I stepped on a bee. It hurt. I almost caused panic in trying to explain what happened to some onlookers because I accidentally told them that I stepped on a snake [nyoka] rather than a bee [nyuki]. My Kiswahili, it is problematic.
Once we cleared up that minor language trouble, I had to introduce myself at length, because the onlookers at the college right now are all government workers who don't know who I am. Naturally, among the things I was asked (after "will you fix my computer?" "No.") was about religion, specifically, whether I was Christian or Muslim. This is a common question*. It's also not one I like getting because in addition to disliking false dichotomies, I'm somewhat bitter about religion in general for many reasons, and in Tanzania as in the rest of the world, when it comes to religion, one cannot simply claim not to have one and get on with life the way one can with admitting to a lack of, say, vegetable peeler. My standard explanation is that religion, like love, must come from the heart, and if it doesn't there is no good reason to pretend and a lot of good reasons to not. In this case, this did not work, because the man asked if I didn't believe in religion or didn't believe in god.
In most circumstances, I would be really happy to talk about this because it is an important distinction, but in a garbled conversation of partial English (that he doesn't really understand) and partial Kiswahili (that I don't really understand) I am not prepared for a conversation about metaphysics. Particularly not after stepping on a bee. Which hurt. So I just said I didn't believe in god, because that's easy, at which he got all pantheistic (god is everywhere, even in that tree, or is that panintheism?) and then demanded explanations for the origin of everything or else QED god. Somehow the upshot of this was his telling me that the origin of the bee that had just enjoyed my foot (that's a translation weirdness) was of god and caused by god as was stepping on it.
I smiled weakly and went home to take over the counter antihistamines and a generic pain killer, because I had stepped on a bee, and it hurt.
*My hypothesis is actually that this happens to women a lot more than men, and only to anyone in regions which don't have a fairly homogeneous religious distribution, but I don't have the data to support that claim.
About receiving on a regular basis the question "are you Christian or Muslim"
People in the sample: 12
men: 5
women: 7
men who say they don't get that question: 4
women who say they don't get that question: 3
Of the three women who are not asked this, all 3 of them qualify that they are in a place with a homogeneous religious distribution, and the 2 of those who are in Christian areas say they get asked which denomination they are a lot.
I need a larger sample size.
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