Kipilefti

I spent the weekend in Bulongwa with Jess and Bret. I’ve been seeing one or both of them every other weekend with some regularity, and it’s a good interval. I walked over, headphones covering my ears, a strange veneer of America over the landscape and greetings of Tanzania. Both of them showed me the places […]

This past weekend my headmaster came back, bringing with him donated technology. About 40 CPUs, in various states of workingness (many missing hard drives, CD drives, many old); several dozen monitors; keyboards, mice, two digital projectors, overhead projectors, office furniture, and, randomly, an antique sewing machine. Although I’d thought classes ended last Friday, it turns […]

It’s Tuesday night. Even before the power goes out, my house is peacefully quiet: the cats entertaining themselves with their toys, the neighbor’s music at a reasonable level since I knocked on the door at 1 A.M. Saturday night and grouchily informed them that we couldn’t sleep because of the music. It’s raining lightly, but […]

My friend who owns a stand in the market went to Makambako yesterday, the big trading-post town, that’s six or eight hours’ drive away, maybe more, and came back with pineapples, tangerines, oranges, some weird things that might be custard apples, cucumbers, watermelons…heaven! I went home with a pineapple, a squash, five tangerines, and a […]

My cell phone’s alarm woke me up at 6.45, as it does every weekday. May 1st is a holiday in Tanzania (their equivalent of Labor Day), so I turned off the phone and rolled over, waiting for the chorus of hungry kittens that accompanies my phone alarm every morning. It never came. Instead I heard […]

When I finish the Annie Proulx book (Close Range) it starts to rain. I dislodge the kittens from my lap, go through the kitchen, put out the basins to catch water. Grand plans to wash a blanket, if there’s enough water. I walk over to the shelf in my living room, pick out another Annie […]

And then there are days like this. The kittens slept through the night in my bed; I woke to two small purring solidnesses on the ridge of my sleeping body. Until yesterday I was going over exam answers with classes; Friday is a holiday. I hate imbalance and love symmetry, so these two days between […]

It’s 3.15 in the afternoon. I’m reading in bed under my new, expensive, soft soft soft blanket. The cats are curled up on top of the blanket but not on top of me, wise because I keep getting up to do small things around the house. They were curled up separately but a few minutes […]

We went for a hike: some time ago, Bret and Mama Jully and I were talking, and she mentioned that there are caves around. “A hundred people hid in them, once”, she told us. So we all agreed that, one day, we would hike out and have a look. Today was that day, the morning […]

Pictures are now up on Flickr.