Mr Pixie and the mini Maasai

As we become familiar with the wonders of this place we are also adjusting our views on what it takes to cope with the difficulties that accompany them.

For example, there are people selling things all over the road: sunglasses, coconuts, cassava chips etc. you don't even have to get out of your car, if you glance that way someone will just come to your window and start shoving things in and you can try them on or taste them and then decide whether or not to buy. You know how fun it is to try on sunglasses in gas stations? Well, we get to check out multiple shaded looks in our rear view mirror every time we drive somewhere! The downside is that because our skin and language betray our connection to the West, we are considered rich enough to pay top dollar for  things whether we like it or not (expensive is relative here where the annual Per Capita income is 1,400). So we're learning to haggle down prices using broken kiswahili and hand gestures. When we succeed in reducing prices we feel a bit bad for paying $3 for a pair of imitation Ray Bans, but readjust our concept of a fair standard of living when we realize that this is a big sale for someone who spends their days hawking sunglasses to the automobile-owning slice of the population from a battered styrofoam display block. When we can't get the price we want we say "Hapana asante" (no thanks) and roll the window up a bit until traffic moves on. It takes some getting used to, but its the way they roll around here!

Another blessing is the weather. It is like summer in Maine here every day, they warn us that the rains and heat will come, but for now skirts are lovely and the sun is gentle and warm. We live near the ocean and can stay in the water forever without getting cold, as it is as mild as the sweet August air. The other side of this coin is the presence of a nasty population of mosquitos who my classroom assistant tells me are escapees from a local medical experimentation lab. They hover under tables, around screen doors and in my students' backpacks as they hang innocently outside of our classroom. As soon as the sun goes down they get hungry. Of course, the lovely weather tempts you to wear shorts or skirts when you begin a journey and then when the sun goes down you're hopping from leg to leg trying to multitask your thoughts and conversations with relentless itchy stinging on any exposed skin. Of course, I arrived with my mind made up that I wouldn't need to spray chemical bug spray all over my skin and that I'd sleep with a mosquito net and take precautions when I travel out of the city, but that I could take these urban mosquitos never mind the overreactive hype of less-tough individuals in my privileged community. Tanzanians aren't drenched in "Off" as they mill about the streets, why should I be?! Zak was of the same camp when we went out to a staff happy hour with him in shorts and me in a skirt and boots, he's lucky he has leg hair and now I wear bug spray.

So that's enough of tainting the dream with reality, let's get down to the purely good stuff! 

I've figured out how to cook sustainable meals even though I'm inventing what to do with ingredients that are mostly labeled in kiswahili or arabic if at all. See the picture of our first meal in our home together, curried somethings, rice, apples and peanutbutter and local beer. I cook for five people, I eat 1 portion, Zak eats 2, then we pack 2 for lunch the next day!

The beaches are incredible, we visited one with some new friends from school a few weekends ago and I found the best seashells of my life! You take a ferry there to cross a crook in the peninsula and once again you can buy chips and sunglasses while sitting in your car on the ferry, you can also look around at the people packed in along side of you. Seeing babies slung on backs Zak and I had a good chat about the differences in developmental stimulation received by babies who are carried around as parents/supervising siblings do other things vs babies who are given more time to interact with their environment. Trying to empathize with women in burkas we tried to think about what it might feel like to be the child of someone who is all eyes and cloth. People are accomplishing incredible feats of balance with bicycles loaded with mattresses, baskets of fruit and stacks of wood or with buckets of fish, overstuffed parcels, even a pumpkin on their heads! Once across the water we're in a very different community, Dar es Salaam is a city (although it is more bustling markets and foot traffic than high rises) with distance you see more open land, mud huts, half-built cement block houses, grazing cows...then you're on these striking beaches. There is one that is full of vendors and radios, a bustling party beach (we haven't yet been there) or you can go to the secluded areas where its nothing but you and some baobab trees (and in our case a cheeky monkey and a huge dead jellyfish).

This weekend Zak and I headed back in that direction without our friends to guide us. We drove past little pyramids of tomatoes and pineapples on strings for sale along the road, a cluster of children kicking a soccer ball into a stick and twine goal, men laying mortar on one of the many unfinished cement block houses, a man in his sunday clothes looking towards the sea with his hands on his hips, two women in head scarves laughing happily and strolling in rubber flip flops along the dusty road and a long expanse of sandy palm-treed emptiness until we came to a little sign that said "horse club." This was a sight for sore eyes because as much as we're loving our adventure and adapting quite nicely considering the circumstances, we had both been feeling quite trapped in the world of migrating from our apartment to school and back again all week long. We needed to be freed and who else could do such a thing than the horse club! So we followed the sign down a road of pure sand (thank god for our Escudo with two kinds of 4 wheel drive!) The whole time we lived with the awareness that we were most likely not going to find anything like a horse club out in the bush, but decided to enjoy the journey nonetheless. Eventually we were pleasantly shocked to be welcomed into a little gated wonderland in the middle of nowhere by a kind and twinkly german woman named Josephine. She had a tuft of wooly hair pulled across her head and a glaring sunburn leathering her matronly chest. She showed us the Jungle Lolo,

her fuscia bouganvilla,

her pack of german shepherds, and finally her horses. She is trying to make the perfect breed of horse to live in Tanzania. She seems to be the only one doing it because she said she has to import their food from all over the place get a vet from Kenya, but she's part gypsy so horses are in her blood and she's got quite a large family of them! A young girl named Ana who has come from abroad to stay on the farm for the summer (she responded to an ad the paper, what a bold move!) brought us Mr Pixie and Andy, two big chestnut horses. They each got a big nip off a burly carrot and then we hopped on their backs, I got Andy and Zak got- that's right Mr Pixie! Ana lead us on her horse to a sticked-in practice ring, we each had one Tanzanian man accompanying us on foot in case our horses got out of hand. We practiced one time each the skills of stop, go and turn and then we were off towards the beach! We spent a whole hour just meandering this heavenly expanse of beach on the backs of horses! The waves rolled in, our horses rocked us with their gate and we just kept looking at each other with that "can you believe this?!" smile. We really could have been in a dream. There was no one on the beach except for a few local guys who joked with our escorts and some coy teenaged girls splashing topless in the sea. Andy and Mr Pixie liked walking right along the surf and once Mr Pixie tried to go in and my helper had to fetch us out because he wasn't responding to left, right or stop! Ana said that she takes them riding in the sea bareback! After bidding farewell to our new found friends, vowing to return so that we could learn to gallop (Zak was itching to go faster!) and pinching ourselves to make sure that this was our lives, we returned to the beach for a few hours to swim, read, run, conspire and be grateful. When finally headed home we were singing!

So those are my thoughts and adventures from the in between, if you want to know about the mini Maasai or the rest of the week at school, check out our classroom blog and hear straight from the experts!
http://istgrade2.wordpress.com/

First days

I have been in Dar es Salaam for ten days and teaching for three, therefore I am a sponge without much conclusive analysis, but want to start the sharing before it gets more unmanageable than it already is! I spent 35 hours in transit, eating international airplane food and reading a great book from Opera's list "Say You're One of Them"by Uwem Akpan, stories of trial and resiliency in children from several African countries. My imagination latched onto the dusty roads, smoky food and barefoot children. I felt the limitations of my perception of Africa; common knowledge about this place is deeply simplified and stereotyped. I said many times that  I was "moving to Africa", but it is Tanzania that I come to, Dar es Salaam, my neighborhood, not the entire continent, that is a much larger being to come to know, if it is even possible.
This journey to know a new place is quite complicated. Not only do your senses need to adjust to new shapes, colors and smells, but the very foundation of knowledge that you base your assumptions on for what is safe and what is friendly, what success means and how time is spent is new. Its like language, you are not simply learning new words for the same old things, greetings have different weight for different people in each moment, the reception of a single question can vary by region, the notion of love has vast interpretations as well as a menagerie of methods for communication.
But I am here in it doing my best to learn and see- we are here. Zak and I are making a home with a crazy quilt and a mosquito net, a gas stove and an in-shower water heater, a falling over refrigerator and makeshift laundry lines in the corners. Our walls are white and our furniture heavy brown wood. Things are simple but of good quality, cheap has a different meaning here. I feel like cheap means simple and not needing to be replaced often, whereas I am used to cheap meaning flimsy and tossable (though there is no shortage of that sort of cheap at the road side stalls or in the hands of the people who knock on your windows when you're driving). We're having a grand old time trying to figure out how to keep the floors clean and our tummies full without the usual Aiya (spelling?) to do it for us. We wake up each morning in the dark and though we're a bit groggy for a few moments, we are so happy to see each other. We wander through a busy street, wade through a new language, study people in staff meetings and at fruit stalls and then put our heads together to try to make sense of it all. This blessing is the Red Thread, the steady line that runs through the story as all else changes. We get to catch a glimpse of each other walking our lines to lunch, vent frustrations at the homework policy or the unwieldy mess left in our closets by a previous teacher,  and overflow with the excitement of successes and unique noticings from the day. What a trip to be each other's closest friends, constant companions, truest loves and to get to see each other in the staff lounge!
We are each delighted by our classes, our students have seen so much of the world, are hungry to learn and are unabashed in their response to our theatrical classroom shenanigans. During morning meeting we sing to the ukulele each day, they chase my imagination with wide eyes as I lay out an idea through a story then pick up where I left off, asking when all is said and done if they can write or read more on the topic! I'm not saying that they don't have their struggles, managing many languages, many transitions, unusual attachments due to multiple moves, wide cultural differences, and a life sheltered within a vibrant but very distinct culture. Though the origins of my students range from Tanzania, to California, Bolivia to Pakistan, many of them have lived in multiple countries and can't quite answer the question "where are you from? " There is a strong push to make a home in the school community that can soothe the confusing edges of roots spread so wide.
In my math curriculum yesterday I was supposed to teach money, of course the objective and manipulatives were geared towards American money, in the states that's kindergarten work. But many of my kids didn't know which one is a penny or a nickel, and why should they? We went through with the objective and practiced identifying and counting and the like, but for homework I decided that they should bring in money from their countries. Everyone came in clutching little envelopes full of coins and we exploded from there. We ended up with a coin museum (see pics), we researched and presented values, did rubbings of pictures, felt shape and weight and celebrated a truly 'global economy.' Tomorrow the other second grades and Zak's class will come in and see our spontaneous World Coins Museum!! Since I'm now behind on the curricular objectives for taking the time to do this we probably won't go into comparing values and making economic judgements, but the possibilities are endless and it was so fun and rewarding for us all to take what the world says we should know and carry it to an authentic place. I am learning so much about the limitations of assumptions because the experience of the people that I'm sharing my days with are so varied.
Well, gotta take the underwear off the back of the couch, 'cause we're having guests tomorrow! (we have to hang clothes inside or Mango Flies will lay their flesh burrowing larvae in them. What an adventure!

Thanks for reading, love to you all!!