A Recalcitrant Eucalyptus

Went to Mikumi Park again,
cute teenaged giraffe.

On a normal day, daladalas are like ticks about to burst, so perhaps I should have thought twice, even thrice, before traveling to Morogoro on the last day of Ramadan (which precedes the first day of Idd). So two huge Islamic holy days, and there I am in town with a big stupid grin on my face, looking for books. Morogoro has a very large Muslim population, so anyone wearing a kofia or a burqa was either in town, or trying to get there.

Why did the elephant cross the road? 

At that size, what does 

it matter? I wanted to back up for a closer shot 

but the driver was a sissy. 

And maybe I was a dope. Take your pick.

Knowing this, albeit a little late, I  crammed myself onto a coaster, which is size-wise halfway between a daladala and a bus. I tried to grab the overhead bar so I wouldn't fall when the coaster lurched, which I could only assume it would, but hamna shida, we were packed too tightly to move, much less fall. A tin of sardines would have been more spacious, and as a sardine has no armpits I would have been spared that particular human experience.


There was a family of nine waiting at a bus stop, minding their own business, enjoying the day. Two kids under three were sitting in the dirt, plus a few mid sized kiddies and assorted adults. They seemed as though they were planning to board another, less crowded car, good luck with that. But they were standing at a bus stop, so the condo (loads people and takes money) hopped off, plucked the watoto from the ground, and handed them through the windows to random Africans in the front seats . Then they shepherded the mid sized kids in, after which the adults had no option but to climb on. This happens all the time, it's happened to me.The babysitters don't seem to mind, and the parents haven't got much choice after the kids have been shanghaied. I tell you, condos have power.

Re power, the upper body on the average condo is spectacular, lean and strong with biceps to die for. But then, biceps are all that stand between them and certain death as they hang out the side of the bus calling to potential passengers. It's the hand of Allah (remember the holy days) no one has lost an arm or been decapitated by a passing truck. Bado kidogo.
Last week we returned to Chagongwe to finish some business regarding the Humanure project and the checkechea. My memory of the road is like labor pains, you forget about it when it's finished, only to remember again, acutely, the next time. It's a migraine of a road, the pictures don't do it justice. We almost made it down before dark, it's bad enough in the daylight, but we turned a corner and came upon a tree crossing the road that wasn't there on the way up.

Everyone standing around looking

 at the tree that crossed the road. 

A chicken would have been easier to move.  

Why did the tree cross the road? Loggers come up to the mountains to cut down eucalyptus trees, which are enormous and provide mbao mengi. If you cut them correctly, they fall where you want them to fall. If you don't, they fall across the road. The only road. I know this because I asked.

Here's the story: they tried to cut it so it would fall in one direction but inakataa (it refused) and fell the other way. Scary that guys with chainsaws can't outsmart a tree. They knew they had made a mistake and were thinking about running away. Again, as there's only so many loggers on the mountain, the tree is still ahead on points. We saw the guy holding the chainsaw, but he said it didn't work. This was starting to take on all the earmarks of a classic TIA moment. TIA being This is Africa. If you've been here, you know what I mean.

 A goddess walks among us, 

possibly a goddess with a sore 

neck, but a goddess nonetheless.

So finally, the guy decided the saw actually did work, and they got busy hacking loose branches and clearing away debris. They measured the height of the car against the clearance under the tree with an old bent stick, so I was more than a little concerned about our passage. We managed to squeeze under the tree, but it was a squeaker. THEN, after we got through, they asked us for money. 





Why, I asked, and they said because they helped us. I reminded them that it was their fault to begin with, but they said it wasn't, the tree refused to fall in the right direction. And, they stayed to help instead of running away, which was bullmavi because but for our untimely arrival they would have disappeared into the woods like a bunch of elves. I refused, much like the tree, but Ruth gave in and slipped them 2,000 /-, about $1.50. In the end, they proved smarter than us, if not the tree.

Water hole in a village called Mnafu, 

where will set up someprojects. 

This is how deep the women need to go to get maji. 

The one in the hole will pass the buckets up.

Folks here have lots of creative ways to make money, recall the ten dollar cat from a few months ago. We were in Dar this past weekend, just an overnighter to get my work permit. I'm legal in Africa, by the way. At last. Up until now I've been painting illegally. Tz considers volunteer work as work, so requires a permit. It's taken eight months, but ninayo work permit. 

Water hole thankfully not being used for humans,

 but for brick making. Not that the other 

water is much better.

The fact is, I could have been in a pile of shida if Immigration had caught me painting. I haven't always walked the straight and narrow road, but imagine going to jail for painting the ABCs on a preschool wall. The other inmates would ridicule me and take my food.I digress.



 We're breaking in a new driver, Abdallah, my student and former daladala driver, so were cruising around Dar learning the town. We came upon an old guy standing in the middle of the road, next to a hastily filled hole. He stopped us and asked for money, because he filled the hole. We never saw him fill the hole, it could have been filled days ago, by another old guy, but that was irrelevant. Also irrelevant was that he was standing on a pristine portion of the road, and had he moved three feet in any direction, we could have driven right through. But he wasn't moving, so Abdallah gave him some change. Geezer probably spends all day standing in front of recently filled holes, taking advantage of anyone too polite to run him over.
This is why I love Africa. 

Dead water hole. 

A friend once told me she wouldn't visit me here because she feared the unknown. l fear the known. Things get too normal I get antsy, so Africa is the perfect place for me. Nothing is too normal, and many things are downright bizarre.




The kids are good, moving along just like they should. Gairo, a village about an hour away, wants us to board their chekechea kids. It's good folks are finding out about us, but not so good to board babies. Even worse that the schools here are generally bad enough that folks actually consider, and do, board their preschoolers. Won't go into the state of the schools here, I've done that time and time again, but I just got three new evening class students and all three are in upper level classes and have almost no English. Our chekechea kids speak better. But then they still pee in their pants sometimes, so it's six of one and half a dozen of the other.

Chameleon crawling up my leg in Mbeya. 

Locals are afraid of these, won't touch them,

 much lesslet them walk up their jeans. 

This, plus the python, has cemented

 my weirdness with my friends and

neighbors.

The breakfast program is going well, the kids like it, and they come to class on time now. We read stories while they eat their ugi (porridge), then start the day. The library is catching on slowly, the only problem is no one, I repeat no one, returns their books on time, not even close. Wanarudisha chelewa sana. But everyone lives close, so I can hunt them down when someone else wants the book.

If you look hard you can see a cat in this tree. 

That's Mr. Greenwell attempting a rescue. The 

cat was in the tree for 3 days, screaming at us.

This one didn't cost me anything.

I love the smallness of the village. Anyone I need I can find, and they can find me. Everyone says hi, kids play in the street, and people sit out on the stoops so if you want to visit, there they are. If it wasn't for poverty, oppression and repression of women, bad schools, corruption, and limited access to just about anything, this place would be perfect.


Nakupenda

Where Two Or More Are Gathered

Tanzania, like much of Africa, is rich in resources, and but for corruption and general bad management, would be the richest continent since the invention of land. There are gems and minerals to be had, all you have to do is dig. Mines throughout Africa yield tanzanite, silver, diamonds, garnets and of course, gold. The gold I'm talking about today, however, isn't harvested from the bowels of the earth, but closer, much, much closer.

Nose picking; a subject to which I have alluded in the past but never explored. In America, TAKE YOUR FINGER OUT OF YOUR NOSE is a our parental mantra.  We'd rather not talk about it and we dislike watching it, although at any intersection anywhere in America, at any given time, there's ten guys meditatively screwing their fingers into their noses while they listen to old Queen songs on the radio. The average African is joyously uninhibited in this respect, however, nobody cares, miners or bystanders.

"Where two or more are gathered" is Scripture. But here in Berega, the second half of the verse goes "one or more will be picking his nose." The reason I'm so blatantly belaboring this point is because it's the national sport here. Everybody's doin' it. And here I am at ground zero.

Villages are by nature intimate places, everyone knows everyone, and during the day you're likely to meet most of your friends at least once. And you'll shake their hands, all of them, multiple times while you greet and talk. In Africa, or at least the countries I've visited, if you're not shaking a hand, you're holding one. Africans hold hands, men and women, men and men, women and women, hamna shida. So all those little nose germs travel from hand to hand all day and well into the night. Handkerchiefs are available here, and cheaply, but are mostly used for wiping sweat off your forehead. They rarely make it to an actual nostril.


Invariably, at some point during a conversation, out comes a finger, in goes the finger, and dialogue continues as your friend happily and energetically slides his finger halfway into his brain. The degree of interest and vigor with which they root around in there is fascinating and alarming, mostly alarming. Sometimes it seems there's nothing up there, it's just something to do with your hand, besides hold someone elses.

You could ask where I'm looking during all this. Usually somewhere in the region of my friend's forehead, or over his shoulder, or in my bag, anywhere but his nose. It's difficult sana to ignore, and equally difficult to keep my mind on track while my brain is screaming TAKE YOUR FINGER OUT OF YOUR NOSE!

In the village, it's all about manual dexterity. I've seen six year old kids launch snot rockets half way across the road, and despite my continuing efforts, I'm unable to match their speed and trajectory. Not to mention accuracy.This is a skill, like weaving and knitting, learned at a young age, perfected over time, and generally performed in full view of anyone who cares to watch.
About the only polite way to avoid a bacterial transfer is to keep your hands full, consider yourself warned. As for me, I just stick out my hand and hope for the best. These are my friends, besides after all this time I've developed the immune system of a New York cockroach, so hamna shida. I've said about all I care to say on this subject, I imagine you've heard more than enough.

A few of us went to a village called Chagongwe this weekend, a day trip into the mountains. Not too far, according to our driver Bayona. In reality, it took us three hours to get up the mountain, and three to get down. This was probably the worst rode I have ever traveled,with the steepest sides, but the village is beautiful, the air smells like eucalyptus, and hopefully I will spend some time there painting their classrooms.

Homemade but surprisingly
 sturdy bridge up the mountain.

Quite a few of us went, Isaac and his wife Ruth, Brad from Hands4Africa, his son Zach, and assorted others. Zach and I sat in the back of the truck because we wanted to take pictures, in spite of bouncing and lurching around ruts and holes the size of a small country. It's the dry season, and the road was about as dusty as it could get, so I had grit in my eyes all day and my every bite crunched.

About a third of the way up the

 mountain to Chagongwe. 

This is when you know you're far, far away.

We picked up a hitch hiker, a man about 50 years old, walking his bike up the mountain. It wasn't easy getting his bike in the back of he truck, but I'm glad we did. We collected him about one third the way up, but it would have taken him all day to get there on his bike, walking, riding, veering around holes. At different times of the year the road is impassable, hopefully not the time I plan to be there. There's no chekechea, but hamna shida, there's a primary school, so I can paint the Standard 1, which is in essence a chekechea, as the kids will know nothing when they start.

Part of the road to Chagongwe. 

Hard to tell how bad it, but 

we would never have made it without 4 wheel drive.

Brad Logan, the doc who runs Hands4Africa, is hoping to start a jatropha tree farm there, the nuts of which will be pressed and eventually turned into diesel oil, which will bring jobs and money into the village. The fertilizer will be home grown, truly, as the project which goes along with the jatropha trees is Humanure.

Note large hole to the right. A good reason to be off the

mountain before dark.

Chagongwa classroom we will paint. 

This is a very nice room

and will be easy to paint.

This involves collecting buckets of human waste, adding sawdust and other crap (couldn't resist) lying around the village, and composting it for use as fertilizer on the tree farm. The plan is to first put the collection buckets in the primary school, where we anticipate a more than adequate supply of waste, kids being, as they are, full of it.




If successful, this will bring jobs and money into the village, and even better, decrease the incidence of diarrheal diseases which account for so many deaths among children, elders, and other vulnerable folks.

Interim classroom until the new 

school is completed. It looks 

about as good on the inside.

The locals are interested in the project, willing to give it a try, yet a little squeamish about sitting their matako on a toilet seat that has been used by oh, just about anybody. Culturally,I can see their point. They squat. On the other hand (so shoot me), these are the folks who teach their kids never to eat, shake, or receive with their left as that's the hand they use to "help themselves". Sometimes there's newspaper, sometimes a corncob, sometimes just water, sometimes none of the aforementioned. I'm just going to chalk this up to a clash of cultures and wait to see how it pans out.

Sunset on the mountain. Beautiful, however it

 did remind us 

we were shortly to navigate the decent in the dark.

There's been a lot of interest in the preschool walls. This mountain village wants to send a couple of potential teachers to us for "wall training" It's a great idea, they can watch, and then do, and then return to the village to teach, using the walls we will paint. The old see one, do one, teach one nursing theory. Other villages can do this as well, which makes it much easier for Martha and me. All we need now is to train some painters.

Downtown Gairo, which is below Chagongwa. Lots of ox

carts in this area. 

I wonder if other travel bloggers waste (there I go again) this much cyberspace talking about mucus and mavi. Is it just me?? Am I just inordinately interested in all things fecal/nasal? Is this the result of 20 years of nursing?? Do I really care? Pole sana, if you've gotten this far, it's too late.

Nakupenda

Food na Chakula y Comida

My daughter-in-law Sarah just wrote describing her birthday cupcakes, black forest with molten amaretto filling, and I tell you it pierced my heart. I love Africa, I must, I spend enough time here. But there are times when I wish I had fallen in love with a country with tastier cuisine.



This is an amazing place, the people, scenery, music, animals, colors and customs are astounding in their beauty and variety. So why is it that the staple food is a lump of starch that resembles a tumor the size and shape of a grapefruit. Truthfully, the tumor would have more flavor.

Note the forked metal tool braced against the pot. 

Without this, 

the pot would fall over.

Ugali. Every country has their favorite starch, and until I came to Africa, I had not met a carb I couldn't love with all my heart. But I've met my match, starchwise. It has NO TASTE, none whatsoever, and it doesn't move or smell either, it just lies there. If you made cream of wheat with one third the required liquid you could approximate its texture. If you fashioned a ball of laundry starch,you might approximate its taste.

Yet 95% of Tanzanians eat ugali at least once a day, sometimes twice. They swear by it, saying they won't feel full until they've had their daily allotment, and this is where it starts to make sense. We all want to leave the table feeling full and satisfied, wherever we live. But this is a poor country, and most people eat only one meal each day. So they eat an enormous globe of ugali, and walk away happy until the next day. And it does last until the next meal, trust me, I've eaten it. Sometimes there's beans, usually some greens, but only rarely is there meat. It's just too expensive.

Ugali powder is added until it becomes thick, even thicker

than this.

Dagaa, however, is dirt cheap, and if given the choice I would eat the dirt. I've mentioned dagaa, the tiny dried fish that looks like little silver nails. Unlike ugali, it does have a taste, and a smell, neither of which is in any way appealing. My friend Carmen is a nurse on the pediatric ward. Originally, she's from Cuba, and has been here about twenty ears. She won't eat either one, and says ugali no tienes sabor ( has no taste). She won't even talk about dagaa. I went by her house today and she gave me some rice and a kind of Cuban marinara sauce with beef and pork.  Muy delicioso.

Carmen speaks Kiswahili fluently, and Spanish, of course, and has some English. I am fluent only in English, but have some Spanish and Kiswahili. I'd forgotten my Spanish, it was replaced by Kiswahili. So she's helping me to resurrect my Espanol, and we speak this weird mix of the three. Folks here in Berega don't quite know what to make of it, but I'm happy to be relearning my Spanish, because I think my next trip may be to Honduras, or Panama, someplace with a never ending supply of tortillas and mangoes.

Carmen, who hates ugali, and Mama 

Dani, who probably

eats it every day. 

Carmen is cleaning rice, which we buy complete 

little rocks. But it's a good way to sit and talk.

I'm fortunate sana that I have enough money to avoid the foods I dislike, most people here don't have that option, and are just happy to be eating. It's the basic poverty diet, mostly starch, few vegetables, very little calcium and protein, the same thing, day in and day out. Because of the lack of water, farmers grow only essentials, so there's no fruit grown here. Our river here is bone dry, which is scary for  everyone.




You know, I'll eat. I'll just go to Morogoro to buy what I need. The folks here can't do that, and December and January are lean months. The call it the hungry time. Apparently it's gotten worse every year, mostly due to global warming, which they don't even know about, and certainly haven't caused. So in December and January there will be only ugali, and possibly not much of that. If a farmer can't grow his food, then he must buy it, but he won't have money to do this because he depends on his harvest for money.

Bananas, which we don't have in Berega.

What's amazing is that everyone here just carries on. Kids play, people work, their bodies having adapted to the environment. One day I was at the lab and Magadula showed me the blood work log and I'm here to tell you that most people in Berega are anemic. Anemic, malnourished, poor, and every day they get up and get busy. If asked, they talk about  about their problems, but without whining. These are just the facts of their lives.

Food displayed by the roadside, 

in much larger quantities than

in Berega.

Certainly the women do a great majority of the work, and they accept that as just maisha (life). My feeling is life's a crap shoot, we're where we are because 1) it's the hand we've been dealt or 2) Mungu akipenda (if God wishes). But as I watch village life I'm aware that I could have been Aissa or Mary, fetching maji, farming maize, trying to feed too many kids with too little money. And I'm grateful that if and when I want to, I can leave. I may never leave, or if I do it will be to someplace like this, but I have the choice. It's the idea of no choices that scares me. Life choices, food choices, work choices.

But back to food. In America I rarely cook,I don't have to. There's so much to choose from, the menus get longer and longer every year. Usually I wait till the waitress comes and pick something. I never pick liver, but most everything is ok with me. They love liver here, and kidneys and eyes. No picky eaters in Berega. I've gotten pretty good at cooking greens in coconut milk (the powdered kind from Morogoro). Homemade coconut milk is way too labor intensive. Curry is easy as well, and my potato curry is great. I eat pretty well here, better than in America, where I usually head straight for the greasy/ salty end of the buffet.

And pumpkins, along the road to Dodoma, outside Berega.

I like to share food with my friends, but mostly the things I make just puzzle them, First, there's no ugali, and second, what the hell is a salad? Everyone eats, and says mzuri sana, asante kwa chakula, but I get the feeling they run right home for a wad of ugali before they go to bed so they won't starve during the night.

My adult students want me to make them American food. Think I'll go with pasta, a whole lot of it. Maybe if I overcook it and roll it into a big ball...
Breakfast for the locals is usually not until around ten, when everyone takes chai. Chai is sweet tea made with milk instead of water. Along with the chai is often times maandazi, a lump (yet another lump) of fried dough, not sweet, just dough. Good when eaten fresh, less endearing an hour later.

Watermelons. also available only outside of Berega.

There's chapati, which I use to make African breakfast burritos, and which the locals eat naked (the chipati). I dearly love half cakes, a small square lump of, yep, fried dough. But half cakes are sweet, and if you buy them just after frying they're crispy and wonderful. Mostly they're a little old, because they stay in the store until they sell, but sometimes I get to the duka early and scoop up a bunch of fresh ones. Don't know if I like whole cakes, so far I've never seen one, and haven't thought to ask.

Food here is a big deal, like everywhere. The difference is Americans wonder what they will eat today, while people here wonder if they will. Americans crave variety in their menu, folks here find comfort in a ball, wad, lump of ground maize. It's been an eye opener living here. I'm aware enough to bear a small measure of guilt over how much easier my life is, but not enough to live in a mud hut and eat ugali seven days a week.

Rarely in the US did I ever have such moral dilemmas, you'd think at my age I'd have figured it all out, but it just gets more complicated. As simply as I live, there's just such a huge disparity between my life and the lives of my neighbors. They don't think twice about it, though, and even if they do, they're too polite to mention it.

There's a chubby bald guy named Andrew Zimmern, who has a food show. He travels the globe eating worms and roaches and other nasty garbage, you've probably seen the show. Well, one episode took him to Tanzania, and he spent the entire hour showing us how Tanzanians eat dirt soup and other things I've personally never seen or been offered. Since then I don't like him. I freely admit that in the main I'm not impressed with Tanzanian dishes, but I have had great food here. It's just been prepared by people with enough money to buy the ingredients. Mostly I don't live around those people. Mostly, I'm  just be happy to be eating.


Nakupenda

Semi-Annual Report Card

Chicken drama at Ruth's house. Fighting over a girl chicken, 

of course.

I arrived in January with lots of plans, always lots of plans, rolling around in my head day and night, making it hard to sleep. Berega needs everything, so it doesn't take a mental giant to develop a list of projects, what's difficult is to focus on just one or two at a time. Then there's the time factor.

Chased him all the way across the yard and down the road.

As an American raised in Hawaii, my sense of time and urgency, or lack thereof, rests comfortably between wazungu and African. The pace here doesn't drive me crazy, but then, maybe I've just adapted. In America, time is money. In Africa, time is time, and hamna shida, there's plenty of it.

Just painting a classroom involves a multitude of delays. If I run out of blue paint I go into town and back, which takes all day, or I can ask Abdallah (handsome daladala driver and one of my adult students) to pick it up for me, again all day . Lots of things here take all day, or longer.  But I usually work multiple projects, so I can flit from one to another depending upon the availability of supplies.

The winner. Hard to imagine a 

chicken looking proud of 

himself, but this one does. 

Yes, this is what I do with my time.

But sooner or later (mostly later), things get done and ninafurahi kabisa to announce that the checkechea is finished. It's been likizo so I was able to proceed unimpeded by classes and kids. On Monday, Martha , Mary and I will prepare the room for school on Tuesday. The screens are about as dusty as they can get while still letting in light and air. The floors are a horror.

Berega Community Library. 

Told you it was small. I'm going to

Dar this weekend to beef up 

the English grammar, math, and

 the health and medicine section.

The kids have done very well, everyone knows their letters and numbers, in and out of order. Some can count up to 150. In varying degrees, they can write numbers from 1-150 as we call them out, read a few words, do simple addition, speak some English, lots of stuff. I'm really impressed, and the parents are more than happy.

Animals labeled in English and Kiswahili. 

Used the same as 

everything else on the walls. 

Nothing is just one thing. Everything 

a color, a sound...

AND the Berega Community Library is done as well. It's smaller than small, we just painted the walls white, borrowed some bricks from the pastor next door, and laid planks over them, old hippie style. As we get more books, we can add more bricks and planks, but it's operational. People are filtering in, getting books, and telling their friends.
We offer the usual library menu, adventure, mystery, and a few bodice rippers, lakini as it's located inside the Anglican Church school building I've avoided titles featuring words like heaving, throbbing or burgeoning. We also have a Kiswahili section for adults and kids, lots of English story books, and grammar books for all levels. There's a bilingual health and medicine section, and some of the hospital staff and nursing students are coming to get books to improve their English and prepare for exams.

Aissa and Jeska, two of my adult students, pluralizing. 

Kiswahili pluralizes from the front, and doesn't use a or an.

It's a process.

Last week I sent out a gangmail asking for money for a laminator, and accessories. Thanks to Evelyn, Patti, Chris, and whoever put money directly in my bank account, I have enough. There's some surplus which I will use to buy yet more books, if that's ok with the donors.
One of the things I plan to do is rip out the pages from all the workbooks I've collected, erase the answers, and laminate them so we can use them milele na milele. Schools here are generally resource free, so hopefully after I've plasticized everything in sight we can have a teachers resource section.

This is how we teach numbers, 

and fruit, and sentences. Also

a and an. I want an apple and a banana.

Last week I was talking with Sylvia and Isabelle, the owners of Ricky's Cafe (home of Black Forest Cake and ice cream). I mentioned needing books for the library, so they took me to a tiny hole in the wall shop way in the back of the market and I bought over 100 books, 20 plastic animals and about 30 little matchbox cars for 60,000 tsh, a good deal.This is why I talk to everyone. S and I are also boxing up some old books for me.
The kids are nuts over the cars and plastic animals, and spent about an hour lining them up till I showed them how to push the cars up and down every available surface. Now they're crawling all over the place. African kids are creative, and make their own toys out of sticks and mud and anything else lying around. I save my plastic bags and broken flip flops for them and they use them to make soccer balls, lorry tires, lots of stuff, but these are new and different and the word is out. I can hardly walk down the street without a troop of dusty little watoto trailing behind. Wait till I've finished the blocks.

Days of the week and below greetings using position of the sun.

There's a group of fundi wa mbao (carpenters) that work near my house, and they saved all the end pieces and made about 200 blocks, all different sizes and shapes. I'm painting them now, planning to draw numbers and letters and words on them as well, because Mungu forbid something should just be fun. The thing is, preschool is just games, so the kids are learning painlessly and playfully, and it's fun to watch.

Where the kids practice writing letters. Also note the letters 

out of order. Below is the transport section we use for sentences,

letter sounds...

Wall mural. Hard to see but we 

use this to teach nouns, verbs 

and pronouns. The boy is sitting on the rock. 

He is swimming in the river...

We do math with little blocks, and if I say to make 5 + 5 they make 2 groups of five, then count 'em up. The usual. One day after 5+5  I said "Now make 6 + 4" and two of the kids just moved a block from one pile to another. Ninashangaa sana. That's pretty sophisticated for a five year old who hasn't had a TV or computer or books. Smart kids.
The adult students are doing fine. They aren't as fast as the kids, but they work, farm, cook... Still they've made a lot of progress but I've decided that English is a dopey language. It's totally unexplainable, there's exceptions to every rule, and homonyms are just unfair.
Kiswahili has its wierdness as well, but on the plus side, there's fewer words to learn. Big is kubwa, very big is kubwa sana and really really big is kubwa kabisa and that's pretty much it for big. So I showed them the probably 200 English words for big in my laptop thesaurus. They looked appropriately intimidated.

At first we taught up to 20, then 40, 

and it was so easy we upped 

to 150 and they're learning it. 

So that's how the first six months have gone, and I'm satisfied. I hope all the Sisters at St. Theresa's and Sacred Hearts are happy to see that I'm finally "using my free time wisely." The plan now is to paint the Kiswahili chekechea across the courtyard. But I think I might take a few weeks off from painting to get the smell of paint thinner out of my skin and scrub off the remaining paint splatters on my person. It's a handy way to teach colors though, half the village knows all their primary colors from watching me walk home from work.
Brad Logan is coming next week, he's the doc who runs Hands4Africa, the org that sent me here. I gave him a yard long Santa list and he's got it all. Some exciting things coming, equipment, computer stuff, but most important, a box of Oreos. By and large the cookies hare are stale, or taste like pesticide, or both. I still eat them, it's what we have, but I'm looking forward to eating the middle out of my favorite store bought cookie.

Shapes and colors.

And THEN, Patti is sending me some home made chocolate chip walnut cookies in the mail. Yes, you can do that, if anyone else feels the urge. Not sure how well peanut butter cookies would travel but hamna shida, I would suck up the crumbs without complaint.
Just ate an eye, a little one, but an eye nonetheless. I've been avoiding eating eyes, picking around them while politely refusing the actual orb. In Ghana, one of the kids rolled a couple across my desk just to see what I'd do. I looked at the eyes, they looked at me, and I rolled them back to Alice, who ate them. Guess I've gotten over the trauma, because today I caved under the pressure and had a little fried fish, guppy sized, with the eyes still attached. From Moshi, where apparently the fish is good. Maybe by the next six month report I'll have eaten a big eyed fish, you never know.


Nakupenda.