Stories of Magic: Enchickening the Spirits

A long-haired Icelandic gentleman in tight plaid pants was telling me about his travels, and what he's seen of various local practices for curing illness by sacrificing chickens, and how he believes that witch doctors and shamans are right in buying off evil disease-causing spirits with chicken deaths.  While chickens are a reasonable enough currency being, as they are, ubiquitous, affordable, and easy to kill, it does beg the question of what the spirits do with dead chickens.  I'm assuming a nice spiritual cordon bleu is out of the question here.

You Must Be the Fabulosity you Wish to See

I like my new dressmaker, possibly even better than my Morogoro dressmaker (which is good, since I was a little worried about being able to find a good one at my new site.  Unimportant priorities, I haz them.)  And that I am good friends with the mamas in the corner of the market around her shop.  I don't have to plan my dresses anymore, my dressmaker, mama Asha, in consultation with the other mamas, decides what I should be wearing. She asks me how I want things to fit, and if I tell her she does a good job she modestly tells me it is because I buy good fabrics.  Which I do, but she is really really good at putting the fabric together.  Cutting up patterned fabrics to make a lovely dress is an art and not necessarily easy, even for people in the states who have giant cutting boards and clean floors on which to spread out the fabric and think.   Once she finishes my dresses I try things on in her shop to make sure they fit in case she needs to make adjustments and then the market mamas have to see how it fits as well and tell me how pretty I look.  Which is nice if I've been feeling particularly dirty recently.  Also, I am fulfilling my Peace Corps goal of being a combination status symbol and entertainment option for the local peoples.

The bottom part of the skirt has these clever folds in it. 

More Things in the Stairwell

In Which I Make Even More Money off Expats

In addition to the expat who wants me to live in his house, eat and drink anything in his house except the scotch and take care of his clingy puppy (not feed it or anything, his staff does that, I just have to play with the pup and take him for walks and let him cuddle beside me and follow me around), there are some other expats who want me to go to their house every day for a week and feed their cats.  Not change litter boxes or anything unpleasant, their staff does that, but show up and if I feel like it hang around playing with the cats, use their washing machine, and eat and drink anything in their house.  Peace Corps Feat #17, sponging off expats.   Also, these are really fun cats, prim Penzi and Enthusiastic Claudius.

Enthusiastic Claudius

Prim Penzi

The Good News News Channel

For Christmas lunch, I was invited to the home of another teacher at the college.  Peace Corps Feat #6, get someone to take you home and feed you.  Anyway, she is a lady that I do want to be better friends with, being the other woman teacher in the department (the department head is also a women but because of the way rank works here, the teachers are not just friends with the department heads, particularly if there is a difference in education levels).  She is a very determined lady who took over and fixed her parents' home after they passed away, and she is in the process of divorcing an abusive husband.  She has a small daughter who is going to grow up with a mother who has the guts to be a woman in a very male-dominated field (that's hard enough in the US where there at least is a sexual harassment policy even if it may or may not be enforced depending on the authorities' views of the clothing the wronged party was wearing at the time), and has the courage to defy the traditional role that a woman must have a husband any husband regardless of mistreatment.   My friend on the Masai Steppe told me that the talk of her village is still the lady who divorced her husband and left after he hit her.   Patriarchy: getting weaker all the time!

In other news, cheese!  We've apparently been eating it since before lactose tolerance.  Go, Atlantic Holocene ancestors, go!

An African nation is noteworthy for a lack of corruption!  Go Botswana!  Send some capacity builders to Tanzania!

There is a push for Alan Turing to be officially pardoned, not just apologized to.  Respect for the father of computer science!

Apocalypse Bado

The world didn't end Friday, all my preparations notwithstanding.  I went up (in elevation) to Njombe town for a doomsday party armed with wine, cookies, and glitter (just in case we have time for a final fabulous musical number before the lights go out).   We the volunteers of the southern highlands had a lot of free time that day, since by our assumption, the Mayans would have assumed the world would be ending at sunset in their own time.  After an internet-less fact check (we guessed), we decided that the Yucatan peninsula is probably in the same time zone as Texas, and in December in Texas the sun probably sets around 6:30pm, which would be our 3:30am.  So we went to the waterfall at the end of the world to pass the time.

Above the boulders
Slick from roaring waterfall,
A patient spider.

Sure sign of the impending apocalypse: man in a skirt playing a ukelele.

Waiting for the end of the world was very omen-y--the power kept going in and out--but we went to bed rather than wait for the end of days in the very early morning.  We're wimps that way.  We awoke to find that the apocalypse was still bado, a useful Kiswahili word meaning later, where later is in the range from an hour from the current time to never.  Such the disappointment!

In Which I am Confused by Attitudes Toward Animals

People in the US tend to ask what it's like in Tanzania, and people in Tanzania, well, actually they ask me about Europe, but the idea is that they want to know where it is like in other places.  Typically I respond, "well, uh, different."  Because it's hard to come up with a decent answer that doesn't take up a lot of time.  A friend answers this question by pointing toward the different treatment of animals.  Tanzanians do not have pets.  At most, the more upper class may have dogs and cats around (maybe) as security and pest control, but these animals are not pets, and they do not live in people's houses and sleep in people's beds.  Particularly not dogs, who are, to Muslims, unclean animals and some Canadian volunteers in the Tanga region reported that their Muslim neighbors disapproved of them having a dog named Julius, after the first president of Tanzania.  Additionally, animals are not treated, well, humanely.  Strays are kicked, abused, killed, fairly casually.  It's a bit upsetting.  Recently my apartment building was being painted, and despite the fact that I asked them not to and left a sign to the same effect, the painters knocked down the bird's nest that was in the corner of the balcony.  I don't know why, it wasn't hurting anything.  And I LIKED having birds there.

I don't understand casual cruelty towards animals.  Other people, yes, (not that it's in any way good, but I can understand it) but animals that aren't hurting anything or getting in one's way?  It's incidents like that that really make me want to go home to the states and cuddle with my sweet kitties, droll Scaramouche and world-conquering Tamerlane.  They will snuggle and purr and generally be spoilt, pampered housepets, safe from the cruelty of strangers.

Droll Scaramouche

World-conquering Tamerlane

In the meantime, at least, I have agreed to spend several weeks living in the house of an expat in town to take care of and walk his giant puppy.   Alas that I have neither the equipment nor skills to build a chariot for the puppy to learn to pull!  Because that would be great.  Also, people are scared of this dog, who is, indeed much bigger than the normal dogs around here, being some purebred giant thing and also getting as much food every day as he cares to eat.  Despite being a nice and well-behaved dog on a leash, people will not come near me when I am walking him.  This is great.  Truly.  Normally I do not just walk around, because I have to deal with people yelling "mzungu,", asking for money, asking to be my boyfriend, asking if I need help, or just asking me to explain everything about something related to European culture that I don't know.  Even when people are nice and know me, I have to stop and greet everyone.  So a dog is proving a nice accessory for a peaceful, undisturbed walk.