Dear Family & Friends,

I have plenty to tell of my own stories and adventures since the last time I wrote... but I won't; at least not just yet. For now I'd like to give you all a slightly different perspective. My friend Amanda came to visit me for two weeks in late February - early March. Just as I did with my sister last year, I asked Amanda to write a little something for you all. It's always nice to have a new perspective; after more than two and a half years here, there are some things that I just don't notice anymore. Hopefully, Amanda's experience will tease out some of the basic things about my life here that I've been unable to so far. Enjoy!

I am so lucky to have been able to visit Ethan in Tanzania earlier this month. I think I really got a lot more out of the trip by staying in a small town with someone who lives there, rather than staying in the cities and going on safaris all the time. I got a sense of the rhythms of Ethan’s life: where he goes to shop, how much work it is to separate the rocks from the lentils, or to purify the drinking water, grading papers at night, walking two miles to remind people about a meeting later that day because they don’t have phones. I really got addicted to the calm and slow life there, and am missing that now that I am back in crazy drive-all-over-the-city-to-get-to-work, meetings-at-night kind of life.

Monduli and all of Tanzania are so beautiful! Things are much greener now than in other parts of the year, which I am glad for since things are so brown and boring in Ohio right now. The people are also so much more colorful, it seem. Women wear these really beautiful fun colorful wraps called khangas over their clothes, and they also wear them on their heads and to hold their babies and a dozen other uses as well. There seem to always be people outside, in the streets or in their yards, working or going somewhere or just sitting outside a store with some friends. It seemed to me to be an alive place, with the connection between people and the life forces that sustain them really evident and strong.

I have highlighted a few areas below of things that just struck me strongly or were interesting. I hope you find them interesting too, and not painfully long. I have already written four pages, and while I am really tired of typing now, I feel like to stop now is to be excluding so many stories and impressions and differences that I want to include. But you have to stop somewhere, and while this isn't the whole picture, I hope it does give some insight into Ethan’s life in a foreign land.

I also must apologize in advance for my tendency to write really long sentences. Also I am sorry if some of this was stated in the past.

The thing I seemed most concerned about was the whole bathroom situation. Does Ethan have a flush toilet? How does he bathe himself? These questions seemed really important to me. It is always interesting to me how different cultures deal with simple human functions so differently. In Ethan’s case, everything really depends on the availability of water. Ethan has plumbing and everything, but running water doesn't happen that often, so Ethan has two large tubs in which he stores his water. When the water is running, he attaches a rubber hose from the faucet and runs it into one or other of the tubs and lets the water slowly flow into the tub. He says sometimes he leaves it running when he goes to class because he needs water, but sometimes the tub fills up and starts overflowing while he is gone, so he comes back to a wet kitchen. Whether the water is running in his plumbing is also totally a direct result of whether or not there has been rain lately. After a big storm, the water was running for many hours a day. When it didn't rain for a week, we barely had any. It was good to be so intimately connected with the climate of the region (unlike in the American system, any American system, where it seems like the goal is to allow people to forget that they have any connection at all to nature).

For bathing, the whole process was much more pleasant and actually fun than I expected it to be. Ethan has worked out a system whereby he puts two pitcherfuls of cold water from his water tubs into a bucket, and then boils another pitcher of water. He then combines the boiling water with the cold water, and a really good bathing temperature results. He then takes the bucket into the bathroom bathing area and uses a little cleaned peanut butter tub to scoop the water over him. It was actually really fun for me to bathe this way. I was amazed at how little water it takes to clean me and my long hair as opposed to how much I use here every day in the shower. And it doesn't steam up the bathroom nearly as much.

I came at the right time of year for the toilet situation. While half the year, Ethan uses his little outhouse thing out back, which I somehow managed to avoid seeing the whole time I was there, and which is a traditional African-style squat toilet, he actually does have an indoor flush toilet that he uses during the rainier times of year when he has enough water. The problem is, it doesn't really work because the water is seldom running, so you have to dump a bucket of water into the toilet every time you want to flush it. Which involves taking the bucket from the bathroom to the kitchen, using the yellow pitcher to dump a bunch of pitchers of water into the bucket, lugging the bucket back to the toilet, and dumping the water into the toilet at the right speed to make everything flush properly. This didn't always work for me thoroughly the first time, so several times I had to go through the whole thing again. In light of all the other uses of water in the house (washing dishes, bathing, drinking), it was a really big surprise how much water it takes to flush a simple toilet. It does make sense why the traditional toilets don't use water, and why bringing in a foreign "convenience" actually ends up being much more of a hassle. Though I was glad to have a sit-down toilet inside the house.

As a non-car owner, Ethan, like most other people in Monduli, gets to take the public transportation to get around. Which means lots of buses. There is some kind of train track, and apparently it used to be used for public transportation quite regularly, especially on the route from Arusha to Dar, but that has been cancelled in recent years. This is too bad, because there is a law in Tanzania that buses aren't allowed to run at night, so if you are trying to get anywhere really far away, you will no doubt use at least a day getting there. The train was allowed to run overnight, eliminating this problem. I'm not sure why it isn't used anymore maybe Ethan could explain it better[*]. But so a bus in Tanzania can range from a big 40- or 60- seater, with a little rack for luggage above your head, to a little minibus thing with seating for like 12. When I would go into Arusha, I usually took a minibus (called a dalla-dalla) into town, and then a larger bus back.

[* Ed. Note: The train still runs in many other parts of the country, across places where the road is really bad. The Arusha-Dar road has been refurbished sometime in the past ten years, so the buses go quite a bit faster than the train. I think the large migration of people from trains to buses along that route put the trains out of business.]

The way the whole system works is really interesting. The buses are all privately owned, usually by the driver. There isn't a set schedule. The buses only leave when they are full, because otherwise it wouldn't be worth it financially for the driver. And when I say full I mean FULL. On those little 12 seaters, they squish in 20 easy. People sit down, then when a row is full often there will be another seat that folds down into the aisle (a really ingenious use of space). With that seat down, you can usually fit two more people on that row. Two or three people sit up front with the driver, some more people stand kind of hunched over in the remaining non-seat area by the door, and if it is a particularly busy day, a few more people will hang out of the open doorway. This is all done with a minimum of fuss, and people's bags and packages are distributed where they best fit. If you are standing and have something that you can't hold, like some bread or a shopping bag or your baby, someone who is sitting down will be more than happy to help you out.

Because I would get on the buses in Arusha, the starting point, and get off in Monduli, the end of the line, I almost always had a seat and was thus spared from having to be all bent over and dealing with all the potholes and speed bumps on the roads standing up. The day before I left, though, I did take a daladala a couple of miles out of Arusha and was forced to hold on for dear life by the door. I felt like such an adventurer.

Also, in Arusha, when you are waiting for your bus to fill up (which I did for over an hour one day -- I had the bad luck to arrive at the bus stand when a new Monduli bus showed up, and was the first one on one of the big buses) you can also accomplish some of your shopping out your window. Guys come by with big boards kind of balanced on their heads so that their products will be at eye-level to you sitting in the bus. Their products were widely varied: leather belts that say CROCODILE and have a picture of a crocodile on them, little hand-held radios (which I really wanted to get but somehow didn't manage it before I left), lots of cheap plastic things and plastic cell phones with candy inside. Some guys would specialize in feeding the weary shopper and would come by with cold drinks, peanuts and candy bars. Other people would just have a couple of things they just wanted to get rid of, so they would bring it by the buses to see if anyone was interested. People would try to sell me eggs and bread. One guy came by with only two large bunches of steel wool. Pretty random. I didn't engage in shopping out my window, though because I was white everyone thought I would and would stand patiently outside my window with their wares. One day they were getting kind of aggressive and this one guy reached in to grab me to get my attention or something, so I had to slam my window shut rudely and ignore them till they went away. The other people on the bus laughed. Maggie, the other PCV in Monduli, says she loves shopping out the window and does so often.

I got so used to these buses and the crowding that when a safari car came to take Ethan and me away for the weekend, I felt like we were living in the lap of luxury. It was so decadent to have a whole car for just three people! Apparently our driver felt the same way because we did actually give a guy a ride back with us at the end of our safari that came up to our car. If we have the space, why not use it? Just another example of how people in Tanzania make good use of their resources (because there isn't money to do otherwise).

Before I came to Tanzania, Ethan explained to me that greeting people is very big in Tanzania, and that I would need to learn some greetings so that I wouldn't be totally rude to everyone. I made all these flash cards and everything on the plane on the way over, but for some reason, this didn't give me quite enough time to work it all out, and the first few days I felt like I was really bad at greeting people. I am looking at my trip journal and the sentence appears from when we first get into Monduli: :…we got to Monduli and then walked to Ethan’s house without serious incident, other than we had to greet some people." It totally stressed me out at first, and I could never understand what they were saying to me. Ethan started repeating what they were saying, but slower, and that helped a lot.

By the end of my first week there, I felt much more comfortable and was doing a lot of offensive greeting, where I would greet people first and set the tone of the exchange so they couldn't throw something complicated at me. A good "habari yako" was my favorite kind of a "how are things going" greeting. Of course, for older people, you needed to give them the greeting of respect "shikamoo," to which they would respond "marahaba." Children would either give you the respectful greeting, or instead the younger ones would say loudly in English "Good morning!" or "Goody morn!" or "Good morning, teacha!" My favorite was when a group of girls all proudly declared "Good morning class!" to me and Maggie, just as they had been taught in school. This of course happens during all times of the day. A usual exchange like this would be something like "Good morning, teacha!" "Good afternoon. How are you?" "Thank you." Very cute.

So while at first greeting people stressed me out, I actually came to quite like it. One day I had gone to Arusha, where (being the Big City) people don't greet each other, and not only that, but as a white person trying to walk around the tourist section, I would get totally hassled by people trying to sell me stuff. It had been pretty exhausting, and when I got off the bus in Monduli, I was just so happy all of a sudden to be back in the beautiful countryside, and so happy to be saying hi to the passers-by with polite greetings. Monduli seemed all of a sudden like this really friendly, beautiful place where people respected each other and smiled a lot. I thought maybe it was like small-town America where people actually know each other and say hi even if they don't. I don't know if I have ever been to a town like that in America, but I have heard that they exist, and it seems like a great thing. So the nearest I have found to that is a small town in Tanzania. I am sure that if I spoke the language and stayed there long enough, I would discover the seedy underbelly of Monduli, but on the surface it seems like such a nice place, and I can understand why Ethan extended his stay there another year.

There were a few customs that I had trouble getting used to. First of all, Tanzanian men and women do not show any affection in public. Absolutely no PDA. The men can hold hands, but women and men do not touch at all. Which seems like not such a big deal, but you end up having to be really conscious all the time about what your body is doing, making sure you’re not being inappropriate ever. It was unnatural for me.

As kind of an extension of that, women’s dress there is much more conservative, with lots of skirts and seldom pants. I brought some skirts, but and I tried to wear them around Monduli, but couldn't bring myself to do it all the time and definitely not into Arusha where I had to do a lot of walking. This probably contributed to my looking like a tourist, which is okay, because I was. But I couldn't wear shorts and I had a tank top that I felt I needed to wear when it was so hot during the day and couldn't really. The funny thing was, I couldn't even wear them in Ethan’s house unless the door was closed, because people could look in and in Tanzania apparently, you always have to be ON, and even your house isn't a good place for you to act inappropriately if there is any chance that someone might see you. Once I think I embarrassed Ethan because I had switched into my tank top and pajama bottoms when I got back to his place one hot day and his two Tanzanian friends from the military academy came over. It was the equivalent probably of them seeing me in my underwear. They didn't say anything, but it probably would have been better if I had had more clothes on. Oh well.

The last one was that you don't eat or drink in public unless you plan on sharing it with everyone, or else it is really rude. It is surprising how often I would want to be snacking or drinking or whatever in public I didn't realize I do that so much. I guess it comes from that American multi-tasking attitude. If you can eat AND walk, that is better than just sitting and eating, right? So I felt like I couldn't drink my water ever when I was out on the town unless I was sitting in a restaurant or maybe on the bus surreptitiously, which is too bad because I was thirsty there a lot.

One thing that is cool though is that if you buy a pop from some store, you either have to return the bottle or pay a deposit on it. So you end up drinking your whole drink at the store and then returning the bottle. Forget about recycling; all the bottles get cleaned and reused for as long as they can be. Because of this, the bottles are much thicker than they are in the States, so that they last longer. Ethan introduced me to Fanta Passion, which I drank a lot of while I was there. I drank so many more carbonated beverages than I am used to. They are more likely to have Coke products in a store than bottled water, I think. Though most places sold both.

One of my favorite customs was going with Ethan every morning to chai, the little tea break that all the teachers take at his school at 10:10 every morning. The tea was SO good! They make it with milk instead of water (which is why they probably call it chai, though all the tea in Tz is called chai) and add lots of sugar and maybe some other spices, and they make it in this huge pot then put it in big thermoses for the teachers. It is so hot at first, and Ethan and I had to wait at least 5 minutes to be able to drink the stuff, but everyone else would be slurping away. I asked Ethan’s neighbor Mr. Mollel about this, and he was like, "well, you just have to blow on it!" which of course I was doing the whole five minutes I was waiting for it to cool down. Ethan says they may be much more sensitive to cold things than we are, in contrast. They are just used to heat there.

They also have these fried dough things that aren't sweet, but go really well with the tea. So I would sit there every morning and listen to everyone speak to each other in Swahili, or maybe I would talk to a teacher in English, and savor my two cups of tea and two fried dough things. I bought some tea leaves to bring home with me, but I know it won't taste the same when I try to make it.

Another favorite moment for me comes in the evening when the sun is just setting and all the students at Ethan’s school are going in to dinner. Before dinner, they all sing for like 10 minutes. It is so beautiful and powerful, and I would go out and watch the sun set and listen to the students singing.

While much of the time, Ethan and I would cook dinner and make lunch at his place, and make such American things as burritos and pb&js and soup, I definitely got to try some of the local dishes and restaurants for "normal" Tanzanian fare. In Monduli, there are many little places to go and eat. The trouble is that when you want to eat, there may not be much there for you to eat. Ethan and I went to a few places before we found anyone who had more than rice and meat on hand. A dish called "chips mayai" which sounds like "chips my eye" was what I ended up having the most. It is basically eggs with french fries cooked inside. It is pretty good if greasy, but I think I ended up having it 5 times during my 2 ½ weeks which I think was a little much.

The day before I left, Maggie took me to a restaurant in Arusha that had all the traditional meals, and I ate ugali with beans and vegetables. Ugali is a kind of paste made out of coarse flour that you can roll into balls and dip into sauces and stuff. Quite good. They also have chapati which is a fried bread that is good with all the rice and sauces they have.

All around Monduli, and when we went onto Mt. Kilimanjaro to visit another PCV, Ethan and I or Maggie and I would go on little hikes to check out the area. First of all, Tanzanians don't hike in general. They don't really understand "hiking," so when one asks you what you are doing, you just say you are stretching your legs or going for a little walk. What struck me was that we would be walking, and I would be totally hot of course and with my hiking boots on and all of this, and wherever we would walk, we would pass people’s houses and the people themselves out farming or walking home. For them it was just the road that they took every day. Maybe in the national parks it is different, but I never went on any path that wasn't the way to someone’s home.

Maggie and I were climbing up this little mountain behind Ethan’s house one day. We greeted people on the way of course and but once we started getting up higher and asking if we could get to the top with this path, the people started saying "no, no, you shouldn't go up any higher. You should turn around. It’s not safe." It turns out that the previous night, elephants had come down that way and trampled some plants and had possibly hurt this boy. So we had to turn around because wild elephants were roaming around right by Ethan’s house! How crazy is that?

Ethan says that Tanzanians think it is odd for Americans to come so far for so short of a time. He says that people will probably be asking him a month or two from now how his guest (me) is doing. They also figured that since I was coming to Tanzania, I must be studying Kiswahili pretty seriously. When I said that I didn't know much and was leaving soon, a couple of people were like, "well, you can find programs back in America to study the language. You'll learn." Ethan says they don't really get that outside of East Africa, few people speak Swahili, and I could go my whole life in the U.S. and never meet any Swahili speakers, so there wasn't much reason for me to learn the language. For them, it is this huge language that cuts across many tribal lines, so it seems really big.

Also, some people assume that the U.S. must be similar in language to Tanzania, i.e. that everyone speaks English, but also their own tribal language. Ethan’s friend asked me what my tribal language was like and was really sad for me when I told him that we didn't have tribal languages and actually I only spoke one language. I tried to explain that in the U.S., all we had are accents to tell people’s home. He was surprised and sad for us.

Well, like I said, there are a million other stories to tell, but this is quite long enough already. I can just say that I quickly got used to the speed of life there, and I was sad to leave. Ethan’s town and the surrounding countryside are so lovely. I would love to see how they change throughout the seasons. I thank Ethan for being such a great host and taking care of me for so long. I am just really glad to have had the opportunity to see such a different culture. If any of you can afford it, I would definitely suggest visiting him before he leaves it all!

Ethan here again. One more short thing before I go -- this is a poem written by another PCV's mother who came to visit her a few months ago. You might see some parallels with Amanda's views, as well as some other stuff. I will say this: It's definitely about the Africa I know.

I never met anyone I ate before.
Asked to cull a goat out from the small herd,
how do I select the one honored to become my meal,
watch as its soft brown eyes rim with white,
struggling against the boy who holds it firmly
while his mother draws the knife swiftly across its throat.
I long for nameless faceless meat I have never watched breathe
Ground up, not coarse hide and bloody organs,
That I hear bleat just minutes before.

I never walked to draw my water before.
The women swing their jugs effortlessly up onto their heads,
then sashay back on uneven paths, staying dry
while I trudge under the weight of the water,
spilling more than my daily portion.
Rusty dust softly rises from our feet, coating my throat,
yet the water cannot be drunk
until the children return with kindling and it is boiled.
I dream of cool, transparent water, without leaves or silt,
Amoeba or dysentery, pouring from a tap inside my house.

I never competed with animals for my food before.
The grasshoppers zing my hands as I pick squash leaves;
birds as big as small cats noisily protest
my intrusion into their mango tree;
worms lazily eat their way out of the fruit I have gathered.
Bony chickens and slinking dogs anxiously eye me,
quickly darting in to wrest my harvest if it is dropped
I want to open a package of rice or flour, pre-sifted and sorted, and
bite into a piece of fruit not previously feasted upon by birds
or currently occupied by bugs.

I never waited six hours for a bus before.
And when it came, weighted down beyond capacity,
seemingly unfettered by a schedule,
no shock absorbers to cushion us from the pitted dirt road,
everyone squeezed over to include me.
Hours later, someone graciously waled me from the road
Up the forking paths to my destination, as I was lost beyond repair,
Fondly remembering paved streets with clearly marked signs.

My proficiency with words is an unknown currency here;
my skill at carving through bureaucratic thickets
has no useful applications as there is no paper to be punched.
I am uneducated in all things relevant,
and reduced the the mercy of strangers and small children.
There are no unknown vendors whom I can pay to meet my daily needs.
My keen ache for the familiar is as much for the comforts of home
As for my illusion of self-sufficiency.

Take care, folks. More to come soon.

Wageni wanasema ukweli,
Ethan

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