Ice, Ice Daddy

Having a brief online chat with Michael Rudez while I write this. We’re talking about unpaid internships…and it occurs to me that I am in the middle of the ultimate unpaid internship. Except to get milk for the boss’s coffee…I need to start a farm collective and secure a loan from Heifer International. Sawasawa (the same).

There’s this funny little custom here. In the local dialect, the first time you see someone every day, you say “Kamwene”, and they reply “Kamwene”. Roughly translated, it’s “You are well?” and “I am well”. Or literally, “Whole?”, “Whole.” All that’s totally cool, and they love it that I’m speaking the tribal language a little bit. “Twiteleka ugimbi” (we are cooking corn liquor. I have some interesting days here.) But here is the catch. And oh what a catch. The SECOND time you see somebody in a day, you CANNOT say “Kamwene”. You have to say “Wheoli” (I’m attempting to spell that, I have no idea how it’s actually spelled.) And they say “Wheoli” right back. Which is great. But it’s not great. Cuz in order for you to say the correct greeting, you have to remember everybody you see in a day!!! And that’s really hard!!! It’s not so bad for the men. They wear fairly distinctive clothing (including some truly stunning floor length women’s coats). But the women wear traditional dress, and a lot of it blends together…and about four or five times a day I get this feeling like I’m being tested. Did I see them? They look familiar. Of course they look familiar. Did they pass by and greet me when I stumbled out of my house this morning, awakened by roosters and silently cursing the beautiful sunrise that I’m seeing through one bloodshot eye? So I try to cheat, and greet in Kiswahili. But they know my tricks. I can tell. It’s this damn white skin. I’m transparent.

And here’s another funky thing, which I love. There is a tradition here that you after you have kids, you are no longer called by your own name. You are normally called Mama or Baba, and then insert the name of your firstborn child. Which creates a really interesting dilemma, wherein you have to pick a name for your first kid that you want to be called for the next however many years. I wondered if this was just my American take on things. It is not. I have met Mama and Baba Flavy, and Mama Amani (peace). Nobody names their child Flavy out of love. You name your child Flavy because you want to be Daddy Flavy. And who can blame you? My parents are Mama Vicky and Baba Vicky. Nice name, but they could have been more original. I’m thinking Flash for my first child. Daddy Flash. Or Ice. Yeah. Daddy Ice.

Let’s do a short day-in-the-life (who am I kidding? It won’t be short): Woke up at 5:30 (usually somewhere between 5:45 and 7:00, impossible to sleep longer because of the jogoos (roosters)). Started the jiko la mafuta (kerosene stove, like camping style (jiko means stove, mafuta means oil or gas)) and put on three pitchers worth of water to heat for bathing. Go back inside and cut up about two dozen fish called dagaa into little pieces for the kitten to eat. She eats them whilst I chill and listen to music for about ten minutes. It’s cold, but it’s a nice cold. Get to sleep in pants and wool socks, and wake up feeling pretty damn cozy.

Give the water 15 minutes to heat up, then combine it with three more pitchers of cold water, giving me six pitchers (or maybe a gallon, give or take) of lukewarm to hot water. I won’t need all of it. It takes roughly two pitchers to wet, and three pitchers to rinse. As I said before, it’s a bit on the frosty, so you kinda gotta hurry. Finish, and use my remaining water to shave. Change, get ready, which today means dress shirt and pants. Why? Cuz I’m going to a wedding!

We’re supposed to leave at 6:30...so 7:30 actually ain’t too bad. I shouldn’t judge, I can remember any number of times I’ve left for engagements well over an hour late. So we load 30 people into the back of a truck, me into the cab (for I am fragile and liable to crack), and we set off. We stop about 3 miles up the road for a police checkpoint, which means we actually stop 2.75 miles up the road...and unload every single person in the back of the truck, who now start hoofing it by the side of the road. There are laws about having more people than seatbelts in Tanzania too...but like lots of laws, they only apply when the lawmakers are watching. So we go through the checkpoint, pay a 2,000 shilling fine, drive a quarter mile farther up the road, and, you guessed it, all the people who have been busting it climb back into the back of the truck, and off we go. Again.

We arrive in the village of the wedding. I, and all the people in our own private Grapes of Wrath truck, were invited by the chairman of our village. So it’s me, the church choir, and 20 other people the bride and groom have never met. Again, I suppose, not so different. We hang out for a couple hours before the wedding, eating ugali and beans. Then we head to the wedding. It’s completely in Kiswahili, of course, and quite beautiful. It’s also 3 hours long...but hey, they’re gonna spend a lifetime together. Give ‘em some time to think it all over. There are a half dozen different speeches, some of them given into a microphone that makes people sound like they are reporting from a rooftop in London during the middle of the Blitz. What helped me pass the time was listening to the keyboard player. You know how sometimes, when you give a kid a kazoo, they make it the soundtrack for everything. I mean everything. That’s kind of like this guy and his keyboard. When someone said something poignant, he played rockets taking off. When people clapped, he played cymbals. And I swear to you all, when someone said something funny, he played something that sounded a lot like a frisky robot becoming aroused.

So the wedding is presided over by a 60-year old Italian priest, who speaks Kiswahili with a distinctive “It’s meeeee, Maaaaario” accent, and speaks it very well. We have a very odd conversation after the wedding. Odd, because I know he speaks English, and we both speak in Swahili. Language is a funny thing, especially when it stops defining you...or rather defines you in a different way. It’s a bridge between people, and we have completely different language, completely different bridges, for every person, every circle we move through. So here we are, an elderly priest and a young volunteer, speaking their 3rd and 2nd languages, respectively, wondering just how much is being lost in translation.

We walk from the church to the reception. I’ve only ever seen Tanzanians walk fast for weddings, and for funerals. Or maybe it’s just for free food. Pick ‘em. There is an MC shouting instructions and telling jokes. They even call him an MC. He’d fit in perfectly in any American wedding. We all squeeze into the reception hall, and here’s where the real fun starts. Because a parade starts coming up the aisle, dancing. They aren’t escorting the bride, the groom, or the parents. It’s the cake. They’re escorting the cake. Love it. Except there is something I don’t really get...there’s a guy holding a log, and he’s kind of cradling it like a baby...or something. I don’t get it, so I ask my neighbor. And it turns out that the log is supposed to be a gun. And the guy is pretending to be a soldier. A soldier. To guard the cake. What really makes this moment is the look on my neighbor’s face when he explains it. Because he gets it. It’s ridiculous. And I know it’s ridiculous and hilarious, and so does he. But leaving carrots for reindeer might be kind of hard to explain (and gnawing half of them for the sake of the kids). So would hiding eggs, dressing up like Captain Morgan, or jumping off furniture at the stroke of twelve. But I hope we never lose it. Any of it. The world gets flatter and flatter, and lots of our weird, beautiful kinks become ironed out. But somewhere, in the middle of Africa, a guy is guarding a cake with a stick. And you ain’t getting to that cake. You ain’t even getting close. That stick is loaded.

Love,

Dan