1
December
2007
The new crop of education volunteers just arrived for their site installations and I’m feeling sentimental. It was this time last year that I constructed my water filter, struggled with lighting my charcoal stove, and first learned to keep myself reasonably clean and fed without the benefits of electricty and running water. My early days were spent cleaning up mounds of 2-year old decaying trash and trying to make my surroundings as livable as possible.Â
These days I’ve got a well-structured kitchen, stocked with all the basic appliances and accoutrements, a solar panel generating electricity for my laptop, a decent sized vegetable and herb garden-in-progress and a thorough familiarity with my community and its facilities, as well as a fluent knowledge of Kiswahili coupled with a working familiarity of the local Kibena.  Over the last year I faced the daunting task of teaching students 2 year’s worth of biology in a single year. Next year, all my students will start off with one syllabus topic already completed. Living well in the bush has been no small feat and one that I will undoubtedly continue to work on until the end of my service next year. It is my hope that the next volunteer (hopefully there will be a next volunteer here) gets to start off a few steps ahead because of what I’ve done. For example, my only “gardening” work this past year was composting. Right now, however, I’ve got about 15 avocado seedlings ready for transplanting and grafting, 3 hearty indigenous fruit bushes (Songu - whose leaves are also used as Typhoid medicine) cleared and surrounded with mulch, 4 major compost piles, natural fencing construction, 6 passionfruit vines growing from cuttings, a small herb garden (generously supplied with cuttings by my site mate and farmer extroirdinaire Jason Maglaughlin) and a number of double-dug beds in-progress for vegetable planting. (Thanks to Katy Wettengel for the recent package with seeds!)  But more on my gardening projects for a subsequent blog (and after more of it’s finished). Anyway, hopefully the next volunteer will have a decent garden to build on in their first year.
As for the year-in-review, I have also learned a great deal from my fellow volunteers and have had to say goodbye to far too many of them. I also continue to learn from Tanzanian friends in the village as well as those I meet in towns and while traveling. A prescient observation I made early in training has proven to ring true, that those volunteers and other foreigners with negative attitudes towards Tanzanians are those who have failed to learn Kiswahili beyond the elementary level.  Effective communication breeds understanding and understanding breeds affection – hardly surprising. Of course in keeping with the mission of the Peace Corps, I continue to find aspects of Tanzania that could benefit from American influence (e.g., aspects of the educational system, LGBT tolerance and gender rights, consumer rights) as well as those aspects of the United States that could benefit from Tanzanian influence (e.g., aspects of the community/family structure, religious tolerance, respect for seniors). There are practices common in the U.S. that I wish more Tanzanians would adopt (e.g., better business auditing and management) as well as practices common in Tanzania that the U.S. could use far more of (e.g., households growing some their own food, instead of chemi-polluting their yards for mere ornamental grasses).Â
While I am sure that, when the time comes, I will be ready to move on from UL Sec. for new opportunities and challenges, I am equally sure that I will never be completely finished with Tanzania.  In the best of all possible worlds, I will be able to continue to return here for the rest of my life. This country has gotten way under my skin. On that note, I do have another project in the works for post-Peace Corps work in Tanzania. But, more on that for another blog.
For those who have continued to keep up with me, in emails, letters and delicious candy-filled packages, I cannot thank you enough. I will do my best to keep the blog updates coming along with the pictures. For the next couple of months, my work is moving from that of teacher to farmer. But more on that later.
Peace, Dr. Josh
  Â
Posted: Peace Corps Tanzania, Personal, Tanzanian Society & Culture, Uncategorized
11
May
2007
Posted: Personal, South Africa
5
May
2007
T (Tragedy) + t (time) = C (Comedy) may not qualify as a scientific law in the Newtonian sense. However, it has proven to be a fairly effective approximation of my experiences thus far in Tanzania (at least the ones in which I was the victim).  Since the incident relayed below happened back in January, before classes had even started at UL Secondary, I have safely recovered from any and all injuries here relayed: physical, moral and psychological. It is my sincerest wish that my past pain may now become your present pleasure. I had originally written up this little piece for a dear friend of mine who was going through a rough patch for a little while, operating under the assumption that a little Schadenfreude can be good for ails ya. Enjoy! (This one’s for you Speedwagon.)
It began with an unusually loud scratching noise in the middle of the night. The first time I had heard this particular sound, I could not for the life of me figure it out, pacing throughout the house, periodically glancing outside and even craning my ear towards the ceiling boards.  By this time, however, I well knew what I was hearing. There was a rodent in my house. Somewhere in my wooden cabinets, it was rooting through my pots and pans, dishes, spices and preserved foods, chewing through plastic bags of flour, nuts and fruit, shitting on my silverware. I well knew what I was up against and the price of failure on my part seemed truly unbearable.
I sat up in my bed, pulled back the mosquito net and slipped into my house shoes. Armed only with a broom and flashlight, I crept out of my bedroom and into the main room towards the cabinet and the source of the somehow deafening grating, fingernails on chalkboard disguised as rodent claws on wood. I was ready to beat the son-of-a-bitch to death if given the chance. Using the broom handle, I gently pried open the cabinet doors. The screetching stopped. I became aware of a gentle rain hitting the aluminum roof overhead.Â
Cautiously lowering on bended knees, I peered with flashlight into the simple two-compartment cabinet. There simply seemed to be no place to hide amid the handful of tupperware containers and tins of powdered milk, instant coffee and jars of honey and jam. I stabbed blindly with the broom handle at the interior, giving up all pretence of stealth.  With the instantaneous conduction of an electrical charge, The Rat (definitely not the mouse I had been secretly hoping to encounter) leaped from the cabinet almost bowling me over as it recaptured the element of surprise. It charged half-way around the room before I had managed so much as one feeble swing of the broom. Long before I could even think about rearing up for a second assault, I had to watch in sheer horror as the consequences of my actions dawned on me.  The Rat finished encircling the main room and headed directly into my bedroom, with its multi-compartmented closet, piles of clothes in three of the four corners, and innumerable other far-superior hiding places and vantage points.
I cursed myself aloud with the sudden realization of the inevitable course of events I had set into motion. Try as I might to rationalize, the inherent inefficacy of so-called free will was no salve. If only I had stayed warm and in bed and given The Rat its rightful share of my plentiful resources. I could have perhaps kept time to the rhythm of its scratches, rocking myself gently to sleep. But now, my bedroom, anywhere but my bedroom!
It is now 1:30 AM (or 7:30 at night as the locals say). I stalk back into my bedroom, broom in one hand, flashlight in the other. Of course, Now I have the good sense to leave the door leading outside to the courtyard wide open, hoping The Rat will accept the invitation. After twenty futile minutes of haphazardly poking and proding about my bedroom, however, I despair that the case is hopeless. I have already blown my cover in a display of sheer oafish boobery. It is dark, my solar flashlight has begun to lose its charge and fade, and the guerilla war always favors the native. I am the colonizer in the bright red “shoot-me” coat and I know it. Crushed, dejected, I sulk back into the main room, propping myself up in a chair facing the bedroom door. Stubbornly, I convince myself that I can wait out the enemy, lure him back to the treasures of the cabinet and perhaps see him out the courtyard door or at least cede back the original territory and sleep soundly in a gentle Rat-free bliss.
By about 3:30 AM, it was again time to reassess the strategy. The Rat could gnaw on my face while I slept for all I cared at this point. I might have even voiced this judgment aloud, although the haze of historical memory still clouds this period of the night. At any event, I had surrendered. The Rat had won. I would return to bed, tucking my mosquito net tightly into the space between the mattress and the frame. I would pretend the creature that feared neither wood nor plastic would somehow be repelled by thin netting. In any event, this would all still be preferable to camping out in the chair, fully exposed and sleeping poorly. As I cautiously returned to my bedroom, I listened for any sounds of The Rat and, hearing none, dozed gently off to a much deserved sleep.
It was maybe around 4:00 AM when I lept out of bed and rushed headlong into the courtyard. For this part of the story, however, I need to back up a bit. Not having any electricity in my house and therefore not having any proper refrigeration system has taken some getting used to. For example, eggs and pineapples last quite a long time in the cool temperatures of Tanzania’s southern highlands. Some fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, may turn rapidly and must be consumed during a shorter time frame. The real issue, however, has been with cooked food. I have long grown accustomed to cooking in bulk and freezing, enjoying the time I spend cooking but recognizing that my slow pace makes daily preparation something of an excessive commitment. Here in Tanzania, I am also more conscious of wasting food, which has truly taxed my ability to cook just enough for maximum work efficiency without dumping out kilos of food in a land of significant malnutrition. So, I have learned, for example, that I can cook a meal and re-cook that meal the second day with a minimum of effort. The lesson I learned the hard way is that you cannot re-cook again, saving your stir-fry with steamed vegetables for Day 3. No matter what.Â
In my case, it was on this “Night of the Rat” that I had eaten rice and greens on the 3rd day, to which I had added additional fresh vegetables and curry. I’m still having a hard time even smelling curry powder. Returning to my story, my self-inflicted food poisoning kicked in right after I’d resigned myself to the Rat-occupied bedroom and drifted off to sleep. My irrepressible urge to bolt out into the courtyard was quickly followed by a long and protracted bout of what I can only describe as projectile vomiting. I you’ve had the occasion to experience this phenomenon, you’ll instantly recognize the descriptor.  In case you don’t know, there’s (1) Vomiting (2) Intense Vomiting and then there’s (3) Projectile Vomiting.
When my body had satisfied itself that the contents of my stomach were sufficiently empty, priority then shifted to the lower tract. I had barely managed to race to the pit latrine and pull off my pants when a virtual waterfall of diarrhea errupted out of my ass. On the bright side, there was very little I could do to consciously control the situation. I could easily resign myself. I simply cleared a path and my bowels took care of the rest. I suppose it would be equally accurate to refer to this particular episode as projectile diarrhea as well, but there was really no opportunity to “project” anywhere but into the pit latrine (which the locals call a “choo,” pronounced ch-owe).  Therefore, I think I’ll leave it with the metaphor “Waterfall” and leave it at that. But no matter. Nor do I intend to dwell simply on the scatology of the scenario. After all, it was not long after exercising my colon that I resumed projectile vomiting, at least until the mass failed to keep up with the force.Â
Now I should point out that it seemed fairly clear to me at this juncture that my body was desperately trying to void everthing I had deigned to introduce into it. Also, by my shivering uncontrollably at the mere thought of curry (although obviously not the culprit, guilty by association nonetheless), I assumed rather unproblematically, it seemed to me, that I had fallen victim to food poisoning. But more on that in just a bit. Needless to say, when I dragged what was left of my body to bed, my concern about the rat had completely vanished (no thanks for small blessings). I would have no happily kept the animal as a pet, furnishing it with its own cabinet playground and guest room if it meant I would once again be able to keep food in my digestive system.
I was already thankful, though I had no energy to make use of it yet, that I had several packets of powdered chicken soup mix and bouillion in the cabinet, the rat cabinet I mean. As a brief aside, I had won these prized food items in a 5-round game of Texas-Hold-Em with three other volunteers. When one of our colleagues unexpectedly ET’ed (Early Terminated, in other words went back home to the United States) we had gambled her possessions away – far more valuable to us at this point than to her what with her imminent return to the land of malls and supermarkets. I had been lucky enough to win her solar flashlight (a Christmas gift that had been given to all volunteers from the U.S. Ambassador) as well as these several packets of soup and bouillion. But anyway, back to lying in bed, a mere shell of a human being.
As expected, the Fundi (think handyman, although the word refers to any skilled person) showed up at my house by 9:00 AM to continue his work fixing the doors in my courtyard. As I had given him some avocados from my tree the previous day, he was kind enough to bring me a bag of carrots, fresh from his garden. It was all I could do simply to walk outside, inform him that I was sick, thank him for his gift and promptly return to bed. Something as basic to my life here as speaking Kiswahili was almost beyond me. I did not even bother to lock the door to my courtyard as I threw myself back into bed. Naturally, the Fundi reported to the teachers that I was out for the count, or some suitable Kiswahili version of that idiom. Of course, they came by individually to visit, spacing out their housecalls just far enough apart to ensure that I could not get back to sleep.
When Tanzanians are sick, apparently, they love nothing more than to be visited all day long by a procession of friends and well-wishers. I have tried to grasp this cultural incongruity. “I look and feel like shit, need bed rest to recover, . . . what a perfect time to have company over!” And so, I found myself sitting and keeping company with my array of individual guests over the span of the morning and afternoon, in the very room where I had stalked The Rat not several hours earlier. “Pole sana.” (I’m very sorry) I heard many times. Asante sana (Thank you very much) I continued to reply. This actually represented the bulk of my conversations. What else to talk about? Well, there’s vomiting, diarrhea, rodent infestation, what do you want to talk about?
Eventually, I would express how little sleep I had gotten (Pole sana, Asante sana) and excuse myself to bed, neglecting to see my visitors out or even close/lock the door for that matter. I had at the time no patience for playing host and was still dumbfounded that I would be put into the position.  Nevertheless the sincere looks of concern from my guests kept my frustration from turning into bitterness or anger. They meant well; we just were not on the same page – or some suitable Kiswahili version of that idiom. However, the spontaneous attempts at diagnosis almost pushed me over the edge.
“You probably have malaria,” was the first bit of good cheer my guests spread with their arrival, engaging in helpful conversation. “I don’t have malaria,” I insisted, “it was food poisoning.” Yet their zeal for misdiagnosis continued unabated. “Maybe it is cholera.” Charming. Just what I needed with my hair-trigger vomitous stomach, the taste of bile in my mouth and a possible rat infestation: the doomsday doctors to keep me from much needed sleep. Of course, the malaria diagnosis I had come to expect. Tanzanians tend to assume that the first sign of sickness is malaria. Frankly, it’s not a bad impulse. Treating yourself for malaria when you don’t actually have the disease is still preferable to death-by-malaria. Then again, Tanzanians, in my observations, might call a general sickness malaria without bothering to take it seriously enough to treat. Stigmatized diseases like HIV/AIDS are also usually disguised as malaria. You don’t go to a funeral and hear that the cause of death was AIDS; it was malaria.Â
As I said, the malaria thing I expected. However, over the subsequent days, whenever discussion of my sickness arose (long after it had abated), the teachers refused to accept my diagnosis. “I think maybe you were very tired from working in the garden,” I heard. Fed up with this bizarre obstinancy, I finally snapped. “Being tired from working in the garden doesn’t make you puke and shit your guts out!  My body was clearly getting rid of rotten food that I had re-cooked one time to many and it’s my own damn fault. Trust me. THIS WAS FOOD POISONING!”
“But, if you tell the Peace Corps that you had food poisoning,” one of the teachers said to me, “they will think someone has tried to poison you.”
“Oh,” I said, everything finally becoming clear to me. “No,” I now calmly assured him, “food poisoning is just the name we use for describing the symptoms that come with eating rotten food. The medical officers at the Peace Corps know this. No one will think I was deliberately poisoned.”
How sweet. They were worried I would be sent home. Who could stay angry and dwell on such a thing? In fact, I’m feeling better about it already.
Posted: Peace Corps Tanzania, Personal
5
March
2007
Unfortunately, I am taking a brief hiatus from my work at UL Secondary. A nasty spill on my bike has left me with a fractured left clavicle and an upcoming trip to South Africa for surgery.Â
Posted: Personal
18
September
2006
This will be my last post before I arrive in Tanzania. I’m feeling a bit scattered, but I want to put a few more thoughts down before I leave, some political, some personal.
I know I’m a bit late for commemorating the 5-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks, but as I think about the task of representing our government’s Peace Corps under the command of our “wartime president,” I cannot help but think about the day that seemed (on the surface) to change the way our country views foreign policy.
For me, as I’m sure for many, September 11, 2001 was frightening, ominous, yet surreal and somehow detached. For me, it was difficult to square these horrific events from the beautiful Baltimore morning outside of my high-rise apartment. Celeste had called from work, woken me up and told me to turn on the TV. I barely understood the significance of what I was watching. I remember shaking my head and saying that somewhere in the world, brown people would be getting bombed for this atrocity. I felt as certain of this fact as I was fearful that those who paid the price for this would have as little connection to this terrorist act as the murdered civilians in New York City had to this falling symbol of American imperial hegemony. As America embraced the extremist dictatorial General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan as an ally while cynically turning on their dependent client-state in Afghanistan, my worst fears seemed to be confirmed. This was another example of the West playing a calculated game of political chess with 3rd World pawns. Their civilian dead would be classified as calculated losses while ours would be a rallying cry for perpetual warfare.
While September 11, 2001 pushed me deeper into the study of U.S. foreign policy, it was March 11, 2004 that made this disconnected, surreal war a personal matter. Again, it was Celeste that woke me up; the phone was for me. My mom’s voice on the other line was somewhat stiff and controlled, emotionally precise. She remained clear and careful in her tone without losing any empathetic inflection. It was the well-practiced voice of a professional therapist far too accustomed to sharing in her clients’ pain and suffering. She started with the facts. Did I know that Scottie had been working in Iraq? I did. Although now, in retrospect, with a mind crammed full of information about his work with Blackwater, about his expectations for acting as a bodyguard for Paul Bremer, about how he was betrayed and ultimately murdered, I cannot now reconstruct what I really knew at the time. Nor can I remember exactly what my mother told me next. Did she tell me to turn on the television? Did she tell me to call Katy and Jason? Or did she just tell me to get on a plane and come back to Florida? I’m not sure what all she asked me to do at this point, only what I soon learned.
Stephen Scotten Helvenston, age 38, was killed in the city of Fallujah along with fellow Blackwater employees: Wesley Batalona, Jerry Zovko and Michael Teague. Their bodies were burned and mutiliated and two of them were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
I had only ever thought of the Euphrates River before as the boundary line of the fertile crescent, the cradle of civilization, the waters outside the Garden of Eden.
One of the the last times I saw Scott, we were sharing a trundle bed in my old room at my parent’s house. I felt self-consciously out-of-shape laying next to him; he was certainly the most impressive physical specimen I have ever known. In fact, he was staying with us while promoting a series of exercise videos for the Home Shopping Network; they promised to teach slobs like me to “train like a Navy SEAL,” although I couldn’t imagine that 30-minutes a day, three days a week could ever put me in the same league as him. Not that I was trying all that hard at the time. I had taken Scott out drinking. I was smoking like a chimney and although he hated the stuff, he didn’t say a word about it. We drank local brews at the Tampa Bay Brewing Company, watched South Park (a new show at the time – that appealed to Scott’s dark sense of humor) and talked about war. Despite his deserved family reputation for being something of a hothead, he was calm, thoughtful and seemed to confirm my cynical assumptions about U.S. foreign policy in Central America during the 1980s. Once we were back at home and getting ready to sleep, our conversation transitioned from the professional to the personal.
He talked with me about his kids, Kyle and Kelsey, how proud he was of them, his fears about being the best parent he could. Although, as a SEAL, Scott faced combat challenges the likes of which I’m sure I could never imagine, when I think about him, I think about how he overcame his peacetime challenges, as a father, a brother and a son.
At a time when our military is overextended in an illegal, immoral war in Iraq and an ill-prepared, ill-conceived war in Afghanistan, as we continue to support immoral military actions in Haiti (having facilitated the coup against Jean Bertrand Aristide) as well as in occupied Palestine and Lebanon (failing to hold Israel accountable for tageting civilian populations), I will be representing the United States at a secondary school in Tanzania, teaching biology, chemistry and physics. It feels both inadequate and overwhelming.
I was asked to write an aspiration statement for my impending service to be sent ahead to the training team in Morogoro. I won’t restate here, but to summarize: I just want my work to be relevant.
P.S. As I write this, my good friend Kevin Ashbaugh is in critical care at St. Joseph’s. For those of you that do, send him your prayers.
See y’all in Africa, Josh
Posted: Personal
14
September
2006
When I first began my Peace Corps application (almost two years ago at this point!) I was instructed to write an essay about my previous experiences with other cultures – positive and negative. Knowing that any material I submitted would be held as confidential, I wrote without much in the way of self-censorship. What follows is essentially the essay I submitted with a few emendations and updates. As a big fan of David Sedaris, I know that open discussion of private family moments can be something of a double-edged sword. I hope, however, that my search for honesty and clarity about the cross-cultural events that have shaped my outlook on Peace Corps service has not overwhlemed my sense of proper discretion in this instance.
Cross-Cultural Experiences
When Granddaddy remarried in the Summer of 1998, my family’s reaction had been mixed, bittersweet to put it charitably. When he called from Jamaica to announce his intentions, he instructed his children on the other line to: “Say hello to your mother.” It had only been two years since Grandmere had passed away, after a protracted series of tests, therapies and remissions from her third and final cancer. My grandfather’s new love, a Jamaican woman roughly thirty-five years his junior failed to arouse any wellsprings of maternal affection in her soon-to-be adopted family back in Florida. It is hard to say whether or not she would have been better received under different circumstances; first impressions, after all, still matter.
At least for my mother, sister and I, my grandfather’s newfound love was immediately seen as a welcome development, a sure sign of progress. We could all still remember the Easter before last, when my sister and I raged against our grandfather’s depictions of the untrustworthy “Japs” and incompetent “Negroes” that he had encountered during the Second World War in the Pacific theater. In his own inimitable style, Granddaddy defended these racist stereotypes with the same unflappable, cocksure disposition that had made him both a great salesman and an overbearing father. Growing up I had rarely seen my grandfather contradicted, whether he was predicting the impending Rapture, explaining that God answered his prayers by sending him checks in the mail (from “Nowhere,” he insisted), or buying Gator football tickets (he never paid more than face-value!). Needless to say, it was quite something when my Dad interrupted our debate by telling his father to just shut up about the whole thing. None of us had ever seen anything like that before. Apparently Granddaddy was as stunned as the rest of us, and he did shut up. Anyway, now that he was living in Jamaica and engaged to be married, it seemed as though love had broken down his long held attitudes about race. At least it seemed to be a great thing to the three of us.
My father and his three younger siblings, however, had somthing of a longer road to travel. The hardest part about watching your parent re-remarry, I have to think, must be the internalized fear that your parent is somehow being “replaced.” Granddaddy’s less-than-tactful, “Say hello to your mother,” hardly worked to dispell this fear. In addition, a lifetime’s worth of relaively benign xenophobia and subtly circumspect racism at their father’s feet could not have been without consequence for my dad and his siblings. For some, I think the marriage catalyzed already destructive tendencies into full-blown moral and emotional breakdowns. For my dad, I believe, it became a time of reckoning and self-awareness. He was one of two siblings to attend the wedding in Jamaica. “Just don’t have kids!” he warned his father.
The four of us, Mom, Dad, Beth and I flew into Montego Bay where we took a taxicab along the coast and through the mountains to Mandeville, Jamaica. My third visit to the country, this was the first time I felt that maybe I was supposed to be there. Back in the summer of 1992, I still considered myself a Christian. Along with some thirty other 16 and 17 year-old predominantly white kids from the affluent Hyde Park and Palma Ceia Presbyterian churches, we had come to Ocho Rios to build a basketball court at a local church and to distribute used clothes in the nearby mountains. We stayed in the homes of local parishioners, ate communally with the whole congregation, worked by day and played by night.
There are at least three episodes I cannot forget about this trip (my first ever outside the United States). When we delivered used clothes to the people in the mountains, I was struck by the condition of their homes, free-standing shacks really. Children came running up to us when they saw what we were doing; they tried on our clothes, flirted and played with us. Soon, raised voices behind me caught my attention. A man was yelling at us, angered and insulted by our handouts of used wares, our carefree decadence, our ignorant hubris. Poverty was not a game and his home was not a playground. The minister of the local church confronted the man; he dismissed the man’s resentment and protected our sense of benevolence. We went back to enjoying the sunshine and thought no more about it. Later on, I found myself griping about the home in which we were staying, the cold showers and generally meager accommodations by south Tampa standards. I had unintentionally done this in the presence of our hosts. Finally, I acutely remember how we spent our free time in Ocho Rios. A group of us began to trespass at the local hotel, where we swam in the pool and drank complementary Rum Runners and Yellow Birds. Our whiteness was the perfect cover. A British boy of about 10 that I met in the pool told me how he had been offered marijuana on the beach. “It’s called the black market,” he told me, “because everyone who sells it is black.”
My second trip to the island was devoid of any of the previous pretenses to altruism. At this point, Granddaddy had been living in Mandeville for almost a year where he worked at Jamaica Bible College. A man who finished his undergraduate degree from a Bible College in Clearwater, FL at the age of 63, he was known in Jamaica as Dr. Levens. At my grandfather’s urging, our family stayed at an all-inclusive resort on the coast in Runaway Bay. We basked and gorged for nearly a week. While the hotel owned and closed-off the stretch of beach on its face, locals congregated all over the beach adjoining the hotel property. I spent a few long afternoons talking with a local named Winston (his friends called him “Blackah”) who told me all about his life on the island, his own business of selling t-shirts and drugs to tourists, about Jamaican history and politics, local crime, corruption in the police force as well as in the hotel industry. He was well-informed as well as ambitious. “I bought this pair of Nike shoes,” he proudly showed me, “they cost me about a week’s pay.” Winston said he had never left the island and assured me he would probably be on the same stretch of beach if I ever returned.
One year later, at the wedding in Mandeville, my family moved from place to place as if in a daze. The people we had just met talked to us as if we were old friends; they laughed with us as if we all knew the same inside jokes. We were honored guests; at the same time, we were expected to pull our fair share of the work that needed to be done. It was both comforting and disconcerting.
As I get ready to leave for Tanzania, where I will live with a family I’ve never met, learn to speak Kiswahili, learn to cook/clean/live without electricity or plumbing, I have to imagine that I will encounter similar feelings, a kind of shotgun approach to familiarity and intimacy.
Posted: Personal
