In the second week of my shooting I arranged a visit to one of my neighbor “site mates” in his small village. We hiked perhaps 10 kilometers to his water source, a mountain stream overlooking his valley.
The village kids haven’t noticed me yet, they’re throwing rocks into the tree to knock down the dried tart Vitamin C filled fruits of this giant Baobao tree. This one is probably pretty well known and picked over, a good challenge. Worthless for firewood, there are thousands of these trees around our district (i.e. county).
The Center of Attention in the village is always you. Whether people are asking for a bit of food, begging for pictures taken of them (i.e. children) or just warmly greeting you as you pass their hovels. Contrary to the previous picture the kids have spotted me and are caught in mid-bound in my direction.
Living handholds. People sometimes borrow some bark from these monsters to make twine and leave indentations which are pretty good for climbing. Pictured is my nearest sitemate, Ben.
A writers desk in the village with solar lamp, speakers & CD player, my fresh overcropped haircut, water bottles, mild vices, varmint proof basket, american style calendar. Evenings in the village move slowly and there’s usually not too much to do besides chat and cook dinner after the sun sets at 7pm.
Village Intake. This is a small concrete dam backed by a pipe which catches the water for these friends’ entire village (and another). It starts here, forks to the second village, passes a cattle watering station and ends up next to my friend’s house. Obviously the water is anything but crystal clear and villagers have to come up and flush the mud from it once in a while but the maji was quite plentiful. I heard that some villages nearby were not so lucky with their intakes that week. Water is life.
This water also has the valuable feature of not being very hard and salty. My house taps produce nearly undrinkable water, even after boiling and filtering, while this can be made as sweet as bottled water. This sort, called maji baridi, fed from a large damp plateau above the village is infinitely nicer to bathe in as well. Its alternative, Maji chumvi hardly lathers and sits on your skin like you’ve just exited the ocean.
(Pictured Ben & his counterpart Stanley)
Various Acacia seedpods & flowers. Remember those flat topped scraggly looking trees you always see on the African plains–the ones with the fierce thorns to deter thousands of years of large mammals? It turns out there are hundreds, maybe thousands of different varieties of them in Tanzania and in my Dodoma region. It seems that nearly every sort has its own beautiful method of proliferating.
Unlikely Dependants. These two kids are fixtures at my sitemates place. The one on the left is deaf and unable to communicate outside of personal hand gestures. He has had a lot of trouble interacting with impatient adults and teasing children. He is also a bit sneaky and has grown up taking what he needs. His cousin, right, can hear and speak the local tribal language kigogo but is often struck brutally by his father.
I should note that even with Ben’s hard won fluency in the national language of Swahili, none of them share a language: Gestures, Kiswahili, Kigogo, respectably. There is no one else for them. Ben does his best to welcome them into his house, carving out an impressive life of facilitating environmental projects like beekeeping, caring when it matters, and writing.
I venture into the villages every few months from my cushy, well educated bubble of the Teachers’ College community. It is tantalizingly easy to forget that just an hour away, deep in my district, there are people living day by day, completely dependant on crops and not contemporary education. It is tempting to write them off as “peasants”. Recently the Peace Corps staff met with our district government and we could hear the mild derision in the executive’s voice whenever he said it, overemphasized “peesants”. It was depressing meeting leaving little room for faith in our local executives. Even if your parents could never afford secondary school you are still a person. Even if you work a farm for your livelihood you can value the companionship of other people, strive to improve the work you can do and deserve attention for social support when the very local community doesn’t quite have sufficient internal resources to offer it.
Unfortunately despite the obvious value of these volunteers in bringing new ideas and changes, Peace Corps is moving away. In a few years there will likely be no environmental volunteers here through a combination of this administrative apathy for social and community works and a wild-west-esque influx of sapphire mining. Thankfully the neighboring district has shown more enthusiasm for their communities and has welcomed our organization with open arms.
To be continued with an account of the first rain and the first signs of the segue into the wet season…
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