Wiki Tatu (week three)

African Moments

Ever since Siza mentioned that there was a waterfall near Tengeru, we’d been itching to go check it out. After being in Africa for three weeks, we were finally able to put it on the schedule.
Last Sunday afternoon Siza escorted Kathleen and the two of us on a 2 mile hike up the valley to the falls. We followed the same tunneling path through the banana plantation that we walk to school, but instead of taking our usual left at the fork in the road, we continued “moja kwa moja,” straight ahead up a steep hill.

We walked for about 20 minutes until we came to another village, which was obviously a little more upscale than little Tengeru. The main road took us across a bridge over a rushing river. “This is it!?” we asked Siza with sarcastic disappointment. He didn’t say anything and kept walking.
Siza talked with a few of the local villagers, and we ended up traipsing behind some houses, across some cow pastures, and then back through the banana trees. We only went a few hundred meters before Siza disappeared over a steep precipice. Through the trees we could hear the thundering water in the bottom of the gorge, and one by one we scaled down the precarious slope.
When Siza told us about a waterfall, we were expecting to find a river spilling happily over some rocks in the picturesque way they do in Hawaii. When we got to the bottom of this gorge, however, we were both overwhelmed by the sheer force of these falls. The waterfall itself was only 30 or 40 feet tall, but the power of the water coming through a chute of rock at the top was incredible! The falls generated a swirling wind that shrouded us in mist at the bottom.

Before long we noticed a troop of “kimas” messing around in the trees above the gorge. We like the Swahili word “kima” because it almost sounds like a flip-flop of the English syllables in “monkey.” The monkeys scampered across limbs and leapt sometimes 20 feet from tree to tree. We looked at each other and took stock of all that was around us…the huge waterfall, the mist, and monkeys playing high in the tangled canopy. It was definitely a true African moment.

Another truly African moment was on the way back to Tengeru. A group of women, dressed very nicely in colorful skirts and head wraps, was walking towards us as we came down the hill. We stopped to greet them and Siza, of course, recognized the older women. Among the older ladies was a young girl who looked barely 14. After the polite “jambos,” one of the women asked Siza if Rob would like to marry her daughter! Siza burst out laughing before he could translate, but Rob got the gist from the body language and the pointing. Rob responded immediately by shaking his head and giving Emily a big hug. Everyone started to laugh through the awkwardness. Before we left, Rob did compliment the young lady on her ability to balance that bucket on her head.

Finally, to top off our outting, Emily helped a local man corral his two baby goats back into his gated home. For some odd reason Emily was so excited about this and all the way home she kept saying, "I held a goat today!"

Swahili Time

On the daily schedule that hangs up in the teachers’ room at Mavinuni Primary School it says that first period starts at “2 am.” The next period begins at “2:40, then 3:20” and so on for the rest of the school day. Utterly confounded by this, we asked Mama Helena, the 4th Grade teacher, to explain the time to us. Struggling a bit with broken English, Mama Helena explained that the time was written in “Swahili Time,” and “that means it’s 8 o’clock in English.” Naturally, we asked her “What!? Why does ‘Swahili Time’ subtract 6 hours from the actual time?” We tried to troubleshoot for the answer to help improve her explanation. We are only 3 hours ahead of London so we ruled out Greenwich Mean Time and we were otherwise unsuccessful at finding any sort of rationale for the system. So we decided that maybe we’ll ask someone else who might be able to explain it better than, “Oh, it’s just Swahili Time.” Before we thanked Mama Helena, we asked to look at her watch to see if it was set to Swahili Time. Nope. It read 8 o’clock on the dot: time to go to class.

We asked Lema about Swahili Time. Of all the people we know in Tanzania, Lema speaks the most fluent English, and we figured he could give us the best explanation of. Lema described the system in the same way Mama Helena did, with the rationale ultimately hinging on the premise that “Swahili Time” is actually just regular time, just in Swahili. Well that doesn’t explain the arbitrary subtraction of 6 hours from whatever time it reads on your watch! Even Lema’s wristwatch had the world standard time on it, which he called “English Time.” He described a conversation where someone might ask you for the time and you’re expected to reply in “Swahili Time,” not “English Time.” Lema insisted that it is the official time of Tanzania, Kenya, and the other countries of the East African Community (Burundi, Uganda, and Rwanda). Rob countered this claim with evidence like official travel schedules for air and ground transportation, which are all conducted in “English Time,” or as we like to refer to it, the “correct” time.
We are still not satisfied with the explanation of this peculiar aspect of Tanzanian culture. It didn’t help that we even peeked at the time on a young man’s watch while we were riding in a dolla-dolla. It was an hour and 18 minutes off of English Time! ? What was that?!
Determined to unravel this mystery, we asked Babu if he knew how this whole thing got started. Babu, who is normally very helpful, was unable to give us the solution we’re looking for, but he did give us our favorite answer: “When I was being born,” he said, “I woke up and I saw this.”

Last week was “harvest week” for Mama Gladness and her family. She jokingly asked if we wanted to help harvest maize at her farm. Without thinking twice about it we agreed. The two of us were very excited to help out as we had never harvested corn before. We looked forward to a new and interesting experience, especially because we planned to meet Mama Gladness on Tuesday morning at “3am, Swahili Time.”


Mahindi

There was some resistance to the thought of us two Mzungus going out to harvest “mahindi,” or maize. Lema told us that it was a terrible idea and even bet us that he’d have to take us to the hospital before the end of the day. He even offered to take us out to the farm for an hour so that we could “see what it was like.” Nevertheless, the two of us decided that we wanted a full day of honest corn-picking work and a couple of quick shucks wouldn’t be enough.
Lema picked us up at the volunteer house in a beat-up Honda del Sol with tinted windows and a 6 inch suspension. Ironically, this was the first time we were expecting to go off-road in Africa and Lema’s prized Range Rover happened to be in the shop. The two of us hopped in the back while Babu and Lema sat up front and we rocked out to Swahili rap all the way to Kilimanjaro.
Lema pulled carefully off the highway and onto a dirt track. The trail followed a wadi past a line of acacia trees up a gradual slope to Mama’s farm. We were expecting to find a barn or farmhouse of some sort at the end of the road, after all, Siza had been living out there for the last several days. It turned out, though, that Mama’s farm is simple a 10-acre plot of land and Siza has been living in a tent under a tree.
We were glad to see Siza, and he was glad to see us. He shouted “Mambo Vipi!” (Hey, what’s happening!?) from amongst the stalks and came to meet us near the tent. He laughed at Rob when he put on his wide-brimmed hat. Babu said Rob looked like he was from Vietnam (- that’s the first time that’s ever happened to Rob, by the way - ). The four of us crunched out through the knee-high grass to the far end of the field and got to work.
There was a surprisingly large distance between each cornstalk. The spaces in between were filled with different types of weeds including wild tomatoes, which are yellow and fuzzy. The other dominant weed out there was a type of mint, which Siza said can be used as a remedy for cuts and scratches.
The day turned out to be a lot of work, but it wasn’t the grueling drama that Lema made it out to be. There were a few more hired workers in the field and we all got in a line and slowly moved over the field. It turns out that shucking corn is really not that hard. You pull the ear off the stalk, undress the cobb, and then toss it into a big pile in the weeds. After several hours, it’s the repetitive tediousness that makes it hard. At the end of each day the hired workers go around to each pile and load them into bushel bags. We had a great time, and being out at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro in a minty-smelling field for the day was fun in itself.

Mama Gladness came out to the field around mid-day. She was so surprised that we volunteered to help harvest that she made us a special lunch which we ate in the shade of a scrub tree. She kept saying in her broken English, “Please don’t tell your family that your Africa Mama punish you!!” Lunch was absolutely fantastic for us. She brought us chunks of beef, boiled eggs, avocado, bread and two bottles of orange Fanta. The rest of the workers ate traditional “leshoto” out of a bucket. Mama insisted we try it and scooped up a cupful for us. Emily looked at the lumps of corn flour floating in soupy white yogurt, or some type of milk, and mustered an anxious smile. At the risk of sounding culturally insensitive, the truth was that the leshoto was absolutely horrible! Rob decided that it tasted like cat’s vomit and happily returned to the chunks of beef and avocados. We told Mama that she didn’t have to make an extra lunch for us, but we were so glad she did.
After lunch Mama came out to work in the field with the rest of us. It turns out that picking corn is good for conversation. We learned that Mama owns four other similar farms, some with corn and some with beans. She owns more than 70 acres in addition to her farm in Tengeru and the volunteer house. Mama is also an elected representative for northern Tanzania and moonlights as a delegate to the national board of energy and biofuels. She is perhaps the most humble person we’ve ever met, and you’d never know how much power she has by the way she shucks corn. It was an interesting moment when she stopped, in the middle of the corn field, in the middle of nowhere, and pulled out her cell phone. We like Mama Gladness.

Lastly, we wanted to give a quick shout-out to all the washers and dryers out there. If you have them, please give them a hug for us...doing laundry by hand is hard!