A Farewell to Tanzania

I’ve been neglecting my blog a bit recently, in part because I haven’t been doing anything particularly blog-worthy, and in part because everything here is somehow absurd or challenging or worrisome or thought-provoking etc—from the Nakivale forced repatriation disaster, or my long, eventful busride back from Kigoma to dealings with the various forms of justice here, or my evolving opinion of the state’s role in development. So it turns out that suddenly it’s the end of my journey, as I’ve passed safely into the hands of Swiss Air, and I’m left trying to articulate a goodbye. Goodbyes are not one of my strengths.




There are a lot of things not to like about Dar es Salaam. It’s a hard place, gritty with dirt and crime and poverty. The city is mean in a way that I will never be. These characteristics can seem particularly harsh in the early days of culture shock, or when you’ve just had some of your most valued possessions stolen, as happened to me a few days ago. But despite all of the reasons to dislike Dar, it has won me over, and, as I sit in this bizarrely clean and air-conditioned airplane seat, I am deeply sad to leave.



So instead of thinking about the things I’ve lost, or whining about the fact that I was a mere twenty pages away(!) from finishing Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject, which I’ve been studiously underlining and marking for future reference, but which is now probably lying in a ditch somewhere since no thief would likely see the value in a scribbled-in book he can’t read, I’m going to focus on the wonderful things I’ve found here, the things I’m going to miss, the things that have changed my mind about my not-so-positive first impressions, and the things that will probably pull me back here some day in the future.




I will miss the brilliant, aquamarine blue of the ocean at Kigamboni, which makes you wonder, “How could I possibly want to be anywhere else in the world?” as you watch the waves crash gently down along the empty beach and contemplate whether you’ll buy a ridiculously cheap ice cream from the ice cream bicycles (or “bice creamsycles” as I think of them) now or later (or, in my case, both). I will miss sunset strolls down that beach, past the locals who cartwheel into the water and call out to the muzungu, to go back across the main road to the village where Bree and Alex live and where one small girl always approaches me to shyly grip my pointer finger while boys call out “give me money!”, or to catch a dalla-dalla back to Kigamboni town, which is lit at night by the candles of street vendors selling fresh calamari cooked in front of you on your way to the ferry back to Dar.




I will miss the smells of Africa. Multiple, conflicting, impossible-to-describe smells (the English language has fewer words to describe smells than any other senses) that fade as you adjust to them, and sink into your subconscious awareness. The smoky smell of morning in the village, cool with the promise of later heat. The stink of sewage, and garbage strewn in a muddy street. The distinct smell of body odor. The faint, elusive perfume of a flower in the humid evening. And more that I can’t distinguish or name, but which flood me with the contradictory thrill of being here, in Africa, and of their comforting familiarity every time I take a deep breath.




I will miss the faded, worn beauty of Dar’s old buildings. Celebrated neither for their history nor for the hodge-podge effect of old and new side-by-side, the pale blue or salmon pink buildings dating back to the 1800s are mostly ignored, orso it seems, coexisting with their uglier replacements and the newer, equally beautiful mosques. The dark lines of weather-worn age, the architectural equivalent of wrinkles, remind you of their pending demise—due either to lack of care or deliberate destruction to make way for new development.




I will miss hearing the Muslim call to prayer.




I will miss the fruit!! Do they even sell passionfruit in the US? And don’t get me started on the pineapple… Actually, let me amend that: I will miss all of the produce, its prevalence and the process of buying it. If I was charmed by places like West Side Market and Garden of Eden displaying their produce on the sidewalks of Morningside Heights as the sun seemed to draw out their aroma to entice passers-by, it’s nothing compared to the fruit and vegetable sellers here. It’s all so fresh and flavorful and adds even more color to the already-saturated scene of day-to-day life, laid out on mats on the sidewalks like a rainbow sea. I will miss the candles on the food stands at night, which make me think of those candles in churches.




I will almost miss the adventure of public transportation. It’s funny: when I was squeezed into the very back corner (where the window had come out, blowing such a thick layer of dust over me that I looked more orange than the cast of Jersey Shore) of the bus that rescued us when ours broke down, three hours into the journey from Kigoma to Dar, and I was worried about my backpack, which didn’t fit between my legs and was sitting in the aisle out of my sight, I texted Bree, “I hate traveling in Africa!!” Her response was, “Don’t worry, soon you’ll be back home and everything will be so easy and you’ll miss it.” And it’s sort of true. Fortunately, the MTA is doing a good job of cutting back on the number of subways in NYC, creating dalla-dalla-esque levels of cramped-ness – yay!




I will miss Kariakoo.




I will actually miss rice and beans. Is that weird? Wait, don’t answer that. But seriously, I’ve kind of been craving it… And pilau is now one of my favorite things ever. YUM!




I will miss the open, giving hospitality of the people who helped me—people who made my research and my travels possible, like Robert, Bree and Alex, Luke and Christiane, Obadiah, and others.




And many other things, I’m sure, that I won’t notice until I get home and don’t have them any more, or maybe even until I return. Like most experiences, my trip to Tanzania has had its ups and downs. My research was much less successful than I’d hoped, for several reasons, and I’m definitely leaving with many more questions, doubts and uncertainties than I came with. Overall, I’d say the experience has been humbling, in every possible way… but that’s a good thing! People like me (i.e. privileged and full of themselves) need to have humbling experiences more often! In the end, I’m really glad I came.

Thinking of Nabokov in Tanzania

“if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, another dimension follows—a special Space maybe, not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again”

In a week, I saw a cross-section of Tanzania. The drive from east to west, Dar es Salaam to Kigoma, cut diagonally through the country, through the vast, empty spaces dotted with the occasional town, and wove around the sporadic hills and towering mountain ranges. More revealingly, the journey from urban to rural brought me from capital city to quintessential African village with stops at each intermediate step along the way: Dar es Salaam to Kigoma to Kasulu to Makere. Each location brought me further from the comforts of home and closer to what some refer to as the “real” Africa, though I resist that equation of villages and authenticity (but sometimes find myself subconsciously buying into it).

I wrote at the beginning of my trip that I wanted to take Tanzania on its own terms, without comparison to Uganda and Rwanda. Nevertheless, at each stage in this progression, I found myself trying to fit what I was seeing into what I had seen in Uganda and Rwanda, trying to match each town or village to a parallel one in my previous travels. But nothing fit exactly and it felt like trying to hold onto water.

In Makere, the bizarre thrill of realizing that I can adjust (kind of, and a bit grumpily) to a temporary life without electricity, toilet paper, or running water (important in that order) brought back memories of Gulu and Nakivale. At the same time, this life was completely foreign, being so different from the other 20 years and 7 months of my life. Unfamiliarity clashed with familiarity as I simultaneously thought, “oh cool, I’m getting a chance to really see how other people who are completely different from me live” and “this is just like Gulu/Nakivale—and hey, why are you making such a big deal about reading by gaslight for two nights? You did that for a whole month in Gulu, silly.” When I walked past a large group of women and children singing outside a home, I thought (with the rosy tint of retrospection) of nights with my Acholi host family, Emma and Mama Winnie, when we would sit in darkness under the stars and Mama Winnie would lead us in singing, “My Jesus is Alive” while a pig wandered through the yard behind us and Nancy would tease us for our funny mzungu voices.

As refugees approached me on the path from Makere to Nyarugusu refugee camp to speak with me, I was almost back in Nakivale (and maybe Makere was the small town outside the camp where I stayed for a couple of nights while trying to arrange housing inside the camp). Even the red clay dust was familiar. Just like before, I groped my way through interviews in almost-correct French, and received many of the same answers to my very similar questions. At the same time, this village was neither Gulu nor Nakivale, and the little differences stood out, stubbornly refusing to allow Makere to conform to the neat categories I wanted to sort it into.

It wasn’t just in Makere, though it was there that I felt the disjointed dislocation of being in a place that didn’t quite fit any previous model the most. Every town feels vaguely familiar, like if I just catch it when it isn’t looking I’ll realize I’m really back in Kitgum, Uganda or that town where we always ate lunch on the road between Gulu and Kampala. But then there’s something a little bit different, a little out of place, every time.

A few weeks ago, RJS posted an article about culture shock in the comments of one of my entries. The article said that culture shock is a loss of meaning, and part of the process of negotiating and overcoming culture shock is the effort to find ways to make meaning for yourself, and I think my attempt to relate Tanzania to Uganda is my brain trying to make meaning out of my experiences in Tanzania.

In the same way that we look for patterns and recurring details in a text to understand what the author is trying to do, or compare similar situations across space and time to try to come up with a theory (both in hard sciences and in social sciences), we look for points of overlap in our lives—when one part of the pattern is superimposed on another—as if finding the thread that spirals through will give us the satisfaction of believing there is a purpose and significance to our individual existences. When these points don’t quite align, it’s harder to ascribe meaning, but I guess the point is that we don’t really want to come full circle anyways. Really it’s all about catching glimpses of comforting familiarity in new places and wondering if the thread is a precise spiral or just a wandering, erratic trail—if life can conform to artistic ideals, or if such organization is necessarily artificial by virtue of being ideal.

Children in Makere

When Tanzanian mothers want to scare their children into behaving, they tell them, “if you keep doing that, the mzungu’s going to come and get you!!”

And I almost have been the mythical mzungu boogeyman the past couple of days. Like the pied piper, I walk through the village with a growing swarm of children around me. One girl apparently told her friends she would follow me until she got to be just like me.

Some run away from me (one girl ran like her life depended on it while the whole neighborhood laughed at her; when she fell flat on her face, we laughed even harder), some run to me, trying to catch my attention, and all of them treat me like the best entertainment possible. It’s a game to chase after me and see who can get the closest before I look at them (or better yet, turn my camera in their direction) and they scatter.



On our first night in Makere, Robert picked out a “really nice” restaurant for us, though I was immediately skeptical because no one was eating there, and they were only serving rice and beans (fine by me, but Robert only eats ugali). Over the past day, their menu has expanded to include rice, beans, ugali and those nasty small fish with their shells still on that they buy dry and then cook in soup (as far as I can tell). Needless to say, I’ve been eating a lot of rice and beans the past couple of days.

Robert insists that we go back there for every meal—I’m tangentially wondering if he has a bit of a crush on the woman who runs it—and on our second night, the woman shepherded two bashful young girls to the bench of the other table to stare at us sit with the mzungu.

“Habarti?” I don’t know much Swahili, but “how are you?” is essential. Behind the glare of the room’s one gas lamp, directly in front of me, the girls are silent, either assuming that I’m not addressing them or too shocked to answer. I try again.

“Nzuri,” comes the timid, embarrassed reply, as the older girl, half hidden behind the younger finds her voice again.

“Nitwa nani?” I try to mimic what Robert says when he asks for people’s names. This is one of the cool overlaps between Swahili and Kinyarwanda: in Rwanda, I introduce myself, “Nitwa Danielle”

The older girl, bolder now, announces that her name is Kalega and her sister’s name is Epi (I think). We stare at each other in half-awkward silence, since I’ve used up almost all of my Swahili other than, “How is your morning?” which isn’t really appropriate at the moment. The girls are dressed in pale pink dresses, and the younger girl’s dress looks like exactly the sort of princess dress my four-year-old self would have absolutely loved to wear every day. I ask Robert how to say “I like your dresses.”

“Npanda mavazi zeno” It takes me a couple of tries, and I’m not sure my point gets across, because the young girl chirps up excitedly that her mami will give her clothes (or at least, that’s how I understood Robert’s translation). Their mother bustles in to wash some dishes in the corner and starts to tease the girls about how much they love the mzungu, how they’re going to dream about the mzungu, and what would happen to them if they went to the US.

The young girl has apparently decided that she wants to give me her dress, and sits there earnestly pulling the bows with a look of deep determination in an attempt to take it off while the rest of us try to breathe around our laughter. We tease her about what she will wear when she’s given me her dress, but she ignores us and begins to steadfastly brush the dirt from every inch she can reach, so that she can give me a clean dress.

Even though I usually think it’s creepy and disturbing when people here tell me they love me as soon as they see me, I’m going to chalk this one up to children being adorable, sweet, and sincerely giving.

Kigoma

So I spent one day in Kigoma, long enough to find out that none of the organizations I wanted to talk to could meet me until next week, and then decided to go to Kasulu, which is closer to the refugee camps and hosts a number of other organizations that work in the camps. In Kasulu, I spoke to a couple of really helpful people (specifically at World Vision and GTZ) and some extremely unhelpful, bureaucratic nincompoops (specifically at UNHCR and IRC), and decided that an even better use of my time would be to go to Makere, the small village on the edge of Nyarugusu refugee camp, where I can meet refugees without going into the camp. Now I’m back in Kigoma and happy to be reunited with the internet and electricity!

I’ve got a backlog of writing to do to get caught up on all that, but in the meantime, here’s the entry I wrote about my first day in Kigoma:

You know that feeling, “I must be the luckiest person alive”? That’s kind of how I felt on Tuesday morning, my first morning in Kigoma. I couldn’t tell you what exactly it was that made me feel that way—I’m sure it had to do with leaving Dar es Salaam on a good note, my optimism about the research I’ll be doing for the next couple of weeks, and the overwhelming familiarity of my African breakfast (too sweet tea and sliced bread with Blue Band, served on an awkwardly low table in a sitting room with gaudy, obviously fake flowers and those stupid lace doilies draped over the couches), but I think mostly it had to do with Robert.

Robert is my guide here, and he’s smart, fluent in English, cheerful, and one of the most genuinely selfless people I’ve ever met. Even down to the little things like making sure I have a place to sit, or begging me to let him do my laundry. He’s short, almost reaching my shoulder, and when he laughs, revealing his practically horizontal buck-teeth, his whole being goes into that laugh. He spent today taking me around to various organizations, introducing me to people, translating when necessary, and basically being exactly the kind of help I needed in Dar es Salaam. He’s so sincerely helpful and motivated to make sure things work out for me. I propose an organization to visit, and he jumps up excitedly and mentions two others that might be useful. When someone doesn’t answer my questions fully, he presses them for answers for me.

I’m living with Robert’s brother, a magistrate in Kigoma. His house is quite big, with electricity (which has already gone out twice, and I’m getting suspicious of its reliability despite their reassurances that this is a fluke), running water (though there’s a leak in the faucet, so I’ve been taking cold bucket showers from the collected water), and even a TV that was playing BBC news and the Cartoon Network this morning. So far they are refusing to let me pay them for accommodation or meals, but I’m hoping that I can find some way to repay their generosity—maybe I can donate to Robert’s NGO, Environmental Protection and Humanitarian Agency.

Kigoma is a small town right on the edge of Lake Tanganyika. It’s actually a lot bigger than it seems, at first, because it isn’t laid out the way we’d expect. A Western city that’s isolated and hard to reach by land, but situated at the edge of a body of water would most likely be centered along the coastline, so when you look at a map of Kigoma and see one main road that leads down to the water, it’s easy to assume that that’s pretty much the extent of the city. In person, it’s a nondescript road, with some small restaurants, a train station, a couple of internet cafés, and some shops—though it is one of the few paved roads in the town.

To either side of that road, the town sprawls up steep hills, and once you get up into the neighborhood where I’m living it feels a bit like a village. Houses are dispersed and farm animals outnumber people on the street The fresh breeze from the lake keeps the temperature cool while the sun beats down, and periodically you come around a corner and see a view of hills rolling into the lake, which stretches out as far as the eye can see (apparently it’s a ten hour boat ride to the Congo).

So at first, I thought that Kigoma was just one strip of road and rural, residential areas up in the hills. Soon I discovered that there’s a ton more activity further inland. The center of gravity, so to speak, is not along the waterline, but maybe a mile to the east. It almost feels like the one, paved road is a façade to trick the mzungu tourists into thinking there’s nothing here, and it isn’t until you turn down the alleyways that you find a bumpy, dusty backroad teeming with shops and activity, or at least one busy marketplace. Kigoma is also home to one of the world’s most spectacular sunsets. Tonight the sun became a brilliant red ball that slid by fractions into a blue haze over the lake, framed by hills on either side. /sigh/

I’m really excited to be here, doing research on refugees. I’ve realized that this is so much more what I’m interested in—the conflicts between different groups of refugees, how their displacement from their conflict influences their opinion of home and here, their relations with the local community, etc etc etc. I have so many questions. Unfortunately, I still haven’t managed to get a permit to enter the camps, so I have to rely on what I hear from the aid organizations working there. But I’m trying my best to find other ways (short of, you know, sneaking into the camp and risking deportation…)

I’ll be back in Kigoma next week to talk to organizations here and hopefully I can find some self-settled refugees. They have to keep a low profile, since they’re basically illegal immigrants, but I’d love to talk to them…

I’m still trying to decide whether I’ll stay in Kigoma until July 20th or 22nd, which would bring me back to Dar on either the 22nd or 24th. Not sure if I’ll have organizations to meet with there, or if I’ll just be hanging out in Kigamboni with Bree and Alex until my departure on the 27th – hard to believe my time in Tanzania is going by so quickly!

A Walking tour of Kariakoo

So I’m heading out to Kigoma, in the far west of the country, early on Sunday morning! I’m really excited. I’ll be there for at least two weeks, meeting up with the aid organizations working in the refugee camps in the region. I’ll write more about that later, but in the meantime, keep an eye out for increased political instability in Burundi following the sham elections, from which most if not all of the opposition parties have withdrawn and there are rumors that the main opposition leader may start fighting again. Chances are that more refugees will be headed my way, since Tanzania has always been the main destination for Burundian refugees. This time, however, Tanzania is threatening not to let them in, which could be a big problem.

In the meantime, I’m spending my last day in Dar (for now) soaking in as much of the craziness that is Kariakoo as possible, relaxing on the beaches of Kigamboni (paradise), and trying not to finish the new books I bought for Kigoma (likely devoid of any sort of decent bookstore) before I even get there. Fortunately the memory of the crap I had to read in the refugee camp in Uganda is enough to make me put down the book… I doubt there’s a worse book than Ben Carson’s disgustingly narcissistic autobiography (I mean really, the guy gives “autobiography” a bad name), but I’d hate to have to find out.

It’s strange to me that I’m already leaving Kariakoo. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface here, though I could probably live here for years and still feel the same way. Yet another way in which it’s like NYC.

There are two downsides to having a really nice camera. The first is that other people don’t know how to use it, and the second is that it’s really hard to be subtle about taking pictures. Especially in a place where I stick out like a sore thumb anyways, where such luxuries are rare, and where people are suspicious of anyone taking their picture. The point is that there are some pictures I just can’t take, and it’s driving me crazy. Since I can’t show you Kariakoo, and it’s really a place worth seeing, I’m going to try to walk you from one side to the other. I can’t possibly do the neighborhood justice, but it’s the best I can do for now.

We start by exiting the apartment building where I’m staying, and greet the building’s security guard. We walk carefully into the street, which is dirty and a little bit wet, so watch where you step. It was paved not too long ago, but the rainy season destroyed it—to the left, there is a hole big enough to swallow a small car (Luke and Christiane have videos from their balcony of cars and buses getting stuck in the mini lake). Merge into the stream of pedestrian traffic and try to avoid being run over by a car—it’s technically a two-way street, but sometimes fitting two cars can be a tight squeeze. Across the street, there’s a stand selling phone credit and other random knick-knacks, and a row of large wooden carts. Wedged between parked cars on the side of the road is a man selling slightly under-ripe oranges from a tray on his bicycle. He peels the zest off with a knife and the smell of oranges fills the air as we walk past.

We reach the taxi stand at the corner, where at least ten taxis are parked and their owners call out “Jambo, mzungu! Taxi?” from the stoop of the corner store. This is one of the busiest streets of Kariakoo, traffic-wise. Dust and gas fumes make the air murky. A constant rush of two way traffic (technically it’s a two lane street, but there are usually at least three lanes. The intersection here can be really interesting, since stoplights and right-of-way rules are laughable ideas. Two lorries try to turn down the same street at the same time, as a dalla-dalla comes up from the other direction. The three stop and yell at each other, blocking the roads in all directions, so a taxi drives into oncoming traffic to get around the truck as a motorcycle weaves in between all of them. Now that the cars are busy working around this blockage, it’s a good time to cross the street—otherwise, you just have to walk into the taillights of a car and hope that the upcoming driver is patient in case you mistime your jay-walking. There’s a large gas station with tacky light-up palm trees and a bunch of employees in official-looking uniforms hanging out, joking with each other and trying to catch the mzungu’s attention.

After walking through the gas station, we reach an unpaved, bumpy road, which happens to be one of the most exciting in the whole city. Most of the Kariakoo-bound dalla-dallas stop along this road, so there are throngs of people waiting for their bus. The buses pull over wherever they get a chance (it’s loosely organized based on where the buses are heading), cutting each other off and keeping other drivers and pedestrians on their toes. In the evenings, there’s a crush to get out of the city (thank god I live in the middle of everything, and travel against the traffic most of the time) and the fight to get onto a dalla-dalla gets really brutal. I am now fully trained to participate in the Filene’s Basement wedding dress sale. Men meander through the crowds and buses with boxes of cold water bottles or trays of roasted nuts and cigarettes on their shoulders clinking coins loudly in their hands and/or making a garbled, nasally sound to attract the attention of people waiting for the bus to squeeze its way through the traffic.

We have to walk in the street, even though there are sidewalks, because the sidewalks are taken up by parked cars and motorcycles, people selling stuff, people sitting on benches, people waiting for buses, food stands, etc. etc. The shops along the road sell clothes, new and second-hand, plastic shopping bags, spare (possibly stolen) car parts, sodas, cooking oil, phone credit, snacks, tools, pirated DVDs, and just about anything. Outside of the big indoor market, there’s another taxi stand of some 20 taxis who offer me a ride every time I walk past, even though I turn them down every time, at least once or twice a day. There’s also a big sidewalk area, with a couple of carts selling herbal remedies and rows of vegetable vendors who lay their small tomato pyramids on mats on the ground. It’s an exercise in agility to weave through the shifting streams of pedestrians, around the vegetable mats and over a rolling onion that’s escaped its bright kitenge-clad seller.

A couple of days ago, as I was walking down this stretch of road, I heard some shouts directly behind me, and turned in time to see a crowd gathering around a would-be thief. Young men began to pour out of the surrounding streets to cheer on the fight, but I got myself out of there quickly. You see all sorts of people in this area, but not many police, except those who blast through traffic on their motorcycles, or the secret police, in their pick-up trucks (we can tell because we see their Kalashnikovs from our balcony).

The side roads behind the main market place are narrow dirt paths lined by market stalls and more vegetable vendors. Here your feet can get caked in mud, and people are usually quite surprised to see me wandering around. As we walk further down the road, away from the dalla-dalla stands and the vegetable mats, the pedestrian traffic thins. There are fewer carts selling sugar cane or blasting music and most of the women aren’t carrying anything on their heads. There’s still a trickle of people walking around the parked cars, and of course shop owners and their friends and customers sit out on the stoop. We reach Mnazi Mmoja park and there’s a tent where I think TVs and radios and electronics are sold, though to be honest, the ring of people surrounding it tend to obscure what’s going on, so I can’t be sure. There are usually one or two crippled beggars here, and another cart of herbal medicine. Cross another busy street, and we’ve reached my favorite street in Dar (though technically Kariakoo ended at the park).

To the right is a covered market selling grains and along both sides of the street is shelf after shelf, and cart after cart, all heaping with a panoply of delicious fruits and vegetables. Pineapple, papaya, passionfruit, mangos, grapes, oranges, bananas, tomatoes, avocados, limes, bell peppers, carrots, onions, and some I don’t even know the names of. A feast of colors and yumminess. Cars don’t typically turn down this dirt road because pedestrian traffic is so dense, so we only have to think about not bumping into people while staring at the fresh produce. We are starting to move into the oldest part of the city, and there are still some beautiful, run-down and crumbling old buildings with intricate carvings that have yet to be torn down and replaced by the ugly new monstrosities.

The call to prayer rises from the mosque to the left, and as we reach the end of this garden of Eden, there’s a book seller, with stacks of books four of five deep on the two large tables and displays along the back wall as high as I can reach. Ever wonder what happened to that old book on, um, anything (no, really, anything) that you gave away but weren’t sure if anyone would ever want it? It’s here. Along with every other obscure, misplaced, unusual and battered old book that no one wanted.

Visiting Keko

I have so much to write about from the past few days! It’s going to take me a couple of days to get caught up, but I’ll start with my visit to Keko.

On Tuesday, Christiane and I went to a seminar on hygiene promotion in Keko, one of the most centrally-located informal settlements. The seminar was conducted entirely in Swahili, so even though Christiane translated some of it for me, I was pretty bored (and let’s face it, “seminar on hygiene promotion” sounds pretty boring anyways). So I took pictures and wrote notes to myself about what I had seen on my way there and what was happening in class. I’ll share some of them here:

Walking through Keko: dirty streets with trampled garbage and roosters picking their way through the mud; tiny shops line the streets; we stopped for water at a place whose window shelves were littered with cheap plastic toys that recall McDonald’s happy meals: “mchina, mchina, mchina,” says Hemedi, our guide. As the wind blows dust from the streets into our eyes and mouths, he laughs to me, “Squatter street!” At least two men have asked to marry us already.

In class, participants are asked to write what they want from the seminar, what they don’t want, and their doubts about the project. A good twenty minutes is spent reading each person’s response out loud and writing each one on a sheet of paper taped to the chalkboard – a boring and time-consuming process. Attentions begin to wander (mine, especially). A man reads the newspaper, people whisper to each other – feels just like home!

At the same time, it’s funny how different education is here compared with the US. It gets me every time. Like right now they’ve written most of the lecture on a paper and people are copying it word-for-word. Ah, now the organizers have moved one of the posters to the back, and people complain that they were still writing. They’re told “if you want to write every word, you should come tomorrow morning because now we want to talk.” I’m seriously impressed. Of course, now that the leaders are just talking, no one writes a word.

We stand up and I’m suddenly aware of how sore my butt is already from ten minutes on the uncomfortable bench. Oh dear. The leader asks if there are different kinds of trees (yes). We’re told to stand a certain distance from each other: far enough to put hands on hips—a huge luxury in Tanzania! We’re led in miming fruit-picking from the branches of a tree, a motion which apparently includes twisting the foot opposite the reaching arm and shaking the butt in a way that looks playful and cute on the more callipygian and painfully awkward on us sore mzungus.

Suddenly, everyone is clapping and singing a song about not sleeping in class! It boggles me that every single person joins in enthusiastically and with no sense of irony or resentment. It reminds me of some of the difficulties we had with teachers in Gulu, Uganda, who thought that we should know an arsenal of games and songs to keep classes lively. I noticed at the group meeting I went to in Tandale last week that sometimes people would all start flapping their hands in the direction of the person speaking. Christiane explains that this is called “giving someone electricity.” I’m not totally sure if it means they agree with the speaker, or like what they are saying, or what. The class applauds when someone gives a correct answer (and by “applauds” I mean “rubs their hands together for a minute and then claps them together loudly once, pushing the top hand in the direction of the person they’re applauding”)

The wind blows strongly in the trees outside the classroom. This bench is really uncomfortable. Children run around outside, yelling. A few stare silently at us from their position under the tree a few yards from where Christiane and I are sitting. Then the more rambunctious gather and yell to each other about the mzungus. It occurs to me for the millionth time that school would be a lot more interesting if I could amuse myself with taking pictures in my real classes, too!

Christiane, Hemedi and I snuck out during the class soda break, and walked through part of the settlement. I stared at the shacks and marveled that they manage to stay standing. There are people everywhere, but not like in Kariakoo, where most people bustle around like it’s Times Square. Here they stroll casually, or sit outside their shops, or play with other children or try to sell stuff. We stop at one of the water taps, where a woman tells us that the water pressure wasn’t strong enough for the tap to come out of the ground, so they had to dig a hole around it and stick in a bucket to collect the water. From there, she scoops the water out by pitcher into her bucket. As the water trickled out from the tap, we could see that it was going to take her a while. We could also see the stacks of buckets lined up around the tap: about 40 people were waiting for their turn.

Hemedi took us to his mother’s home, and I took pictures of the adorable children who stared at us with wonder as we waited for our host to finish her midday prayers. She welcomed us warmly into her one-room home (about 3m by 3m). Inside, the standing room was about 1m by 1m and the rest of the space was taken up by two short beds, a couch for visitors, and a stack of cooking utensils and plastic buckets. I couldn’t communicate, but her sincerity in offering us six of her hen’s eggs couldn’t be anything but heartwarming.

The settlement is slowly recovering from the rainy season. We saw a house that had been completely washed away—all that was left was the crumbling stone jetting out from the wall of the house next to it. Christiane tells me that during the rains, water ran through the settlement like a river, and the houses in the valley were flooded chest-high. Now the trash that people just dumped into the flowing water rests wherever the water left it… I can only imagine that this must be what New Orleans looked like after Hurricane Katrina.