A snippet of tea conversation

We sat having tea and cassava during the morning break at school. One of the teachers went to the US, to New York, over the summer, for her son’s wedding. It was her first time abroad.

Apparently, they are like animals over there, like cattle. You wouldn’t know it from meeting Americans here. Here they can talk so loudly, you think they really like talking. But over there, they pass each other on the street without saying anything at all. No greetings, nothing. In fact, if they are standing right next to each other, waiting for a bus, they do not greet each other. One woman even scolded her child for talking to someone, yelling at her that if she doesn’t know that person she has no business going over and talking like that. Cows do that, just moving past each other, bumping into each other, but just moving on.

The teacher made gestures with her hands, like cattle, moving, and the other teachers shook their heads and laughed a little. It sounded just too outrageous to be true, but then again, when it comes to white people, we all know nothing is beyond belief.

The poor, those in need, and the truly needy.

I have never met a poor person who has trouble defining poverty. This seems to be a problem exclusively burdening the wealthy. Perhaps it is because God’s heart beats for the poor that even He, who is generally more knowledgeable and educated than the rest of us, feels no need to define ‘the needy’. This is, frankly, a little irritating. It’s hard to read much of the Bible without coming across the simple command—“give to the poor.” Sure, there is some complexity to it—we are apparently to give freely, and cheerfully, and not from pressure imposed by some fundraiser or church leader; yet at the same time our giving is an act of obedience, not something optional; and yet again it is a way to show our love, to prove that this love of ours is real; and again it seems to be a primary purpose of earning a living (“if you’re a thief, stop stealing and work, so you can earn a living and give to others in need”). All this complexity on the side of why and how we give, and not a single mention of how we should categorize the poor. Surely they must be categorized. You see, we see millions of poor people. The wealthier we are, the more there seems to be of them. There must be a way to sift out the ‘truly needy’ (you know, as opposed to the what? the ‘fake’ needy?). It is at this point, I think, that the Bible just plain fails us, and so we obviously need to look elsewhere for guidance, for something a little more intellectual and realistic. Poverty eradication, for example. There’s a pretty term, all medical sounding and everything. We just about eradicated polio, so why not poverty? We use words, lots of words, bookfuls of words. We even—I kid you not—print up T-shirts with “Say no to poverty.” It would be funny, except it’s true—real white cotton T-shirt with UN-blue writing. I can just see Jesus with it, a gnarled old man with a leper’s stump reaching out, begging, and Him, all wise and sophisticated, turning, smiling, and pointing to the slogan on his chest, reading for the poor illiterate non-self-reliant, not-yet-empowered poor person, “Say no to poverty”. I’m thinking all the poor people in the world should get together and throw a Nike slogan back at us: “Just do it.”

Now that I can see Jesus with, with his dusty feet and matted hair and faded shirt from the used-clothes marked, waving aside all the yahdeeyah of our words, and reminding us to maybe be fooled, maybe be taken advantage of, maybe never ever receive thanks or feel effective or see results, but still, just shut up and do it.

Bono comes to town

I was sitting in the classroom today, just before quitting time, a little tired, squeezing in one last session, when the door opened, the principal standing there, and an mzungu (white person) rushed in. He walked around and shook the hands of all the kids, who just sat and stared, hands limp in his, confused. We, too, just looked at him, until we caught ourselves and asked why he was there. Oh, Bono was going to be there in 10 minutes, and he was selecting some classrooms for him to visit. And off he went.

We went back to work, and 10 minutes later one boy ran to the window, “I see them! The wazungus!” Of course, he has an mzungu in his class every day, but I am just one, and I have a name, but this—this was the wazungus to beat all wazungu-visits. There was Bono, who walked in and shook our hands and was clearly the visitor. Then there were about 5 Tanzanian officials, taking him to visit us, and then there were the 20 wazungus who took pictures or stood and just looked at Bono looking at us. He was polite and (except for his signature shades) looked like every other mzungu on a project visit. He stood, he smiled and nodded a lot, was somewhat distracted by (more attracted to?) the kids while the district chairman introduced the class. “This is a unit for those children who are mentally retarded. Some of them can learn so that they can pass and enter the regular classes. It is a gift from a Dutch non governmental organization.” (Yes, the physical classroom is an NGO gift, but the class? It is a public classroom, with public school teachers.) Our teacher rose from her seat and said a few words—how do you explain in a few minutes, to total strangers, what you do in this room? It would have been so nice for her to have some warning, to have some idea of who these people were and why they came, to maybe take this opportunity to plant a few choice words of advocacy for out kids. Bono looked mainly at a little girl who was rocking from side to side and saying “Shikamuu”. He said nothing, and she said it again, and again, leaning toward him. I told him to say “Marahaba,” and he obliged, again and again. They had their conversation. The teacher said her words. And they left. Bono and one woman said thank you, and the entire crowd moved out again, on to the next classroom.

The kids sat completely still, even after the crowd left. This was not as great as an mzungu visit could have been—there were so many of them, and they just stood there and then they left, and it was all over before it started.

I asked a man on the outskirts of the crowd, overflowing from the next classroom, where they were from and why they were visiting. And I will quote his answer, so succinct and simple: “To understand Africa.” Wow. They are TED—an organization of very rich people who meet and talk about ideas. And they are in Arusha for a four-day conference to understand Africa. And I felt so slow and ineffective, sitting there with my little data sheets in the classroom, day in and day out, just trying to understand one little part of one little classroom. If I were somebody, I could breeze through a few project visits in a week and understand the entire continent. When I walked out of the school, trudging through the mud, past the caravan of shiny minibuses in front of the office and the huddle of drivers under the tree, the visitors were taking a group picture. Maybe they need a picture to remember what they saw? When I sat on the daladala on my way home, the man next to me—a farmer who smelled like fresh dung and rain—moved his hoe and held my backpack for me, since I had another big bag of cupcakes and peanuts and crisps for tomorrow’s end-of-semester party for the kids. It occurred to me that if you have only four days, it would probably be better to simply follow one person around for a day than to do 40 project visits. Anyone on the bus would do. Maybe just following someone home, taking the bus and then walking to the house, would give more understanding. Then again, maybe talking about ideas and trying to understand are two different things, and the man I spoke with simply misunderstood TED’s purpose.

And how did I feel, shaking hands with someone famous, introducing myself, and teaching him a word in Swahili? Mainly that it was nothing. That if I had gotten to lay our issues on the table—to put our kids on the table of grand ideas and agendas—then it would have been something. It always comes back to this, I think: that some people are created more equal than others, and our kids are always the ‘others’.

Market Day

Today is market day at Tengeru. It is Wednesday, so when I come to the main road in the morning it is already beginning to come alive. By 8 am, the daladalas (minibuses) are filling up with people who have bought their goods and are leaving: a woman with a giant stalk of plantains, green and seeping glue onto your clothes if you sit too close; a young man with an armful of shoes, hanging by their laces in a cascading display—I could go shopping right there, on the bus to work; an old man with two hens in his lap; someone in the front seat with a tower of eggs on trays; a bucket of milk under every seat, making for awkward leg-space; large baskets of vegetables or grains or beans, covered with bright green banana leaves. On mornings like this, the daladala smells green.

In the early afternoon, when I come back from town, the market is loud and bright. There is the shoe section: rectangles of tarp laid out on the ground forming narrow paths. Some have heaps of shiny new plastic slippers straight from China; some have heaps of very used shoes, probably also from China, but via USA or Europe—you have to bend over double to search for matching pairs, women’s backsides jutting up and creating traffic jams on the narrow paths; some have carefully cleaned and polished pairs of used shoes, displayed in neat rows on their tarps. Beyond the shoe section, once you have navigated the butts-up-heads-down shoe shoppers, you get to the clothes. Here again, there are neat displays of pants and shirts, folded and sorted, but there are also piles. Giant mountains of clothes with the sellers lounging within them, sing-songing like autioneers, “Three hundred children’s clothes; children’s clothes three hundred; three hundred is the price; three hundred children’s clothes…”, “Shiiirts five hundred, five-five-five, five hundred shirtssss”. You have to listen carefully, because what was clearly “mia tatu, mia tatu” (three hundred) at 7 am has by 1 pm morphed into something like “mmmtatatata”. (By 5 pm, the sellers are often sleeping in their mountains, and you have to wake them up to ask the price.)

On the other side of the shoes is the vegetable market, with the less aggressive, more business-as-usual women, and the young boys who follow shoppers around with their assortment of plastic bags for sale. And after that is the road home, lined with clusters of women sitting, resting abit before their return home, maybe waiting for the last of their party to sell the last of her stuff. Everywhere, women, walking to the market with heavy sacks of maize on their heads. Walking back home, with children on their backs and whole plantain stalks on their heads. Women carry home food for the week or month, for the family. A man ride past them on a black Chinese bicycles with a single avocado strapped on the back—a snack, perhaps, for one?

Hurra for syttende mai

It was the 17th of May, the Norwegian National Day. I last celebrated it in 1994, so I felt rather small and un-Norwegian as I showed up on the Norwegian mission station in Arusha. Two girls, in blond curls, red white and blue ribbons and pretty dresses informed me that they'd show me how it was done. "First we need these flags, then we are going to have a parade, then games, and then hot dogs and ice cream." And so the parade began, with music and pomp and fanfare. Well, ok, so maybe we weren't quite enough people to create fanfare, and perhaps we lacked the coordination to produce pomp, but we did have music. A cd-player played some patriotic music--we could hear it when our parade turned the corner where it stood. There were 9 of us, and we walked around the driveway roundabout. There were never more than 5 of us walking in the parade, since at least 3 of us walked backwards in front, taking pictures. We sang the national anthem, and then proceeded to games on the lawn: horse-shoes, sack-race, potato-relay, rope-skipping contest, balloon game, and the all-time favorite--the fishing game, all with prices (trinkets from little Arab shops in town plus one coveted pack of chocolate bars from Norway). We grilled hot dogs and wrapped them in lefser that a grandmother in Norway had made. In the afternoon, we were tired and full and the three children walked around with their pockets or skirts bulging with candy loot, their stomachs hurting, and their clothes crumpled. They were happy. They had woken up at 5:30 am, the way one does on days that involve parades and party games. I am not sure it could have been any more perfect if they had been in Norway and the children had numbered something more than three. As for me, I feel no more patriotic--I have lived in the US just long enough to dislike that word--but the celebration was quite palatable. It celebrated our constitution (we had one Kenyan man visiting, so we got to explain it all to him), but it did not include any speeches about the glory of war or how much greater than others our country is. It's just more tasteful to keep that bit of information to ourselves.

Macho men and toenail art

I got my nails painted three weeks ago, and they still look quite intact, shiny pale pink with a little white and red and black feather design on each nail. I went with a friend, Justine, and we sat in plastic chairs on the sidewalk across the street from the main daladala (minibus) stand in downtown Arusha. A young man, maybe 18, sat in front of me, picked up my big toe, hunched over it, and began filing away, working hard and fast, as one might on a piece of wood or steel. A man in his 30s did Justine’s hands, with elaborate flowers, tiny and perfect. They were men of the streets, rough and fast and loud, running back and forth to borrow supplies from each other. But they also knew their craft, with steady hands on delicate work. A neighboring man complained to our men that they’d borrowed such and such nail polish from him and what they gave him back wasn’t fair. They ignored him. He grew angrier. They told him to chill. He wanted to fight. In the end, two large men had to hold him back, to avoid a street fight. Over nail polish. When I leaned over to my friend, whispering that this was the first time I’d had this done by a man, she looked at me, confused. “What? Painting nails? Only men do that. Where you are from, do women paint nails? Huh. I hadn’t heard that.” I wondered aloud whether they might think it strange, that their job is to work with women’s feet, but she quickly explained why it was a great job, going into detail about the cost of a bottle of nail polish, how many toenails it might cover, and the cost of one pedicure. Clearly, it was good business. So clearly, it was a man's job.

Robbie Seay Band has a song, “Rescued Ones”, about how before God we are all the same. I like it, the raspy voice, the catchy tune…the words? “So we stand in line, with the poor and the blind.” It’s such a true image, because that is exactly what the poor and the blind do: they stand in line. They clamor at huge metal gates, in crowds, for the slim chance that it will open and they will slip through the crack and get work for the day. They stand in line for a bucket of water, for the doctor, for the drunk nurse who calls himself a doctor and who’s to question that? They form lines that snake their way in curves from the door, round the building, out across the courtyard and all the way back to hot, hours-in-the-sun hopelessness. They form thick, desperate crowds that move en masse against the bus door, the food truck, the chance. They form slow, sitting lines, silent, on wooden benches, looking straight ahead, flies on stone faces, tired, dusty and simply waiting.
It’s nice that the songwriter recognizes that before God he has no special status because he is rich or because his eyes work well for him. But does he really stand in line with the poor? With the blind? Does he sit on the street and hear feet all day and hold his hand up, aching, begging? Or does he stand in line the way you do at the mall, to take your picture with Santa? You may get hungry while you are waiting, so you eat a cookie. And while you are standing there, you know with absolute certainty that at the end of the line, you WILL see Santa. And does the songwriter think it’s normal, and therefore OK, for the poor and blind to stand in line? Does disability or poverty or the combination of the two somehow make it natural for you to stand in line? If we really—completely—believed that in God’s eyes we have no more right to anything than those who are poor or have a disability, could we possibly accept all this standing in line by the poor and the blind? Would it not outrage us?