Emily's Worldview

The Question is; "So what should be done about the problems in Africa?". So today somebody asked me The Question. I hate The Question, because it impossible to answer briefly. But I do have an answer that I give in that situation. I usually say something like, "African governments should have stronger capacity".

If you look at any of the fundamental problems in a country like Tanzania--poor distribution of food, inadequate sewer and sanitation systems, not enough hospitals, bad roads, inefficient administration--those are problems that a capable government would be able to address. Take trash collection. In slum neighborhoods, garbage is everywhere, and people throw things away into the same small streams they get water from for washing dishes and cooking. At most, they'll burn their garbage, or throw it in to one of the major trash piles right in the midst of their neighborhood. If there was a truck coming door to door once a week to collect garbage, that problem would not be there. It's not a personal failure on the part of individuals; it's a failure of capacity on the part of their government. Most issues could be charactized this way.

Now, how to fix the governments. I'll leave that one to the experts. Here's an article about how Nigeria is trying: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/06/international/africa/06lagos.html?pagewanted=3&ei=5070&en=fac619a6bf67ab0c&ex=1125547200

I was kind of surprised after I sent the final email in the series ("Last Days in Tanzania", below), that a lot of people picked up on one sentence, buried in the last paragraph. I had written, "I am trying to set up my life in America to be more basic and more socially responsible than it was when I left for Africa."

My friends, being wonderful people, brought this up and challenged me about it. I'm still figuring it out, and I'm not forming a philosophy as absolute as veganism or as radical as Marxism. I have a few principles that I'm trying to set up my life around, and I'm still working on the logistics. The principles are:

1) Show love towards the people around me.
2) Avoid supporting sweatshops.
3) Minimize my personal impact on the environment.
4) Eat food that is natural.
5) Live with what I need, and not with what capitalism tells me I should want.

I find it quite disturbing that in our society #2-5 are extremely difficult, and #1 is tricky, especially with strangers. I guess I could give up everything and move to the woods and make my own soap and all that. But I want to be able to participate in society and live a life that is morally acceptable too. All five of those principles were easy to adhere to in Tanzania, why, here, do they have to be so hard?

So I finished posting the emails from the time in Tanzania, all of which are below. Next week I move to a new city to start a Master's Program in Public Health. I have conflicting feelings about it; I am excited to live somewhere new and be a student and an American, but I'm going to miss the spareness of my life in Africa. I have to find a balance between doing things that only benefit myself, like making my apartment nice and cooking and shopping, etc. and the things that really matter.

What I'm hoping is that even if no one reads it, this blog will be a place where I can hash out ideas. I want to think about how and why the world allows millions of people to live with standards of living that are totally unacceptable. What strategies might provide a way forward. And how, as an American and a private individual, to lead a life that is moral and geared towards "pragmatic solidarity" with the poor. We'll see how it goes.

Originally sent August 15, 2005. This is the eighth of 8 mass emails I sent while living in Tanzania.

Greetings again and welcome to the Emily Travelogue. This email comes to you not from the internet cafe slash hair salon, nor the expat fast food hangout, nor the rickety, dark and funny-smelling secretarial bureau at Arusha's busiest intersection. It comes from my basement, in my house, in the town I grew up in. Three weeks ago, my replacement arrived in Tanzania. He was fresh from Ireland and coming to Africa for his first time. Despite this, and despite the fact that two of our key staff members quit without notice on the very day that he arrived, he seemed undaunted. In the process of handing over my job to him, it finally sunk in that I was leaving and I began to let go.

The celebrations to send me off began a week and a half before I left, and included several sumptuous feasts at various people's houses. One of these dinners included, in addition to some things I forgot, fried green bananas, french fries, chapatis (pancakey things), vegetable rice, spaghetti, a sauce with meat, one with coconut and peas, okra in sauce, fried peanuts, and fruit: papaya, oranges, watermelon. At the insistence of our hosts, we ate ourselves to the verge of tears.

The staff, volunteers and children threw a big goodbye party the day before I left. My boss explained to the kids that I was leaving by telling about my decision in the form of a story. A boy named Honest spoke for the children and said that I could go to school, but that I had to come back on the school breaks. The kids sang and wrapped me in their gift--an elaborately beaded Masai wedding outfit. We had lunch and pbj and cake (no whole roasted goat for me, thank you) and the staff said nice things about me and I said nice things about them. I gave out gifts. It was a very special day for me, and when I hugged and kissed each of the children for the last goodbye, I was very sad, but felt ready to go.

On my last day, I puttered around, packing and saying my last goodbyes to my neighbors. Water came out of the pipes for the first time in about 5 days, so I got to take a final bucket bath, and wash the dishes that had accumulated. Even as I was experiencing the giddy thrill that comes with having water come out after nearly a week without it, I was thinking about how far away from that I was going to be within a few days. Four of the children from the school, my roommate Glory, my boss, and her son crowded into a small car to take me to the airport. I took the kids up to the observation deck to see airplanes, but there actually weren't any at the entire airport, even on the ground. They were happy enough to push the luggage cart and use sit-down toilets.

And soon we were hugging our goodbyes, and I had to wipe away tears as I went through security and into the utterly foreign world of the airport. The flights were uneventful; Arusha to Addis Ababa to Rome to America. I had been looking forward for months to watching movies the whole way home, but the screens in our section of the plane just happened to be broken. I read, slept, chatted with my seatmate, and before I knew it I was...waiting irritatedly by the baggage carousel as my suitcase took forever to come out. But eventually it did and then I was through security and jumping up and down at seeing my mom.

Since then I've been getting used to being home: air conditioning, hot showers, unlimited internet, good television, driving, and all the ice cream my little heart desires. But I already miss Tanzania--I've called my boss just to talk and play the CD of Swahili hip-hop that one of my friends gave me when I left. Having lived fairly ascetically for the last year and liking it, I am trying to set up my life in America to be more basic and more socially responsible than it was when I left for Africa. So even though I am home and "home is home" as my Swahili friends say, I can tell that I have changed. It's difficult, but worthwhile, and this is the only place in the world that I want to be right now.

It's hard to believe it, but I'm back.

Emily

Originally sent July 14, 2005. This is the seventh of 8 mass emails I sent while living in Tanzania.

Dear readers of E, The Newsletter.

It's been a while since my last update, and apologies are in order because this one's a whopper. About a month ago now, we had a big event at our school. We brought together kids from both of our Arusha projects, their siblings and some of my neighbors for four days at our main site. Where we would usually have 30 kids, we suddenly had 93. Despite my initial concerns, we made it through the weekend with no runaways, major fires, or fatalities, and when not running around herding children into their groups, or giving the cooks more rice, or organizing clothes for handing out, I was happy to see the kids enjoying themselves. At the staff's request, we celebrated the end of the camp with a "goat cake". Despite my hopes, there was nothing cakey about it--it was a whole goat, roasted on a spit. Although I observed the process at several key moments, I was not prepared for the sight of the whole carcass, propped up with leaves stuffed in its mouth. The assembled Tanzanians looked at it with appetite--the assembled foreigners with disgust bordering on horror.

At the close of the camp, we sent all the kids home for a two week vacation. Sharifu, the boy who stayed with me over the Christmas break, was with me again, and my roommate Glory and I had fun being his two moms. Unfortunately, he is going through a bit of a bedwetting phase which would not have been a problem if he had his own bed and we had a washing machine. As it was, however, we groggily tried to wake him up several times each night and frantically did handwash so he would have dry, non-urine smelling clothes to wear.

A week or so after the kids had returned to school and things had returned to normal, I was lucky to take a trip to Shinyanga, a mostly rural region in the west of the country where we have a project. It was a lovely visit, bookended by two very arduous bus rides. On the way there, the trip took a total of 25 hours and featured a cast of characters including: 50 Disgruntled Standing Passengers, 2 Constantly Complaining Women, 2 Loudly Arguing Men, and, squished between these last four with an unfortunately timed stomach ailment, me. On the other hand, the ride back to Arusha only took 14 hours and despite all the dust and the rattling, seemed like a luxury coach after the hellish journey out.

But the stay itself, as I said, was lovely. I was visiting our third and smallest project for the first time. In addition to young children (mostly AIDS orphans), this project helps homeless elderly people who are feeble and nearly impossible to please. But they all have very sad stories of being rejected by their families, and it is obvious that despite their complaining, they are pleased to have a project serving them. They laughed and laughed when I played Ring around the Rosy and London Bridges with the kids; it was a beautiful sound that I will never forget.

All I had been told about Shinyanga was that it was hot and dusty. It was, but it was also beautiful. The flat landscape was studded with baobob and acacia trees, and the fields not under cultivation were waist-high with yellow grasses. Houses were square, built out of red blocks and roofed with thatch; the yards were sand and tidily swept each morning. But my favorite part was that, because the terrain is so flat and the villages are spread out, everyone gets around on bicycles, my favorites being fat people, women with babies on their backs, children on adult-sized bikes. We took "bicycle taxis", which are bicycles with a narrow second seat welded over the back wheel. Gripping this seat tightly and riding side-saddle, I was ferried around like a decorative parcel on several occasions, to general laughter.

I guess that laughter was actually my favorite part of the stay. My boss has a lot of relatives--her mother was the third wife and had 12 children of her own. I think people were excited to meet a foreigner who knows Swahili, and I spent long hours fumbling to explain various aspects of life back home--skyscrapers, winter, milking machines, the subway--to the hysterical laughter of my boss' sisters. "We'll never be able to do that, Emily", the eighth-born sister told me after I explained the Washington Metro. "We wake up in the morning, wash our faces, then look for shade to sit in. The rest of the day, we just move our chairs to stay in the shade." She was exaggerating: despite her 7th grade education, she herself was in the midst of campaigning to represent women's interests to the local municipal council, and ultimately won.

While I was in Shinyanga, I also got to visit my friend from college, Brian, who is in the Peace Corps near the city of Mwanza. It was great to see his set up (he's got a whole house all to himself!) and hear about his work teaching and training about AIDS. It was fun comparing notes with him, and the two of us were a pretty funny spectacle to the Tanzanians; both of us are fluent in Swahili now, but have different dialects because of where we've been living. We visited people in the town where he lives, and went to Mwanza itself for a day. We went to a museum about thelocal culture; a bizarre institution which needs its own email, and perhaps an anthropologist's doctoral dissertation. Mwanza is on Lake Victoria, surrounded by hills studded with large, smooth boulders. We climbed one of these hills, and, with falcons circling overhead and the breeze in our faces, looked out where the lake, shimmering, disappeared into the horizon.

Now I am back in Arusha, wrapping up with work and making good on promises I made of things I would do before I go. I'm glad to be here and glad to be going home too. Yet I find it alarming how the days slip through my fingers. I can say: I am bracing myself for the final goodbyes.

Many thanks for reading, and all my love to all of you,

Emily

Originally sent May 16, 2005. This is the sixth of 8 mass emails that I sent while I was in Tanzania.

Hello again from the Editor of the Emily Peer Review. It's been a while since I wrote, and it's been hectic. Things are looking up lately, but the month of April was pretty tough. In the aftermath of the break-in, one of my neighbors was accused of organizing the crime. He was a young guy I counted among my friends. One night I sat in his family's living room with elders from the neighborhood and listened as his sisters wept and his mother prayed out loud, accusing us of hating her for being a widow. Off he went to jail, and a few days later, the investigating officer released him. None of my things have been traced, and all I was left with was a new set of enemies inthe neighborhood.

The day after the arrest, I got a headache at work that turned into a fever by evening. As my roommate Glory and I sat down to dinner, the landlord came to the door and asked for rent. Then, in one of the Top Ten Most Embarrassing Moments of My Life, I threw up all over the table. It was a long night, full of more embarrassments and a lot of patience from Glory, but what I was convinced must be malaria turned out to be a stomach bug that antibiotics quickly knocked out. My convalescence was an instructive period in Tanzanian folk wisdom about the proper treatment of sick people, which apparently includes force-feeding them, mocking them for sleeping too much, and ensuring an uninterrupted stream of visitors.

As I was getting better, reading a novel when not receiving guests, another neighbor died from AIDS in a crowded public hospital. A man in his thirties, he left behind a wife and three kids, one still nursing. At the last minute, a white Catholic priest came to his bedside and baptized him; it might have been more useful for him to buy the IV drip my neighbor couldn't afford. Back in our neighborhood, the widow sat in mourning for several days in the single dirt room they had shared. The women in the neighborhood took up a collection and used it to prepare dinner for everyone and pay the funeral costs. In the evenings, men came and sat respectfully outside the widow's door; the women sat inside and sang songs about heaven. There was no crying. After a few days, the widow went to the husband's home village to bury him and a few days after that came back with a glazed look and her baby on her back.

Overlapping with all of these events, the rainy season came and went. (Interestingly it was months late and people talked constantly about the increasing unpredictability of the seasons; global warming evidently matters more to people still participating in rain-fed agriculture). Overnight, the rain came in torrents and the mornings were cool and gray, the streets coated with slick mud. In a few days, the landscape was transformed, all the dry fields turning green then to hoed rows of dark mud then suddenly sprouting rows of corn and beans. All the people turned into farmers, trudging off in the morning with long-handled hoes on their shoulders and coming back at night with muddy feet. Even Glory was called away from her tailoring business to help in somebody's fields. Just like at home, the days of rain and cool and gray were quite melancholy after awhile, and I started wishing for big clouds of dust and the beating sun again.

Last night I woke up at 2 am to the shouts of my neighbors. We were under attack by army ants, who flowed along the outer walls of our compound and through the cracks under our doors with eerie efficiency. A lot of stamping and throwing around kerosene, salt, and insecticide ensued. After about 20 minutes, the ants that remained were sufficiently demoralized and we climbed back into bed. "I want to go back to America," I whined, but I was just joking.

The thing about the tough parts of the last few weeks is that goodthings still vastly outweigh the bad. We added new kids at the school--three little girls leaving the worst of circumstances. I took a trip to Dar es Salaam to replace my stolen passport, and in addition to getting a peek at the new ultra-secure US embassy (the previous one was bombed in 1998) I ate pad thai for the first time in seven months and spent a day on the beach. Back home, another neighbor, a young boy who needed surgery, was finally operated on after months of effort. The neighbor accused of the robbery and his sisters have started greeting me again. And, in a time with no volunteers at work, which I was dreading, I have been spending a lot of time hanging outwith Glory and the neighbors and that's nice too. Plus, now that the heaviest rains are over, just the mornings are gray and the afternoon sun on the fields of head-high corn is unreal; it's vivid like when Dorothy steps out of her house into the Land of Oz.

Even so, there's no place like home and every day I think about the date I will be back on my own soil (August 9, for those with calendars).

Much love from Oz,

Emily

Originally sent March 29, 2005. This is the fifth of 8 mass emails I sent while living in Tanzania.

Greetings to long-time and first-time readers of the Emily Monthly Illustrated. It seems like a long time ago, but I promised to share all the detailsof my former roommate, Genya's, wedding. It was a hectic week for us. Starting on the Saturday before the big day, two women moved in with us to help her get ready--one of whose primary job was to cook four meals a day so that Genya could be fat for her wedding. The Sunday before the big day was the kitchen party, for women friends and family on the bride's side of the family. This was very cool--it was held in the bride's mother's backyard and the women came dressed in their brightest, biggest outfits. They sang and danced to songs about childbirth, climaxing in the bride-to-be's mother collapsing on the ground in feigned labor pain. The bride and her maid of honor came dressed in special matching outfits and observed all of the proceedings with intent looks of supreme boredom. The best part, though, was the gifts, when all of the women lined up and danced and gave Genya brooms and bars of soap and kitchen utensils, each presented with an explanation of how to use it at home.

The Thursday before the big day was Genya's Send Off, held in a formal space with sort of high school prom-level glamor. Genya and her maid of honor came wearing identical lavender silk dresses and big bouffant hairdos, but the bride was easily distinguished by the look of sheer terror on her face. There was a church choir and a chuckling MC and a long series of formal gestures to bid the bride farewell. Like at many events in Tanzania, everything was relayed through an enormous and painful sound system. The send off cake, which the bride had to feed to her reluctant parents, looked just like a typical tiered wedding cake, except on top there was only a bride, with a jaunty hand on her hip.

And Sunday was the wedding itself. I arrived with three other white people 15 minutes after the time on the invitation; the church was completely empty. An hour later the church began to fill up and the wedding took place. It was a great mix of our tradition and theirs--the bride came in, hidden by a white veil and escorted by her father and a chorus of ululating aunts. The vows were quite standard, but were followed by more ululations, and in recognition of both traditions, everyone got teary. The service was followed by picture taking at the local fountain and then a long party with more huge speakers and more lines of dancing people presenting gifts. It was loud and joyful and just an overall great wedding.

And since then life has been preceding apace. Genya cleared out all of her (and some of my) things including the fridge, all of the cupboards, and most of the kitchenware. After a few weeks on my own, I got a new roommate, a Tanzanian named Glory. She has a sweet disposition and an absurd sense of humor and it is nice to be sharing the house, even if it now only has one bed. At work, we got electricity for the first time at our school and we opened a new site--a day preschool in the slum where our kids are from. So it's been busy.

For the Easter holiday, my friend Kate from home, who is teaching in the southern part of the country came up, and after a few days in Arusha we traveled to the coast. This turned out to be a longer, hotter, sweatier journey than we had imagined, and as the bus rolled past fields of sisal plants then orange groves then palm trees, we were both craving the moment when we reached the water. So when we arrived at our planned resort, away from any town at all and with few public transport connections, our hearts sank when we heard that the place was full. "But," the proprietor said, "the place next door might be able to make you a deal..." and so it was, by pure blind luck, that Kate and I ended up paying a very reasonable price for a luxurious and breezy cottage right on the Indian Ocean.

That night, as we slept under a mosquito net big enough to accomodate our king-sized bed, in Arusha, Glory was woken by the sound of 20 men breaking into our compound. They ripped through everything we owned and took what looked most valuable, including my laptop, our radio, jewelry, cash, and a long list of other things--some that are funny (macaroni) and some that it breaks my heart to think of (my CDs). They left a huge mess of trampled clothes and our neighbors were all very shaken, but, thankfully, unhurt. The next evening, still sticky and sandy from lounging on the beach, I turned on my phone and got the news. We cut our vacation short, and Easter day I spent on the bus again, worrying as I wondered what I would find in Arusha.

When I arrived at home the mess had, mercifully, already been cleaned up. Initially I had been told that they had taken "everything" but fortunately that was not true. My clothes and shoes and books were all left behind; I lost most hope of getting my other things back whenI noticed that the room in the police station where I reported them missing was piled seven feet high with stacks of yellowing lost items reports. But they only took things, and I, and my neighbors are fine. Yet when I walk down the street now I wonder if the strangers I see did it or know who did. When people tell me how lucky I was not to have been there I wonder if what they say is true. Of course I want my laptop and my camera back, but I want the serenity that I used to feel back more.

Happy Easter.

Emily

Originally sent February 8, 2005. This is the fourth of 8 mass emails I sent while living in Tanzania.

Hello again, readers of the Emily Monthly Round-Up. I hope the onset of February in your various northern climes hasn't been too harsh—here it has meant more rainy days and more sun on days when it doesn't rain. Work is fine and currently my crowd is all a-bustle with preparations for my roommate's wedding, details of which will certainly be in the next update.

But the big news from my end is that I took a vacation. Specifically, I spent 16 days in Ethiopia and I had a fantastic time. I had been wanting to go there because at the end of college I took a couple of classes that focused on Ethiopia and those piqued my interest. So I made an itinerary that covered the historical route in the north ofthe country, connected by bus and short-hop plane flights, and off I went. So it was that I found myself in the following situations; exploring a bat-filled tomb by candlelight in Aksum, following a procession of sacred replicas of the Ark of Covenant with hundreds of other people, shimmying my shoulders with a woman in traditional dress, sharing brown bread and spices with Ethiopian monks, riding a mule up a slope that Ethiopians climbed while carrying huge bundles of firewood, and eating pesto in an airy restaurant full of chic expatriate diplomats and development professionals in Addis Ababa.

The one thing that constantly amazed me about the country was the waythat the country's long and complicated history was manifested in the landscape. In Aksum, traders still walk down the streets leading camels and here and there you can find big stone monuments erected in the early hundreds AD when Aksum was one of the world's great civilizations. In Bahar Dar, I visited half a dozen 14th century churches and monasteries on islands in Lake Tana that are still in use and that survived Muslim invasions in the 19th century because of their remoteness. In cafes and restaurants are small mementos of the Italian Fascist occupation in the omnipresent espresso and spaghetti and, in several places I saw reminders of the anti-Communist war of liberation in the early 1990's; rusting Russian tanks lying in neatly plowed fields, their silent gun turrets pointing aimlessly off into the distance.

The most ubiquitous example of this historicity was the fact that everywhere I went there were signs of cultivation, with terraces for farming on all but the steepest mountain slopes, and sometimes even there. Even from the airplane I could see the patchwork of small farmers' plots; a pattern that spoke equally of the 7,000+ years ofhuman habitation and the recent population boom. It was completely unlike other African countries I've been to, where you can drive for miles through sparsely inhabited scrub, and quite an impressive testament to the tenacity of Ethiopian farmers.

I was also impressed with the consideration and hospitality ofEthiopian people everywhere I went. One morning I boarded a bus, expecting to arrive at my destination that night. By noon, the bus had stopped in a dinky town and the driver told us the road was closed and we weren't going to go any further until the next day. I was dreading having that much time to kill in the Ethiopian equivalent of a truck stop when the woman across the aisle, a widow with twodaughters who spoke no English, undertook my entertainment for the afternoon. We went to her cousin's rented room for the coffee ceremony, (fresh roasted beans and prepared with lots of sugar—the first coffee I've ever liked) and then to another relative's for tea with cloves and a nice walk through rolling farmland, mostly brown stubble, but still beautiful. Because all of the through bus traffic was stopped in this one town, most of the hotel rooms were full, and it turned out that I stayed in a room (that another passenger from the bus helped us find) with the woman and her daughters, all four of us sleeping tangled up together on one bed.

On another night, while on a two-day hike, the guide pitched my tent next to a farmer's haystack and we ate with the farmer's family. The house was round and spacious; there was a fire in the center, which we sat around as we ate. In a circle around us, tethered cows and goats calmly munched on hay. Cats wound around our ankles and the farmer's children played in the light of the fire, out of the evening chill. It was one of the poorest places and one of the coziest places that I've ever been.

But now I'm back in Tanzania, and back to work. I wasn't happy to give up being a wide-eyed tourist, I have to be honest. Still, even though it wasn't exactly a restful vacation, I feel invigorated and I appreciated having time to reflect on my situation and my work and myplace on this earth. But I'll spare you all that.

Best wishes to you all!

Emily

Originally sent January 4, 2005. This is the third of 8 mass emails I sent while living in Tanzania.

Gentle Readers—

Well, this dispatch is overdue and apologies to those of you who have put the less important parts of your life on hold in order to check your email compulsively to see if this update has finally arrived. Fortunately for those of you with an insatiable appetite for EmilyNews, this email is not only overdue, it is also overlong.

The major development in my life is that I moved. I now live with my boss' eldest daughter, Genya, who will move out in February when she gets married. We have two rooms, with electricity. One room has our beds and a small amount of storage space; the other has living room furniture, a fridge, a small kerosene stove, a cupboard for dishes, and about 6 inches to turn around in. Until recently, it also had our Christmas tree—a few evergreen branches in a pot of soil, decorated with ribbons, Christmas cards, colored lights, and bits of leftover wrapping paper.

Our rooms are part of a compound that we share with three other families. Next door is Jacinta, a single mom with a little son whose dad is married to another woman, but who visits on his motorcycle sometimes under cover of night. Across the courtyard is a woman that everyone calls Cousin, who is very nice. She and I have polite-fights every night when I go to wash the dishes ("Oh are these your pots?Please go ahead." "No, I have more dishes than you, you go first"). We also have another set of neighbors who earned everyone's ire recently when their failure to pay the bill resulted in our water being cut off for almost 2 weeks. They are now in the process of covertly moving their things out bit by bit when nobody else is around.

Our compound has a shared courtyard with a sink for washing dishes, clotheslines, and various containers for holding water. Even having lived here for a month, I invariably use the wrong bucket ("Why didn'tyou tell me I was washing dishes in the laundry bucket?") and I swear that at night people come and mix them all around just to confuse me. We also share a bathroom with our neighbors; it has a tap and a toilet. It recently occurred to me that I have managed to move into the Tanzanian equivalent of a dorm.

As for Christmas, our kids went home for the holidays for three weeks, my boss went on vacation, and no volunteers were around, so I was largely on my own. Anticipating this, I had agreed to stay with one of the kids who didn't have a family to take him. So into our cramped two rooms entered 6-year-old Sharifu. I had had visions of him tagging along happily when I ran errands for work and coloring happily as I worked in my quiet office at school. But my boss forbade me from taking him to school when I told him we were going totown, he refused to go. So, during the day, I went to work, andSharifu played at my boss' house. In the afternoon I came home to find him completely filthy and usually having been robbed by some other child who did not have a white surrogate mother to buy him toys. I found it hard to predict his preferences (likes: my alarm clock, a Christmas service at "white people's church": dislikes: spaghetti marinara, dogs) and I was surprised to find myself arguing with my roommate over various aspects of child rearing. I was living like a single mother, albeit one with an extended African family, and it had its ups and downs.

Most importantly, Sharifu kept me company over the holidays. On Christmas Day, our little family opened presents—me, Genya, and Sharifu. My parents had sent me boxes of gifts that I had been surreptitiously shaking but not opening until the 25th. I loved all of them. Then we all dressed up in our very best clothes and went to church. I had had an outfit made for the occasion, Genya had a new hairdo, and Sharifu had shiny new shoes. Jacinta cooked a lavish lunch for the whole compound and I bought a round of sodas. The afternoon we whiled away, Sharifu with his new toys, me with my new books.

It was like at home, but not like at home at all. It was hard for me to imagine shopping malls all decked out and caroling in the cold and gingerbread, though I knew those things were there, all those thousands of miles away. It's been noticeably hotter the last few weeks, so that even though the air is dry the sun is almost unbearable from 10 am to 3 pm and the dust just hangs. The fruits in season now are mangoes and pineapples and tiny red plums. They are incredibly delicious, but certainly not like Christmas food at home. Talking to my family on the phone on Christmas made me want to trade in my dusty bare feet for warm socks and strangers talking about me in Swahili everywhere I go for my own family and being home, even if it was just for 24 hours.

New Year's Eve I stayed home with Sharifu. We fell asleep and woke to the sounds of my neighbors banging drums, singing, cracking homemade noisemakers and shouting to each other. Lying there in the dark, listening to them, I felt happy to be starting a new year here, even if it's not my home and even if I don't know where I will be when it ends.

And a very happy new year to all of you,

Emily

Originally sent November 28, 2004. This is the second of 8 mass emails I sent while I was in Tanzania.

Dear Subscribers of the Emily Digest,

Hello again from my current corner of the world. Here in Arusha we had been having wickedly hot days where it felt like the sun had moved to within 900 feet of the earth's surface, but fortunately, the rain came again. Unfortunately, this change in weather has resulted in a cockroach infestation in the house where I'm staying. As far as I can tell there are four minor differences between Tanzanian cockroaches and those I have encountered in America:

1) Tanzanian roaches are large enough to leave mouse poo-sized droppings
2) They are faster
3) They climb walls
4) They are not afraid of light or humans

Even though they don't bite or spit or anything like that, I find these UberRoaches terrifying and my host family finds my terror amusing, which is fine with me as long as they kill the buggers whenthey rear their disturbingly large heads.

Other than the roaches, there have been three central events in my life since I last wrote. The first was that my boss went away to a 2week long seminar on project management, leaving me in charge of the whole shebang. While she was away, her cellphone broke, so I was really on my own. But while I was much less productive than I am usually and spent a lot of time making lists of things to tell her, the school didn't burn down and none of our children died, so I count that as a success.

While she was gone, one of our volunteers, my friend Dee, got seriously sick and this was the second major event. Her illness started on a Sunday afternoon, taking the form of a headache and a fever. But she came out with us that night to a goodbye dinner foranother volunteer, Nick, who was leaving the next day. Five of us were at an Indian restaurant having sodas and waiting for our food when Dee started fainting. When I realized what was going on I felt a surge of cold, unadulterated panic. Anything could be wrong with her and there was no ambulance to call, no doctor in the house, and I had no idea where there might be an emergency room open at 8 pm on a Sunday night.

I was hugely relieved when the restaurant owner pointed out a hospital just down the street. I went to check if they were open and a sleepy nurse informed me that they were and that there was a doctor. We drag-carried Dee to an examination room and a doctor in a white coat walked in and sat down matter-of-factly. But he didn't DO anything and the minutes went by and he was taking an evidently irrelevant medical history and when he delivered his diagnosis, leaning over a semi-conscious and shivering Dee, he said that she had an upset stomach and a case of nerves and that he was going to prescribe diarrhea medicine and a vitamin complex.

I told the others to call a cab and we went to a different hospital and they had a doctor who was at least capable of seeing that something was really wrong. And she got a bed to stay in and an IV drip and late the next day, a diagnosis of malaria. I slept at the hospital for two nights with her and watched her feverish sleeping and pestered the nurses to take care of her and made sure, with other people, that she had food to eat when she felt like it. Although itwas never as stressful as in those first hours when we didn't know what was going on, the whole ordeal was emotionally and physically draining for me and at the least it made me really conscientious about taking my malaria tablets.

The third major event happened last Monday, during the staff meeting,when one of our workers accused another worker of stealing. The item under discussion was small, but the accusation unleashed a flood of pent-up bad sentiment as well as new insults and injuries. All of these were shots in a war being waged between the cook and the guards on one side and the other three women workers on the other side. It also revealed that my oversight of the food supplies was not as tightn as it should have been and taught me an important lesson about that. As of right now, not knowing what else to do, my boss and I are waiting for them to work it out amongst themselves and it almost seems to be working.

There have been other noteworthy incidents like meeting the mayor ofArusha, meeting a girl who was a lead in a play with my brother in Iowa, going on a mission to buy bows and arrows in a Masai village, and catching five of our children in a serious lie and giving them a Stern Lecture in my Office. But I'll spare you, and I'd like to have at least a few interesting anecdotes to relay in 2005 when I'm back. For those of you who are wondering, I celebrated Thanksgiving by calling my family and pining for turkey and cranberries and that was it.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and until next time, I'm

Emily

Originally sent October 3, 2004. This is the first of eight mass emails I sent while living in Tanzania.

Hello again, all--Well, I have successfully arrived in Tanzania and settled in. The trip involved spending much more time on an airplane than I would ever like to spend again, so I won't be returning to the States.

Just kidding, of course, though my return to the US is contingent on the outcome of the presidential election. My job has turned out to be completely incredible and it involves a wide range of tasks from chasing Tanzanian bureaucrats, dealing with bedwetting, counting out cups of rice and beans, and writing funding proposals. I'm basically the right hand person for the lady who runs the organization, which is alternately stimulating, frustrating, rewarding, and boring.

I'm living in a house with a host family for now, but I will be moving in to my own place in December. My host family is big and complicated. Running the house are two women who are widows of the same man (yes, married at the same time). Also living there are the children of these two women, plus one son of the husband's first wife (who departed when the second one arrived and remarried), a granddaughter from a daughter from the second wife's first marriage, the daughter of the third wife's best friend, and another girl who is not related but has been living there so long she just decided to stay. I thinkthat's everyone.

One of the people in my host family is Irene. She is 18, and, having failed to pass an exam after 7th grade, is finished with her schooling. Irene speaks no English but yells a lot in Swahili and has the habit of explaining words to me by way of examples that include vocabulary much more difficult than what she is trying to explain.The other day I asked her what she did that day, and here is what she said: washed dishes, mopped, cooked lunch, did laundry, watered the yard (to keep the dust down), cooked dinner. She then asked me if my family has a worker and I said no, and she said, but who does all the work? and I said, well, machines do it. And then I discovered that my Swahili is not yet good enough to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen wall to wall carpet. Last Sunday I went to church with my host family. I didn't know much about the church except that they went there often, almost every day. I don't know what kind of church it was, so I will just describe it. It was the type of church where, two hours into the service (the halfway point, as it turns out) after a rousing sermon and the offertory, everyone gets filled with the holy spirit and goes completely nuts. There was screaming and crying and people fainting and the girl behind me, for some reason, kept shouting "push" in English. Since I was not doing any of those things, I was unsure ofthe etiquette of the situation and felt even more conspicuous than usual. So I just sat there primly and waited for things to die down and tried not to stare. This week I went to a Lutheran church.

There is something else I want to say about my host family. The father died in his forties after a months-long illness. He had worked in the mines, and as a result, lived away from his wives for a long time. No one here will say the word, but the evidence points towards AIDS. Sometimes when all of us are sitting down to dinner and the Swahili soaps are blaring and I am being urged to eat another plate of food I think about all that churchgoing and the afternoons of rest that my two host mothers take and I think about how AIDS is not just stick-thin people drawing their last breaths but also the uncertaintythat hangs over those boisterous gatherings like a cloud.

Well I said I'd try not to be longwinded, but I didn't promise, so hopefully you all will forgive me and write back soon.

Doing, truly, fine,

Emily