Craziness!

It's been a while since I posted. Sorry. I've been on vacation for almost a month now. I think I blogged about it before, the vacation was supposed to be September, the dates were set way back in March. Then, in mid-August, my headmaster comes back from one of his endless trips and announces that the Form 6 Mock Exam dates have been announced by the region: a week of exams to start Sept 17. He announces that, because of the mock exams, the A-Level school break will be postponed until after the mock exams. The Form 5 students, showing a remarkable amount of backbone, disagree. They tell him that they've been away from their families for half a year and that their end-of-term exams are already scheduled for the next week, and that they will abide by the original schedule. Also, the cooks tell the headmaster that they don't have enough food to keep the school open for an extra 3 weeks on that short of notice. So the headmaster decides that we will keep the original schedule, and the Form 6 kids can just hang out for the extra 17 days studying by themselves and not being taught. Now, I would have stuck around and taught them myself, except that Annie (my girlfriend) had long before bought plane tickets to come visit me, so I was leaving to pick her up in early September.

The completely ludicrous part is that when I took Annie back to my site the headmaster showed up for one afternoon, and announced (not to me, one of the other teachers told me later) that he was changing the plan again, and that the school would indeed officially close only after the Form 6 mock exam. Basically, he announced halfway through a vacation period, that it wasn't actually vacation, the vacation would be next month. Then he promptly left that evening.

I have no idea how they plan on contacting the 60-some Form 5 students. Perhaps they'll send letters, but the school has also been running out of money, meaning we haven't been buying diesel to power the generator in the evenings, so without electricity and computers, I don't envy the typist the task of typing out all those letters. She types pretty slowly...

In a way my vacation from school was extended, but I've already taken my Peace Corps vacation with Annie and it just means there's none of my normal work for me to do at school. There's plenty of other work to do, but my chances of finishing the syllabus with the Form 6's are shattered. (The real exam is at the end of February. That's a national thing and thankfully the dates are already set.) Also, the university students who were teaching at my school during their holiday all went back to school, leaving me as the only physics teacher. Basi. So they'll probably expect me to pick up some O-Level physics classes, which is fine until the A-Level kids get back, but it's much harder to stop doing something once people are used to you doing it.

On lighter notes, I got some good travel stories. On my way to town from site this poor teenager was getting carsick in front of me. He threw up a little bit, and then the mama sitting next to me started telling him that of course he threw up, he hadn't drunk any kerosene that morning. I wasn't the only one giving her a weird look, but she kept on explaining how if you drink a little kerosene, it makes it impossible to throw up. At the next little village we stopped at this mama got out and found someone to give her a little kerosene, which she brought back cupped in her hands. She gave it to the poor sick kid and insisted that he drink it. He kind of lapped it up out of his hand. Personally, I think I would have heaved again on the spot, but he managed to finish the kerosene and--the worst part of the story--he kept it down for about half an hour, at which point the mama had gotten off. So she didn't see him when he threw up again, much more violently this time, and she probably still thinks kerosene is a miracle at settling stomachs.

A bit further along in the journey I had to wait for a couple hours at the bus stand in Iringa (this was on my way to Dar es Salaam to pick up Annie). I ended up having a fairly interesting conversation with a rasta guy. (There's a few of them here, I see them mostly around bus stands in bigger cities. He was wearing some Bob Marley stuff, had dreadlocks, and offered me weed.) I bought him a cup of chai and we talked mostly about AIDS. He was asking me about things he had heard and at least half-believed: that AIDS was created by white men to reduce the population of Africa, that AIDS was created by condom companies to improve business, and so forth. We talked a bit about why those don't really make any sense at all. I didn't convince him completely, but he did acknowledge that dead people don't buy things. Then we got on to politics a little bit, and he told me that he liked Bush but didn't like Reagan. When I asked him why, he said that Bush didn't bring AIDS. I guess he blames Reagan for that.

Then, I got on the bus (warning, this is another story about carsickness) and this time it was the poor mama next to me getting carsick. I was reading a book though, and she was amazingly quiet about it. I hadn't even realized except we were pulling in to the Al-Jazeera rest stop--the nicest stop on entire road from Njombe to Dar--so I looked up to see her throwing up absolutely silently into a nice little bowl she had made out of her khanga. (Piece of fabric women wear a carry around. They're more useful than even a towel is to a hitchhiker.) Nothing is remarkable there, what makes it a story is that seconds later the bus stopped and we had a 15 minute break, and instead of getting off the bus to wash out her khanga or just find a place to ditch the vomit, she folded it up in her khanga and stuffed it into her suitcase. Then she got off the bus.

That's the craziness, the rest was mostly sane, though Annie might disagree. I picked her up at the airport, we went pretty directly to my site where she got to meet all sorts of neighbors. Then we did a safari in the beautiful Ruaha National Park, where we saw 14 lions, baby elephants, and fighting giraffes, and we spent her last weekend on Zanzibar, which was lovely and relaxed due to Ramadhan, although it was a little difficult finding food during the day. Another day I'll put up safari pictures and better account of our trip.

basi.

Gregor