The Sweetest Thing

Today, on Thanksgiving, I'd like to take a minute to introduce you to a little feller I'm thankful to have known for a few short weeks. Moody.

Named after Mohamed, my counterpart, Moody was quite the hotstepper.

He was a special friend of the chickens.

And he loved helping me with my crossword puzzles. (Here he is meditating on Thursday.)

Sadly, Moody succumbed to some mystery puppy sickness on Tuesday morning. Martin and I buried him in the garden with his cloth bone. 

Our two guard dogs, Simba and Chui (lion and leopard in Swahili), ran off about a week ago in search of some female companionship and have not yet returned. Martin thinks someone may be holding them against their will, but as yet there has been no ransom note. We all know I love a good mystery, but this one is beyond my capacity to solve. 

I brought home one of Moody's brothers yesterday for Martin to replace the lost guard dogs. Martin asked for a big dog, and the new puppy might not be as big as what he had in mind, but he will grow. He is hardier and heartier than Moody (the runt of seven) was and stands a good chance of making it to full-fledged vicious-to-strangers adulthood. Martin already loves him so much, he named him Nicole.

As my time here grows shorter, I am thankful that the dogs have brought Martin and I closer together. I have learned so many new vocabulary words in Swahili, like minyoo (worms), viroboto (fleas), kufa (to die), and others that are purely for the purpose of describing dogs, their maladies, and their actions. We have spent many a night making the universal throw-up noises that transcend language (the first time was after Moody pooped out a pink, tennis-ball-sized mesh of twine-like worms). And I have learned more about Martin as a compassionate person as I have seen him care for the little (and big) dogs. While we won't be able to discuss the ethics of international service learning projects or the plot of a Spanish soap opera on TV, we can laugh together and take care of each other and our pets. I am thankful to have a friend like him.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Superheroes on Safari

On Halloween weekend, my group took a wonderful trip to visit Oldupai Gorge, Shifting Sands, and Ngorongoro Crater. Here are a few highlights:

After a three hour drive from Arusha, we stopped to look out over the crater on our way over the rim.

After a visit to the Oldupai Gorge museum to learn about the Australopithecus and Homo Habilis who were discovered there, we hiked down into the gorge to see the site of some of the excavations. The Gorge is also where a set of footprints were found preserved in a layer of hardened ash. As so many finds are made, the footprints were discovered when a couple of archaeologists were fooling around throwing dung balls at each other and one of the archaeologists fell on a piece of ground that was harder than the others. They dug and found a remarkable set of three people's footprints along with an ancestor of the horse. You never know what will come out of a good old fashioned dung ball fight.


Our next stop was the Shifting Sands. An incredible dune of black magnetic sand in the middle of a flat, dry piece of land that is blown 17 meters per year. There are markers leading up to it showing where it used to sit since the 1970s.

Here we are celebrating the shifting of the sands:

And again:

The next day was Halloween, so we decided to be practical and wear our costumes on Safari to the crater. What better way to keep ourselves safe from the animals than disguised as superheroes and ninjas?

   

We ran into some other Americans on safari:

And then it was time to go see the animals.

After the safari, we returned to our campsite for pumpkin carving, tent-to-tent trick-or-treating, and s'mores around a campfire.

That night I heard chomping around my tent and then suddenly it went quiet. I thought maybe whatever was chomping saw a lion, but the next morning a couple of my interns said they looked out during the night and said they saw three zebras sleeping in a circle around my tent. What an entourage!


It was a great trip and a nice break midway through the program. The interns are back in their villages and next weekend we are off to climb Mount Meru.

Fire on the Mountain

This is Martin.

He’s my guard. He is about 5’2” and I’d be surprised if he weighed 100 lbs. As far as guards go, he's pretty non-threatening, except he carries a bow and arrow at night and has a vicious dog named Simba (lion in Swahili). I think the bow and arrow is just for show because security isn’t really a problem. The top of the concrete wall around the compound is studded with spiky fleurs-de-lises, and each entrance to my house has an extra door with iron bars and 1-2 padlocks.

While my interns are away teaching in their villages, I’ve had to keep myself busy. Grad school certainly takes up some time, but I still have leftover hours to fill. Luckily one of my interns brought a Rubik’s cube.

You might not know this about me, but I’m a logical mastermind.

In the afternoons Martin and I have hula hoop practice. I bought some tubes at the local hardware shop and made a couple of hula hoops. Martin is a quick learner and has already picked up a few tricks.

The other day, Martin and I were hula hooping in the gravel of our yard (which he rakes every morning at 6 am) when he looked upward towards Mount Meru (2^nd tallest mountain in TZ after Kilimanjaro), pointed, and said “fire.”

The top of the mountain was smothered with white puffy clouds. Since Martin speaks about as many words in English as I do in Swahili (about 10), I needed a little clarification, so I pantomimed a volcano erupting out of the top of my head and asked, “erupting?”

Martin nodded and said, “fire!”

“No,” I said, “Clouds.”

“Fire!” he said and nodded emphatically. Not one to contradict someone who carries a bow and arrow and whose best friend may or may not have rabies, I decided to go with it, and began planning my climb to the tin roof to get out of the way of the lava flow.

“Erupting?” I asked again. “Did they say so on the radio?” I pointed to the house and mimed a radio, which actually looked more like a phone. The radio in his house was blasting Swahili Christian rock music, not the urgent government warnings one would expect during such a crisis.

“Yeah,” he said with another confident nod.

Still certain it was just a thick cloud cover, I decided to call my friend and counterpart Mohammed to get to the bottom of it. Mohammed has spent several years working as a cook on climbing expeditions on Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru. He would know.

“Mohammed,” I said when he answered, “Martin is trying to convince me that Mount Meru is erupting. Is this true?”

“No. We expect other mountains to erupt. Not Meru.”

“That’s what I thought. Thanks.”

I told Martin what Mohammed said and he started to get a little annoyed. He kept insisting that the mountain was erupting, so I texted Hussein, our safari and expedition guide who has been guiding climbs for 14 years. (Sidenote – as I was writing this, there was a knock at the compound gate. It was Hussein – write of the devil! – and I couldn’t let him in because Martin has gone to bring some giant pots to a neighbor and has locked me in the compound. Also, the chickens are starting to circle me with a hungry look in their eye.)

Okay, back to the story.

Hussein texted back, “Who is Martin? It is not.”

If Hussein says it’s not, it is definitely not. The best way to deal with this situation, I decided, was to let Martin think I believed him. About 5 minutes later, as Martin and I stared at the thick clouds around the top half of Meru, Mohammed called on Martin’s phone. A heated discussion ensued and then Martin laughed and passed the phone to me. Mohammed (who may be the male Tanzanian version of me) was calling to check up on the lies Martin was spreading. He told me that Meru wasn’t erupting, but that people were burning trees on the mountain. Fire.

I don’t know why I didn’t get the literal meaning of Martin’s words the first time around. Having lived over 2 years in Cameroon, I am pretty familiar with slash-and-burn practices. Perhaps in my current approach to cross-cultural situations as fraught with subtext, I was looking so hard for the other meaning, that I missed what was right in front of my face. Or maybe I just wanted to spice up an afternoon.

House Hunters International: Arusha

House #1:

Sweet bungalow-style house set back from the main road to Arusha in an enclosed family compound. Three "efficient" bedrooms, 2 bathrooms. Cement kitchen. Will provide bed, sofa, and coffee table. Needed: stove, everything else. Bonus: get to listen to the glory of Christ over the loudspeaker at the nearby church - every day until 6 or 7 pm!

House #2:

Pepto Palace - named for the color of the exterior paint. 3 spacious bedrooms, 2 bathrooms. Absolutely empty except for the horrifying smell of wood stain and paint sealed up in the house for the weeks it has been empty. Needed: furniture, security guard, gas mask.

Upon arriving at the house, we met the landlord, who had lost the key to the padlock on the outside of the exterior gate to the compound. After standing around for about 15 minutes discussing whether we could find a saw, he called over a local teen to hop over the wall and let us in from the inside, in the process demonstrating the house's "safe and secure" location on an unlit dirt road. The teen obediently and swiftly scaled the 8 foot high wall, using the gate as a ladder, in a blur of whitewashed horizontal stripes in his dark blue jeans, so fast I barely had time to read the white-lettered "Akon" written on the back of his black canvas belt.


House #3:


Safely situated across the street from a house with an armed guard, this 3 bed, 2 bath house is surrounded by a beautiful garden and spacious dirt yard. Paper tapestries of Jesus in various ministerial scenarios adorn the walls and a large stuffed dog guards the plush couches. It's a bit more expensive than our budget, but it comes with everything needed to sleep, feed, and comfort one leader and 11 gap year interns.


Which house did I choose?


After a leisurely negotiation with the landlord of House #1 and his lady, the price of the house went up $50 for including furniture. After some more leisurely negotiation, the house was swept off the bargaining table because they wanted a minimum stay of 6 months. Mine: only 3 months.


It was a tough choice between the toxic crack house and the lush Eden, but I decided to go with....


The Garden of Eden (House #3).


The interns arrive tomorrow and I couldn't ask for a better place to house them.

Away We Go!

It's the eve of my departure for Tanzania, where I'll be leading a 3 month Global Routes Teaching Internship Program for gap year and college students. 


I'm heading back into the world of penpalship, and for those of you who like to use a paper and pen, carrier pigeon, or petit, here is where you should send your correspondance:


Global Routes
c/o Frida Tomito
P.O. Box 2151
Arusha, Tanzania

Attn: Nicole Sheldon-Desjardins

Kwaheri for now. See you from the other side of the ocean (not literally, Sarah Palin).