I used to work during the day, go to town in the afternoon and return to blog and eat in the evening. The last two weeks have been exciting partly because of all the time I had without being tied to my computer for work and writing. Most importantly, I’ve become a fairly well integrated hearing member of Bukoba’s deaf community. I even attended a three-day seminar with CHAVITA (Chama cha Viziwa wa Tanzania or Tanzania Association of the Deaf) with the organization’s Poverty Reduction Strategist from Dar es Salaam, and helped convince some angry business owners that their deaf employees should be allowed to skip work to attend. I tried to hide my visible excitement about the event as the culmination of everything I’ve ever enjoyed studying: Sign Language, Swahili, East Africa, government and politics, public
policy, institutional exclusion, community organization, microfinance, democratic engagement, poverty and unemployment. Maybe it’s my enthusiasm about all of those subjects that kept me from making friends until now. I don’t know how to talk about those things in Sign though, so my deaf friends won’t have to hear about it. I do know how to say “lizard” though.

I also got a new sign name because the original one apparently meant “mzungu” or “white/European person” and my deaf friends felt that was too broad. My new one is more specific to me than to a couple continents of humans, but references another physical condition with which I’m uncomfortable: my new fatness. So I don’t care to discuss it. The same day, me and Stanslaus wiped out on his bike, which we’ve been dangerously double-riding all over Bukoba. I happened to be at the controls when a motorcycle ran us off the road next to a speed bump and a big rock marking the entrance to a hotel. There were too many ingredients for things to turn out well and I flipped us over, giving Stans a four-inch cut on his ankle and a lot of blood in his shoe. I helped him limp to a hospital where I translated his Sign into Swahili to explain our problem to a nurse who fixed him up for 4,000 shillings, then translated her Swahili into Sign to explain to Stans how to care for the wound over the next few days. Exhausted, we went to the beach for sodas.

Another interesting thing about the service was the complicated single-file line system used to weave rows of people out and back into their rows to place money in three different offering baskets around the church—three times. The only thing I can compare it to is my high school graduation rehearsal, which was four hours of teaching public-school-educated Americans to stand in unison and walk in single file, then return to their seats. That rehearsal tells me that the system employed by this church would never work for Americans, maybe because we care so much about individualism that we can’t think about doing our part when we’re part of a 400-body moving organism of receiving diplomas or dropping coins in a basket. After all, there are text messages to be sent.

After church we went home for lunch and naps (the service was at 7am). Ditrick picked us up around 4 for drinks and dinner on the beach, where Hope, Jeremy and I waited for him to go pick up some other people. Halfway through a can of Redd’s (crisp apple beer?), Komel, the only Muslim member of the deaf crew, showed up on a four-wheeler. Like many, if not most Tanzanians of Asian or specifically Indian origin, his family is comparatively wealthy in Bukoba and owns a restaurant, and several other businesses, next to their home on Lake Victoria. The Muslim community in Tanzania, which is one third of its population, is a mix between people of African ancestry and those with Asian/Indian ancestry. Regardless, the community seems to identify strongly with their Tanzanian national identity along with their fellow citizens of Christian and traditional beliefs. Still, Tanzanians who are visibly of Asian/Indian ancestry are (pretty accurately) stereotyped as wealthy business owners. History explains that the Indians who first came to the East African (Kenya/Tanzanian) coast were traders who brought goods from India like dyes and spices in exchange for (I think, but I can’t remember) coffee, tea and maybe animal pelts (?). They eventually established coastal communities for managing trade, explaining East Africa’s Muslim coast, and the religion and people have spread inland to places like Bukoba. That history also explains the relative wealth of the Muslim community, especially the portion with Asian/Indian ethnic backgrounds.

Anyway, he asked me to come with him to see another deaf person (literal translation of “kiziwi”), so I told Hope and Jeremy I’d be back and hopped on the four-wheeler. Stanslaus, whose name I learned today when he put his number in my phone, is 20, deaf, has a job that has something to do with fish and boxes, and is really good at helping me understand when I don’t know what’s going on. Some of the other guys sign bigger and faster when I ask them to explain something, but Stanslaus mouths words for me, spells things and tries synonyms or scenarios to help me understand. When Komel left with his family, Stanslaus walked me back to the hotel restaurant to meet Hope and Jeremy. En route, he said he’d bring his Tanzanian Sign Language book tomorrow for me to use to learn more signs on my own.

And today my circle of friends expanded like the US housing bubble in 2007. As promised, Shubi introduced me to her deaf friend with whom I wanted to try to talk in Sign language, which I took sophomore year at Vassar. It turns out he had a sign teacher from Denmark. (They used to be socialist, right? They do a lot of cool stuff in Tanzania.) At first I struggled really hard because I’ve forgotten a lot, but eventually was signing faster and able to keep up with a lot of what he was signing. His name is Johanes William, he’s 27 and works at a small outdoor furniture factory. He took me to visit and his boss let him off for the rest of the day so we could go meet other deaf people in Bukoba. At this point, I was as pee-my-pants excited as you.

You know how people say that when you learn your third language you often revert to your second language to try to fill in holes in your vocabulary? Well my second language was Sign, so when my Swahili isn’t keeping up, I do what looks to others like advanced gesturing. Sign language isn’t written though, so you have to finger-spell words whose sign you don’t know in the written language that you do know. (When I don’t know how to sign a word, I use my hand to spell it in English). That works when you’re signing with someone who knows the same written language, but failed pretty hard when I was spelling in English and Johanes was spelling in Swahili. As long as both of us understand a given word in any one of the three languages, we can communicate with it.

I was happy when we met his friends because they were closer to my age. For some reason I felt a lot more comfortable trying to get to know them in Sign than I usually do speaking to people in Swahili. I think part of it (get ready for the part that’s fascinating) is that I hear and see English words in my head when I sign, even if the person on the other side of the conversation is thinking in Swahili (or maybe in Sign since they’re fluent and don’t know what words sound like, only what they look like). Anyway, it was kind of confusing but also really fun to use three languages between five people, often with two people translating one language into the other two so that everyone could understand. Also kind of fun: I don’t know their names because they just told me their sign names. So I can’t tell you.

We stood near a shop where one of them works in town for almost three hours having a conversation that could have happened in half the time if we were all fluent in the same language. A few times the youngest one (whose Sign name is a horizontal index finger moved across the forehead) pointed out that people were staring at them because of me. I apologized for being white instead of deaf, and he laughed. Later a guy with no legs who uses a hand-pedaled bike came over to talk to us. He wasn’t deaf but was able to sign well and spoke to me in Swahili when we told him I could hear too. When he left, the youngest guy said in Sign, “He’s like us because he’s different. Like you, you’re different too.” He touched my white arm (Tanzanians are very touchy) to remind me that my skin emits light like a six-foot glow stick of awkward. I somehow felt very at home with other people who tend to be a spectacle everywhere they go because they talk with their hands.

Highlight: They gave me a Sign name! It’s kind of cheesy, but it’s kind of a big deal. You can learn to sign fluently, but your Sign name has to come from a deaf person—like a friend who is not your teacher. Until then, you just spell your name for people, so it’s kind of special. Anyway, mine is an open palm facing the eye, moved across the temple. I got excited and forgot to ask what it meant, so I’ll do that
next time I see them.

The first is the suggestion that people in Africa have inferior spiritual and intellectual capacity, an ugly idea that was that slap of Pastor Paul’s backhanded compliment, expressed with great surprise, that he could learn so much from “Africans.” Too interested in the differences between his lifestyle and those of the people of Bukoba, he failed to speak as a fellow human and instead preached to Tanzanian people who already know they have a lot to teach people from rich countries. American and European visitors to East Africa are also very impressed at the simple industriousness people employ to carry out their daily tasks: using a piece of fabric as a sling for a small child, folded scraps of newspaper to lift pots and pans without handles from the fire, a banana leaf to wrap fish from the market, a thorn or small stick to repair a broken strap on a rubber sandal. Their surprise mocks people who use simple innovations that are actually very obvious adaptations to a lack of unnecessary baby-carrying backpacks with straps and safety locks, oven mittens, Saran wrap, and sufficient disposable income to buy new sandals. You shouldn’t be impressed by how smart a Tanzanian woman is when she uses a kanga (multi-purpose piece of fabric adorning the dorm room walls of many globetrotting American college students) to carry her child. You should think the mall-walking dad with a $200 steel and Space-grade plastic baby-carrying apparatus wrapped around his torso is an idiot. Being barefoot and poor doesn’t make people stupid, so people from rich countries should be less surprised when we learn things from them—through our RayBans. Pastor Paul wouldn’t have been so surprised, in 1965 or 2009, at what he had learned here if it weren’t for the underlying assumption that Tanzanians didn’t have anything to teach him. Surely, Jesus would have had little to do with that.

The Church often refers to the Bible as a tool from God, an instruction manual, and people are quick to turn to it for answers, citing the chapter and verse that advise Christians on a particular subject. But too many people have failed to recognize that if the Bible is a tool, so is a newspaper, an economics textbook, the vast academic literature on poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Internet, from which you can cite facts and statistics about a reality fewer than 2,000 years old. Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008, wrote, “Economic statistics are useful, of course, to the extent that they shed light on the human condition. But these statistics do tell a human tale,” and they inform substantive solutions to problems faced by poor people. That’s not to suggest that a set of values doesn’t inform policy as well, but loving Jesus only makes you half of the empathetic and solution-driven expert on global political economy who is actually poised to be an effective partner for people working to improve their lives. The rest takes some studying.

The church’s actions are carried out in the name of God. When you believe your work is divine or inspired by divinity, you eliminate much of the necessary ability to admit that you’re wrong and change course. Christian missionaries in Kenya in the 1880s were so bent on converting the Kikuyu people from their traditional beliefs—which did not directly conflict with Christianity—that they hastily translated “Virgin Mary” using a word that basically meant “circumcised unmarried woman.” Later, they tried to force semi-converted Kikuyu people to stop practicing female circumcision (“female genital mutilation” in the developed world), and were met with understandably confused and angry opposition. Today, African kids read Bible stories in donated books with illustrations of a white Jesus. Isn’t that some bullshit? In the 1880s and too often since, the church is too quick to act in the name of Jesus and too slow to admit fault.

So how much of the reason I’m here is explained by Jesus? A Jesus turned shiny white by Europeans, but who the best anthropologists and ethnographers say had darker skin, exported to Africa on the lips of inarticulate missionaries and the pages of tattered children’s books? As little as possible. The question for me came down to how much of what I want to do is due to values and how much is due to knowledge. I think the application of values is limited to what we know is true—our concept of Truth with a capital T. After you know what you believe, you have to learn something to make it matter. I know what I believe, so I hope my actions are inspired by my understanding, not a faith in the Jesus of Pastor Paul, who has no idea how belittling and offensive the attitude under his smiling lecture on the vanity of Christianity in America was. True love for other people and true humility, which my kind of Jesus would have talked about, would have given Pastor Paul something else to preach about. He spoke slowly and loudly, interjecting mispronounced Swahili words in a room full of college-educated Tanzanians who speak perfect English and who, ironically, seemed to pity his poor understanding.

Backison picked me up and took me to the bus platform in town to meet Morris and his friend Cyliacus. We took a dolla-dolla (taxi van) to the village where they’re staying, which is about fourteen letters long and I’ll have to learn to spell it later. All three of them, ages 20-23, went to secondary school but had to leave because it was too expensive. They all speak pretty good English, especially Morris, and since they couldn’t continue in school or find work they started a tutoring center for primary and secondary school students in what is essentially a slum (that’s also how they describe it). The classroom is a concrete building with posters of English words hanging everywhere with one wall painted black to be used as the chalkboard. It works. Their students’ parents pay a very small fee (basically enough to feed these four guys) for their kids to attend after-school tutoring sessions during the school year and two-a-day sessions during holidays. Schools are on holiday now, so my visit was between their morning and evening sessions.

The guys live in one of a series of attached wood and tin rooms that used to belong to an NGO that folded in the 1980s. Apparently the guy who owns it now lets them stay there for free, along with a few other people who live in other more solid (nicer) homes on the property. A Rwandan woman (now a Tanzanian citizen) in the house next door acts as a sort of landlord and the guys said she takes care of them when they really need something.

(Long side note: I’m pretty sure Tanzania took more Rwandan refugees during/after the 1994 genocide than any other country, and I think the peace negotiations took place in Arusha, TZ. I say “I think” because that’s what I remember, but the internet is too slow to look it up. Bukoba is only a couple of hours by car from the Tanzania-Rwanda border and a substantial refugee population remains and many have been naturalized. I have no way to verify this, but people in Bukoba say they knew things got bad when bodies came floating down the river.)

Morrison, Cyliacus and Fargence made a lunch of traditional ndizi (potato-like bananas), beans and Nile perch, and gave me a soda. Once we got past the conversation about our families and what I’m doing here (which I had several times because they kept leaving to cook one at a time) we talked a lot about their tutoring center, Tanzanian girls, what college is like in the US (it was difficult to explain that Vassar is not typical), why I would leave the US to come to Bukoba, and whether my sisters were married. After lunch they took me to meet some of the neighbors and then to a bar on the main road to listen to their favorite reggae artist on the juke box. I got to play a P-Square song (Nigerian twin singers named Peter and Paul) and watch a couple real drunk guys drink vodka out of what looked like ketchup packets, then accidentally squirt each other in the eyes and laugh about it. Part of me judged them, but most of me wanted a ketchup packet of Supreme Essence Vodka.

Morris and I agreed to meet at the beach sometime next week and I took a motorcycle back to town. During the ride, I found another reason why I should always ride with Backison: he’s tall enough to block the wind/bugs from my face. I never appreciated it before, but I always will now. Before heading home I bought some mandazi at the Tea Room, a restaurant owned by the Lutheran church, because we haven’t had any in the house for a long time and my weight-gaining self needs it.

While Hope was serving dinner tonight she tried to give me a spoon but I told her I didn’t want it. We were eating ugali and fish, which everyone here eats with their hands. I can only eat some things with my hands (rice is too hard), but I do it when I can. She said in Swahili, “You’re a different white person.” I don’t think she knows that I understood her, but I definitely appreciated it  more than she knows.

After the internet café closed I had to kill some time waiting for Smart to pick me up since he was coming to town. He was “on his way” for two and a half hours, during which I made several friends around town. Rahim works at a cell phone shop on the same block as the internet café and I always buy airtime cards from him. Today he asked my name and what I was doing here, then I entered too many numbers incorrectly and set off some security setting on my phone and he had to help me unlock it. (The error messages were in Swahili. Oops.) He laughed really hard when I said I’d see him next time I break something. For some reason I feel like most people here wouldn’t think that’s funny. Sarcasm and self-deprecating humor usually fail, but the longer I’m here the more I feel like verbalizing stupid jokes is less awkward than giggling and not sharing them.

Mahazi is the owner of the only small Western-style grocery in Bukoba called Fido Dido that sells, among other things, Twix bars and peanut butter (the peanut butter is a thumbs-down though). He entertained my Swahili for a couple of minutes while we went over the usual where I’m from and what I’m doing here, then spoke in perfect English to tell me he appreciated my effort to learn the language and get to know people around town. He encouraged me to do Peace Corps, which somehow became part of our conversation, before telling me they were out of mandazi. Not to be defeated, I made my way across town to Hasseki, a restaurant that’s open later than most places in Bukoba. A waiter named Osward brought me mandazi and a Coke (skinny diet), and sat with me for a chat since no one else was there. He revealed that he’s trying to get a job at a super fancy restaurant/hotel on the other side of town. It’s on a hill by the lake that people refer to as the place where white people stay. I can’t remember what it’s actually called.

On the way back, Backison and I exercised my latest Swahili vocabulary words to learn about each other’s families, where we live, and what our big future plans are—all of this during his ninja-driving. He’s only twenty-two, married, lives a couple of kilometers from COSAD, didn’t finish primary school (seventh grade), has been driving a motorcycle for three or five years (couldn’t hear whether he said “tatu” or “tano”), and he has a three-year-old son named Beckham—like David. Yes, he likes soccer. Usually when he drops me off he just says (in Swahili), “Later,” but today he said, “See you tomorrow.” I don’t like thinking I’m predictable but I like that Backison knows my schedule well enough to know we’re going for a ride tomorrow.

Later in the afternoon I went for a run and then into town to use the internet (and update the blog) for the first time in over a week. We haven’t had mandazi (fried dough) at the house since the volunteers left and I now think it’s something we will only have when there are visitors, so I went to buy some before leaving town because I miss it dearly. I think it was actually introduced by Indian traders and isn’t indigenous, and the delicious mandazi I bought from an Indian storekeeper reinforced that idea. I texted Backison to pick me up and got more of a thrill out of the ride home than usual because it turned into a race. Another motorcycle passed us going up the hill and Backison was not ok with it. I think my tailbone is bruised from the small metal bar that barely keeps me from falling off the back and I thought he was going to take out my knees a few times when we were passing trucks, but we won so it was worth it. He complimented my improving Swahili when he dropped me off and I told him I’d text him tomorrow when I need to go to town again.

I was relieved that Hope made dinner tonight (not Godwin), along with Edina who returned from home to help out at COSAD for a while. She said, “You don’t look sick. It’s because I pray for you.” I also got a text message from Morris after dinner confirming our chill plans for Friday. Internet, Backison, mandazi, Hope and Morris made today a good day.

Smart came home shortly after Morris gave up on him and left, and the house started to smell like something big died and was decomposing in it. When Godwin served his second food-related offense for lunch I learned that the smell was several hundred tiny fish that were only kind of cooked in what seemed to be brown tiny-fish-flavored water. Strategy: I wrapped as many fish as possible into bite-size balls of rice and ugali, covered them in salt and swallowed without chewing. That worked pretty well for the first three bites when I was hungry enough to swallow huge fish-filled ugali/rice balls, but failed after I ran out of ugali and had to feel stiff baby fish bodies hanging out in my esophagus because my stomach was absolutely not having it. I left the table feeling sick and unsatisfied.

Someone in Smart’s wife’s family recently died and like in many traditional cultures, Haya people have several days of visiting the family before the burial, so we’re going to visit some people. In a procedure that I still don’t understand, we picked up a few people waiting for us on the side of the road on the way to Smart’s in-laws’ place. Imagine the depth of my awkwardness here: I’m interning at an organization whose executive director is married to the daughter of the niece of the woman who died. I couldn’t be less relevant if I tried, but there I was sitting on the grass-covered concrete floor exchanging greetings in the only three words of Kihaya I know and drinking warm Fanta. The mood was expectedly somber and our “delegation” of me, Godwin, Smart, Smart’s crazy uncle and Smart’s other less crazy uncle kept moving back and forth between a porch area with the men of the family and the sitting room with the women. You have to attend with an elder from your family, which for us was Smart’s less crazy uncle, and he was the one getting and giving instruction on where we were supposed to sit next. That’s as far as I got in understanding that.

What happened next seemed like another gift like Morris appearing in my life: A woman walked into the room of men with a covered platter of ndizi (mashed bananas that taste like potatoes) and beans. With my newly insatiable appetite and after today’s painful lunch, the traditional Haya meal, which has become one of my favorites, looked like a small yellow mountain of satisfaction. But when she lowered the platter a giant open-mouthed fresh water tilapia with fins and eyes was lying on top, laughing at my hopefulness and marking every bite with its taste of Lake Victoria fisheyness. Dammit. As I ate, I silently missed America, where it’s annoying but acceptable to vocalize your dislike of different foods on your plate touching each other—and where you can hate fish but like fish sticks and everyone understands why.

Interesting cultural note of the day: We brought a big piece of white fabric to visit the family today. The Kihaya word for it translates literally as “something to go with” but is understood to mean the white fabric that is buried with a person, a piece of which is given to members of the family first. Smart said he still has a piece of the cloth that was buried with his mother.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been working with the oldest daughter Fatuma, who is in Form III (high school sophomore) with her geometry lessons every night. She missed a couple weeks of school in February because she was sick, got the class notes from a friend, but never understood the lessons the teacher gave those weeks. Part of the problem is that her English is not up to the level it should be for secondary school, for which the language of instruction in Tanzania is English. After two weeks, I’ve learned enough of the Swahili words you need to talk about geometry for us to just speak Swahili instead.

It was difficult the first few days to demonstrate things like congruence and the difference between an isosceles and scalene triangles with marks and arrows that don’t mean much on the other side of the language barrier I was trying to explain them through. On the third day I brought out three pens: red, blue and black. It worked wonders and we’ve since been able to go over area, perimeter, interior
and exterior angles, and inscribed polygons. I think volume of cylinders is next, but I need to quickly find a diagram to demonstrate the difference between the formulas for the volume of a cylinder and cone. And maybe a green pen. I gave Fatuma the three pens and now when we go over each lesson she brings her notebook back the next day and has rewritten the lessons in multicolor and corrected wrong formulas.
From the looks of her old notes, either her friend or her teacher doesn’t understand geometry either.

Though she’s clearly engaged in the work, Fatuma yawns the entire time we go over her notes and we usually finish at midnight. When she’s not at school, she works almost the entire day, waking up with the sun to work on the farm (“shamba”), wash clothes, cook, carry five-gallon buckets of water from the river, clean around the house and take care of her younger sister. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing a lot of work in iteself, but when school is in session she often does the same at the expense of her school work. Someone who’s living in the backyard of an American NGO, especially one with an after school reading program for girls that asks parents of like families to let their daughters stay at school instead of coming home to do chores, should not be making that sacrifice. COSAD rents the office space (house) from a local realtor and her family would live here whether COSAD were here or not. A girl who wears the same shirt and long skirt every day—but washes the clothes of American volunteers that may be nicer than anything she’ll ever wear—should be benefiting from where she lives and where her mother works as much as people from the surrounding villages who are enrolled in COSAD’s programs. Isn’t that social capital?