Going Gently into that Good Night

A good and bad thing about Dar is that there are often people there preparing to leave Tanzania for good and go back to the states.  This is sad, but usually these people have money to throw around at tropical beaches with fried octopus stands close by.  Because apparently fried octopus street food is a thing.  I approve.  

ship moored specifically for tourists to swim to and play on.

algae and crab covered rocks

ship that looks like a lego block

departing volunteer (the shirtless one) imparts his wisdom to those remaining

Peacocks of Peacemongering

The Peace Corps office in Dar es Salaam is infested by peacocks.  They are cool and amazingly pretty and sound like dying cats and land heavily on the roof and scare people. They are protected by law from being killed, but there's nothing in the laws that suggest we can't harass and annoy  them.

The peacock tries to hide from the crowd of volunteers who have
never been this close to a peacock. 

Checking to see if the coast is clear.

Stalking off in unmolested splendor when someone reminds us
that these birds are aggressive. 

In Which I Engage in Classroom Discipline

I recently saw this surprisingly nuanced article suggesting, among other things, that cheating among students tends to become more rampant as more emphasis is placed on tests.  This seems a reasonable conclusion to draw.  I teach kids whose entire future is determined by a set of terribly written tests.  Cheating is an issue on exams.  But on a recent homework assignment I gave, some of the papers turned in bore a resemblance to one another that defied probability.  I was disappointed, and actually a little surprised.   It wasn't  a difficult assignment;  I'd told them all to write a test, worth 100 marks, for the subject of their choice.  It seemed a better thing to do for teaching pedagogy than a lecture about selecting the proper domain of learning (cognitive, affective, or psychomotor, and please don't ask me what this means) when preparing a test.  As long as they put in a reasonable effort on this they were going to get full marks.

I am not a teacher, I have never been a teacher, occasional TA stints at lecturing undergrads are not sufficient preparation to be a teacher, so I am mostly making this up as I go along.  Their next pedagogy period, I started out talking about cheating, had them give me some examples they had encountered in their teaching practice, and asked them why it was bad to cheat.  (They seemed a little confused and responded that it led to an incorrect evaluation of the student.  Fair enough, it does.)  Then I picked up the offending papers, announced that their authors had cheated, and launched into, if I do say so myself, one of my best impassioned speeches ever.  I told them that by cheating they were insulting me, their classmates, and ultimately themselves.  I reminded them that, the resource situation of secondary schools being as it is, they as future teachers might be the only source of information their classes have, so if they aren't honest, god help us all.  I called the offenders by name and ordered them to stand up and asked if any of them had anything to say to me.  The offenders were three men and a woman.  The woman claimed that one of the men had asked to see her paper, she thought for the formatting, and that was all.  It sounded a little fishy, but after some quick thought I decided to accept this.   Maybe she was lying and I shouldn't have believed her, but she was the only person to offer a defense, and I have never been the teacher (and therefore judge jury and executioner) in such a situation, and if she was lying maybe the public humiliation should be enough.  I don't really know.  Anyway, I ordered my other cheaters out of my class and told them not to come back until they each wrote me a letter of apology, and then I set their papers on fire.   The things you can do as a teacher in a school without fire codes.   One of them had actually written his letter of apology during his time kicked out of class and gave it to me on my way back to the office after the class.   That made me a little happy.  That boy seriously wants to come back to my class.  Or else he just has really good time management skills.

My other class got to hear a little about cheating for their pedagogy period as well, mostly because I  don't bother having two different lesson plans, even though the lessons always go significantly differently because the classes are very dissimilar.  Since no one in this class cheated (they got the same assignment) at least as far as their not-always-observant teacher can tell, we had a discussion about how to prevent cheating in secondary schools.  I mentioned character education, which is a very buzzwordy way of trying to convince children that they should be good people and talking about what makes a person good before you start beating them for not being good people, which I think is probably worth a try.  It's not like the punishings and beatings and patrolling of the exam rooms seem to be working all that well.  But then, it might help to just not treat the students as slaves whose job is to alternate between cleaning the school (important as it is for landscaping purposes to have students paint rocks white), running errands for the teachers, and sometimes mindlessly copying things off blackboards to memorize them for exams.

My Dressmaker

I love this lady.  For all I can never remember her name  She's sweet, she does good work.  She has always charged me less than the going rate, and is very tolerant of my pointing and inept drawing for explaining my wants.  She is also very tolerant of my recent desire for really slutty clothes (what else do I do when I'm irritated with the dress code except order stuff that shows my knees)?   

The lady herself, with the pictures I point at to explain my wants in
the background, as well as some fabric on the wall waiting to be made into clothes.
The bright orange fabric will be mine, and it will show scandalous cleavage.

Her sewing machine, with one of her children pretending to sew.
The fabric on the table will also be mine, and it will be traditional and conservative.

In which I am too Logical

'Tis the season of university students showing up at the college for their student teaching practice, an annoying time during the which I have already received one emailed declaration of undying love.  Another university student keeps stopping me wanting to talk about politics, which I would rather not, if only because my first meeting with him gave me severe panic, as he yelled at me "your embassy is being attacked!"  I jumped to the conclusion that it was the embassy in Dar, and the time frame was right now.  Even had he phrased this to more clearly mean the embassy in Libya a week ago, this is still not as pleasant an introduction as, oh I don't know, "hello, how are you?"

After he told me that "you Americans you have a problem with Muslims" to which I could only protest that there are 350 million of us Americans, more or less, and while I personally am not pleased with the existence of such a dumb movie as the trailer of The Innocence of Muslims made the movie appear to be, I will defend to the death the right of people to make dumb movies that offend people, and the proper response to such a thing is never ever to kill people.  There is, of course, a caveat that I will regard with anger and scorn these filmmakers for using their rights of speech in such a way that they personally do not have to suffer the consequences.  Other people died, while they sat smug and safe with their rights and clearly no ability to use that safety and those rights to any good purpose.

That seemed to be a satisfactory way to dispose of the subject and the young man then started complimenting me on my clothes.  I wear fairly traditional Tanzanian clothing, mostly because fabric shopping and bringing it to a dressmaker is fun, easy, cheap, and since a dressmaker who routinely charges me less than the usual price opened a shop very close to my house, far too convenient.  This, combined with other teachers who have started noticing how much I like clothes and bringing me fabric that they think would look nice on me, means that I now have enough clothes that packing to move to Mbeya is going to be a little difficult.   To return to the narrative, our student teacher wanted to express his displeasure that, while women visiting from Europe (they all think I'm from Europe) adopt Tanzanian clothes, women from Tanzania who visit Europe often return wearing miniskirts, and as a man who will never be judged as a slut based on what he does or does not wear, he disapproves.  I told him that I did not understand the extreme attention paid to women's clothing, and really, as a man who will not be affected by this, he should try to have empathy and not restrict the freedom of others to wear what they like.  He then tried explaining to me that "morphologically, our African women should wear clothes that are long and tight around the thighs and" [trail off into confused embarrassment.]

Let me explain here that the typical traditional skirt is long but extremely tight at the top.  The reasoning being that every movement of the woman's rear should be clearly visible but should she show her knees, she is a whore.  I have noticed this, but this is the first time I have had it blatantly explained to me that this is because men in this culture want to see a butt more than a knee.

I decided to ignore this, however, as I am not quite up to calmly saying to an entitled man that the job of a woman is not to look attractive to men.  The job of a woman is to be a person, and that entails things that differ depending on personal preference, ideology, and religion if applicable.  Do no harm, however, might be a fairly good universal starting principle.   For example, treat people as people, more important than what they wear or what they look like.  Which is the part that  I said.  This was countered with claims about men's sexual arousal, which apparently always trumps women's freedom.  To which I gave my favorite rousing speech on how men are better than that, they are better than animals who cannot control themselves and certainly better than to need to restrict the freedom of others for their selfishness.

My interlocutor told me my problem was that I was too logical, and I couldn't understand things like culture.   Umm, okay, so what now?   Once logic is off the table for a discussion, what do I do?  Say "giraffe" and walk away?  Claim that god or the ghost of Alan Turing told me to think like this and therefore I'm correct?   Say that women have been dressing immodestly in other cultures since the dawn of time and therefore it's good (probably true by at least 1 person's standards of immodesty)?  I ended up excusing myself from the conversation on the grounds of having to prepare myself for class.

In happier news, this.  I monger peace, not violence, but since no lasting damages were done to any involved parties, I'm willing to call this awesome.  Take that for policing women's bodies and clothes instead of greeting them and then minding his own business like a non-sanctimonious person!

In Praise of the Parachichi

In general, I regard Tanzanian cooks as lovely people, more patient and hardworking than I will ever be*, who need to be introduced to a spice rack.  Salt, watery tomato sauce, and possibly some chili peppers on the side are the only garnishes one can usually hope for.  In the case of the avocado, also known as the parachichi to them that speak the Kiswahili, salt is the only thing you actually need to make it perfectly palatable raw.  They make great snacks that one can sometimes just buy off the street in slices.  Fortunately they also tend to be huge and succulent.  If you happen to have ground black pepper (surprisingly hard to come by, thank you darling aunt and uncle in the states) and some barbecue sauce and Jack Daniel's mustard (thank you stateside girlfriend of a volunteer in the region) the avocado makes for a perfectly delightful dish and one large enough to count, for me, as a meal.  Serious Eats offers a recipe for an avocado pie, but that might be going a bit far.

*and less clumsy.  I have never ever been able to scrape out a coconut without cutting the heel of my hand open.

The giant avocados of Tanzania.  If you are like me and can't easily figure out ripeness,
when in the market you just tell the mama you are buying from when you want to eat the
avocado and she will pick appropriate ones for you.

lunch!

A Small Step for Women

Today the college was selecting teachers for some committee.  I was pleased to note that during the selection, one of the main concerns seemed to be to ensure equal numbers of men and women.  Good on them.