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.