Delightful! Delightful! Delightful!

I don’t remember who it was, but before leaving, somebody told me that Kiswahili is an easy language to learn.  I wish I could remember who that was, because I have a noogie for that person.  Kiswahili is hard.  Case in point: there are several different ways to say “it” depending on what class the noun falls into.  Some classes are logical, like living creatures, trees, or (most) fruit, but others you must simply remember where they belong.  For each noun class, there is a different way to say “it,” “of,” “my,” “which,” “that,” “all,” and etc., plus the adjective agreement, and it’s different for singular and plural—It’s enough to just make you sick!   So whoever it was that said Kiswahili is easy, please feel free to come forward here and we can have a pity party for me in the comments section. 

I complain about the noun classes, but it is nice that there is no formal/informal--“you” is the same for a child as it is for an elder.  But for anyone older than you, you should first greet him or her with “shikamoo!” to express respect.  This is for elders, yes, but also people who are even 5 years or so older than you.  The correct response is “marahaba!”  Good kids will say this to me all the time, so walking to and from my house, I am usually saying “Marahaba! Marahaba! Marahaba!” because there are a lot of good kids in my neighborhood.  I was really tickled to read that “shikamoo!” literally means “I touch your feet!” and “marahaba!” means “Delightful!” So, I stroll through my neighborhood saying, “Delightful! Delightful! Delightful!”

Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out who should be shikamoo’d.  A lot of Tanzanians look younger than they are.  But it’s easy to razz age-phobic Americans with this custom--I bristled when a fellow trainee, 23 years old, greeted me with “shikamoo!”  Not delighted.

Before coming here, I was familiar with “African time,” meaning that you might schedule a meeting for 8 and people don’t show up until 10.  Well, I’m pretty sure that Tanzanians do read clocks on “Africa time” but they also read them in “Kiswahili time.”   Here at 4 degrees latitude, the days are split pretty evenly between hours of daylight and darkness.  So at 6am, the day starts, and so does the Kiswahili clock. 7am is 1 in the morning.  8 is 2 and so on and so forth, until 7pm when it becomes 1 in the evening.  So if you ask someone what time it is at 4:30pm, they will say it is 10:30 in the afternoon.  It is taking some getting used to. 

So, I should probably take this opportunity to brag about some of the cool stuff I’ve done during training.  At my homestay village’s primary school, a few trainees and I led students in building a compost pile, and on another occasion, a permagarden.  PC Tanzania has a permagarden specialist on staff, who gave us an excellent training.  It is an awesome design of double-dug beds, berms, swales, and holes that make for a soil and water-conserving, high-food-yielding, pretty-good-looking-nutrition-machine.  Hopefully I can get some pictures up here.  Mama Halima wanted one, and we wanted more practice at building one, so we made one for her, too.  The damn chickens promptly rooted through our terraforming, but I was so happy that the next day Mama Halima and Fatouma spent the hot afternoon building a fence around it!  Mama Halima was really interested in the idea of redirecting and conserving water.  Also, I showed my family how to make a mosquito repelling lotion with neem tree leaves.  Fatouma is planning on making more and selling it.  Today is Thanksgiving, and I am feeling thankful for my families--my family at home, whose love and support I am so grateful for, and also my Tanzanian host family for their effort and patience.

Coming up next…the big reveal: where is Nora going to live for the next two years? Site announcements are on Saturday!

Wedding and a Funeral

Slowly, the Kiswahili is coming.  Sometimes the conversations go really smoothly, but in others I miss a lot of information.  The kinds of conversations that I’m really good at are usually some variation of: “Do you like oranges? Yes, I like oranges. I like eggs. Do you like eggs?  We like oranges and eggs.”  The conversations that still need improvement…are most of them.   A common failed conversation is one in which Mama Halima tries to explain to me what we are going to do later that day.  Last Sunday was Id al Haj, a day of celebration and feasting in Islam, and apparently my Mama wanted to take me to visit her sister in a nearby village.  I got the part about visiting a sister, but I thought we were just walking across the village and I was very confused when she was squeezing us onto a crowded dala dala (bush taxi)—I didn’t have any money for the ride and I had no idea where we were going.  Or better yet: my first weekend at homestay, I thought we were going to the farm but I ended up at a funeral.  The moment of realization was wonderful… “ahhh,” I said to myself, “that’s why Mama made me wash my feet and wear this fancy outfit.” 

At the funeral, we joined a group of women sitting in the shade outside a house where the deceased’s close family was seated.  Food was brought to all 50 or so women.  The mood was light, women were chatting and laughing.  The men were seated somewhere where I couldn’t see them—this was a traditional Muslim ceremony.  Eventually some men came, entered the house then came out carrying a coffin, causing a wave of wailing.  Suddenly the mood was sorrowful, the women around me were crying silently, while the people closest to the house wailed.   I felt ashamed of having chatted so cheerily just minutes before.  I had never met her, but I was sad for the 30-year-old woman; she had died of malaria and had young children.  

My Mama said she died of homa, which means fever and is usually malaria.  This brings up an interesting issue about data on malaria deaths and HIV/AIDS.  I am not saying that she had HIV; I have no idea what her status was.  But I asked my teacher about this event, and this was the discussion that it led to: when someone dies from AIDS in Tanzania, this is rarely if ever openly admitted, and they usually say that it was homa, even though it was really AIDS.  So if homa is malaria sometimes, but other times it is any number of other things including AIDS, this issue not only demonstrates the HIV stigma problem in Tanzania but also the difficulty of quantifying the malaria and HIV epidemics.  

In my last post I promised that I would write about 3 weddings and a funeral, which, I must admit, was misleading.  There was only one wedding, but I went to three big parties for this one wedding.  The first party, the “kitchen party” was for women only.  The bride sat at the front of the room, looking like a fabulous 80s prom queen.  She was not supposed to smile, but every once in awhile she couldn’t hold back a smile as different groups of ladies travelled up to the bride to deliver gifts for her new kitchen, dancing all the way.  A poignant moment was when her mom was gifted with new kangas, (basically skirts) Ladies danced them up to her and wrapped her in them until she was buried under so many kangas you couldn’t see her face.  When they took the kangas off of her you could see that she was crying. 

The next day, again only women gathered outside the groom’s family’s house to dance to the traditional drum music in the late afternoon.  Guests brought firewood on their heads, offering them to the family by entering the dance circle and dancing a little, then removing the cumbersome load from their heads.  The mother of the groom eventually took a seat in the center of the circle, other women close to the family sat around her in a half-moon-shape.  A very short very old lady blew a train whistle in an unpredictable but very danceable rhythm as she bounced around inside the circle.  Three women from the family of the groom came out of the house and danced, shaking their butts (in kiswahili a big butt is called a wowowo) in the mother’s and other ladies’ faces. This dancing is similar to bounce if you’re familiar with the American dance.  They would go back into the house, then return, this time to shake their butts even more in their faces, eventually even lifting their skirts over the mother’s head and shaking their wowowo’s way up in her face.  Women here are generally very conservative, but get some women at a party where there are no men, and they will really let loose.  I knew this already because I had seen these women really dance at the women-only kitchen party the night before.  But what they did next, I could not expect at all.  The ladies came out of the house, this time wearing only underwear.  One lady had a corncob between her legs, and they dance-acted the many ways to do it!  My jaw nearly hit the ground as I realized what I was witnessing (I was like, wo(wowo)).  I feel a bit guilty writing this here, like I’m telling the ladies’ ancient secret, but it’s too good not to share. 

Later that night was the send-off party, which is a party for the bride and her maid of honor.  It was basically the same in that presents are danced up to her and the mother is wrapped in kangas, but this time men were there, too.  There was constant spotlit video of the event being projected live onto a huge screen, which can make someone (me) uncomfortable if they don’t like being videotaped (I don’t) and if they are in the front row on the center isle (I was) and if they are for some reason being treated as an honored guest (I Don’t know.)  After some delicious food, there was some more dancing that night.  Then there was another party the following night, a dance party for both men and women.  Finally, the couple got married the next morning in a traditional Muslim ceremony.  I couldn’t even go to the actual wedding ceremony although I made it to all the other celebrations, but I heard that it was very traditional compared to the 80s prom-ness of the kitchen party and send-off party. 

This post is very long!  Thanks for reading and I appreciate your comments a lot!

First post from Tanzania

I wrote this a week ago and I am currently working on a new post--coming up next: 3 weddings and a funeral.

Two and a half weeks in Tanzania!  The first 5 days were spent at a convent/hostel in Dar es Salaam, where we sat through a bunch of Peace Corps administrative sessions that seemed oddly familiar… and a quick and dirty intro to Kiswahili.  Then we took a bus to Tanga district, about 5 hours north of Dar, where I was dropped off at my host family’s house in a small village between Tanga and Muheza.  Our training class of 40 was split up into groups of 5 or so, each group placed in their own village and each trainee with a family of their own.  We five will have class together with the same instructor for the entire training.  Luckily I got a great teacher, a capital-L-Lady named Rahema as well as a very compatible group. 

My host mother is a widow named Halima.  Mama Halima has five children. Fatouma, 19-years-old, lives at home, as well as Jeska, the 11-year-old granddaughter of Halima’s son.  They are exceptionally patient and helpful.  I love making them laugh, which I can do without even trying to be funny.  Just cutting an onion is like the most hilarious thing they have ever seen, not because I’m doing it funny, but just because I am cutting an onion.  So they almost died laughing when they were teaching me body parts and I pointed out the only body part I knew at the time—the butt.  What?  It’s “tako” like “taco al pastor,” so now go ahead and try to forget that tako means butt in Kiswahili. 

The tin-roofed house has two bedrooms, a pantry, and a living room.  No glass in the windows here, just metal bars, a screen if you’re lucky.  The toilet and shower are outside, and although there is no running water, I do have electricity!  We listen to Tanzanian radio and tapes all the time.  Sometimes American country music I’ve never even heard of comes on and I don’t like that as much.  There are banana, papaya, orange, and coconut trees within spitting distance of the back yard, and I enjoy the fruit from all of them with every meal.  Last year in Niger, getting my hands on a banana every other day was lucky. Here I’m actually having too many bananas. I always have a banana with breakfast and the other day I had boiled bananas for lunch, and boiled bananas for dinner.  That is too many bananas, and I won’t go into why at this time.

My village for training is in rolling hills between the mountain and the ocean, so the climate is very tropical. I am dripping in sweat the whole day long.  But it’s okay because, you know, my mama makes me shower at least twice a day.  I wake up at 5:30 am to the sound of Mama Halima banging on my door, hollering “NORA! KUOGA!” : “NORA! BATHE!”  For the first few days when my Kiswahili was limited to only a few greetings, you can imagine I was pretty frazzled trying to find the words to say “yes, I’m up, I’m coming!” when really I just wanted to say “oh hell no!”  I was pretty amused on my first night, when I was going outside to brush my teeth, Mama Halima took my toothbrush and toothpaste from my hands and showed me how I should brush my teeth.  I have had to relearn almost everything the Mama Halima way…how to sweep, how to eat an orange, how to pour tea, how to wear my hair…how to wash my clothes (but that is something I was and still am bad at anyway--I’ll be walking around with soap-stiff clothes for awhile).  Several times now Mama Halima has told me to fix my hair, but I haven’t yet figured out how to say, “mama there’s no fixing this mess” in Kiswahili. 

I give mama a hard time for being a micromanager, but really she’s been great.  Not only has she been an invaluable help for my Kiswahili, but she also spoils me.  She warms up my bathwater every morning, she serves me delicious food, she teaches me how to cook, she buys me sodas, and she finishes washing my laundry when she sees how terrible I am at it.  Today she took me on an excursion to her farm field, about a mile from the house.  Dennis the neighbor came with us, and I realized why he was invited soon after we arrived at the field—he promptly climbed a 40ish foot coconut palm and started sending coconuts down.  We gathered the coconuts and sat under a mango tree cracking open coconut after coconut with a machete, drinking the milk and scraping out the meat with a spoon fashioned out of coconut shell.  I was delirious with delight, and meanwhile Dennis the neighbor grabbed a palm leaf and quickly wove a basket.  We put coconuts in the basket and I carried it home on my head.

One third of the way through training, there will be more stories from Nyumbani Mama Halima to come.  Please leave any comments or questions!