Razzaq the Rascal

Would like to begin today’s post with a few tales about my friend Razzaq. Razzaq is three. When you ask Razzaq how old he is, he says “Tatu!” This means three. Very good Razzaq. When you ask Razzaq what grade he is in, he answers, “Tatu!” Not quite accurate. When you ask Razzaq how many kilos he weighs, he says, “Tatu!”. Awww...you’re cute.

And cute he is. It’s as if his father, my principal counterpart, designed a child purposely to amuse me. He is short...and funny. It is as if his cheeks have grown fully, and the rest of his body is moving at normal pace. He has the chubbiest cheeks I have ever seen on a child. They seem to be squeezing his eyes in, and his voice also sounds like it is being squeezed, like he is always talking around a muffin he hasn’t finished eating. He also waddles when he walks, and occasionally sports a three piece black suit…which he wears to the farm, and while playing in the dirt (more on this later). I find him adorable. One day when he was pretending to drive the stool he was sitting on, making all sorts of car noises, I asked him if the stool he was driving had gears. “LAZIMA ina gia!”, says our budding Jimmy Johnson (definitely the first and probably only NASCAR reference this blog will see). By which he meant, “OF COURSE it has gears!”.

He is also one of the biggest fans of my favorite greeting with small Tanzanian children: the exploding fist bump. I say, “Nipe tano!” (give me five), and hold out my fist. They give me a bump, and then we do the explode and say “ripua!” (explode). Some of the kids like it, most don’t get it, but every time I see chubby-cheeked Razzaq he walks up to me with a fist and says in his squeezed little voice, “Nipe tano!!!”. Makes me laugh every single time.

Last Razzaq story. When my partner and I talk at his house, we always do so in his living room, with a door that leads right out to his courtyard. The courtyard is also where the kukus (chickens) spend their time. Inside is the usual source of food, so the kukus occasionally try to enter. This is no good, as they might lay eggs, or other organic material, anywhere inside the house. So during our conversations about village development and cross-culture, we also spend lots of time shooing kukus outside. One day Razzaq was waddling around without purpose, so my counterpart gives him a purpose. He finds a stool (the aforementioned car with gears) and a stick. He sits Razzaq in the doorway and gives him the stick. We now have a mlinzi (guard). Attaboy Razzaq.

The rains have been getting interesting these days. Went a couple days without them last week. Then came Sunday. Am sitting in my house after church, just reading. It’s felt real quiet for a few hours, like it does before a storm. The clouds, which usually roll in slowly, one by one, are just a towering mass of gray. It begins to rain, then rain heavily. And then, for the first time, it begins to hail. I have a metal roof. This makes a drizzle sound like a shower, a shower sound like a hail storm, and a hail storm...it’s hard to describe. The storm lasted about 20 minutes. It felt like forever. The pea-sized hail hammered my roof, and it wasn’t just that I couldn’t hear. It was that the sound became so deafening it was like white noise in my head. I remember wondering if this is what Noriega felt like DOUBLE CHECK NORIEGA. It was a novelty for a couple minutes, and then it started to hurt. So this is how I ended up like a five year-old in the middle of a storm, with my head buried under the pillow, waiting for the storm to pass.

Speaking of unusual pain. Nothing here is quite as tied to my identity as a rough-and-ready Peace Corps Volunteer as my panga (machete). I love it. It’s coming back with me. So when my neighbor told me I had to build trellises for my tomatoes, I was thrilled. A chance to use the machete without chasing mice! Still have not caught one yet, got a lot of work to do to catch up with Kelsey (a naturally gifted rat-catcher). So I pull out a few bamboo poles from my fence and start hacking. It’s awesome! And then it’s not! Because I slip, and instead of delivering the final blow to a piece of muhanzi (bamboo), I deliver a rather nice blow to my wrist, leaving a nice little gash. Which is how I ended up with my very first, and very favorite, machete wound. Living the dream people. The. Dream.

To pick up my earlier point about clothes. Razzaq wearing a full suit is not all that unusual. I am never, and I mean never, the best dressed person in my village. Every day there are Tanzanian men in my village with immaculately pressed shirts and slacks with creases so sharp they don’t need machetes (but they still use them, because machetes ongeza (increase) manhood). These are not rich people, but the cultural ideal is to look your best at all times. I occasionally feel self conscious; maybe I’m underdressed (I never leave the house without a button-down shirt, but occasionally early morning visitors get a glimpse of my Dark Side of the Moon pajama pants. Eat your heart out)? Here is where it gets really fun. These beautiful dress slacks and sharp dress shirts…they wear them everywhere. Particularly to the farm. Nothing preps you for the first time you are digging up potatoes with a man who looks ready to address a jury. It’s a very different cultural thing, and I don’t completely understand it. But for Tanzanians, appearances are incredibly important, even occasionally to the detriment of the task at hand. I cannot count the number of times I have had to sign guest books. Every school, office, hospital, and hostel has one. I am a permanent guest. Does the thing matter? Not really. But its presence makes things official…and that is what matters. My cow group does not have an office, any money, any cow sheds, or any feed (though we are working on all those things). But dammit, we’ve got a sign in book. All is well.

Was out for a walk in the middle of the night to send some text messages (I only get service to send messages if I walk a few hundred feet uphill. The full moon is out, and Wow it is bright. I am looking around, and I am literally seeing colors of plants and houses in the middle of the night. It’s like the negative of the world I’m used to, and it’s unbelievably beautiful, like some mischievous god spray-painted the village with silver. It is so bright, in fact, that I have an idea. I reach into my pocket and pull out my notebook. Sure enough, I’m right. Which is how, twenty minutes later, our humble narrator finds himself outside on his folding chair, reading “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, completely by moonlight. Next time I’ll find something slightly more poetic, but even reading about clinical neurology, I was mbinguni (in heaven). No flashlight needed. Not tonight.