Mimi ni Helena.

Hi friends!

I realized after I finished my last blog I never explained the title. Mzungu is the Swahili word for any white-skinned tourist. We cannot walk down the street without getting chants of Mzungu! Mzungu! The cool thing is is that it's not meant to be rude, more a term of excitement, and locals get excited when they realize we're students here and can speak some Swahili. Right before I walked into the internet cafe last week, a young man looked me straight in the eyes and said "Mzungu, I love you." It made me smile :) This blog's title refers to the fact that my name has been officially changed back to Helena. Apparently Canada is the only place where my name exists. When people ask my name and I respond mimi ni (I'm) Alannah, they say "Ooohh Helena. Helen." (The h is silent) I kinda like it.

Anyway, I guess I should pick up where my last post ended - the Maasai bomma. I don't want to say too much about the Maasai now because later in the program I will be doing a homestay with them and will know more. But, basically a Maasai bomma is a small community of mud and stick homes. Bomma is also the name of each individual home. Normally each community has one main man and he lives there with all his wives. His brothers can also live there with their wives. Maasai practice polygamy and wifesharing, meaning that men can sleep with their friends' wives and it's totally fine. A phrase we heard over and over from our Maasai teachers is that Maasai don't feel jealousy. In the bomma (community) we were split up into smaller groups and each group was taken into a bomma (hut) to take to one of the mamas. A bomma is tiny. It is a circle with no windows and no room to stand up in. It was shocking how dark it was considering that outside the midday sun was beaming. Inside the small circle, there is a small fire pit where mama cooks - the bomma is also very smoky. There are also two alcoves in the walls, beds. Mama sleeps in one with the children and Baba (the father) sleeps in the other when he decides to stay over with that wife. I was seated in one alcove and the mama was in the alcove right next to me. I couldn't see her except for her feet which were decorated with numerous beaded anklets and teal plastic sandals. Mike came with us to translate. The mama began the conversation. "Do you have children?" We all answered no. "Why?" she asked surprised. We answered that we're not married and busy studying at college. When we asked her old she was, she said she didn't know, she only knew how old her children were. We asked about the other wives - did she get along with them? Again, Maasai not feel jealousy. She also told us that in her little free time (Maasai mamas do all the work - milking cows, cooking, cleaning, etc.) she liked to sit under trees and talk with her friends. That was something I can relate too. She asked about what we liked to eat and when I told her I was a vegetarian she let out a hearty laugh and said something in Maa (Maasai language). I asked Mike what she said, and he responded, "She thinks it's weird." Eventually, it was time to leave the smoky dark hut and we did followed by mama. I was surprised by her appearance. Her feet had seemed thin and frail but she was a strudy woman of about my age with big breasts heavy with milk for the baby who was hanging peacefully from a peace of fabric wrapped around her back. I thought about how I could have been her had I been born here instead of Toronto. Different ways of living.

The day after the Maasai bomma, we all took down our tents, packed up our stuff, and headed to Arusha, a medium-sized town on the side of Mt. Meru. The few days we had in town flew by as they were packed with our first two Kiswahili lessons, attempting to do laundry by hand, and running errands in town. Luckily, the hotel we stayed at had a nice bar where we could all hang out and relax each night. On Friday, in the middle of Kiswahili class, the homestay coordinator came to give us pictures of the family we would be living with for three weeks in Bangata, a village outside Arusha. The picture I received showed a mama and a baba standing with four children in between them. The sheet of paper attached notified me that I would have many pets at the homestay - 5 cows, 4 dogs, 9 chicken, and 4 goats and sheep. I was excited to have kids to play with and nervous about the whole thing. I anticipated many awkward silences when my broken Kiswahili wouldn't be enough to hold up a conversation past greetings. Afterward, we got a brief lesson on important cultural do's and dont's. Important ones included: giving, receiving, and eating with your right hand, not crossing your legs or arms in front of elders, and covering your mouth when yawning. We also learned some Swahili words not to mispronounce:
Hakuna matata = no worries, but hakuna matiti = no nipples
Kunywa = to drink, but kunwa = to poo
Kuelewi = to understand, but kulewi = to be drunk

I spent the rest of the day reading Baba Jack's paper on the political economy of Tanzania. It began with the following warning: "Note: Always questino authority and check your source; i.e. this is my perspective/polemic and you should ask Tanzanians and yourself about theirs and your 'historical perspective.'" :) Some interesting ideas in the paper:
 - the idea of the relationship between core and periphery areas and the historical trends of core centres exploiting peripheries of many scales (from rich/poor neighbourhoods of cities to developing/developed countries)
 - the USA has the only veto votes in both the World Bank and the IMF's decision making process - scary
 - I marked the following stats as WTF: in 2006, the net worth of the 358 richest people was equal to the combined income of the poorest 45% of the world (2.3 billion people); and, the assets of the top three richest people (in 2008) in the world was more than the combined GDP of all the UN titled "least developed countries" and their 600 million inhabitants. WTF!!
 - cool quote: "The word 'poverty is, no doubt, a key word of our times, extensively used and abused by everyone. Huge amounts of money are spent in the name of the poor. Thousands of books and experts' advice continue to offer solutions to their problems. Strangely enough, however, nobody, including the proposed 'beneficiaries' of these activities, seems to have a clear and commonly shared view of poverty. For one reason, almost all definitions given to the wor are woven around the concept of 'lack' or 'deficiency.' This notion reflects only the basic relativity of the concept. What is necessary and to whom? And who is qualified to determine all that?" - Majid Rehnema

As homework, we were supposed to write a one page "concept paper" responding to the reading. Mine turned out to be an angsty clusterfuck about how the best thing I could do for Tanzania was leave.  Who am I to be the nth Mzungu to come here to try to find a solution to a problem we created. Also, it seems like the West is largely admired here - youth have begun leaving their traditional family occupations infavour of Western-modeled education, everyone here loves Obama - whether or not it's a good way of life for thew country. It seems hopeless to convince Tanzanians to go back to their traditional lives (not even sure if this is good/fair) and going forward in the Western model predict disaster - environmental degradation, income inequality, extinction of tribal cultures and languages. Clearly the world can't sustain business as usual but it seems like large scale change is impossible so we're waiting around for a major disaster to enforce it. Yikes?

Baba Jack did a follow-up on the reading before dinner. He began the lecture by demonstrating the idea of privatization by giving us each a beer from a Tanzanian brewery that had been bought by a South African company and continued the lecture barefoot. I sat there mostly enraged wondering whether inequality was an inherent element of human nature. I then changed my mind when thinking of traditional hunter-gathering societies, but that makes it seems like civilization (if we define from the creation of private property) is inextricably linked to inequality. Baba Jack said some things that were hard to here:
 - idealism is a way to maintain the status quo
 - change happens on a small scale
 - power expressed through violence is a major part of why things are so shitty in the world today
It's hard to be learning about real problems in the world and know that I can't really do anything to truly change the system because of the way the system works (it's effed up). Anyway, it is probably good to be thinking this way realistically than fantasizing about a world in which money doesn't run everything. To quote Lou Reed, "And I guess that I just don't know."

The next morning we packed up again, paid our bar tabs, and left the hotel for Bangata. The carride was entirely silent - we were all nervous about meeting our homestay families and being separately from all other English-speakers for the weekend. We arrived at the centre where we take Swahili classes everyday. It is a nice building with classrooms, beautiful flowers along the fence (rose trees?), and good-sized lawn to play soccer or frisbee on. After a few minutes of anticipation, Baba Jack called us out to the front of the building where a group of people from the village waited with smiles on their faces. The homestay coordinator asked us if any of us recognized someone in our family from the picture. I didn't but when one girl and her mama stepped forward at the same time and hugged, I was overcome with emotion and couldn't hold back my tears. There is something so special about seeing two complete strangers from opposite sides of the world and completely different lifestyles embrace so warmly. It really moved me and even writing about it now is making my throat sore. Then Julius, the coordinator, called out the name of each student followed by the title of who from the family was picking them up (mama, baba, kaka - brother, dad - sister, etc.) Eventually every village was gone with a student, and I was still standing there. My mama was late, he said, but she'd be there any second. I smiled. My homestay mama already reminded me of my real mama. :)

When she arrived, she gave me a great big hug. I held back more tears, grabbed my big pack, and Mama Dori (my mama's name) helped me with my school bag and moquito net. We started the short walk home. Bangata is lush and green, very different from the savannah landscape of Ndarakwai. We walked past banana, mango, and avocado trees. mmmm. The peak of Mt Meru is almost always in site. Eventually we crossed a bridge over a small river and we were home (home = nyumbani). My home is a cement building with three bedrooms and a sitting room. I am lucky that I have my own room and even have electricity (although it is often turned off by the government for most of the day and night). The kitchen is in a small building outside with a firepit and a few shelves for storage. It is attached to a chicken coop. There is also a wooden stable-type thing that holds the cows. The goats mostly roam around wild, as does one of the dogs. The chu (toilet) is also in a separate structure. It is a hole in the ground with a step on each side of the hole for feet. The first time I used the chu, there was no toilet paper. Instead there was a big bucket of water with a smaller bucket inside to clean yourself. I thought I was supposed to pour the water on my body to clean but apparently Tanzanians wipe with their hands and then use the water to rinse. I guess Mama Dori could tell I was struggling so next time I went, there was a roll of toilet paper for me. Next to the chu is another dark room - the shower. A shower means a bucket of warm water that you pour on yourself with a smaller cup. It's actually really refreshing and uses way less water than a regular shower.

I spent the first day helping Mama cook - my first task was to peel a potato. I finished one in the same time she peeled and chopped the rest. Lunch was huge and delicious - I wasn't even hungry by dinner. I also had my first cup of village chai (chai=tea in swahili) - tea leaves steeped in about a cup of water with two cups of whole milk from the cows in the yard and lots of suggar. It's creamy, hearty, and sweet. I could be a whole meal and I can't have more than one cup a day, but my family drinks it like water. In the afternoon, when I had some free time I practiced my Swahili with Danieli, a 14-year-old boy living here on the weekends (he goes to school in Arusha with the other children during the week). He is really nice and speaks some English but he's quite shy, so he doesn't say much to me. Everywhere there are strange signs of modernity in the village - everyone has a cellphone, each equiped with a flashnight due to the lack of electricity, and my family has a tv on which everyone watches All About Eve, a nightly english-dubbed filipino soap opera (it is ridiculous but everyone seems to take it really seriously).

It looks like I'm running out of time again, but so far the homestay has been really wonderful. There has definitely been some prolonged silence due to the language barriar, and other moments when I know they are laughing at my attempts to speak Swahili but my family was welcomed me in fully and warmly. Kiswahili classes are pretty long but good - everyone feels really motivated to pick up the language so we can bond with out families. We spend the afternoon walking around the village or chilling at the centre playing soccer. Today we had class in town where we practiced buying things in a market and a restaurant. I hope everything in North America is great!