Nane nane and other updates

I have delayed finishing/posting this blog for a while, obviously…it may be out of date but still accurate.

8/8, the eighth of August, was a national holiday for farmers in Tanzania.  Dodoma hosts the national 8/8 festival.  It was like a county fair but African, and people came from all over to see it over the course of a week.  Each district had displays of their best crops and various products.  Chamwino district, my district, had an impressive display with beautiful veggies, lots of honey and baobob products.  Baobob oil is a popular product selling at around $20/liter, said to help control obesity and perform numerous other health miracles.  Beside the agricultural products, flocks of people showed up to hock crappy chinese trinkets, nice maasai jewelry, used American clothes, and housewares.  Guys rolled in with trucks full of housewares and huge P.A. systems and they rapped rambling sales pitches to Tanzanian pop music for their buckets, basins and bowls as they juggled a housewares acrobatics, launching them into the air and catching them.  As impressive as the spectacle was, I wasn’t moved to buy any buckets. 

The biggest attraction was the menagerie of African animals.  They had surprisingly humane mews displaying a leopard, hyenas, a lion, an enormous tortoise, a chimpanzee, a python, monkeys and other animals.  My friend and I met a couple of wildlife master’s degree students who told us a bit about some of the animals, which was a lucky encounter.  The highlight for me was seeing a 10-frame Langstroth beehive from Arusha.  My beekeeping counterpart/carpenter was in town, so I called him up and we met so that we could look at it together and he was able to talk to a Tanzanian about how it works.  We had already looked at pictures together and I had talked at length about the Langstroth hive, but I was nervous about him building one with only a vague idea of what it should look like.  This was an excellent opportunity to show him a model without having to go out and buy an example.  It was also a relief for me to see that Tanzanians are actually using this kind of hive, and it’s not just me trying to introduce this technology that no Tanzanian is going to use.

And now more than a month has passed since 8/8.  Since then, I have continued teaching, and I was lucky enough to travel to a short training on teaching English.  There is an excellent organization called Village Schools Tanzania that builds secondary schools in villages (in Tanzania, could you have guessed?)  The villages put forward a significant contribution of rocks, sand and bricks, and VST provides the other materials that are difficult to access.  They have a “pre-form” English curriculum, designed so that students can learn the English they should have learned in primary school had they been taught properly, to prepare them to start secondary school.  I am so excited to have materials and a curriculum to help my students! 

It was also fascinating to be introduced to VST.  For whatever reason, I have a reflex to be skeptical of missionary work, but this organization, although started by missionaries, does excellent work with education and HIV/AIDS, and doesn’t seem concerned with converting muslims or translating the bible.  The missionary couple who hosted us have been living in Tanzania for more than a decade, and their approach to development seems a lot like life-long Peace Corps service.  They live modestly and the strength of their work is based in human relationships.  They get paid even less than I do, and they seem to spend all of their time in the village.  They built an HIV/AIDS treatment and counseling center where people can come to get medicine and checkups.  They also send patients with the skin cancer associated with AIDS to receive radiation treatment using designated funds.  It was inspiring to see this model of development that appears to be the most effective of anything I’ve yet to see.  If anyone were to ask for my advice on making donations to organizations in Tanzania, I would first recommend Village Schools Tanzania without hesitation. 

More updates later, for now I’m going to throw this post up so that my mom will stop bugging me to update my blog. Hi mom! 

A To Do

I have been living in my village for more than seven months now.  Where does the time go?   No, literally, what have I spend all these months doing?  Well truthfully, the days are generally filled by ordinary tasks that just take up much more time than they would in America.  For instance, doing laundry by hand:  a time consuming task that could take me all day if I was doing the equivalent of a full load, but I’ll be the first to say that this might be due to my domestic ineptitude rather than the size of the task.  Fetching a 20-liter bucket of water takes around 20 minutes, not including crucial schmooze time with the nuns at the mission, where I fill up every day.  And then just boiling water for breakfast takes about 40 minutes.  These are some of the tasks that set the rhythm for my days. 

Ok, so I can set aside a good chunk of time every day that is spent completing these routines, but then there are the things that are not on this daily to-do list.  For example: taking 40 minutes to individually remove dozens and dozens of ants from a kilo of sugar.  Generally speaking, a lot of my time is spent on Removing Ants From _______.   And then of course waiting takes up a lot of time: waiting for people to show up, waiting for my change, waiting for the bus to show up.  I bet this I true of life in America, too, but trust me--the waiting is on a different level here.  Oh, also I’ve spent a shameful amount of time scanning the shortwave radio’s 100’s of channels trying to find the news in English. 

Another example, of the unexpected things that fill my days, is stumbling upon a Kigogo celebration.   This month being the harvest season, people are feeling flush with money, and so it is the season to party.  I’ve heard some people criticize this as an extravagance—come next February all that money’s gone and food becomes scarce.  But either way, it is fascinating to experience these celebrations. 

Last week I was invited to a party for a young girl on the event of her first period.  I was invited by the girl’s dad!  My dad has been incredibly supportive of me throughout all the stages of my life, but I could never imagine, let alone want at all such a celebration organized by my father!  That aside, the customs observed at such a celebration are really neat.  The girl was wearing beautiful new clothes, henna, beads, bangles and a whimsical headdress.  The girl and some elders of both genders led a procession from the house to a little hill nearby where they placed a gourd on her head and tucked Tsh10,000 (big bucks!) underneath it.  They hooked an axe over her shoulder and then said a bunch of stuff in Kigogo that I didn’t understand.  An old lady had made a small hole in a baobob pod, poured honey inside it, then mixed the honey and baobob fruit well with a stick.  She was dipping the stick into the pod and feeding herself the baobob-honey and then feeding the girl.  The girl did not seem to like it, but the old lady sure did.  Then the girl held two babies, a boy and a girl. 

I found out that the axe symbolizes that the girl should hike up Kinyami, the big mountain by the village and cut down a tree to make a beehive out of it.  The gourd is what she will put her honey harvest into, and the baobob-honey is the food she will make with the honey, and the cash is the money she will make from the honey.  The two babies symbolizes that she will have both boy and girl babies.  Then we enjoyed tasty food and a lot of old mamas playing drums and singing Kigogo songs and that was it. 

As if there was any doubt in my mind as to just what kind of region I am in, I can now be certain that I am in bee and baobob country.  I can already see myself craving baobob when I have gone back to America.  Baobob fruit comes in a thick, fuzzy and bulbous pod.  Inside, the seeds are coated in a chalky layer of fruit.  It tastes pretty tangy and only mildly sweet; it’s a great snack and it also makes a very tasty juice. 

In other news, or rather to add to my “everyday to-do list,” this month I started teaching Life Skills at the secondary school and English at the primary school.  Yeah…I don’t have any background in ESL but the students can use any help they can get.  Likewise I can use any help I can get--please send me your best practices if you have any tips!

Storming the Castle by Night

Some days I just feel like getting under my mosquito net as soon as the sun sets.  This day was one of those days.  I had found another snake in my house, a really small one, but a snake nonetheless, and I don’t trust a single one of them.  I grabbed a stick and killed it myself. Three months ago, I literally ran out of my house screaming.  I am now flaunting this as proof that I am becoming a tough Tanzanian broad.  I still need to work on hoisting a full bucket of water on my head by myself, cooking ugali, working constantly from sunup to sundown with a baby on my back like a real Tanzanian woman…okay so I have quite a ways to go before being tough like a Tanzanian lady, but I am proud of this self defense milestone.  Anyway I found the snake at dusk and at sun down, I was in my net with a book and my stick just in case they work in pairs.   About an hour later, I got a call from a friend and he was outside waiting for me to go beekeeping with him.  At last!  But wait, I said to myself, is my Swahili really still that bad that I didn’t understand that this was the plan for tonight?  No matter, I need to get out of my pajamas and into something to go beekeeping in!  Ah! All my pants are still wet from doing laundry!  Spandex and skirt will have to do. 

Off we went into the night with about four vijana (young people) and flashlights.  When we got to the trees with the beehives, they started a fire and once it made coals, they blew it out so that it would smoke and not give off much light.  One of the vijana climbed a tree to lower a hive and we all turned out our flashlights.  There was the sound of breaking branches (he was climbing a tree in the dark!) and then we could hear when reached the hive because the otherwise silent night filled with the urgent hum of bees.  I took several steps backward.  I was terrified.

Working in the dark, only occasionally using the lamps in short flashes (the bees are attracted to light), they cracked the hollow-log hive open once it hit the ground.  The hum grew even more urgent and again I took several steps backward.  They dragged the two halves just downwind of the smoking coals.  I wasn’t wearing a veil or gloves--hell, I was wearing a skirt!  African honey bees are notoriously aggressive! That’s why beekeepers open the hives at night here, doing this in the daytime is practically unthinkable.  The thought of beekeeping unprotected with these bees...I was resigned to just observe in the dim light from afar.  But after a little while, I mustered up some nerve to go a little closer, then closer, and closer until I was taking out a piece of honey comb with my bare hands.  Soon both my hands were dowsed with honey as I placed comb into the buckets.  The comb was attached in broad stretches across the length of the log.  The honey was concentrated at the periphery and the brood in the center, the same pattern as in any healthy hive.  We basically had to just dig in and grab a chunk of comb and pick all the bees off it, hoping not to get stung.  Chewing on beeswax and licking the dripping honey off my hands, I was feeling very Pooh Bear.

That night we harvested from four hives, and we harvested everything: honey, brood, pollen, keeping the honey separate from the rest.  It was really hard to take part in the destruction of a hive—the brood pattern was perfect and the hive was so healthy, and we just gutted it.  In a stroke of amazing luck, I found the queen on a segment of comb that I was de-beeing.  I called to the vijana and my friend to come see, and the first one to come over started to flick her off—he thought she was just another bee.  When I told them they were looking at the queen, they were amazed.  “I say!” they exclaimed in an adorable Anglicism.  Decades of beekeeping and they had never seen a queen!  They all wanted to hold her, and they asked all sorts of questions about her as she darted around their hands. “How many eggs does she lay? Can she fly? Can she sting? Are all of these bees her babies?”  They took special care to put her some place safe, even though we had just destroyed her hive. 

I can firmly say that that was the last time that I go beekeeping in Africa in a skirt.  Although the spandex blunted many of the stings to my butt and thighs, I definitely learned my lesson.  I was stung two times on my hand, as well, without the buffer of spandex.  For the next two days my right hand was 50% larger than my left!  The sugar high was first to wear off after the adrenaline, then the swelling, but I’m still swooning from my first beekeeping outing in Tanzania.

A few words

The past two months have been very busy!  Last month was IST, In-service Training, Peace Corps-speak for when our training class reunites for two weeks of further technical training.  We learned about grant writing, project design, technical info about malaria, HIV/AIDS, education and etc.  It took place in Morogoro, a beautiful town at the base of a mountain, and it was a busy two weeks that, for better or worse, felt a lot like summer camp.  Returning to my village was a little overwhelming…for one thing now I’m back to only partially being able to express myself in Kiswahili and passing my evenings by lamplight, but also now is when volunteers are supposed to be ready to start projects.  

The first project I’m going to try is a permagardening project at the primary school.  After meeting with the teachers to discuss the benefits of a permagarden project, the teachers were so enthusiastic and supportive that they said, “ok this is great, we’ll start tomorrow.”  Woah woah woah…hang on a second!  My counterpart and I had to rein them in and explain that we all need a little bit of time to prepare and organize the students first.  It was exhilarating that they wanted to run with it, but woah, guys! Pole pole.

The World Food Program provides corn meal, beans and fortified millet porridge to my primary school for free, so the students have food to eat every day, but they don’t get vegetables.  They get calories, but they still lack nutrition.   Also, a few people in my village have said that vegetables just can’t grow in our soil.   I made a demonstration permagarden at my house, and vegetables indeed can grow in our soil.  So the permagarden will teach about nutrition, soil health and vegetable cultivation, and hopefully also demonstrate to others that with a few soil amendments and a bio-intensive garden design, they can grow beautiful vegetables for their families and for sale. 

I am happy to report that bees have moved into both my hives!  I haven’t been into the hives yet to see how they’re doing, but I see them coming and going, way up there in the trees.  Next month we will lower them by the cover of night and get some honey and I can’t wait!   Next month is when the rainy season ends.  The beekeeping schedule here still confuses me, considering it is the opposite to beekeeping in the US or Europe, where we harvest honey when the environment is green.  Here the honey season is when the environment starts to dry up. 

It is interesting to experience a rainy season where the rain has such an obvious impact on every day life.   For the entire month of February it didn’t rain at all.  Many farmers’ corn fell over and was ruined.  It was so sad to see the plants’ leaves start to brown, the pumpkins’ leaves collapsed like a closed umbrella (because after all what use is an umbrella with no rain?)  And when it finally did rain, in March, the farmers were in their fields almost immediately, trying to replant their ruined fields of corn with sunflowers to try and make up for the loss. 

I went to a nearby Gogo village for the Easter holiday with some friends from my village, and I got a new Kigogo name there.  In my village I am “Rain” because I arrived with the rains.  In this other village, I am matika, or “When the corn is yea-high [holding hand to hip-height]” in Kigogo.  I am fascinated by the specificity of certain words that some languages have.  As far as this suburban-raised gal knows, in English, corn is corn from the kernel to when it’s grilled on the cob.  In Kiswahili, there is a word for a fresh coconut that is mostly water and a different word for a coconut that is dried and mostly meat.   A different word for cooked and uncooked rice.  There is a name for each individual type of ant but no word for a generic ant.   And there are many different kinds of ants here.  I have only been able to commit siafu to memory, probably just because those are the ones that bite.  But these differences are becoming more important as I become increasingly conversant in Kiswahili, and as I see that ants of various kinds are just more prominent in every day life--at least one day a week a temporary river of ants courses through my house, each time in a new location.  Similarly, there are many names for aunts as well.  A paternal aunt is shangazi and a maternal aunt is mama mkubwa, also reflecting the environment here in Tanzania.

A picture series in which beehives are hung from trees.

I recently installed my two beehives! And by that I mean I oversaw the installment of my hives.  In order to do this, one must climb a tree, so I enlisted a kijana (youth) to undertake this task for me.  Most beekeepers over 30 enlist a kijana to do the more athletic aspect of beekeeping in Tanzania, but even though I am still in my (now late, ack!) 20's, I get special permission because I am a wimp.  These hives were put up in a tree that is about a 5 minute walk from my house, on the edge of the forest.

The traditional hive--a hollowed out log that will be fastened together. The bees will build "burr" comb (what beekeepers call wild comb) attached to one side of the log.  When it is time to harvest, beekeepers open the hive and cut out all of the comb, brood included.  

Top bar hive.  The sticker says "We should protect forests for our own development" And the picture has a beehive hanging from a tree.

The inside of the top bar hive.  These are just wooden slats.  The bees will build walls of comb on each of these bars.  Harvesting from a hive like this, it is easier to just take honey and leave the brood.  This is the type of hive that I am trying to promote because it is healthier for the bees and it should help increase honey production.

The traditional hive, fastened shut with wire.  There are several holes for potential entrances, the one on the end and a few on the side.  

A kijana  (youth) climbed the tree to install my beehives.  They are installed in trees because there are many critters in the forest who also think that honey is delicious.  Monkeys are known perpetrators, and honey badgers are particularly notorious (for not giving a... : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg)

Kosma securing the top bar hive to a branch and hoisting it into the tree.

Securing the top bar hive to the tree.

Kosma getting the traditional hive ready to be hoisted up into the tree.

The kijana installing the traditional hive, the top bar hive installed.

So now that my beehives are installed, I just wait for bees to move in.  If you build it, they will come.  Unfortunately, bees are more likely to swarm if there is rain, and we haven't had a good rain in more than a month, so it might take a little while for the bees to move in.  Considering that the hives are installed in a tree and also that African honey bees are notoriously aggressive, this makes performing hive maintenance a bit more of an ordeal.  Which is probably why not a lot of people do perform hive maintenance.  Most beekeepers access their hives only to take honey and only at night.

People often ask me about the Africanized honey bee--the "killer bees."  Africanized bees are a hybrid of European honey bees and bees that are coincidentally from Tanzania that were accidentally released in Brazil.  They are more aggressive than African bees, but African bees are still very aggressive.  In fact, sadly, a man was reportedly killed by bees in Tanzania just last month. 

The big months for harvesting honey begin next month until August.  There will be more pictures and more news soon hopefully, once the girls find their way over to their new homes.

Chamwino Running Club and Bad Cats

As I have mentioned before, house visits make up most of my days of late, and there are two customs relating to the house visit that I find particularly charming: pokea and sindikiza.  To pokea is to receive someone, and in this context, it means relieving someone of whatever they are carrying.  They will receive a sack of groceries if you happened to have hit the veggie stand before visiting a friend, or just your notebook if it’s all you’re carrying.  Most helpfully, often if I’m walking to my house carrying a lot of stuff, someone will pokea me and help me all the way home.  To sindikiza is to accompany a visitor part of the way.  At the end of a visit, a host will gather whatever they pokea’ed you and escort you on your way home.  When they have decided they have sindikiza’ed you enough, they will hand off your things—groceries, notebook, what-have-you, and wish you well on your way.  Some people will just walk some 20 feet, and some people will send a child to do the sindikiza’ing for them.  Some people have sindikiza’d me almost all the way home, as a very kind gesture of friendship. Then I feel the need to sindikiza them since they’ve gone so far from their home, and I can imagine this going on and on and neither of us ever gets home.

Most mornings I have taken to jogging into the fields along a dirt path.  Not too many people live out that way, but I often pass a few people going to their fields or to a neighboring village.  The other day I passed a Gogo man of about 40 years who was walking, dressed in the typical Gogo fashion: red plaid cloak draped about him, wooden staff in hand, sandals made out of repurposed old car tires.  After a morning greeting, he asked me where I was going, and I breathlessly replied, “Not too far!”  He said, “You’re doing exercise?”  I said, “Yes,” and he said, “I see.”  And without any other words, car tire sandals and all, he ran to catch up with me and he sindikiza’ed me on my jog.  He sindikiza’ed me for more than 15 minutes until I had to turn around to go home.  A few days later on another jog, I was on my way home when I passed a few schoolgirls carrying buckets and school things.  One of them also wordlessly decided to run with me, and the others joined.  Along the way, each schoolgirl that we passed joined us as if there was some tacit obligation, and by the time we got to the school, I had a pack of 15 girls sindikiza’ing me.

Finally I got another cat! It is a nice kitten that sits on my lap and purrs and it hasn’t run away yet.  I am very grateful for these things, but I am sort of disappointed that it hasn’t really been doing its job.  I’m still finding mice droppings in the corners, and in an even graver lapse in felinity, the cat failed to alert me to the 3-foot snake in my kitchen last week.  The cat was sleeping in the other room when I came across the black snake slithering amongst my coffee mugs and cans of oatmeal (still no furniture).  I ran, terrified, out my front door to get a neighbor, but when the neighbor came with his wooden staff to kill it, it was nowhere to be found.  After an extensive search, I left my house still terrified, and not long after, students said they saw the snake leave my courtyard, and at which point they ID’d it as the spitting cobra.  I kept on thinking of the turn of phrase people use when you’re looking and looking for something and it’s right in front of you—“If it was a snake you’d be dead by now.” 

That night and every night since, I slept with my wooden staff, and now I enter every room with my head first to survey before stepping.  Even so, I am often tricked by things like backpack straps, shoelaces.  Just this morning, my heart did a cartwheel when I walked into the kitchen to find a serpentine white line curving across the floor like a sine wave, like a perfect negative of that haunting black cobra.  Upon investigation, at the end of the twisting trail I found a half-empty bag of salt with little rodent teeth marks.  I don’t know what a mouse would want with a bag of salt, but it’s just more proof that that cat is not doing its job.

Mice and Honey

Last week I gave myself a haircut, my first haircut in ten years that wasn’t given to me by my sister.  Since I have yet to see a mirror, I still don’t know how it looks but I am sure that my blind attempt at a coiffe would make sister balk.  Beyond not having a mirror, my house is still very unfurnished.  I have some orders in at the carpenter’s that are already tardy, but I have low expectations for any timeliness in this country anyway.  I also still have a mouse problem.

I got a cat after one week here.  I walked across the village and chatted with some old Gogo ladies, and after about 10 minutes one of the ladies slipped into another room in the hut and came out with a hissing and mewling sack.  It was about a 10 minutes walk home and once in the house, the cat timidly made its way out of the bag (there is a pun here somewhere but I’m not up to it right now.)  It seemed distressed at the lack of furniture to hide behind, but it quickly found a nook between my bed frame and mattress.  I fetched it some fresh cow’s milk that it didn’t touch, and I eventually went to bed with the kitten hiding behind the mattress.  I woke up in the morning and lit the stove for tea, came back inside and the cat was nowhere to be found.  I’m not that surprised that the cat would run away, it was a pretty old kitten, but I am dumbfounded as to how the cat escaped.  The door from my house to my courtyard was open for all of 2 minutes as I lit the stove, and even so I should have seen a cat darting out.  And the only way out of my courtyard is the drain in the shower.  The cat could have fit through it, but it is a pretty long tube, and I’m convinced this kind of jailbreak would have required some calculated premeditation.  Now three weeks later, I still wake up to the sound of the mouse eating giant millipedes behind my desk, and I still expect any day to see this cat come sauntering out of its hiding.  If I ever do, I will call it Houdini.

I’m trying to learn basic Kigogo and Kisandawe, the two main languages that are spoken here.  Of course everyone speaks Kiswahili as well, but it really tickles people if I greet them in their tribal language.  Kisandawe is truly a click language, and I can really crack people up when I attempt to make those impossible sounds. 

A lot of my job right now is to wander around the village and talk with new people.  This often means going up to a house and saying “Hodi! Hodi!” I don’t knock, I just say these words and if people are about, they say, “Karibu!” to welcome me in.  If they are cooking, they will invite me to eat.  If it isn’t mealtime, they will likely send a kid out to buy a soda for me.  Or, if I am visiting a beekeeper, they will bring me a bowl of honey.  The first time this happened, I didn’t really know what to do—about ½ a liter of honey and a spoon!  That’s gluttonous, but if I only take a few spoonfuls, not only might it be rude, but the precious stuff might go to waste.  Well, after a few bites, I wasn’t worried about any of that because I knew I could easily eat the whole bowl.  I had been told that my Peace Corps service would change me forever; I had no idea it would just be Type II Diabetes.

A particularly industrious beekeeper had me taste the honey from nyuki wadogo, little bees, which I think are some species of dwarf honey bee. The plastic water bottle hissed releasing pressure as the beekeeper opened it, which would normally be a red flag alerting me to Something I Shouldn’t Eat, but being a profligate lover of honey, I sallied forth.  It had a texture and buttery sweetness like warm caramel, a slightly tart taste like an apple, and it was curiously bubbly with carbonation.  It might have been slightly alcoholic.  It was delicious.

 Last week I made an attempt to climb the tallest mountain in my beautiful skyline.  (I told everyone I wanted to go in order to see the surroundings but really I just wanted to try and catch a glimpse of the chewi a.k.a. leopard) Unfortunately we departed too late in the afternoon, so we didn’t make it all the way to the top.  News of my excursion spread, as all news does in the village: like wildfire.  Now when some people ask me about my plans, they’ll say, “Are you free Thursday?  Or are you going to go climb another mountain?” 

When I go to visit houses, I try to ask them survey questions about what problems they are facing and what sort of work they would like to see in their village.  This is an important yet frustrating exercise because their suggestions are very valid, but often too big for me to help with, which I think this is a common struggle at the start for Peace Corps volunteers.  For instance, many people want me to help their group get a tractor, or access the international honey market while circumventing the price-slashing middleman in Dar es Salaam.  Some of the other things they suggest are very feasible, like setting up beekeeping workshops, creating other income generating projects, and etc.  Nonetheless, I am trying to do research on all these ideas so that I can tell them just how realistic the possibilities are.