Pregnancy is not celebrated in this village. A woman with child is viewed with a simple, practical mix of pity and respect.

There are no baby showers.

When you are expecting, you can expect to be cautiously optimistic at best.

Names are not discussed until weeks or months after the baby is born. The women here know all too well that infants can and will die. It’s harder to bury a child with a name.

Before I left for my American vacation, my neighbor whispered to me that she thought she was a few months pregnant and wasn’t feeling very well. She asked for advice, and I told her to go to the doctor.

Since then, every Wednesday, she walked an hour round-trip to the local clinic. Every Wednesday, she was told that the clinic is out of tests and medicine and she’ll have to come back the next week.

Around 8pm on Monday night, I heard a tiny voice outside my door. I had spent a long time on the bus the day before and wasn’t feeling up to visitors, so I pretended to be asleep. When the little voice started sounding frantic, I yelled from my bed, asking who it was and what was wrong.

“I’m Hawa,” the girl replied. “Mama’s sick and wants you to call Baba and tell him to come home now.” She hesitated, and then she whispered, “I’m scared.”

I jumped out of bed and opened the door. Hawa, eleven years old with the body of a child much younger and the eyes of a woman much older, stood shaking on my doorstep. We called and called, but no one answered Baba’s phone.

“It’s ok, he’ll come home eventually,” Hawa said, uncertainly.

Adrenaline quickly killing my exhaustion, I told Hawa I’d be over in a minute.

Mama Hawa lay on her bed, emaciated limbs curled around her swollen belly, moaning softly as the waves of pain hit her. She’s 34, but at that moment she seemed no older than twelve. I asked what I could do to help, but she could hardly even reply.

A series of phone calls began. I called another volunteer to ask for advice. I called the village midwife. I called the doctor from the local clinic. I took my phone out of my pocket after mixing a sugar-salt rehydration solution and realized that I had also butt-dialed 911.

In the village, a scream for help is 911. Your neighbors are your paramedics. Anything with wheels is an ambulance.

Mama Hawa rode to the clinic on the back of a bicycle with a flat tire.

Two other neighbors appeared at the clinic to help, and I held a bucket for Mama Hawa’s vomit while the nurse confirmed what no one wanted to admit we already knew.

“You just wait. She will birth. No life birth,” the nurse said to me in proud, sing-song English. Her perkiness annoyed me.

“I know,” I replied in Swahili. “What can we do to help?”

“Do you have any medicine?” She asked. I knew better than to be surprised at the fact that this clinic had no medicine, and produced a few pathetic tablets of paracetamol and rehydration fluid. She seemed genuinely impressed.

“What kind of husband isn’t home by 9pm? Someone else will have to stay with her tonight,” one of the other women announced, looking at me.

During the awkward pause that followed, I reminded myself that these two women had children and husbands to go home to. I had half an episode of Gossip Girl and a skype date with my boyfriend. I agreed to stay, and the other women departed gratefully.

The hours that followed are a blur. While I fought off sleep, I heard the other patient, a woman suffering from pneumonia, talk comfortingly to Mama Hawa in their tribal language. Mama Hawa made a brave effort to communicate but mostly just moaned in response. After a few hours, her husband finally showed up looking frazzled and appropriately ashamed at his tardiness. Moaning turned to wailing and it became clear that we had to find transport to the hospital in town. Fast.

It took several calls to finally track down a functioning vehicle. The moans of a very sick woman mixed with the sputtering of a very sick car, and we slowly made our way to the hospital.

Sitting in a chair, waiting at the reception desk, Mama Hawa’s water broke. There was more fluid than I expected from seeing it happen in movies. Grabbing her to keep her from hitting her head as she collapsed on the floor, I yelled for the nurses.

When the nurses arrived, I finally took a good look around. The ward contained thirty or so other sick women, sleeping or coughing or whining, two in each twin-sized bed. Most women were being looked after by relatives. Others were being taken care of by slightly less ill patients. There was one clogged latrine and no sink, water or soap in sight.

While I wondered at the gross surroundings, a thin curtain was put up. There, on the floor, Mama Hawa gave birth to a fetus a little smaller than my hand. The nurses asked for whatever khangas we had brought as a pool of blood and amniotic fluid began to seep out from under the curtain. Minutes later, the curtain was removed and the nurse handed me a small bundle of fabric.

“I’m going to go get an IV. What should we do with the dead baby?” she asked me. I stared at the bundle of fabric and swallowed my vomit.

As the exhausted patient slept in a bed also occupied by an old woman whose cough I prayed was something other than TB, her husband and I took the baby home to be washed and buried in accordance with Muslim tradition. The trip was excruciatingly long. Baba Hawa sat next to me, holding the bundle of fabric and silently weeping. The car broke down twice. We didn’t speak.

When we finally reached the village, I looked up at the stars, slightly dimed by the light of a monstrously full moon. I tried to find the constellation Orion. When I’m lonely or sad at night, I like to look up at Orion and think of him as an impeccably constant companion—there for me wherever it’s dark and not cloudy. But it was already nearing 6am and Orion had set beyond the mountains. Rising from the other side of the skyline, the Southern Cross stared down at me. After a night spent entirely out of my comfort zone, those four stars officiously reminded me that I was very, very far from home.

By the light of the rising sun, I shut my eyes and tried to sleep.

A few hours later, I walked over to the neighbor’s house and found a gaggle of Mamas cooking and looking after the children. A group of young men were solemnly digging a small grave in the yard. Word travels fast in the village. Throughout the morning, friends and family continually stopped by to offer condolence and gifts.

I sat with Hawa and her six year old brother, Muku. Muku was staring at the men digging the grave with an angry expression. He refused to talk, but finally smiled when I showed up with coloring books and markers. Silently I sat and colored pictures of cars while the women cooked and the men dug. I showed Muku how to write his name and after several failed attempts he proudly wrote “WUKU” on top of the prettiest picture. Close enough. I promised to bring it to his mom when I went to see her in a few hours.

After collecting clothes, blankets, water and food—the hospital is “bring your own everything”—I set off again. Mama Hawa wasn’t doing as well as I’d hoped. While the miscarriage may have been the most traumatic of her problems, it turned out she was also suffering from dysentery and malaria. The nurses seemed annoyed at my desire to know what her diagnoses were. Patients here are expected to just shut up and swallow whatever pills they’re given and if that medicine isn’t available, find a relative to go to town and buy it.

In a state of exhaustion such that nothing felt entirely real and everything felt entirely overwhelming, I spent the day looking after Mama Hawa along with two of her relatives who happened to be at the hospital looking after their sick mother.

Around 3pm, I realized that I hadn’t eaten or slept in a very, very long time. I had intended to sleep at the hospital to keep Mama Hawa company, but a fellow volunteer happened to be coming back from town headed in my direction and more or less kidnapped me for my own good. She used a Snickers bar as bait. I sobbed as I left Mama Hawa’s side, terrified that she would die during the night. The other women in the ward spoke comforting words to me, but laughed with each other behind my back. “Who gets so worked up over a simple case of miscarriage, diarrhea, and fever?” they might have been saying. I forced a smile as I left, promising to bring little Muku to visit the next day.

I just got back from the hospital again. Traveling with a six year old Tanzanian kid was interesting. People kept yelling comments—some of which were rather obscene—as we walked hand-in-hand to the bus stop. We caught a ride with a Chinese road worker, which was the first piece of news that Muku relayed to his healthier looking mother. Her niece, a woman about my age and toting a 2-month-old baby, walked from her home about an hour away to help cook and clean for the patient.

I went to town to find milk and fruit and when I came back, Mama Hawa was laying next to the sleeping baby, staring at her with a desperate expression. I asked if there was anything she wanted to talk about, but she said she was just tired. She didn’t take her eyes off of her niece’s baby as she spoke.

When Muku and I got home, I asked Hawa what she had done all day.

“Cooked, cleaned, carried water, and brought corn to the machine to be ground,” she replied. I looked at her with obvious pity, and she continued: “Lots of Mamas came to help me, and I played a little too.”

Throughout this whole experience, I’ve been constantly amazed at the way people help each other out here. A woman I’ve never met walked with me all the way to the clinic in the dark. Patients helped fellow patients. Women came from all over to help cook and keep the family company. Men showed up on a moment’s notice to bury the baby. Though the official mourning process would have been considered inappropriate, friends came from hours away to help the family mourn the hopes they had built over the past months.

We’ve all heard that it takes a village to raise a child. This week I learned that it takes a village to lose a child, too.

Sunday, December 4, 2011My bedroom in Michigan.

I’m sitting in a pile of my past, carelessly tossing things into a big plastic bag slated for give-away. Dresses and pants and sweatshirts and t-shirts and shoes and purses and pajamas. I work at a comical speed, feeling nothing but relief as my closet slowly empties. My friend Abbey catches the soon-to-be-forgotten items and places them in a giant black bag. Hours go by and we fill up two bags, three bags, four bags. I’m astounded and a little embarrassed by the sheer volume of crap I’ve acquired over the years. For a while we work in silence, sometimes we chat about unrelated things, and every once in a while I uncover an entertaining memory and tell her about it. But we’re working on a deadline and there’s no time to get sentimental. Eye on the prize: A clean closet, a fresh start, less crap for my parents to store when my mom moves to Chicago and I head back to Tanzania. We throw the broken or otherwise useless stuff away and I marvel at the quantity of crap that will very, very slowly decompose in some landfill somewhere. I try to imagine how much space a lifetime of my garbage will eventually claim. It makes me feel a little queasy.

I get deeper into my closet and further into the past.

Toss another shirt printed with inside jokes I no longer understand. Another homecoming dress. Another pair of high heels I bought specifically to match that homecoming dress and never wore again. Another hoodie with the name of a play I was in or a team I was briefly affiliated with.

I wonder if I should save some of these things—relics of my high-school self. But I’m in the zone now, tossing away sentimental item after sentimental item. No regrets, no second thoughts. No first thoughts, either, really. Just the mechanical act of tossing away.

I don’t need stuff to have memories. I repeat this to myself when the regrets start to come, hours after the stuff has been hauled away for good.

I can’t bring myself to toss my prom dress. For a while I leave it hanging on the shelf—the lone survivor of my war on the past. Later I decide to give it to my cousin, in the hopes that she can find it a happy home. That dress deserves to be worn.

Things get a little more personal as Abbey and I begin to attack desks and drawers. We go through books, notebooks, pictures, journals, old schoolwork. This time I’m careful to place certain things in the “keep” pile.

I carefully, almost reverently, collect my old journals from their various hiding places around the room and place them in a backpack for safe keeping. I take a moment to hold each notebook and flip through page after page of big, sloppy writing. Rather than read the writing, I try to remember the feel of pen on paper. Try to remember being the person who wrote those words. I can’t. I look at the pages and think about the young girl who filled them. I try to picture myself as this girl, or this girl as me. It doesn’t quite work. I have the eerie feeling that the girl who covered those pages in sloppy scrawl is not the same as the young woman who is currently home on vacation after a year and a half in Tanzania.

~*~

Since I’ve gotten back from my brief vacation, PCVs keep asking me what the weirdest thing about America was. There were definitely moments—hundreds of them--when I thought, “Wow, this country is super bizarre.” I was especially shocked by how easy everything was. Want Taco Bell? You don’t even have to leave your car. In the mood for a hot shower? Just turn it on and hop in. Bored? Turn on the TV, or computer, or Wii, or any of the million other entertainment options regularly available to you. Want new stuff? Hop in the car and go buy it.

That’s weird, right?

But, really, America’s no weirder than it was before I left. More people have iPhones, fashion’s changed a bit (thanks letting me raid your closet, Mom), but the country is still fundamentally the same.

What’s changed is the way I look at it.

One day Abbey and I were driving down Orchard Lake Rd, and I realized that the two of us were not, strictly speaking, alone…but we sort of were. Sitting at a traffic light, I peered through the windows of the cars around us. Old men, teenagers, mothers. Very few cars contained more than one or two people, but when added together it turned out Abbey and I were actually surrounded by hundreds of people, each one alone inside her individual ton of metal, and we were alone inside our ton of metal, and no one was really alone but no one was actually together. My head hurt.

In my village, there is exactly one car and it’s currently broken. Walking at a leisurely pace down thin dirt paths, I come in contact with hundreds of people each day, and greet most everyone, friends and strangers alike. We exchange “the news of the morning” or confirm that we “woke up peacefully.” We see each other and, for a brief moment, we connect.

That connection between strangers exists in America, but it takes special effort to seek it out. You can smile at strangers, and sometimes they’ll smile back. Bartenders and baristas will pretend to be your friend as long as you keep buying drinks. You can make small-talk with the person next to you on the plane, but only until you’ve reached cruising altitude and you both put in your headphones and slip back into your independent worlds.

Maybe I’m being unfair. I actually had a wonderful time in America. But besides the incredible selection of delicious delicious food, the material aspects weren’t what made the trip worthwhile. It was the human connections... Hours spent looking at old photos with my grandparents. Eating pizza with my sister-in-law’s huge, loving, and wonderfully quirky family. Answering insightful questions posed by West Hills 8th Graders and Model High Schoolers. Reconnecting with my oldest friends.

America might not always feel like home, but the people there will always be my people. I will never stop being American. But something in me has shifted over the past year and a half. How weird and sad to feel like a stranger in your homeland. How strange to walk down the aisles of Plum Market and be torn between buying twenty different kinds of rice, just because you can, and running out the door screaming “do you people seriously need twenty different kinds of rice to choose from?” I will never be able to walk into a supermarket without imagining my neighbor’s children—eyes full of hope, bellies full of nothing. I will never be able to clean out my closet without being haunted by little Razaki’s bare feet. I wish that last paragraph were true, but I’m almost certainly exaggerating.

Here’s the truth: A day will come when I will walk into a supermarket and feel only my own hunger. I’ll probably own an iPhone at some point, and I will talk on it as I drive mindlessly down a crowded, lonely street. One day I’ll have another closet full of clothes and nothing but pictures by which to remember little shoeless Razaki.

Here's the truth: One day I'll read an article about something terrible going on in Africa, and I will feel nothing.

Here’s the truth: I will never stop being American.

A few months ago I was talking to my 10-year-old neighbor, Hawa, and she told me that her primary school had closed down one of the choo (latrine) stalls because it was, if I understood her properly, haunted by an angry spirit that was causing students to faint and speak in tongues. This morning I asked her if the choo in question was still causing problems and she informed me that it isn’t. I asked her why not. “The teachers prayed,” she stated, as though it were obvious. “Where?” “In the choo.” I took a moment to visualize this. I imagined candles and elaborate costumes and leather drums. As Hawa described the prayer session in more detail, though, I realized that it probably involved more cell phone MP3 players and fewer tribal trimmings. Oh, development. Apparently both the Muslim and the Christian teachers prayed together, because you never know if the spirit is a Muslim spirit or a Christian spirit. Hawa, who is Muslim, firmly believes it was the Christian teachers’ prayers that did the trick, though she was unable to explain why. Regardless of whether it was the work of psychosomatics, Allah, or Jesus, being rid of the evil choo spirit is super good news for the primary school. There aren’t enough choos to accommodate all the students even when none of them are being frequently by angry spirits. The bad news is that the spirit from the haunted choo has somehow traveled to the secondary school, becoming the latest in a series of unfortunate events preventing my Appropriate Technology Seminar from following anything resembling a schedule. The spirit has changed its tactics—rather than attack the unfortunate attendants of a choo at the secondary school, it takes the shape of “genies” that seem to prey exclusively upon girls. The teachers informed me that the genie possessions occur about once a day now, and sometimes the girls will become possessed in pairs. Most of the genies have names and are capable of speech, albeit accompanied by a lot of foaming at the mouth and convulsing. Rumor has it that these possessions are also taking place at the secondary school in the next village over. That village is pretty sure that they have found the woman responsible for the curse that is causing all these possessions. She is allegedly the former mistress of a man who (again, allegedly) has a habit of “going with” secondary school girls. I asked one of the teachers about this story and wrote down his answer word-for-word—mostly because the way he speaks English makes everything sound like a Bible story and I love it. “It is said that people who are religious came to know that this woman is not a human being and they warned the man and he decided to chase the woman away,” he explained. “The woman promised that the man will suffer and will be facing things which are not good. So it is said that every woman who runs with that man will get this problem [of losing consciousness and becoming possessed]. It is said that the one student who fell [today] had been with him for two days in the past. This is just what is said.” The possessions have become so routine that the daily drama is played out without fuss or excitement among the bystanders. Rather, the genie attacks are treated with, of all things, a cautious lightheartedness and sense of humor. Here’s how it usually works. A girl faints in the middle of a lesson. Sometimes she starts screaming immediately; sometimes she goes limp for a while first. Either way, she is carried out of the classroom and placed on the floor in an empty classroom or under the shade of one of the few scraggly trees that grow curiously out of the desert-esque landscape of the school campus. At some point, the girl’s eyes roll to the back of her head and she starts foaming at the mouth, twitching, maybe convulsing and some of the girls look like they are legitimately having seizures. It’s pretty terrifying the first time you see it, but as cold hearted as this may make me sound, you get used to it after the first few times. Some of the girls start to kick and scream and have to be restrained by several male students. At this point, they finally start responding (sort of) to the stimuli around them, but will usually do so in the character of another person—the “genie,” they call it. This is the fun part for the observers lucky enough to be permitted to leave class to help their friend regain consciousness. With a lackadaisicalness that seems a little out of place in this situation, they start asking the genie questions. What’s your name? Where do you come from? Why are you possessing so-and-so? Do you have any special powers? Does the God of the underworld demand that the teachers cancel exams, by any chance? Sometimes the genie just screams and yells profanities. Sometimes the genie tells an elaborate story about who she (or he?) is and what she’s doing here. One genie likes to demand a soda as sacrifice in exchange for the girl’s spirit. That genie gets laughed at more than any of the others. If the girl is a Christian, a teacher will donate his cell phone so her friends can play her MP3s of hymns translated into Swahili and accompanied by what sounds like a foreign missionary’s idea of “African” style music. If she hasn’t been cured within a few hours, the Pentecostal minister (who happens to be the Headmistress’s husband) might come to attend to her spiritual needs. If the girl is a Muslim, her friends will attempt to cast off the genie by reading certain passages of the Quran that are, apparently, good for this kind of situation. Sometimes things get complicated. One of the girls who suffers from these attacks is a Christian, but she becomes possessed by a Muslim genie named Fatuma. Fatuma is, according to the girl’s unconscious outbursts, a princess from an underwater kingdom ruled by a man named Hamadi. His second in command is named Shaarif, and there are a few other members of the underwater royalty whose names and descriptions she can recite consistently when prompted. One of the princes (or something like that, I don’t have the lineage down exactly) is intent on marrying her (the student, not the genie) and is trying to carry her spirit down into the underworld with him. She doesn’t snap out of the possession until her teachers and friends grab hold of her and somehow convince her that they want her to stay here in this world.In a school system that still teaches almost entirely through rote memorization, I’ve never seen such creativity from a student—conscious or otherwise. You may be wondering whether the Christian student possessed by a Muslim demon can be cured with Christian or Muslim prayer. The answer, according to the teachers, is that you have to address the student, not the demon, in trying to bring her out of the possessed state. While explaining why this is, one teacher said that he believes the girls are just pretending and therefore there’s no point trying to pacify a non-existent spirit. I thought it was kind of odd that he believed prayer was necessary to cure the girls, even though he believed their ailments to be entirely psychological in nature. The more I think about it, though, it’s beginning to make sense. The teachers and I have launched a private investigation into the “genie situation.” We began by trying to find a pattern—what do these girls have in common? Pretty much every student at that school is dealing with what we Americans might call “serious issues at home,” but some issues are more serious than others. One of these girls recently suffered the death of her mother, another lost her brother, a third is discriminated against for having been born out of wedlock, etc, etc, etc. Even if these attacks are being caused by genies, our investigation team determined, it seems that the genies are particularly attracted to emotionally vulnerable girls. This is a culture where crisis and trauma are expected to be forgotten and moved on from almost immediately. The young woman whose brother died a few months ago would not be expected to burst into tears and rush out of the classroom on occasion, the way that an American teenager might as she goes through the grieving process. But when that girl becomes rigid, collapses, starts speaking in tongues and demanding soda in exchange for her soul, no one is particularly surprised. She doesn’t get gentle pats on the backs and assurances like “we’re here for you” and “it’s ok to still miss your brother”; she gets a roomful of spectators who watch (and sometimes giggle) as she foams at the mouth and screams. But really, what’s the difference? What the girl wants, and gets, is attention and the assurance that her peers and teachers love and support her. Every time her friends beg her to remain here on Earth rather than follow the genie Fatuma to the underwater Kingdom, they are reminding her that she is wanted here, she is loved. I want to believe that every time this girl comes out of her possession and rejoins our world, she is one step closer to growing more confident with herself and more able to ignore the horrible things the village gossips say about her. Alas, this style of community psychotherapy is seriously disruptive to the learning process (and my appropriate tech project). One way or another, the genies have got to go. The various religious and spiritual communities are working on the issue from their end (though I desperately hope their chosen cure doesn’t involve sacrificing the “witch” who is supposedly responsible for this). Meanwhile, some of the teachers and I are looking into the possibility of holding group therapy sessions with the doctor from the local clinic, who luckily enough happens to be a rather young women who knows how to talk to teenagers. I debated a lot about posting this blog… felt a little bad, like I’m somehow fetishizing or objectifying Tanzanian culture by telling you all about this particularly “exotic” situation. But, really, it’s not so exotic, is it? Everywhere in the world, teenagers are struggling to find ways to deal with the terribly difficult task of growing up and learning to express themselves when no one wants to listen. I know some of this is funny to us “Westerners”, but in between chuckles I want us to see that, even in a situation as seemingly strange as an outbreak of genie possessions, there is a common thread of humanity that holds us all together as one flawed but beautiful human race.

You will need:2 cups sugar4 eggs1 cup milk2 cups all-purpose flour½ cup butter1 tsp vanilla Patience

Instructions:

Take a deep breath. This might take a while.

The process begins the next time you go to a town with over 10,000 residents. You must find the only store that sells such western luxuries as shampoo and chocolate and buy some baking powder, creepy-never-goes-bad-on-the-shelf-no-matter-how-hot-your-house-is margarine (“Blueband”), and very chemical tasting vanilla “flavouring”. You will be tempted to buy powdered milk. Don’t. It costs more than you make in a day with your volunteer stipend. (Unless it’s the dry season and none of the village animals are getting enough nutrition to produce milk, in which case go ahead and buy the powdered milk.)

When you get back home, make sure you have enough charcoal. If you don’t, find the nearest child who is inexplicably but not unexpectedly at home in the middle of the day on a Wednesday. Ask the kid to go down to the road for you and stop one of the guys who rides by every few hours on his bike, selling charcoal. When you hear the child screaming “MKAA!! MKAA!!” it is time to run down to the road to help the man carry the large bag of charcoal up to your house. After he puts the charcoal down, suddenly realize that you should have agreed on a price beforehand. Barter futilely for a few minutes before paying him 10,000 shillings (even though you know your neighbor only paid 8,000 last week).

If your cell phone is charged, look at the time. If not, look at the sun. If the sun is already near the top of the mountain, you don’t have time to bake a cake today. Give the charcoal-finding kid a sticker for her hard work, find a neighbor to feed you dinner, and wait till the morning to try again.

In the morning, walk half a mile to find the Mama who owns a dairy cow (complements of Heifer International—www.heifer.org ) and ask if you can buy half a liter of milk. The cow may be sick, in which case you’ll have to go to another family’s house to see if you can buy some of their goat’s milk. It’s likely they’ve already sold today’s milk in advance. In this case, put in an order for the next morning. If you don’t have anything else to do that day, stick around, drink some chai, eat some ugali, and play with the kids. You might get the goat’s milk for free the next day.

Once you have acquired milk, start hunting for eggs. Four is a lot, so you may need to hit up a few chicken-owning houses before you get enough. Make sure to test them all before you buy them—don’t buy the ones that float. While wandering around searching for eggs, stop by the store to buy a kilo of flour and sugar.

When you’ve finally got three eggs, you may find yourself in the situation where the last available egg in the vicinity has not quite yet been laid. In this case, gratefully accept a cup of cardamom, clove, and cinnamon-spiced chai and prepare to make small talk while the chicken balks and prepares to relieve itself of your cake ingredient.

Once the final egg has been lain and purchased (try not to think too hard about it as you are handed the still-body-temperature egg), head home and prepare to light your charcoal stove. If there are any kids nearby, ask them to help you collect “taka-taka”—farm waste—to use as kindling. When the kids aren’t looking, pour some kerosene on top of the kindling. The kids would make fun of you because they consider using kerosene to start a fire serious cheating, besides wasting valuable lamp fuel. No matter what you do, do not let the children find out that you’re baking a cake. Tell them you’re cooking ugali (corn mush, the staple carb here) if they ask (they will ask).

Once you have a fire roaring, mix the ingredients together and put them in a small greased pot. Take a slightly larger pot and place three rocks in the bottom. Place the small pot inside the big pot, cover the big pot, and put a little more than half the charcoal on top of the cover. You’ve just (sort of) made an oven! Don't forget to lick the bowl--raw eggs be damned. This is no time to be wasting precious food.

As you wait for your cake to bake, assess your water situation. Do you have enough water to do dishes? If not, find a kid to fetch you some water from the hand-dug well about a kilometer away. Reward her with an extra-big sticker and make a mental note to give her a piece of cake later.

Check on the cake often to make any adjustments necessary to your oven-ish-thing.

When it’s done, let the cake cool off while you put on some drinking water to boil (can’t waste those hot coals!). Remind yourself that, even though it’s kind of foggy and brown, whatever bugs in there are plotting to hurt you are about to be destroyed by the wonder of heat. If you haven’t already decided what to do with the cake (eating it all by yourself is a totally legitimate option), try to remember if any of the neighbors have had babies or other cake-deserving life events lately. If not, share it with the neighbor with the fewest kids—bigger servings for the grown-ups.

As the last of the sugary goodness melts on your tongue and the sun begins to slip back behind the mountain marking the end of a day entirely spent in pursuit of cake, it’s ok to feel incredibly accomplished. Your cake may not change the world, but it will make it a little sweeter.

I’ve been waiting for this water project to be completely finished before I updated my blog with an entry that’s been forming in my brain for a week or so now. The entry started brewing on the trip between my site and Dodoma. Dodoma, as a quick aside, is the actual capital of Tanzania, but one of those Brasilia-type capitals randomly built in the middle of nowhere. It looks like the cityscape equivalent of a skinny child wearing his father’s nicest suit. Besides the actual law-making, Dar Es Salaam is where the real action goes down. Dar, in stark contrast, grew organically out of a small fishing village is as big for its clothes as Dodoma is small. Dar is more like a full grown man with a beer belly squeezed into a speedo.

Anyway, I was heading to our Dodoma Regional Gathering—a chance for the 20 or so volunteers in this area to get together and do some cross-sectoral best practice sharing. As I sat staring out the window during the billion-hour bus ride to my “nearest regional center” I thought about how great it would be to finally get a chance to write a blog about actually finish something. I would call it “getting stuff done.” I had just spoken on the phone with my counterpart at the secondary school and was fairly convinced that—for real this time—the tank was going to be done and ready to paint by the time I got back in the vil.

Well here we are, several days back in the village, and I’m still unable to write an entry entitled “getting stuff done.” You could say we’re building at a steady but leisurely pace but you could also say we’re seriously dragging. My counterpart/carpenter/appropriate technology guru says it’s going to be about 3 more days. I’m not sure how to translate that into real time. He originally told me the project would take 10 days. We’re going on 3 months. So here’s an entry called “doing stuff,” which seems more appropriate to my life right now than an entry called “getting stuff done.”

At the beginning of Regional Gathering, we were asked to list our expectations for the two day gathering. One smartass replied, “I expect to learn more acronyms.”

I only stayed long enough to learn one new acronym because I had to leave for Dar to attend TDE (training development and evaluation; also known as “TOTOT”—Training of Trainers of Trainers—this is a funny joke to people who don’t have a lot to laugh about). Leaving Dodoma early was kind of sad, because I missed out the only mini-golf course in Tanzania, but I was excited for the opportunity to go to Dar and hang out with a smaller group of people. Only four volunteers were involved in the TDE-ing, compared to the usual group of 30+ volunteers that descend on Dar for various trainings and conferences throughout our terms here. Instead of staying at a hotel downtown, we all decided to stay with ex-pat families who generously open their doors to PCVs and offer us access to their unbelievable luxuries like refrigerators and washing machines (those things are seriously like magic, but I digress…) I’ve been to Dar many times before (you may have noticed my complaining about the 2- to 3-day trip is a common theme in this blog), but I’ve never spent an entire trip on the Peninsula, the ex-pat area of town.

Here is my observation based on five days of going native with the ex-pat community in Dar: Ex-pats, awesome though they undoubtedly are, live the weirdest lives of anyone I know. And I know some weird people (see: “lifestyle-ists,” freegans, orthodox Jews, republicans). They live in this bubbly world-within-a-world, but it’s impossible to create a complete replica of the worlds they left behind. Instead they’ve created this weird mixedmemoryland that contains selections from the various European, American, and other cultures they’ve come from—more similar to each other than they are to Tanzania, certainly, but still remarkably different (just look at how the French respond to a leader with a mistress while Americans are barely learning to laugh at ourselves over the Lewinsky scandal [on a related note: “Lewinsky” is in my Microsoft Word dictionary as a reminder of how much and for how long we all freaked out about that]).

While in ex-pat land, I spent an afternoon hanging out with Peace Corps staff at the yacht club while children of all shades of white (with a few tan-ish ones mixed in) ran around yelling in English and French and Italian—no Swahili, except a few words muttered between the Nannies as they chased after their hyperactive and (to my village-centric eyes) incredibly healthy looking children. I even went sailing on a catamaran! (And by “I went sailing,” I mean I tried to keep out of the way while Anna kept us alive and on course.)

The food in ex-pat land was enough alone to make me forget I was in Tanzania… and upset my stomach—shock and confusion registering itself loud and clear every time I ate a meal that wasn’t rice and beans. But no matter. It was all delicious and worth it. I enjoyed Thai food, yogurt, cheese, and homemade brownies with the incredibly generous couple that hosted me (what’s up Tim and Jill?), and splurged on incredible Ethiopian food with the PCV crew.

Then, in an event that captures the absurdity of ex-pat culture in its entirety, we went to the goat races.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Goat races.

I assume it was some kind of parody of horse races, but I’ve never been to those so I don’t know how much was serious and how much was ironic. Pretty much everything seemed hilarious to me, from the buckets of Miller beer with a complementary bottle-opener-ring to the cocktails costing a little more than my daily stipend. Did I mention that the goats were dressed up in costume, as were many of the attendees? Yeah. Weird. The event was ostensibly for charity, though I'm not sure which one(s). They certainly made a few bucks off of me, especially after the first bucket of beer. With the help of a buddy willing to put me on his shoulders like a child, I actually get a chance to watch the goats racing… though we stayed for hours, no one else I was there with managed to do the same. It pays to be small, sometimes. The goat outfits were cute, I’ll admit, but the whole thing would have been more realistic if there were skinny four-year-olds chasing the goats with giant sticks and screaming what sounds like but almost certainly isn’t obscenities in the guttural-sounding local language (ah, life in the village).

But Dar wasn’t all fun and goat races—I was there to do work. To get stuff done. Or at the very least, to do stuff.

TDE itself was a lot of work, but rewarding. Our job was to plan the schedule for the incoming training class and write up “session primers” to guide the various facilitators who will be teaching about everything from compost making to community entry strategies to HIV/AIDS prevention. Hyped up on sugar from American candy (thank you Mr. Honeyman!!) we worked long into the night (or at least, until the late afternoon) pounding away at the computers, trying to fit enough information to help these new PCTs survive and thrive for the next 2 years into just 9 weeks of training. But alas! Even TDE wouldn’t really fit in an entry about getting stuff done, because a lot of things were left shagalabagala [=chaotic] when I had to peace out to get back to the village and do more stuff that has yet to be finished.

So here I am. Back in the village. I feel like I’ve been in-and-out of here so much, it’s hard to remember that this is my home, and I’m not on some crazy 2-year-long roadtrip across Tanzania. But I’m finally here for a good long time now—no reason to leave again until November. The building crew will be coming on Friday to put the finishing touches (“finishing” is a relative term) on the tank and I’ve got the students brainstorming for an educational mural we’ll paint once the tank is ready. (Thank you to Ben Falik and the Summer in the City crew for helping me develop a healthy love of all things mural-y).

For those who pay attention to this sort of thing, it’s Rosh Hashana today—the Jewish New Year. Maybe it’s because I mess up a lot, but I’ve always loved any holiday or event that gives me an excuse to begin with a fresh start. As I enter fresh start #4 of this year (the others being: January 1st, anniversary of arrival in Tanzania, my birthday), I resolve to be less concerned about getting things done in my western conception of an appropriate time table. So what if the water project has taken 2 months? I could have come in with a set-in-stone timetable, hired a bunch of contractors and paid to get a bunch of materials brought in, but by waiting for the community contribution as it slowly, piece-by-piece materialized, we really built something together. Or rather, are building. Still.

For today, it’s time to get some smaller stuff done. I bought a bunch of apples and honey from Arusha on my way back, and I’m about to go next door to share it with the neighbors.

L’shana tova. May you all have a sweet new year in which you do a lot of stuff and don’t worry too much about getting stuff done.

Since my last update, I’ve had my first visitor from home, attending mid-service conference, and started/finished my first funded project. It’s been a busy month. Here goes my attempt to capture it without boring you silly.

After weeks of being told by my headmistress that the community contribution was never going to come through, it actually did. Little by little, and mostly through students’ parents rather than the village government, we got all the materials we needed to start building. Who says Africans are lazy? We finished with the first part of the project—building the tank—and will be building the stoves this week. It was great to go to mid-service conference feeling like I actually had an answer when people asked what I’ve done for the past year. It was also awesome to see what great projects they are all up to, from starting a pre-school to HIV/AIDS care groups to chickens and cows and more. It’s a diverse selection of projects—I liked seeing where everyone found the intersection between their skills and interests and their communities’ needs.

Anyway, back to me… By the time the community contribution materialized, I had rush to Kenya to pick up Cameron, my first American visitor and soon-to-be Peace Corps/Senegal Volunteer. So I put the project on hold for a few days and hurried across the border.

I rather liked Nairobi, despite its reputation for being one of the most dangerous cities in Africa (hence, “Nairobbery”). Billboards advertising products that aren’t even available in TZ, huge buildings, clean parks, giant supermarkets… and many people speaking beautiful, fluent English with this sort-of-Britishy-but-still-African-sounding accent.

The highlight of the time we spent in Nairobi was visiting the park where Wangari Maathai and the women of the Greenbelt Movement successfully protected public land from being turned into a giant corporate building. It was great to see an African city where the residents have and use a large green space for recreation. Students doing homework under trees, lovers holding hands and sharing soda, parents running after escaped children… all framed by skyscrapers and the hustle and bustle of one of the business capitals of the continent. If anyone is looking for proof that we’re successfully exporting western culture, for better or worse, visit Nairobi.

After Kenya, we spent a few days at my site, met the neighbors, drank chai until we sweat sugary milk, started organizing for the building project at the secondary school (now nearly complete!!), visiting my site-mate, and hiking around the foot hills of Hanang. After being at site for a while, we headed to a small island called Pemba located on the archipelago of Zanzibar. I cannot recommend Pemba more highly. We rented bikes from a VSO volunteer and a random kid off the street, and in just a couple days were able to see pretty much the entire Island, including a lovely little stretch of rainforest opening out suddenly into a huge stretch of virgin beach. Rivaling the environment, the culture of Pemba is incredibly rich… a wonderful mix of African, Indian, Arabian, and something distinctly Zanzibari that’s hard to put a label on. Every night we went out and enjoyed the street food—octopus soup, shish kebab-y things, fish that’s basically still breathing it’s so fresh, spicy potato soup, and my absolute favorite: spicy ginger tea out of tiny cups, drank while making small talk with old men on their way home from mosque.

While not exactly a down-side, it is important to remember that Pemba is very conservative and not used to foreigners yet, so appropriate dress is crucial to avoiding offense and rude comments. This is rather difficult when you’re a woman who wants to go swimming. Traveling with a male companion, I definitely became more aware of the differences in how we were treated and what things we were allowed to do/comfortable doing. I had to find a totally deserted piece of beach before I felt comfortable getting in the water, whereas Cameron could have stripped down and jumped in pretty much anywhere. I also regularly looked around and realized that I was the only woman doing whatever I was doing—eating soup on the street, being out after dark, drinking tea with the elders, riding a bike.

It’s the same in the village; my white skin and foreign origins act as a sort of trump card that gave me freedom to do things women are technically allowed but not really supposed to do. I’m not treated like a man, but I’m not treated like a woman either. I inhabit a space where white privilege is so pervasive that gender has little room to make itself known. It’s not exactly bad, at least in terms of getting things done, but it’s just disconcerting. I really can’t complain because if I were viewed as 22-year-old women are here, the villagers would be too busy trying to marry me off to listen to what I’ve come to do.

Taking these thoughts back to the village, I had the privilege of watching, and translating for, two of my favorite debaters as they fought it out over gender roles. Cameron and Mama S. are easily the two most opinionated people I know. It all started when I told Mama S. that Cameron is a few months younger than me. She was vehemently convinced that that just wasn’t possible. Baba then explained that, even if a man is younger than me according to the calendar, I’m actually younger than him because he’s a man and therefore he takes care of me. He further explained that, according to the scriptures, I come from man’s rib, which means I was created after man was. Thus, I will always be younger than and submissive to all men on the planet. I asked if that held true for their two-year-old grandson and they affirmed that the toddler is, in fact, older than me. At this point I just had to start laughing, but Cameron was still ready to argue the point. At one point, Cameron made the argument that I run and hike faster than he does, but he bikes faster than me, so we really are equals physically. Mama just used the point he made about biking as an argument in favor of the “men are better than women” point. Baba S. refused to believe that it was possible that I had an easier time climbing Mt. Hanang than Cameron did, and later told me in secret that he thinks Cameron must have been pretending to make me feel better.

The argument somehow expanded to talking about how we discipline children in the states, and who’s in charge of deciding the family’s schedule for the day. Obviously someone (preferably the father) has to be the stronger, meaner parent. And someone has to decide what the other does for the day. They asked what would happen if I woke up one morning and wanted to go to Katesh (a town about an hours’ bus ride away) and Cameron said no. Would I really still go without permission? Wouldn’t he beat me up until I agreed to stay? What terrible things would happen when I got home? We tried to explain that, at least ideally, relationships in our culture are based on mutual trust and equality—each partner does what they want, with respect for the needs and desires of the other partner. Baba and Mama S. just kept asking, “But who’s in charge? Who gets the final say?”

As the argument wound down, Baba S. announced that he had just one question left to ask: “Who pays the bride price?”

“No one,” I replied.

He looked at me like I had just told him that all cows in America have three heads. And that’s when it hit me.

My Tanzanian parents don’t care who’s in charge as long as someone is. Yes, to some extent, it’s about men being dominant over women, but on a deeper level, it’s about societies and families having a rigid structure. For someone living in a very patriarchal society, the concept of a matriarchal society is more fathomable and comfortable than the concept of a world where everyone is equally free to make choices for themselves.

The debate between Cameron and Mama S. raises provocative questions about the way international NGOs approach women’s empowerment. Seeing the questionable way women are treated in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and the remarkable amount of work they do compared to their (often drunk) husbands, the development community has responded by distributing aid money so that it benefits women more than men. It’s absolutely logical, since they’ve proven more trustworthy as well as more in need. Microloans, community development projects, HIV/AIDS education, farming technology, fuel-saving stoves, small-scale income generation projects—the new trend is to focus the majority of resources on women in pretty much every development effort out there. While I definitely think that’s a step up from focusing mostly on men, I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of leaving the men out. And I do see the men being left out of a lot of development efforts these days.

What’s the danger of a woman-focused, woman-led development movement? Do I envision a future Africa where women call the shots and men are destined to spend their lives following after their wives’ skirt-tails? No, of course not. But if we really want to be promoting gender equality rather than just the almost vacuous concept of women’s empowerment, we have to promote equality in our work on the ground and not just in theory.

“You see now?” The Headmistress towers over me, all six feet of her glowing with triumph as though her long-argued point is finally indisputable. “You wazungu keep your promises and show up on time. That is why you are rich. We Africans are lazy and stupid. We descend from the bad son, the dark son, the slow son. That is why we are poor. That’s why the community hasn’t brought stones and sand for the project. If the project fails, it is a punishment from God for the Africans’ lazy ways."

The giant woman pauses, catching her breath. I narrow my eyes and prepare my response. How do you say institutionalized racism in Kiswahili?

Before I can respond, she dismisses me with a wave of her hand and the most frustrating argument ever: “It’s in the Bible.”

“Madam, we agreed the other day that white men probably had some hand in translating what is considered the word of God. Don’t you think they might have had a reason to convince black people that they aren’t as good? And after all of the colonialism and oppression and slavery, of course it’s hard to feel confident, and if you don’t feel confident, you lose hope, you don’t bother working hard because you don’t believe it will be worth it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do great things if you believe in yourself and…” She’s just looking amused. I pull out my last card. A desperate attempt. “What about Obama? You think he’s lazy and stupid?”

“Oh, daughter, your president is only half African. You are so kind to try to defend us, though. Thank you."

She sighs. I sigh. We’ve been having this debate for two weeks. I’m sick of it. As a last-ditch effort, I try pulling out whatever I can remember from the liberation theology course I took senior year of college. I can’t figure out how to say “God is on the side of the oppressed” in Swahili. And even if I could translate it, and convince her that people in this village count as oppressed people, I doubt she’d agree with the belief that today’s oppressed are analogous to the Bible’s Israelites. She is constantly reminding me of my superiority above other white people on account of my being a member of the chosen people.

Let’s back up a bit. Here’s how the argument began.

Last week, funding for my “Appropriate Technology Training Program” came through. The plan is to train students how to build three kinds of fuel-efficient stove and a 40,000 liter rainwater harvesting tank. As soon as the funding arrived, two counterparts and I traveled to Arusha to buy materials. The trip went amazingly well—we not only found all the materials in one day, we also got great prices. My counterparts were dedicated and honest, carefully accounting for every single shilling. We’re all set to start…except. The community contribution.

In accordance with Peace Corps policy and general good sense, the community is required to donate in services or materials at least 25% of the total cost of the project. The theory is that they’ll feel more ownership over the project this way, be more involved and dedicated to its success, and more likely to do something about it if there are problems in the future. For this project, the community agreed to donate a few trailers of stones, concrete, and sand in addition to manual labor.

Every morning for the past week, the village chairman has said that he will be holding a meeting with all the sub-village chairpeople to delegate responsibilities. Every evening he says that the meeting will be tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow… We’re supposed to start building on Monday. Still no meeting. Still no stones.

Yes, I’m frustrated. No, I don’t believe this has anything to do with some kind of biblically mandated racial inferiority. Duh.

Madam tells me that I’m very good for taking two years of my life to try to help her village, but I shouldn’t be upset if I don’t see any results. Her people are just doomed to a life of wretchedness and poverty. It’s been that way since time immemorial. They are a less blessed people. God makes no mistakes, she says, so there is a reason for their misfortune. They’ve clearly done something wrong.

I can’t decide whether to scream or cry. This nonsense is coming from a brilliant, dedicated educator who has worked so hard to improve her own life—becoming headmistress of the secondary school and one of the wealthiest people, certainly the wealthiest woman, in the village.

The colonialists might be gone, but their presence isn’t necessary anymore anyway. Their legacy lives on in Madam’s fervent belief in her own inferiority. Their legacy lives on in Madam’s constant deferral to my nonexistent authority. I’m a 22 year old kid with no practical training in anything remotely relevant to the work I’m doing here. All I have is a liberal arts degree, idealism, and two years to spare. But she sees my skin and immediately decides that I’m better than she is.

This argument is making me question things I don’t want to question.

What am I really doing here? Every time I teach a lesson or plan a project, am I just reinforcing the idea that I’m somehow superior because I have education and resources?

By an accident of fate, I was born to a very comfortable family in a very wealthy nation. By an accident of fate, Madam was born into a poor family in one of the poorest countries on this planet. Perhaps in order to avoid accepting that the world is a cruel and random place, or else because of a legacy of instruction and intervention from people in whose interest it was to convince Africans that they are inferior, Madam doesn't see any accidents at all.

How do you convince someone of their value when they comfortably believe that God has cursed them, their ancestors, and their descendants for all eternity?

Stepping off the bus at the Ubungo Bus Stand in Dar Es Salaam, I’m immediately assaulted by thick moist air flavored with car exhaust, heated by the equatorial sun and millions of sweating human bodies. Screaming men greet me with cries of “Arusha!” or “Nairobi! Nairobi!” As the men try to grab my bags and direct me towards busses heading to all sorts of places I don’t want to go, I focus on keeping my wallet in my pocket and my temper under control. My track record is pretty good--I’ve never lost my wallet and only slapped a bus agent once. Upon arrival, my first thought (after “where’s the nearest bathroom?”) is usually, “why did I think this was a good idea?”

Over the past two weeks, I’ve traveled from my village to Dar twice. That puts me pretty firmly in the crazy category. Even before the insanity of arrival, it takes two days and up to four cars, vans, or busses to just get there. More often than not I’m basically sitting on my neighbor’s lap (if I sit on their lap completely, I might get to ride for free like the children). I’m frequently holding a child or a chicken or both.

Busses are bad, but nothing compares to the mental and emotional whiplash I’ve experience traveling between the multiple worlds that exist within this country.

I don’t know where I belong in Dar. I’m not like most aid workers, driving big white Land Rovers and checking email on my smartphone between meetings. I’m certainly not any kind of Tanzanian. I wear a khanga but I’m not a village girl. I wear jeans but I’m not a city girl. I wear a backpack but I’m not a backpacker. I’m not a tourist or a short-term volunteer, wandering around with eyes wide with pain at the first glimpse of an unfair world. I’m not a fashionable expat wearing big designer sunglasses and a bored expression.

Everywhere I go, I feel underdressed and tactless. My clothes feel frumpy and my Teva sandals just plain ugly. At up-scale restaurants and clubs, I feel like an mshamba (Tanzanian equivalent of hillbilly) who shouldn’t have been allowed out of the village. At the grocery stores I feel like a doe-eyed idiot salivating over the multiple cereal options. I can’t shake the feeling that everyone is staring at me and judging, but I’m also shocked and a little disturbed by the fact that a large number of people are totally ignoring me. I’ve grown accustomed to my fishbowl.

This year, Peace Corps celebrates 50 years of turning Americans into unclassifiable freaks in capital cities around the developing world. This month, I celebrate one year of joining the freak show and loving it. None of those years has been easy, but nothing worth doing ever is.

Yesterday I had the privilege of meeting the newly arrived Peace Corps Trainees (or if I may, the future freaks). Talking to them, answering their questions, hearing their concerns, I realized just how far I’ve really come. One year ago today, I was going through the same thing they are—freaking out about everything from squat toilets to Swahili to how to get my host Mama to stop feeding me so much. One year ago today, I was going through the most intense emotional rollercoaster of my life. Though the ride hasn’t gotten any calmer, I no longer require a barf bag and I’m comfortable throwing my hands up and letting out a triumphant scream.

I presented to the new trainees on the topic of diversity, which was incredibly relevant because this class could not be more representative of America. There’s an 80 year old man serving his second tour, a man who applied for Peace Corps on the same day he became an American citizen, energetic kids fresh out of college like me, people of every shape and shade you can imagine. They also seem incredibly cool, if a little shell-shocked. Before we started our session, my fellow presenter Katie turned to me and said something like, “Isn’t it weird that in a few months we’re going to be best friends with some of these people?” I really hope that’s true.

But for now it’s time to go back to my village. The grant money for my appropriate technology training program just came through and the secondary school will be opening up again in a few days. I’m ready to go back. I have to admit, before this little vacation I was losing steam. The cynicism that PCVs are famous for was setting in and I had forgotten why I came here in the first place; just going through the motions without my characteristic energy and passion. Celebrating the 50th, celebrating my 1st, meeting returned volunteers and hearing their stories, listening to the impassioned speech that our very own Dan Waldron gave at the party, meeting the newbies and feeling their energy and excitement, I remember again why I’m here. As awkward as it feels for me to praise the government, the mission of Peace Corps is something I really do believe in. Promoting world peace and friendship is a bizarre and daunting task, but there’s nothing I’d rather be doing right now, and no where I’d rather be doing it.

People keep telling me that I must be changing lives here, but the only thing I know is true is that my own life is changing. I’m only halfway to the person I’ll be when this is over. I’m looking forward to one more year living in the most loving village in Tanzania and fifty more years of unclassifiable freaks changing the world one village, one life at a time. Here’s to the future.

Surprise extra blog this month due to an emergency trip to electricity-land to deal with an email hacking situation. Huge apologies extended to all my victims. I think it’s under control now.

Anyway, onto the blogification!

As I’ve been staring like a deer in headlights at the one-year mark approaching unstoppably like a runaway train (but significantly less deadly), I decided to take some time to assess the last twelve months the way my generation knows best: by re-reading old blog entries and looking at facebook pictures.

In the course of my reminiscence, I noticed a disconnect.

I have plenty of facebook pictures of me having fun with other volunteers, but I pretty much never mention those not-exactly-Tanzanian experiences in this blog. I’ll admit, covering myself in soap and running head-first onto a very make-shift slip-and-slide isn’t going to win me a Nobel Peace Prize (although if I hit my head a little harder, it might have earned me a Darwin Award), but the crazy things I do to blow off steam with other volunteers are just as much a part of my Peace Corps experience as the painful, or touching, or inspiring, or endearing, or entertaining moments I have with my Tanzanian friends. I’m fine in the village most of the time, but once in a while I have to get out and have some American time. I honestly don’t think I’d survive the village life if I didn’t have my fellow volunteers to lean on, kvetch with, drink with, make inappropriate jokes with, and generally just be myself with.

One of the people who has kept me most sane since getting to site is my site-mate (PC lingo for “person who lives closest to me,” in this case about a 1 hour walk away), Dana Baker. This post is dedicated to her. I hope she’s not embarrassed that I’m sharing our secrets with the whole world wide web. The people have a right to know.

So here’s a sample of Peace Corps reality.

Dana and I meet up once a week or so to go for a run and chitchat. This week, we decided to take a short loop and head back to her house early because her knee was hurting. Not one to leave an injured friend to face the day alone, I decided to invite myself over for the day to sunbathe in her courtyard, which is much larger and more secluded than my own.

“I’m going to be a health-hazard next time I go to the beach," I complained, "I’m literally going to blind people when the sun reflects off the whiteness of my legs."

“I miss the beach,” Dana replied, ignoring the rest of my statement, which was intended to provoke a compliment. I forgave her, though, because she just gave me an excellent idea.

We decided to spend the rest of the day pretending her courtyard was the beach. I spent hundreds of hours of my childhood pretending that my grandparents’ basement was a Floridian beach, why shouldn’t I spend at least a few hours of my adulthood doing the same thing?

As we lay on her large straw mat and tried to imagine that the banana trees in her backyard were palms framing the ocean, we both decided that a day at the beach was incomplete without cold beer. Cold was out of the question, but beer was possible if we weren't too lazy to go looking for it.

Being a good friend, and on account of Dana's injured-ness, I volunteered to go on a beer hunt. We may not have refrigerators out here in the bush, but beer is always available. Or so we thought. Actually it turned out that all (by which I mean, all two) of the stores in her village were out of beer. So I did what any self-respecting Peace Corps Volunteer who is pretending to have a day at the beach in her friend’s courtyard in the middle of the semi-arid lands of central northern Tanzania would do. I put on my hiking boots and went for a 40 minute trek to the nearest store guaranteed to have warm beer. It tasted like victory.

The rest of the day we spent lying in Dana’s courtyard, listening to the breeze dance its way through the banana leaves, talking about how much fun it was to be at the beach. We even had music…though the solar-powered speakers would go off every time the sun fell behind a cloud.

As if on cue, we got a phone call from our friend Sativa who was on the actual beach with her sister. We put the phone on speaker and placed it between us, chatting as though we were lying in three side-by-side lounge chairs. Sativa seemed not at all surprised that we were pretending to be on the beach, though she didn’t seem to agree that our imaginary adventure was more fun than her own, actual, beach excursion. That’s when we considered filling up a small basin with water kiddie-pool style. We ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the trek to go fetch enough water to fill up a basin.

When the sun started to cool off, I decided to come home. My neighbor was extremely confused when I told her I was late getting back because Dana and I decided to go to the beach. Her five-year-old totally understood the concept of a pretend beach adventure, and asked if he could be invited next time.

I’ve heard that a few members of the TZ Education class of 2011-2013 have found this blog. A special shout-out to you guys: I know you are probably freaking out right now as you try to decide whether or not to bring that adorable blue shirt to country. If it helps you decide, I did bring that adorable blue shirt to country and it’s currently somewhere between Arusha and Singida on the bus I left it on five months ago. I rarely think about it, but when I do I feel a brief pang of loss flitting like a moth in my chest. But more importantly, I hope you read this post and realize that you’re not going into this alone, you won’t be going through this alone, and you won’t be coming out of this alone. Peace Corps is tough, but volunteers find all sorts of creative ways to get through it, and we get through it together. Enjoy these last few weeks at home, and eat some oreos dipped in cold milk for me. But most importantly, don’t panic. You’re going to be fine and we’re really excited to meet you. Feel free to email me if you have any questions, no need to stalk anonymously.

Pictures from the conference can be found here: Facebook Album.

I groaned as the alarm began to go off. Staring into the dark and lifting up the mosquito net half-heartedly, I tried to figure out why I was waking up before the sun. Changing my mind about waking up, I turned off my phone, put the net back down and snuggled into my blankets, trying to ignore how badly my nose was itching from breathing cold morning air. Seriously, cold air makes my nostrils itch. Is that weird? Pondering my nose-itching situation, I turned over and starting falling back into my bizarrely realistic anti-malarial-med-induced dreams. WAIT! The conference! The event I’d been anticipating with a mixture of excitement and dread since we started planning in January.

The five boys I’d chosen to attend from my village would be getting up now, maybe forcing down some chai their moms had boiled the night before and left in a thermos, packing their tiny rucksacks with a plate, gym shoes if they had any, and an extra shirt. They’d be hurrying out of the house, probably feeling just as excited and nervous as I was.

But I wasn’t hurrying. It was only a matter of time before my perpetually late self became a little overly accustomed to the Tanzanian concept of time which is, to put it lightly, flexible. The saying goes: “Europeans have watches, but Africans have time.” So I took my sweet time getting ready, ignoring my watch (that’s a lie—I lost my watch my first week here), and finally walked out the door only an hour late.

I met one of my students along the road to the bus stand. He had hitched a ride on a bicycle because he was afraid of being late. I remembered the speech I had given the boys about how it was important that they were on time throughout the entire conference, because their behavior reflected on me. Oops.

As I got to the bus stop, the teacher I was taking with me as a counterpart and fellow chaperone nonchalantly informed me that his wife was in labor and could he please have permission to go see her and the new baby in the during break time at the conference? After getting over the bizarre-ness of being asked permission to do something by a grown man with a wife and kids (three-and-a-half kids at that particular moment), I informed him that I’d be disappointed if he didn’t go see them and demanded details about the new baby and his wife’s health. (It’s a boy, by the way, and they are both doing fine.)

Anyway, we made it down to Katesh with hours to spare before our organized programming began so me and three other PCVs ended up and a roomful of teenage boys and a mandate to entertain. Finally, those summers working at the JCC paid off. Camp-Counselor-Lauren came out full force and got the boys to play some getting-to-know-you games. Then I noticed a PSI (Population Services International, an NGO I’m particularly fond of) truck parked outside the hall we were using to host the conference. Since we still had a few hours to kill, I decided to sweet talk the PSI community educator who was probably on a schedule and supposed to be doing something else (but again, it’s Tanzania, so who cares about schedules?). It didn’t take much cajoling to get him to agree to be a surprise guest speaker. The kids had a good time asking him about condoms, mosquito nets, and how he enjoys his job as a community educator. I was particularly pumped to have him as a speaker because a lot of students have told me they want to be community educators when they grow up... which might just be them sucking up and saying they want to be like me when they grow up, but anyway I wanted to show them that not all community educators are white foreigners.

The next few days of the conference went by in a blur of lectures, games, insane amounts of poster-paper, reasonable amounts of well-deserved beer (after the boys went to sleep, of course), and awkward questions about sex. My session was on HIV/AIDS. In the album you'll see a pictures of the boys placing activity cards along a spectrum from “salama” (safe) to “hatari sana” (very risky). After placing the cards, I gave them time to discuss and move cards around as they saw fit. I was particularly proud to notice that the boys from my school, who have been subjected to a semester's worth of my Life Skills/stand-up-comedy routine, were consistent accurate in placing their activity cards and changing around the misplaced ones.

We had the luck of borrowing a projector from a nearby church, so each evening we treated the boys to a movie. The first day we asked them what kind of movie they wanted to watch. They all started miming gun fights and saying they wanted to watch anything starring someone they referred to as “short nigger.” Seriously. I was trying to explain why that wasn’t a nice thing to say, even if it is somebody’s name, until finally a fellow American clued me in that that’s how Tanzanians pronounce “Schwarzenegger.” I have so much left to learn in this country…

The best day of the conference by far was beekeeping day. We had a local expert come in to spend a whole day teaching the boys about bee behavior, health benefits of honey, products from beeswax and other byproducts of beekeeping. The boys were particularly fascinated by how bees have sex, which was good for me because it broke the ice on using words like “penis” before I had to give my AIDS talk. (In case you care: male bees, aka drones, have only one function. Once they’ve copulated with the queen, they die. Awesome, right??)

After the lecture, the boys were set loose with hammers and wood and set to work building their “modern” beehives and playing with the smoker, pretending to harvest honey. One of the kids from my group also got to try on the bee costume. (See Samweli rockin' the white overalls in the facebook album.)

At the end of the beekeeping day, the Bwana Nyuki (literally translated, this means “Mr. Bee” but it is what we call someone who is an expert in something) took some fresh honeycomb and showed us how to squeeze out the honey. It was possibly the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted.

The conference was insanely stressful, full of all sorts of problems and setbacks we couldn’t have anticipated, and definitely the longest three-and-a-half days in recent memory. But it was so, so worth it. I brought the boys over to the headmistress’s house when we got back to the village and they were so excited to start sharing the information they had learned and show off the beehive they built. Of course the information they were most excited about was the graphic details of how exactly drones die after copulating with the queen bee (it’s pretty gross)… I cringed at their mini-lecture, wishing they would talk about decision-making or goal-setting or nutrition or HIV/AIDS or pretty much any other topic, but the headmistress seemed impressed with their knowledge anyway.

As the year-mark has been approaching I’ve been having a lot of “what the hell have I been doing with myself for the past twelve months?” moments. I don’t feel that way this week. Looking back over the conference, I feel legitimately proud of myself. And of course, I’m madly proud of my fellow Hanang-ers: Dana, Justin, Duncan, and Megan—all of whom were absolutely essentially to making this conference happen. I feel super lucky to have such wonderful region-mates. I've heard horror stories from other conferences where the volunteers just didn't work well together, but we made an excellent team.

And now it’s time to start planning the Girl’s Conference… oh dear.

It’s a little awkward how often I find myself writing about religion, but it seems to be a theme in my life these days. So bear with me, here comes yet another post about religion.

It’s Passover. A week-long celebration of the exodus from Egypt, a celebration of freedom from bondage, a time to remember that we were once slaves and now we are free (well, according to the torah at least). It’s my favorite Jewish holiday for a number of reasons. One is because of that DreamWorks animated genius, The Prince of Egypt, which I am only a little ashamed to admit is one of my favorite movies. I also love Passover because of all the theme of freedom and liberation, near and dear to my little progressive activist heart. I also happen to find matzoh (flat bread) tasty, which is not exactly the point since I think by eating it we’re supposed to feel deprived, but whatever. Matzoh pizza? Heck yes. I’ll eat that any time of year.

So. As the holiday approached I started to feel kind of down. At first I was planning to hold a seder (ritual Passover meal) in my village, translate the haggadah (instructions on how to lead said meal) into Swahili, turn it into an awesome cultural sharing moment. But I dropped the ball on that… my Swahili wasn’t good enough to produce a Haggadah much beyond “we were slaves, now we’re free, salt water tastes like tears, let’s eat flat bread!” So that failed. But, scary thought, I’ll still be here Passover next year so I can just do it then when my Swahili will hopefully be less embarrassing.

As today came to a close I was wandering back to my house singing “When you Believe” (embarrassing, I know, but that song is damn catchy) to myself, feeling lonely and all sorts of bad. I had tried explaining to a few different village friends why I was sad today but they just didn’t really get it. I got sympathetic texts from other volunteers but they didn't really get it either. I was feeling super alone and kind of stupid about it, considering all the times I've been away at school had to skip out on the family seder (sorry, Pahka and Gramma).

Now, quick side story: Because I’m an idiot and didn’t realize that corn gets really big when it grows and blocks you out unless you make a path through it, currently the only way to get back to my house is to pass through my neighbor’s courtyard.

So, I was on that path, just getting to the particularly relevant “in this time of fear, when prayer’s so often proved in vain” part of the song when Mama Hawa came outside to greet me and ask what and why I was singing to myself.

“It’s a holiday for my religion,” I told her, holding back tears and trying to act like this was an exciting thing. My smile was, apparently, unconvincing.

“I’m so sorry,” she replied. “I completely understand. The first few Easters were really hard for me after I got married and had to become Muslim. I missed going to church and singing in the choir.”

Hold up. What? It had never occurred to me that Mama Hawa wasn’t born into a Muslim family.

“Why did you convert to Islam if you loved Christianity so much?” I asked, hoping desperately that the answer was something like “I loved my future husband even more than I loved Jesus.” I should have known better.

“There weren’t many men to choose from, I was kind of in a hurry, most of the available men were Muslim,” she replied.

Now I decided to get nosey. I asked why she was in such a rush. Turns out she was the oldest daughter and three of her younger siblings got married before her, which was a disgrace. She was 20 when she got married, by the way. I was somehow reminded of Fiddler on the Roof as she told the story. As I kept asking awkwardly personal questions, the answers got sadder. She had waited to get married because she wanted to go to Secondary School. She’d passed the exam but her father wouldn’t agree at first. So she tried to make some money as a dressmaker, hoping she’d eventually get back to school on her own, but in the end it didn’t work out and her remaining sisters (apparently she has a lot of sisters) and father told her that she absolutely had to get married as soon as possible or she’d be an embarrassment to the whole family.

Mama Hawa is beautiful, kind, smart, quiet and gentle (very positive qualities for women here), and heart-heartbreakingly generous considering she has pretty much nothing material to give. If she took her time, she’d have had no problem finding someone equally wonderful and kind to fall in love with and marry, even if she limited her choices to the Christians in the village. But she was in a hurry so she just married the first person who would take her, and he happened to be Muslim. And just like that, her days in the church choir were over.

After she finished telling her story, we sat in silence for a while, but not that uncomfortable kind of silence, more of the "I get what you're feeling right now and we don't need to put words on it" kind of silence. Finally I had to go home, it was getting dark. As I left, she suddenly grinned and said, “Happy Jewish Easter!” We both laughed that kind of laugh you laugh when you were moments away from crying a moment ago.

Mama Hawa will never get to sing in the church choir again. She really had no choice when giving up her beloved religion. I, on the other hand, will be going home in a little over a year. I've got years of seders and opportunities to watch and unashamedly sing along to The Prince of Egypt ahead of me. In some ways, Mama Hawa and I shared something so special today. In other, more profound ways, her story eclipsed mine a hundred times over. Mama Hawa is not a slave in the technical sense of the word, but she is, in so many ways, bound. If nothing else, our conversation tonight fit the real spirit of passover--to share the story of bondage so that we will never forget what a blessing it is to be free.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming—apologies for the theological interruption.

Many of you know that in my former life, I was involved in The Vagina Monologues. One of the most memorable parts of the show, at least among the Wellesley crowd, is “The Happy Fact” – a pithy ode to that mysterious organ of pleasure known as the clitoris. So, deciding I was going to be a brave and empowering Life Skills teacher, I devoted a significant chunk of my female anatomy lesson to translating and reciting the Happy Fact with my students. We giggled, chanted, high-fived. It was pretty adorable. I left the classroom feeling particularly proud of myself—I had finally found something from my pre-Peace Corps experience that felt relevant here. Most of the time I feel like I’m totally unprepared, making everything up as I go.

A few hours later, a shy female student came up to me in private.

“Madam Lauren,” she asked, her mouth curling into an embarrassed smile, “is it true that men prefer women who are ‘cut’?”

My heart momentarily stopped. I felt like be most insensitive person ever. The student was using a local euphemism for female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) – a series of controversial practices which include cutting or removing part or all of the clitoris, sometimes going so far as to include the labia majora and minora. It dawned on me like a piano falling from the sky that some of the students I had just forced to recite an ode to the clitoris did not, in fact, have a clitoris.

I had been so apprehensive about approaching the topic, I had almost forgot about FGM. It seemed like the kind of cultural territory I was too foreign to be touching. But at this point it was too late, so I decided to go with it and try to turn my error into a learning opportunity—for me as well as my students.

The next class period, I held a session exclusively devoted to FGM, where we talked about the biological facts—how woman who are circumcised are more likely to die during childbirth or develop fistula, how there is no biological benefit to circumcision, how there are alternatives to the practice that are legal (FGM is technically illegal in Tanzania) and have been accepted by many tribes throughout the region. The students asked a lot of impersonal questions and seemed academically interested in the concept, but seemed reluctant to connect it to their own lives.

At the end of the session, I noticed that the girls had completely shut up, though they seemed to have questions left to ask. So we kicked out the boys and held a woman-to-woman heart-to-heart.

The girls told me that “the cut” is very underground, taboo, but still practiced in this community. It usually takes place during young childhood, though the age varies by tribe. Some of the girls were unsure whether or not they had received the operation. I suggested they ask their mothers. They laughed a “The mzungu’s being an idiot again” laugh-- I’m getting pretty used to it these days. I was, as usual, missing something.

“We’d get smacked for even mentioning it!” they told me, as though this was obvious.

So instead we drew pictures and talked about how they could find out for themselves.

Afterwards, I asked what they would do if they one day had a baby girl and their husband or mother wanted to circumcise her. “Waelimishe! Wataelewa!” they all responded in chorus. “We should educate them! They’ll understand!” I was floored, yet again. Critical thinking isn’t a normal part of their school curriculum, so my hypothetical questions are usually met with silence and exasperated looks.

I was beaming, legitimately this time, as I walked out of the classroom. I’ve had a few girls come up to me since and thank me for helping break the silence. Now that they understand the real dangers, they told me, they refuse to continue the practice with the next generation. I won’t ever know whether they were serious, but it felt good to hear it.

Less successful was my Life Skills session on masturbation. I tried to present it as a healthy alternative to “ngono zembe”—unsafe sex. We talked about the biological and health consequences (for those of you who don’t know, masturbation does not, in fact, lead to infertility or blindness). At the end of the session, a student raised his hand. “Even if that’s all true, which I doubt, isn’t it still true that God hates you if you masturbate?”

I tried to put my on “culturally sensitive” hat.

“I’m not a religious leader, I’m a teacher. Unless someone here has God’s cell phone number”—a stupid joke that got me a ego-inflatingly large laugh—“I’m just going to stick to biological facts.”

The lesson continued.

At the end of the session, I asked—“So, who still thinks that masturbation is a terrible sin and will bring disease and the wrath of an angry God down upon you?”

Forty out of forty-eight hands shot up into the air. The remaining eight were raised slightly slower, less certainly. Though that probably had less to do with their conviction and more to do with my broken and sometimes hard to understand Swahili.

I stared at them, hoping they were just trying to annoy me. They were all grinning, but looked somehow sincere.

Oh well. I'm learning.

Thanks for the speedy and thought-provoking responses.

I suppose just throwing out there the "I consider myself an atheist" thing without defining what I mean by the term "atheist" was probably a poor choice. So for those who are interested, let me explain a little bit more.

Here's the deal. When I call myself an atheist, I mean it in the literal, linguistic sense of the word--I live without theism, without the belief in an external higher power or powers, usually referred to as God or gods.

When I say "external higher power," I mean something totally separate from the amazing powers already imbued in us mortal human beings. Those I believe in. There is incredible power within humanity, some of which we understand and lots of which we don't, some of which we've explored and lots of which we haven't.

Like you said, Martina, I agree that something awesome put those words in my head at that moment and for a good reason, but I think that awesome thing was not external; I believe it lives inside my own being.

I think it was Rabbi Josh who first explained to me the Jewish concept that we all have a "breath of God" in us, giving us "souls" and thus making us human. My personal belief system is along the "breath of God" lines, but minus the "God" part. I believe that human beings have souls. I believe we have consciences, we have voices inside us that tell us when we've done wrong. Some people are better at ignoring those voices than others, and many people would call those voices "God," in which case I guess I am forced to admit that I do believe in that particular conception of "God," but I don't think the term really fits since it traditionally implies external-ness and what I'm talking about is entirely internal. I believe we humans have incredible capabilities. We can love and forgive and create and destroy and comfort ourselves and comfort others. We can do good things and we can do terrible things.

Yes, Dad, I am willing to accept that there is something more than the placebo effect at work here--I am willing to believe that human beings have the power to use our minds to heal our broken bodies. That's awesome, but it's not God.

Why should we let some being we can't see or speak with or prove the existence of take credit for our own incredible abilities? I just don't see the point in that.

The only time I see that the external higher power argument is absolutely necessary is when we're trying to take the blame off of ourselves, like when expansionist Zionists try to use the Bible as a real estate document. (I know that's a low blow for some people who may be reading this, but it's a real and sad example.) The "an external higher power says it's the right thing to do" argument has been used over and over again to oppress Christians, Muslims, Jews, Pagans, Africans, Native Americans... the list goes on. It is as long as human history.

Dad, you say that "belief in a supreme being has been a force for many great things." I agree. But here's a question, and I really do want an answer if you can think of one: When has the "an external higher power made me do it" argument really been *necessary* in the creation of something good? During my time here I've seen missionaries doing some really great work, and they are doing it for Jesus. But would they not be taken seriously if they were doing it for another reason, like the love of their fellow man? Of course they would. Here I am, doing similar work but without the religious pretext, and I'm taken just as seriously as they are. But if the people who killed the Native Americans because they believed they had the God-given right to do so had used a different argument and let the blame fall on themselves (in other words, if they had been honest and said "we want your land"), they'd have been in a pretty tough spot.

I don't hate religion. I don't think it is only a force for bad--but I don't think it is necessary if what we're doing is truly good.

I've had plenty of interactions with Christians who say that they believe in salvation and heaven for people who spend their time on Earth doing "the Lord's work" without doing it for the Lord (as in, people who are "good without God"). My belief is like that, but backwards. I don't care why people are out there fighting for justice--whether it's because the Bible tells them it's a good thing to do or because Marx tells them it's a good thing to do. We're all on the same team.

Many people fight for justice and peace and equality because a religious force tells them to do so. That's great for them, but it doesn't work for me. I fight for justice and peace and equality because a little voice inside me tells that it is the right thing to do, the only acceptable thing to do. You may want to call that voice God, and I'm not going to stop you. But I, perhaps selfishly, prefer to think of that voice, my conscience, as inextricably a part of myself.

So, no, I don't think that my particular brand of "a firm belief" that there is no external higher power is as "irrational" as the firm belief that there is. It is in fact a belief I came to through what I hope you'll now realize is rather rational thinking. I am indeed denying outright the possibility of "something greater than ourselves," in as far as that something is external. What I am not denying, and what I passionately hope is true, is that we humans are ourselves greater than we have thus far shown ourselves to be. By "greater," I mean willing to own up to our responsibility as sentient beings with the ability to create and preserve and destroy. We've spent generations exploring all of these abilities, but I think the many crises my generation has inherited suggest that our fore bearers explored that ability to "destroy" more than the others. I hope that we will not make the same mistake, and I know that the fate of the planet rests on our decision.

Maybe it’s a crude question, but I ask myself a lot: How can people who have been dealt such a discouraging hand in the game of life constantly praise the one they believe dealt it to them? Nine months living with some of the poorest people in the world and experiencing my own little tastes of desperation, I’m starting to understand things better. When there’s nothing left to hold onto, faith steps in. She takes you in her arms, intoxicates and comforts you with the simplest of words. “There is an answer,” she coos. “There is a reason. You are going to be ok.”

But is there a dose at which faith becomes toxic?

I intended this to be a post about the “Loliondo miracle cure”--a medicine “sent from God” that supposedly treats everything from AIDS to diabetes to TB to chronic pain and has people flocking by the thousands, several of whom have died in the process, to a small village in northern Tanzania. But we’ll get back to that later. Right now my mind is flashing-back to the child’s funeral I wrote about two posts ago.

As I was sitting there on the floor, desperate, terrified, miserable, angry… all of a sudden, the mourner’s kaddish started running through my mind. Yid gadal viyid gadash shmeh rabbah… I have no clue what those words mean, I didn‘t even realize I had the prayer memorized, but the words came to me and they comforted me. I pulled my knees in, wrapped my arms around myself, and whispered that ancient prayer against my skirt. My mind flew back in time, reconnected to memories I didn’t know I had. I sat again under the hot sun at Camp Tamarack and felt the itchy choir robes I once wore as part of the children’s choir at Temple Israel.

I’ve heard the mourner’s kaddish recited thousands of times for faceless dead. Very few times I’ve spoken it aloud for people I knew personally. Those words, the ritual of saying them over the dead, has become a part of me, an essential part of my ability to cope with death. That day, hugging myself on a mat, surrounded by women wailing, chanting, singing in Arabic, I too called out to the universe using a language I don’t understand at all, and I too felt better.

I guess all of this is to say that, even though I’m not a “religious” person, I really do understand the power of belief and ritual. I've felt it in my bones, in the deepest stores of my memory, in the saddest of my days.

Despite that, I simply can’t accept what’s going on in Loliondo. You can get the details from many different sources by googling “Loliondo cure.” Here’s the cliff notes: a former church leader had a dream in which God told him to take the bark from a certain tree, mix it up a certain way, and give it to people for the low low price of 500Tsh (less than 50 cents). The catch is that the cure will only work in that particular place and when given to you from that particular guy, so while the price of the actual medicine is low, the bus fare is not. Meanwhile, this formerly sleepy village is suddenly facing a public health crisis as sick people flood in by the thousands with no where to sleep, no sanitation facilities, and very little water. It’s been compared to the conditions in a hastily thrown together refugee camp. Pretty much all bus stations, from the capital city to my little village, are now offering direct transport to Loliondo. This is the rainy season and most of the roads in this country are a muddy, dangerous mess. There have been accidents, including at least 7 fatalities and hundreds of injuries, as people rush to get their hands on the miracle cure.

I don’t mean to sound entirely negative about this. First of all, I’m not a science-centric anti-herbal medicine kind of person. Plenty of plants have legitimate medical properties. This guy's concoction, or rather, his patients' faith in it, really has done some incredible things.

One of the students at my secondary school, Asteria, has a weird condition where she faints when she hears loud noises. I’ve been at school on a day where she fainted twice and was unconscious for a total of almost an hour after hearing desks being banged in the next classroom over. Asteria hasn’t fainted once since her trip to Loliondo a few weeks ago. Regardless of why, her quality of life has improved dramatically and I wouldn’t dare take that away from her.

But claiming to have cured AIDS is a different story. It’s a dangerous thing to do. Hundreds, maybe thousands by now, of people living with HIV/AIDS are abandoning their ARVs, declaring themselves cured. Some doctors, apparently forgetting that patients who have been on ARVs are at risk for false negative HIV test if their viral load has diminished sufficiently, are confirming the cure. When I try to continue with my lesson plans about HIV prevention, students rebel, demanding to know why I’m bothering to teach them about a disease that has such a simple and cheap cure. People are noticeably less excited about the free condoms I give out at the market. And pretty much everyone in the village thinks I’m an idiot for not accepting the Loliondo miracle.

Even though I consider myself an atheist, I found comfort in my ancestors' ancient prayer during a time when I felt hopeless, desperate, alone. I'm not trying and not willing to make an argument against faith, religion, or herbal healing. But the Loliondo situation isn't really about faith, religion, or herbal healing. To me at least, it's about the dangers of desperation.

A positive outlook and belief that you will be ok can go a long way in curing or reducing the symptoms of many, many diseases. One of my favorite village elders, Waziri, struggles with diabetes. He hopped on a bus to Loliondo and now drinks soda and sugary tea every day, feeling great. Do I think he’s faking it? No. Do I think he’s really cured? No. I think Waziri, like Asteria, has had a powerful dose of the placebo effect and it’s doing good things for them--as of now.

But what comes next?

Wow. The response to my last post was incredible. Your emails, comments, facebook messages and texts lifted my spirits and made me feel like, even if I can’t stop the painful things I’m dealing with here, at least I can bear witness and bring attention to them. I’ve passed on your warm thoughts to the family the post was about and they send their love and appreciation. Thank you.

About once a month here, I have something like a breakdown. I don’t know what else to call it. Usually I handle it in private, sit in my house and sob my eyes out as I think of all the things I’ll never be able to fix in this world and how desperate and pointless and tiny it makes me feel.

Last week, for the first time, I let myself go to pieces in front of a Tanzanian. I was standing in the middle of my backyard with my neighbor, ankle deep in mud as we transplanted vegetables into warm, wet, inviting earth. The rains had finally returned. I looked down at the soil and thought about how dry it had been just days before. I thought about the mercilessness of weather. I thought about my own complicity in the matter. The droughts in this region have been linked to climate change, among other human factors. I saw my American life flash before my eyes--hours spent spewing carbon out of my car, lights left on all night, computers eternally plugged in, hours in the library printing out ream after ream of tree flesh.

Sobs of laughter and pain forced tears down my cheeks. The tears mixed with sweat rain, still lightly falling like post-coital caresses on exhausted but satisfied maize stalks. I sobbed and laughed harder, started to hum to myself and dig into the earth with my bare feet. I tried to dig myself roots. I stared up at the sky and let the rain fall in my eyes; I stared out at the crops and felt their relief flooding my body and mixing with my own; I stared at my Mama and realized that she seemed confused and sort of embarrassed for me.

All I could say was mvua -- rain.

And then she understood. Having lived her whole life at the whim of the rain, Mama Hawa is not thrown into hysterics by its irregular behavior. But for me, this was a novel and incredible feeling. After a terrifyingly dry January, the rains were back. But were they back for good? The corn lifted up its browning leaves, tentatively promising to give it one last shot. The village elders shook their heads and told me that God was tricking us; He made us think we were going to starve this year. But may He be praised! He wouldn’t really do that to us.

Maybe God wouldn’t, but climate change, deforestation, and desertification would.

Two years is a very short time. If I’m lucky, the students I teach will protect themselves from HIV and pursue their dreams of being nurses, doctors, pilots, and teachers. If I’ve done my job properly, the groups I organize will keep planting trees after I leave. If I can break through the stigma, the young women I hang out with will feel empowered to choose the number of babies they bring into this world. If I give it my all, this village might be a little bit greener and a little bit healthier in the years to come.

I know I should think about all that and feel good. And sometimes I do. But it’s all about perspective and my particular brand of perspective is, to be honest, not well suited to this job.

I’ve been told before that I’m the kind of person who sees the forest and doesn’t realize that it‘s made up of trees. I’m a big-picture person. Yet here I am in the middle of Africa, literally and figuratively planting tiny little seedlings that will hopefully one day be part of a global forest of change. And it sucks. I feel like an idiot most of the time. Every class I teach or tree I plant feels like a stupid little drop in an infinite ocean of problems.

But that’s how it has to be. That’s how we’re going to repair the world. Poverty and inequality and cruelty and climate disaster and corruption and hunger and AIDS and preventable death and overpopulation and environmental exploitation and insane republicans who think that the road to freedom is paved with the blood of our nation’s natural resources … these problems won’t be solved by one person with a sudden revelation about the path to a feasible and sustainable utopia. If we’re going to save this world--and I’m assuming anyone reading this understands that the world as we know it is in danger and needs to be saved--it’s going to take a lot of seedlings of all different sorts. It’s going to take people all over the world planting seeds of knowledge, seeds of peace, seeds of trees and seeds of nutritious and affordable vegetables. Sometimes it‘s going to be fun, sometimes it‘s going to suck, and most of the time we‘re going to feel like we‘re just running in place. But we’re not. What we’re doing is planting a forest whose canopy we won’t live to see.

But we have to keep planting. We can’t afford to give up. My neighbors can’t afford for you to give up.

As you read these words, a Mama just a few yards from me is worrying about whether she’ll have enough corn to feed her children in June. If her vegetables grow, she’s going to have to decide whether she’d rather sell them to buy shoes so her kids can go to school, or keep them so her kids can eat nutritious food. I’m not telling you this to make you feel guilty. I’m hoping that you can imagine me, a fellow First World-er, hanging out here and being friends with that woman. I’m hoping that will make her more real to you.

A few of you have asked me what you can do, specifically, to help my village. I don’t really know what to say. I’ve spent the last 9 months staring at bone-dry water pumps generously donated by the Danish people, so I’m not going to ask you for money. At least not right now. For now, I’ll ask you to think about your impact on the planet. When the snow melts or if it‘s the appropriate time wherever you are in the world, I’d also like you to plant a tree. I know you know that climate change is a problem, but take a moment, close your eyes, and imagine what its like to live at the whim of the rains. Then plant another tree.

Swahili has a nifty word with no good English translation. Harambee -- it’s sort of like “Let’s all pull together and get this job done!” That’s what we need right now. A worldwide Harambee. Harambee isn’t about people coming together with one mind and similar skills--its about the whole community, each person contributing what she has to give.

Now, when I have my breakdowns, I take a deep breath and imagine the tiny seedlings, the little efforts I’m making here, joining up with the efforts of people all over the world. I imagine them growing into a beautiful, better world. I imagine three generations from now looking back and thanking us as a collective era for saving the world from destruction. And then, when I’m ready, I stop looking for the forest and focus in on the trees.

I’m sitting on a mat on the floor, eating oily rice with my fingers and trying not to cry.

A stream of old women walk past to greet me and the girls I‘m sitting with. One has her head resting on my legs and her shirt open as she breastfeeds her newest baby. Maimuna, my best friend and surrogate sister, is stifling a sob and wiping a tear as she rests her head on my shoulder. I keep shoveling in the food, even though I‘m full and I don‘t like the taste. Maybe it’s a Jewish thing. Grief makes me hungry.

I want to vomit. I want some water. I want fresh air. I want to be anywhere but here.

But this is exactly where I need to be today. I need my Tanzanian friends to teach me how to grieve for a child. I need Maimuna to teach me how to go on living and laughing and working to make this village a better place when a tiny, lifeless body lies before me covered in a shroud. A tiny body that used to be a tiny person I knew, a tiny person I exchanged high-fives with and made funny faces at. I’ve never had to do this before, but my Mamas and sisters are old pros. They will show me how it’s done.

Step one is wailing.

Step two is eating some pilau and accepting that it’s a fact of life.

Step three is going back to the farm because there are weeds to pull and beans to plant.

It’s been a week now since the funeral. The official mourning process is over. But I can’t get past that empty space between step one and step two. The space where you are done crying and done feeling angry and done wanting to vomit, but you can’t yet accept that we live in a world this cruel.

“It’s God’s work,” my Mama keeps saying. “Praise him.”

Those words don’t comfort me; they make it worse. They make me want to scream.

I try to say, “No, Mama, it’s not God’s work. It’s the work of malnutrition and dirty water and broken promises by NGOs and governments and water pumps that have been dry for a year and Mamas that have to carry their babies in the hot sun for hours to fetch water and babies that don’t even have the strength to complain and men who are supposed to be leading this village but actually spend all day in the bar. It’s the work of years of people watching babies die and saying ’it’s just the work of God, what can we mortals do?’ rather than saying ’no, really, what CAN we do?’”

I wanted my words to have an impact, to rally her, to catalyze a movement of angry Mamas that would fight for food security and nutrition, stop blaming God, save the babies and hold the real culprits responsible.

But the Swahili that stumbled out of my mouth sounded feeble and broken. Or maybe my argument was feeble and broken, regardless of the language. Mama just gave me that “Are you seriously questioning God right now?” look, and we switched topics.

We talked about what the harvest might be like this year. We talked about the rains and we whispered in nervous tones about drought. Mama didn’t acknowledge my little rant against the “it’s all part of God’s plan” theory. But if she did, she might have said there’s no time to search for root causes and start a movement. She might have reminded me that there are weeds to pull and beans to plant. Maybe she’d tell me that if we don’t get over this and get our asses back to the farm, more babies will die. And she would be right and I would realize I was wrong.

Time passes slowly in the village, but it passes. The rainy season makes the mountains bloom, bursting into greenness like they are finally waking after months of brown, rocky sleep. My Swahili improves and I get closer to my village friends and slowly, painfully, I start to understand this place a little better. I also start to realize that there are things I’ll never understand.

I came here to change lives and make a small corner of the world a slightly better place. I came here to teach and to mobilize. In the classroom I’ve had fun watching my teenage students gain confidence, beamed as I’ve overheard them explaining important details of HIV/AIDS to their younger friends. But I also came here to learn.

In the classroom, I am a teacher. At the funeral, I was the newest kid in class. This week I learned how to bury a child and go back to the farm with tears still wet on my cheeks, grateful that the hot sun will dry them.

I'm now connected to the internet from my house in the village!!! I bought a mobile modem last week and it has pretty much changed my life. I still don't have electricity, so don't expect me to be much more accessible, but from the time I get to town and charge my computer to the time the battery runs out, I am truly straddling two worlds. I read by candlelight, cook outside on a charcoal stove, and carry water (or rather, pay my neighbor's kid to carry water) from 2k away, yet I can keep updated on Natalie Portman's pregnancy and Lindsay Lohan's shenanigans if I so choose (which I don't). WEIRD.

So here are some updates...

First of all, I made it home safely from my in-service training in Morogoro and a week of rest and relaxation in Dar Es Salaam. Dar is a big city that has all sorts of exciting things, most notably in the part of town where diplomats and ex-pats live and shop, officially known as "the Peninsula" but (sometimes fondly, sometimes sarcastically) referred to as "America" by me and my friends. During my time in "America," I visited a few grocery stores. They are probably small by real American standards but they were scary nonetheless. I know you all think that the life I'm living out in the village is tough, but I'm more impressed at those of you that can stare at a wall of toothpaste and know which one you want. Keeping in mind that I live in a place where the nearest loaf of bread to buy is a 1 hr bus ride away, I'm sure you can understand why I caused some stares by the amount of time I spent gawking at the toothpaste selection.

I'm super pumped to be back in my village now. I've been gone waaaay too long. My counterpart (Mama Ashura) and I are geared up to start projects, though most of them will have to wait until after the planting season (April). Tomorrow, my neighbor is going to help me prepare to farm the plot of land I didn't realize I inherited along with my house. I'm also getting ready to begin two projects with the secondary school, both of which I'm really excited about. Starting mid-January, I'm going to be teaching Life Skills (aka how to not get HIV, pregnant, addicted to drugs, etc) to the Form 4s, mostly 17-19 year olds. I'm nervous about it, because I haven't had the best luck with teaching (zoom in on the preschoolers who, after two months of my tutelage, can sing the ABCs up to G, at which point it all goes to hell), but I seem to do better with older kids and the topics are sexy enough that they'll actually pay attention.

The second project has the eventual goal of getting a water tank and/or pump installed at the secondary school because right now the kids spend an ungodly amount of time fetching water rather than studying. Rather than just whipping off a grant for them, I've decided to take a painfully slow but hopefully more sustainable route. Along with the Headmistress, I'm in the process of selecting 5-10 top students to form a "water and development taskforce." Over the next semester, I'm going to teach them about grants, NGOs, aid, etc. I'm hoping to engage them in more than just project planning, but also to discuss sticky issues, like the sustainability of aid. The ultimately aim of the taskforce is for the students themselves to come up with a solution to the school's water problem. Whether they decide to fund raise in the community and build it themselves or write a grant, I'm going to do my best to support them while still granting them full ownership of the project, whether or not it succeeds.

That's the plan at least. But over the past 6 months I've learned that the only thing I can definitely count on is that nothing will happen as I expect.

Finally, I want to share with you all a funny situation I found myself in today. My neighbors, Mama and Baba Mdogo, just got home from a long journey that took them on a bus passing through a few of the national parks. I remember when my Dad and Amy got back from their safari last year I was kind of rude to them about their picture slide-show--saying it was dehumanizing for them to show off pictures of the Africans they passed on the bus the same way they show off pictures of animals. Keeping that in mind, here is what Baba Mdogo told me when I asked him what they saw on their journey: "So many animals! We saw giraffes and hippopotamus and zebras and elephants...and the wazungu [white people]! You wouldn't believe how many wazungu we saw!! They were wearing these funny hats and they all had cameras and they were speaking English so fast and some of them were speaking other languages, too. There were so many of them and they all looked so excited to see the animals. You should go to the national parks because you will have lots of wazungu friends there, Lauren!"

So there you have it, Dad. They think you're just as fascinating as you think they are.

Living without electricity or running water makes you appreciate things in a different way. Before I hopped on that Africa-bound plane, I had never seen, let alone wore, let alone mopped my floor with, a Khanga. Today I can safely say that I would be dead without it.

The khanga is just a thin piece of fabric. It is most frequently used as a wrap or headscarf. The internet here isn't fancy enough for me to upload a picture right now, but you should google it if you're confused.

My friend Sativa is convinced that the bucket has more uses than the khanga. Buckets are useful, don't get me wrong. You should definitely read her blog post about them (www.sativamarie.wordpress.com) and make up your own mind. But I feel, in the name of fairness, you deserve to hear the khanga's side of the story. Sativa says I'm copying her by writing this post. She is a bully. That is why I call her "Dada Mkubwa," which means "big sister," because big sisters are bullies. I think. I've never actually had one.

Anyway. The many uses of a khanga:

- The Classic (wrapping around your waist)

- Tablecloth

- Carpet

- Drapes

- Poster/general wall art

- Get your local tailor to make you a: dress, shirt, pants, skirt, hat, dira, headscarf, etc etc etc)

- Cape to wear to the Harry Potter movie in Dar Es Salaam ("I'm so not going with you to that," - Jen)

- Any/all articles of clothing for kids

- Grocery bag

- To cover up your luggage if you don't want people to see how fancy your bags are

- Menstrual pads (if anyone wants information on how to do this, attend your local Peace Corps girls conference)

- Oven mitts (but be careful, I've already burned holes in 3 khangas doing this...)

- Head wrap (all styles--the bigger the better)

- Apron (kinda synonymous with "the classic")

- Filter for water (but not a substitution for boiling!)

- Diaper (if you believe in that kind of thing, most Mamas just let the kiddos run free)

- Blanket and/or sheets

- Bathing suit cover

- "Farm clothes"

- Prayer rug (I'm actually not sure this would be allowed--I'll ask a Mama and let you know)

- Yoga mat

- Covering up your tanktop when you can't stand the heat

- Really cheap sunscreen

- Hijab

- Sending subliminal messages (each khanga has a saying on the bottom in Swahili, usually it's things like "God's word is the final word" but sometimes it's more sassy and less religious.)

- Face mask when the dust and/or body odor takes over your nasal passages

- Make-shift curtain when you have to chimba dawa* on a bus ride

- "Mattress mambo" (if you have to ask, you're too young to know)

- Travel pillow

- Door mat

- Umbrella

- Required uniform for any village funeral or wedding

- Fanny pack (Sativa's favorite)

- To strap a child to your back (he ain't going nowhere)

- To shield yourself when breastfeed--though open-air is the preference in my village

- Jifunga-ing** when you're wearing scandalous things like jeans or a knee-length skirt

- When it gets old, it becomes a rag/mop/etc

- Automatic hand-dryer (minus the automatic)

- Bathing suit (or so I hear, this sounds kind of impractical)

- If you're in a really hard spot, toilet paper

- Gauze and pretty much any other medical supply

I'll keep adding if I think of more things... let me know if you come up with any I haven't thought of!

* "Chimba dawa" is literally "dig for medicine," but it's a euphemism for pissing on the side of the road

** "Jifunga" literally means "close yourself"

- Campaign

I’m in Morogoro right now at in-service training (IST), which is kinda like Camp Peace Corps Part 2. After spending the past three and a half months alone in our villages, all 39 members of my training class are back together for training and to share our site experiences. The first day we all drew creative, artistic, or graphical interpretations of our experience over the past six months. I drew a color coded line graph that depicted my happiness, feeling of success, and integration. Apparently I'm a little left brained. The lines were all over the place, and also tended to be pretty aligned with one another--I can't integrate if I'm not happy, I don't feel happy when I don't feel successful, etc.

Some of the more creative volunteers drew pictures. Katie, who spent a lot of time traveling due to medical and administrative issues, drew a map of Tanzania and outlined her emotions on each of her many bus rides. My friend Justin titled his y-axis "craving for taco bell." One girl just balled up her paper and taped it to the wall. And we all knew what she meant by that, because we've all felt that way too at some point or another. It was comforting to realize that we're all going through this crazy experience together.

Last night, our “counterparts,“ people from our villages that we’ve chosen to be partners and advisors over the next two years, arrived. This next week seems likely to be a sort of “worlds collide” type experience.

The first activity we did was for each PCV to introduce their counterpart and then be introduced by her or him. It was immediately evident that we have all chosen what can only be described as our Tanzanian clones. Quiet people choose quiet people, class clown types used their introductions as an opportunity for a duet standup act, the academic types tended to choose students or teachers, and a girl I’ve always described as an “old soul” chose an adorable and sprightly 70-year-old man.

I’m no exception. My counterpart, Mama Ashura, was the first woman in the group to talk (in this culture, women are usually pretty quiet in groups when men are present). Like me, she has a tendency to dominate conversations, always has an opinion, and frequently raised her hand when a question was asked, eager to show off that she had an answer and unafraid to give a wrong one. We did a group activity that involved writing on big poster papers and I looked over from my group and saw that she, like me, had taken on the role of scribe. And anyone who’s been in a class with me also knows that I have a nasty habit of chit-chatting to my neighbors during lectures. Mama Ashura was constantly leaning over to whisper things to me, give her opinions, giggle over inside jokes, or ask me for translations when the speaker lapsed into English.

Creepy, right?

During the session today, our counterparts had an opportunity to list some of the myths they have heard in the villages about Peace Corps. Among the highlights (and lowlights) were:

- We are CIA spies (the classic)

- We are photographers intending to take pictures of Tanzanians to either sell in America for large sums of money or to share with our friends back home so we can laugh at how poor people are here (if you laugh at the pictures I post online, unless they are of people being funny, I will be very angry at you)

- Our parents lived in Tanzania many years ago and we have come to retrieve the things they left behind (this weird myth exists in my village, apparently--Mom, Dad, anything you need to tell me?)

- We are here on a bioterror/business venture in which we will spread strange diseases, and later return with an expensive cure (this terrifying rumor was also a Mama Ashura contribution)

Most of today was spent clarifying what Peace Corps is and what it isn’t. For the record, none of that is true.

After this training, I'm heading to Dar Es Salaam (the capital) for a few days to do some administrative stuff, shopping, and most importantly to see the new Harry Potter movie!!! I'm taking a slightly longer route back to my village (the shortest possible route would be 2 days anyway) because apparently the rains have started so once I'm there, I'll be stranded in a muddy mess of roadlessness for a good long time. Hopefully I'll be able to be in touch somewhat, but if I seem to have gone quiet for a few months, that'll be why. (And now I can't get "I bless the rains down in Africa" out of my head. Awesome.)

I haven't spent a lot of time in this blog talking about the difficult times. Maybe I've been misleading you, in which case I'm sorry. So here's the truth: At least once a day, the thought runs through my head--"I could go home right now. I could call it quits and be eating a goat cheese salad [or pizza, or thai food, or mint chocolate chip ice cream, or...] in 72 hours." That's the sort of thing we're not supposed to admit, but it's true. It doesn't mean I'm going anywhere anytime soon. At least once a day I also think, "I'm the luckiest human being in the world." The combination of these two thoughts, and the short time frame within which both of them float through my mind, is referred to by volunteers as the "roller coaster." The thing about roller coasters, even emotional ones, is that they are simultaneously thrilling, terrifying, fun, and nauseating.

Some days I would rather sit in my house and stare at the wall than attempt to have a coherent conversation in Swahili. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the cultural barriers separating me from my new friends--it has become apparent over the past few months that there really are some things that can't be understood cross-culturally. As close as I am to my Mamas, there is so much about me they will never understand. And I'm sure they feel the same way about me. And sometimes I just want to sit in my house and sob hysterically about the things I've witnessed here, and the fact that there is so, so little I can do to help. Other times I just feel totally numb. I find myself making really off-color jokes, which I guess is my way of trying to deal with things that are just beyond my comprehension. AIDS? Food insecurity? If I can't laugh, I'll cry. Sometimes I do cry. The realization that, statistically, at least a few of the children I play with on a daily basis are going to die of preventable disease. How are you supposed to deal with that? Everyday, I rotate between feelings of anger so intense I think it might eat me alive and numbness to the point of boredom and sadness so deep I might get lost inside it.

The roller coaster has been getting faster. The twists are more nauseating, the rails a little rickety-er, the drops are more dramatic. I find myself overwhelmed by the simplest decisions -- do I hold on or throw my hands up? Do I scream with joy or scream with fear? And really, is there even a difference?

I pull the hem of my dira over my bare feet and hide my hands beneath my shawl. My hijab is tight and itchy around my neck but I don't pull my hands out to adjust it. Even if I wanted to, I'm practically sitting on top of the women next to me so any unperscribed movement is a poor choice. As the service begins I mimic my Mama's actions--standing, kneeling, endlessly repeating "Allah Akbar." I try to pay attention, stay open and aware of the culture, spirituality, and beauty of this event I am honored to have been invited to. But all I can think about is keeping my white hands hidden and how, for the first time in 5 months, I might, maybe, blend into a crowd. The kids in front and to the side of me can still see my pale face, but to the rows and rows of women sitting and kneeling behind me, my colorful hijab and dira won't warrent a second glance. I feel relieved, free, and human in a way I suddenly realize I haven't felt in a very long time.

But for every other hour of my life here, I will never blend in. And if anyone was watching closely they noticed me fumble over prayers, motions, the itchy hijab situation.

I'm doing what I can to integrate here, but there are some barriers I will never cross. One minute I feel like one of the gang, laughing and drinking chai with my Mamas, and the next minute I notice that a kid has burst into tears at the sight of my strange pale eyes and freckly nose, or a teenage boy is staring at me like I'm a dirty picture in the bathroom who can't see his objectifying gaze.

One story which nicely illustrates the stage of integration I'm at took place last week as i was returning home from a long and poorly planned thougrh, thankfully, safely fexecuted hike up Mt. Hanang with, no joke, 50 secondary school students. I was exhausted and grumpy and ready to be home, alone, far away from the nearest teenager. As we reached the base of the mountain, we still had another few hours of walking back to the village. So, please don't judge me for this, I left the kids with their other chaparone and made my way to the main road to try to catch a ride. (Yes, I hitchhike here sometimes, but if you saw our busses, you'd understand why.) So a young man finally picked me up and immediately started doing what most men here do upon first meeting me--talking about marraige. Usually I just laugh it off and let him off gently by saying something like "That's very kind of you, but right now I'm focused on my studies." (Which has led to a running joke in my village where the young men ask me everyday if I've learned everything there is to know yet.)

But that day, I was in a particularly irritable mood. So the driver ends up asking if I have a husband, but instead of saying "mume" he says "mzee," which works in context but literally means "old man." So I decide to mess with him and tell him I'm married to a wonderful mzee named Saidi Jumanne*. Saidi Jumanne, in reality, is my favorite "mzee" grandpa in the village. So the driver and I have this long chat where I make up all sorts of ridiculous stuff about my fictional marraige.

Finally we reach the village and I hop out of the car to a crowd of the same young men I mentioned earlier, who like to joke about when I'm going to stop studying and settle down. So they're all boisterously welcoming me home and the driver turns to them and asks if it's true that I have an mzee named Saidi Jumanne. It turns out the real Saidi was standing about ten feet away, perfectly in sight and very much in his mid-70s. The men, laughing hysterically, point in his direction and vehemently affirm that he is, in fact, my husband. The driver drove off, utterly confused.

During Peace Corps staging (the three days of logistics before we boarded the plane to TZ), we were asked to write what would make us feel like we've "succeeded" in the Peace Corps. Knowing my tendencies to be a stressed out ambitious freak, I decided to write something simpler than "when climate change halts and all of Tanzania is reforested." I wrote, "When I laugh with my neighbors." Mission accomplished, now on to deforestation...

*Not his real name, but it's equally Tanzanian

Finally found some of that internet stuff again!! Welcome to Month #5. I’ve officially gone from counting days to counting weeks to counting months--the next logical increment is years. That’s kind of terrifying, kind of awesome, and makes me feel like I really haven’t done a whole lot to write home about yet considering I’ve almost been in this country for half a year now. Either way, there’s been a request for more information about what I actually do all day, so here we go.

I’m still in the “first three months at site” phase during which Peace Corps discourages starting projects. Basically my job is to just get settled in, make friends, and integrate. I’m also slowly but surely gaining confidence in Swahili and starting to be able to really get to know people in a way I couldn’t before. In the meantime, I’ve learned a lot about myself. For example: I don’t want to be a preschool teacher. It seemed like a good way to practice Swahili, but it turns out I have no patience and I’m really, really bad at controlling a room of screaming children. Another example: I am not a collectivist--my neighbors think it’s insane that I live alone and feel really bad for me because of it, but I rush home at the end of every day to enjoy my few hours of solitude. Political inclinations aside, living in America for 21 years instilled some serious individualist tendencies in me. I‘m slowly getting used to collectivism, though--if it’s 7pm and I haven’t got my charcoal stove started yet, I don’t hesitate to pop by my neighbors and guiltlessly enjoy her ugali. I’ve also been known to show up at Mama Hawa’s to ask for help with things like spiders, ant infestations, cleaning up the kerosene I spilled all over my floor, etc.

But if I’m honestly integrating, that concept has to go both ways, right? So last night a sixteen year old girl I’ve talked to a few times before showed up at my house with her one month old baby, saying she had been kicked out and had no where to sleep. She definitely wasn’t lying--I had heard from other kids that she had some serious problems at home, had dropped out of school to work after second grade, and had very little family left in the village to help her out. This was exactly the sort of “Lauren has a chance to be someone’s hero” situation that I was looking forward to. But when the time came, I am ashamed to admit I hesitated pretty seriously before taking the girl in for the night. In the end we had a peaceful evening, though she seemed very suspicious of the brown rice I cooked. I asked her what she would do if she had unlimited money and she said she’d build a three-room brick house with a tin roof and buy a plot of land near the river to plant cabbage, carrots, and green peppers (particularly lucrative crops here). Insert reality check here.

And now in no particular order, examples of the other exciting things I‘ve done in the past few months:

- Spent a day hanging out at the local water source talking to people as they washed clothes and fetched water. During this time a long group of kids came to stare at me and after about half an hour I finally turned to them and said, “I’m a human being, not a TV” and then they screamed and ran away. I also overheard my favorite quote so far: “That’s the new mzungu (white person). She lives in America. Life there is so easy--they drive their CARS to fetch water from the river!” This was followed by a very confusing attempt by me to explain indoor plumbing. I’m always surprised by the things I’m incapable of explaining… pathetically, it’s partly because I don’t actually understand how many of our modern conveniences work. Air conditioning, airplanes, the internet… as far as I know that stuff runs on magic.

- I hang out a lot with the local wazee (old people), talking about their lives and all the things they remember about the village. Lately I’ve been on a tree kick, so sometimes I ask them to take me around and show me their favorite trees and their medicinal and technical uses. The younger community members tend to know a lot less about these sorts of things, partly because the area has been pretty badly deforested so there just aren’t as many trees to use anymore. I think this might be the start of a good project that will involve collecting this information (maybe with the help of the school kids through the environment club I am slowly in the process of organizing) and putting it into a booklet type thing. The booklet will serve partly to educate people about their local resources and partly to demonstrate the importance of reforestation and of reforesting with native species.

- I’ve started a girl’s exercise club that mostly involves me attempting to teach yoga to a group of Mamas and girls who are falling all over each other and laughing hysterically at my instructions. Some things just sound bizarre when you translate them into a language you’ve only been learning for four months… I end up saying stuff like “Now you will start as a dog which has down and then slowly turn into a child.”

Besides that I pretty much just walk around and meet people, read a lot, practice guitar, and spend way more time doing household chores than you could imagine. Washing clothes by hand is a full-day job…especially since I live 2km from my nearest water source. I’ve also been doing a lot of running--there are a lot of beautiful trails through the hills behind my house that I’ve been exploring. I’m hoping to run the Kilimanjaro half (or maybe (big maybe) full) marathon in February. I’m mostly posting that here right now so I’ll feel social pressure to actually do it because I’ve just announced to the whole wide internet that I’m going to--so be sure to make fun of me if I give up.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the concept of development. Before I came here, my belief system, peppered with radical ideology and salted with a nagging pragmatism that I can't seem to get rid of, put me pretty firmly in the "skeptical of development for environmental and cultural reasons" camp. I was, and am, incredibly disturbed by the fact that if everyone in the world lived as we do in the US, we would require something ridiculous like 7 and a half Planet Earths to sustain our destructive communities.

So here I am in a little village in Tanzania. You may be thinking of some sort of "land before time" traditional situation where people have a deep ancestral connection to the earth and everyone respects the environment and communities have lived here sustainable for thousands of years. Sorry to dissappoint, but it's not quite like that. My village is a mish-mash of many tribes, all of whom get along splendidly, but very few of whom have a traditional ancestral connection to this land. Many people I've met wound up here during the "villigization" process (Tanzania's experiment in socialism) or migrated to work on sisal plantations during the colonial period. The original inhabitants, pastoralist Barbaig, have emigrated. While many of my friends do have an environmentalist outlook, many of the villagers are just like Americans--they look at trees and see lumber, they look at all their natural resources and see ways that they can use them to make money. And why shouldn't they?

But let's pretend for a moment that community development follows a similar trajectory as individual human development. I would say my village is stuck in the middle of a very awkward pre-teen stage. Most of my neighbors live in mud or brick huts with grass roofs, but many have corrogated tin roofing, a fair few have electricity, and I know of at least five with satellite TV. Satellite TV! But no one has running water and clean water can be as far as 3 kilometers away. See what I mean about the awkward pre-teen stage of development? Here's the scary thing about comparing community development to human development... once we pass our prime, we continue "developing" until our bodies can no longer support life. Then we die. And so will our global community if we continue on the road to "dirty development" at home and abroad.

Of course it's ridiculous to say that my villagers, who have a vague idea of what life is like in the "First World," shouldn't be allowed to work towards achieving it if that's what they want. Above all else, I believe that all human beings have a right to self-determination. And many people want dirty development, at least for now. But what's the point of having highly developed, technological, advanced societies if we don't have a planet to enjoy our success on? The only possible solution I see is for a serious and fundamental shift of values to take place in our already "developed" communities. If we want our friends in the global south to live in luxury and comfort the way we do, we need to find a way to make "luxury and comfort" sustainable, starting with our own lives. Or we need to consider the real possibility that our very understanding of luxury and comfort is the problem.

I’m seating at the head table as the guest of honor at a graduation party for a bunch of kids I’ve never met. Someone gets up to give a speech and I listen for the first few seconds, then decide that I’m too lazy to try to pay attention to a speech I only understand about 30% of. I’m zoning out when suddenly I hear some weird words and notice that everyone is staring at me. If my Swahili isn’t failing me (which it very well could be), I’m fairly certain the speaker just said “Jewish,” “Jesus’s tribe,” and “great blessing.”

I had a lot of expectations coming in to the Peace Corps, but there are some notions you just can‘t preconceive. I didn’t have any idea how to respond, but they were staring at me like they expected me to give a speech so I stood up and said, “Congrats to the graduates. God bless everyone.” At least, I think I said that. I might have said, “I like oranges. Where is the bathroom?” Either way, everyone seemed happy enough and applauded a lot.

That’s a fairly representative snapshot of life in my new village. People compliment me and are very excited by my presence, and I smile and am confused most of the time. But most of the time, I love it. My village is about half Muslim and half Christian, and though everyone gets along wonderfully, they have very strong ties to their particular religious communities. As such, “What is your religion?” is one of the first questions I get asked by everyone I meet. At first, this question made me very nervous. Many Tanzanians I meet have never even heard the Swahili word for the Jewish people, “Wayahudi,” or they’ve seen it only in the Bible or Qur’an and assume that Wayahudi are some kind of mythical extinct population. I get very long, very awkward, very strange looks from pretty much everyone. And then the questions start coming. “Who is a Jew?” is a question that entire college courses, none of which I’ve taken, are focused on. So when I find myself struggling to explain, in Swahili, what it means to be Jewish, I feel a little overwhelmed. I also end up using the word “we” for things that I myself very rarely do. “We pray on Saturday,” I’ll start, and the Mama will interrupt me: “Ah yes, you’re a Seventh Day Adventist.”

It’s a long process, but can be very rewarding. I’ve actually found that being Jewish provides for good balance in my village, since neither the Muslim nor the Christian communities can claim me as exclusively their own. I fasted with my Muslim neighbors during Ramadan and partied it up on Eid--sort of like Halloween except instead of getting candy, you go door-to-door and eat ungodly amounts of spiced rice and beef. I also spend every Sunday zoning out during a sermon I don’t understand at one of the many Churches in my village--so far I’ve hit Lutheran and Pentecostal, next weekend I’m going to Seventh-Day Adventist and next up is Catholic.

My Muslim neighbors are delighted to hear that Jews don’t eat pigs either, and my Christian neighbors think it’s badass that I come from the same “tribe” as Jesus, in their words. One of my Mamas has taken a particular interest in learning about my religion. Having conversations about topics as intense as religion is not easy in a language I’ve been learning for only three months now, but she’s patient and we spend a lot of time flipping through dictionaries and apologetically grinning at each other. After I managed to explain Rosh Hashana to her, she gave me a papaya “for a sweet new year.”

One of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in Tanzania so far came when the same Mama asked me why there are so few Jews. I explained that we aren’t into proselytizing, and also that a genocide was committed against us during World War II. Having to boil the Holocaust down to concepts simple enough to explain with my shitty Swahili was tough. In the end I just said something like, “A bad man with a lot of power didn’t like Jewish people. He didn‘t like people who look like you either. They were forced to move to special villages where they were forced to work like slaves. Then they were killed. Six million were killed.” She held my hand for a very long time and said something very fast in what I think was a mixture of Arabic, Swahili, and her local tribal language.

Later that day, I was listening to my shortwave radio, and they were talking about the Rwandan genocide. I realized that I’d never really thought about the Holocaust in the context of other genocides. I also realized that it's really bizarre that I'd never seriously thought about the Holocaust in the context of other genocides. Jews like to think of ourselves as special, removed, our experiences separating rather than uniting us with other peoples - but wouldn't it make more sense for us to emerge from that experience with a sense of profound solidarity? When we say "Never Again," shouldn't we mean Darfur, too? Just some food for thought.

Here are a couple pictures from my training village. Still no pictures from my new village, it takes forever to upload them so it might be a while.

Two of my favorite people, Logan and baby Batuli:

Me and my hot mess of a host family, making "funny faces":

Two months ago, I was dropped off at a burnt orange hut dwarfed by coconut trees in the picturesque village of Kibaoni. As the village kids crowded around me and stared, Baba gave me an orange peeled in the Tanzanian fashion. I had no idea how to eat it. I felt myself start to tear up as I stared at this fruit that was simultaneously so familiar and so, so foreign.

Flash forward two months. Last night Mama challenged me to peel an orange, TZ style, with a single knife stroke. When I succeeded, she grabbed my hand and she exclaimed, “You are Tanzanian.” Then we sang the Tanzanian national anthem together. Seriously.

I sat with Mama for several hours last night as she cooked dinner on the fire. She asked why I was being so quiet and I said I was sad to leave and scared to live without her. She said, “You’ll get used to it.” and continued to give me a pep talk about what a great Volunteer I’ll be and how she’s sure I’ll be ok because I am able to cook ugali. Then she teared up a little bit as she complimented me some more about how fat I've gotten. I seriously have no idea what I'm going to do without her.

Our goodbye this morning went like this: "My child! I will remember you so much! I have gotten so used to you." "Mama! I will call you and I will say, 'Help! how do you cook Ugali?" "You lie! You already know how to cook ugali! You are so ready." (We both start crying.)

Training is now over. Having passed the Swahili exam and proven myself to have enough common sense to not be a danger to US interests abroad, tomorrow I will be sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I have yet again packed up everything I own and am leaving the place that has truly begun to feel like home.

My last week at homestay was amazing. Ramadan started on Tuesday, and I decided to join my family in fasting during daylight hours. In a weird way, I think it was the most important decision I’ve made since coming here. It‘s hard to explain why exactly I decided to fast, but it was mostly an impulsive response to the sudden realization that I have a limited number of hours left to spend with my host family. The family will keep fasting for the next 30 days, but I'm waiting till I get to my site to decide if I'm going to keep it up. I think it might be a good way to help with the integration process, as my new community has a large muslim population as well. Ramadan with my host family was a lot of fun. We fasted all day and then ate a gigantic and incredibly delicious meal at 6:30. Then we hung out for a bit, cooked some more, went to bed early, and woke up at 2 or 3am to eat again.

A few days ago she explained to me the purpose of fasting during Ramadan. From the every-third-word I understood, it sounds a lot like Yom Kippur--repentance, purification, all that good stuff. Today I told her that I am fasting because people from my religion (she’s still not sure what Jews are, but she gets that I’m something other than Muslim or Christian) have a holiday that is like a one-day Ramadan, but I don’t like to celebrate it alone. I’ve been bumming a bit about the fact that I’m the only Jew in my training class--I’m not religious in the “pray to God on a regular basis” (or really ever) kind of way, but after spending nine summers at Tamarack, four years in BBYO, and countless hours in Temple Israel’s youth choir, Judaism played a role in many of my best memories. Jewish rituals have so many warm-fuzzy associations, but for me, practicing religion has never been about connecting to an external deity -- I practice Judaism as a way to connect to my community. Here in Tanzania, my community is Muslim. So ramadan it is.

I have to wrap up now... time for dinner and then my last night as a trainee--tomorrow I become a real volunteer! wooooooohoo. I'll be getting to my site sometime between the 19th and 21st... still not sure on the specifics there. I have my super safi new cell phone and would love to hear from anyone. My number is 855-782-496-513. You can call from skype for pretty cheap. My birthday is September 10th... Tanzanians aren't really into birthdays, most of them have to think really hard when you ask how hold they are... so you know, hint hint...

So I had a whole long blog typed up, but Karibu Tanzania, it's not looking like I'm going to be able to upload it anytime soon. No worries, I'll just give the cliffnotes. Pretty much my experience so far can be summed up with a single story, which goes something like this...

I got a cell phone! Then I dropped it in the pit latrine. Then my Mama decided it was a good idea to build this ten foot long pole-with-a-bowl-attached contraption thing to literally scoop it out. Of the giant underground pool of human shit. I thought that was a brilliant idea at the time. So did the 50 or so kids from the village who all came over to laugh in my face. Word travels fast. We got the phone out. It was gross. I bought a new one anyway.

This was an important cultural lesson. I'm aware that the normal American response to dropping your 30 dollar cell phone into a giant pile of shit ten feet below the ground (not that that's a normal American thing to do, but you know what I mean) is to think, "Well, guess I'm down 30 bucks. Sucks." But for people living on less than a dollar a day, it would be insane to not go to absurd lengths like taking the roof off of the bathroom hut (don't ask, it was necessary) to extract the valuable item.

Besides exemplifying the differing perspectives we have on money, which are pretty obvious, some more subtle cultural lessons were hidden in the drama. I recently learned that there is no Swahili equivilant for the English construction "to have" as in "to possess." In Swahili, you never "have" an item, you say that you happen to "be with" the item. It doesn't get much more collectivist than that. My host family, despite being desperately poor by pretty much any standard, showers me with gifts and delicious meals on a daily basis. They also went out of their way to extract my disgusting piece of unnecessary electronic-ness from their pit latrine. And they did so while smiling and laughing with me.

I have so much more to write but I only have 4 minutes before the internet shuts off! I also want to let everyone know that I have my site information!! After training ends and I'm officially sworn in as a volunteer, I'll be "installed" on August 18th in a very remote village at the base of Mt. Hanang. I couldn't be more pleased with my placement, it is everything I could have hoped for with a cool/dry climate to boot! Send me warm socks and bring your hiking boots if you come to visit!! I'll give more information later, I'm not sure I'm allowed to post the name of the actual village on this blog but if you're interested you can email me.

I'll be posting my new address in a few weeks, but you can send things to the old one and they'll make it to me eventually. Big thanks to everyone who has sent me letters so far. They keep me going.

so much love,

Lauren

The past week and a half has felt like a year, but now that I’ve settled into a routine time has suddenly sped up. Training has been incredible so far, and I’ll be sad to see it end--though the prospect of moving to a new part of the country and settling in to what will become my home for two years is exciting as well.

It’s hard to explain all of the emotions I go through on a daily basis. There is so much I want to say but it’s hard to find the words. I think I’ll start by explaining what a normal day is like for me in my new home.

I wake up at 5am to the crowing of a rooster. I lay in bed for a while staring at my mosquito net and thinking about whatever crazy dream I just had (realistic and bizarre dreams are a side-effect of the malaria prophylaxis). At 5:45 I crawl out of bed and put on a pair of long pants, a modest tee-shirt, and a kanga (kinda like a wrap). The kanga is very important -- once I forgot to put my kanga on over my pants and my host Mama looked at me as if I’d just walked out of my room naked.

I walk down the mud road that is beginning to glow bright orange as the sun slowly rises. I wave to sleepy neighbors who collecting buckets of water from the well near our home or chasing after escaped goats. I meet up with a couple other PCTs for a morning jog. I’m quite convinced that people would pay good money for a virtual reality “African Village” exercise/video game. The point of the game would be to gather as many points as possible as you run through two or three villages and frantically try to remember how to speak Swahili while enjoying the delicious feeling of humidity filling up your gasping lungs. You get 20 points for each person you properly greet, lose 100 points if you fail to say “Shikamoo” to an elder (an important sign of respect) if a barefoot kid or neighbor decides to follow you for a while, it could go either way. You gain 30 points if you are able to sustain a 2+ minute conversation, but you lose 30 points if you can’t communicate with your new running mate.

After coming home from my morning run, I enjoy the luxury of a warm shower. And by warm shower, I mean Mama heats up water before putting it in a bucket for me to pour over my body. No joke, I love bucket baths. I don’t know why, but my steaming bucket bath is the highlight of my morning. Tanzanians are extremely cleanly people, so Mama makes me take a bucket bath at night as well. Very little can compare to a warm bucket bath under the incredible Tanzanian stars. After bathing, I grab some tea and breakfast and then head to school. It’s not unusual for a small crowd of children to follow me to school--less so now that the village is getting used to having five wazungu (white people) hanging around all the time, but for a while it was like something out of a movie. I think my fellow PCT Logan put it accurately when he said that sometimes he feels like he fell asleep watching a commercial for one of those "sponsor a child" things and woke up here.

After a long day of Swahili class, I go for a “language walk around” in which I’m supposed to converse with villagers using the Swahili words I learned that day. It usually goes something like this (note the 300 greetings, they are a crucial part of any Tanzanian conversation)

Me: Hello! How are you today?

Child: Hello! I’m fine, thanks. How is school?

Me: Good. How is home?

Child: Good. How is your Mama?

Me: Good. How is your family?

Child: Good. How are your studies?

Me: Good. I am learning, slowly. This is a tree.

Child: Yes, that is a tree. *says something I don’t understand*

Me: *awkward pause* How old are you?

Child: I am 10. *says something I don’t understand*

Me: I am 21. *pause* That is a tree. *pause* OK thank you, goodbye!

Language learning is a frustrating process, but I’m feeling more confident after this week. After getting home from school everyday, I hang out around the kitchen (which is actually a mud cave-type-thing outside our house) with Mama, who is also known as my new best friend. We chat about my day (in Swahili, no one in my family speaks English) and she quizzes me by pointing to things within eyesight and making me give her their names in Swahili. Things within eyesight include: cows, goats, chickens, fire, firewood, charcoal stove, kerosene lamp… you get the idea.

After cooking, I chill out with my host sisters and brothers for a while. We play a lot of Uno and sometimes they try to teach me songs in Swahili. Once they talked me into singing for them in English, and Mama came in and yelled at us because I’m not supposed to be speaking English. I took Mama’s willingness to yell at me as a sign that I’m integrating well into the family.

Tonight Mama was excited because I ate all of my ugali (with my hands, by the way). She said something I didn’t quite catch, but I think the gist was that she’s going to help me get nice and fat for the Tanzanian men. Love this country!

I have so much more to say but this is getting ridiculously long and I'm really running late. I'll have internet again... in another few weeks? maybe? in the meantime, see posts below and SEND ME LETTERS. I LOVE MAIL.

For those who were concerned, rest assured that I am alive, healthy, happy, mosquito bitten but not yet sunburnt, and enjoying my first week in Tanzania. I don’t really have a lot to report just yet. I met the other trainees in Philidelphia and we had a long but mostly uneventful trip to Tanzania. The highlight of the journey came about 5 hours into the second flight when I glanced out the window and was shocked to discover that the ocean had turned tan. I hadn't expected the Sahara Desert to be so clear or so impressive from above. We landed in Kenya for a moment when it was still light out, and the landscape on the way down was incredible. Some of the others claim they saw a group of galloping giraffes (haha alliteration), but I'm not convinced they weren't a hallucination.

Since arriving, I've spent most of the time at the hostel/compound we're basically stuck at this week. My day mostly consists of: wearing long skirts even though my thighs are chafing and I keep tripping, greeting people in horrible Swahili and making them giggle hysterically, being frequently stared at and called “mzungu” (white person), and using a shower that is basically attached to my toilet. Meanwhile, I am still not entirely convinced that I am in Africa. For some reason I felt like "being" in Africa would feel somehow different than "being" feels elsewhere, but obviously it doesn't. I just feel like me, only more aware of my skin color and the importance of nonverbal communication.

On Wednesday we will be moving in to our homestay families, and I expect a cold bucket bath of reality will follow. I’ll be living in a village outside of Muheza with four other trainees, a host Mama (mother) and a host Baba (father) and most likely a few host siblings. Hopefully they’ll find some use for the 10 inflatable beach balls I impulsively packed.

Kiswahili lesson of the day:

Karibu Tanzania: Welcome to Tanzania! Also used to mean "get used to it." As in, "Ouuuch there's a rock in my rice....oh well, Karibu Tanzania!"

Leg one of my journey, the flight to staging in Philly, begins in about three hours. In about 24 hours, I'll be waking up to get my vaccines (yummm shots), then hop on a bus to New York, then a plane to Zurich, then Nairobi, then finally finally Dar Es Salaam. Of course I can't sleep. I keep arranging and re-arranging my stuff, suddenly deciding that it's incredibly important that I bring my Spanish poetry books. Then I decide that's a stupid idea when I should obviously be focusing on Swahili for the next two years. Then I decide I'll try to sleep... only to get up a minute later to freak out about whether I'm cheating somehow by bringing my ipod. That's really not "living at the level of the community." Ahhhhhhh no time for second thoughts. I've already been over this a million times, and I really do think that having an ipod will make me happier, and thus a more productive volunteer. Crisis resolved. Then I stare at my luggage and think about rearranging it again. But there's only so much you can do with one big duffle, one small backpack, and one guitar that I don't yet know how to play.

I think I had my first "Peace Corps Moment" tonight, staring at all the crap I'm leaving at home. I don't even remember buying most of this stuff, but for each item I possess, there was a moment in which I or whoever bought that item for me believed it was necessary or at least enjoyable enough to be worth whatever it cost. How could that possibly have been true when I am leaving the vast majority of my possessions behind?

Stripped of the essentials, my room feels foreign. Packed bags are anxiously waiting for me downstairs. What I am currently staring at is a room full of stuff but lacking anything necessary. Then back to those bags I'm bringing, all the thoughts that go along with realizing what I consider to be necessary. A netbook? An ipod? I probably won't even have electricity, but I know I will be so much happier for the opportunity to use these items when I can. Should that thought make me as sad as it does?

I am freaking out on every possible level. I think I have invented new levels of freaking out to freak out on. It's kind of impressive.

OK, apparently this blog is going to be a bit more emotional than my others have been. Get excited and/or have your barf bags at the ready...

- Lauren

PS: "Volunteers" was an excellent send-off movie. Thank you, Uncle Jimmy!

So it turns out preparing to move to Tanzania for two years is stressful. 500 cool points to my mom for being her awesome self and dealing with me.

Anyway. Here is a head's up about where I'll be and when...

(Mon) June 14th - Fly out of Detroit at 7am, arrive in Philadelphia, schlep ass to hotel, do Peace Corps Staging all day. This will probably consist of meeting the other volunteers and lots of paperwork... and if all goes well, some camp-style ice breakers. I am pumped.

(Tues) June 15th - Leave hotel early in the morning, get a bunch of shots, ride a bus to JFK Airport in NYC, flight leaves in the evening.

(Wed) June 16th - Layover in Zurich, Switzerland, but mostly just flying all day. Arrive in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in the evening. Counting the bus ride, that is about 33 hours of travel. Yum.

Next 8 days will be spent in Dar es Salaam doing...something.

After our time in Dar es Salaam, we'll travel up to a town in north-east Tanzania, where we'll be living and learning until Swearing In day, in mid-August. We'll be split up into groups of 5 (out of our group of 45ish) and put into villages which as far as I can tell are basically simulation Peace Corps sites. The people are real people, not simulation people, in case that wasn't clear. The simulation part is that we're in a group of 5 and not all by our lonesomes, like we will be after swearing in. And also that we have Peace Corps staff helping us. Our training includes 5 categories: Technical (so for me, Agriculture and Environmental stuff), Language (Swahili), Safety and Security, Cross Cultural, and Health.

Hello friends,

I'll be arriving in Tanzania in two weeks. I am so excited, so nervous, and so not packed. Packing is overrated; I have been preparing in other ways. I've been reading up on Tanzanian history and politics. It's really fascinating. I am a huge dork. I also have a guitar lesson tonight! I've decided to bring the old guitar my brother never learned how to play to give myself something to do. If I'm ever going to figure out how to play that thing, I think two years without electricity is my only hope.

If you write a letter today, it might beat me there. But it might not. So get on it. I have seen other volunteers from my crew pleading for letters already and I have decided it is a competition and I must win. Letters are better than email because they are portable and I can read over them in my electricity-less hut on steaming afternoons when I'm sweating my toes off and missing the beautiful Michigan winters, which I will have obviously romanticized by this point. Bonus points if you include a picture or a note from someone under age 4. Extra bonus points if that person is named Noa.

My address until August (I'll let you know when it changes):

Lauren Fink, PCT

U.S. Peace Corps

PO Box 9123

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

**AIR MAIL**

Tips for sending mail: (stolen from another volunteer, whatup Sativa??)

-Go over the writing in red ink to make it look more official and important

-Indicate that it contains educational materials

-Never disclose a value over $10 for the items being sent

-Draw religious pictures on (Jesus, crosses, Virgin de Guadeloupe... etc). Apparently the search people aren't too keen on messing with religious crap.

For those who wish to send me presents, here are some ideas:

- Guitar tabs (bonus points for Simon and Garfunkel, extra bonus points for labor organizing tunes)

- Cliff Bars! I am addicted and they are indestructible.

- Powdered drink mixes (crystal light, etc.) - not cherry flavored if you can avoid it

- Recorded cassette tapes (remember the early 90s??). Bonus points for mixed tapes.

- Photos of all the fun I'm missing

- Love letters

- Books (I'll read pretty much anything)

- Seeds (things that will grow anywhere)

- Coloring books, markers, and craft supplies

I also want your addresses!! If you want a letter, please reply to this post or send me an email with your mailing address.

Who's excited?? I AM!!