Kuuliza si ujinga

Just to let you all know, I've posted some new photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgtanzania.

One step forward, one step back.

I had about 14 fruit trees in my garden. The garden is surrounded by a wooden fence, built by a local craftsman from trees he cut down with his machete. For 11 months, it successfully protected my garden from the donkeys, cows, pigs, and goats that wander around the school ground. But it was starting to fall apart, and my attempts at repairing it by tying flimsy planks across the fence with twine were not very successful. Two weeks ago, on Sunday morning, a donkey entered my garden. It ate the tops off my papaya trees, chopped my formerly-thriving passion fruit vines down to a few leaves, and pulled my stafeli tree out of the ground.

Eight months of watering, and the passion vines are back to where they started. The papaya and stafeli trees may or may not make it. Yeah, I've been a little demoralized garden-wise. But there are still many trees the donkey didn't touch, and the fence has been rebuilt, complete with thorns. Hopefully, when I return to my site from travelling, enough time will have passed that I'll be motivated to work on my garden again.

(I've been watering my trees every day for months now, and watching them slowly grow taller provides some stability to my life and helps me keep my sanity. Seeing them eaten by donkeys was not good for my mental equilibrium).

But in good news, I built a brick oven! I took this idea from another volunteer, whose been baking bread for himself for months now. It turns out to be much easier than I thought to build an oven. Basically, you need a pile of bricks and some metal window mesh. You make a U-shape (three sides of a rectangle, with the fourth side left open) two bricks high. Then you lay a piece of window mesh across the bricks, for hot charcoal to sit on. Then you add two more layers of bricks, followed by another piece of window mesh (this one is for the thing you're cooking to sit on). Then two more layers of bricks, or three if you expect to cook something big.

The next steps are to close the top and front of the oven. To close the top, you can use a piece of metal roofing with dirt or bricks piled on top as insulation. I don't have metal roofing, so I used a piece of window mesh, plus a plank to strengthen the mesh. I then piled bricks on top of the oven. I left a small opening for a chimney, which is made of a can with the bottom cut out.

To close the front of the oven, I used bricks. You need to leave a space on the bottom for air to blow in, so I placed two bricks to either side of the front of the oven, then placed one brick across them to make a sort of arch. I then piled bricks in front of the rest of the oven.

To use the oven, I simply place lit charcoal in the lower piece of window mesh, place the pan of whatever I'm cooking on the higher piece of window mesh, and close the oven with a large pile of bricks in the front. And wait. Bread takes about an hour to an hour and a half to cook, and quick bread takes only 30 minutes.

So: donkeys are bad, but fresh bread is awesome. That's my conclusion for the week.

(You can see pictures of the oven at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgtanzania)

Yesterday morning, I was in my office, listening to Obama’s acceptance speech on the radio. A teacher came by with a common sight: a sheet of paper requesting michango, or contributions. Michango can be for weddings, for graduation ceremonies, for funerals. This one was for a funeral.

To be honest, I didn’t sign the sheet at the time. I told her to come back when the speech was over. And then told a second teacher the same thing. But later that day, I did give my 1000 Tsh (about eighty cents, a common donation sum) in michango. And thought no more of it.

Until about 5:30 that evening, when a teacher came by. “Sorry I’m late. Are you ready to go?”

To go? Where?

“To visit the family of the deceased. We’re leaving now.”

But…I’ve never met the deceased.

“Neither have many of us, but she is mwenzetu, our companion, because she was a teacher like us. So we are visiting the family to give them support.”

But…I’m not dressed nicely enough. I’m not ready to go.

“No problem. We can wait for you.”

This is clearly a community duty. And besides, what reasons do I have not to go? I didn’t have any other plans, other than listening to the radio and writing in my journal.

So I put on a nice set of clothes, and climb into the back of a pick-up truck with a crowd of teachers.

There is much conversation about Obama on the way there. Can it be called the White House, now that a black man is president? Will there start to be prejudice against white people instead of against black people? There seems to be an assumption that whoever’s in power will give advantages to their “tribe”; I try to explain that things don’t quite work that way in America. At least they shouldn’t, if we’re living up to our ideals.

We bump over dirt roads, ducking down so that branches don’t hit our heads. As we travel, I see what most of my region looks like: hills, rolling fields, scattered mud houses with thatched roof. There’s not a high population density here. A family, a few cows, a large field for corn and grazing. Then open space. Then another few houses, another herd of cows, more fields. There are parts of Tanzania where you can’t walk for more than a few minutes without walking into someone’s yard. I’m not living in one of those areas.

We arrive at the house, greet the family, and sit down for tea. As we chat, my headmaster notes the two old men who are sitting with us: one man, already in his late sixties, is the son of the older man. “How old is he?” we ask the son. “One hundred twenty three,” the son says. “How old are you?” we ask. “Sixty eight. But I’m his fourth son.” I don’t quite buy that the older man is a hundred twenty three, but I’ll believe that he’s over a hundred. When he was a child, Tanganyika was a German colony. He tells us of carrying stones for the German colonists, and how each person had to pay a tax of one rupiah (three shillings, less than a cent in current money) per year.

Lots of tea, lots of conversation. At the end we take pictures. Me with the old man, our hands held together and up in the air as if we’re running for office. Some students from my school with the two old men: the new generation that’s only known a free Tanzania, and a generation that saw both German and British colonist. Me with some children of the family. Then we leave the house, climb into the pick-up truck, and crouch down in the bed for a bumpy ride home in the dark.