Terrible, Hilarious, True

"I think what you're groping for is that people need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them." -Ishmael, Daniel Quinn

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I feel like this is a long entry, but I just got back from a week in the villages.

I'm sorry to pick up on a down note, but I need to take another minute to talk about Matt Healey. Something wails inside of me to even start writing about this. When I last wrote, almost a week ago, I had literally just found out. Maybe half way through that entry, as I was checking my email and facebook. I was in shock for the next couple of hours. It didn't hit home until I started trying to make contact with my parents and Alex. During the circus intermission I got a live line with my Dad, who was in Michigan at the time after a sailing trip with the Lisiecki parents. Then I lost it.

There were the standard pains of grief and sympathy. The typical shock at the injustice. The overwhelming wash of worry for my brother and the Healey family, and everyone else at risk of any sort of fatal injury, infection, or circumstance- unexpected or drawn out.

For the first time since I've been here, I felt completely isolated. It had taken me days to get to a computer and check my email and finally discover that something had happened. I had been sending stupid text messages about baboons, and carrying on as if everything was fine. I had no idea. I couldn't have.

If you look back through my entries you'll find that my greatest worry upon leaving the states was that something bad would happen back home while I was away. My dad mentioned that when we were on the phone. I now think that it was less of an uncanny feeling, and more of a general worry that we all suppress enough to live through the day. Okay, melodramatic, but bear with me. Obviously we can't go through every day worried about what we could lose, the panic would finish you off in a matter of weeks. Bad things happen. They can, will, and do happen whether I'm home or away or whatever. Life is fragile. It just took the Atlantic Ocean, the African continent, and an absolute tragedy for it to fully register with me.

Can you all do me an enormous favor and take extra good care of yourselves?

Enough of that for now, I don't want to lose it in the middle of the internet cafe.

I spent the week in a village called Makoyuni, out in the middle of Maasai territories. Desert lands waiting for the rainy season, a quiet dusty realm just outside the entrance to a few of Tanzania's infamous national parks.

This past week we were doing chanjo ya kuku meaning vaccinating chickens for the deadly New Castle's Disease. It doesn't directly affect humans, but it is highly contagious and makes for almost certain death among chickens, thus eliminating a vital source of nutrition and market sales for many families. We essentially spent every morning this week chasing chickens, and I mean that to the fullest extent of your imagination. Chickens are ridiculous. All we needed to do was put a tiny drop of clear painless liquid into one eye, and shazam! Vaccinated! But was it shazam? No. There was no shazam. It was more like RUN GO THAT WAY NO THE YELLOW ONE RUDE THING DAMN ROOSTER oh finally. It was funny, but took a while.

This experience set into stone my long-standing dislike for roosters. River Wind Farm had a mean old black and white rooster that would chase after you if you got out. That was the beginning. This week I learned that roosters are also by far the most difficult to catch. Yesterday morning, there was one that took us over an hour. When I thought I had him cornered inside of a hut he went to fly out a whole in the roof and I ended up cutting my arm on a piece of exposed sheet metal. While the family continued to chase him, I did what any rational American who cut herself on rusty metal from a chicken farm in East Africa would do. I freaked out. I spent the next ten minutes in the truck, using my drinking water to wash my arm, my hand sanitizer to clean the cut, and my bandanna to cover it up and apply pressure. It wasn't that deep of a cut and I have been boosted for tetanus, but this mzungu ain't taking no chances. Damn roosters.

Rooster chasing aside, the time we spent among the Maasai people was incredible. The lives they lead are extraordinary in that they are extraordinarily difficult. Most traditions are firmly in tact, but occasional signs would remind you that this was not a static society. At one point Harry (our driver and my official go-to on any question) caught me glancing at a Maasai man of at least 70 chatting away on a cell phone. Harry smiled and said, "People develop."

Yes, they certainly do.

When I shared that with the rest of the group at dinner that night, I added that we shouldn't tell the western cell phone companies because they would just love that as a new ad campaign. Someone else said we shouldn't tell Apple because the iphone applications would be out of control. Can you even imagine?! We came up with some good ones: Catch the chicken- every gold coin is 5 drops of NCD vaccine! Or, how many Maasai wives can you get? Or, how much rain water can you catch in your bucket?

Terrible, hilarious, true.

The land out there is the pinnacle of harsh. It's beauty is calm but stark. The ground is smothered with dust and trash, littered with starving dogs and deranged chickens. The mudbrick houses are topped with thatched roofs and surrounded by ragtag smiling children and exhausted mamas. Huts are not houses of the history books alone, they are the past, present, and future for many of the people here.

Driving down one of the nation's main "highways" or wandering any corner of the villages you see hundreds of half-standing houses. They are either on their way up or the way down, and sometimes is takes a second look to see which are which. When people leave houses behind in favor of city living, the valuable tin roofs either go with them or are salvaged by scavenger. The mud walls stay behind, watching the road and the dust. As in the states, and much of the Takers' world (read Ishmael!) people are constantly expanding, building bigger and better things for what they hope will be bigger and better lives. Unfortunately, the flailing and thus failing economy has left most families without incomes, and so the new houses are without bricks, doors, or roofs. They wait to be completed, on a day that may or may not come.

I work with the GSC staff as one of five interns. One of the interns is a girl in her mid-twenties named Jordan. Jordan and I have talked a few times about the effects of trash on moral and the environment. I truly cannot convey how beautiful it is here... or the extent to which it is completely covered in trash. As a self-esteem or national pride boost and source of several thousand jobs, it could be an extraordinary project! Hey, government! Get your dirty hands out of your fat pockets and put them to use (hands and pockets both.)

Everyone here knows the government is corrupt, but they love peace and lack resources to initiate peaceful change. Tanzanians continue to be completely in love with the first president, Julius Nyerere, and harbor not so secret hopes that he'll rise from the dead and fulfill the dreams he planted 30 odd years ago. Unity, compassion, growth, education, water, dignity. Not so very much to as, eh? You wouldn't think so.

Politics and political dissatisfaction seem like a hot topic at first glance, but if you listen long enough you hear the same three or four comments over and over again. They go something like this: "Nyerere was the greatest."... "The government is corrupt."... "What will your Obama do for us?"..."I don't like politics."

How encouraging.

At one point last week I was having chai with Some, a Tanzanian GSC staffer, and Zaina, a Tanzanian trainee with the GSC chicken vaccination program. Some started in on the same old story I've heard about politics in Tanzania. Zaina is a college student who speaks very little English, and I asked Some to translate a question for me: Colleges are the hotbeds of progressive change and political voices. What are Tanzanian college students doing about changing things?

Yeah, Some didn't exactly get me an answer.

He talked with her for a while in Swahili and when he came back to English he said that he had advised her to study agriculture instead of computers, because many of the groups she had been sent to train had told her they wanted nothing to do with computers. I countered, hoping he would translate. I told him I felt it was nearly impossible to access information here, and computers could change that. Knowledge is power, and that means computers are empowering. I said I thought what she was doing was great. Again, I don't think Some was actively participating in crossing the language barrier.

The rut Tanzanian politicians have helped create is extreme, but what's more frustrating is the lacking momentum for positive change. Two of the most well-educated, well-liked, and compassionate individuals I have met here want to go into tourism management or safari guiding. Everyone is trying to cater to tourism, but seldom few are looking to change the structures that perpetuate a failing dependency on tourism and foreign "aid." Even the few who manage to go far in their education shy away from addressing the problems that they know are hurting their communities. I don't really understand it yet. But I'm trying.

There's a lot I don't quite understand here. One thing I do know is I love kids, and I had been missing them terribly. To go from Michigania, to DREAM, to Michigania, to children running away from me yelling "Mzungu" was hardly short of traumatic.

All of that changed when we arrived in Makoyuni! Okay, so I did make the occasional village baby cry because they had never seen a white person, but other than that it was like therapy! Upon arrival we were immediately swarmed with little kids of all ages who wanted to be our friends. Before I had been there a full hour, a baby peed on me. Yeah... they don't have diapers in these places. Can you imagine 11th week in the Michigania 0-2 nursery without diapers? No way, no how.

The kids are adorable, and I quickly taught them to call me Daniella instead of mzungu (Danielle sounds too close to a boy's name for local taste, so I just introduce myself as Daniella.) Everywhere I go "Daniella! Daniella! Daniella!" and the GSC staff would always laugh and come tell me that my babies were asking for me. I'm determined to make it through my stay without giving them candy, money, or pens. That sounds cruel, right? Why not give them a treat? But the truth is some kids skip school to beg on market days, dolling out gifts increases targeting of tourists and expectations of gifts, and above all: I didn't give them presents and they STILL liked me more than some who do. That sounds conceited, I'm sure, but what I'm trying to say is that these kids need attention, not random handouts. They play on a rusty tetanus infested truck that serves as their playground of doom. They chew on batteries that they find on the ground- BATTERIES! Their mothers are exhausted, their fathers aren't around, and their school only lasts half a day so that the few available teachers can hold two sessions of classes daily. The kids are happy as clams, but they have little to do except look for trouble, and when they get old enough they'll surely find it. So we played with the kids every chance we could. I taught them all high fives-which they find hilarious- AND....drum roll please.... I taught several different groups of kids to sing "Boom Chicka Boom"!!!!!! It's HILARIOUS, and don't worry! I caught it on video, and I will upload it to facebook or youtube when I get home. Just imagine...

Sometimes when I couldn't express myself in Swahili, I would just continue to talk to them. Whispering little hopes in English, willing them into translation. Like when my two dearest girls, 7 year olds named Yunsi and Zuema, were completely immune to the ugly scene of three goats getting every step beaten out of them as they were taken past the hostel. Jordan, Andrew, and I don't eat meat, and we looked on with disgust and the occasional "oh come on! stop that!" but the girls hardly noticed. As they looked excitedly at their newly painted toe-nails, I said "You know we're all animals right? We should be nice to animals so that they will be happy too. Animals behave best when you treat them well. Beating them just makes them scared and they won't do what you want when they're scared." Yunsi held up the nail polish, asking for more, and Zu giggled her agreement with Yunsi. I sighed. I sigh a lot, it seems. Those two are so damn cute.

I'm also guilty of some of my old Michigania tricks- besides repeat after me songs. At camp I would get the 789s and preteens to cheer "Invasive Species" and here in Tanzania I had a few kids chanting "Equal Rights!" It wasn't totally random. They were trying to read the stickers off of my journal notebook and they asked about that one (probably because it was rainbow colored and looked pretty.) They ask, I oblige. "Equal Rights! Equal Rights! Equal Rights!"

Fortunately, we'll get to see the kids again this coming week when we go back to dig for water conservation and train local groups in bio-intensive agriculture. I really liked where we were staying, but I'll admit readily that I'm not stoked about leaving behind my real toilet at Mama Salome's house. Over the past week our Swahili got a lot better, but Andrew has yet to learn the one phrase he desperately wants to know: What's that smell? He claims that it could be a highly successful game show in East Africa but I insist that there's only one answer, so what's the point in asking? Waste management, folks. Shit happens, and responsible management should too. Just one more reason I'm going into public health.


So here comes another week. I don't think I'll be able to update between now and next weekend, but this entry was so long that I'm thinking we'll all manage without an update for a while.

Take good care of yourselves, be grateful for your toilet seats, read Ishmael and/or Pathologies of Power, and never curse the rain.