On the front porch:

Badger Badger, Badger Badger, Badger Badger, Badger Badger, Mushroom, Mushroom!

SNAKE!!

Nearly stepped on a Boomslang snake on my porch today. Startled me pissless. He was sunning himself on the edge of my porch as I came around the corner of my house. They are pretty shy snakes, so I don't think I would have been bitten. It ran and hid under my miwanzi as soon as it saw me. I took a picture and then the neighbor got it. They don't like snakes much.

My ear:

Jess van Gogh here, admiring her handywork with a "safety" razor. This is not just a mere cut, but a visible chunk of my ear that has been removed, and not much longer after this picture was taken, she cut the other one too.

Crazy prep for Septemberfest:

Today was full of crazy-ness. I’m up super late typing emails and trying to pack for September Fest. Spent the day hanging out with Jess and Steve. Got Steve’s bike fixed, barely. Tanzanian bike fundis don’t always (ever) admit to not being able to do something, and often substitute force for the right tool and patience. The hammer is quite literally used in almost every job. So we’re trying to get Steve’s cranks off, since the pedals stripped out. The fundi has a tool (amazingly enough, the correct one) and starts to thread it on. It starts to stick so, of course, out comes the hammer.
He reefs on this poor crank and pops out of the threads twice before I take a closer look at his tool and the crank threads: his tool is completely stripped, threads rounded over completely; the crank threads are now shot as well. I ask him if he knows his tool is completely and utterly broken, and he seems to think he just wasn’t using enough force. So with Don’s help, we convince him to use a new tool, which we naturally have to buy. 8,000 isn’t too bad, so we get the tool, and he gets going again but quickly drops it in the sand. He picks it up with sand coating the threads and starts to put it back on the bike. I’m stop him and ask him if he knows that the sand will strip out the threads and ruin the tool - he is oblivious. I as if he has a toothbrush to clean the tool off, nope, so 300 shillings later, we have bought a toothbrush to clean his new tool. It goes back on, and as soon as it’s tight, he wants to get out the hammer again and wail on it. I stop him and tell him it’s tight enough. Sure enough, the crank popped right off. It even worked on the stripped side, but we were basically re-cutting the threads.
All in all, about an hour later Steve had new cranks and pedals on his bike, and in the mean time, I bought a new panga and jembe for my garden and had them sharpened.

Later in the early afternoon, Jess came into town, and we had lunch with her, then when shopping, Her phone was broken again, so we swapped it out at Aziz’s, no problem, and he ordered a new one for her right then and there. Those guys rock. On the way back at my house Jess attempted to get a handlebar lifti on my bike. Shocks and loose sand made it pretty difficult, and it didn’t help that we were laughing so hard that we could barely stand. I launched her off 3 or 4 times. It was a spectacle for the Tanzanians for sure. We hung out for a while at my house, then I decided I wanted to have my hair cut before September Fest. Seeing as I have a tradition of stupid hair and beard to hold up, I decided to go with a Mohawk and chinstrap-fu man chu beard combo. Jess got to work and started to shave my head, but she got a bit carried away and Ms Van Goh took off a piece of my ear. Not just a cut. A visible chunk is missing. She attempted to balance out the other ear, but I stopped her and assured her it was ok. We went back over to Jens for dinner, and Steve and I cooked peanut sauce again. It was good. Jess is not to be allowed to touch sharp objects around me for the immediate future.

A sad day in remeberance:

I didn’t even realize today was the anniversary untill a few hours into the morning. It was pretty under the radar here, but CNN sometimes is available and they were re-airing some of the live footage from the day. Pretty traumatic even after this long. I was able to watch some CNN by way of injury: That afternoon I was busy trying to fix my stupid kerosene stove, since it was not burning clean. I had trimmed and adjusted the wicks, and then let it burn super high for a few minutes to burn down the wicks and clear the soot. I took it apart with my hot pads and set about preparing breakfast.
Normally the metal bits of the stove cool off fairly quickly, unfortunately, as mine had been heated super hot, the outer baffle was still quite hot as I grabbed it bare handed to put the stove back together. As I yelp and run to dunk my hand under the coolest water I have, my house girl shows up at the door. I let here in and with pain interfering with my Swahili skills, I try to explain that I need to go get some ice. So I hop on my bike and ride, one handed, to Don and Monica’s since they have a freezer. On the way, my phone, which is in my pocket on the burned-hand side, rings. I slow down and reach my left hand into my right pocket and pull out my phone to talk while riding gimpy-handed: It was Steve. He had taken off in the morning, but didn’t get too far as his bike broke just out side of town. So we hung out and tried to be as cheerful as can be.
An added bit of poignance is that the Embassy in Dar was the target of terrorist bombing not to long ago, so it is definately on the minds of ex-pats here.

Spring Break has begun!

I have a new phone again. Aziz’s duka is amazing like that. It only took 3 days for it to arrive, and the price was very good. Steve the Makondeko transfer came up for the weekend to do some business, pimp out his bike with mud guards, a bell, rack and kickstand, helped me start a compost pile and garden and for a health club debate / soccer tournament between Newala Day (My school) and Mahuta (Marissa’s school) after, Jen Steve Marissa and I all cooked awesome veggie stir fry in peanut sauce. I never thought that I'd be eating this good in Africa. Seriously, good stuff. Now a week to relax and get ready for Septemberfest!

Feeling bummed, but bouncing back stong

I was bummed out this week from my school pretty much sucking all around. Here’s a long winded explanation as to why:
Lately it’s been seeming like I don’t even exist at the school. I show up to teach, but in between my classes I am almost always the only one in the teacher’s lounge. I know for a fact that the other teachers are somewhere other than the classrooms for a good portion of the day, but I don’t know where. On the rare occasions when another teacher is in the lounge with me (other than at chai break, when everyone suddenly appears), hardly ever does a conversation ensue. I used to have one good buddy who would sit in the lounge and talk to me about anything, help me with Swahili, and who showed some interest in doing a secondary project. He left last month because he got into university. The only other teacher that has made conversation is also leaving after midterm break to go to university.
To throw a little salt in that wound, somehow even though I’m in the teacher’s lounge all the time, I’m never told anything about what‘s going on at the school, for example: I usually find out about meetings after they have started. Or I’ll learn my classes are cancelled on my way to teach them. On top of the feeling isolated during work, in 8 months I have yet to be invited over by anyone at the school for a meal, chai, a celebration or just to hang out after work. I have been making efforts to reach out to the other teachers, but I just don’t feel like a part of the school community. I feel like if I just snuck into my classes to teach and then hit out the rest of the week, no one at the school would miss me.
The last straw was after I proposed some great ideas for secondary projects for my school, and the enthusiasm level of everyone else was just above zero. I just don’t know what else I can do to try to integrate at the school.
Now after school I go eat and usually go into town, where the difference is like night and day. In town I have many friends who are engaging and receptive. They start conversations, they ask me questions. They ask where I have been if I haven’t been by in a couple of days. I have a few friends in town who probably know as much about my work as the rest of the teachers do combined. I often get invited to tea and meals with friends in town. People in the town are interested in doing secondary projects with me, even if they don’t always relate to PC goals. Most of all, I feel welcomed and appreciated in town, and I feel like the people are glad to have me here. That isn’t something I feel at the school.
So I spent this week at Jen’s house, for her Birthday on the 30th, and partying. On top of it all, my phone just up and died on Thursday for no reason. But I vented to my friends and hung out with the new PCVs, which was good. I’ve come to the conclusion that even though teaching is my primary assignment, my sense of achievement, accomplishment and appreciation are going to come out of side projects, and that’s OK.

Friday we went to the disco and danced up a storm, then Saturday we took a car down to the Ruvuma river and saw hippos and Mozambique. It was amazing. By Monday, I was feeling recharged and more enthusiastic about teaching. Incidentally, none of the other teachers noticed that I hadn’t been around.