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 where they get their water, now that the rainy season is over. Bret’s is a steep but manageable hike down to a mountain stream (I carried 25L or so of water back up, stopping a few times to catch my breath; he carried 40L). Jess’s is a terrifying descent down a slippery, pine-needle-covered slope. I’m spoiled by the spigot right behind my house, no matter how dirty the water is. Then again, they both have fireplaces in their houses and doors that latch.

I took the bus back Sunday evening. We waited until I was sure it wouldn’t come, and then it did. Sitting in a window seat, barely noticing the Tanzanian woman leaning into me from the seat next to me, I watched the slanting sunlight cast long shadows, turning the mountains gold, and remembered standing on a mountain in Maine a year and a half ago with friends, watching a similar sunset.

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 out that they run through this week. Thankfully, all these new computers mean that there are more pressing things for me to deal with: figuring out how to clone computers; putting the lab into some sort of order; figuring out how to use the projector (which I’m very excited about).

I have high hopes that the extra computers and the projector (and preparation that I plan to do over break) will make teaching next semester more manageable, less dread-able.

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 I can only hear it when I leave my room and enter the ceiling-less parts of the house, where there’s nothing between me and the corrugated metal roof.

The power comes on, tantalizingly, for a few seconds. Then it’s off again.

A couple minutes later it comes on again, this time for longer. I head to the kitchen to put basins out under the roof to catch some water. If it rains hard enough I can bathe guiltlessly in clean rainwater, and I’m getting to the point where bathing is necessary. I have optimistically entered the choo without a flashlight or lantern when the power goes out again. I leave carefully, not wanting to explain to the medical officer how I sprained my ankle in a squat toilet. My computer’s been charging and claims to have an hour of battery life left, so the cats join me in bed, with only the computer as illumination (flashlight, lantern, solar light turned off to save the light).

Teaching today was exhausting, and I emerged with a terrible headache. Tuesdays are my worst days, three eighty-minute periods scattered throughout the day (I prefer to have all my periods in a block, preferably first thing in the morning so I can get them over with). Three of my eleven student computers are not working, will not in fact turn on, which I suspect is because the students persist in essentially unplugging them rather than shutting them down properly. Every class has had several extensive lessons on how and why to shut down a computer properly but most of the students don’t pay a lick of attention to what I say, only wanting to get to the computers. It’s partially my fault–I’m not a very good teacher–and partially their fault. Fault aside, it’s incredibly frustrating. I like everything about being here except for teaching, and when I’m not actually teaching (or suffering from the aftermath) it’s easy to convince myself that I can do it better, that I’ll be able to stay, that the remaining eighteen months will fly by. But, running around the lab to shut down the computers properly before the UPSes give out because the power’s just gone, I’m not so sure. “Shut the computers down, please! The power is out!” I tell the students. They sit and look at the screens, watch me as I frantically pound keyboards, the four-key sequence to shut down the machines ingrained in my mind.

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 cucumber, almost running to get to my door before the rain hit. Cut up half the pineapple and ate a quarter of it standing in my back doorway, looking out at the mountains, colors dimmed by the veil of rain, listening to drops plop into the basins I put under the eaves as usual, hoping for a big storm. From the sound of it I think today I got my wish.

The heavy rain makes the cats slightly nuttier, although in a more stationary way. They sit, alert, eyes wide and dilated and ears back. Ting mews her inexorable mew, then jumps straight to my desk to the almost-top rung of the window bars, backing down again as though she’s on a ladder. Pol jumps from place to place, stock-still between movements. When I open the curtain to look outside everything’s rain-grey. I can see the bushes and tree twenty feet from my window but not much else. I wonder if the basins are full yet.

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 weird yowling and hissing noises from the hallway. Opened the door to my room (they’d been kicked out in the middle of the night when Polycarp forgot my bed isn’t a litterbox, again) to find them facing each other, backs arched impossibly high, tails puffed, ears back.

Pretty freaked out, I made various noises, herded them with a broom, tried everything. Even breakfast didn’t break the hostilities. They moved around the house like ballerinas, walking on the very tips of their feet, backs so high that they were twice as tall and half as long as usual.

I gave up on trying to reconcile them and just kicked them out of my room whenever they started hissing at each other.

Six hours later, they’re now curled up together on my lap. Nothing seems to have happened to change their opinions of each other, except that they maybe got bored. I hope it doesn’t happen again! I much prefer the good-natured wrestling, barreling around the house, biting each other while napping.

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 Proulx book (Postcards), walk back to my room. Forgiving, the kittens climb back onto my lap as soon as I pull the blankets over it, contented to be napping together on a rainy afternoon.

This morning at the market I bought mushrooms, avocadoes, tomatoes, onions, strange potato-like roots like the fingers of some evil tree in a movie. After I wash them I break them into pieces. They break satisfyingly, with sharp cracks, like a tree’s fingers would. I put them on to boil, put the rest of my purchases into the shallow basket where produce goes. They join two types of bananas, a few inches of ginger, garlic.

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 exam review and holiday rankle. When I go up to the school and walk into the lab I have an almost physical reaction of desire to be somewhere, anywhere else. It’s one of the days when I consider the logistics of going home. The best time, I think, would be to teach one more term and leave in early December of this year, home for Christmas without having to come back. In front of the lab computer, staring listlessly at the screen, it seems a very appealing plan indeed.

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 ago Pol, the all-black one, got up and walked a few steps and curled up on top of her sister, completely covering her body but leaving head and paws exposed. They’re so casually, completely comfortable with each other, even when they’re wrestling and seem to want to bite each other’s heads off. I like them best when the curl up together on my chest, on my legs, in the crook of my arm, one in my elbow and the other preventing my hand from moving.

Even though I have to clean up after them, even though I sometimes wish they wouldn’t wake me up at six, hungry for breakfast, or constantly throw the living-room rug out of alignment, I’m glad to have them, glad to have their company. They do make it harder than ever to leave the house, though.

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 sunny and cool. We walked a few hours away from Makete on the road, then turned down into a valley to pass a primary school. At the school, Bret commented that he imagined this was how many Peace Corps education sites were: just a school with nothing around. We both agreed that we were happy to live at our sites and not there, beautiful though it was.

At the school we stopped to ask directions and one of the teachers, in his suit and nice shoes, gave himself the role of our guide and took us zig-zagging through fields and then up a steep, grassy slope to a large rock overhang.

“The caves are over there,” he said, “but you can’t pass.” I looked at the path: “I think I could, actually…” “People don’t pass. The chief sleeps there, and nobody else can go there.” So, after our hike and after wending our way through fields, all we got to see was the path down to the caves. If I’d been a bit braver (or less culturally sensitive, depending on how you want to think about it) I would have gone down anyway: I was quite irked. It was a nice enough walk but we were arbitrarily forbidden to reach our destination, and that rankled.

On the way back the clouds rolled in and the air became wonderfully cool. A breeze came and visibility lessened. We arrived back in Makete and saw Bret’s car pulling out: he ran to my house, grabbed his bag, and was gone.

Alone again, I did some stretches to appease my aching legs. After each short hike my legs complain but I don’t mind: I know that the complaints mean that they know they are inadequate, they’re becoming stronger. If I want to hike Mt. Meru (to do this June or during September break) I’ll have to be moderately fit, and this is the way to achieve that.

Pictures are now up on Flickr.