It was the Best of Homecomings and the Worst of Homecomings

I had a fight with my department head yesterday over teaching methods.    On the other hand I received several packages containing books, and no home is complete without untidy piles of books in the process of being read or simply spilling out of the bookcases.  On the other hand again my proxy server in the states is down currently.  Farewell sweet netflix.   Fortunately, the internet is providing me with some wonderful things like the latest xkcd, in which Randall Munroe asks an important question that should have occurred to me back when I was an undergrad presented with this problem.  Seriously, why do you have a wolf?

Oh well.  I did have a fabulous trip.  I had some work to do in Tanga that not so coincidentally was arranged for a weekend when I could see my old Morogoro sitemate before he left for America and also it was my birthday.

We went to a bamboo forest and toured some limestone caves.

 

Tree full of annoying birds and their nests. 

Sculpture probably for traditional worship
but I couldn't get a story about it.

Into the gaping black maw. 

Unfortunately, a lot of the rock was defaced by graffiti. 

The caves are a very interfaith place of worship, the traditionalists, as always, came first and they leave offerings.  That's grain scattered on the floor, bottles of various things (the darker ones blood, most likely not human) and in the middle there's a bottle of rose water.  People soak twigs in the water and burn it like incense.

This stone is where the Muslims worship because some of the markings look
like words from the Koran.

This is where the Christians worship, there are some stone formations up
in the arch that supposedly look like the annunciation. 

It's nice to see some tolerance going on.  Normally everyone is Christian or Muslim and makes fun of the traditionalists.  Of course, acknowledging only three possible religious beliefs isn't that big a step up from acknowledging only two possible religious beliefs and the logic of worshiping in the caves seems to be because of pareidolia more than anything else, but whatever.  There was also a natural chair formation that was where the king of demons sat back in the days of demon congresses.  I sat on it, though every horror show I have ever seen tells me this is a bad idea.  

 Most of the stalactites were touched so much that they weren't shiny any more, but this was up near the ceiling out of easy reach.

Light at the end of the tunnel. 

Since we were in the area, we also stopped by some sulphur hot springs with healing properties, maintained by an old man rocking a toothbrush mustache.  He presented me with a water bottle full of the water.  

The grasses are free floating islands formed of the dead roots and fronds
that the sulphur kills and which somehow forms a shield and nutrient base for the stuff on top. 

The water is kind of whitish and bubbly.  Also smelly. 

No day is complete without a football match.  Fortunately, Yanga (the Young Africans, a team from Dar) was here to play the home team, the Coastal Union.  In the hot sun.  Fortunately, as spectators, we get to sit and drink water and eat popsicles (frozen mango juice on a stick.  Sold by the weirdest seller I've ever encountered.  Most vendors everywhere yell constantly what they are selling and shove it in one's face, but this man just walked around with an unlabeled closed cooler, and when I asked him what he was selling he muttered something I couldn't even hear.  I can't decide if this was terrible business strategy or good business strategy, since it did make him stand out) while other people sweat for our entertainment.  Popsicles and circuses, yo.  Also guards with really big guns.

So hard to get pictures through the fence I didn't really try.  But I did like that people climbed what I assume would be the light poles assuming they had lights on them.

Can you spot the white person?

Stories of Magic: Infidelity and the Witch Doctor

A man in Tanga told me that a woman in Dar was cheating on her husband.  The wronged husband went to the witch doctor and complained.  As a result, the cheating woman and her lover became locked together in an inseparable copulatory embrace and supposedly this has lasted for five days now.  One wonders how and if they are drinking fluids, since in the climate of Dar terminal dehydration should have set in by now.

As a side note, given how silly and uncritical Americans tend to be about accepting any sort of healthcare provided it is of foreign or ancient or "natural" origin,* I am considering getting rich quick setting up a videoconferencing service to allow Americans to talk to an Authentic Witch Doctor (authentic except for speaking English, so maybe just someone with a feathered hat who looks African) about their problems, health, situational, and otherwise.  Just imagine the advice:  "You don't like your president?  Leave a well-cooked crocodile tongue and some chicken blood in a cave with incense burning and call me after two full moons."  

*healthcare itself is unnatural.  What could be more natural than dying from disease?

In Which I Continue to be in Love with my New Site

I've actually had complete classes and lectures that happen and so far they are going well. My multimedia students have had a chance to play with my camera and will be attempting some photo editing next week.  Including a short tutorial on how to make animated GIFs because the internet needs more of those.  And cats.  Also animated cats.  Yes.   My programming students have met the Python turtle* and can successfully make the turtle draw things, though it remains to be seen from their homework next week whether they can make the turtle draw things without me holding their hands.  All they have to do though is write a function to draw a triangle, so if any of them are really into it, that should leave room and time for them to play around if they feel so inclined.

The lab supervisor continues to try to vanish with the keys, invariably five minutes before my class, but I have taken to calling him 10 minutes before class if he is not present and demanding the keys.  Amazingly enough, not only does he not mind, he has taken to telling other teachers how good I am for him because I train him to be on time.   Now if I can just get my students to be on time I will be happy.  I am currently attempting this by being in class on time and giving people 5 minutes to get in before I start lecturing, and if people are late and miss part of the lecture, that is not my problem.
I have an easier time telling my students apart here because they don't have to wear uniforms.  Some of the girls are even bold enough to wear pants, or show their knees!  I love it!

I don't so much love that the schedule keeps changing.  I was talking to my sister, who professes professorially at a university stateside, and she already knows what her schedule is for the next semester, and it won't change on her daily throughout the first two weeks of classes!  USA!  Also, all her students will be registered well before classes and she will have a list of them!  I still can't get anyone to give me lists of my students, so I have no idea who all is supposed to be in my classes.  Oh well.

*For the non nerds, the turtle is a toy for beginning programmers.  It's an arrow in the middle of a screen and it responds to simple commands like forward, backward, left and right, and draws a straight line behind it when it moves.

In Which I Talk about Porn More, and This Time it's a Little Fun

I have been working on my aerial silks things off a rather public abandoned crane.  Usually I am accompanied only by a crowd of children, one of whom tends to should "Angalia!" [Look!] over and over.  There is one very sweet child who helps me gather up the fabric when I'm done and stuff it back in its tote bag.  I have actually asked her if she would like to learn silks (I normally do not offer to teach Tanzanians due to a mixture of selfishness--this is MY recreation--and fear that due to language barrier of instruction I'm going to get someone hurt because I won't be able to give good directions, and while this isn't overly dangerous as aerial stuff goes, it is very very important to do it right in order to be safe.) but she gets shy and bashful and refuses.  Oh well.  Now that classes are in session and the students are more or less around, I am getting students coming over to talk to me.  I have mixed feelings about this.  I like that the students are interested in talking to me in a relaxed environment, but the ones who do come talk to me are by and large men and I am just waiting for them to start hitting on me.  I hate that I have to have this nervous expectation.  I blame the patriarchy.

Anyway, the other day three young men were hanging about wanting to ask questions.  The usual about how I see Tanzania as compared to America and what I think about Tanzanian education.  That last one takes a while since now that I'm not at a teacher's college I feel more free to criticize the entire institution of teacher colleges.  Eventually, as all young men seem to, they got around to asking me how technology affected society, by which they really meant porn, but they were too shy to say so, so I talked about how we now had more information in a half an hour than our many-times great grandparents might have seen in a lifetime until they got up courage to actually talk about porn almost directly.  They asked about technology inspiring people to do bad things, like have relationships with people much younger, and encourage the "boy girl thing."

As euphemisms go, boy girl thing is cute but a little annoying in that it implies that the most logical "thing" for girls and boys is sex, rather than those multiple other possible things between girls and boys.  Friendship, for instance.  Mutual respect.  Professional colleague-ism.  Bitter enmity.  Mild annoyance.   There's a whole range of human interaction that doesn't involve sex which can happen between boys and girls.    

Whatever, I began with my usual speech of "you need evidence for such a claim and do you really think such relationships didn't happen before easy access to porn?"  Really, teacher-student relationships/rapes seem such an entrenched part of secondary and primary school culture I'm having a hard time imagining it being recent.  I mean, the whole structure of teachers as omnipotent masters with students as rightsless slaves coupled with all academic success based on test scores that teachers can and do alter given certain considerations just lends itself to teachers raping students.  (Given the power inbalance, I just don't see a student being able to give consent on any sort of footing of equality with a teacher, therefore rape.) Also, if nothing else, I want the students who talk to me to get the idea that I don't like unsubstantiated assertions.  Critical thinking!  Credible and convincing evidence!  I need some science cheerleaders in lab coats to follow me around chanting such things.  

Another of the young men responded that yes, it is true that inappropriate relationships have existed for a while, but having easy communication forces situations into the open.  This is an insightful point, I like this kid.  My response was to comment that yes, it does, and that can be a really good thing (except that part of this openness means that people beside me on public buses sometimes look at porn on their phones and I don't like that, though it is less objectionable than being beside a vomiting child on a bus.) because when sexual relationships become a more open event we can educate people about having sex safely without disease or unwanted pregnancy, and we can talk about how inappropriate relationships are bad and when they happen we are educated to take action to protect and support the victim and shame and punish the person forcing the victim into such a situation.  It was a little awkward grammatically talking through this in terms in which these kids were more comfortable, but I did what I could.  

It ended up being a long discussion that I think went really well.  I didn't get much silking done, but someone has to talk to the children about safe and consensual sex.  Enter the dirty condom-brandishing hippie brigade which is Peace Corps.  Trying to making the world a more equal and less disease-riddled place, one safe and consensual sex talk at a time.

Sonnets from the Peace Corps Volunteers: Lament of the Bus

I sit, without a purpose or diversion.

I trade my germs with yonder spewing child.

I cannot bleat for mercy like the goats

Who suffocate, amongst the luggage piled.

Were I that chicken in its plastic bag

I could accept my fate with glassy eyes

For life would end, a-simmer in my fat,

Some hunger could be stayed by my demise.

But I am not a dinosaur reduced 

To filthy scratchings then a greasy plate,

I am adult and must pretend to patience

Though police stops make us hours late

I sit through music videos repeating. 

I can't escape this bus, hot and fatiguing.  

In Which I Bless the Rains Down in Africa

The rains are here!  Finally!  They are late.  The end of the dry season is a time of water shortages, excessive windblown dust, hard to find food, and, due to hydroelectric reliance, power shortages.  Everything gets better when the rains come, and it is just more pleasant to be outside, because there is no longer dust blown into and onto everything, and the dust haze washes out of the sky.  Now I understand why rain gods tend to be popular in the tropics.    

The Kipengere mountains, now with rain clouds.  

Of the Days Annoyances These: the First Week of Classes

I have sort of met all my classes at this point.  Apparently no one shows up the first week, or expects anyone to teach.  Also, sometimes people take the keys to the lab and disappear with them five minutes before my class is supposed to start, so I can't start until 20 minutes late because I am hunting the keys, by which time the students, as is really their prerogative, have disappeared.

Keys in Tanzania: never not an exasperating and poorly managed situation.

Today I made the mistake of showing up early, when will I ever learn, for a 7:30 class, had to wait for the registrar's secretary to arrive so I could get the keys to the computer office and try a bunch of the unlabeled keys there to see which opened the lab.  Exactly 3 students appeared for class, so I told them to come back next period and bring all their friends.  I supposedly have a class this afternoon, but I have also heard that there are supplementary exams, whatever those are, during that class period.  So I'm not holding my breath.  At least no one cares if I just go back to my house, which is good for my blood pressure, particularly on exasperating mornings like this when clearly the only response to the world is to go drink coffee in the privacy of my home and play violent computer games until calm.

On the plus side, my multimedia students seemed somewhat excited when I met them.  Apparently my predecessor told them about me, and they loved my predecessor and have told me they expect excellent teaching from me as well.  Well, maybe that's a plus. No pressure or anything.

edited to add:  about 20 students came to the afternoon class, so I decided to just lecture them because clearly they are the ones who care.  It was fun.  This was the multimedia class, so I talked about the project they'll be doing over the semester (I'm making them make music videos), talked about the necessity of planning a concept and not letting the media overwhelm the message, and then showed them a bunch of my favorite anime music videos as examples to give them ideas of what was possible.  I'm not sure what they thought, but I had fun, and the young man who likes to carry my projector for me and talk to me (I need to be careful he doesn't start hitting on me) said that they were not used to teachers who made them create things, and I think he said it like he thought it was a good thing.  So that was nice.