Kucheza!!

Wow, last night was probably the craziest and most fun night I have had so far in Tanzania! I went out to dinner and then to Maasai Camp – a pseudo-dance club – with some other volunteers…we also went with one of our Tanzanian friends who is a translator with GSC, and ran into another one there. Actually, the one we ran into at the club is Isaya, the Maasai who ran in the London Marathon. I am going to his village next weekend, and I am stoked. Anyway, once I danced with one person, I literally could not get away with dancing by myself for more than 2 minutes before the next guy would turn up and dance with me. It was fun for sure, albeit a bit overwhelming. Luckily I have not danced in a long time so I mainly just appreciated it. I think the fact that my hair was done in African style in the little braids probably did not help my cause, I got a lot of comments on it…I realize it probably looks a little ridiculous, but Rachel my dada did it yesterday afternoon (completely of her own volition and uninvited), so I could not really take it out right after she spent half an hour on it. I actually kind of like it a lot, it feels nice. The Tanzanian guys claimed to like it too… “Unapenda? “Ndiyo, ninapenda sana” was a recurring exchange. The music was an eclectic mix of stellar American hip-hop (by my standards), old 90’s music, and Bongo Flava, which kind of all sounds the same to me. I got many proclamations of love and a lot of Kiswahili practice in, haha. One of Isaya’s friends was particularly into me, so I spent a lot of the night dancing with a Maasai guy. Seriously, if I had been told my sophomore year when I was learning about Maasai culture both in cultural/social anthro and my theology course that I would be dancing with a Maasai in a dance club…there is no way I would have believed it. Both he and Isaya are actually not very good at dancing, but the sweet cultural aspect completely makes up for it…although I kind of felt like I was corrupting their culture or something…hmm. But overall, a great night, I had a lot of fun.

On a different note, I just realized yesterday that my flight out of Kilimanjaro is actually on July 31; I had been thinking it was July 29 pretty much my entire time here. Oops. It is probably good that I have an extra two days to finish up interviews and things though, so overall a positive discovery. Interviews so far are going quite well. Everyone that I have talked with so far is enjoying the chance to talk about these things, and many of them have meaningful insights that I had not considered before. I am starting to understand more and more how important it is to get input from the people who actually live the culture, as opposed to coming in with Western ideas and blindly implementing them – I always believed this in theory, but I have never witnessed it until now. Hopefully my thesis will eventually do a good job of capturing everyone’s ideas and representing their feelings, because people have been very welcoming and helpful with interviews. The only slight glitch is that I, being the genius I am, failed to realize that I needed to put the software for my digital voice recorder onto my laptop before I could transfer interviews from the recorder to the computer. Apparently the recorder came with a cd that had the program, although I cannot remember ever seeing this. Hopefully it is sitting in my room at home…we will see. For now, I hope I have enough space to keep everyone’s interview recorded. I could always downgrade the quality of the recording and hence have more space, but I have been really happy with the setting it is on so far so I would rather not. Perhaps I will just transcribe some of the “less important” (i.e. other volunteers) interviews while I am here and then delete them? I started transcribing the other day and did not get very far; I kind of forgot how tedious it can be. At least I had practice with it last fall so I have a framework for attacking it.

I had a great last couple of days with my family…on Friday and Saturday I spent a good amount of time playing Frisbee, hopscotch, and jump rope with my dadas. I stole back one of the Frisbees that I originally brought for GSC’s day camp and took it home to them, and they love it. We have started playing a game where the three of us count how many consecutive successful throws/catches we can get…so far our record is 98, and they are shooting for 100. Yesterday, I made s’mores with my family, which they really liked. Mama was really cute: “Wait, Mary, I want to write down the recipe!”…“It is really easy Mama, I really do not think you need to write it down…” haha. The food situation also drastically improved on Friday. The chai had ginger in it, which was amazing. Then Mama asked if I liked spices or not in my food – YES – so then we had the spaghetti with carrots and peas that we often have but with some seasoning, and it was ten times tastier. Then for lunch on Saturday we had rice with beans and carrots, one of my favorite Tanzanian dishes. All of this inevitably means that dinner tonight will be ugali though. If you do not know what ugali is, look it up on wikipedia. I liked it for about 3 weeks, and then my family started eating it 5 nights a week…a bit too much for my liking.

This week will be another community training, and I also need to seriously start buying things that I want to take home. I have been holding out because it is not a particularly pleasant experience. People here have a hard time with the concept of looking but not buying. Especially if you shika (touch) anything, they KNOW that you want it, and are determined to get you to buy it. When you try to walk away, they will not let you out of their little stall, and ask you how much you will pay for it. A bit overwhelming, you definitely need to go in with the right mindset to make it. Last week I went fabric shopping though, and it was actually very fun. I am in love with the fabrics here, although I limited myself to just two. There are so many gorgeous ones though. Especially on African women, they look amazing. If the fabric I bought looks half as good on me, I will be happy.