Badass

Have been trying to load this blog for about two weeks now, but better late than never. 2nd to last blog post before I head for warmer climes (it’s freaking freezing here!)

We are preparing a girls empowerment conference at the moment. This involves many things, such as life skills, confidence building, dance parties, and lots of other sessions where Dan stands out in a field playing frisbee with his fellow males...because inside they’re talkin bout lady parts. I’m cool with being in the field.

What a Girls Empowerment Conference also involves is condom demonstrations. And while we can show the young lasses how to make the magic happen on a water bottle, banana, gently tapered carrot, or (insert your phallic vegetable of choice here...yeah), nothing beats a good old wooden penis. So I went to my village fundi (in this case, carpenter) with an unusual request. I wanted an uume wa mbao (a penis of wood). To which he replied (ever the thoughtful fundi), “unataka mbao laini, au ngumu?” You’ll understand why my giggles prevented me from answering for a few minutes after you read the following translation:

“Do you want hard wood or soft wood?”

Definitely hard wood. No warping. Definitely no warping. (Thank you, Rain Man)

A word about my cat. A talented mouser is my furry Kelsey. Not a day goes by that he does not bring me in a small present of a field mouse or a bird or a lizard. Then some days he brings in rats the size of my foot. Well played, sir cat. But the problem is that he, of course, enjoys the thrill of the hunt. By which I means he likes to play with his food. Which is fine in the normal course of things, but a little disturbing when I’m trying to have a meeting and he’s slowly slaughtering a bewildered varmit underneath my feet. Nothing, however, tops the day I awoke to the sound of him knocking over stuff in my living room, which usually means one of God’s smaller pests is near death’s door. And as it turned out, I was right. Because when I entered my main room, prepared to greet the day, I found a mouse floating face down in my cat’s water dish. It looked like a feline mob killing.

Was out a walkin’ the other day, round evenin’ time. The sun had set, but the light had not yet gone. I’ve always loved this time of day, when if you’re reading something you need to hurry, because the words grow fainter literally every second. I was looking off to the east, at the first few twinkle stars. A semi comes roaring by on the road, which is maybe thirty feet to my left, to the west. A reminder, if I wanted one (I don’t), how close is the world of diesel and capitalism and profit margins and iPhones and microwave ovens. I look back to my right, to the east, and I see a small cooking fire. A fire lit by native forests that are rapidly disappearing, a flickering symbol of the way life used to be, a way of cooking ugali and beans that has been around far longer than me...but might beat me to the grave. Find myself wondering, for the hundredth time, how one world can possibly hold all of this in it. More wonderful sights and sounds and people than I could meet in a dozen lifetimes, but the little sliver I’ve been privileged to behold keeps me in awe every single day.

I wonder, as I write the last part, if I’m guilty of romanticizing the poverty I see here. I think I absolutely am. But I make no real apologies to that. I do think life here is better in a lot of fundamental ways. Or if not better, perhaps simpler, and with that simplicity comes a grace that is treasured in America. Why is it treasured? Because of its scarcity. Here, it’s just how life goes. I miss all of you more than I can say, and when my clock hits zeroes, I’m coming back. Because I miss Americans. America...I’m not sure yet. Ask me in a month.

Two birthday celebration moments (only one of them actually happened on my birthday, but I like how we’ve all started to embrace the concept of a Birthday Week. Like the queen, we all get our seven day Jubilees.) The first was the day of my birthday, which was wonderful. I got text messages, facebook messages, and phone calls from lots of kickass people (namely all of you). I also got a piece of cake, got sung to, had a milkshake, smoked a cigar on a balcony, and saw possibly the most spectacular sunset of my life (though I think that almost every other day here, and I’m usually right). The sunset presented some logistical difficulties, however. We had to hike up to this massive rock that overlooks Iringa to watch it. But I was also jonesin for a vodka watermelon on my birthday (it ended up being made with local gin that comes from plastic baggies, but who’s counting?). So here’s the shida: it’s now getting near sunset. Have to buy the watermelon before sunset or the market or close. Do not have time to return it to our hostel. Do not want to hike up a mountain with a watermelon. Solution: find a storekeeper willing to hang onto my tikiti maji (watermelon) until we get back. Another shida: no store will be open then. So I puzzle and puzzle till my puzzler is sore, and then what to my wondering eyes should appear? The local police station. Which is how we find our hero, 6pm on his birthday, humbly asking the local constabulary to guard his birthday watermelon until his safe return.

This job rocks.

Celebration moment number two. I wrote in this blog many months ago about a wedding I went to, in far away Maduma (there was a guy guarding a cake with a stick). On the way back from that wedding there were about 30 Tanzanians in the back of the truck, and it was late, and it was cold. So what did they do? They sang the whole damn way. Flash forward: Saturday night we are at a beautiful resort in the hills near Mbeya. We want to get back to town. But taxis are scarce, and it’s a good 25 kilometers (real men use metric) back to our hostel. So we manage to shanghai a passing pickup truck. Three of us go in the cab…and the other 20 go in the flatbed. Now, it has an overhead frame, so we are able to hold on. But it’s late, and it’s cold. So what do we do? We sing the whole freaking way home. Television theme shows, 80’s Billy Joel, Journey, but nothing as loud as the Star Spangled Banner. There’s nothing like belonging to a community of people that are from home, and there’s nothing like being jammed into a truck like sardines with that group of people, cruising the miles on a dark dirt road, singing about the land of the free and the home of the brave. Happy Birthday to me.

Brief comic interlude. I taught my last Life Skills class of the semester last week. And because my co-teacher was off picking up a friend in the capital, I was solo. Which of course is the week we decided to do the sex talk with all the children. What fun for your boy. You want a true linguistics test? Try having someone explain how sex works, and how AIDS is transmitted, in their second language. Not easy. Not fun. So how do you make it easy and fun? Simple. Every time they answer a question or ask a good one, you teach them a new way to say “Awesome” in English. And if you do this, and you have the opportunity to have a classroom filled with Tanzanian students shout “Badass!” at the top of their lungs, you better take it. Because trust me, it will make your week.

I was sitting with my dear friend Kenzie one morning, and we were talking about something unimportant. And something about the moment: the coffee, the omelet we’d made on charcoal, the odd African cold, something brought the realization stinging to my eyes...I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to relive this. I may even succeed, on a few beautiful mornings in the middle of a forest somewhere in America. But what it really means is that I’m doomed to forever be torn, forever in two places. In Kiswahili the word for together is Pamoja. It literally means “one place”. And from the moment I got here...until the day I die, I think, I’ll never be together. I’ll always be Pawili. Two places. In a way, it’s torture. I feel like Sam at the end of the Ring Wars, divided, unwhole, wanting to dream all his old dreams of Rosie and the Shire, but knowing all the while that the man who started down the road at the onset of the journey is not the man who has returned. But on the other hand...I’m home. And when I come back...I’ll be home. While I’m here, I never, not for a moment, stop missing all of you. But when I’m back with you all, I will never, not even for an instant, be able to forget these blessed, fleeting years, and this beautiful, welcoming village. So many people spend their lives searching for one place where they belong, where they are loved and appreciated. Many never find it. I have two. And though these choices I’ve made have broken my heart once, and will break it again, I wouldn’t change a moment of any of it for all the stars in the sky.