Kipilefti

We’re sitting inside Mama Ismael’s booth at the market. The rain is solid but not devastating. I wouldn’t want to walk in it in my thin cotton shirt, but it wouldn’t drench me immediately.
She’s telling me about how she had strange dreams, how she overslept. She dreamt that thieves stole into her house and took [...]

When I was home, one question I got from just about everyone was “so do you think in Swahili now?” It seems pretty basic, but it really got me thinking, because I don’t think in any language at all, really. Since then I’ve had a few conversations about how various people’s thought processes work. Kit [...]

There was another storm tonight over Lake Nyasa (do you all call it Lake Malawi? I can’t remember). I could see the lightning flashing from my bedroom window, lower than the last storm, half-hidden behind the mountains.
It’s almost March. The crocuses have started to bloom in our front yard, my mother told me on the [...]

Bret said the rain started at 4 A.M. It was still raining hard–but not pouring–when I woke up at 4.30. The car was supposed to leave at 5 so we were out before 5, waiting along the road in the shelter of the post office. And wait we did. We waited like champs, and waited [...]

Mama Ismael’s daughter Maria failed her Form II exams. What this actually means is unclear–before two years ago it would have meant repeat the year or drop out; two years ago the government decided to essentially invalidate all Form II results and let everyone continue to Form III; but they may or may not have [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]