26
August
2007
Between the end of the school day at 2:30 and the 6:00 dinner bell ( by which I mean the hubcap hanging from a rope that gets hit by a stick), I usually get at least two student visits. Dinner, by the way, is the same as lunch (ugali and beans *lather, rinse, repeat* – I used to comment at home how the dogs always seemed excited to eat the same food every day, twice a day, I suppose it beats the alternative). First, 2-3 students, sent by the student leaders-on-duty, arrive in their role as unpaid manual laborers. If I’m hammering or sawing away at one project or another, I toss them some tools and work alongside them for an hour or so. If I’m low on water (typically the case now, during the dry season), I ask for one bucket per student, and assuage my guilt by paying them in fruit or candy.
My other reliable visit is from (at least) my two most reliable yoga/ju-jitsu students. Even if I’m busy doing work, they drop by to pick up the exercise mat, which they set on a thick chunk of grass near the boy’s hostel. They return later, guzzle down some water, take some bit of fruit and patiently listen as run on about the importance of good nutrition, proper stretching, studying hard or somesuch teacherly thing. These are my typical visits after school, as I explained to Jessica, who was passing through my village after leaving her own to finish her Peace Corps service (see previous post). And then, Murphy’s Law and all that, I got an atypical visit.
When I first heard the screaming horde of young male students, it hardly registered with me as something out of the ordinary. School was out; maybe a rival soccer team from a neighboring village had just pulled up in a Chai Truck. However, the horde got louder and closer, finally bursting through the door of my courtyard leading a colobus monkey by the arm, ensnared in a homemade trap. *Mental note to self* Be careful around mysterious bunches of bananas left invitingly in the middle of the road.
Whooping, hollering and quite proud of their catch, the whole group gave me a self-evident “This is pretty cool, huh?” look. Part of me shared their fascination. I had heard about and seen evidence of monkeys in this area, but had yet to get a good look at one, much less 2 feet away in my backyard. Part of me wanted to grab my camera and really get a good look at the thing. However, the rest of me was somehow horrified.
Like a small child being led by the hand, the poor creature dutifully kept apace behind the lead boy and probable crafter of the reed-snare. The monkey remained downcast and passive, moving only when necessary. I struggled to come to grips with what was going on and ran inside to tell Jessica. “They’ve brought me a monkey!” was all I managed to blurt out.
“Kwa nini mmemkamata?” (Why did y’all capture him?) I asked the group. They collectively looked at me with a quizzical smile, as if I were being rhetorical. Clearly they were expecting a different reaction. As I transitioned from shock to understanding, I led the group outside, urging the immediate release of the animal with repeated pleas not to kill it.
“It’s hand will heal won’t it?” I had asked one of the students. He reassured me with all the sincerity of a parent explaining doggy-heaven to a 5 year old. Like a brave little kid at the doctor’s office, the monkey held out its left hand, looking down and to the right as the trap’s creator undid his handiwork. After a brief pause of realization upon its release, the monkey shot off towards the thick vegetation at the rim of the valley. The assembled masses resumed their leaping, screaming, laughing chase.
One of my more serious-minded Form III students explained to me (after watching my response to most of the incident), “They are happy to have captured what they think of as a dangerous animal.” “So, they will kill it?” I confirmed. “Yes, they will kill it.” It’s nice to have those students who will cut to the chase and not bother with trying to give you what they think you want to hear.
I watched from my side yard as the monkey and lynch mob disappeared into the valley. I think the monkey got away. At least, that’s the memory I’m sticking with.
While the mythical indigenous ethnic group that respects life in all its forms would have been appalled to see one of our genetic cousins paraded about in torment, even the most serene of yogis would have understood the carnage of the next day. For what, I believe, has now been the fourth time, I fended off a siafu attack at home.
Known in English as army ants and in Kiswahili as siafu, these creatures are at once one of the most fascinating and one of the most troublesome lifeforms I have so far encountered here. In the Congo, siafu are known to swarm entire villages, completely wiping out everything edible in their path, including any animals that may be tied up and unable to escape. In Tanzania, you are more likely to see long caravans of them, with larger members linking limbs at the edges of the march to protect the procession. If you jab a stick through the caravan and lift it up, you will collect a good foot of attached guard ants, hanging together like the “Barrel O’ Monkeys” children’s game.
When the siafu attacked my house from the rear last week, I had a small group of female students (who had come to ask questions about Life Skills, read: sex, the previous day) waiting in my courtyard. “Siafu!” they said, and huddled together on my deck looking on as the ground was covered in a black, moving mass, spreading to the walls and heading towards my back door. They seemed shangaa’ed (think: surprised/shocked) as I used up almost 2 liters of kerosene covering all entrances and attempting to find the source of the rampage. Kerosene does the job better than just about anything else, killing the little bastards as well as sending the borg-hive-mind into a retreat. I swept up thousands of them after the kerosene went to work. Although, a few members came back later to collect their remaining dead. Fascinating. Oh yeah, and creepy.
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12
August
2007
First, a brief word about misleading titles. I will not be saying farewell to the good people of *undisclosed location* village any time soon. That being said, I have had cause to think about this eventuality quite a bit lately. Peace Corps Tanzania volunteers leave the country (COS: Close of Service; an important bit of the PC-TZ alphabet soup to remember) during two times of the year. Education volunteers, such as myself, leave between October and December. Health and Environment volunteers COS between June and August; in other words, right about now. So, I have had a chance lately to observe a number of the volunteers in my region go through this process: Throwing Good-Bye Parties; finishing up their Peace Corps projects; seeing their villager friends for (possibly) the last time; making plans with other volunteers to meet up in the United States (“You live in Minnesota? I’m in Ohio, we’ll see each other all the time!); passing along their material goods to other greedy volunteers (“Non-stick pan? All-right! Wait, you don’t have any vanilla or nutmeg do you?) and, of course, mentally preparing themselves for returning to the fast-paced American lifestyle. I have seen tears, protestations of eternal friendship, and even the outright refusal to leave. A number of volunteers opt to exend with the Peace Corps in Tanzania, extend with the Peace Corps in another country (such as the newly opened office in Ethopia), and even to find work with another organization in Tanzania.
Egotistically, my main thoughts concern my own fate. Will I be ready to leave? Or, will I be eager to stay in Tanzania by any means necessary? What anxieties will I face when confronted with the prospect of moving back to the States? For the time being, fortunately, I can see how others are coping with these issues well in advance of my own departure. I even recently had the chance to discuss these matters with some returned Peace Corps volunteers (RPCVs, for those keeping up with the jargon) who were going back their sites for the first time in roughly five years. “When I got back to the States, all my friends had the nerve to get on with their lives without me,” I heard from one self-deprecating observer. Pessimistically, he also commented that “All those people, I said I’d keep in touch with . . . well, life goes on.” On the up-side, the return visits to the village yielded some positive results: improved farming techniques continuing to be practiced, former students holding prestigious jobs near their home communities, and the especially rewarding finding, that people remembered you, and fondly at that.
In addition to simply hearing outgoing volunteers relate these farewell stories, I recently had the chance to see the whole process up-close. Now that my collarbone has fully healed (thanks to you well-wishers), I am back on my bike and once again exploring the region. I therefore took the opportunity to travel to a fellow volunteer’s site (Jessica Stephens lived, of late, in a village 50 km. outside of my own) to attend her farewell party. Jessica had not yet begun to pack up her house; she was still unsure whether or not another volunteer would be moving into her village; and, as she confessed, “It doesn’t feel like I’m really leaving yet.” As she lived in a much smaller village than my own, I was curious to see what kind of shindig her friends and neighbors would put together.
In typical African fashion, everything started late. At 11:00 someone came to let us know that the 9:00 party would actually get started around noon. And so, at around 12:15, our escorts to the party arrived. Leading the front of the pack, 6 young women in identical t-shirts, skirts (in the yellow and green colors of the leading political party: CCM) and baseball caps (reading: ENGLAND) sashayed through the wooden gate to the house in synchronized rhythm, joined in their singing by a dozen or so others, waving tree branches and banging on drums. After assembling in the courtyard, they grabbed Jessica and I by the hand and led us with them on their parade to the office of the village chairman. We moved slowly and were allowed to walk only in dance. Hand waving, periodic chanting or hooting, and singing songs about Jessica seemed to be the norm. Jessica and I fumbled for our cameras, trying to document all of this even as we were thrown in the midst of it. One man held onto my hand, swinging it back and forth over our heads, as I tried to capture some pictures and video, continuing with my dance steps and trying to sing along with the refrain (dah-dah-dih-dah-JESSICA-dah-dah-dah-dih-dah-dah).
Our parade route ended at the offices of the village government, with a table and chairs for the guests of honor (of which it turned out I was one) and groups of villagers assembled before us, sitting on the ground, women and children on one side, men on the other. After the mandatory round of formal introductions, people got up to give speeches. Jessica had warned me in advance that I too would be expected to give a speech. The village leaders extolled Jessica’s work in the village: a fish pond project, a chicken project, milking goat project, an AIDS seminar and a water project (they even thanked her for a cow project that she had no part in).
By far the best part of the presentation, however, was the giving of gifts and singing of songs. In addition to the typical Kiswahili celebration songs, the small choir tried their hand at a couple of English-language selections (especially impressive as no one in the village speaks any English – actually most of the villagers speak a mixture of Kibena and Kiswahili that can be difficult to follow). This means, of course, that some of the lyrics lost or occasionally gained new meanings in their translation. Witness the following sample:
“When I think of Sister Jessica, I am very sorry.” This was the sole lyric for a song and dance that lasted roughly 5 minutes. As I have mentioned before, “Pole” or “sorry” is used far more broadly and with more frequency in Kiswahili than in English. I don’t believe the villagers intended to imply their regret at having known sister Jessica, for example.
The giving of gifts (mostly a barrage of baskets of various size, shape and color) was also accompanied by songs and dances. With each single basket, a small group stood up, sang, played drums and a horn and danced the gift up front. Jessica and I began to stand and dance on these occasions as well. When one woman put a basket on my head as I danced, the women smiled and ululated loudly. The whole affair was concluded by a meal prepared for Jessica, myself and a few of the village leaders. While I had been impressed with the preparations and the turn-out, Jessica was somewhat let-down: “I had 500 people at my AIDS seminar. Where were they?” As it turned out, the funeral of a prominent elder was being held at the same time.
When Jessica had her village tested for HIV, she came up with a percentage rate of around 11%. This, mind you, is in a tiny village that is relatively isolated from other communities and major roads. And, of course, rates in towns and heavily trafficked villages is higher. All of which makes the official statistics of around 7% hard to swallow. Almost any party, therefore, may well be in competition with a funeral. When my parents came to visit my own village, we had planned a party for the whole school community. It too was postponed by a day because a young woman and member of Parliament, who had grown up in my village, was being buried.
Saying good-bye to the village, it seems to me, means not only saying good-bye to the life you have built over the past two years; it also means saying good-bye to people who may not be around when you come back to visit even 5 years later.
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