Kipilefti

They tell you, when you join the Peace Corps, that you’ll have more free time than you’ve ever had in your life. Coming out of 16+ straight years of school, you figure that can hardly not be the case. After all, Peace Corps won’t have homework, right?

You have no idea what they mean until you’re done with training, done with culture shock, at site. I got to Tanzania two Septembers ago; now it’s February. I’ve read over two hundred books, watched innumerable hours of television and movies on my computer, sent hundreds if not thousands of text messages and written what must by this point be about a book’s worth of e-mails, blog posts, and journal entries.

Sometimes I do my job, too.

I taught today, actually had kids in the computer lab for the first time since who knows when. My sitemate Bret called me right after the class ended; when he asked how I was I replied, slightly giddy: “I just taught a class, and it didn’t suck!” Kind soul that he is, we chatted about it for a while before I got around to asking him how he was. “I woke up last night with a 105-degree fever,” he said matter-of-fact-ly. We talked about that for a bit, I gave him my condolences, and we hung up; I called him back a moment later to recommend that he watch a certain TV show, if he needed something to distract him during his convalescence.

Then I was home, having fled the school, as I generally do, as soon as classes ended. I lit my charcoal stove and started boiling bath water, then mixed up some banana bread to use up both the leftover coals and the bananas I’d had for long enough that they had started to support an entire fruit fly civilization. While the water was boiling I did the calisthenics I did every morning, put off today because I knew I’d be bathing later. The water came close to boiling and I took it off the charcoal, put the bread on. I use a makeshift oven consisting of a large pot with a tripod of small rocks in the bottom, topped with a metal tray and a blanket on top of that. The item to be baked sits on the rocks while the blanket provides a reasonable facsimile of a heating element on top. Things tend to burn on the bottom but in general it works pretty well.

Bread safely baking, I dumped the hot water into a bucket, topped it off with some cold water from the tap, and had my bucket bath. Imagine having to bathe from a bucket of water, using a pitcher, and you’ve pretty much got it.

Bathing always makes me tired, I’m not really sure why, and today was no exception. After ascertaining that the bread would not be baked by the start of the class I’d pretty much decided to put off until next week anyway (there were electrical issues the first two days of the week, and I hate for students at the same level to be at different points in my curriculum: it gets too confusing!) I retreated to bed. A cat crawled in next to me and I curled around him. Distant thunder rumbled as the clouds drove sunlight away. It rained for a while, a soothing static that didn’t threaten to come in the windows, that wouldn’t blow under the doors. I don’t actually nod off but I relax into the warmth of the blankets and the cat, eyes closed, breathing even, ears filled with the quiet sound of the rain.

Music has always been important to me, something that I strongly associate with specific times of my life. Listen to Elvis Costello’s album ‘My Aim Is True’ and I find myself driving my beloved yellow Volvo station wagon along the windy mountain roads surrounding State College, PA; ‘Kojak Variety’ finds me a bit later that summer, driving a rental car very fast along the broad, straight highways around Phoenix. Put on Doves’ ‘The Last Broadcast’ and I’m in the back seat of a rental van with my family, plugged into my CD player with a teenager’s sullen conviction that I’m right, watching the sunflower fields of southern France fly by outside the window. The Wailin’ Jennys’ ‘Firecracker’ is the trip up to Acadia I took senior fall with two friends; Alison Krauss & Union Station’s ‘New Favorite’ is sophomore fall, hunched over my computer in my dorm room, driving my roommate crazy listening to the album on repeat as I tried to get over a break-up. The soundtrack for our post-graduation road trip was Brad Paisley’s “I’m Still a Guy”, which played–seemingly on repeat–on every country radio station we listened to. We initially greeted it with cheers and then, one by one, began to groan as we heard the first notes.

In the kitchen today, iPod on shuffle, I tried to figure out what the soundtrack to Tanzania would be. Dar Williams’ ‘The Beauty of the Rain’? Sugarland’s ‘Enjoy the Ride’? Amy Winehouse? Beck? The Cowboy Junkies? Eddie from Ohio? Ollabelle? I won’t know what my Tanzania soundtrack is, I realized, until after the fact. I won’t know until I’m at home, in a context that is definitely not here, and the first few notes of a song transport me to a bus on a bumpy road, the top of the mountain between here and where my sitemates live, my bed covered in two purring cats.

I kind of can’t wait to know what it’ll be.

Since I woke up this morning, my shoulders and left arm have felt strange, as though someone took them apart and wasn’t quite sure how to put them back together. My shoulders ache; my arm twinges strangely when it’s in perfectly normal positions. I have no idea why.

The weather has been apathetic lately. Walking home this evening I looked up at the half-grey half-blue sky, listening to distant rumblings, and imagine that the sky was like me, knowing that it should be raining but really not wanting to get out of bed.

I’ve been experiencing a strange overlapping of dreaming and waking. My dreams, never particularly elaborate or unbelievable, have seemingly become so prosaic that I forget that the things I dream about and the things I do in life are different. Like: I couldn’t decide, earlier today, if I’d actually been in Philadelphia yesterday. I dream about doing things here and then can’t figure out if my subconscious is screwing with me or not. It’s like high school, when my mom would knock on the door to wake me up and I’d roll over, go back to sleep, and dream that I was getting up an getting ready for school. When she knocked again, telling me to get dressed, I’d mumble “but I am!”

P.S. I scheduled my done-with-Peace-Corps meeting. It’ll be the morning of October 28, after which I will be home. In time for Halloween. Crazy!

“That car’s windshield looks like a Jackson Pollock painting made entirely of mud,” I said to Bret towards the beginning of our second day of travel, as we bumped along the pot-holed dirt road towards Makete. “That does not bode well for our trip.”

“I think you’ll really enjoy the mud patch before Tandala,” he replied. “On the way out we had to push the minibus up the mountain.” And he was right: that part of the road was truly a sight to see, loose, churned-up mud all the way up the mountain. It wasn’t far from the spot where the bus went off the road, killing three people and heralding the end of bus service until the end of the rainy season.

The trip wasn’t bad, though, despite that mud. It helped that it hadn’t rained in a day or two, so the mud was better than it could have been. It helped that we were in a minibus instead of a big bus, and that the worst mud patch was downhill for us rather than up. We got to site in a little under six hours, counting an hour of waiting in Tandala while people were dropped off and others got on. Once the rains start in earnest, though, I think that if we want to leave we’ll have to take the other road, towards Mbeya instead of Njombe.

I arrived home exhausted, slightly sick, to find one very skinny cat who was delighted to see me. His brother was MIA; I was afraid to ask my friend who was taking care of them where he was, afraid that he got sick and died. So the one cat and I unpacked (he being as involved as possible, shoving his face into my hand and mewing plaintively) and then sat in bed as I worked on the book I’d been reading since Dar. I felt strange, out of place. Stuck between two worlds. As great as the visit home was, I didn’t quite belong there any more–things proceeded without me, friends changed in ways I hadn’t predicted, everything seemed a little off. But I don’t belong here, either, and that’s never been clearer to me. Probably I just need to re-adjust, need to be less exhausted, but as I sit staring at my book but not seeing it, I want to be somewhere else, but I don’t know where that is. Neither place seems right.

The closest to home I got, actually, was the weekend my family spent at the beach house. There, nothing had changed, and I could convince myself that things were as they always were. In our house there were subtle differences: new glasses in the cupboard, a new painting on the wall, a new sink in the bathroom. The sorts of things you only notice when you’ve been away from a wholly familiar environment for a little too long.

The next day I go to school in the morning, set up the new power strips I bought in Dar, peer out the window at the students cutting grass, hoeing flower bets, hauling water. Then I walk into town to visit friends, make myself seen. “Where’s my gift from America?” people I barely know ask when I tell them where I’ve been. “Haven’t got one, sorry!” I reply with a smile to soften the blow. They don’t really expect anything, necessarily, but seem to figure that it never hurts to ask.

Even as I resume my normal routine, chatting with friends, I’m still haunted by this feeling that I don’t belong here. “I missed you!” one friend tells me, and I reply in kind even though she barely crossed my mind while I was home. From America, this whole country seemed like a strange dream, something I’d just woken up from. Something that changed me so subtly that I felt the same, even as the differences wore at me like a stone in my shoe. Arriving home from the airport late at night, I strode into the kitchen, grabbed a glass from the cabinet without thinking, and filled it with tapwater. It was only as I started to gulp it down that I did a double-take and almost spit out the water before remembering that no, in America the tapwater’s safe to drink. When I take a bus up to Philly I half-expect to see vendors out the window selling eggs, fruit, cell talk time, but the windows are sealed shut. Tanzania peers around the corners, always in my peripheral vision but never there when I try to look at it head-on, as elusive as a reflection in my glasses.

And despite all that, I don’t feel changed. I expected to come home from Africa a dramatically different person, but it turns out that I’m the same, that my Africa-self and my America-self are neatly partitioned. I have no urge to speak Swahili with black people (as I’d half-feared I would), and despite those corner-of-the-eye glimpses and the nagging sense that something’s different, I feel like the same person. I cut off a foot of my hair, but that doesn’t change me. I have my left ear pierced, something that for years I thought I’d never do, but I’m still the same.

But now I’m back here and, looking back, I can see clearly what I didn’t see in America: I’m trapped in between. Between the girl who can sit on a bus for three hours and not talk and not miss it and the one who reflexively starts a conversation with the Tanzanian sitting next to her. Between our kitchen in Arlington, full of light and family, and my kitchen here, full of nothing but me.

Back in Tanzania since Sunday, I have a week in Dar es Salaam for my class’s Mid-Service Conference (which is exactly what it sounds like) before I head back to Makete.

So tonight we all had dinner together at the Badminton Institute, an Indian restaurant downtown. We’d planned to arrive at 6 but did so to find that the restaurant didn’t open until 7 (we sipped passionfruit juice at the side of the road, waiting). What with the complexity of paying both a food and a drinks tab for 30 people, I didn’t get back to where I was staying until 10.30, late for me in any country even when I’m not jet-lagged.

Thanking my lucky stars that I’m staying with friends of the family rather than at a hostel (and feeling a bit guilty at leaving so early and staying out so late), I walked into the house, said goodnight to my gracious hosts, and stepped into the shower to wash off the grime of the city.

Dar is a very grimy city. All day I kept looking at my feet, disbelieving that they were so filthy, and rubbing a patch clean, marveling at the grossness. There’s clove soap in the shower, and I emerge feeling clean and smelling wonderful, like Christmas potpourri.

And then, to bed. Despite some jet lag, I managed to stay awake all day today (unlike yesterday, which featured two naps of two and three hours, as well as an early bedtime).

Heading to the airport for an epic journey featuring a day-long layover at Heathrow in about an hour. Thank you to everyone who made this an excellent vacation. A more detailed post may or may not be forthcoming.

I got home three days ago, and it’s almost like I never left. I get flashes of “…wait, that’s not right”: looking right instead of left when I cross the street; a doubletake when I reflexively poured myself a glass of tapwater; astonishment at the cleanness–no dust! no mud!; the feeling that I should know every white person I see on the street. But it feels natural to be here, feels normal to be seeing family and friends.

Will culture shock come later?

So I’m home! I’ll be around until January 8th. Drop me a line if you’ll be in DC or Philly!

Sitting with my friend at her duka in the afternoon, her daughter brings food and we move behind the counter to eat it. As we eat the ugali and beans with our hands I flash back to the trip I tagged along on with my father, when we went to Zambia. In Livingstone, the town on the Zambia side of Victoria Falls, we sat outside, under a tree at a beautifully decorated restaurant that served local food to tourists. We ate with our hands: nshima (ugali by any other name is just as bland), beans, fish, spinach. At the time I regarded the meal as an interesting insight into how locals lived, never once thinking that a few years later I’d be living in a nearby country and eating such food as a matter of course. I remember to remind myself that the future is more infinite than I can possibly envision.

I notice a strange sepia light coming through the curtains, so I pull them aside and look out on the most beautiful evening I’ve seen here, which is saying quite a lot. It’s like a Lisa Frank landscape come to life, but subtle and natural and minus the unicorns and dolphins. Each cardinal direction has something different: in the west, delicate white clouds edged with gold from the setting sun; in the north, two birds on a wire flank the bottom of a rainbow; east, a soft grey cloud tinged with pink on the edges hovers over the edge of glowing mountains; south, the other side of the rainbow descends into dark mountains, silhouetted against a subtly beautiful pastel sky.

I put on my best Nina Simone voice and sing to the cats. “Birds flying high, you know how I feel; sun in the sky, you know how I feel…” They remain nonplussed, reminding me that they’re only feeling good when there’s fresh food in their bowl. (If you were wondering–and I know you were–my best Nina Simone voice sounds good, but also sounds nothing like the great lady.)