Salaam Aleikum Zanzibar

Left Tabora yesterday in a flood of tears after saying goodbye to the children. All of them had started calling me "Mama Chiku", so that, added to the fact that Chiku herself came up to me and said "Sister Liza! Mimi na wewe kwenda Australia"(Me and you go to Australia), made leaving feel like my heart tore in half. I know the idea of bringing Chiku home with me is a ridiculous pipe dream for legal reasons (made more ridiculous by the fact that I am unmarried, the wrong religion for international adoption, unemployed, homeless and unconversant in her native tongue) but I really felt a connection with that little girl and could actually imagine becoming her mother. It was interesting to contemplate just from an ethical perspective - ie, what are the rights and wrongs of bringing an 11 year old swahili-speaking Tanzanian orphan to live in Australia? It's the whole cultural maintenance vs quality of life question, made bigger and more resonant as a result of having someone I came to love dearly bring an otherwise hypothetical argument to life. It's hard to accept the image of Chiku, as bright and clever and sparkly and promising as she is, becoming pregnant and housebound by age 16 by some unemployed bloke who will abandon her and only come back to knock her up again the following year. Without a private school education, it's entirely possible this will happen to her, regardless of how clever she is. She's an orphan in a country where 5 per cent of children finish high school.

My mind is ticking over.

Arrived in Zanzibar yesterday afternoon and was soon overcome with excitement at the prospect of a fairly decent hotel room (with my own bathroom! It's the first time I have actually been able to see the bottom of a toilet bowl in three months - there are no words to describe the one at the HAPO house, I am still having flashbacks). Zanzibar itself is languid, hot and exotic, despite the hoards of tourists walking around in (gulp) shorts, which I haven't seen since I arrive in Tanzania. It's weird getting used to seeing body parts again (including my own). Last night I walked through the crazy walled streets and accidently found myself at Forodhani Gardens, an outdoor seafood barbecue market perched on an ocean wall, where you walk around sampling skewers of lobster, prawns and octopus while the vendors compete (very theatrically) for your business. Obviously I have many opportunities for a four-day adventure with a scantily-clad, bemuscled rastafarian (as was offered to me at least seven times between the beach and the market) so I am sitting back and considering my option before picking my companion for the week :-)

The rain seems to have stopped so I'm off to explore Stonetown... will probably head to one of the beaches tomorrow. So far loving it here.... but nothing compares to my Tabora....

Totall Recall

I can’t believe I will be home in two weeks. That’s not leaving Tabora in two weeks, that’s home in two weeks. In a place where everything from the post to a meal order takes eons, I can’t believe that time could go so quickly. It’s a weird dichotomy – in some ways I feel like I got here yesterday; in others I feel like I have always lived here and I can’t imagine anywhere else on earth feeling normal again. Claire and Becci, the new vols, got here in the second week of December which feels like yesterday, yet next weekend the next lot are arriving, overlapping with the time I am supposed to leave (but I am staying in Tabora for a few extra days until Wednesday 16 January). It’s insane. I can barely remember what it was like to be here with Ann Marie and Sandra even though the majority of my time here was spent with them. Having Claire and Becci here is so enormously different; it’s a completely different vibe in the house and while I was worried about what it would be like to share work and play with two 18 year olds, it’s been more fun living with them. Of course, they spent the majority of their first two weeks here ensconced in their very first adventure-travel romances with two pilots (who have all, blessedly, now left for Mali, so the girls can concentrate on, er, actually working at HAPO) so things haven’t exactly been routine like they were in November/December. But that’s also due to us now having the kids all day from 9 to 3, instead of only in the afternoons like it is when they’re at school. It has been crazy and difficult and HOT but I cried while looking at my pictures and listening to my CD of the Tanzanian Top 40 this afternoon, so I am clearly not too ruffled by the intensity of my time with the children.

How can I ever communicate to anyone what it’s like to be here? Sometimes I’m not sure even I fully grasp the reality of it. I think really, only Mandi will ever understand how I feel. There were many times we’d be walking along the road or riding our bikes into town (the time I most feel like a grass-roots African, like I really belong here) and she’d turn to me and say “wewe… can you believe it? We live in motherfucking Africa.” For something that feels so real, so comfortable, so damn normal on a day to day basis, it sure is surreal. I’m at the stage where I’m starting to get obsessed with memory – I walk into the kitchen to make chai and I try and file the whole sequence away in my mind – feeling the sand under my feet; watching the tap and the kettle leak; gazing out the window into the compound while I wait for the tea to brew. I want to remember that our night guard’s radio has only one volume – sauti sana (very loud) – and that distorted bongo flava and news of the unrest following the Kenyan elections blasts in through our glassless windows from 6pm every night.

I want to remember how it sounds to hear “hey, mzungu! I love you!” when I ride through the streets; how people smell here (like hard work and sweat and rainwater); how I have learned to cook rice African style and that I know what okra is and that I cook a killer dal; the way the weather can change from stifling hot to pelting rain in a ten-minute period, and that I know it’s going to happen when the living room curtains blow suddenly inward. The way the kids eat from a “kitchen” in the backyard of HAPO that gets hotter than hell every day from Martha cooking on coals on the ground.

The way Tabora drips with mangoes; the way the One Temi Band members at the Tabora Hotel dance like they’re imitating animals from the Serengeti, all jumps and kicks and footwork. How we find ourselves speaking Swahinglish without even realizing it until it’s played back on video.

The way I love being known in town as one of the HAPO girls; that people know why we are here because Dr Sekasua is well-known in Tabora, and that people routinely introduce themselves and thank us for coming to Tanzania to “saidia” (help). That we are let into the Tabora Hotel for free, even though we are the ones who could really afford the $3 entrance fee, because Mr Pole is grateful for the work of volunteers. How appreciative people are of (attempts at) Swahili, and that all the resulting laughter is good-natured rather than sinister.

How when it rains, my street becomes a river. The lightning that’s so frequent it looks like fireworks. The hedgehogs that muddle through the grass at night. The pink, purple, grey and blue lizards that do push-ups in the sunshine.

The taste of fried grasshoppers (one of the legs got stuck in my teeth). The first time I saw a kinyonga (chameleon), watching it turn from brown (on a stick) to bright green (amongst leaves) and wishing I could put it on my purple shirt.

The time the pilots did a flyby 100 metres over the HAPO house and we ran outside and waved in our pajamas.

Sheki’s insistence that Mandi and I announce to Dr, Mama and the rest of the Christmas guests around the bonfire that we were sending him to university, and the sound of Mama ululating in delight.

About the children: that I am still in love with Chiku and could bring her home in a heartbeat; the way she sweats all over her whole face and head; that she likes to run up beside me, grab my arm with both hands and gazes up at me with that smile that could move mountains…

…how tiny Kagori is; the time the other kids dragged me over and made her show me the burn on her inner thigh, that her buck teeth make her photographs sparkle…

…that Maganga always walks straight up to the volunteers, extends his little hand for a shake and says “shikamoo” like a gentleman…

…how Zeituni has a very distinctive smell, so that when the kids come up behind me and put their hands over my eyes for me to guess their identity, I always know Zeituni from her scent…

…that Zawadi is like a wild animal you’re trying to tame – ferocious and determined and aggressive, yet every few days she peeks her head out from her cage and extends a hand or a smile and even, recently, a hug…

…the way Juma never smiles or says anything, but does both when I’m teaching him to read, and that when he smiles, it’s like the sky has cracked open and you can barely see for all the teeth…

…how Masele loves it when I pick her up and slide her over my shoulder and down my back head-first…

…how tiny Ali is; at seven years old he looks four, but he reminds me of a grasshopper, the way he walks with his knees out in front of him, and he’s the fastest thing with two legs on a soccer field I’ve ever seen…

In some ways life here makes no sense at all and it’s cruel, cruel, cruel. Education basically sucks; even if you do manage to struggle through the overcrowded, understaffed schools and make it to university, there are no jobs and no one has any control over their destiny. People are poor, so poor they can’t go to the hospital if they’re sick because they don’t have money for a taxi, but they still pump out the children. Malaria just fells people constantly, draining families of manpower. In other ways it’s the most honest, raw, real three months I’ve ever lived. I feel like an insect with its feelers sliding along the ground; I am eye to eye with life rather than floating along the top of it. I am forced to pay attention to the parts underneath me that prop up the parts that usually take the majority of my attention away. Everything about living here is completely elemental; there’s no room for extremities or extraneous things. Life is pared down to the absolute essentials, and in that way it make more sense than many of the Western ways of life I question and feel uncomfortable with at home. It’s like doing an autopsy and ending up with someone’s heart in my hands. Here it all is. This is, ultimately, all that matters if life is to continue (although Peter Singer would take emphatic exception to that).

People come here and are powerfully changed; I know Mandi feels she was. Maybe it’s because I was born on this continent and my mother fed me an affinity for it with my breakfast cereal, or because I have worked with communities and with Africans, but I don’t feel like I have been shaken to the core. This isn’t to say I haven’t had some core-shaking moments here (have), learned an enormous amount (have), or that I haven’t experienced the most simple, genuine happiness of my life here (honestly, really have). I feel like I will go home with a much stronger sense of how and why Africa struggles; why I think it will continue to struggle, and how the West can help Africans in at least trying to improve life a little. But will I go home a different person? I don’t think so. Will I go home an improved version of me? I hope so. This has been hands down, without exception, no dispute, the best thing I have ever done in my life. I’ve loved every single second, every flash of the eye, of being here. Even when I have been miserable and crying or hating everyone and everything, I have still loved everything about how I’ve felt.

But will I ever be able to communicate how it feels, inside me, to have lived in Tabora for three months?

Hapana sana, as we say in the HAPO dialect. Hapana sana kabisa.

Kwa heri Sister Mandi

[Here is Mandi having her disastrous hair braiding session with the Masai...

... and Christmas day at the Sekasuas]

Mandi left this morning, in a whirlwind of overstuffed bags, stress and last-minute airline dramas which I think ended up making her departure easier in the long run. The stress and drama wasn’t helped by the fact that she insisted on getting her hair done by the Masai who braids hair by the side of the road. We figured: four or five corn rows, TSh15,000, an hour or two, hamna shida! SEVEN HOURS it took for this Masai to do her entire head in microscopic twists that we pulled out the second we walked in the door at 11 at night. Both of us were near tears at the end of the experience (yes, I was there from the beginning to the bitter, bitter end), which began by the side of the road and then, when night fell, moved to a shack that alarmingly resembled a crack house from a Spike Lee movie. Many onlookers came and went, offering advice and sharing gossip, beer and cigarettes with the Masai, who took hairdressing perfectionism to unprecedented heights and experienced intense inner conflict when trying to decide whether to include four hairs or five in the final sections of Mandi’s forehead. To top it off, he chattered away in Swahili for seven hours straight, which, when you can understand individual words but not what they mean joined together, can grate on the brain with an intensity that would rival torture at Abu Graib. Within ten minutes of the operation, I could tell that she was going to end up looking like a cross between Bo Derek, Britney Spears during her Deranged Phase, and Anna Nicole Smith, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her. Even if I had, Mandi’s determination to see even the most diabolical experiences through would have ensured we didn’t budge until it was done – even if we ended up disassembling seven hours’ worth of work in eight minutes flat.

Mandi came to Tabora with the group of volunteers before me (Ann Marie and Sandra) but fell in love with Tabora and stayed an extra five or so weeks. For months she has been thinking about how hard it will be for her to leave here, and now that I am back at the house writing this, I look over at the chair she always sat in by the window and I can’t imagine being in Tabora without her. I’ve lived, worked, played, eaten, socialized, cooked, cleaned up, done washing, cried and laughed (myself sick) with her for the last three months. So many of the phrases that have become integral to the HAPO volunteer house vernacular (in my memory) originated with Mandi. A few examples:

“Hapana sana!”: (Literally translates to “Very no!” and makes no sense in Swahili, but roughly means over my dead body/not in a month of Mondays)
“I am so done with this right now”: (Get me the hell out of this situation before I kill the person responsible)
“Pole mimi”: (Literally: sorry me, but means “everyone please feel pity for me, something bad happened”)
“I cannot mess with you right now”: (actually, I’m not entirely sure what that means)

…but the list goes on and on. I miss her already. I realized that when I leave Tabora, no one is ever going to look at me, point their finger and say “wewe…” (“you…”: it’s what Tanzanians say to each other when someone is being provocative/irritating/funny/
annoying/risking someone’s life on the roads/trying to get someone’s attention) like she did. It’s like ending a relationship – all the secrets you shared that no one else knows about get lost in the memories. There’s little that remains living about the experience – most of it is just memories that you can only trigger with photographs. I feel slightly envious of the new girls because they’re best friends and will always have each other to laugh and joke with about their time here. I’ll have to call Mandi to do that – and she hates talking on the phone.

Funny thing is, I’m not sure we’d have much reason to be real friends if we lived in the same place and had never had this experience together. We have a lot in common in terms of the way we handle interpersonal relationships (dealing with the schism that emerged in the house in the two weeks before Ann Marie and Sandra left revealed those similarities – both of us liked to get conflict out in the open and neither of us is bitchy, whereas… ) but there were also a lot of differences. What was great was that the differences didn’t make it hard to get along; everything always felt so honest with Mandi; we could be up front and all would be ok. It wasn’t like that with the other girls, even though I really liked them.

Mandi has to be one of the most courageous people I’ve ever met. She’s incredibly loyal and generous and giving and feels pain experienced by other people, and she threw herself into the experience of being here with amazing agility, particularly for someone who, at 28, has never traveled out of the United States, or alone, before. I feel really happy that she and I made the decision to sponsor Sheki’s university education together. That way I’ll have some connection with her over the next few years – and who knows, maybe we really will make good on the suggestion to come back here together to see him graduate.

So, Shane, if you are still reading this blog, I would like to thank you for giving your wife to us in Tabora for four months. It’s definitely a better place because she spent time here, and there’s a big Mandi-shaped hole in the HAPO house now. From everything I’ve heard, you are a totally top bloke (there’s some Australian language for you) and I hope we get to meet up in New York one day. Just take her for some Mexican food and she’ll be very, very happy to be home :-).