. This proposal basically was the brainchild of an elderly man who lives in a village near me. He’s one of the local leaders, and founded a small organization to try helping those in need around his community. Pretty admirable, yeah? One day I was walking into town down this rural path I really enjoy, and met and impressed this elder with my Swahili. We ended up talking for over an hour, and briefly touched on the idea that we might be able to combine forces. A few weeks later, I invited him over and we discussed different projects his organization was trying to implement around the village. In particular, a plan of chicken rearing intrigued me. Basically, the hope was to build a coop capable of holding some 500 chickens which would be under the care of the organization members. The fantastic part of this plan? Every week, most of the eggs from these chickens will go to the households in the direst need of nutrition and protein- specifically those with orphans, widows, and HIV/AIDS victims. Believe it or not, unless one’s family owns chickens, eggs are almost a luxury in the villages around here. There is more the project than what I’ve detailed here, but you get the point- eggs to help people. I’m particularly proud of this grant for the fact that I did almost nothing in getting off the ground; the organization in general, and the elder in particular, they drove the planning almost entirely, and now their efforts at philanthropy have been rewarded. Again, when the coop gets built, I’ll take some photos (imagine the maelstrom that is 500 chickens in one massive enclosure).

Personally, the chicken project helps to assuage an odd feeling of guilt I’ve been faced with from time to time during my stay here. This guilt is specifically derived from the plight of the numerous orphans around Bukoba, and from my feeling powerless to help them. Just the other day, I had my heart broken again by people’s struggles of life. A few weeks ago, I invited a local man who is HIV-positive to speak to my students about living with the virus, taking anti-retroviral medications, and about the stigmatism. It was a great lesson, and the man stressed the importance of being tested, mentioning that it might be possible to get a mobile testing unit to come to the school (I’m looking into it). The students were so supportive of this idea they gave a round of applause. Flash forward to several days ago, when one of my students approached me after class, asking if he could come to my house to “discuss some issues.” I’ve tried to be more than a teacher to my students, also hoping to fill the nonexistent role of counselor as best as I can. Later that day, he came over and we sat down to talk. He told me that he was an orphan, having lost both his parents by the age of eight. During his ordinary-level secondary school studies, the government had subsidized his school fees, but now that he is an advanced-level student, they have referred him to pursue other sources of funding. That was his first question- if there are any Western organizations which might help him pay for school. Sadly, I went down this road with other students of mine last year, and its all dead ends. For several months, I played the game of being juggled back and forth between various non-profits, all of which claimed to have no jurisdiction over certain areas of the region that my students came from. I was given too many excuses for too real a problem, and I left feeling weak and unable to help these kids. (I know that the organizations don’t have the resources to support every orphan that knocks on their door, and that sometimes con artists come along, but I couldn’t help thinking that everything they told me was bullshit. If I had aspirations towards investigative journalism, here would be where I expose the corruption or bureaucracy clouding up this system; for now, I’ll have to settle with voicing the futility.) This boy came with the same questions, and I had to give him the lame answers I’d been given. I felt like a chump, but what could I do or say? If I support these kids directly, what will they do when I go? No, that reliance isn’t something that should be engendered. But telling this boy that I couldn’t help him or even advise him wasn’t what really hit me. On top of being an orphan, he told me he suspects that he’s HIV-positive, but doesn’t know what to do. Apparently, he thinks that his mother passed away from AIDS, and that he might’ve inherited it. He asked me if I’d arranged for the mobile testing unit to come to the school so that he could get tested. I told him that we are waiting on the headmaster’s approval (I’m pretty sure this sort of this needs a green light from the government), but that there are testing facilities in around town if he doesn’t want to wait. I asked him if he’d like me to escort him to a reputable clinic I know of, one which offers free counseling and support groups. He said yes, so we are going sometime soon. I don’t think I’ll write any updates about this boy here, but just think about his position for a minute. No family members who can support him, the fear of having HIV, I wonder how lonely and hard life must be for him. That’s what hit me hard enough that I sat in a chair for an hour, staring at nothing. What a world, where a bright young boy like this can be in such an impossible situation through no fault of his own. Crap.

I noticed that my posts have been getting increasingly serious over the last month, so I figured it would be a good idea to use my jazz hands to create one a bit more light-hearted. In one of my recent posts, I mentioned the “origin of Asian peoples” as understood by my Tanzanian friend. While that might be the most absurd idea I’ve heard (and the funniest; I laughed until I had used up all my “fasting energy,” then I was really tired), it isn’t the only one. Not by a long shot. Here’s some of the funny, bizarre, or ridiculous happenings of my last few weeks-

Let me start with the hilarity that is Tanzanian English. Just as we developed our American English with its profusion of slang and “y’alls”, Tanzanian English has become its own brand of fantastic. Some of the more common sayings include “I say!” (which has even infiltrated into Swahili as is written “aisee”), “somehow” (I will school you all in the proper use of this underrated word when I get back), and a ton of throwbacks to British English, straight from the source (referring to “Z” as zed, for example). Just last weekend, a friend of mine used the following excuse to back out of going to a disco- “I regret to inform you that I cannot attend for the fact that my heart is beating too high. It is because I have exceeded my doctor’s weight limit.” I still don’t know what he was talking about. Beyond the grammar issues, one common struggle that people have in speaking English as an acquired language is the distinction between “L” and “R” sounds. This is the perennial scourge of most Asian cultures (when I was in Japan, I saw one sign for “Best Raundry”) and there’s even a website whose name alone might be enough make you laugh: Engrish.com. This same phenomenon occurs here in T-Zed, just as I saw last week at the town market. Some enterprising soul had begun packaging sorghum flour into small packets, clearly labeled as “Ulezi (Sorghum) Froul”. It took me about five seconds to realize what “froul” is, and then I showed it to Jodi and we busted up, drawing looks from all the froul sellers. What’s really strange about the L/R interchange is that people even apply it to their own names; I have a student who wrote his name as Kafulela on one test, Kafurera on the next, and Kafurela the third time. No one seems to notice this except me. Some of my favorite days in class are those when we discuss anything in “parallel.” Oh yeah, the way they pronounce it is at least as funny as you are imagining.

Tanzanians, socially open as their society is, tend to be hesitant in trying new things as well as pursuing unorthodox lines of thought. You could explain it as a “this is good enough for everyone else, so why shouldn’t it be for me?” rationale. Over the last few weeks though, I’ve had the opportunity to see some friends and acquaintances attempt to be trailblazers, and it is usually hilarious. The first time was at my home, when two friends of mine came over. I have a simple “solar system” text that explains about the planets in some detail and has nice pictures, so I offered it to them to peruse. Some of the questions I got were tremendous. “This book says that one year on Mercury is 88 Earth days. Does that mean if I go to Mercury is will get old really fast?” “If Earth is spinning, why isn’t it windier? And if I jump really high, shouldn’t I end up in Mwanza?” To be honest, I loved getting asked these questions, not because of their hilarity, but because it means these kids are interested in learning, and can draw basic inferences (although the hilarity factor was also good).

A day later I went to Jodi’s place to prepare desserts for a sushi night we were having at Gayle’s place (that’s right, sushi in the middle of Africa; what?). We made a bunch of sweets, including lemon bars, mocha brownies, and those no-bake oatmeal peanut butter chocolate cookies. As we walked towards Gayle’s house, a little boy offered to help us carry the plates. When we reached her road, we gave the boy one of the cookies as thanks. The way he looked at it was timeless- imagine you’ve never seen a cookie before. Some strange foreigners give you one, and it’s weird, lumpy, a little squishy, and brown. Poor kid looked like he’d lost the raffle of life, and been given the worst possible prize. After several minutes being convinced that it was good to eat, the boy finally took the smallest nibble imaginable. Immediately, his eyes lit up, he looked up at us with a sort of awestruck grin, and then he just took off running. Who knows where he ran off to with that cookie..?

When we got to Gayle’s place, we helped out a bit rolling the sushi. (For those of you who are curious, we used canned tuna, canned salmon, and lots of cucumber, avocado, and mayonnaise). Eventually, two of Gayle’s friends from her school showed up, one of whom was the school cook. Apparently she wanted to learn how to make sushi, a fact which still confuses me. Anyway, she made a totally passable salmon roll, and then we all sat down to eat. Gayle’s friends looked so scared to try anything, in particular the wasabi-soy combo. It didn’t help that everyone kept telling them “now be careful this is really, really spicy!” In the end, they both ate about three pieces and said they were full. I ate somewhere in the range of 15, and then bombed on dessert. It saddens me to say this, but I actually ate so much food that when it was time to go, I physically could not finish my beer (its ok, I came back the next morning and laid it to rest). Obviously, I have decided not to fast on weekends. Jodi says this will make me gain weight if I keep fasting during the week. I told her that it’s ok, I need to build up a squirrel-esque winter coat before coming back to chilly North America.

Earlier that day, before heading to Jodi’s to make dessert, I’d been invited to the wedding of Mama Shukuru’s daughter, whose name is Shukuru (that’s how naming works here, it’s gnarly). I almost wanted to go and enjoy the festivities, but I know well how tedious they can be, so I opted to go cook with Jodi instead. However, I wanted to give Shukuru the wedding gift I’d bought, so I swung by the reception early to drop it off, and maybe swipe a few beers. No one was there, and nothing had been set up. I asked around, and they looked at me like I was crazy. “No, there is no wedding reception here today. Try the next hotel.” So I did, and there was a reception there, but for a different wedding. What are the chances? That’s nonsense. So I gave up hope and started walking towards Jodi’s, when off in the distance I heard the cacophony of a mobile wedding procession, car horns a-blarin’. Sure enough, within minutes I caught sight of the substantial caravan, which was heading right for me. As it began to pass me, I noticed some of my friends in the cars, waving and smiling. The third car was the bridal car, and there was Shukuru, wedding gown and all. Her car stopped, and she and I had a full conversation, there on the street. People further back in the caravan started looking to see the hold-up. Great, so much for escaping discreetly. I decided not to give her the present through the car window, that’s tactless yeah? In the end, I told her that I would try to make it, but as they drove off I realized I didn’t know where they were going. So much for getting some free beer…dang.

One last thing- today is my routine day to come into town to use the internet, but at around 9am a massive thunderstorm kicked up. I have a lot I have to do online (graduate school applications, ugh), so I was chagrined, but resolute to come down anyway. When the storm abated just enough, I hopped on my bike and tore down the dirt road and into town. Yeah, it was a dirt road. Yeah, it was soaked and muddy. No, my bike doesn’t have a mud guard. Yeah, it now looks like I might’ve had “an accident” of the non-biking variety. It’s embarrassing. Peace.

Last weekend, I had an unexpected guest stay with me. No, it wasn’t malaria, a monkey, safari ants, or a time-traveling Isaac Newton. Prior to my arrival, two other volunteers had been stationed at Ihungo- Jessica, the gregarious biology teacher, and Joseph, the “computer wizard.” I keep in occasional contact with Jessica (actually, I tend to forget to write back; sorry, Jess), but Joseph and I had never emailed. That is, until two weeks ago, when he wrote to tell me he was surprised to find himself back in Tanzania, after nearly two years away. He’d planned to pass through Bukoba en route to Kigali, and so I invited him to stay with me here at his former school.

It was both interesting and refreshing spending time with Joe. A lot of the ideas I’ve developed and judgments I’ve made about Ihungo are similar to Joe’s own. Talking with him allowed a certain level of understanding that not even Jodi and I share, her living some five miles away. I found some of my thoughts on life here being reinforced, others put under a new light, and others challenged. All in all, it was fun to see how quickly we could bond. Before he came to stay for three days, we’d never had any discourse at all, and yet the mutual understanding that comes from two people struggling through the same trials enabled us to feel at ease almost immediately. And being able to share the ridiculousness of life here with someone was a great relief. Trust me, there are times when life here is very, very ridiculous, and I have no one to laugh about it with. (Case in point: just last week, one of my students explained to me why Asian people look different than European “wazungu.” His explanation? When the atomic bombs hit, the light was so bright that it caused Asians to have permanently squinty eyes, and the different color is because of the radiation. He even told me that before the bomb, Asians and white Europeans looked the same. How awesomely ridiculous is this? I laughed so hard.)

Another ridiculousness, but one Joe didn’t quite understand, is my new “diet.” Living in a country which is roughly one-third Islamic, I’ve had the opportunity to witness a fair amount of Muslim tradition. One of the Islamic practices that highly impresses me is Ramadan, the month during which Muslims are not allowed to eat or drink anything during the day (from about 6am to 7pm). Think about it- that’s thirteen full hours of fasting, without even water passing one’s lips. I wouldn’t want to be a Muslim during Ramadan anywhere in the Middle East, where the heat would have to make the thirst intolerable. In any case, I decided that I admired this practice enough that I would attempt it myself. Since I’m not Muslim, there was no particular reason for me to wait until September (the month of Ramadan), so I started fasting about two weeks ago. I wake up every day at about 5:30 and cook myself a small breakfast to get me through the day. Usually, it’s two pieces of toast, a small banana, and two eggs. While I eat, I knock back as much water as I can, plus some life-sustaining coffee. Then I go about my daily business until 7:30 at night, when the sun has gone down and I can eat again. For dinner, I have basically the same foods as I had for breakfast, with the exception of an avocado. After roughly thirteen hours of waiting, dinner is always miraculous, but never is it quite enough.

If you are asking yourself “why in the world would he want to do that? He must be insane” then I should tell you that, no, I’m not insane yet. I suppose my reasoning went as follows: “Man, those Muslims really fast for a month. I wonder what that’s like. I wonder if I could do it…” So I decided to give it a shot. Why not at least try? I knew that once I get back to the States, I’ll never want to try this again (thanks to a little restaurant called Jack-in-theBox), so its now-or-never. I’m not attempting to fast out of any masochistic impulses, or to save the orphaned dolphins, or anything like that. I’m only trying it to see if I can do it, and what it’s like. That’s all. So how have the last two weeks been? Long.

The last day before starting “my Ramadan,” I hung out with Jodi and cooked and ate as much as possible. As a consequence, my first day was pretty easy. My body was still working on my stomach’s leftovers. The three following days were agony, pure and simple. I learned two lessons very quickly: first, the thirst is always worse than the hunger; second, my metabolism was still burning along fast enough that my energy was spent by around noon each day. I’ve never been so weary, both mentally and physically. Sure, I’ve exhausted my body during races and work-outs, but this constant and utter lack of energy was a different feeling entirely. It’s hard to run the machine without fueling it. After several days, I thought I finally realized why so many people who can’t afford enough to eat just lay motionless all day long (but I’ve since corrected that impression). For real, I would go to teach and just writing on the chalkboard and speaking would completely exhaust me. Following a lesson, I would come home and lie down on my bed and stare at the ceiling for far too much time (usually I was daydreaming about what foods I would eat as soon as I get home. The favorites: steak, bacon-cheeseburger, sushi, Thai, pale ales, cocktails, salads, berries, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and so many more). Each time I stood up after sitting for a long time, I would swoon and nearly pass out. The dizziness was killer. On occasion, I would try to play volleyball in the early evenings, hoping to pass the time until I could eat and drink again. While playing, I would only try for balls that came within about two feet of my arms; I might’ve been the laziest volleyball player of all time, if you don’t count Farkas.

Luckily, the first week was the worst. My metabolism has since realized that it was burning me apart, and has slowed down to match my new intake and output levels (which are substantially lower than they used to be). In fact, I’ve only spent maybe an hour daydreaming about food over the last few days. I have more energy in the afternoons now, as my body hasn’t wasted it in the mornings. Today, I played two hours of basketball, and never even felt dizzy. Sure, the thirst and the hunger are still there, especially around my former lunch-time, but at least now they are tolerable and I can push them to the back of my mind. This tells me that even if people don’t eat three squares per day, they can still lead active lives (squashing my earlier theory about lack of energy). The only time over the last week I've been tempted to quit was when I got a package from my mom. It had cookies, chocolate bars, and other candy in it, and I had the misfortune of opening it midmorning. Over the rest of the day, I squirmed with the knowledge that delicious chocolate was just sitting there, waiting to taste great. I managed to stave it off, somehow.

I’m not sure how much longer I plan on maintaining the fast. After only two weeks, my body has burned off so much fat that I’ve been feeling chilly all the time. Plus, the truth is, I love eating. I enjoy trying to cook new and tasty foods. Reducing my diet to bread, eggs, and fruits has taken that joy from me. So I’m not sure…do I keep it up for two more weeks to make my fast last an entire month, or do I give it up now that I’ve seen that I can do it?

Last week, I was at the shop of one of my favorite local merchants, an old Arab electrician named Jaffar, and we got on the subject of movies. He began talking all about his cassette collection (over two thousand of them, apparently) and was wondering if I had a player. I only have the laptop and its internal DVD player available to me, but his son has recently begun sending him films from Canada. These include recent DVDs, and he asked if I would like to borrow any of them. When I said sure, he brought out a case with 15 or 20 movies, one of which was The Last King of Scotland. Being only an hour from Uganda, Bukoba was highly affected by Idi Amin’s reign, so I figured I ought to watch the Oscar-winner.

What did you all think of that movie? Being here, and having been in and around Kampala, I probably had a different perspective on it than you. The first thing that surprised me was to hear Idi Amin addressing people in Swahili. I didn’t know Swahili was ever spoken in Uganda; now, they use either Kiganda or English. (The subtitles weren’t so accurate, by the way). The second surprise was how sweepingly the East African life they depicted from the 1970’s resembles life here now. Honestly, the only difference I could spot was the type of cars people drive. The groups of kids in tattered clothes running alongside cars and yelling at foreigners still occurs just as it did in the film; in fact, they probably didn’t even have to plan or edit that footage at all, instead just filming as they drove around.

About the movie itself…it was powerful, huh? Forrest Whitaker really made the dictator come off as capricious, egomaniacal, and terrifying. I’ve heard James McAvoy has a pretty big cult following (wasn’t he the satyr in the Narnia movie?) and he was adept in his role as the Scottish doctor/advisor of Amin, showing the doctor’s inner turmoil as he slowly realized the evils of the regime with which he was so involved. But Whitaker stole the show, both physically and in terms of presence. I’m not sure how well the plot stuck to history, but I’d imagine it was more factual than Titanic. That’s good enough for me.

After watching it, I talked to various people around Bukoba who’d been here during that time. They had interesting things to say. When I asked Jaffar and his wife if Amin was truly as crazy as the film portrayed him, Jaffar’s wife replied, “Much, much crazier he was in reality” and shook her head sadly. Jaffar then informed me of Amin’s claim that “all of Kagera was his” over public television as an illustration of the megalomaniacal insanity. Kagera is the region of Tanzania where I live. While we were discussing Amin’s time in power, Jaffar informed me that even in Bukoba, people were killed and bombs were dropped. The building we were standing in had been hit by one bomb and his employees had been seriously injured. Amin’s troops never reached Bukoba, but other fanatics killed people in town in support of him, Jaffar told me. At Ihungo, I asked our old chemistry teacher, who’s been teaching here for almost forty years, what he remembered. Apparently, at all areas associated with the government, even public schools, they had to dig trenches and prepare for invasion by the Ugandan army. I asked Jaffar about this, and he too recalled Bukoba’s various preparations for war. (The army never reached Bukoba. The Tanzanian army stopped it at Mutukula, which is now the border town between Tanzania and Uganda. It was the only war Tanzania has fought in since its independence).

A little over a year ago, I wrote about a trip I took to Kampala. While there, I took a tour of the old kabaka’s palace. (Kabaka is the title the chieftains of Ugandan tribes used to have, and the Kampala kabaka was basically the king of the country). The palace was a disappointment- an unfinished mansion, still being built and lacking any historical significance- but the tour guide I had was fantastic. He had been a soldier in the kabaka’s army, which struggled against Idi Amin. This old veteran told me a few stories about the war, including one in which he’d been at the palace when Amin’s troops stormed it. The guards, including my guide, were sorely outmatched and he was one of very few that made it out alive. Halfway through the tour, he asked me if I wanted to see something Amin left behind. You know I did. He took me down a small overgrown path behind the palace and led me to what looked at first glance like a bunker or warehouse. There was a gaping opening leading to a wide hallway, slightly sunken and made of concrete. Two large steps ten meters apart each led up to concrete rooms with no doors. The rooms went far back into the hillside, under the palace, and had no other exits. The kabaka’s former guard told me this was where Amin had kept his prisoners of war. There was no way in or out of the rooms except through the sunken hallway. Apparently, about a foot of standing water was kept in the hallway at all times. This water was highly electrified, such that any prisoner trying to escape would be electrocuted to death. Despite the size of the two rooms, the old guard told me that both had been so full that there was no room even to lie down. I’m not sure how much of this was hearsay and how much was truth, but after talking to Jaffar, it seems clear that Amin was capable of any number of hard-to-believe atrocities.

I feel fortunate being able to hear these stories first-hand, to discuss how peoples’ lives were affected by the tyrant. It reminds me of when I went to Rwanda and stayed with Jean-Pierre, and heard about his family. As strongly as a film may affect you, hearing someone who lived through a tragedy recant it to you will always affect you more, and have a deeper, more permanent impact. I’ll never forget going to the genocide memorial and listening to Jean-Pierre’s story afterward, nor will I forget about Amin’s prison and the old guard.

When I returned his DVD, Jaffar asked me if I’d like to borrow another. Without asking what I’d like, he brought me out Darwin’s Nightmare, an expose in the guise of a documentary that showcases the Nile perch fishing industry of Lake Victoria. Guess it was my week for watching intense films which concern my immediate surroundings. To be completely honest, I didn’t like this movie at all. At times it reminded me of a Michael Moore film- designed to prejudice the viewer by showing only negative aspects of a situation.

Let me explain a little more about the film. Its title derives from the extinctions which are occurring in the lake due to the introduction of the perch some 30 or 40 years ago. Apparently, as a foreign species, it has already begun wiping out many of the natural inhabitants of the lake. This is partly due to it reducing oxygen levels in the lake and thereby killing certain types of algae and microorganisms that other fish survive on and partly due to the perch just eating the other fish. I guess Darwin must’ve had really bad dreams about this happening. However, the film only discussed the ecological impact of the fish briefly, instead focusing on the socioeconomic issues which are related to the fishing industry. My first problem with the movie is that it never cohesively linked these two areas together; there was no connection shown between the environmental and the social crises which stem from the Nile perch’s existence in Lake Victoria. It was more like the filmmaker wanted to condemn the fish to hell, and thereby showed it’s every negative aspect, whether or not they were even tenuously related. I hope no one ever makes a film like that about me, huh?

On top of this, some part of the movie were highly suspect. There is one narrator/guide who takes the filmmaker all around Mwanza. This man is introduced as a night watchman for some offices, a common enough job here. What stuck out was the man’s amazing English ability. Having talked to lots of guards around Tanzania, I feel confident in saying that if that man was really who he claimed to be, then he is the most educated guard in Tanzania. His vocabulary even exceeded that of the university students who are currently at my school. Hmmm… Beyond this guard/professor anomaly, many of the Tanzanians who were interviewed were led to make statements that they didn’t even understand. The filmmaker would ask them questions in English, and as they struggled to respond coherently, he would prompt them to answer a certain way by asking another question. In Tanzania, you can say almost anything you want in English and get the average person to agree with it completely. I’ve done this many times to entertain myself (yes, I’m an immoral person). Jodi and I watched the movie together, and both of us started getting pissed at the inaccurate comments he was soliciting from the Tanzanians.

It’s a filmmaker’s prerogative to show whatever aspects of a situation that he might choose, but it was hard for me to swallow such a pessimistic pill. Rather than showing normal life in Mwanza, he chose to only film crippled street children who fight each other for food. Well yeah, this does happen here, and its terrible. But at the same time, this happens all over the world, and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the introduction of a foreign species of animal into their environment. Lastly, he kept juxtaposing scenes of all this fish which would be exported to foreign consumers with shots of these emaciated children, or with vignettes of people discussing a soon-to-come rice famine in Tanzania, as though saying that keeping the fish from being exported could halt the incipient starvation. He neglected to show that the area which reported the possible famine is so far away from Mwanza, separated by such terrible roads, that it is simply not viable to transport fish there before it rots. Learn the logistics before you make a movie, chump. If I write much more about it, I’ll just get more worked up.

On a sad but funny note, today I saw the town veterinarian. He was on his motorcycle, leaving my school and heading towards town. Hanging from the back of the motorcycle was a bag that was "meowing" in a very forlorn manner. Don't worry, the cat was ok, I think that is just the vet's way of transporting cats to his clinic. Welcome to Tanzania.

About a week ago, twenty student-teachers arrived at my school from the University of Dar Es Salaam. They’re all pursuing degrees in education, and their stint here as teachers is an improvised internship. The Ministry of Education did well in implementing this student-teacher program- for the two months that they are here (and elsewhere throughout Tanzania), the constant pressure from the shortage of teachers, especially in upper levels, is relieved. Ihungo was provided with biology, chemistry, geography, math, history, economics, English, French, and Kiswahili teachers. Reread that last sentence. Yes, we were provided with teachers for every subject except physics. While the rest of Ihungo’s normal A-level teachers are enjoying a two-month vacation thanks to these student-teachers, yours truly is plodding along same as always. Honestly, I’m pleased that I don’t have to share my periods; I believe no one will prepare my students for their examinations as thoroughly as I do (more on this in a moment).

Additionally, it’s been nice having them around, socially. When I came here first, I found that the staff room was filled with older, well-experienced teachers. Unfortunately, what comes with their experience is often intractability to new ideas or undertakings. It would happen that I would speak up during a meeting with an (in my eyes) important viewpoint, only to get immediately shouted down by the elder teachers- “Well, that’s not how we do things here.” Yeah, that’s fine. With the arrival of the university students, I’ve found a group of dynamic, open people who want to become involved during their short stay. So far, this has only manifested itself in daily volleyball matches, lots of card games, and interesting discussions. While I’ve enjoyed this breath of fresh air in my social life, it seems that while these students are here, perhaps we can work together to foster structural changes in Ihungo’s environment. For once, the young, idealistic crowd has the majority over the middle-aged teachers and their static mindsets. It’s an opportunity…

With seeking to implement changes, however, a constant debate rears its head: should we try to alter the existing structure of an education system simply because we are products of a different one? That is, Tanzania has its own methods of instruction and discipline which are largely influenced by its cultural patterns and the behaviors of teachers and students alike. Perhaps ideas which are highly lauded in the US would find a poor breeding ground here, just due to these social differences. This is something I’ve had to consider and reflect on before bringing anything new to the staff. Even a concept and simple and fundamental to us as positive reinforcement (remember the star stickers that teachers put on the best papers?) was met with an amazing amount of resistance- “If we treat them nicely, the students will take try to take advantage of us.” Sadly, this can be sometimes true.

The main battleground for this debate tends to be the area of corporal punishment. To beat or not to beat… When teachers ask what discipline methods we use in the States, I usually mention detention, suspension, Saturday school, and the like. Invariably, the teachers will respond by laughing, telling me how ridiculous Americans are and that such methods would never work in Tanzania. Strangely, perhaps they are right. What would be the use of detention in a boarding school where the students have already been stripped of all their free time? In the international Peace Corps monthly magazine, I read an article titled “Punishing Lessons: How some of us whipped those kids into shape” that shocked me. Here, in this magazine which gets sent to every Peace Corps country in the world, reaching a minimum of 7,000 volunteers, was an article endorsing the use of corporal punishment, not only by local teachers but by us volunteers as well. The main argument stems from the debate I mentioned earlier- we as American guests never know the education system as well as the people who live there, and therefore it isn’t our prerogative to come in and try to affect changes. We don’t know what works, and the locals do. There was testimonial in this article from several past volunteers explaining their rationale for beating the students (one- “my students didn’t respect me until I hit them.” Another- “my head of school rated me as the best volunteer in the country after I started beating the students”). Does this give you a queasy feeling? It did me, when I read it. These volunteers seem to have followed the doctrine “if you can’t defeat them, join them,” and hit their students simply because they didn’t have any better solution. What the author of this article seems to have forgotten is that there are certain objective truths which transcend cultural beliefs and education systems. Studies have shown that corporal punishment is demeaning, engenders animosity, and hinders development. Granted, these studies were conducted in Western nations, but if one can believe their veracity, then it seems that one universal truth ought to be “beating is an ineffective, inhumane form of punishment.” Corporal punishment used to be the norm in American schools as well, and we gave it up when we realized its negative effects. Just because beating still occurs in some developing nations does not mean that it is the proper form of punishment for those nations. It means they haven’t yet realized, as we did, the absurdity of hitting those we are trying to teach. What do we hold onto when we travel from culture to culture and attempt to adapt? If we just give up all our values to follow the current customs, we lose sight of those objective truths and we never grow from our travels. In a sense, choosing to enjoin corporal punishment is choosing to turn a blind eye to a truth which we as Americans have already been exposed to: corporal punishment is wrong. Those who beat their students in order to adapt more readily to their society shouldn’t be congratulating themselves; they should be mourning the loss of their humanity and their values.

While I’m on morality, I should mention my own current crisis. Last year, for several months there was another teacher on the Ihungo staff that was capable of teaching A-level physics. The administration asked me to share my periods with him, and I did so, albeit reluctantly. During the short time he stayed here, this teacher developed a reputation for being a lazy drunkard. Without telling the school, I began teaching during the periods he was supposed to be in class. I didn’t care that he wasn’t responsible, I just wanted to help my students. After several months, he found work elsewhere and moved on. Now, a year later, he’s back. I’ve been told by several another teachers that he has changed, this is a different person altogether. Uh-huh. As it happens, again the school asked me to share my periods with him. The next topic we cover is electromagnetism, which is the same topic he was supposed to teach last year. This means I have no experience at all with how to present electromagnetism, how to prepare my students in it. So I agreed to give him a few periods per week, on the condition that he will finish electromagnetism and then give them back. My moral dilemma: did I make a mistake in giving this guy a second chance? He’s shown that he is an unreliable teacher, but he does know the topic we asked him to teach more thoroughly than I do. I didn’t really have time to go through my options when the administration asked me to give him periods, so only now am I reflecting on whether I made the right decision. Perhaps if I work closely with him, so that he feels me breathing down his neck, it will keep him on task. Let’s hope so, I don’t want to let these kids down.

Finally, on a sad note, I forgot to mention in my last post that my best friend of the last year left a few weeks ago. Manuel, the Laurel to my Hardy, got a job in DC working for a branch of the World Bank. Apparently, he’s working on international economics and development. Hats off, but Jodi and I are missing him something fierce. Over the year we all had together, the three of us became really close (as tends to happen in small town Africa). Jodi, cool as she is, just does not appreciate some of the ridiculousness that Manuel and I brewed up. I’ll miss him a lot over my last few months, I’m sure of it. Manuel- ulikuwa mbwa wangu wa kwanza kabisa. Sasa siwezi kujamba mara kwa mara kama zamani, tulipokuwa pamoja. Tutaonana siku nyingi, mtu wangu.

So Kit went home a few days ago, now the house seems a bit empty. I’m still in the habit of cooking enough for two and am forced to eat all of it myself (I have no fridge), then I reach that point of uncomfortable fullness. Once when I was maybe 10 years old, after eating at a big buffet, my brother and I were taken to Dairy Queen by my grandmother. If you are familiar with buffets, you should know that you always, always leave full. If you are familiar with children, you should know that they always, always want ice cream. Naturally, we ordered the largest, and on the ride home tried cramming the cones, chocolate dip, and ice cream into our stomachs. By the time we reached my grandmother’s house, I was so full that I was worried about keeping it all in; in fact, I’d begun to sweat and have that warm saliva that precedes the inevitable. Before she could park the car, I pleaded for her to stop, and then flopped out of her car onto the lawn. I proceeded to lay there in overfull-belly agony, rolling back and forth and waiting for the food to digest. I’ve had that same agony twice since Kit left, just by cooking too much and feeling required to eat it all.

Having had her as my guest for the last month, I picked up some new insights into Tanzania- one charming and one ugly. Let me start with the former… I noticed this slightly when my parents visited four months ago, but when Kit and I visited acquaintances and casual friends, the courtesy and friendliness with which we were received was outstanding. Tanzania tends to be an open, social country, so this isn’t really a departure from the norm, I was just surprised at the level of hospitality we were given. I didn’t know that I had ten best friends around Bukoba until she and I wandered the town over a week or two. The Arab electrician never gave me a cold soda to drink while we talked when I was by myself, and the Indian shopkeeper never gave me a Bounty bar. I wonder what spurs this exaggerated benevolence..? I suppose its partly a way to show fondness for a friend by treating their guests well. Perhaps also, people wants their visitors to leave with the best impression they can bestow, and thus the gifts and maneno matamu (literally “sweet words”, can be used to mean “pillow talk”). Whatever the reason, it brought a smile to my face to have us both treated with such courtesy by the people here that I’ve come to care about.

On the flip side, Kit and I did get to see one of the dirtier facets of society here- degradation of women. I’d rather not go into particular details, but as man and woman going around together, this bias was constantly thrown in our faces, sometimes subtly and sometimes blatantly. An example of the former: as we walked and talked to people we would pass, unless Kit specifically greeted someone first, they would always address me. I would be engaged in entire conversations about Kit while she stood there, trying not to feel the sexism. Why ask me, why not just ask her? Probably because people assumed that we were married, and that therefore she was my “property” and addressing her would be tantamount to insulting me. I’d imagine only a portion of the people who treated her this way actually have such archaic beliefs, but who knows? In any case, it was the latter form of degradation was the one that got me in “fightin’ Rob” mode- catcalls, gestures, and comments that make American construction workers look like celibate monks. At one point, a group of some young punks (yeah, I said it) prattled on in Swahili, not realizing both of us can understand it. Finally, I told them to calm down and back off, or else I’d beat them. The loudmouth of the group said “yeah, how?” and I flexed and said “with this thunder and this lightning.” However, in Swahili thunder and lightning are combined into one word, so what I ended up saying was more like “this thunder and this thunder.” I’m pretty sure I said it as a joke, so if you are shaking your head and thinking that I’ve gone from being a pacifist to a man carrying around two loaded thunders, don’t worry. Most of us, Kit and I included, started laughing after I said it, and a couple of the punks claimed to have their own thunders. Back to the point of it, the vocal and flagrant harassment of women, especially white women, wasn’t something I’d really come face to face with before her visit. I’d like to think that most of the people here aren’t that way, but judging by the regularity of it, maybe I’m wrong. It’s sad, and it’s ugly.

So yeah, you can see what a polarizing effect having Kit as a guest had on the way I see life here: my acquaintances became good friends, my good friends became blood brothers, but random male strangers became insulting and bellicose. Now that she’s back home (safe and sound and melting) in Tanga, my interactions have reverted to normality, and there is no more cold soda to be had from Mr. Jaffar.

Being alone again and still being on break has given me time to try putting my experience here into context. For example, it’s odd for me to realize that my contract expires in less than half a year. Maybe this sounds like a long time to you, but my parents were just here yesterday, and now yesterday is four months ago. Two thoughts tend to follow that one. First, how is the readjustment going to be; will I be too different to pick up where I left off? Then, what can I do here during my last five months that will let me leave with a sense of completion? The second question is the scarier of the two; there is so much that I’d like to do and sometimes I feel stretched so thin that I can’t possible take on anything else. But I’ll try, I’ll keep looking for ways to feel useful that fit into my teaching schedule. For those of you who helped or are planning on helping with the push-mower project, thanks again. Sometimes our efforts seem so small when we put them into a greater picture, but for each student here who sees and feels what we are trying to do, I guess it’s not small at all. OK I’m starting to sound like a Hallmark card.

First, an update on our school push-mower project: fund-raising is going quite well; we have already received over 50% of our target amount. For those of you that donated, or are planning on doing so, thank you from all of us at Ihungo. We plan on ordering the mowers roughly a month from now, and I will keep you posted through it all.

I only have a short update today, as I have had a visitor over the last week. Kit arrived last Sunday from the Tanga region, and we’ve been spending some quality time together. She’s on leave from her school at the moment, and decided to come see the land of her man. As I am still in session and teaching, my free time has been fairly limited and we’ve just been hanging around my house watching Japanese cartoons and reading. I have a midterm break coming up in about a week, so I think we’ll use that time to explore the area a bit more thoroughly. Word on the street is that she digs Bukoba, with its lush green rolling hills. The Tanga region is one of the hottest in all of Tanzania (and Tanga town is said to be even hotter than Dar Es Salaam, which would mean that white people cannot go outside without melting), so the clement weather of this region has been a godsend. Also, Kit played basketball in university, so she’s been hooping it up on our humble, non-university dirt court, with our humble, non-university basketball team. Our rules are mostly nominal, so the games are maybe a bit of a departure from her past, what with the kids kicking the ball and whatnot. “They don’t have the fundamentals,” she said. It’s true, I suppose it’s a sign that I wasn’t born to be a basketball coach. The games are still fun though, and they help us burn off all the delicious food we’ve been eating (I’ve been trying to prepare her the foods that I’ve slowly learned how to cook over the last year and a half; sometimes I do a good job, other times I mix together bread, avocado, and bananas).

So yeah, that’s about it for today. It might be a few weeks before my next update, so in the meantime perhaps you should go to my pictures page and realize that the face of haute couture has changed. It is now called “short-sleeve fish coat.” Peace.

Method 1 of producing thunder:

Make a batch of peas to eat with dinner, but accidentally make far too many.

After eating, put the remaining peas in a sealing container purchased in Tanzania and leave them on the counter.

Wait three days.

When asked if they smell spoiled by Mama Shukuru, lie and answer “no.”

Eat the re-heated, three day-old peas, which are in fact spoiled.

Thunder!

I “discovered” this method last week, using peas that I cooked on Tuesday. Friday came, and Mama Shukuru wanted to cook lunch for us. I had put the leftover peas in a “sealed” container, but I’m not certain that it did its job in preventing bacteria from entering. I am certain that, when Mama Shukuru asked me to smell the peas, I was working on lesson plans. Distractedly, I told her I thought they smelled a little off (this wasn’t true, they were pretty far gone). She disagreed, and since she was cooking and I was busy, we left it at that. That is, she cooked them and we subsequently ate them. As I ate, I thought the taste was odd, but the flavor intensity of Mama Shukuru’s cooking masked it well, much like the cologne of a sweaty man.

Flash forward two hours, and I’m sitting in the internet café, feeling woozy and nauseous, a slight stomach discomfort. I didn’t know why I the time and assumed that maybe it was just exhaustion. In fact, the nausea reached a point where I was looking through my pack for a plastic bag, “just in case.” Upon leaving the internet café, I’d planned to walk up to my friend’s house to visit and then get dinner. Did I mention that last Friday was my birthday? We had arranged a night of good food, cold drinks. By the time I was a quarter of the way up the hill, I had to call my friend and ask him to come pick me up. The pain in my stomach had exacerbated to the point where I could hardly walk.

Upon reaching his house, I flopped on his couch and attempted to remain completely motionless. As a proper friend and host, he brought me my first “birthday beer,” which I was obligated by man-code to drink. Nothing good came of that. I’m pretty sure nothing good ever comes from the man-code. Other friends showed up over the next half an hour or so, and I couldn’t even stand to greet them.

With the hope that walking might help me out, we all ambled down the hill to the restaurant, 15 minutes away. By the time we arrived, the thunderheads had formed. For the next three or four hours while my friends got drunk and ate delicious food, I was thunderstruck. Some birthday… I was in pain until two days later. Come Monday, what did Mama Shukuru cook for lunch? More peas.

Method two of producing thunder:

Take a very large cloud.

Rub its molecules together so that friction causes its electrons to be freed.

Allow the electrons to arrange themselves on the bottom of the cloud, hence giving the earth near the cloud a positive charge by induction.

Continue building electrons until there are so many the air can no longer keep them from traveling to the positive charges on the earth.

Thunder!

Bukoba is well-known as being one of the rainiest towns in Tanzania, largely due to Lake Victoria’s proximity. Ihungo tends to get lashed pretty severely as it is on the crest of a plateau, and the rain clouds often break directly over our school. Throughout the campus, one can spot several tall metal lightning rods, for good reason: I have seen more thunderstorms and lightning here in a year and a half than I had during all my previous years together. However, as luck goes, usually the storms pass to one side or another of the school, and we avoid lightning.

Yesterday, while I was sitting in the staff room preparing a lesson on, aptly enough, electrostatics, the sky began to darken. This was more than the usual deluge, we could tell that sound and fury were approaching, ready to tear our school apart. The storm seemed to pick up momentum as it continued, until as I looked out the window, rain obscured everything but the nearest five meters. For those of you who have sat in a room with a metal roof during a thunderstorm, you know just how overpowering the roar of the rain can be; it swallows all sound, leaving you in a state of white-noise confusion.

The one thing that can be heard, incessantly, is the boom of the thunder. As a physicist, its easy to calculate how far away the lightning must be, due to the time difference between the light flash and the thundering (hint: its roughly a third of a kilometer for every second that passes, therefore three seconds corresponds to one kilometer; bam! get yourself educated). My habit during storms is to always count the distance of the lightning, and I began doing so. The first few were “five seconds” away, but then they got closer, closer, until I counted one strike less than a kilometer away. That means the storm was passing directly over Ihungo.

I should mention the attitude in the staff room at this time. Even among the well-educated teachers at my school, there is a certain primal fear of lightning. Coming from the nature-taming land of technology, I just smiled and continued lesson planning while others were turning off their cellular phones and rapidly talking in hopes of forgetting their fear. Then it struck, a bolt hit no more than five or ten meters from the staff room.

I can’t describe in words the feeling of having that much raw energy released so close to me. Sparks flew through the air, metal to metal. The flash of light, combined with the terrible boom, completely overwhelmed my senses. For that instant, that split-second, we were humans at the whim of the elements, only reacting to the forces around us. Never, ever believe that you aren’t scared of lightning. When it hits near you, you will be. Sweet fancy Moses.

You know in a scary movie, when Mr. Knifey pops out from behind the fridge, you scream and jump? When the bolt hit, I did that, but I tried setting the “scream and jump” world record. I had been mid-sentence, and there was a long pen scrawl across half the page, a testament to my abject fear and shock. I showed the page to the other teachers, who could not stop laughing. Jerks...

I got home and Mama Shukuru told me that when another bolt hit, she felt the electricity go up her legs (she wasn’t wearing any shoes; can anyone give us the reason she felt it?). Then she served me that second lunch of peas, and I was sad.

First, if you have been wondering what happened to my last post, about the request for assistance, send me an email at africanrob@gmail.com. The computer teacher and I created a separate site at which to host the request (I can't link to it here, hence the need for the email). Thanks for all of those who have shown interest in helping! Now for my nine hours on the Sabbath-

It started at his armpits. Two incongruous dark blotches in a field of pink, blotches we felt compelled to focus on as the preacher flailed his arms wildly while in the throes of his sermon. The church was crowded, standing-room only, amplifying the heat of the day. This heat was being slowly manifested as sweat blotches on the preacher’s pink shirt, blotch after blotch creeping into being as he continued to praise Jesus. By the end of his two-hour, arm-flailing sermon, his entire shirt had morphed into a different shade of pink- more of a slighly translucent purple- except for the collar and cuffs. It was a long day.

One of my favorite students invited me to go to his church last Saturday (he’s a Seventh Day Adventist) for a “day of guests.” He said he was the chairman of the event, and would be honored to bring me as his guest. Knowing the propensity of such religious days to literally take an entire day, I told him I’d go but had prior obligations in the afternoon hence would leave early. He seemed to accept that.

Saturday morning, I was showering with a cold bucket of water (I used cold to wake myself up; out of coffee that day) when he arrived to escort me into town, to the Adventist church. As soon as we’d reached the church, we were showered in warm welcomes and holy exultations: “praise the Lord, a white man has come!” We entered the already crowded church and searched for seats. Do you know that awkward feeling you get when you enter a theater, church, or classroom and the all the seating in the rear of the room is taken? You slowly proceed down the aisle, hoping to find an empty spot, gradually being drawn closer and closer to the front. Eyes begin to follow you, you feel them on you (especially if you are the only white person in the room), and yet you have to continue onward, forward, hoping in vain for that elusive open seat. I finally found an opportunity to sit at the very front of the room, next to the leaders of the congregation and the preachers; I felt out of place. During my ambling trek to the front, every single member and guest in that church had noticed me, evidenced by the constant whispering “mzungu...!”

Within five minutes of my arrival, the man at the pulpit made this announcement, in English: “…and if there is anyone, anyone at all in the crowd who does not understand Kiswahili, let him raise his hand now so that we can find a way to help him understand.” Like a wave, face after face turned to look at me, until once again the weight of those stares made me wish I had stayed home to watch “Pitch Black” again. I wanted to laugh, but felt too uncomfortable. The silence rang while the church waited for me to raise my hand and admit that, as a white person, I don’t know Kiswahili. Well, after fifteen seconds of my sitting like an inert lump, they decided I must not know English either, and just continued on in Kiswahili. This same language question was repeated at least three times by different people, each time causing a pause during which I was closely scrutinized. Finally, my student stood up and introduced me: “This is Mwalimu Masanja from Ihungo Sec., and he knows Kiswahili.” From that point on, I was no longer an issue.

The preacher in pink climbed the pulpit at around 11am, after I’d been sitting in the church for two hours, feeling it become hotter as the day progressed. During the course of his sermon, he flat out insulted Americans no less that three times (comparing us to Babylon, usually) and got so frenzied and sweaty due to the message he was delivering that I thought he would pass out from either divine rapture or dehydration, take your pick. If you remember a post from a long time ago, this isn’t the first time I’ve been in a church here in Tanzania. It’s the second time. When I went to church with Mama Mipawa a year and a half ago, I was in agony, just sitting and waiting for the service to conclude. I didn’t understand anything that was being said, and my little sister was having bladder issues. The contrast between that time and now was fodder for my reflections throughout the day. This time, I could understand the preacher when he said that “all Americans are evil sinners” in Kiswahili. Trust me, being able to comprehend his words made my day far more entertaining that it would have been otherwise.

After Mr. Pink (“Why do I have to be Mr. Pink? Why can’t I choose my color?” “Because if we chose colors there would be five Mr. Blacks.”) finished his diatribe against sinners and America, we broke for lunch. For some reason, after I’d sat with the big potatoes of the church for four hours, they decided that I was also a big potato. That meant that, while all the other guests had to go stand in line for half an hour to get their food, I just sat and gossiped with these old fellas while the church youth served us. Again, I felt awkward. Plus, everyone was eating with their hands. Have you ever tried eating beans, rice, and avocado with your hands? Try it, I challenge you. It wouldn’t have been so ridiculous if all my students hadn’t been there, watching me try to eat. In any case, eventually my food made it where it was supposed to go and the day’s festivities continued.

At this point, I went up to the student who invited me and politely told him that I’d had enough for one day. The look on his face was so devastating that I decided to stay for the second half, just to prevent having that sad face haunt me later. Having appeased him that I wouldn’t be leaving, he went and took his place on a stage which had been constructed outside the church. It seems that when he said “chairman” he meant “MC”, because for the next five hours he was on the mic, making jokes and introducing speakers. I think he was really proud to have that responsibility, and he wanted me to see him at his finest.

The highlights of those five hours were few, and I gradually retreated from the world until I was a thoughtless mass of Rob, just taking up space. I got a phone call from my mom at some point, and I was so removed from activity that I probably said a total on ten words while we talked. However, there were a number of choirs whose music was a delight, and my students performed some “educational skits” which I didn’t really understand but everyone around me was laughing pretty hard. A hapless HIV/AIDS lecturer came and gave us a lesson in which she referred to HIV as a “virus that is a bacteria” and referred to one of my twenty year-old students as “that old man over there.”

Eventually, Mr. Pink got back on stage and delivered another America-bashing sermon. This time, the literal translation of one of his quips goes: “…and Americans, they’re cowards. If I say the words ‘Al-Qaeda,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Bin Ladin,’ or ‘Afghanistan,’ all they can do is shiver in fear.” A point worth noting is that this had nothing to do with anything else in his sermon, he just wanted to sound tough and draw in the crowd. I was so overcome with ennui at this point, to entertain myself I decided to go confront this guy. (If you are wondering why he kept making these remarks while an American was in his audience, you should know that it’s because he assumed that I’m German). Of course, he tried to say that I was taking the meaning wrong, taking his words out of context. He had a large number of poor arguments, and I didn’t take to any of them. Finally, he admitted that he could’ve said things differently. I took that to be as much of a victory as I would get, and left him alone.

All in all, when the day ended, I’d spent over nine hours at this church. That is a long time. But it was worth it- I could see in my student’s eyes the joy he had not only in the fact that I’d come, but that I’d stayed.

When I first arrived here, my head was full of anticipation of what I would find, how I would change my behavior patterns to adapt to those things, and how I would ultimately undergo changes myself. In my head, the aphorism “life is what you make of it” resounded. I sincerely believed that, with the right attitude, it is possible for a person to transform any situation, no matter how alien or discomfiting, into both an enjoyable and educational experience. True enough, within my own group of trainees I witnessed examples of this idea’s veracity on both ends of the spectrum- those volunteers who managed to maintain an optimistic and gregarious manner kept themselves in pleasant circumstances; those who continually found fault with their surroundings sooner or later also found their early tickets home.

After some sixteen months here at Ihungo, I took a step back to reevaluate my own situation. Sadly, I came to realize that my initial beliefs were not quite accurate; once again, theory and practice were disparate. What prompted my reflections was my increasingly common habit of daydreaming about returning home, which led to me counting the time, the months, weeks, and days I have remaining. At some point, I realized that this desire must be due to me feeling incongruous with my environment, feeling like the odd man out and wanting to get back to a life where I could blend in again. But why should I have felt this way? I’d spent almost a year and a half with my neighbors, students, and fellow teachers, but the bonds one tends to share with such people were strangely missing. I came with high hopes, trying to make my situation as positive as I could. Somewhere along the line, I’d lost track. In honesty, I had only one or two people, outside of my fellow volunteers, that I could confide in and share my experiences with. On the phone with Kit one day, I told her I’d decided this isn’t how it has to be, and this isn’t how I want to leave Tanzania in seven months. Briefly, you could say the result of my appraisal is that I’ve gotten a second wind, and I’m trying to re-integrate with all those people I’ve taken for granted since my arrival.

The first, largest, and most obvious step was to reconnect with the faculty and staff of Ihungo. In retrospect, I believe that I’d written most of them off due to two factors- generally poor work ethic and a willingness (perhaps even an eagerness) to inflict corporal punishment. As hard as it is to admit culture differences sometimes, I now can admit that my judgments against those teachers were premature and perhaps unfair. I still disagree with both practices, but my differing opinions don’t make me an authority. So I opened myself back up to my coworkers, spending more time with them in the staff room and at their homes. In the last few months, we’ve established a stronger rapport than we’d had over the entire past year. The most significant action I’ve enjoined is weekly visits to my headmaster’s house, where he and I discuss the school, life, and whatever comes to mind for several hours while he plies me with beer. Each visit culminates with a feast of Haya foods that Mama George (the headmaster’s wife) always apologizes for despite its magnitude. I can’t seem to convince her that my bachelor cooking holds no candle to what she serves. Maybe if I invite them to sample my typical dinner, she’ll get the point.

The major change that I’ve noticed is that I am slowly becoming a more respected voice on campus, both by teachers and by students. When I ventured an opinion in a staff meeting last year, my “crazy white man” ideas tended to be dismissed. The other day we held a computer board meeting which they’d asked me to audit, despite my status as a non-member. When I informed them early on in the meeting that I had to leave and attend a prior engagement, they made a flattering ado, complaining that with my departure no more good ideas would be presented. It was a validating moment, helping me to see that I am becoming valued here. The difference an open mind and some effort can make...

Last weekend was the first time in months where my schedule was full with activities outside my home. Friday night, I was invited to a birthday party for the girlfriend of a local businessman. I enjoyed myself a little more than was warranted, as his business happens to be with the Tanzanian Distilleries Corporation and his stock of liquor was mind-boggling. By the time the party got underway, I’d had a few and they decided that I should be the MC for the night. Without any specific details, it was ridiculous. The next day, a fellow teacher had invited me to attend a ceremony in the village in which a husband-to-be presents his fiancée’s family with their bride price. Those of us teachers who went were in effect the fiancé’s support contingent and I’m pretty sure I was invited to be a status symbol for him. “Look, we are totally serious about this guy marrying your daughter. We even brought a white guy to prove it. Look, there he is. He’s pretty white, huh?” The ceremony was the most traditional event I’ve had the opportunity to attend here, rigid formality held sway throughout the duration. I caused a titter when it was the men’s turn to thank the bride-to-be’s family, and I properly followed suit by getting on my knees and saying a florid Kihaya “thank you” to each person in the room. Actually, the laughs were probably because I messed up somehow, but I felt proud to take part regardless. My favorite part of the day was the bus ride to and from the village, during which all the women on the bus sang beautiful traditional harmonies for two hours each way. Gazing out the window at the gorgeous scenery to the cadence of these melodic songs was a fine way to spend a Saturday. Sunday, I received a visitor who I’ve run into so many times in town, it was becoming embarrassing. It was akin to the office coworker you see in the hallway everyday, always giving the head nod and a “hey,” feeling awkward each time. She had attended her secondary school studies in England, so we had an easy conversation about relative differences and such. The bonus was that she had also been a pupil of my neighbors, so we had a chance to give them a surprise visit and socialize for awhile. It was only the second time I’d set foot inside their house, and they gave me a good-natured drubbing (yeah, I said it) about only coming over when escorting other guests. Guess they had a point, and I’ll try to remedy that.

Rereading that last paragraph, I feel like I’ve missed the point a bit. I’ll leave it as it stands, but I was more trying to explain the difference that my attempts at becoming involved have made. In the past, I would have entire months without so much as visiting a single person at Ihungo, and entire weeks where I would avoid the office. (No, I wouldn’t shirk work, I’d just go directly from home to class and then back). I can see with the effort that I am putting forth, my views are beginning to change once again. Hopefully now, I won’t have to leave Tanzania with any regrets or a bad taste in my mouth.

Bonus Bonus Bonus: If anyone is interested in having a Tanzanian pen-pal, there is a form four student who has been bugging me for the last few months about wanting an "American friend to write with." Her name is Henrietta Henry (her dad's name is Henry, and since he had a daughter and couldn't name her Henry as well, he went with the next best thing, Henrietta) and she's an intelligent, devoted student. If you wanna help out and make a friend, toss me an email. No Shawn Safavis need apply.

I had a council meeting in Dar, hence the delayed update. Its a long one (yeah, even for me).

That evening, as we relaxed before dinner, we were surprised by the weather on the rim- a sharp, cold wind was blowing incessantly, inescapable and penetrating. Imagine being in the middle of a safari and wishing you’d brought a coat; it seemed incongruous. As the wind continued, it began to bode ill for us campers, bringing with it those frightful and somber dark clouds that we in the Pacific Northwest know so well. Being at the crest of the crater, it seemed likely that the thunderheads might break above us, but when we went to bed, the ground was still dry. That was not to last.

At around midnight, the clouds gave up on holding back their shores of condensation, and a furious rainstorm erupted. Rain drops fell from the sky, cascading downwards with increasing velocity until they struck our tents. These tents were apparently not designed to be rain-proof, or even rain-resistant. After less than five minutes, our rainflys were soaked through and plastered to the roof of the tents, enabling the rain to pass through unimpeded. The first few drops that landed on my face and woke me up were the saddest thing. The saddest. Bill yelled over the din of the storm and its fury, telling me that it was like there was a person standing over their tent pouring buckets of water on them. My mom hunkered down in her sleeping bag, wrapping herself around her (and soon to be, my) new camera, trying to protect it from the deluge. Half an hour later, the rain lessened to a drizzle, and I’ve never been so happy to see a drizzle while camping. Our sleeping bags, our tents, and most of our packs were drenched, and it was only one in the morning. Have you ever tried sleeping while cold and wet? It’s a less fun experience than sleeping dry and warm. Luckily however, the rain didn’t return, body warmth eventually prevailed over sopping bags, and we were able to get some sleep. In the morning, Bill showed me inside my parents’ tent- there was at least three inches of standing water in the lower half. So yeah, you might say we had equipment problems.

Okaka, incorrigible rascal that he is, had opted to stay at a nearby cheap guest house (perhaps he was familiar with Ngorongoro rim weather patterns?) and arrived well-rested, happy, and dry. When we acquainted him with the details of our rough night, he laughed the same belly laugh that we’d heard the previous day when the baby gnu was in danger. It was the right response, and after some coffee and fruit, we felt rejuvenated enough to “tackle” Ngorongoro.

Let’s see what I can remember about the crater off of the top of my head (that my friends Ivan and Shawn won’t either mock me for or look up and correct; “friends” huh). Ngorongoro is the world’s largest dormant volcanic crater, being around twenty kilometers wide and fifteen long. The wildlife is highly diverse, largely due to the alkali lakes which are enough to sustain life year-round. Even while the great migration is taking place, the wildebeests in the crater remain; they still have access to water. All of the “big five” safari animals are visible in the crater (these being rhinoceros, wildebeest, lion, leopard, and....um...maybe hippo or eland or cheetah or buffalo, I don’t recall). One can see two of the most beautiful larger bird species: the crowned crane and the flamingo (greater and lesser). Personally, I was most excited to see cheetahs and rhinoceros, both of which are quite rare or absent in the Serengeti.

Within five minutes of reaching the crater floor (by means of a steep, winding access road), we were treated to our first cheetah sighting. Far in the distance, one crouched motionless on his haunches, apparently saving energy for one of those legendary bursts of feline speed. As we continued, we kept seeing large animals in the distance which I constantly assumed were rhinos; Okaka must’ve grown tired of repeatedly telling us that they were actually just more Cape buffalo.

The roads in the crater suffer from its moist climate and heavy rainfall it sees, as was evidenced by the profusion of mud patches, severe ruts, and stomach-lurching bumps and potholes. We began our tour by skirting the main salt lake, and immediately the variety of animals living in Ngorongoro was plain- in half an hour we’d seen hippos, four or five gazelle, antelope and cousin species, flamingo and crane, buffalo, zebra, wildebeest, warthog, hyena, and various species of birds. I’m sure I’m forgetting others... My mom and Bill were in awe that the manifold animals co-existed so readily. “It’s just like Wildlife Safari!” Bill kept exclaiming, referring to a drive-through animal viewing park in southern Oregon which was designed to emulate the animals’ natural habitats. I suppose it’s an entirely different experience seeing them live together in the wild. Honestly, any direction we looked we were treated to a profusion of species; the abundance was overwhelming and beautiful.

We passed the morning cruising around, repeatedly witnessing the crater’s hoards, taking fantastic (or so I assume; I have yet to see them) pictures of it all. Sometime before lunch, we stumbled upon a small pride of lionesses (Okaka said there are some twenty prides in total throughout the Ngorongroro). What was enlightening about this particular sighting was the number of vehicles that had lined up to observe the great beasts. You can’t help but feel like a tourist when there are fifteen other vehicles exactly like yours, arranged end-to-end in a semicircle around an animal, all Tanzanian drivers, all white passengers. You can delve into that one if you want, I’ll leave it alone.

Leaving the photo frenzy behind, we headed towards a well-known hippo and elephant pool. En route, Okaka saw yet another lion pride, this time on the move. We watched them lope along, a bubble of fear forming around them as other animals moved out of their way. As we reached the pool, Okaka’s guide-sense was tingling, and he told us we could come back and see the hippos later, that we should follow the lions instead. There were maybe five other vehicles at the pool, looking at the hippos and elephants mingling in the cool water. Amazingly, we were able to spend less than five minutes at the pool before we agreed to take Okaka’s advice and move on (this is amazing due to my mother’s pure joy in taking scands of pictures). Leaving the other people behind us, Okaka raced down a rarely-traveled side road and parked near a small herd of zebra.

Sure enough, his instincts were spot-on, and shortly we spotted the trotting lions coming over a crest some two hundred meters behind the zebra.

This was the third hunt we’d had the fortune to watch, and it didn’t disappoint. One other vehicle eventually showed up and watched with us, and over the following half hour, one lioness had expertly used long grass, wind, and the terrain to position herself within ten meters of the zebra. We waited expectantly, assuming that she would lunge and nail an unwary zebra at any moment. Then, in what must be the worst luck of the day, a single, lonesome wildebeest came out of nowhere, walking directly between the zebra and the lioness. It must have been within five meters of the lioness without noticing her; the wildebeest never had a chance. Bam! The lioness sprang from its hollow with such alacrity that I hardly glimpsed its motion. The hunt was over before it began, zebras scattering in terror and the wildebeest hanging on for dear life as a hungry lioness clung to its body, raking and biting. How's that for agility? Almost instantly, other lions appeared and joined in, trying to bring their massive prey down. At one point, there were two lioness and two cubs all attacking the wildebeest, while it stubbornly stood its ground, refusing to fall, refusing to die. It all ended when a third lioness came up from behind and jumped on the wildebeest’s back, driving it to the ground with her weight. Its knees buckled, down it went, the hunt ended and the feast began.

Wow, what a thing to witness. Cross that off the list, huh? I might sound morbid, but getting to see a lion kill was one of the highlights of the safari for me. Even my mom was okay with watching it, as it wasn’t a baby. Okaka kept laughing about the wildebeest’s stupidity. Bill and I just felt gratified and lucky that we were there to see it all go down. Okaka, that immaculate guide, told us there are usually about five kills each full day (including night, remember lions are also nocturnal hunters). I had to chuckle and shake my head recalling all the other tourists who we left looking at hippos; we outdid them, yeah?

The rest of the day seemed to pass in a blur, our climax having been reached. Eventually, we saw some rhinos in the distance, and another cheetah, but the lion hunt was still resounding and jading our viewing. Other things I can say about Ngorongoro- there are more zebras than you would think is possible; the monkeys in the forest wanted to fight me; the road heading out of the crater is terrifying, and I don’t even get vertigo (Okaka told us later that many tourists “cry and are very scared” during the ascent). It was a beautiful place, not only for the plethora of unusual animals which inhabit it, but for the landscape itself. The mountainous rim provides a stunning background to the wildlife, and the alkali lakes, the forests, and grasslands are all uniquely fantastic. For anyone looking to be overwhelmed by nature’s beauty and profusion, the crater is well worth your time.

That night passed without incident; the rainstorm was not repeated (although we’d taken precautions, using Okaka’s tent and tarp as additional rainflys) and we slept deeply. Awaking the following morning, we realized our safari had reached its final day. As we were so far from Mwanza, our departure and return point, almost the entire day was devoted to the journey back. This was a grand opportunity to view the true diversity of Tanzania’s environment. We traveled from the rugged volcanic highlands of the crater to the sweeping expansiveness of the southern Serengeti, and then back through all the locales that awed us on our first day in the park. The tse-tse flies came back in full force during the second half of our trip, and I can’t say we weren’t relieved when we saw the exit gate, signaling our proximity to Mwanza. While Bill and I shared a congratulatory Heineken, my mom picked up some distinctly Tanzanian souvenirs (statues and bowls made from ebony or soapstone) at the gate; we all felt gratified.

Back in Mwanza, we had several hours to burn before taking the overnight ferry back to Bukoba. My mom and I went to the local crafts market, where she wanted to buy some gifts for friends. After having traveled all day, my nerves were shot and when I noticed that all she was bringing to the market was money and a big, fancy camera, I became unduly agitated (to be fair, theft is pretty damn common here, and nothing says “rob me!” like a camera around the neck). In the sweltering heat, the market made both of us woozy and we spent a bit less time shopping than she might’ve enjoyed on a cooler day. Nonetheless, she found a more than a few good gifts for a fair price before we headed back. My mom is the queen of bargain shopping, even in a hot Tanzanian crafts market.

We had time to catch a nice dinner before the ferry departed, so we went to the New Mwanza Hotel’s balcony restaurant. The menu at this place is like fifteen pages of Indian, Chinese, and Italian dishes; another epicurean oasis. Hot, tired, and beat, I ordered a cold Stella Artois. There are times when the first drink of a beer transcends the simple act of slaking a thirst, of enjoying its taste, and becomes more, an experience that rejuvenates the soul and refreshes the spirit. My first drink of that ice-cold Stella was one of the best drinks of beer I’ve ever had; I can still recall the feeling, more than the taste. The feeling of my heat and exhaustion being washed away under the cascade of cool ambrosia. Brilliance. I think the food was pretty good too.

The ferry ride went without incident. Our arrival in Bukoba spawned in me those homecoming feelings that we all welcome but rarely experience; my mom and Bill told me they felt the same relief. Before we’d left for the safari, my parents had bought some material and taken it to my tailor, to get some custom Tanzanian clothes made (the Bukoba Nordstrom is overpriced). We went to pick them up, and were delighted to find that he’d done (almost) exactly what we had agreed upon. I’ve heard many horror stories about miscommunications with tailors about alterations of one’s favorite dress and so on... My parents now have authentic, custom-made Tanzanian outfits; ask them to model their new styles for you. Very fancy, very fantastic.

As soon as we got home and rested a bit, Jack Bauer was back in action on my laptop, and his day hadn’t gotten any better (in fact, despite his best efforts, it kept getting worse). At four in the afternoon, Manuel showed up, and he, Bill and I went to teach my basketball players a thing or two. Let me tell you this: Bill has got some moves. The players immediately gave him the nickname “Bouncer” for his skill at wrestling the ball from other players and protecting it, and his rebounding. It was a fun game, despite the sweaty exhaustion we white folk always cultivate during the two hours of ball. If you are wondering “who won?” I should let you know that when we ball, the teams are as liquid as...well...yeah. The teams at the end of the game have only a passing resemblance to the original teams, so I guess I’d say that Bill was the winner, with Manuel being a close runner-up. After taking very critical bucket-baths and drinking about two gallons of water apiece, we made some pancakes for dinner, and let the comfort of being at home seep through our bones as we relaxed.

The next morning, we met with Manuel at the only tourism office in Bukoba. We’d planned to have a “Haya Cultural Day” in which we explored a bit of the area around Bukoba, ate some traditional foods, saw a famous local church, and watched the famous Haya drum and dancing ceremony. The tour guides, while not on a level with Okaka, were knowledgeable and pleasant. Our first stop was some mysterious rock paintings about an hour’s drive from Bukoba. I say mysterious for three reasons: first, no one knows when they were painted (the guide said “at least two hundred years ago” but maybe a lot more); second, no one knows what they were painted with (some red ochre type plant, but nothing like that is indigenous here); third, no one know what they represent (although Manuel had his highly expert guesses). On the path to the rocks, we stumbled across a bright green snake. This could have been either a green mamba (pretty poisonous) or a boomslang (very poisonous). Either way, I was glad I was wearing my highly protective teva sandals. The rocks were cool, and truly unique for the area, but sadly had been defaced to a degree we are unaccustomed to in America. Apparently the nearby village has a school, and many of the students bring the school chalk to the rock paintings. They then proceed to write their names directly over the historic paintings. How frustrating, coming from a country where conservation of such monuments is taken as a matter of course. There were precious few original drawings that hadn’t been scrawled on, and it left a bad taste in all our mouths.

From there we visited a famous church that has some ties to the Virgin Mary. I’m not sure why or what, but yearly there is a large festival that draws thousands from all over East Africa to this remote little place, to pray and receive Our Lady’s blessing. While not a staunch follower of any religion, I have to admit, this place really resonated with me. I can’t do it justice by describing it in words, but the locale of the church was so placid, it emanated true peace. It was set in a narrow dell, surrounded by a canopy of verdant trees and a thin stream twisted its lethargic way under the church. I told my parents that if I could ever be a monk or give my life to the church, this is where I could do it. We all went and received ablutions from the stream where it exited the holy church, and were on our way. I’ll try to get a picture of this place to post. Tranquility exemplified.

The traditional food and dance was next on our agenda, but we were a bit early, so we took a detour to a local waterfall. Bill was laughing as he mentioned the number of waterfalls in Douglas County (where I’m from and they live). It was fun, even to us jaded waterfall-rich Oregonians. The path going to the base of the falls was not so much a trail as it was us picking our way down a cliff. The last twenty meters down was the best: someone had come in and cut down all the shrubbery and saplings, and left them on the “trail”, forcing us to climb down this heap of branches and such, not actually ever setting foot on the ground. The view of the falls was rewarding, especially for Manuel, who basked in the spray for a good ten minutes (apparently waterfalls aren’t as common in his native Peru). Climbing back up was less fun, and by the time we were back in the car, all of us were sweatier than when we played ball the previous day.

By the time we arrived at the house where we’d be eating the Haya foods, the natural air conditioning (read: open windows) had cooled us off and reduced our sweatiness to an acceptable level. We were invited inside this Mama’s house, where we sat on rushes on the floor and waited to be served lunch. When it was ready, the lunch was laid out upon several large banana leaves. The primary food for the Wahaya people is a boiled banana and beans combination that Mama set directly on the leaves. On top of this, she had made some six or seven side dishes, including spinach leaves, boiled fish, some sort of meat, a peanut sauce, and other foods. It was a great lunch, made even better by the delicious juice she served us to wash it down (a passion-pineapple juice, made with lemongrass and ginger! Oh man...). My parents seemed to enjoy the act of eating it more than they enjoyed the food itself, which I suppose is the point.

As we exited Mama’s house, a fast, deep drum beat kicked up. We walked toward it, and found ourselves watching “ngoma”- the traditional dancing and drumming of the Haya people (actually, ngoma means drum in Swahili, but we’ll let that slide). For almost half an hour, this four person dance troupe shivered, shimmied, and shook to the persistent beat of the drummer. Manuel and I both agreed that it was “really cool” and my parents took some great video of the dancing. Some of the dances were recognizable, including one mock-up of the twist, and other dances were completely foreign to us, like this one-footed hop thing. I’m glad to have seen it, it made me feel like I know a bit more about the people who I’ve been living with for the last year or so.

After our “cultural day” was over, we returned to our standard of relaxing, talking, and watching “24”. This continued until the next evening, when another American in the area, Gayle, had invited us over for dinner. It was the only time my parents had a chance to visit with all of my friends here in Bukoba. Jodi and Manuel were there, and Gayle of course, and our Tanzanian friend John. Again my parents were eager to hear more about life here from other people, especially from Gayle, who has a different perspective than us volunteers, being a middle-aged primary school teacher with a focus on music. Gayle outdid herself and cooked some delicious food, probably the best I’ve ever had in Bukoba. The conversation was good; we delved into a lot of the cultural differences that we expatriates have to deal with in our lives here. Manuel, being the only non-American expat, kept acting like he didn’t know what we were talking about and continually repeated his mantra: “I’m foreign!” (imagine him saying like Mario would).

On our final day in Bukoba, we’d planned on visiting the fishing village which I helped with writing a grant in the morning. Unfortunately, my parents needed to confirm their reservations for their flight home, and we didn’t have the number. The next two hours were spent with my mom, Bill, and I taking turns calling every number we could find that might help, starting with the Dar Es Salaam airport (even though they were flying out of Entebbe). While we were using the local payphones in town to do this, it began pouring rain. This was a bad sign for our impending village trip. In the end, we tallied that we’d spoken to at least ten different people before finally calling the correct number and confirming the reservations. To be honest, I was amazed that we succeeded. I’m no stranger to communications in East Africa (if you are wondering why we didn’t get the number online, you are a stranger to communications in East Africa; all the internet cafes were defunct that morning, naturally). By the time we’d returned home, the rain had let up, but it was much later than when we’d planned to meet with the villagers, so we decided just to relax, talk, do some Bauer (later, it turns out that the rain had dissuaded them from coming at all, so no feelings were hurt). At some point in the afternoon, when we had about six episodes left, the power went out. This forced us to A) not watch any more “24”, B) have to use candles to pack our luggage, and C) get some of the students’ food for our dinner (this included plain rice and rock-infested beans).

We caught the bus back in the early morning, bidding farewell to Ihungo, Bukoba, and then to Tanzania itself. The driver of this bus was more…sane, but I could still tell that my mom and Bill couldn’t wait for the trip to be over. We got into Kampala in the early afternoon, got ripped off by a taxi driver, and settled into our hotel rooms. The power was out, so “24” would have to wait. In the meantime, we went for a nice leisurely walk, happy to stretch our legs after the bus ride. We meandered toward the biggest, cleanest, and best craft market in East Africa, a place that I thought my mom would go crazy over. When we first walked in, she whispered to me, “I doubt I’ll buy anything, I’ve already gotten everything I want.” She was wrong. But to her credit, despite the sheer magnitude of this place and the availability of any curios one might possibly want, she only bought a few things. When we got back to the hotel, the power was back, so we watched a few more episodes of Bauer before dinnertime rolled around. You have to understand, by this point, “24” was something we HAD to finish. I would not allow them to leave with all the discs if I hadn’t watched all of it, and they weren’t planning on leaving it behind. It had claimed us.

For dinner, we’d planned on heading to the Kampala Carnivore at Half-London, the same place I went last year with Malara and ate crocodile. After a long taxi ride with a myopic old Ugandan with a discouragingly battered car, we reached the restaurant. Rather, we reached where it used to be, that is. In the last year, it went out of business and was in the process of being demolished. Curse the day! So there we were, hungry, far from the city center and its plethora of restaurants, and with the Mr. Magoo of taxi drivers. We asked if there was anything like the Half-London nearby, and eventually ended up at a French restaurant. Crocodile....French...I don’t see the connection. But en route to the French joint, we’d passed a name I recognized from the Lonely Planet guide book I’d brought with me last year- a famous Ethiopian restaurant. My parents said “what the heck, why not?” and we went for it. I now strongly urge any of you who have never had Ethiopian food to stop whatever you are doing right now, especially if it is reading this, and drive to the nearest Ethiopian restaurant. My mind was blown by this food, and my mom and Bill agreed it was beyond delicious. Keep in mind, this is no Tex-Mex or whatever, it’s a totally different way of eating. The tablecloth is edible and the dishes you order are poured onto it, then you rip off pieces of the tablecloth and scoop up whatever tastes good to you (it all will taste good to you). In the end, I feel pretty fortunate that we didn’t get crocodile, which isn’t all that great anyway.

The next day, we caught a taxi to Entebbe, and awaited my parents’ flight home (at eleven in the evening). We all had a number of emotions stirring- my parents were looking at flying back home to work, leaving behind their son and the drastically different life they’d begun to adjust to and enjoy; I was looking at saying goodbye to two people who know me so well and returning to a country of (relative) strangers, and also it was hard to realize they were heading home and I was staying. So most of the day we spent talking, reminiscing, discussing my life plans after here, and such things. We had a long, meaningful talk that lasted throughout the day, interrupted only by meals and the last few episodes of “24” (which we managed to finish; Jack saved the day, pass it on). Before we knew it, the time came and we caught the cab to the airport, said a short goodbye, and they were on their way.

I’m not sure if I’ve felt lonelier in my tenure here than I did when I took that cab back to my (now) empty hotel room. Having my parents constantly around me was a great comfort, despite the occasional difficulties in translating or cultural oddities. I guess this is where I write “thanks” to them. Mom, Bill, thanks so much for coming and seeing me here. It meant more to me than you know.

That’s it... I appreciate ((you)) reading all of what I wrote.

Sorry to keep you waiting...

Right away, my parents got a taste of what my life at Ihungo tends to be like- we arrived to find the house almost barren of water. There wasn’t enough even for all of us to bathe that first night, hardly enough for the toilet and cooking. However, my parents came here with their eyes open, they were expecting some discomforts, and they shrugged off the shortage without a second thought. And more importantly, once we began unpacking their luggage and didn’t have time to worry about trivial things like water. After all, they’d brought me an entire suitcase full of candy. I’ll write that again. They’d brought me an Entire Suitcase full of candy. Think about it for a minute.... In addition to the 70-odd pounds of chocolates, sour gummies, and wasabi peas, they’d also brought me my long-awaited Christmas present- a guitar. Let’s just say that I was more than a bit overwhelmed, especially after unpacking it all and forming a giant mound of candy on my coffee table. I’ll try and post a picture; you’ll be impressed. In other news, I now have diabetes.

The next morning was the weekly “Monday Morning Parade,” an hour-long fiesta where the student body stands in formal columns and gets drilled by their elected representatives and whichever teachers may have a bone to pick. It’s very reminiscent of what I’d imagine a military inspection would be like- lots of denigrating yelling, singling out poor examples, and rigid formality. I’d planned on escorting my mom and Bill to this in order to introduce them in one fell swoop, hoping that this particular parade would be calmer than some that I’ve witnessed. That was not to be the case. We arrived at the parade grounds at around 7:15 in the morning, and stood mutely for the next half an hour as name after name was called out, the “chosen” students coming forward to kneel in infamy. It must’ve been a rough week for the some of the teachers; they were on the warpath that morning. At least fifty of the several hundred assembled students ended up being summoned to the front of the columns, all patiently waiting on their knees for whatever punishment they would receive for whatever crime they committed. Before said punishments commenced, I managed to squeeze in a quick introduction of my parents. Unfortunately, the mood wasn’t very light and all my attempts at levity fell on humorless ears. Looking at my form five students however, I saw many grins and nods; they were happy to finally get a look at Mwalimu Masanja’s family. Immediately following the introduction, I saw one of the teachers bring out a stick. There are some ugly realities here, and that is not one that I wanted my parents to see, so we left as quickly as possible. As we made our way back to the home, we walked to the rhythmic cracking of the atrocity that is corporal punishment. Sorry, sometimes it really gets to me...

Back home, Bill and I made our black coffee (this became a near-ritual) and we prepared to visit Bukoba. I was excited to show them my favorite path, descending the bluff from Ihungo and winding through villages, offering great views of our surroundings. It was also an opportunity for me to show off a little bit; I greeted most people in the tribal language, causing a wake of happiness and awe (again, white folks don’t tend to know any Kihaya). It was a pleasant walk in the mid-morning sun, mainly because it was downhill rather than up, and before we knew it we’d reached town.

My parents later told me that, even though they didn’t speak any Swahili (that’s not entirely true; by this point, they’d learned the criticals: how to thank and how to say hello), the people in Bukoba were the most friendly they encountered throughout the trip. That’s nice to hear. I met a tourist once in Dar, and told her I was from Bukoba. Her response: “Oh, that’s the place where they don’t call you ‘mzungu’.” Well…yeah, they do. Just not as often as elsewhere in Tanzania, and not out of any negative sentiment. After covering almost all of greater Bukoba by foot, and after a disappointing buffet at a normally (I swear!) passable restaurant, we headed back up (this time by taxi; it was hot, and it was uphill). As the sun went down, we decided it was now or never, and put in disc one of “24” Season Five.

Four or five episodes later, Jack Bauer is having a pretty crappy day and we’re tired. As some cruel twist of fate, for the first week or so, every night only one of my parents would get a good night’s sleep, and the other...well, wouldn’t. That next morning, we decided to take the day off and rest up, to have our A-game for the fast-approaching safari. We took a short, pleasant walk around the Ihungo area, watched some more “24” (by this point we were in too deep; that show is really addictive, you know), talked and relaxed. One of the nicest parts of my parents visit was the opportunities we had to converse, and to get to know Bill on a different level. And for me, normally being surrounded by non-native English speakers, it was such a release being able to express myself fluidly and regularly (that sounds like I’m talking about something else entirely, doesn’t it?).

On the following day, our ferry to Mwanza was leaving in the evening. We’d arranged to meet Jodi and Manuel at a restaurant near the port before heading out. Most of the day prior to that was spent packing for the safari and watching Jack either get betrayed by the last one you’d expect or convince someone to help him in the pursuit of truth. Very nice. During dinner, Bill got his first taste of ambrosia- Stoney Tangawizi. This is a ginger-flavored soda that Coke produces here in East Africa. Do not be misled; Stoney has little in common with its feeble cousin “ginger ale.” My mom took one sip and did the “bitter beer face” from those old Miller commercials. Stoney has a serious ginger bite and it’s heavenly. Oh yeah, I guess it was nice for my parents to finally meet my two closest friends here, too. They said it was interesting to hear perspectives about life here, or life as a volunteer, beyond my own. Those of us living here have truly manifold experiences...

Right on schedule, the whistle blew and we boarded the overnight ferry, my favorite form of transportation in East Africa. First-class is actually comfortable (at least compared to the death trap that is a bus), sleeps two, and generally I’m out like a rock until the skipper guy smacks on the door, telling us the boat has arrived. I guess Bill didn’t sleep as well, as his bunk, the upper one, wasn’t properly fastened and the engine vibrations caused it to properly shudder throughout the night. Luckily, the safari wasn’t departing until the next morning, and we had a full day to kick around Mwanza.

Kathryn, another volunteer and good friend of mine who lives on the east side of the lake, had arranged to come meet us. In the afternoon, we got together at a swanky joint for lunch, then spent the next six hours or so talking, enjoying the warm weather and cold beer, and chilling out. In an unprecedented move, we went straight from this place to the Chinese restaurant where we planned on having dinner. Every time I swing by Mwanza, I try to eat at this restaurant. As my parents said, “This would be good even in America.” The sizzling beef and the gongbao chicken are oases in the desert of Tanzanian cuisine (read: ugali and dagaa).

Bright and early the next morning, our safari began. The driver, who would be doubling as our guide, picked us up at our hotel (the “Christmas Tree Inn”; woop!). His name was Ezekiel Okaka, and he was the man. Throughout our safari, he proved himself time and again to be one of the best guides in the park. Considering he’d been doing tours since 1978, that makes some sense. Okaka was a stoic fellow with a deep belly laugh and a “no worries in Africa” attitude. We felt fortunate to have him at the helm, with his calmness and experience. The vehicle he (and nearly every other Serengeti guide) was driving was a converted Toyota Land Rover, in which the roof could be propped up high enough for all but the very tall to comfortably stand up and look out. I am very tall.

After stocking up on the essentials (toilet paper, water, Scotch), we left Mwanza and traveled the two hours north to the western Serengeti gate, near Musoma. Our first day in the national park would be spent traversing the “Western Corridor,” a long, contracted swath of land heading east towards the park’s center. Most tourists enter and exit Serengeti from the east side, coming from Arusha, so the Western Corridor is a less-viewed (and less crowded) section of the park. As we followed the main dirt road leading eastward, we began to catch glimpses of the raison d’etre of our safari- animals! Along the Corridor, there was a profusion of zebra, antelope, Grant’s and Thomson’s gazelles, and warthog. My mom kept laughing when she would ask Okaka to stop so that she could take a picture of some beast in the distance (this happened more than a few times), as she knew we would see so many of these animals in the following days, likely in more camera-friendly locations, but we stopped anyway, eager to get a taste of African wildlife. The Western Corridor ran along a narrow river, and we stopped for lunch in the shade of some acacia trees on the bank. As we ate our hot dog sandwiches, we listened to the nearby hippos bellowing and snorting. We continued making our way towards Seronera, the central “town” in the Serengeti, and as the afternoon wore on, we began to see other animals in the distance- elephant and giraffe. For all of us, one of the most striking aspects of the Serengeti was the amazing environmental variance we couldn’t help but notice as we covered kilometer after kilometer. The landscape changed from lush wooded river basin to thorn-bush scrub plains to hilly savannah (just like you are imagining a savannah ought to look) in the course of a few hours’ travel. Each region was dramatic in its own right, and we found ourselves repeatedly stunned by Serengeti’s natural beauty. The unique and unusual creatures dotting this scenery only added to our appreciation; the raisins in our tapioca pudding.

Some of the highlights of that first day, beyond getting our first taste of the land and animals, were: Okaka brazenly driving through rivers where bridges had been washed out (in spite of another car which obviously didn’t make it to the other side), finding out that tse-tse flies exist in the Serengeti, and that they can bite through clothing (these aren’t the deadly ones, I hope, as all of us were bitten at least ten or fifteen times), and getting a look at a massive crocodile sleeping among the rocks, only to realize that some of those rocks were additional crocodiles (sneaky sneaky).

We arrived at the campsite as Apollo’s chariot was taking him into Hades for the evening, and were greeted by our one disappointment during the entire safari: most other campers had large canvas tents, with cots, camp chairs, lanterns, and so on; we had two small tents that a Boy Scout might take on a weekend trip to his backyard, and no other equipment. In the end, my mom had to scour the area to find a rock to use as a chair, and we used our flashlights for illumination. How much are we paying for this..? Luckily, being the rugged Oregonians that we are, we were only temporarily nonplussed. After putting all the packs in my tent, Bill and my mom had almost enough room to share the other one, and if I slept diagonally, only my head and feet touched the tent walls.

The campsite was replete with campers from all over the world, and the social climate was laid-back and open. We had conversations with some Dutch rose-growers, a young Indian from Goa, and a French couple. Despite our deficiency of equipment, and despite the relatively basic nature of the available facilities (ask my mom about that...), we eventually decided we were glad that we’d chosen to camp (as opposed to staying in lodges), mainly due to this friendly atmosphere. As Bill later told us, he was happy we camped for many reasons, but mainly because he woke up at 2:30am that first night to the roar of some distant lions. Imagine laying in your tent and listening to the thunderous growls of the “king of the jungle,” that’s a pretty awesome, if a bit scary, experience.

Our itinerary for the next day included several “game drives” in which we would seek out lions, a hippo pool, and the elusive leopard (Matt, the British chap who lived in Bukoba for some five years, told me he’d been on four safaris and never seen “el leopardo”). That morning was a testament to the skill of our hero, Okaka. Throughout the Seronera area, many drivers were conducting a morning search for leopards. Okaka took us down on particular road where he said they tend to sleep, and we searched in the trees for the telling outline of the dozing cat. As we reached the end of the road without any luck, Okaka turned us around, to find other areas to search. Halfway back, however, Okaka’s expert eyes spotted a lump-shaped shadow on the branches of an acacia tree some 200 meters away (Bill, is that about right? You’re the hunter...). Sure enough, he’d found a leopard that was almost indistinguishable from its perch, as it lay straddling one large branch. We were treated to Okaka’s belly laugh for a good five minutes as he kept telling us how clever those leopards are (turns out they’re his favorite animal in the entire park), and shaking his finger at the leopard as if he was scolding it for trying to hide from him. When we’d finished taking pictures and staring at the big, lazy cat through binoculars, Okaka got on the “leopard channel” on his radio, and broadcast the location to the other drivers in the area who were still searching (in vain). As we headed back to the central area to look for lions, a bevy of vehicles passed us heading to where we’d come from, spurred on by Okaka’s sighting. It made me really appreciate Okaka’s instinct and skill as a guide that, out of the twenty or so other vehicles we saw that morning, he’d been the one to find the leopard.

An hour later, we had our first sighting of a lioness. Several other Land Rovers were stopped at a seemingly random place, and until we pulled up alongside them, we wondered at what they looking. Then, well-hidden in the tall grass, the lioness raised her head and looked around. Though this lioness was only ten feet away from the road, she was so obscured we would’ve driven right past her if not for the other cars watching her. Again I was impressed with the reliance that all the guides have on one another to make sure their clients have a memorable safari. For us, one lion wasn’t enough, so we continued to drive around these unique rock formations called “kopjes” that jut out of the Serengeti plains like the prows of sinking ships (think of the “Circle of Life” rock from Lion King), searching in the sun and shadows for the beast. Eventually, we came across another gathering of vehicles, and slowly realized they were watching three lionesses relaxing in the shade of a thorn bush. As we sat and observed, a topi (it’s a member of the antelope family, Davis) crested a nearby hill and stood silhouetted against the blue sky. We humans weren’t the only ones who took note of the topi, one of the lionesses caught its scent as well, and began the hunt. The whole stalking process was fantastic to watch, not just for the thrill of witnessing one of nature’s great hunters in action, but also for Okaka’s belly laughing commentary (“ohhhohohoo you topi!! Oh mister topi ohohoo noo!”) and Bill’s professional excitement (“look how she’s moving with the wind. Ok, now hide yourself for a bit! She’s getting really close now! I can barely see her in that tall grass, what a hunter!”). In the end, after stalking the topi for half an hour, the lioness missed the kill by about ten meters, when the topi finally caught its scent and bolted. According to Okaka, a lion will sprint the last five to seven meters of distance between it and its prey, so it was a close call for “mister topi”. The hunt having ended, the other tourists and their guides headed off to search for the next excitement of the day. As we followed suit, we noticed there was a lorry (big transport truck) parked right next to the thorn bush where the lionesses had been resting. The lorry’s front-left tire was missing, and some tools and parts were strewn on the ground. Pulling alongside the cab, Okaka asked the driver what happened. Listening in, I heard the driver tell him that the lorry had broken down the previous night, and they’d been trying to fix it but lacked a part. Then, sometime in the early morning, the pride of lions had come and planted itself right next to the vehicle, hindering any further attempts at repair. The driver was content putting his seat back and dozing until the lions moved on; I wondered how a semi driver in the States would’ve handled the same situation.

After a nice Tanzanian lunch (rice, beans, chicken), we were off to the hippo pool. En route, we passed through hordes of giraffe and elephant, counting them by the dozens. My mom found a new photographer’s quest: getting pictures of the baby animals alongside their parents. You’ll have to ask her to see “the collection” (word on the street is that she took a remarkable 2000+ pictures during the trip). The hippo pool, when we reached it, turned out to be well named. It was a pool of sluggish water, replete with somewhere between 20 and 40 semi-submerged hippos, bathing and bellowing. They’re hard to count; all you can see is their nostrils half the time. By the time we left to return to our campsite, it was early evening and we’d been animal watching since before eight in the morning. Our arms and necks were getting slow roasted by the sun, and my neck was stiff from standing at odd angles to see out from under the roof (however, eventually I devised a scheme of using a cooler like a booster-seat and just sitting on my “throne” instead of standing; ingenious). Naturally, after two days of sweating and getting dusty, we needed baths. Unfortunately at our campsite, hot water was only provided to the other campers (I don’t know where they got it, but we were jealous), so we had to fill up some empty bottles with the tepid water that was available, and pour it over our heads like a Gatorade commercial. The end result was that we were nominally clean.

After another pleasant night in our miniature tents, we hit the road leading us to Ngorongoro Crater (ask my mom or Bill to say this word, Ngorongoro. It’s got a difficult pronunciation, and en route I tried teaching it to them a number of times, with arguable success). The crater is one of the world’s most renowned animal habitats, and we’d planned our safari so that it would be the climax. It was a bit far from Seronera, though, and we leisurely spent almost an entire day making our way there. During the crossing, we happened upon one of the last great animal migrations: the wildebeest migration from Kenya’s Maasai Mara to the southern Serengeti and back again. Hundreds of thousands of wildebeest (also known as a gnu) smothered the plains, descending away into a mass of indistinguishable brown. In this sea of innumerable animals, the movements reminded us of the ebb and flow of a tide, the swells and troughs of waves. No pictures we took will do justice to the sheer magnitude of the wildebeest migration, and it was fantastic to look upon.

Mid-morning, we passed a wildebeest calf that had been separated from its herd, and was blindly running along the roadside, lost and scared. After expressing the requisite pity, we drove on, only to encounter a small pride of lionesses roughly a kilometer further along the road, in the direction the calf was running. In the distance we saw the remains of their previous kill, and now they rested with swollen bellies. Okaka knew what was likely to happen, and stopped the Land Rover for us to watch the inevitable hunt. Sure enough, a few short moments after we’d stopped, the calf came scampering into view, still moving without direction. The lionesses took note, and slowly slipped into “stalk mode,” laying low in the grass and slinking along to find the right location. Again, Okaka provided us with a soundtrack to the hunt (“ohhh the gnu! That baby gnu oh noooo! Ohh ooohoo no!”). As the calf neared the lionesses, I must admit I began getting excited for the kill. Bloodlust, maybe, but I wanted to witness a successful hunt. Fortunately for my mom, who held the opposite wish, when the calf neared the lionesses, they sprang too late and put forth a halfhearted chase, not being hungry, and the calf escaped unscathed. Minutes later, a jackal caught the scent and took chase. Again, the calf somehow managed to elude its hunter. Finally, it found two adult wildebeests which promptly adopted and protected it, and my mom smiled at the happy ending. So did Okaka, showing his soft side by telling us that it wouldn’t have been fair for the calf to be killed. Me, I was disappointed...

The main stop on our drive to Ngorongoro was at Olduvai Gorge, a name that might ring bells with those of you interested in archaeology and anthropology. The gorge facilitates study and dating due to the highly stratified landscape, and carries interest in researching hominid evolution (East Africa is another “cradle of civilization,” people). In the 1960’s and 70’s, some teams of researchers found distinct and telling footprints in a specific strata that indicated the presence of Australopithecus boisei, a hominid from the Lower Pleistocene epoch that demonstrated an upright posture for walking. If my memory serves, this helped fill a gap between apes and Homo erectus, the evolutionary precursor to us Homo sapiens. Apart from the historical significance, Olduvai carries strong cultural interest, being in the heart of the Maasai people’s homelands. (In fact, “oldupai” is the original name for the Olduvai Gorge, because in the Maasai language, “oldupai” means sisal, a useful plant which is ubiquitous in that area. A German researcher in the early 20th century misunderstood and wrote “olduvai,” and now the world knows it as such). Maasai tribesmen are omnipresent in the area, resplendent in their red and purple tartan-esque robes, armed with machetes and clubs, bows and spears. Their villages dot the region, small clusters of thatched huts surrounding a central gathering point. When you think of Africa, and images spring to life of partly clad men shouting and jumping around a fire, shaking spears and invoking the spirits, you are more or less picturing the traditional Maasai. These are the people who, rather than battling, decide who is correct in a conflict by a “jump-off”. Now, while continuing to live as herdsman and hunters, a large part of their income comes from selling traditional Maasai wares, from beaded necklaces to razor-sharp short swords. The Maasai cluster around tourist-heavy locations, such as the entrance to the crater, and try to make money even by offering to be in pictures (for the right price; apparently, “do it for free” wasn’t the price they were looking for). In the crater itself, a national conservation area, Maasai are still allowed to graze their cattle, which is a sure sign that the Tanzanian government values the Maasai culture and heritage.

Leaving the gorge, our vehicle climbed into the hills, higher and higher, and before we knew it we were on the peak of the crater. We skirted the rim for several kilometers before arriving at our campsite, one which was substantially more crowded than the cozy Seronera site. However, the facilities were improved (hot water!), and the view was grand. Our plan was to relax that night, and then spend the entire following day in the crater, taking our time to see it all.

Next week: the grand finale.

So...I promised to post an update of our trip soon, and here it is. Part one, at least. I need an editor or something to keep me from writing so much. Part two (and perhaps three) will be forthcoming. How's the weather where you are? Here its 75 degrees every day. Ha HA. Without further ado-

My step-father, Bill, and my mom, Terrie, after six months of meticulous planning, arranged to fly into the Entebbe International Airport on February 23. We couldn’t have possibly planned more successfully the dates of their visit, as my one-month vacation began on February 22. The morning of the 23rd, I woke up at 4am to walk into town (on a $6 per day salary, it makes sense to save money where one can, such as on early morning taxis) and catch my bus to Kampala. Having slept poorly the previous night, largely due to my nervousness of receiving my first American visitors, I thought to sleep on the 6-hour ride. However, I found myself sitting next to a young woman who was enrolled at Makarere University (the Oxford of East Africa) in Kampala. She was studying to be a pharmacologist/chemist, and we had a long (roughly 6-hour) conversation about higher education in East Africa, among other things. Unsurprisingly, she had a large number of siblings, mostly older than her. Surprisingly, all of them had graduated from university and we employed as engineers, doctors, lawyers, and so on. This is in an educational system where less than 1% of all students reach university level. How’s that for parenting? It made me wonder about the emphasis that her parents obviously put on education, and whether that same parental motivation would lead to similar successes throughout this area. Sadly, education is often not considered to be of fundamental importance here, especially in more rural areas among farmers and fishermen who rely on the work of their children to live. Slowly, the paradigm is changing (for example, the Maasai, a tribe of semi-nomadic herders and warriors, traditionally resistant to all Western influence such as education and religion, have started allowing their girls to attend school), but it will be at least another generation before most Tanzanians truly believe in the efficacy of education, in its crucial value to life.

As we talked, I occasionally glanced out the window to observe the cultural and landscape gradient passing from Bukoba to Kampala. The most immediately evident sign that I was out of Tanzania was the profusion of English-language signs, English being the national language of Uganda. I looked at the store fronts, one after the other emblazoned with a painted advertisement for a phone company, type of cooking oil, or condom brand, and thought how they resembled a retrograde Tokyo; the neon lights transformed instead into splashes of paint, yet still covering every wall and invading one’s senses. As we neared Kampala itself, that “pearl of Africa” Churchill so praised, I noticed more keenly the difference between Tanzanian and Ugandan culture, specifically in style of women’s dress. In Tanzania, traditional garb still reigns; women wear brightly colored, boldly patterned swaths of fabric that they wrap around themselves like a towel. In Uganda, many women, especially younger ones, wore jeans that must’ve required either a shoehorn or some of that cooking oil to fit into, or both. I didn’t mind so much.

We reached Kampala lagging behind schedule by only an hour, and after a nice lunch with the university student (where she ordered for us what is now my favorite East African food- matoke, or steamed and mashed bananas, and peanut sauce), I hopped on another bus to Entebbe. My parents were scheduled to land at 11pm, and I reached the airport town with a lot of time to spare. I returned to the quaint guest house I’d chanced upon last year, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the proprietor, Mama Clemence, had expanded her humble two-room establishment into an institution with six rooms, a bar(!), and a beautiful outdoor banquet hall. True to East African form, the power was down when I arrived; I could only hope that it would be back in time to provide light for my travel weary parents. I’d brought a Neal Stephenson book, and for most of the remaining time, I lost myself in his world. Around 8pm, I went for dinner at Mama Clemence’s nearby restaurant (this woman is like the Entebbe mafia, a hand in everything; she’s also highly involved with local politics…), enjoying a big fried fish, chips, and Ugandan beer, which is the exact same as Tanzanian beer.

Upon returning to my room, I found that a generator had been installed at the guest house, but that it was going to power some giant speakers at the outdoor banquet hall, where a graduation ceremony would be taking place until the early morning. Oh, that’s nice… Mama Clemence eventually found me, knowing that I’m “from” Tanzania, and demanded that I meet her other Tanzanian guests. She led me to a table at the back of the celebration area, and I was presented to two young Tanzanian fellows who turned out to be pilots from Arusha and Dar. Apparently they weren’t flying that night (or so I hope), as their table was littered with empty whiskey packets and beer bottles. After throwing out some Swahili, I was heartily taken in by these gregarious pilots, who “encouraged” me to go out drinking with them. I still had a few hours left, and no electricity in my room, so I figured a beer or two would be nice. We went to a local bar, where I realized these men were already pretty far gone, and beer was not in fact on the menu. They went straight for whiskey shots. Cool…been there before. After three or four in a half hour’s time, we backed off a bit and relaxed, and my first in-depth conversation about the sexual mores of typical Tanzanians began. These pilots were all too eager to share all their “insider knowledge”, despite the fact that I never asked. It was a hilarious conversation, made all the more ridiculous for the fact that we were speaking in Swahili and all the Ugandans around us were in the dark as to what they were vividly and vehemently explaining to me (or so I assume; this one old fella chuckled a few times, he might’ve been in the know). At 10pm, I told them it was time I went to pick up my parents. Their protestations (“the plane will be four hours late, let’s just go to a dance club instead!”) were well-received, and I managed to leave them in good humor.

I arrived at the airport with half an hour to spare, but sadly the plane’s arrival had been delayed. Apparently a passenger decided to disembark at the stopover in Nairobi without telling anyone, and substantial time was lost as the officials tried figuring out just where this missing passenger went. So what to do at an airport at 11 at night? Yeah…I went to the lounge to relax. As soon as I entered, an elderly Belgian man grabbed my arm and asked what kind of beer I would like. Seems that it was my night for free drinks. He was waiting for his family, and must’ve been pretty stressed out, judging by the alacrity with which he was putting the beers down. In a drunkenness contest, I’m not sure if the pilots or the Belgian would’ve won; a match for the ages. Not wanting to be a wreck when I greeted my parents who’d flown thousands of miles to see me, I nursed the beer, but to no avail. Each time the Belgian re-upped, he made sure not to forget me. Three beers later, I was woozy and the plane was due in ten minutes. I decided to make my exit, against the Belgian’s yells, oddly similar to those from the pilots, “that plane won’t land for another hour, have a beer!” Luckily, it did land, and quickly.

My pleasant, if disorienting, buzz made the arrival of my parents all the more surreal. Surreal…that’s a good word to describe seeing such familiar faces in such an alien environment, and it was a feeling that returned to me more than once during their stay. However, the joy I felt at seeing them arrive safely easily outweighed that oddness, and our initial hugs and greetings were like coming home. The first thing my mom said to me? “You sound different.” Yeah, I guess living in a developing country where the English is so poorly understood, my speech patterns would be altered. I’m sure that was just one of many changes my parents saw in me during their visit.

We caught a cab to the guest house, and I was disheartened to find that not only was the music from ceremony still blasting, but that the electricity was still out as well. Welcome to East Africa, weary travelers! It was nearing midnight by the time we got all the luggage into the room, and knowing that the jet lag could be fierce if they didn’t get some sleep, we allowed ourselves only a brief conversation before heading to bed. I was still awake, spurred on by the strangeness and the brilliance of knowing my parents had arrived, so I went out to the ceremony area, where Mama Clemence met me with a giant smile and requested I have a beer with her. Wow…it really was my night. It was nice to tell her and her husband that everything was fine, that they’d landed safely and were now peacefully (I hoped) asleep in bed. After the beer (final count- 2.5 litres of beer and 200ml of whiskey; it felt like I was back in university), I felt ready for sleep and the upcoming two weeks of adventure and tour-guiding.

First on the following day’s agenda were the botanical gardens, which I’d visited last year and whose tranquility was highly welcomed. Our encyclopedic guide, who knowledge made me feel as though I forgot to should be taking notes, escorted us throughout the diverse gardens over four hour’s time, during which my parents received their first taste of African wildlife- hordes of colobus monkeys littered the area, showing almost no fear of man (in fact, we had some extra bread which they intrepidly came and plucked from my hand; greedy buggers). The gardens were as impressive and varied as I remembered, with such unusual specimens as the “cannon-ball tree” and the “sausage tree”, both aptly named for the shapes of their inedible fruits. All in all, it was a peaceful way to spend their morning in such a foreign land (despite the fact that my mom forgot that we were less than a degree from the equator, not wearing any sunscreen and getting a nice little burn for her efforts).

Following the gardens, we got a local lunch at Mama Clemence’s restaurant. One of my continual fears during their visit was that some particularly feisty bacteria would attack their fragile stomachs just as we boarded a bus heading somewhere (thankfully, this fear was never realized). Their first true local meal was that same matoke and peanut sauce that the university student had shown me, and they loved it, going as far as to ask how it was made in order to try replicating it back home. Bellies full, we called the taxi which would take us from the somewhat secluded Entebbe to the scrappy, bustling city that is Kampala. Bill later said that this one-hour drive was the time he experienced the strongest feelings of culture shock, perhaps from seeing the poverty embodied in the multitude of workers and tiny businesses, equally as attached to the road and its traffic as are the yellow and white painted lines. The drive was an opportunity to gaze out at the sea of foreign people and their constructs, to take in life in Uganda in one fell swoop. The driver got lost (after professing to know “exactly” where the hotel was), and when we arrived at the hotel, it seemed a paradise with its expansive lawns and comforting simplicity, calm in the eye of the chaotic mercantile storm that encompasses Kampala. Shortly after our arrival, the heat of the afternoon was displaced by a torrent of rain, a foreshadowing of what was to be the following day’s journey to Bukoba.

The bus heading back to my home left early enough that we only had time to enjoy breakfast (the same as the previous day’s- bread, banana, and an egg) and some rest before heading to the terminal. By this point, I can well imagine that my parents were still reeling from the cultural and societal differences. While life here is truly the same as life anywhere else, once you adjust, on the surface the incongruities can be overwhelming at first. One of the major areas of dissonance between East African and American societies is that of proper infrastructure- the States have it, Africa doesn’t. This is reflected by the continual power outages, lack of running water, and poor roads. The latter is what my parents were now facing, as we hurtled down the narrow, worn road in our Greyhound-size bus. Interestingly, most people here consider the strip from Kampala to Bukoba to be one of the best in the area. Coming from America, my parents did not share that opinion. Between the driver’s outrageous speed, the potholed, pedestrian-crowded road, and the exhaust smell emanating from right under our feet, the trip was pretty miserable, and that was before it started pouring rain. It rained, and hard, for at least two hours of our ride. During this time, the driver slowly down only nominally, and I became worried when I saw that even the Tanzanian passengers wanted him to slow down. If this wasn’t frightening enough, the wiper on the driver’s side wasn’t working, so the bus would occasionally stop so that they could apply powdered soap to the windshield. Our lives were in the hand of Foma Gold, number one East African powdered soap. As we turned south and neared the border, the rain lessened. We’d escaped unscathed, despite a couple white-knuckle close calls with other cars and people; just another day here…

The rest of the trip was smooth, and we rejoiced when we finally reached fabled Bukoba. As a bonus, not a single piece of the extensive amounts of luggage (more on this later) was damaged or missing. A short taxi ride later, and we had finally arrived at my school and my home- Ihungo. If you are to ask my parents what their favorite place in Tanzania is, my guess is that they will answer “Ihungo”. Although the hotel of the previous night was tranquil in its own right, it wasn’t home. After the harrowing bus ride, compiled with the 30-odd other hours of travel they’d done to get to Africa, reaching the destination spelled better relief than Rolaids. My house is situated several kilometers outside of Bukoba, on a crest overlooking a lush stream valley on one side and the tremendous Lake Victoria on the other. Being part of the school grounds, it is removed enough to feel idyllic and serene, even when the school kids are pounding on my door asking for candy.

You know, this post isn't even a real post. Its just a post to tell you that I'm working on the real post. My mom and step-dad came and went, then I finished a ton of work. Now I am working on a write-up of our adventures, to rival my longest posts. So... sorry for this sad attempt at reparations for my indolence. I'll make up for it soon.

I wrote awhile back about my attempts to pick up the tribal language of Bukoba- Kihaya. Under the assumption that knowing the local mother tongue will somehow work to my advantage, I've slowly picked up enough Kihaya to properly greet people and talk about the weather. As this comprises roughly ninety-five percent of all conversations taking place in Tanzania, I'm sitting pretty. Today I caught a cab-share (really, that is glamourizing the whole business a bit; it was a decrepit post-taxi miraculously carrying seven others) from Ihungo to town. When I did the contortionist trick of taking up as little room as physically possible (as I did when I shared the bed with Jacques), I was able to slam the door closed on myself. Some pain. In an unexplained good mood while sharing the back seat of this cab with four others, I decided to wheeze out a few Kihaya greetings. Again, my theory of this language's utility was correct, and within five minutes some of the ladies were asking if I am married. (To be honest, this isn't that uncommon; some of the women in the Corps tell me that they are asked to marry total strangers on a weekly basis.) When we reached town, I paid the driver with a 2000 shilling bill, expecting change. For some reason, we were surrounded by a large number of Tanzanian men who seemed to have nothing better to do that watch me pay for my cab ride. As soon as I'd handed the driver the bill, several of the men told the driver, in Swahili, that he shouldn't give me any change. The driver and I started laughing simultaneously, and then the driver told one of the guys to guard his tongue, as "the mzungu knows even Kihaya." You're damn right. After a short exchange where he gave me most of my change and I gave him the evil eye, I was on my way having paid the proper fare. When I thanked the driver in Kihaya, the whole crowd of layabouts gasped. Gratifying... I guess all I'm trying to say is that learning Kihaya has paid off, more than just in this example. The facilitation of dealing with people in their own language here has inspired me to try picking up useful phrases whenever and wherever I may travel.

For news from school, my form six students began their national examinations yesterday. This is what they've spent the last two years studying for, and their performance will determine their fates. The examinations take a full two weeks, and are designed to rigorously test a student's ability to memorize obscure facts. I have a number of complaints against the system of examinations here, and the examinations themselves, but I'll save those for another day. The first of two physics tests was held yesterday, and I can't tell you how my heart dropped when I saw my students leaving the exam room with sad, sad faces. Not a single one of the students who I talked to yesterday told me he thought he performed well; all of them said the test was "so so difficult". Crap. Granted, I only talked to students who hadn't attended my class in months (extreme "senioritis"). Granted, the results aren't out, and perhaps some kids did quite well. But for even one of my boys to fail makes me feel that I have failed as a teacher. I can only hope that they performed better than they think they did. I'm still finding my groove as a teacher, and these students were my guinea pigs of a fashion, but I put forth a staggering amount of effort over the last year trying to prepare them to succeed on this test. I hate to see them fail...

Switching topics again, with only this tenuous segue, my mom and step-dad will be arriving here soon! They'll be flying in next weekend, and spending the following three weeks exploring Tanzania and learning about how I live here. I am truly excited to have my first visitors from the States. As much as my words might give you picture of my life here, I can really only paint the broad strokes, and with their visit, my parents will get to see all the minor details. We are planning on going on a safari in the Serengeti, among other things. If I don't update for awhile, its because my guests and I are off challenging the wilderness and taming the wild beasts. Peace...

Since my last post, life here has been pleasantly tranquil as I settle back into routine. Due to my relative physical inactivity, I thought I might take some time to write a few thoughts and views I’ve garnered about my situation and the society I find myself a part of.

Where to start...? Two days ago, I was riding my bike (helmet on, of course) on one of the bumpy dirt roads, coming home from visiting an older British husband and wife who recently arrived. En route, I came across another teacher from my school, and we leisurely rode alongside one another, talking and dodging the various vehicles hurtling past us. As this was Sunday, and as Tanzanians are quite open about their respective religions, he asked me where I’d prayed that morning. How to answer…? Did I pray that morning? Probably not. But with the frequency of religious questioning I get here (No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!), I’ve slowly developed "substitutes" for what they call praying, attending church, even having a set major religion. If I’m asked whether I prayed, I try to recall any action I’d taken which had a similar impact on my day as a prayer might. Perhaps this could be me crossing my fingers that I don’t burn the rice, or hoping that the internet café will have a signal when I go. Any thoughts which are somehow analogous to the act of praying, while not being a de facto prayer. My own personal religion, I suppose... In any case, having these substitutes has allowed me to avoid an intimidating number of awkward conversations about religion with people whom I’ve just met for the first time, or that I don’t want to offend. (As a side note- is this openness of religion a common factor among the former missionary colonies? When I’m asked my religion, people automatically assume I’m Christian, and so they instead inquire as to whether I’m an Adventist, Evangelist, Episcopalian, you name your branch... It seems logical that the influence of the missionaries carries impacts beyond the numbers (Tanzania is forty percent Christian), that their intrusions sowed the corn which we current ex-patriates are being forced to eat, even if we don’t like corn because it sticks between our teeth. Maybe another day I’ll write a little diatribe about the effect of both the missionaries and the colonists...)

So when this teacher asked me where I’d prayed, I thought about my day, and decided that I’d "prayed" for the morning rain to stop so that I could visit this British couple. Therefore, I told him that I’d done my praying at home (I'm not trying to be sacriligous, just practical). He stopped his bike, looking stunned, and proceeded to tell me that it is simply not possible to pray at one’s own home. According to this teacher, prayer and worship is invalid unless demonstrated in church, surrounded by other believers. This started a long discussion, near-argument, in which I cited the holiness of various monks who removed themselves from society strictly to have a closer commune with God. I wasn’t willing to agree with him that its more valid to pray in church than at home (doesn’t the Bible say the opposite, in fact?), and he was intractable in his ideas that those who pray alone are "not serious" about their religion. As an aside, its my understanding that, as Tanzanians have developed such a community-based society, they extend this social customs to their religions. Everyone prays together, no one differentiates himself from the mass (oooh double meaning!).

I mention this because it is a single facet to this Hope Diamond of an issue that has been bringing me down lately- the lack of acceptance and even tolerance that a large number of the citizens here show to outside ideas. Likely, in my own cultural arrogance, I assume my own views are superlative (as most people tend to do), and thus immediately denigrate a society in which these views are scoffed at. I suppose the frustrating factor for me in this is rationality; I’d like to believe that, via some degree of introspection, I’ve analyzed the lion’s share of my American tendencies. Whether or not I’ve been successful is moot, for what bothers me is that the counter-arguments I hear when in discussion have generally not been rationalized to any degree whatsoever; the ideas are parroted without any reasoning behind them.

An example of this was at a tea break meeting some months ago, in which another teacher and I were engaged in a discussion of media bias. This teacher informed me that, as an American, all of my typical sources of information had a pro-American bias and that I wasn’t receiving any true news about, among other things, the Iraq war. She extrapolated to say that I, and most Americans, am largely in the dark about our country’s international activities, for all we see and hear is filtered through a media which pays homage to its government. I agree that it isn’t possible to learn the reality of an event by studying only one news source, and that to understand exactly what is happening it behooves us to swallow the bitter pill that is "the other side of the story". However, when I asked her why she thought this was so, having never been to America herself, she said she knew it was true because she saw it on a Tanzanian television channel (one which has a distinctly anti-American bent). Irony, anyone? So again, I summoned the almighty forces of reason to my side, explaining that her country has its own respective media bias, therefore the truth of things is not quite so concrete as she stated them. Again with the immutable stance… She was impervious to even my highest caliber rationality-tipped bullets, and in the end I gave up and went home, frustrated.

Is it prideful of me to try and promulgate my viewpoints in these discussions? Or to assume that they will be listened to? In that last example, you can imagine how maddening it was to hear her blindly avowing her faith to her television channel, while completely dismissing ours. How to explain the fact that studies have shown that developing countries tend to have some of the strongest media biases? I suppose it’s maybe not my place to make that explanation. I suppose it is arrogant to try and force my ideas to be heard and rationalized. But at the same time, as a sometimes introspective and thoughtful person, I find it difficult to consent to the reality that most of the people I engage in discussion here are only reciting what they’ve been told they should believe, without knowing the reasoning behind that belief structure. Can television and hearsay (here, the two most common forms of information transmission) truly give profound insight into the world around us, especially with any amount of veracity? It seems to me that these methods of propagation will only foster ignorance and degradation of information, which will result (and already has resulted) in people believing things without knowing why. This happens all over the world, I’m just frustrated that I see it so prevalently here. When one seeks to adapt to a culture, one requires a certain amount of open-mindedness, and to have that be met with indigenous close-mindedness can be difficult...

I’d like to write more, but I don’t want to turn this post into a sounding board of my various societal concerns. On another note, I’d like to give my proper respects (props, that is) to my Aunt Misty. Turns out she’s signing up for the Corps. I think that’s awesome, and I hope she gets a placement that she’ll enjoy. Cheers to you, Aunt Misty.

If you haven't chanced upon my page of pictures, you are due for a (delightful?) surprise: I recently shaved my head. Before you ask the inevitably "why?", take a moment to hear me lament on my decision. As I'm sitting at the internet cafe, I have just finished the forty-five minute jaunt from my home into Bukoba town. In an unfortunate lapse of forethought, I chose not to weat a hat, but to be loud and proud with my baldness. The real calamity is that the sun, which was oh-so cleverly hiding itself behind clouds at my departure, feigning harmlessness, unveiled itself in all its fury some ten minutes into my trek. Under its intensity, my poor, freshly nubile scalp began to cry. I found a big leaf on the side of one particular path, which I used as a makeshift hat for some five minutes. I'm certain that I was attention-saturated even before attempting this leaf-hat feat, what with me being the tallest, baldest, whitest guy around, but the hat drove it to new levels. The open-mouthed stares... So I removed the leaf, and instead wore my backpack on my head (Andrew, I'm still using that old FSS pack you "acquired" for me; good man). Even with the protection of my backpack, my head feels like someone tried putting out a forest fire on it with a screwdriver.

So now- the "why". I've had a fair number of co-workers, students, and friends ask me that same question in the last few days. Unfortunately, I haven't thought of a good reason yet. I'm going to make one up... OK. Its because I wanted to donate my hair to a wigmaker for widows (seriously, wigs are mad popular here, I probably ought to have done just that). My dad called me yesterday, worried after seeing my baldness. My dad: "Are you angry at something?" Me: "Nope." Dad: "Sad?" Me: "Nope." Dad: "Oh. Well ok then." I guess I've never really had a chance to see what I look like bald, and I figured now is as good a time as any. If you yourself have never had a bald head, you ought to try it as well; you save $7.56 per month on shampoo. Let's start a bald revolution..!

Now, in serious news, things have been fairly productive for me these past few weeks. I learned that a grant proposal of mine has been passed, and that all the requested funds will be disseminated in the next few weeks. This is great news, as it is a proposal I've been working on for the past six months or so. Briefly, the grant benefits some fishermen in a village nearby my school, as well as their immediate dependents, by creating a self-supporting fishermen's co-op, and then providing that co-op with the equipment they will need to produce a substantial income. One month from now, if everything goes according to plan *cough cough*, the project will be well underway. Awesome. Additionally, at school I've been initiating some changes. If you recall some of my previous posts, the students here are sometimes treated as slaves instead of academics. They have no voice with which to...voice their complaints or outrages. Even if they did find some avenue, the administration tends to have closed doors and little patience for these kids. With that, I've taken it upon myself to be their voice, their defender, if you want to get dramatic. Other than fighting for the rights of these students during our daily meetings, I've been putting forth a lot of efforts at altering the school's discipline policies. Rather than trying to erase corporal punishment (in this, I would not be working with the school at all, but just projecting my own cultural sensitivies onto it; this is not a efficient way to accomplish things here), I thought establishing a "positive reinforcement" system would help. Previously, the best, most endeavoring students got no recognition or compensation for their hard work. Together with the second-master, I created a proposal for a department that would serve to reward those students in various ways. Without boring you with its details, I'll just say that the headmaster and my fellow teachers unanimously agreed to implement this plan, and that this upcoming Monday we will directly begin putting it into effect. Awesome again.

Clap your hands for a bald man getting things done. (Andrew, that would be a good t-shirt slogan).