Graduations!

Christmas vacation was fantastic. I succeeded in getting a duck, which took way too much effort before I realized that 2 other teachers keep ducks. I took it with me to Njombe, and do feel like I've passed some sort of milestone by bringing live cargo on public transportation. I had a couple days in Njombe before it was time to go to Dr. Josh's (Lupembe) for Christmas, so I ended up tying up Butter the Bata on the roof of the Chani, our hotel in Njombe.

After a those busy days of shopping to make sure we had everything necessary to feed 20-some people for a few days, we went to Dr. Josh's village. There were 10 of us the first night, the 23rd,
we had a tasty tasty big batch of macaroni and cheese. The next morning was pancakes, and lunch was avocado salad and hummus. Then, everyone got there, we were up to 20-some, and for dinner we had a Thai-style stir fry and a delicious beef stew. Then, for the Big Day we woke up to a fantastic breakfast. Maandazi are a typical breakfast food here, they're like donuts without the hole and without any sort of frosting. So, for our breakfast, we made chocolate frosting and had frosted maandazi. They were amazing. Lunch was leftover beef stew and another avocado salad. Dinner was the highlight. We spent all afternoon killing and cleaning 6 chickens and Butter te Bata. The chickens we fried, Southern-style, for the duck I made an apple stuffing and we baked it, and on the "side" we had garlic cheesy mashed potatoes, green beans (a specialty, brought from Dar), stuffed green peppers, and pineapple upside-down and chocolate cakes for dessert. It was amazing.

The rainy season is in full swing for me. It really started around the second week of December. It's so nice to have all the water I can use! I can wash my rice--even twice--and not even think twice about it. Drying clothes is a bit more difficult, but at least there's plenty of water to wash them with.

And, I've finally got another house mama. She started in the last week of January. Mama Charles is her name (her firstborn is named Charles). So far, she's not quite as personable as Anumie, my first house-girl, but far better than my second. My clothes are superclean, and I've already taught her how to make fried rice and banana pancakes. Next is guacamole and maybe we'll get to burritos. Or as close as i can get.

My garden is going quite nicely, that's also mostly thanks to one kid, Asifiwe, who I'm employing there. I've got pumpkin, carrots, cilantro, a few types of beans, lettuce, and some other greens growing. The cilantro is just getting big enough that I don't feel bad harvesting leaves from it almost daily, which is good because the avocadoes are just begining to roll in. For more than 6 months there haven't been many fruits availale at my site other than bananas, but now I should be set for a while on avocadoes, apple-pears, and maybe some mangoes brought in from nearby.

The bad news for me when I got back from a conference in early January was that my chickens all died. Which was only 2 of them, at that point. While I was gone they were sleeping at a neighbor teacher's, and they all broke out with Newcastle's Disease, which is apparently a chicken equivalent of cholera, so they all died. The good news is that students are now living in the house closest to me, and the next closest house is this teacher's, who also lost his chickens, so my house is nice and quiet in the mornings.

Within the course of 3 days a couple of weeks ago I found out about 3 unrelated cases of kids with parents claiming to be orphans to try to get sympathy. One was an A-level kid who had been causing some problems. We chewed him out before Christmas break and told him not to come back without a parent. He took the whole lecture and then came out with "I'm an orphan." When pressed for who was paying for his school, he insisted that both parents were dead, he didn't really have any living relatives, and he depended on himself. Now, the school fees for A-Level come to about $100 a year, which isn't easy to scrape together for entire families. And also, everyone here has massive extended families. So the principal told him that we've tried talking to him, and it hasn't worked, so if he can't bring some sort of guardian for us to talk to, he shouldn't bother coming back. He showed up about a week after school opened without anybody. The principal gave him a week and then called him in and asked him where his guardian was. He said she was coming in two days. He got yelled at for disobeying his instructions and kicked out of the dorm until his guardian actually got here. Kumbe! (expression of surprise) it was his mom. He hadn't really filled her in on why she was being asked to come, so it came as a pretty big shock to her, especially when she found out that he had said that she, her sister, and his four little brothers didn't exist.

The other two orphan cases are less interesting. One is a kid who I had given some money for some help in the garden which he did a real half-assed job of. When he came back from break and I asked him why he didn't finish the job he told me that his dad had died on Dec 22. I asked around and found out his dad was fine. The last was the most indirect: our headmaster got a call from some minor government official who had gone to Dar and recognized a kid panhandling, saying he was an orphan. He's actually one of our students and his parents have been wondering where he went.

It's really too bad that in a country that does have over 1 million orphans--mostly due to AIDS--that these people are playing the orphan card, and they're bluffing. It makes me even less inclined than I already was to give out money to random people begging for it.

On the plus side, the headmaster of the elementary school seems to be getting it together and I'm going to try to write a grant to improve the teacher housing situation, which will help them to actually attract some teachers. When that gets put together, I'll start asking for funds, any help you'd care to offer is very very welcome.

The last few weeks have been a flurry of activity at school. We're still severely understaffed, but the A-Level school year ends at the end of February. The national exams began on 11 Feb, but for reasons I'm still not exactly clear on, graduations here are done before final exams and such. And, prior to the official school graduation, various student organizations, which at my school are all religious, all have their own graduation ceremony. In some ways, they're like the graduation parties that followed high school graduation. But they're much more organized. They must have a typed up time-table of events to be ignored later. I attended the Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, and Miscellaneous Other ceremonies, missing only the 7th Day Adventist event because they chose to do it about 10 km away at a church instead of at school, and it was raining pretty hard that morning. Of the small groups, the Catholic one was very well done, but I'm partial to the Pentecostal one because they asked me if I would sing. I said no, but I'd play the violin, so I played a little bit of Pomp and Circumstance and also a fiddle tune.

The best by far was the school graduation. It did drag on a bit long, but the graduating class put on a good show. Graduation is like a talent show. The whole class sang some songs together, and a couple kids put on a little magic show, another group had an elaborate skit... And that's just the graduating class. Every other grade, 1-5 had their own opportunity to sing and dance to a goodbye song. And the Form 5's did a few things. And then there were the speeches... It took about 6 hours but it was well worth it. And when I'm done here I try to post lots of graduation pictures (and other pictures) up on my flickr page and www.flickr.com/gregorgregor .

My star violin student (who has barely touched the violin for monthss because everyone's been frantically studying) is a 7th Day Adventist, and he gave me a present the other day of a little 7th Day Adventist propaganda book. Adventists worship on Saturdays rather than Sundays, and the book makes a big deal of how the Sabbath is properly the last day of the week, but that the Catholic Church subverted this and moved the day of worship to Sunday, the first day. What I find ironic is that this propaganda is apparently distributed here in Tanzania, which has inherited an Arabic week. Moslems also worship on the last day of the week, but they say the last day is Friday, and in Kiswahili, rather than reaching back to pagan gods like in English, the names of the days are Day 1 (Saturday), Day 2 (Sunday), Day 3 (Monday)... except for Thursday and Friday which have special names. So thinking in Kiswahili, one of the larger points in the 7th Day Book is that the Bible says that God created the world in 6 days and on the 7th day rested; this 7th day is the Sabbath, so that's why we tell you to worship on Saturday, Jumamosi (Juma - Day, Mosi - first). It just seems to emphasize that it all depends on where you start counting, which doesn't have just one answer.

So, that's the news from Lake Nyasa (Malawi). Keep sending me questions, and go out and be politically active in America, because I can't do anything from here.
peace,
Gregor