Kuuliza si ujinga

It's a weekday evening during break. I'm at a friend's house in a distant region when the phone rings.

Hey, it's Samweli, the guy who's watering my garden while I'm traveling. Hey, Samweli. How's the village? How's my garden doing?

Everything's fine, teacher. But...

Suddenly the network goes bad. Yet I distinctly catch one word: "imeibiwa". Something was stolen.

I panic. "What? What was stolen? Kitu gani kimeibiwa?"

"Sukumawiki yako." Your collard greens.

"What? They stole my sukumawiki?"

The two Peace Corps volunteers sitting next to me start laughing.

"Wait a minute, Samweli. What do you mean they stole my collard greens? Did they just take a few leaves? Or did they pull up the entire plant?"

"They took the entire plant. All the plants. Hawa ni watu wabaya--they're very bad people."

For a minute, I can't help but laugh myself. It's just such a ridiculous thing to have stolen. My collard greens?

But then, I put a lot of work into those greens. I was the only one watering my garden during a two-month drought, so now I'm the only one who has seedlings in my garden. But those seedlings are still small enough that they could be transplanted to another garden and survive. Apparently, someone did just that.

I'm kind of annoyed that someone else is benefiting from my two months of watering work. (It's a pain to water a garden by hand!). I'm kind of resigned: there's a drought, people are hungry, petty theft of greens isn't that bad compared to what they could be stealing. And, a large part of me wants to laugh. The things I've had stolen so far in Tanzania? A bucket, an A-level chemistry book, and three beds of collard greens.